Your videos get 200 views. The same 200, week after week, while someone with half your experience posts something similar and gets 1,000,000. You stay consistent because that is the advice everybody gives, but consistency on its own changes nothing. Seven rules explain most of the gap between those two outcomes, and every one of them can be copied.

Alessio Bertozzi and Bryan Fischer are the co-founders of Create Content Club , which says it has helped clients gain more than 3.5 million followers and 600 million views. Their own Instagram account has 442,000 followers. Nat Berman, a digital media entrepreneur who runs a paid community for founders, went from 300 Instagram followers to 130,000 in three and a half months using their method. Dorie Clark, author of The Long Game, just crossed 400,000 followers having been at 24,000 four months earlier. Scott Leese, B2B sales coach who advised 15 company exits of which 12 unicorns, who went from 0 to 85K followers. Fischer and Bertozzi gave me the details behind all three.

I founded a social media agency in 2011 and sold it ten years later, publishing a book called Instagram Rules along the way. But Instagram rewards different behavior now. You have to play the new game. Here are the seven rules to get you growing on Instagram in 2026.

How founders grow on Instagram from 300 followers to 100,000

Build the hook in three parts

“A hook isn’t a hook,” says Fischer. Plenty of founders treat it as the clever line at the start. He defines it as a way to package the topic of the video, made of three parts working at the same time. The spoken hook is what you say. The text hook is the line on the screen. The visual hook is what the viewer sees in the first second. “If one of them is off the video won’t perform, even when the other two are great.”

Fischer’s team never writes hooks from scratch. Before a script exists they go through the creator’s niche and adjacent niches, take the hooks that already grabbed attention on videos that outperformed everything else on those accounts, and keep them word for word. Two tests decide whether one will work. It has to be broad, which means it names a problem or a solution a lot of people have. And it has to be about the viewer. “It sounds harsh, but people don’t care about you, they care about the solution you can give them,” says Fischer.

Sell the solution before you give it

Seconds five to fifteen decide whether anybody stays, and Bertozzi puts the failure rate there at 99%. “They say their hook and go straight to the point, and they skip the step that makes anyone stay.” Before any value comes out of your mouth, the viewer needs a reason to listen to you specifically. Bertozzi calls that step the selling of the solution.

Seven techniques do that job and Bertozzi calls them interest peaks. The personal story technique uses your own results as proof you are qualified. Authority endorsement borrows the credibility of someone respected in the niche. Risk reversal removes the cost of watching, telling the viewer the whole setup took you ten hours. Call out names exactly what the viewer is doing right now, which “can go really well or really badly, so it needs handling with care.” One line of that, then you deliver. Then you cut. “If the video can be 35 seconds instead of 60, it has to be 35 seconds.”

Find the outliers before you write anything

Every Monday the team goes through the creator’s niche and adjacent niches, takes around 30 reels per account, and works out each account’s own baseline by dropping the top 10% and averaging the rest. “We never start from a blank page,” says Fischer. Anything at four times that baseline is an outlier. That tells them a format is working this month.

Verification comes before imitation, because views can lie. They read the comments to see who is watching, since an outlier with the wrong audience is a trap. The winners get transcribed and rewritten in five sections. Hook, selling the solution, giving the principle, making it applicable, call to action. The hook and the structure stay exactly as they were, and your own knowledge and proof go in, in the way you talk.

Use the law of least effort

Content works where two things overlap. Bertozzi calls the first one the highway of attention, the formats and topics people already consume. The second is your zone of genius, the subjects you know better than almost anybody and that nobody else can cover the way you can. “Miss the first and nobody watches. Miss the second and you’re building somebody else’s brand and you’ll quit in six weeks because it bores you.” Nat Berman films in his garden in a t-shirt, which is what he has done since 2018, and his unfair advantage is that he can read a script without sounding like he is reading one. The format got built on top of that.

Separating your ideal client from your dream follower takes more thought. The ideal client is the person who buys. The dream follower is the much bigger crowd who makes a video travel. “If you only speak to the buyer, 200 people see it. If you only chase the crowd, a million people see it and none of them can buy from you.” Scripts live between the two, wide enough that anyone in that world gets something out of it, with the filtering done by depth and framing.

Watch skip rate and retention, ignore likes

Likes and comments say almost nothing about whether you will grow. Watch time decides it, for a commercial reason. Platforms make money when people stay and see more ads, so a video that keeps people on Instagram for longer gets pushed to more people. Two numbers show you where you stand. “Skip rate. This is your hook, full stop,” says Fischer. “If people are stopping to watch past those three seconds, the packaging is working.” The retention graph is the verdict on your script, because it shows you exactly where people drop off.

Used together they give you the most underrated move on the platform. Find a video with a low skip rate past three seconds and a steep drop in the retention curve right after. The idea and the hook were strong and the script failed. Repair that exact section and reupload the same video, which gives you a proven hook with the weak part fixed. After that, look at profile visits and at comments and DMs on the keyword you asked for. “That’s where content stops being a vanity thing and turns into pipeline.”

Play the long game, then double down

Clark gained around 300 followers in four and a half months. She had put in hundreds of hours by then, learning scripting, filming, editing and the software around all of it. “For a long time, you see no results and that can feel very discouraging, but you have to have faith in the process.” Her biggest day since then brought 12,653 followers. Berman was told at the start to expect nothing for three or four months, which is why three or four weeks felt early to him.

Instagram does not grow in a straight line, and what you do after a breakout video decides how far it takes you. “You sit flat for weeks, one video breaks, and if you know how to double down on it in the days right after, that’s where the run comes from,” says Fischer. He references Clark, who is adding thousands of followers a day and doing exactly that. Weeks of flat numbers come first. The days right after a hit are where the growth gets decided.

Give every video a next step

A popular argument says going viral hurts a business, and that a few views from qualified people are better than a lot from unqualified ones. Fischer measured it. His team tracked how many ideal clients came in from viral content against more targeted content with fewer views, and the viral content won every time. “It’s pure math.” A targeted video that converts 10% of 1,000 viewers gives you fewer qualified leads than a viral one converting 1% of 100,000.

Views are rarely the problem when the clients do not show up. What goes missing is the system that turns views into conversations. Every video needs a next step, something specific to comment or DM for, and a person on the other end who answers. Fischer has watched clients with strong numbers leave everything on the table because nobody worked the inbox. Showing what you built speeds this up, so post what you made and what it did without giving away the whole method. “The people who just wanted the tip take the tip and leave. The people who want the result come and ask you.” Scott Leese, a sales consultant, did 264,000 views on a 57,000 follower account and closed three deals totaling $200,000 in a month from posting that way.

Apply these Instagram rules to grow your followers and your business

Berman scripts, films and edits one video in about twenty minutes, and three videos in about an hour, which is how three posts a day fits around a business. Once a video works, repurpose content everywhere else. He makes his videos in Instagram, saves the file and uploads the same one to TikTok and YouTube Shorts, where he is closing in on 50,000 followers. Clark cross-posted hers to Facebook and gained over 50,000 followers there without making anything new. Berman says the video that changed things for him was not the one that hit a million. It was the one that hit 1,000 when his normal was 300. Go and find yours.

Go from unknown expert to in-demand. Get the five game-changing prompts, free .