Forget Vanity Metrics: Think Small But Mighty

The Vanity Metric Trap

There's this assumption that more followers means more influence. But chasing those numbers usually means you're missing what actually matters. A thousand people who care beats ten thousand who don't. We learned this the hard way.

The Reset: Best Decision We Ever Made

September 2024. We did something that felt insane: walked away from an account with 45,000 followers.

The reason was simple. Those followers were garbage. Purchased followers, dead engagement, bot comments everywhere. Our brand looked sketchy by association.

We talk about "moving forward with acquired wisdom," so we started over. From scratch. One real person at a time.

The result was wild. Our new account with just 137 followers pulled 7,600 views in the first month. The old account with 45K was averaging 5,500 views. Less than 1% of the followers, more views. That's when it clicked—we'd been measuring the wrong thing.

We Spent Money to Reach 67,000 People. Almost None of Them Cared.

Spring 2025 was our paid advertising phase. We went all-in on ads for the "Shatner vs. Tyson" campaign and kind of forgot who we were.

The ads hit 67,000 people. Engagement landed at 0.05%. Our organic posts were getting 2.33%, performing 46 times better than the paid stuff. The ad strategy actively hurt us. New followers dropped 48%. More negative comments rolled in. We were pushing away the community we'd been building.

The lesson was clear: throwing money at ads doesn't create connection. Most of the times, without a clear strategy, it destroys it.

It's Not About Being Perfect. Focus on Not Giving Up.

The ad campaign bombing was expensive education.

Daniel Fox, our founder, says it best: "We don't believe in perfection. We believe in resilience, curiosity, exploration, failing so we can learn."

Late June 2025, we killed the ad campaign and went back to organic content. We also brought in a few celebs, people whose audiences actually overlap with our values. Six weeks later the numbers told the story. Followers up 81.5%.

Profile visits up 82.6%.

Turns out when you stop gaming the system and just do good work, people notice.

Beyond the Numbers

Real connections beat big numbers. Every time.

That failed ad campaign snapped us back to what matters—building a genuine community, not chasing metrics. The most important measure isn't how many people you reach, but how well you connect with the ones who actually get it.