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You're listening to The Radcast, a top 25 worldwide business podcast. If it's radical, we cover it.

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Here's your host, Ryan Alford. Hey guys, what's up? Welcome to the latest edition of the Radcast. I'm Ryan Alford, your host, and today I'm pretty excited. One of my favorite fucking words is growth, and we got the growth god. We got Julian Walter, what's up brother? What's up? Thank you so much for having me. I'm really, really juiced. Hey man, I'm juiced. Talking growth, we're talking, hey.

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Everybody wants to know the trade secrets, all the knowledge, the good, the bad, the ugly of Instagram growth. Hacking's always been fascinating to me at the end of the day. I've always been fascinated with it. Cause it's like, why do we not want to get to where we want to go faster? Right. As long as we're not breaking any laws or, you know, like, so I've always really admired that mindset of, of kind of getting there, but let's set the table for everyone for your background. And. You know, anybody that's the growth.

01:08
Oh, God. I just realized like some of the strategies I was, you know, I should just sell this like as a service. And so I just started getting people to pay. There was this thing called Instagram. It was like the most awesome thing ever. You could follow and like people based on tags. And I grew it to got like 200 clients at one point and just kept going down that road, consulted some corporations like IBM. And I decided I wanted to build my own software, like start building these tools. Like I've been using these tools.

01:38
build something better. Then kind of went down that path of building these Instagram growth tools, kind of always at war with Goliath. Um. The algorithm slash the powers that be. Right, so like you started to get just used. There was like a solid two years, three years where we've really dominated and like there was maybe two to like 10 people that were like on the same level.

02:06
But you know, with growth hacking, which is why I'm so passionate about it, is when everybody under the sun starts doing the same thing to get attention, it doesn't really work anymore. And so when everybody starts to pick on like, Oh, I can do this follow and follow. I could do this thing. So funny. That's the nature of it. Isn't that funny? They're like the nature of like, everybody wants to keep it secret, but you know. Right. And so, and so that's why I think it's awesome to be in this space because you can't really just put your feet up.

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and think that everything is gonna be cool and tomorrow there's not gonna be a hurricane. So for me, it's always been fun to find new little hacks that work. And it also allows you to be innovative and disruptive and be able to beat some of these people that are just kind of businessmen. I like to make the distinction between businessmen and entrepreneurs that actually create or innovate versus people that have this source and then.

03:01
You know, they just are selling. The space is always changing. Instagram is just nowhere near what it used to be. It's a whole different animal. Not even an animal, a monster. There was something always aesthetically in UI that I just thought was brilliant about the platform. And even to this day, some things have gotten annoying and as bulky as it's gotten, it's still my favorite fucking platform. And maybe it's, you know, maybe familiarity breeds sincere like or something. I don't know, but like.

03:28
It just feels right with the platform. My experiences, I would say like, yeah, it's probably my favorite just because that's been like my life, how I built like my business for a long time. But there are certain things about it that have become like fatigue. It's like you kind of see the same things that we were seeing like three years ago, the success pages, the flaunting, the wealth, like, you know, it gets old a little bit. I guess it depends on what you follow. And yeah, I mean, it's cool. Sometimes it's just distracting. I'll just go on my explore page.

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And there's just like a bunch of like half naked girls. And I'm just like, why? Well, so yeah, no, I think it has, it's definitely an amazing place to connect with people. And that has been probably one of the hardest things as like you get bigger. It's like, you cannot have the same attention that you were giving to everybody in your DMs. It's just, it's insane. You know, it's madness.

04:25
Give everybody a fair chance is what I'm also seeing is really hard. Everybody likes life hacks. Everybody loves shortcuts, right? And as long as you aren't breaking the law, I think there's just a fascination and we should all embrace, you know, finding those loopholes. We got to push the limits a little bit and maximize our time. Of course. The rules.

