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Only on July 4,2025, I randomly checked how many days were left in 2025 and found there were exactly 181 days remaining in the year.

It was a moment of discovery. Why not embark on a transformation challenge with this perfect 180-day timeline ahead of me? 

Kids, don’t doomscroll Instagram too much, you might start thinking Hey, it sounds like everyone can become an influencer today. 

I did, and then I decided to start creating content right away. 

But being a master procrastinator, I dragged it until July 20,2025, before I posted my first Reel. 

Fast forward to the time I am writing this, we are 80 days into the journey

80 reels created, over 4.5M views generated, and 15,000 followers in the bank. 

I will share everything I learned during this time below. If you find this helpful, or think it is another snake oil scam, you can email me your thoughts. Just feels nice to know someone has read this. 

The Idea and the inspiration

For a long time, I have been in the content creation space. But every time I tried something new, something failed. Well, specifically, my consistency in posting videos. 

I used to spend over 3 days preparing a video from ideation, scripting, thumbnails, shoot, and post-production work. 

At one point, I even hired external editors to work with, but it caused even more friction than assistance. 

But this time it was different. There were 4  reasons. 

With all this in the bank, I went ahead with the journey. 

Rules for the Journey

I have to make one video a day for the rest of the year

I will do the process end to end scripting to publishing (Spoiler - I did hire an editor for 3 videos, results of it discussed later)

I will not share anything about me. No building credibility by sharing my achievements, roles etc. 

No flashy edits, the content should succeed not the editing

No fancy equipment. I didn’t buy anything new except a tripod. 

The process has to be so simple in a way that anyone can follow this playbook and succeed. 

Choosing the language 

I have an English channel. For the longest time, though it didn’t produce millions of views, it did help quite a few people. 

But this time, I want to make it regional. So I chose the only other language I am fluent in, Tamil. I know there will be limited reach, but since I have no intentions of monetizing it anytime soon, I went ahead with it. 

The Content Strategy

Every tutorial will start with the same old subject, I did this too on my YouTube course. Finding your niche. 

But I will be honest here, I had no clue what kind of content I want to make. What subject do I want to talk about? 

Eventually, I decided to start off with things I find interesting. I consume a ton of content across disciplines, I run, and I have an enjoyable lifestyle. 

So let me start making videos with things I find interesting and later on I can pick a niche. 

With this in mind, I went ahead with recording my first few videos. 

The Production Strategy

Since I made the decision to post one video a day, I was clear about choosing a production strategy that’s suitable for scale. 

I will be doing the end to end process - from shoot to publish. So the process has to be as frictionless as possible. 

I decided to shoot on my phone. I picked a spot in my house with decent lighting, so no extra lights are required. 

I initially started with horizontal 16:9 shooting mode. I will add B-rolls on the bottom half and text on the top half or viceversa. 

No sound effects, no transitions - so the focus will be entirely on content. 

I later switched to portrait mode of recording (discussed later on in this blog)

The Gear and Recording Set up

My 4-year-old iPhone 12 to record the videos. 1080P 30fps settings.

I purchased a simple tripod to mount the phone. This is a great buy for 45 SAR

I use my 5 year old Fifine mic that costed me 2500 INR or $25 to record my audio directly into my video editor

I used Filmora (bought a perpetual license) and the audio will be directly recorded into filmora. 

I use their AI voice enhancer to improve clarity and reduce noise. 

Once the video is recorded, I airdrop my video to the mac and finish the editing. 

Every video is posted directly from laptop and not via phone. 

Let the learning begin

Until this point, you have heard about gearing up to shoot your first video. Now this is pretty much what everyone would tell you and nothing new. What I am about to say next are exclusive from my experience

This might work for you, might not. But my approach was to experiment as much as possible with each video to test the output. 

Be a creator 

 When I initially created content, I was skeptical or would shy away from thinking of myself as a content creator. I wasn’t comfortable asking people to follow or subscribe.

I wouldn’t ask them to comment link, coz you should not gate knowledge. 

Guess what? I was wrong. 

You are here to become a content creator so get comfortable being one. 

Playing the character

While it is nice to be yourself in videos, which is what I would still recommend. You can choose to play a character. 

Take Borat for example. It is a character played on screen. Similarly you choose the character you wanna play - an expert in a field, a charming friend or a clown. 

Why? You will second guess yourself in early days. Am I the one to talk about this? What credibility do I have?

Well, you don’t but your character does. The Batman effect kicks in and you get the confidence needed to convince your viewers. 

Play to a side

Any topic you choose, you have two sides. You have people who support it, you have people who are against it. 

Pick a side and play with it. 

You cannot be in the middle. That is the difference between 2000 views and 200,000 views. 

In this video, I spoke about Apple’s innovation. Now there are people who support apple and others who hate it. 

I decided to side with the set of people who are against Apple. (I use the entire apple ecosystem though)

Now this will trigger the opposite party to share comments supporting their favourite brand while others would jump to defend. 

Negative Comments

For any video you will receive 3 types of comments. 

Positive comments - These are the ones who agree with you. Support you. 

Negative comments - They don’t agree with the Idea you shared or your perspectives

Hate comments - They just hate you. They don’t care about your content. They will attack you personally. 

If you receive Hate comments, you are doing something right. 

Until I reached about 6000 followers, the comments were mostly positive and rarely negative. Zero Hate. 

The day I started receiving Hate comments, my reach started to blow up. This is Instagram telling you, hey we are now recommending your videos to people who are not in your ICP, but to the common public. 

