Growth: Expectations vs Reality. How I Grew a Brand to 100,000 Followers

If you are reading this, you are likely looking to grow in at least one aspect of your life. It could be spiritually, financially or even socially. Its human nature to seek continuous improvement whether actively or passively through wishing for it. In the fast paced world of today, we are increasingly expecting growth to be immediate or predictable. Today I am going to talk about the path to 100,000 followers for my brand Fiti Milele and what it taught me about growth.

In 2014 I wanted to start a new business. I was in college and had a lot of free time and ideas. I had started to save some money from a tutoring gig I was running with a partner and had the urge to grow my savings. Owing to the hype of Facebook pages at the time, I started new pages and posted on them. To start I created an entrepreneur advice page and a weight loss page named Siri za Kupunguza Uzito.

Growth is giving up. After creating the page I started posting for a few months till December 2014. At that time I saw no traction and saw more potential in growing the tutoring gig into a business. So I stopped posting. At times, things may not go your way, and you may give up on a goal. Its not something that is encouraged, but it is part of the process in several cases, especially if something else shows more promise.

Growth is reevaluating. I didn't post on the page for almost an year. I was putting a lot of effort building the tutoring business and those efforts paid off. We had more clients, more team members and my savings had grown. In November 2015 I went through my pages as part of my process to decide what to go after next. To my surprise even without posting for a full year, the Siri za Kupunguza Uzito page had grown to almost 1,000 followers. I decided it was worth to take another shot at it. At some time in your growth journey, you may have new information that will encourage you to reevaluate your earlier decisions. Embrace that as it is also part of the process.

Growth is focus and consistency. After returning to posting on the page, I created a plan to post 3 times weekly. I also decided to post Tanzania-nized weight loss content (content that is relevant locally) instead of reposting translated western tips sometimes containing foods unavailable in Tanzania. This worked well and the page slowly grew to over 5,000 followers. Focus and consistency is an important part of growth. Most times you won't see immediate results but as long as you know your daily actions are relevant to the end results, keep going.

Growth is luck. After a few weeks of posting consistently, I posted a detox recipe in January 2016. That post changed everything for the page. Until today its the most engaged post in the history of the brand. I just saw detox content getting traction in the west and wanted to create a Tanzania relevant detox drink. By luck the algorithm picked it up and over 500,000 people saw it completely organically. In 2 weeks the page grew from 5,000 followers to over 20,000. It is not a given, but you could have lucky breaks in your growth journey. Almost always luck comes after focus and consistency. Remember to use your luck moment wisely. The best option is to double down on what you are doing for even more growth.

Growth is daring. After consistent growth on the page, I started getting a lot of questions and requests for information. Up to until that point, all I was doing is repurposing English content into Swahili content that is relevant to Tanzania. But most of these questions were specific and needed original content. So I dared to learn more about weight loss and started creating our content from scratch. The followers kept on growing to 35,000. The same way in your growth journey, it will reach a point you need to step beyond your comfort zone to achieve more. Learn to be comfortable with discomfort as it could be what takes you to the next level of your growth.

Growth is scaling. After starting to create our own content, I was able to monetize the page. This brought more bullets to work with for growth. Over the next several years the page's team members grew, we launched several products, bought ads, started doing video, rebranded to Fiti Milele and started an Instagram page. All this enabled us to reach over 90,000 followers by 2019. The same way in your journey, when you have figured out the path to the results you want, you will need help to get there faster and efficiently. Seek out help from people or tools. It is very hard to achieve and manage massive results on your own so make a habit of seeking assistance as you need it.

I am gonna end here for today. Next week Wednesday, I am going to talk about how we broke 100,000 plus, what caused sleepless nights right before it and the hardest thing to do after growth. Make sure to subscribe to the newsletter so as you don't miss it. To your continued growth, fellow hustler.

PS: Today's article image is the 1st weight loss tip ever posted on the Siri za Kupunguza Uzito page (now Fiti Milele) on September 29, 2014, the date the page was created. Fun fact, that tip isn't even that good, it was the 1st 'easy to do' thing I saw after some googling. But could you tell that some day that content could have 100,000 plus followers and reach over 1 million people in 50+ countries? I guess not. So that means future growth could look like nothing currently... Keep hustling.

Update: Part 2 of the article is out. Read it here.