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for me are, it's not that they're meant to be broken, but if you're not really hurting people, I feel like the end justifies means. What's been the evolution of like Instagram growth? What people need to understand about marketing is it's about attention. And it's about getting attention in a place where everybody's trying to get attention. And so that is what makes it harder.

05:20
It used to be a little bit easier to get somebody's attention because you could have liked their posts. But I guess I would say there is this misconception that psychologically when we look at it and we see the people that we look up to that have five million followers, that's a lot of people. Fifty thousand, when you look at it, it's a massive amount of human beings. Yeah. And you're talking about a hundred times that. Five million, right? Am I doing our math right? Exactly. Yeah.

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50,000 people yelling at you or like commenting on you on what you were wearing. So a lot of those are not real. And so sometimes it's more important about getting in front of the right people to get the attention from and really, I hate to say it, but sometimes faking it till you make it can help you. It is reality. It is what it is. The thing that I tell people is I don't tell people to fake it till you make it. I don't.

06:18
shy away from the fact that perception is reality and that you may need to growth hack or do things in the beginning to create the momentum. And look, you got to have substance. I always tell people, and this is kind of where you were headed, like you better have some substance behind it. Because if you're faking everything, then this is not where I'm telling you to go.

06:43
But if you've got the goods and you've got a story to tell on it, or you, you know, no matter what that is, it can be a million different things. As long as you have that substance behind you, then you have to play the game a bit to get the ball rolling. It was the word you used, the purpose. But what rings in my head is like the memes of Gary V impersonators are like, content, content, you gotta have good content, post more content. I think that's really what it is. It's a combination of first, you need to be a pretty girl.

07:10
Like if you're not a pretty girl, people are gonna, yeah, people aren't gonna look at you, but more so like, I love the pizza analogy, I use it all the time, but if you have great pizza and it's really good pizza, and you pay 100 people to wait in line, the people that walk by are like, whoa, like what is that place? The pizza must be good. So that being said, the pizza has to be good. When people go into that line and they go into that pizza store,

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and the pizza's not good, it's not gonna work. You gotta have substance. Substance is a word. That was the word, it was substance. So once you have the substance or the, you know, what I'm driving traffic to is what we would say. Yeah, if you're a knowledge expert, you have knowledge. If you're a marketing person sharing marketing knowledge, it better be real. If you're a wedding expert, you better have wedding knowledge. If you're a pretty girl, you better have bikini photos. Like, you gotta have the sauce once we get you in the front door, right?

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100,000% about driving just massive traffic. I think that's why I love growth hacking is because just sending 30 million DMs, like knocking on, you can't do that. Like you cannot knock on a hundred million people's doors. Like, and that's why the internet is the most awesome thing ever. Because you can email. Like to think that Facebook is going through what it's going through because he can't get more users, it's hilarious. It's like...

08:39
There's no more people on the planet to get. Yeah, he's got 50% of them. And the rest don't probably have a computer. Right. It's like he's got like shareholder meters. Like, yeah, we're going to have to get more users. We're going to build satellites in Africa so that we can get them internet and we can get them more users. And it's like, man, like, but I guess I'll lead it back to the whole content thing, which is funny to me because I just see it as like this charlatan.

09:08
opportunity to make money. That's what the world is. We have these secrets and we want to be compensated for them. But it's funny because Gary Vee is one of the reasons why I took this leap of entrepreneurship. I remember I was in school and it was so hard to continue because I loved the philosophy and all the stuff I was reading in the school.

09:37
But I had a business that was like rocking. It was rocking. Like, you know, and it was taking a lot of my time and my mom said if I dropped out, you know, she was gonna help pay with rent and I was gonna end up working at McDonald's and it was really hard. You know, it was really hard. And I saw one of his videos and he was like, fuck everybody, man. And I don't know how it happened. It came up on YouTube and it was like, if you're not willing to jump and just.

