How I Went from 19 to 25000 Followers on X in 18 Months

Here's the progression I followed to level up my writing and build an audience. It’s reproducible if you're willing to put in the work.

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I went from 19 followers to over 25,000 in the past year and a half, mostly because of my writing on X.

Here’s the progression I followed to level up my writing and build an audience.

It’s reproducible if you’re willing to put in the work.

Step 1

Become a domain expert. Get lots of concrete experience in the trenches of some domain.

This is obvious, but I’ll say it anyway because lots of people waste their time looking for a shortcut that doesn’t exist:

The way you get interesting things to say is by accumulating a massive amount of hands-on experience doing interesting things.

Without that experience, all you can do is effectively function as an LLM.

You’ll cargo-cult things that you’ve read but don’t really understand, don’t have any unique perspectives on, and don’t even know how true they are beyond “[insert credible source] said so.”

You want insight?

So much insight that other people want to listen to what you have to say?

Then you’ve got to get your hands dirty and do the reps.

You don’t get insight until you’ve been in the trenches. That’s where the insight is. That’s where you earn it, that’s where you find it.

If you don’t wanna rough it in the trenches, then sorry, no insight for you.

Step 2

Now you have interesting things to say, so say them.

Write on platforms where you’re likely to get some kind of feedback.

I started on Math Educators StackExchange in summer 2023 and moved to X in summer 2024.

You don’t need a big audience, and you’re not even ready for one anyway.

You just need readers, even just a few, who respond.

Step 3

Study any comments you get, especially the ones where the reader is confused.

Sometimes confusion is your fault. Sometimes it’s not.

Either way, the more you study/poke the confusion, the more you figure out how to write in a way that avoids the confusion, regardless of who is to blame.

Also study/poke comments that disagree.

Sometimes disagreement turns out to be confusion that you can avoid with clearer communication.

Other times it reveals common misunderstandings that are interesting to write more about.

Every time you put out a post, get feedback, make improvements, and carry those improvements forward into future posts, that’s essentially a “rep” of deliberate practice.

Step 4

As you get better at writing, you’ll grow your audience and throw yourself into a compounding cycle:

bigger audience → more feedback → more improvements → more traction → bigger audience.

Once in a while you’ll get a really good follow-up question that you didn’t initially think people would be interested in hearing your perspective on, but you notice it’s got some likes/engagement, and it dawns on you that “oh hey, there is actually quite a bit I can say about this.”

Be sure to answer those.

After you get some traction writing about one particular thing, it can be hard to get yourself to write about other topics.

But you have to, otherwise you pigeonhole yourself and become stale.

So when there’s an adjacent topic that your audience seems to be interested in, that you have things to say about, that just falls in your lap like that, take the shot and see what happens.

Write a detailed answer to the question.

Then turn your answer into a standalone post.

If it does well, then BAM you just found another topic to write about.

If it doesn’t get much attention, then no big deal. It’s a shot on goal. Most shots don’t go in, but that’s the only way you score.

Step 5

Now you’re regularly saying interesting things to a growing audience, and they’re reacting to it.

You’re writing things that some people find valuable.

Semantically, you’ve got something good there.

Now you start to really focus on the structure and tone of your presentation, making it punchy, noticeable, compelling, etc.

By this time, you should have a pretty good idea of what you can write about that other people are interested in, and what kind of “nerve endings” you can hit to spark emotional reactions.

So you start leaning into things like creating a hook, keeping it punchy but not corny, making a smooth transition into elaborating on the hook, building narrative momentum, keeping it relatable, etc.

Steps 6+

Step 5 is about the level where I’m at right now, so I’ll stop here.

I don’t claim to be a writing expert. There’s clearly a long staircase above this point, and I’m still climbing.

Whatever’s up there, I’m excited to work up to it over the coming years.

Follow-Up Questions

Q: How much time do you dedicate daily to your writing?

A: I think I spend about 30-60 minutes on average per day posting on here, drawing on my corpus of existing writing. But whenever I make a completely new, high-effort post like the one above, it takes much longer. I think this one took 3-4 hours spread over 2 days, or something like that.

Q: I have lots of experience doing interesting things, but nobody is reading/commenting on my writing! What should I do? Did you ever do any kind of promotion/ad, e.g., sharing your post in a group chat?

No, I never paid to promote my writing and never shared a post in a chat with the intention of sourcing feedback.

I wouldn’t recommend those things, even if you’re having trouble getting eyes/comments on your writing. Here’s what I’d recommend instead:

Answer people’s questions in the domain where you completed step 1 (which was to become a domain expert by accumulating a massive amount of hands-on experience doing interesting things).

It’s possible to have a lot of expertise in a domain but not really know what parts of that expertise are interesting to other people.

If you start out answering other people’s questions, that can help you identify parts of your expertise that other people actually find interesting.

Personally, I spent a year answering questions on Math Educators StackExchange before moving over to X.

Even after I moved over to X, I still spent a lot of time answering questions. I still do. I’m answering your question right now and will probably turn this answer into a post.

(If you answer a bunch of questions and you still don’t get any eyes/comments on what you’ve written, then either you haven’t really completed step 1, or you need to put more effort into your answers, making them comprehensive and easy to read.)

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