How I Overcame a Growth Plateau

I’ve developed a new motto: a plateau is just a step.

Let me explain.

For the last couple months, I plateau-ed on Twitter at around 19,000 followers. Like sure, there was minor growth, but it was basically a plateau. Maybe I was distracted by my Instagram blowing up and all my ghostwriting work, but it didn’t matter the reasons why—I was in a Twitter plateau and I was pissed off.

I realized I needed to step it up a notch.

Post more frequently. Post danker memes. Drop spicier takes. Write more in-depth posts. Hop on trending topics. Post nudez. Ok maybe not the last one. But the point is I realized if you’re in a plateau, it probably just means you’re not taking enough big bets with your content.

Organic social media growth is like venture capital. It’s ruled by the Power Law. You take A LOT of bets and only a small percentage work out, but the few that work out make up for the failures. In VC, you’re hunting for $1B-valuation unicorns; on social media, you’re hunting for viral bangers. In both cases, the only way to achieve them is to hunt more frequently and with higher intensity.

So fast-forward to Tuesday night around 9 PM.

I watch the keynote for a new piece of AI hardware called the Rabbit. I think the marketing is brilliant, but I see people on Twitter hating on it. I smell a controversial topic. I double down on my belief and I’ve got reasons why.

It’s 9 PM, I’m exhausted, it doesn’t matter, it’s time to take a gamble and talk my shit. I say screw it, shut the door to my office, write an in-depth post up in 45 minutes, publish it, wait about 10 minutes, and go to bed.

When I woke up the next day, it was viral. By the end of Wednesday, it hit 1.7M views and 1,500 new followers. Boom. The big bet paid off.

Cya later plateau!! I’m up to 21,000 followers.

And if you zoom out to the past year, my growth has looked like: plateau, jump, plateau, jump, plateau, jump. It looks like a staircase.

A plateau is just a step. And if you want to decrease the time of plateaus and steepen the staircase, you should increase how often you’re taking big bets.

Obviously, it’s easy to assume you want socials on hypergrowth all the time, but I’m coming to learn that’s not always the best way to leverage your money and time in business. Like I assumed you’d want to go viral all the time but that’s just not the case if you don’t have your business fundamentals set.

Like here’s 1 example i find super funny. I met a dude at some influencer party last week who has 180,000 followers on Instagram and is still working a 9-5 in construction. Bro I’d be making millions at that level of following. He’s spending so much time optimizing for growth and virality he hasn’t taken any time to figure out a product or offering to get him out of his day job! WTF. I was out of corporate by the time I hit 7k on Twitter. That dude should go down to slow growth and spend some time on product development.

Alright another example. Let’s say you’re an early-stage startup founder who just raised a few million. You want to build up buzz for your startup, but you don’t have a product yet. You just have a flashy name and a TechCrunch article. You shouldn’t be spending money on a ghostwriter—until your product is like 1-2 months max before launch. Until then, just save your money and learn to be content being in slow growth mode by yourself. When it’s launch time and you have a product that can make you money, then bring in the ghostwriter and the viral memelords to get a good ROI. There’s no point building buzz online unless you can generate an ROI from it.

Last example. I didn’t start investing in Instagram until my book was up for pre-order. Why would I put my time and money into Instagram if I didn’t even have a single way to get my money back? My Instagram growth looks like a very long plateau and then a bunch of tiny plateaus as the staircase steepened.

PICK THE RIGHT PLATEAU FOR YOU.

You can pick your plateau size.

You can pick the staircase you’re willing to climb.

You can decide how many big bets you’re gonna put on your socials.

How much time, energy, and capital are you willing to invest—and how much of your reputation are you willing to put on the line?

Are you only willing to post 1x/day and exclusively safe boring non-controversial ideas? Get ready for some very long plateaus my friend.

Or are you willing to look like an idiot and make big bets? Are you willing to write a long thread that only gets 5 likes? Are you willing to make memes and look like an idiot to your old classmates?

Become a gambling addict. Become addicted to betting on yourself. If you want your plateaus to decrease, it’s time to make some big crazy bets.

CYBERPUNK HYPERLINKS

🐰 I wrote a viral thread about a new piece of cyberpunk AI hardware called Rabbit. And of course, I pre-ordered one.

⌨️ Miss the old keyboards pre-iPhone days? Imagine if you can strap a keyboard to your iPhone. This is the recently debuted Clicks.

🎵 What if you could explain a playlist vibe you want and AI will create it for you? Boom. This is PlaylistAI.

MEMES OF THE WEEK

The tunnel memes have been insaaane 😂

This is also brilliant

Thanks for reading nerds.

Create some cool shit this week.

Jason Levin