Loosing Followers Made Him Go Viral! #personalbrand #instagram #contentstrategy

20 Aug 2025

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The speaker recounts an August experience using Instagram’s "Clean" feature to remove fake followers, which dropped their reported follower count from ~130,000 to ~70,000 (70k real followers retained). A video posted the next day went viral (about 5 million views) and led to rapid authentic growth: ~320,000 new followers since August, totalling ~381,000. The piece reflects on authenticity, perception, and long-term personal-brand growth.

Instagram came out with the Clean feature. I don't know if you know about the Clean feature. You literally can clean your account, and it will get rid of all of your fake followers in one swoop. And so last August, I had 130,000 followers or something like that. And then I hit the Clean feature, and I went down to 70, man. I don't really want to go under a hundred. You know what I'm saying? Neil might be following me. Like, man, who's this guy? He's got under a hundred. You know, like, perception can be reality sometimes. But like I said earlier, it's like, do I have social media? Does social media have me? So I just hit clean. The video I posted the next day got 5 million views, and I got all 70,000 real followers in the same week. That day I went, man, I think that in a world where you can feel tempted to take shortcuts, man, there's something powerful that I think just happens organically. I think I have 320,000 new followers since August. I treasure those 381,000 followers that I have right now, because these are the people that I'm trying to inspire every single day. This time next year, that's going to be double or more. You know, it's like you had that hockey stick growth. Yeah.