How Chloe Shih Gained 300K IG Followers in a Week

0:00You have something here from Chloe Sheehy. she gained 300 ,000 Instagram followers in a week what does she do to do that? Chloe, she's a friend and she was the one I don't know if you remember this but there was a video of someone getting terminated from her job at Discord that was her last year I think were people getting laid off hers was like being shocked and everything oh and she had signage and stuff that she held up and you were going through the screens or not maybe but she would always make these videos of her like talking and her cutting a watermelon like that that's something I always remember right because I love watermelon and then I met her like one of these like Asian entrepreneur events thing that my friend hosted so anyway she had like a hundred thousand followers or so now she's at like 600 ,000 so she gained 300 ,000 and then since that she gained like another 200 ,000 or so but the key thing is when you look at her videos it's Chloe the videos are super highly produced she's spending a lot of time editing and she's talking about wide tam ideas on how you can be more confident for example and things like that and the style just looks really warm and inviting that's all I can say about it let me show you real quick just so you get an idea I'm curious how one of these videos look I was going to type it on my IG we'll drop this into the notes as well check this out you see this?

1:25Yeah, I'll let you pull it in. Neil's looking at it right now. All right, 500k. You see the quality? Yeah, it's really high quality editing. The quality is super, super high. And when you make large - Amazing editing. Yeah, and she's editing it herself. Okay, it's amazing editing. Yeah, and that's the thing, right? Instagram themselves, I said, when you post higher quality videos, one, that tends to get more reach, but also the editing is so high quality. And the idea is the way she articulates herself By the way, she goes the extra mile where she might be wearing one outfit in one section, and then she might have multiple versions of her crowding around her that are wearing different outfits.

2:04That takes a lot of time and effort, right? I believe it, because then you're recording you in all these positions as well, or maybe using AI to help. But the one I saw, she was wearing an outfit, and literally in a blink of an eye, she snapped her fingers or she did something, and the outfit just switches. And I was like, all right. She makes hard things look easy. Yes. I've never gained that many followers in a week No, because you don't have to take off your clothes I'm just kidding Chloe didn't have to take off her clothes either With me, I think the most amount of followers I gained was from being on interviews of other people's podcasts when they post videos on Instagram or whatever they tag you What did you get from School of Hard Knocks?

2:42I didn't track the whole thing but he mentioned when it first went up he's like, oh you got like 5 ,000 followers this was within a few hours How did he know? because he was tracking he was tracking my page for me okay got it and he tagged me into the video or he he mentioned me right because you can put like the people in this video that was a good one people should actually check that one out if you're looking to start a business and um yeah you got a lot of hate for it too that people just didn't understand but neil's um the biggest the biggest hate i got because it got over 16 million views just on instagram the biggest hate I got was his, uh, cause I said my dad was in banking.

3:19He's like, Oh, his dad worked for Goldman Sachs. I was like, I don't, I think I may have responded to it, but I'm like, Oh, my dad worked at a traditional, like normal bank. Yeah. Getting paid, uh, not minimum wage, but he didn't, he didn't make a killing or anything like that. He wasn't an executive. He was on the bottom of the totem pole. Yep. Here's the thing. People, it's so easy for people to hate. You look at the hate, by the way, I don't know if you're following this stuff on Twitter where it's the MAGA people versus the HB, is it HB1 or 1HB visas? I haven't seen any of that hate. Oh my God.

3:52It's hate against your kind. It's because there's too many of us coming into the country. So basically, okay, we should talk about this for a second. This is interesting because it's whether you're into politics or not, what's interesting is you have the people on the right, you have the far right, and then now you have the tech right as well, right? Which is like Elon, David Sachs, Vivek, right? And so David Sachs, Vivek, and Elon are like, we need more H-1B visas to bring the super talented people in. And then you have the people on the far right that are just like, we have the people in America already, right?

4:22And then they're like, no, if we bring a super skilled people from India or China, for example, these are the best of the best, right? And that's what really has helped shape America. You would agree with that, right? It's a big part of how - I think immigrants, yes, have helped shape America, especially when you get - I'm not saying that to be Indian or Chinese, but when you get brilliant people into this country, they tend to shine. So basically it was like, okay, the tech right are against illegal immigration, but they're for legal, especially skilled immigration. Because it's like we can suck all the talent away and bring it in and help our companies grow, right?

4:56And then the far right, they're just like, no, it should be America first or whatever. These tech bros should get out of here. So there's division happening right now. and I think it's interesting because these guys got in and all of a sudden it seems like there's a fight happening. But I think the one thing we know for sure, someone posted, it's like, wait one thing we know for sure from this is like, oh, there's a lot of people that don't like Indian people. I was like, oh, that's unfortunate. I'll tell you an interesting story when I used to live in Seattle and I think this was during the Obama administration.

