One week ago I rebuilt my brand from the ground up. New ad account, new pixel, new Instagram. As I write this, the new account sits at 121 followers, and I’m so stoked about it. This is my honest one-week check-in on what it really takes to grow your audience from scratch when you’re already an established business owner.
I’m sharing the real post counts from my last account, the two projects I’m focused on right now, and the mindset that decides whether a slow start knocks you over or fires you up. It’s based on a recent episode of my podcast, Six-Figure Signature Offers, so you can listen in if you prefer to hear it from me directly.
Why I chose to grow my audience from scratch
For the last three years my business has been heading in one direction while my online brand hung on for dear life to the one I used to have. So I scrubbed it and started fresh.
I created a brand-new ad account and a brand-new pixel, which means I’m using none of the old website or audience data I spent years building. Does that feel scary? 100% yes. And bad things don’t happen just because you take a new direction.
One week in, so many of the markers have already shifted. Search engine and AI results now reflect the work I’ve actually been doing for the last three years.
The clearest proof of how thick that old personal brand was? The moment I set up the new ad account, Meta slapped me with health and wellness data restrictions. It went to review, and I’m now no longer categorised as health and wellness. It felt like the last link in the chain of an old brand hangover finally breaking.
A while ago I recorded an episode on what I’d do if I were starting my online business from scratch. Now I get to put my own advice to the test in real time, with 121 followers and a very clear plan.
The core four: daily habits vs 90-day projects
I was talking about this on a Mastermind hot seat call just this morning, and it’s a framework every established business owner should have in her back pocket.
Some things in your business happen every single day. I call these the core four, and they live in a power hour you do before you check in with your clients:
- 15 minutes replying to messages and warm leads
- 15 minutes creating a post, because people on the internet need proof of life
- 15 minutes engaging with other creators in your niche
- 15 minutes responding to comments and checking in with people
That proof of life piece matters even more in the current climate. Humans want to connect with humans. Your audience has no interest in another AI-generated carousel, however fast Claude or ChatGPT can create it for you. If you’re marketing to women, the majority of your buyers will purchase through an emotional lens. They want to see the emotion and the payoff of what you offer, and they want to feel connected to you. Only a very small number of buyers purchase purely on logic and data. If Stories are where you show up most, this is the Instagram Story flow I used for years to build trust and conversions.
Then there are projects. Every 90 days you’ll typically have one or two core projects or goals that sit on top of those daily habits. Some quarters that means prioritising more warm outreach. Other quarters, content creation becomes a project in its own right.
Right now, I have two.
Project one: rebuild visibility from the top down
The first project is growing my audience again. Within 36 hours of the rebrand I had 105 followers. A few days in, I’m at 121. So if you’re looking at your own follower count and feeling small, welcome. I probably have fewer than you, and I’m genuinely happy to be starting again.
I know I need to rebuild social proof, which means content creation becomes a focused project for the next few months. Visibility and leads are one of the biggest bottlenecks in any online business, and bottlenecks always get solved from the top down.
In practice, that means if not enough of the right people are seeing your work and raising their hand, endlessly tinkering with your sales page won’t move the numbers. Fix the top of your funnel first. Then optimise what sits underneath it.
I went deeper on bottlenecks during my recent seven-day series on the podcast, so start there if you want to work out exactly where yours sits.
How long does it take to grow your audience from scratch?
My goal is 2,000 Instagram followers by 1 March. We’re at the start of November, so that’s roughly 500 new followers a month from a standing start. On paper, it looks highly ambitious.
So I took a walk down memory lane. I went back through the numbers from the first time I grew an Instagram following and asked Claude to run the maths. Based on my last account, Claude predicts it’ll take me 677 posts to hit 2,000.
What growing my first Instagram account really looked like
- My first 1,000 followers took 502 posts
- My next 1,000 followers took just 200 posts
- The following 1,203 posts brought in another 20,000 followers
And between post 1,574 and post 1,612, every post brought in an average of 41 new followers. If I could get back to that rate, 2,000 followers would take fewer than 50 posts.
We shall see.
Why the start is always the slowest part
Those numbers are an important reflection for you and for me. Growing an audience is a game of reps. You learn along the way, your content gets sharper, and the momentum compounds. The posts you put out at the very beginning are paying for the results you see hundreds of posts later.
I’m also not starting the way I’ll continue. For this first month, my focus is cementing what this brand stands for before I chase any growth goals. I shared more about the plan in the previous episode, and there’s a post on my new Instagram about how I plan to build a cult-like following over the next six months.
Stop comparing your Instagram growth to overnight success stories
If I had to name one of the biggest mistakes people are making in online business right now, it’s this. They look at the biggest names on the internet and assume it’s completely normal to put out 100 posts and suddenly have 300,000 followers and million-dollar launches.