If you are not recieivng hate comments in your video, you are not doing it right. 

Mental Health

Starting your day reading hate comments will make you feel sour. 

But don’t worry this is only in the initial phase. Once you gain more momentum, you will learn to laugh at it. 

And soon, you will have followers who will argue with them instead of you. 

Make sure, these comments don’t affect your progress and I would strongly advice you to ignore them instead of responding to them. 

Your content has to trigger emotions

This is one particular insight I am not happy about, but this is the unfortunate truth. 

If I look into all my successful videos, they all have one thing in common - Negative emotion trigger. 

The video titles that worked great are

Whenever I choose a topic with negative emotion in it, it worked well. There were a few exceptions but they didn’t get the majority. 

Narrowing your niche

After posting about 25 videos, I slowly narrowed down by niche. I went through those 25 videos and found that any talk about career, office culture worked well. 

The reason is simple 

Though I didn’t narrow down into this 100%. I made sure 75% of my content is around these topics and the rest 25% is spread across other subjects. 

Adulting and Aspirations

The way I reached here is by looking at niche in a whole different way. It took me almost 60 posts to narrow down to the above. 

But between 25-post 60 I took a different approach. 

When I look into analytics more than 53% of my video viewers are aged between 25-34

So instead of finding a topic to niche down, I niched down to my audience age. 

What would people in the age of 25-34 seek for? They are adulting for the first time and slowly evolving into new aspirations. 

This could be tackling career growth, taking care of ageing parents, buying their first house, etc. 

I made more content around these areas. 

In addition to this, to please the algorithm I occasionally made content that are trending such as Elon Musk, Open AI, Apple’s iphone 17 launch etc. 

The answer to niche is start broadly, and then review after 25 posts. 

Based on your audience drill down the topics further. 

And after 100 posts you will find your niche. 

Reddit is your friend

In this entire journey Reddit has been my dear friend. 

I managed to get a 150 day streak going and gained over 2500 karma points. I will write another blog in detail about how you can use reddit for your marketing strategies. 

But for content, they helped me in two ways. 

How to make your content go Viral?

I told this after 25 posts that the biggest learning about virality is that I have learned I can’t predict what will go viral. 

But now after 100 posts, I can confirm the same. 

You will get a sense about what will reflect well with your audience, but virality is out of your control and you should not be chasing it. 

However, here are a few things you can do based on the platform analytics. 

For Instagram

Watch audience analytics extensively. I focused on their age, location and similar content they view. 

See if you can use it to your advantage like I did with finding my niche. 

Followed by this you have to satisfy just two metrics for Instagram

For YouTube

YouTube is slightly different. Their distribution is a bit crazy. You can have a short staying silent with 1000 views for 10 days and blow up to 200,000 views in the next two days. 

But the one ke metric to focus would be Average view duration In a video Jenny Hoyos a popular content creator would have mentioned, 

For shorts the average view duration should be above 75% and if your short is less than 30 seconds long, then it should be over a 100%

Which means people have watched the beginning again. 

Optimize your content and editing to match these two metrics and you will see great success. Rest are vanity. 

How to write a great hook?

After a lot of experimentation, I now follow these two process to write a great hook

Initially when I started with creation, I will close the video with a punch line. And then one day I moved the end segment as the opening line of the video. 

The video picked up great traction. This was the start of the experiment. 

After this everytime I write, I spend a lot of time, writing the hook compared to the time spent in writing the script. Today, if you watch the first 3 seconds of the video, it conveys the entire video story. 

So why are people still watching the rest of the video? Common psychology. I am wriitng everything I know about Instagram growth in this playbook. 

But after reading this, you might consider me as an expert on Instagram growth. You will believe that I have mroe to say, more ideas which are not shared here. That’s how video retention works too. People believe you have more to say and they stick to it. 

The second option is writing a line that’s triggering an emotion. Let me use an example to show you the difference here. 

I made a video about Double standards in workplace. Now the common opening line could be 

Hey, these are the 3 most common double standard practices in workplace

This is blunt

But we went

Hey, have you noticed these double standards happening in your workplace? They are so common, all of us are ignoring it

Again, I am writing to the 25-34 year old who has just returned from office or is watching the video from the office late in the evening. 

The line is immediately relatable to them and they are curious to knwo what those practices are and if it is happening in their workplace. 

Let’s look at another example

In this video, I wanted to share about the important outcomes one should expect from their work for great career growth. 

But instead, I chose to open the video with the line

“If you don’t have these 5 benefits from your work, Quit your JOB RIGHT AWAY.” 

This is bold, a bit over the top too - but remember my earlier line about being a creator. You have to play to human psychology and the algorithm. 

How to make your content share-worthy?

This is a simple one. Just open your instagram DMs and go through all the reels shared to you. 

Now try to categorize who shares what kind of videos with you. 

Your parents might share something relevant to you or value add or a chinese dropshipping product ad

Your friends on the other hand will share funny reels and memes

Your office colleagues might share something that is relatable to your work and office. 

Structure your content to appeal to this psychology. 

When you create value driven content, specifiy who is it for

If it is a generic topic side with an audience (refer to the apple example shared above) 

Posting Time

THere has been a lot of discussion, charts and reports about posting time on Instagram. Since I was living in a different time zone and I usually prepare my videos last minute, I did not care about this

And to my attention, I didn’t notice this factor making significant changes in the reach. 

Whenever I post something during the evening hours in India I would get good traction in the first few hours but this would die