5:24I met this guy who worked at Amazon and I'm like, oh, you know it was obvious he was from India from his accent. And I was like, oh, what'd you do in India? He's like, I graduated from IIT. Is that like a top school? Yes, it's harder to get into MIT. That's what they at least claim depending on the IIT that you're applying for. And I was like, okay. So what'd you do in India? I worked for Amazon. And I was like, all right. So how'd you put me here? He's like, oh, Amazon, Microsoft, a lot of these big tech companies, they work with a lot of the top colleges in India, according to him. they help fund a lot of their programs and then what they do is once they have the people who are really good they then take pictures of their living situation literally their whole apartment they move him, he got moved to Seattle they pack all their stuff in a container they place it in an apartment in Seattle identically to how it was placed or close enough to how it was placed in India his family has moved here he has an amazing job, they figure out rent everything for him and he's working here in the U.S.

6:31I look, I think I just, you and I don't care about skin color at the end of the day or immutable characteristics. What matters is how good you are. And like, I think the good thing is when you look at people coming in from like China or you look at people coming in from India, the work ethic is already built in because it's beat into you growing up, right? Like your education is beat into you. Work ethic is beat into you. Like, why would you not want these people to come in? And here's the other thing, the people that are fighting about this, it's stupid because there's only 85 ,000 H1B visas per year.

6:59Amazon claims like 3 ,300. They applied for 3 ,300. And then everyone else is like less, right? Like Google is 2 ,500. It's not that many. So they're fighting over the wrong things. And it's crazy how like some stupid fight like that becomes so big. And now you see it on CNBC and MSNBC. Dude, speaking about politics, Salo on my team, he's just like, we're going to go all MAGA on 2025. I'm like, what does that mean? What the heck are you talking about? because right MAGA, which was Trump's slogan of make America great again. And in our corporation, we don't deal with politics or talk politics. We just focus on the business and our customers.

7:33And he's just like, you know, MAGA make ads great again. Internal ads. And he's like, we're going to do a MAGA marketing. You got to wear a red hat though. I'm okay. I'm the hats. I don't want to be, I don't want to choose a side. Dude, and we had the same thing happen with our marketing. So I started taking over all social and it went from one post a day to two posts a day. And we're getting way more views with, I believe, our right audience. Cause I can tell by the comments, the leads coming in. We asked people where they found us or heard about us. The second thing I started taking, and then I'm going to go to three times a day, starting in by end of Q1 of 2025.

8:15five. The next thing I started taking over is ads, right? I'm talking to right now. We're just giving the example of me running ads. And when I say I'm taking over ads, I'll be quite frank and honest. I'm not going and clicking buttons in Facebook. I'm just telling someone right then and there to go do it. And when my team is off, I literally hit up someone on the marketing team like, Hey, do you know a contractor who can just do this for us right now? They're like, yes, I know one in Brazil. Literally I was messaging solo during this Christmas holiday. I know someone in Brazil who can do this first for a few days for 500 bucks.

8:47I'm like, sounds good. Give him the$500 or tell him someone will pay him once accounting's back in office. And we're already like cranking, right? And he's like, oh, cool. And I already started having him redo the landing pages and I'm having him show me the landing pages. I'm redoing the copy. I'm not actually making the changes myself, but I'm brainstorming with the team and starting to take things over. So now you have, I've taken over most of the social media. I still have the team's help. I am now have taken over ads or I'm working with the team on taking over ads eventually. And I'm recording around three ads a week until I find ads that will work.

9:24And I'm just going to crank them out. And then starting in Q1, I'm taking over all SEO from the blog. And our team says, you know, we don't really drive tons of revenue from the blog because we've moved so upstream. Like when you're pitching people for like a million dollars, two, three million dollars, it is hard to find those kind of clients from a blog. And the reason being is most of those contracts in our industry, they're procurement driven. And they have to include a certain amount of companies or agencies in the pitch. And you have to go through a process. There's no real way to shortcut it, even if you know like the CEO of that organization.

10:02And I was like, well, I'm not speaking as much. This is for branding. So I don't really care if it drives a ROI. you know, let's not focus on the amount of SEO traffic we get. Let's focus on creating really amazing content for our ideal customer, those multimillion dollar contracts. And who cares if our traffic goes down by a fourth, but we target the right customer and like, cool. It's just like, same with the social content. A lot of those charts don't get the love that a broad video would be on like Starbucks, but nonetheless, you know what my ideal audience is seeing it. And I believe in the long-term it'll drive revenue.

