2023 Instagram Growth Hacks with the Growth God Julian Walder

 This is the story of the one.
 As a maintenance supervisor at a manufacturing facility,
 he knows keeping the line up and running is a top priority.
 That's why he chooses Granger.
 Because when a drive belt gets damaged,
 Granger makes it easy to find the exact specs
 with the replacement product he needs.
 And next day delivery helps ensure
 he'll have everything in place and running like clockwork.
 Go 1-800-GRanger, click ranger.com or just stop buying.
 Granger for the ones who get it done.
 You're listening to the Radcast,
 a top 25 worldwide business podcast.
 If it's radical, we cover it.
 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 get 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, 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.
 It's the end of the day.
 I've always been fascinated with it because it's like,
 why do we not want to get to where we want to go faster?
 Right?
 We're not breaking any laws.
 You know, like, so I've always really admired that mindset
 of kind of getting there.
 But let's set the table for everyone for your background.
 And, you know, anybody that's the growth god.
 I just realized like some of the strategies I was in.
 I should just sell this 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 it just kept going down that road.
 Consulted some corporations like IBM.
 And I decided to build my own software.
 Like start building these tools.
 Like I've been using these tools.
 Like I want to build something better.
 Then kind of went down that path of building these Instagram growth tools.
 Kind of always at war with Goliath.
 The algorithm slash.
 Right.
 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.
 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 that's the nature of it.
 Isn't that funny?
 Yeah.
 The nature of like everybody wants to keep it secret.
 But you know,
 And so and so that's why I think it's awesome to be in the space.
 Because you can't really just put your feet up.
 And like think that everything is going to be cool.
 And like tomorrow,
 there's not going to be a hurricane.
 So for me,
 it's always been like fun to find new little little hacks that work.
 And it also allows you to be like innovative and disruptive.
 And be able to be some of these people that are just kind of businessmen.
 You know,
 I like to make the distinction between like businessmen and entrepreneurs
 that like actually create or innovate versus people that, you know,
 have this source and then, 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 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 it just feels right in with my form.
 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 page is the flaunting the wealth like,
 you know, it gets old a little bit.
 I guess it depends of what you follow.
 And yeah, I mean, it's cool.
 Sometimes it's just distracting.
 I'll just go on my explore page.
 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,
 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, it's madness.
 Give everybody a fair chance is what I'm also saying is, 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 for me are, it's not that they're meant to be broken,
 but if you're not really hurting people,
 I feel like they end just five minutes.
 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.
 It used to be a little bit easier to get somebody's attention because you could have liked their post.
 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.
 50,000, when you look at its mass, it's a massive amount of human beings.
 Yeah.
 And you're talking about a hundred times that.
 Five million, right?
 If I'm doing our math right?
 Exactly.
 Yeah.
 Just imagine 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 so you make it can help you.
 Perception is reality.
 It is what it is.
 The thing that I tell people is I don't tell people to fake it to you make it.
 I don't 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, if then this is not where I'm telling you to go.
 But if you've got the goods and you've got a story to tell 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.
 Yeah.
 What brings in my head is like the memes of Gary Vee impersonators are like content, content.
 You got to 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.
 Like if you're not a pretty girl, people are going to, yeah.
 People are going to look at you.
 But for more so, 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, 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 and the pizza is not good, it's not going to work.
 You got to have substance, substances.
 Yeah.
 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, you're in marketing, it's 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 got to have the sauce once we get you in the front door, right?
 100,000 percent about driving just massive traffic.
 I think that's why I love growth hacking is because just sending 3 million dns, like knocking on, you can't do that.
 Like you cannot knock on 100 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 there's no more people on the planet to get it.
 Yeah, he's got 50% of them.
 And that we didn't, they're a stomp. I have a computer.
 Right.
 And it's like, it's like he's got like shareholder meters.
 Like, yeah, you know, we're going to have to get more users.
 We're going to build satellites in Africa so that we could get them internet.
 And we could get them more users.
 And it's like man, like, but I guess, 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 that opportunity to make money, you know.
 And that's kind of what the world is.
 You know, it's like we have these secrets.
 And, you know, we want it.
 We want it to be compensated for them.
 But it's funny because Gary Vee is one of the reasons why I took this leap of entrepreneurship.
 But I remember I was in school and it was so hard to continue.
 Because I loved like the philosophy and all this stuff.
 I was reading and in the school.
 But I had a business that was like rocky.
 It was it was rock.
 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 going to help pay with rent.
 And I was going to work.
 And 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.
 How it happened?
 It came up on YouTube and was like, if you're not willing to jump.
 And just fail or take the risk.
 And not just, all right, I'm going to 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 roadtacking, 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 reals.
 You got shout outs.
 You got it's already a lot to take in to drive traffic.
 Another thing that has been kind of working in say it's pretty gray black hat is just having a people tag you in their story.
 So you just have like a million people tag your account.
 And all of a sudden the algorithms recognizing, whoa, this this account is getting tagged a lot.
 The golden rule.
 That's what it is.
 It's the golden rule.
 Do under other accounts as you would have them do under yours.
 And it's not just that it comes back, right?
 It's so it's social media for a reason.
 Yeah.
 We're supposed to be social.
 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.
 You can, you can waste them.
 I, you know, we talked earlier and you mentioned I'm glad you did because 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 because they do work.
 But you can also spend 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, 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 and just kind of create an AI that runs these ads and has people win, you know.
 What's the, you know, everybody says, okay, images don't perform anymore.
 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 Instagram has always made sure to stay in line with what's trending and that's what people are doing on TikTok.
 So that's, they've changed, they've changed their system to prioritize these, 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 like Facebook page.
 Any final words of wisdom on just the gram in general?
 I would say to just focus on your craft and do your message and what you want to put out there.
 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 Instagram that you will drive the right traffic.
 And not to get so sucked up into that space because it cannot be good for your mind, you know, get off, get off your phone a little bit.
 You don't, 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, that's my wisdom is that, you know, not to let it consume so much of what you think means that you're talented 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.
 So, Julia, man, I really appreciate it. You know, when you get in these episodes, we talk it's such a high level because we can talk for three hours about some of this stuff that will make sure we're linking to articles and different points of view from from Julian team and the Instagram. So excited, man.
 So much trying to 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 love what we 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 thanks.
 Tell me we're working to right keep up with you and or Instagram, if let's drop at least verbally some some links and stuff.
 Right, verbally, my Instagram right now is it's the growth God at it's the growth God and yeah, the website is instagram.com can sign up there.
 And we do have we do have an Instagram page is called instagram.com like spelled out like DOT, COM.
 Well, hey guys, go follow all these guys at Instagram. You'll get a lot of knowledge and we'll have show notes and more information as we move along.
 And you don't want to find us the radcast.com. I'm at Ryan Alford verified on Instagram and I didn't pay for it.
 We'll see you next time on the radcast.
 To listen or watch full episodes, visit us on the web at the radcast.com or follow us on social media at our Instagram account v.rad.cast or at Ryan Alford.
 Stay radical.
 Stay radical.
 Stay radical.
 Stay radical.
 Stay radical.