That is not the norm. Look closely at the people getting those results and you’ll usually find two things. They invest ruthlessly in their businesses, and they network. They didn’t just pick up a microphone one day and start posting on Instagram with zero knowledge or investment behind them.
I was looking at one of these creators just yesterday, and the way she’s constructed her offer tells me she is nowhere near a beginner in business. Many of these women have also spent the last six months dedicating themselves to full-time content creation, with 10 or 20 years of business experience behind them. Unless you have that same capacity and that same history, you’re comparing apples to oranges.
That doesn’t make your path worse. And it’s completely possible for you to take off too. It just means your benchmark needs to be your own numbers. I’ve talked before about being conscious of who you take your cues from, and it applies here more than anywhere.
Why most business owners give up right before it gets easier
The same pattern shows up in launching. One of the core strategies we teach inside the Peace and Profit Mastermind is the rolling webinar funnel. A rolling funnel means you open an intake into your programme weekly or monthly. It’s how we run our own intake into the Mastermind, with a very limited number of places each month.
Now think about your own rolling funnel, or your audience growth, and ask yourself two honest questions:
- How much of your result comes down to simply putting in the reps?
- How much comes down to giving up before you’ve optimised, before you’ve built momentum and traction, and before you’ve learned the lessons each round is trying to teach you?
So much of what holds women back in business is quitting at the exact point before it becomes exponentially easier. Sometimes the start is slow and hard work. If you’re in online business, you have to become a master of delayed gratification.
Project two: upgrading delivery inside the Peace and Profit Mastermind
My second project is happening behind the scenes. I’m working on a number of upgrades inside the Mastermind ahead of our end-of-year intake. It’s the one time of year we offer bonus time, so women can join us at the end of the year and officially start in February.
My focus is two things: how fast our members get results, and how supported they feel. Many of the women in the Mastermind are based all over the world, so a big part of that is increasing the asynchronous support everyone receives.
The instant audit tool
Here’s one example. Inside the Mastermind I offer material audits, which means you get my eyes line by line on your sales page or your launch emails. I’ll be honest, I don’t think there are many things in business as impactful as a material audit from an expert. It teaches you what is working, what isn’t and how to fix it, and you learn psychology, conversions and copywriting like a fire hose. My audits are detailed. A sales page video audit can easily run 20 minutes.
So I’ve built what is basically a USB from my brain. Members can submit their webinar transcript, webinar slides, landing page or sales page into the tool and get an instant audit. It shows you the most impactful things to focus on, gives you a traffic-light rating and names your single biggest bottleneck.
That means you don’t have to wait for me. You can submit your webinar slides, get feedback, iterate, and do it all in seconds before you go live. Then, once you’ve made your edits, you send it through to me for the final human touch.
We’ve also moved material audits from fortnightly to weekly, with a seven-day turnaround.
Why your offer deserves the same attention as your sales page
In business we get so caught up in the offer, the sales page and the selling, which is crucial. But we rarely make time to go back and look at what’s inside the offer itself, and update the curriculum and the experience. That’s my biggest focus until December, and I’m so excited about it.
500 webinar attendees, one sale and two very different businesses
The lasting lesson I want you to take from this is how much of business comes down to perspective. Two people can have an identical experience and walk away with a completely different mindset.
Say you run a webinar. 500 people show up, and one person buys.
The first person lets that completely derail her. She thinks, “I only made one sale. This is terrible. Nothing is working.” She starts catastrophising and makes it mean every reason her business is doomed. Then the self-sabotage kicks in. She quits the webinar, decides she won’t run it again and stops showing up online. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The second person walks off that same webinar thinking, “I just had 500 people on my webinar and made a sale. How good is that?” Then she gets curious about the next problem to solve: how do I get more of those 500 people buying?
Both women had the same numbers, and they’re now on completely different trajectories.
And here I am, throwing my old audience in the bin and rebuilding my ad account, my pixel and my website from scratch. I feel genuinely excited about this fresh start, and I’m so happy with my 121 followers.
You don’t need a huge following to build a six-figure business
One last thing before you go. I’m pretty sure I had a six-figure business with fewer than 1,000 followers. Followers help, and they do kind of pay the bills. But you do not need a wild number of followers to make a wild amount of money in your business.
Even with around 120 followers on the new account, I’m already having conversations with women about joining the February cohort of the Mastermind.
If your group offer is working and you know it could be so much bigger, our end-of-year intake, with bonus time before the February cohort officially starts, is coming up.
Place your bet
Think of this like guessing the jelly beans in the jar. Will I reach 2,000 followers in 50 posts, or closer to 700? DM me your prediction on Instagram. I’ll write your name down, and whoever lands closest gets a $100 voucher from me.