10:38So I'm taking over all three aspects, ads, organic, social, and organic SEO. And then what I'm doing is once I get that in the middle of next year, I'll then scale it all out in all languages for the markets that we're in. Yep. And how often do you meet with your marketing team? I don't really meet with anyone in marketing. There's a guy named Salo who is the real CMO of NP Digital. Even though my title, I think, is a CMO, but he's really the CMO. Yeah. What I'm doing is I'm working with him and he's executing on everything that I want. See, that's important detail. Right? So I'm not really doing it.

11:15So you're pestering him. I'm pestering him. Like, dude, I already chatted with him three times today. I chatted with him twice on Christmas. That's interesting because the Brazilians on my team, they're still working. I think they celebrate Christmas. I'm pretty sure. They do, but it seems like he's still on like the guy I talk to frequently. He's still on like the same working pace. and also for my team, like Salo, he messaged me around a week ago before all the holidays. He's just like, hey, just want to let you know we can still crank out charts and all this kind of stuff because I'm not going to be doing much during Christmas.

11:52And what's cool about Salo, this is what makes him really unique. So we have this database of data from Ubersess and ATP, plus we pay some researchers in Asia to gather us data. So between all of them, we have tons of data. Salo and AI can help us gather the nuggets from the data, right? But here's the interesting thing. Salo's background is not marketing. He first started off as a designer. So all my charts - They look good. He designs them himself. Yeah, I'm like, how do they look so good? That's the question I have. He designs them himself. And no joke, he'll send them to me on Slack and he's like, what about this format?

12:28And I'm like, you know what? I'm tired of these bars. It's too much. What's some other unique thing that we can do? And he's like, okay, let me do a big circle for showing like a number of pieces of content that are post. And let me show small dots for viral posts. Maybe that'll be a more interesting way to showcase the data. And what we found is instead of just using bar graphs, it's not just the topic of the charts, it's the design. And if we can show the design in like table formats, but not something other than just bar charts or pie charts, it tends to do better. And he'll send it to me. I'm like, no, I don't like this design.

13:03He'll send me a few options and we'll crank it out like literally in a matter of like 20, 30 minutes. And then he'll even send me like the colors of like, cause there's different color schemes. Like if you're saying, Hey, what's the best time to send emails? There's hot versus cold. And he'll send me a color palette, like all Google, you know, one of those color wheel websites and I'll pop in the colors and they'll show me like other ancillary colors that we should use. I'm like, check this out, throw it in there. And then he'd be like, ah, let me just say a little bit more. Here's a better version.

13:30Why don't you take his charts and then workshop it with chat GPT? He does it with chat GPT. Okay. Okay. Got it. And Eric knows this about me. I'm really bad about like saying, Hey Neil, here's all this new technology. Do it yourself. It's quicker for me to just get on the phone and be like, I want you to do this now. Dude, even yesterday night, we're recording this on December 27th, but yesterday night was the 26th. I got one of the ads I filmed a few days earlier. It was edited. I sent it to him late at night, and he got to her early in the morning. I wake up around 4 a.m. PST, but already by the middle of the night, I sent the editor's notes.

14:13and you know, cause I, we use that. Um, I don't know what that is owned by Adobe, that, uh, audio company that just like, uh, no, that you can just leave notes on frame.io. Thank you, Brad. So he's frame.io. I went through all of it and I'm like, this is wrong here. Change the sound here. Change the image here. I'm like, and I'm like screenshotting URLs and like paste it from here. And what I would do with my team is I sent it to Mike this morning. He's like, dude, a terrible editing job. I was like, I know. I'm like, let them fix all the stuff I want. And I'm also getting the raw file. And Mike's already looking for an editor who's doing it similar to the format that I want editing style.

14:52And he'll take the version I will give him that has all my modifications because it'll have like screenshots. And then the new people can just edit it the way we want. And they'll have the screenshots right then and there. This is the new contractors you're using. we'll go find new contractors. So this morning he already started finding contractors on Upwork for editors. We also do have editors within our company. And I learned this, this is a random tangent. You know, if you buy a company, unless they specialize in things like video editing, et cetera, and you give them tons of business from your own work, you're also helping them hit their earn out.

15:31So then you're paying them on multiple on your own revenue. I was like, go find me the Upwork person. You get what I mean? Client work is different. I want to send them all our client work and by all means, but like I'm artificially, I'm artificially jacking up the numbers. And if I had a conversation with the companies we bought it and told them this, dude, the founders of those companies are so understanding that they'd be like, yeah, no problem. I just don't want to go down that path. It's just easier for me to find some people on Upwork and crank it out, especially during a holiday weekend.

