How to Grow a Brand (Without Getting Lucky)
I have taken two communities from 0 to 100K on X and Discord and driven eight figures of views. In this post I want to share what I have learned along the way.
The pattern across both was treating audience growth as the result of useful campaigns rather than the goal by itself. Followers were a leading indicator. The business outcome was the real KPI.
I joined Irys and later Fermah as CMO, and at both companies one of my jobs was to build a community from zero. A lot of the principles below I learned by running the Irys account over a long stretch. Then I sped them up at Fermah, where a three-week launch campaign got us 90K followers and eventually took both X and Discord past six figures. In this article I break down the principles first, then walk through how I applied them.
The principles
- Get the big moments right. A single big announcement can do more than a thousand small ones. There is an exponential return on the few things that are actually news, a raise, a launch, a rebrand, so squeeze everything out of them. Small posts rarely add up to much, however many you publish.
- Start as a professional beggar. Your investors, partners, friends and earliest fans are your first distribution channel. A new account has no momentum for an algorithm to pick up, so you go person by person and ask. Then get better at asking. Nobody owes you a repost, but people will gladly share something that makes them look good, so name them in the announcement, send them the artwork, let them post it before anyone else has it. That is the difference between someone doing you a favor once and someone who actually wants in.
- Give your prospective community a real way to participate. People want to engage with what you are building if you hand them something concrete to do, even when the product is deeply technical. A challenge, a claim, a contribution, a seat in a small group. Give them something to do and a reason to be seen doing it.
- Make sure some of your content exists to drive a business outcome. Not all of it has to. But it is easy to forget that content can start a conversation, book a demo, or close a customer, so keep a share of it aimed at that, even when those posts will never go viral. Measurement works the same way. A dashboard is only useful if it changes the next decision.
- Let some content just be fun. People open X for the dopamine. Some posts should lean into that and be purely entertaining.
- Write the blog first, then everything else. At both companies the long-form post was the atomic unit and the rest came off it: the thread, the video script, the messages to partners, the one-pager for sales, the docs. Writing it first forces you to decide what you actually think, and it stops a launch from turning into five people telling five versions of the same story.
- Do not over-index on gaming the algorithm. There is stuff worth experimenting with. But by far the biggest lever is producing high-quality content. It sounds obvious when you say it out loud, and it becomes easy to forget when you are running tons of experiments.
- Stay consistent, and know which stage you are in. At the start it is a volume game. You keep trying, you never know what is going to hit, and the volume is what gives you the data. That flips once you have an audience. We got to a point at Irys where we were publishing more and getting fewer impressions per post, and the fix was fewer, better posts. Either way, keep the loop short. Kill it, scale it, or repackage it quickly.
Most of these come down to picking the right moments, asking for help, giving people something to do, and remembering what the content is for.
How I applied this at Fermah
I joined Fermah before it had a public name. I was the entire growth team, and the immediate goal was to make the launch out of stealth a success. I ran it as a three-week campaign with four moves in it.
Make it news
Announce it once, properly, and get your stakeholders to carry it
Get prominent people talking
Borrow credibility from the names your audience already trusts
Drive business outcomes
Use the attention to open the conversations that matter
Get people engaged
Turn up the hype and give everyone a way in
Make it news. Week one was the announcement itself. Tier-one coverage of the seed round, an announcement thread with an elevator-pitch video, and behind the scenes I asked every stakeholder we had to amplify it, because we were starting with almost no reach. You might not get much reach on a first announcement (ours still did over 200,000 views from a standing start of zero followers). If the right people pick it up, that still sets you up for the virality later.
Today, we’re unveiling Fermah, the universal proof generation layer
Get prominent people talking. We booked our founder on a tier-one industry podcast alongside the best known company in our category. A week-old startup sitting next to the category leader changes how people file you. Then, mid-launch, Vitalik Buterin weighed in publicly on the exact problem we existed to solve. He is the closest thing our industry has to a household name, so that one comment did more for our credibility than anything we could say about ourselves, and we kept using it long after the launch window closed. The repeatable version of this is co-marketing. Find companies whose audience overlaps with yours, build something real together, and you each introduce the other to people who already trust you. I ran those campaigns at Irys well before Fermah, and they are the closest thing I know to a reliable way to borrow an audience.
Drive business outcomes. Week two was for builders. We announced devnet, but the real progress was behind the scenes. About 300 projects were relevant to us and around 50 of them mattered. We had set up chats with all of them before launch, sent each one a message on how our tech helped them, and attached a calendar link. Those conversations later closed our number one prospect, zkSync, against competitors who had raised an order of magnitude more money than we had. Those conversations kept paying out for the next year. Content we made later, including a product launch video we used as a lead magnet, opened doors with the same list and contributed to dozens of closed deals.
Fermah will generate proofs for @zksync ZKsync is innovating at the bleeding edge of ZK. Their adoption of Fermah for a critical component of their stack – proof generation – makes it official: Proof markets are here... and they're bringing moon math to the masses
Get people engaged. Week three turned up the hype. The Day 1 NFT gave everyone a way in, with a Discord role and a proper landing page around the mint. The earlier weeks had built up latent demand, and this is what blew it up. Over 220,000 wallets minted it, and that single activation added roughly 90,000 followers. Creators picked it up on their own. We paid nobody.
It also broke. At peak we were taking more than 300 submissions a minute, which was past what our backend could handle, and we lost signups we were never going to get back. Build for the traffic you are trying to cause.
You guys are crazy (in the best possible way) 😁 Over 220k wallets minted this NFT and almost 100k of you have joined our community on X and Discord This mint is complete Now, it's time to build the best community in ZK and bring moon math to the masses More coming soon™
What I would take to any launch
None of this is specific to one industry or one launch. Any company with investors, partners, and a few early fans already has a distribution channel it is not using. Any product, however technical, can give people something concrete to do. The hard part is choosing which few moments deserve everything you have, and then doing the unglamorous work of asking people one at a time. Remember, your job is to be a professional beggar.
For the closer view of the Fermah work, there is a separate retrospective in From Stealth to 100K+: My Time at Fermah.