We Gained 14,301 Followers in 30 Days… But Was It Worth It? [Experiment]

What happens when you post on social media every day for 30 days?

Maybe you get your first newsletter sponsor.
Maybe you meet a friend in real life to do co-working together.
Or maybe you get $1.5 million in funding for your next project.

Those are some of the results that came out of the social media challenge we ran last month.

But here’s the thing—despite gaining over 14,000 followers collectively, I’m honestly not sure I’d recommend doing this again. At least not in the same way.

Let me explain.

Dylan and I recapped the challenge on the podcast last week if you want to listen to us talk through this 🙂

For some context: We had done a LinkedIn-only challenge back in January 2025 and it was a BLAST. We had a leaderboard, healthy competition, and a winner who hustled for that spot (congrats Elizabeth!).

But it was only open to GIR Pro members – and quite a few people from LinkedIn and the newsletter asked how they could join the next one.

So this time we made 2 changes:

1. We opened it up to the public – unlike before where it was only GIR Pro members
2. This wasn’t just about LinkedIn, you could post on any platform: LinkedIn, Twitter, Threads, Substack—wherever you wanted to grow.

Anyone could join for a small fee (Growth Vault and Pro community members got in free).

We had 128 people sign up total, with about 92 people posting regularly.

There were no real rules, just that you agreed to post at a continuous cadence for the month. Most people posted daily, while others approached it with more sanity and chose 5 days a week. 🙂

The person with the highest follower growth rate would be crowned the winner! (more on that debacle later)

The challenge was supposed to go from September 1st to September 30th.

But as with anything fun in life, we had some technical difficulties.

I tried using a software tool to automatically run the leaderboard, because that felt like a no-brainer. Well, that unfortunately didn’t work out as it wasn’t capturing growth consistently. To make matters worse, it didn’t accurately capture everyones starting follower count either.

So on September 10th, I had to make the decision to completely pivot and restart the challenge over. Meaning that people had been posting for 10 days and weren’t going to get “credit” for the growth during that time.

It was not fun to break that news, but I got a lot of support and understanding. After that, I created a Google Sheet and did it the manual way 🙂

Every Monday started with me clicking into everyone’s profiles and taking note of their current following. Sometimes the manual way is the best way, huh?

The “New” Challenge ran from September 10th to October 10th.

It was a beast to post every day, and I won’t lie, I fell off at the end of September after that original 30 days. But many people stuck it out, and did a great job!

The Numbers Don’t Lie… But They Don’t Tell the Whole Story Either

So what were the results?

Cumulatively, we gained 14,031 followers over the 30 days. Some folks posted a couple times and got 10 followers. Some posted every single day and saw much bigger gains.

But when we zoom into our individual results, things get interesting.

Dylan’s Results:

Here were the results for Dylan:

• Impressions: 25,900
• Engagements: 1,471
• Starting Followers: 2,704
• Ending Followers: 2,811
• New followers: 107
• Email subscribers: 9

That feels like a very small number of subscribers for the amount of effort put in. But let’s keep going.

My Results:

• Impressions: 179,000 (~3 posts did most of that work)
• Engagements: 2,857
• Starting Followers: 12,943
• Ending Followers: 13,445
• New followers: 502
• Email subscribers: 89

Here were the 3 posts that drove most of those numbers:

When we recorded this podcast, I was under the impression I didn’t have a big jump in subscribers.

Mostly because I did a really poor job of trying to get subscribers from this challenge. I know, I know.

I inherently know that you should go back 30-60 minutes after posting and drop a comment with a link to your newsletter. But was feeling overwhelmed with the daily posting that I often didn’t go back and do that.

Actually, I don’t think I did that once.

But when I dug into the data and realized that even though I wasn’t trying to get subscribers, it happened anyway.

Here are the number of subscribers I got from LinkedIn this year broken down by month:

There are some spikes here and there, probably correlated to when I felt like posting (such a great strategy eh?).

In January, the number was a bit higher because we did our last social media challenge.

But then you look at September and realize, I actually did get quite a few more subscribers than normal from LinkedIn.

It’s not groundbreaking, but 89 subscribers is 89 humans who decided they wanted to hear more from me via email. That’s pretty cool!

One thing that really drives home how much work this is is my October number. I didn’t post much in October and it shows. This is one of the big downsides of social media – that once you stop posting, you stop getting results. Which makes sense I guess, but it’s interesting to see.

I wish I had looked at these more regularly because it might have helped me stay more motivated.

The Burnout Factor Is Real

Dylan put it perfectly: “Every morning I’m like, ‘What am I going to write about today for LinkedIn?'”

It’s a lot if you don’t already have some posts in the hopper ready to go.

When you start going down the rabbit hole of optimizing every post—engaging 30 minutes before you post, posting without a link first, waiting for comments, replying to said comments, adding your link in the comments after an hour—it becomes exhausting.

I felt like trying to post every day was tough enough that I wasn’t doing all of the “optimal” things that supposedly helps your posts go further. I just couldn’t get myself to do it.

The thing is, as with many creators, we aren’t solely focused on social media.

We’re also running a podcast, get YouTube videos out, writing newsletters, managing a community.

When you’re trying to do all of that AND post on social media every day with perfect optimization? The feeling of burnout starting to take hold was real.

And looking at these numbers, we had to ask ourselves: is it even worth it?

I wasn’t so sure, but then you look at the other side of things.

The More “Human” Results

Throughout the challenge, we had a dedicated area in the Circle community called “Share Your Wins!”

And let me tell you, that was one of the most active sections of this challenge. People came together and celebrated wins, both big and small.

And many of them had nothing to do with follower count or subscriber growth. And I want to share some of those with you because I think they shed light on the more important side of this whole experiment:

• Farhan got retweeted by a top figure in his niche on day 1
• Tara got her first Substack subscriber and had grown to 300+ during the challenge (she’s now at 619! Go Tara!)
• Caitlyn posted something more personal than her usual content and it went viral with over a thousand likes (normally she gets less than 100)
• Sachin hit an MRR goal and closed a client deal after just posting for 4 consecutive days
• Becky grew her newsletter by 87.5%
• Rachel got shouted out by two top executives at Adobe
• Alejandra and Laura actually met in real life at one of our co-working events because of this challenge (this was probably my favorite “win”!)
• And like I mentioned, one person got $1.5 million dollars in funding for his next project because he was posting on LinkedIn

Those are SERIOUS wins. Clearly, interacting with and engaging with folks online is way more valuable than doing it to see your follower count go up.

And we know this, right? But it’s so easy to get caught up in the numbers that are easy to measure.

You can physically see a follower count or subscriber count increase over time. But you can’t really see all of the impact and relationships you’re building unless you start tracking those intentionally.

I think it’s worth it to start keeping a log of our wins, big and small, so we can go back and reflect even when the follower count might not move as much.

And The Winners Are…

So enough about the ups and downs, there were 3 people who came into this challenge and absolutely crushed it.

Here are the winners of the September Social Challenge:

• 1st place: Tom Orbach from MarketingIdeas.com
• 2nd place: Danny Naz from the Pup of Wall Street
• 3rd place: Alejandra Rojas from Brown Way to Money

Well done, you guys! 👏

Everyone who participated in the challenge did an incredible job – I know it was not easy to get over the hurdle of posting every day.

But they did, and it showed.

So what’s next? We’ll probably do another challenge at the beginning of the year, but maybe it’ll have less of a focus on follower growth and more around relationship building and sharing ideas.

I’m all ears if you have a good idea 🙂 Go find an email from me and hit reply.