16:01It's funny. So I talked to, talked to Yaniv about this, right? This is maybe a year ago or so. So our mutual friend, Yaniv. And so basically he's just like, yeah, I'm so sick and tired of going to the full-time people. I, all I do is I go to Upwork. I just hire people off Upwork. They can do it. If they can't do it, I cut them quickly. And it's the same conversation we're having right now. So yeah, we can talk about all the founder mode stuff. The year's not even over yet. So founder mode, right? You got to founder mode, all of the things in your company, especially for me, one of the big focuses, it's really just sales and marketing next year.

16:34That's really what I'm focused on because all those things feed the company. So it sounds like marketing is a big piece, a big thrust for you next year. And by the way, guys, Neil's cutting his travel down from 200 days a year to 30. We'll see if that actually happens. I already cut mine down from 137 to 87 this year. I'm going to try to cut it down to like 60. So we'll see. My team's trying to like hack my travel schedule. Cause I only told them I'm going to do 10 events. They're like, MailChimp wants you to do an event in Australia and LinkedIn wants you to do an event for all their customers.

17:07Australia is a tough flight. Okay. And I was like, Oh, I got to go. They're like, Oh, don't worry. It's still going to be one event. You're going to do MailChimp's event. And the next day you're going to do linkedin so slowly one trip and i was like uh okay so they're trying to actually book in like three four events into one of them and i'm like guys this is defeating the purpose of have you seen a month have you seen the steve aoki documentary no but i heard his dad created benihana's yeah he did but so steve aoki super successful dj right but the whole deal is there's a period of time where he's getting booked for everything and he's he's on a private jet he's flying everywhere.

17:44Right. And then he just goes apeshit all of a sudden. And he's like, guys, like you didn't give me any time for like, look at this date. Like there's no time for lunch or anything. Right. He just got super frustrated because his team was thinking about production, but they weren't thinking about him. Right. And so it kind of reminded me of that. I don't think, I don't think your team is doing that. Um, but, but it adds up. Yeah, it does add up. So, um, take that into account guys. The fact that we're trying to cut our, our travel down. Um, I would say it's helped me a lot. It seems like it's, um, you haven't done it yet.

18:11We'll see what it happens. No, I already started. We turned down most speaking. What did you just start? It's like the end of December right now. Dude, you know how many of my gigs already get booked for like 20, 27? What percent did you turn down? When I first started my business, the overwhelm was real. I didn't have the tools to help me scale. If only I had Shopify from the start to handle all the behind the scenes work. Shopify is the platform behind millions of businesses globally from huge names like Mattel and Gymshark to the smallest brands just getting started. The best part about it.

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20:24That's framer.com, promo code MS, framer.com, promo code MS, rules and restrictions may apply. Well, we get hit up around like four or five times a week for a paid speaking gig. So we're turning off most of them. But I already have speaking gigs booked for 2026 and beyond. We're not talking about 2025. I'm talking about 2026. I get booked out pretty in advance. But it sounds like you and I are on a very similar page. Yeah, I said no to a lot of speaking things. Yeah. And you and I also believe sales and marketing solves all problems. You just make more money. Yeah. I mean, Mark Cuban, like him or not, sales cures all problems, right?

21:02Sales cures all, literally. Marketing drives sales, right? And then, oh, but product matters. Yeah, well, how are you going to fund product if you don't have sales? So you can't focus on too many things. I was watching a Y Combinator video where they were talking about focus, right? Like focus equals winning. You can only do so many, maybe one or two big initiatives, and that's it. You can't try to do everything. Dude, I'm on the same page as you. One more thing they said, dude, this is Michael Seibel, I think. He runs Y Combinator now, right? So what Gary Tan does, I don't know what he does now.

21:35But basically, it's like, okay, you think as a founder, you don't have superpowers, but you do have superpowers. And sure, you might be able to do something like 10x better or maybe even 100x better or faster, which I do believe is the case. But even then, you can't use your superpower and everything. Like Superman can't save everyone in the world, right? You got to use your powers smartly. dude it's so funny how you and i are just like a big believer and i'm curious what happens at the end of 2025 because if you look at what we're doing right now i don't think you and i have been in the trenches as much with our own businesses um you know since uh 2024 yeah i do believe you and i constantly do work yeah but we're the big shift i think that we made in 2024 is we said all right, we're spending all these hours, but we're spending it on a ton of things.

22:27Let's just cut back on the stuff we're doing and just focus on two or three things and ignore everything else. And one of the things that you're focusing on, and we won't get into this too much, is you're creating this marketing-based software, which I think will do quite well. And you already have a lot of businesses that are interested in it. And a lot of them are already starting to pay you money. Correct me if I'm wrong for it, right? But what's interesting is from this podcast, people end up listening and then people try to sign up and they also try to copy it. Yeah. Yeah. So that's it for today, guys.

23:05Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe. And don't forget to check out marketingschool.io slash agency if you want to grow your agency faster and we'll see you tomorrow.

23:19Thank you.