10:04
or take the risk and not just, all right, I'm gonna put some chips on this bet. If you're not willing to just put it all in, you're not an entrepreneur. And I think with road hacking, it's about just driving traffic from as many ways possible. And Instagram is already such a beast that it's like you got likes, you got stories, you got reels, you got shout outs, you got, it's already a lot to take in to drive traffic. Another thing that has been

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kind of working, I'd say it's pretty gray, black hat, is just having people tag you in their story. So you just have like a million people tag your account and all of a sudden the algorithm's recognizing, whoa, this account's getting tagged a lot. The golden rule. That's what it is. It's the golden rule. Do unto other accounts as you would have them do unto yours. And it comes back, right? It's social media for a reason. We're supposed to be social.

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This is how we engage and we interact. This is how we connect with people. This is how you get people's attention. You like, you follow, you engage with them. You've just got to really know your shit to kind of get it to work. Or cause you can, you can waste some, I, you know, we talked earlier and you mentioned, I'm glad you did. Cause I mean, you're the growth hacker. You're, you're the growth God, but you even mentioned pay to play. You got to pay to play even with ads cause they do work, but you can also spend.

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and waste a lot of money on ads if you don't do it the right way. I really wish that there was more attention on that front because you could only imagine how many Facebook ad campaigns have been created to not build some sort of statistically significant replicas of successful campaigns for somebody to, you know, click a button here, say I'm in entertainment or I'm in selling doors.

12:00
and just kind of create an AI that runs these ads and, and it has people win. You know, what's the, you know, everybody says, okay, images don't perform anymore. Reels perform. Like I've heard they've dialed that back a bit, but any perspective on is, is it truly just video or nothing these days? Yeah. The answer is TikTok is a monster and, um, Instagram has.

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always made sure to stay in line with what's trending and that's what people are doing on TikTok. So they've changed their system to prioritize the reels. And I think what's really cool about it is that now you can be paid on them and you can be paid on your Facebook page. Any final words of wisdom on just the gram in general? I would say to just focus on your craft and your message and what you want to put out there.

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because there's a lot of noise and to just continue putting out what you want to put out and not to let the pressure of this and how much to stop you from if you believe in your work and if you continue and you're consistent and you use and you go work with people like us on

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that space because it cannot be good for your mind. You know, get off your phone a little bit. You don't need to refresh your post every five seconds. Like just, you know, see how many people commented. You don't need, like if you post what you love and what you're doing, just post and move on, you know? You don't need to be, you know, tweaking about that stuff. So that's my wisdom is that.

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you know, not to let it consume so much of, uh, what you think means that you're talented or, or good because I've seen and worked with people that have had, you know, a thousand followers and they've made some of the best music I ever heard. Um, so Julia, man, I really appreciate it. You know, when you get into these episodes, we talk at such a high level cause we could talk for three hours about some of the stuff that we'll make sure we're linking to articles and different

14:23
points of view from from joining the team and the Instagram. So excited, man. Well, thank you so much, Ryan, I had an awesome time. And yeah, if there's any agencies or people that are in the space, please reach out to us. I think you'd love what we've built and serve this for your clients. We want this for agencies. Because I know what it's like to have a house built and have a hurricane destroy it. So so thanks.

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Tell me where can everybody keep up with you and or Instagram, let's drop at least verbally some links and stuff. Right, verbally, my Instagram right now is itsthegrowthgod, at itsthegrowthgod. And yeah, the website is instagrowth.com, you can sign up there. Perfect. And we do have an Instagram page, it's called instagrm.com, like spelt out, like D-O-T-C-O-M. Well, hey guys.

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Go follow all these guys at Instagram growth. You'll get a lot of knowledge and we'll have show notes and more information as we move along. And you know where to find us the radcast.com I'm at Ryan Allford verified on Instagram and I didn't pay for it. Right. We'll see you next time on the Radcast. To listen or watch full episodes, visit us on the web at the radcast.com.

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Or follow us on social media at our Instagram account, V.RAB.CAST, or at Ryan Alford. Stay radical.