Thread by @mathsppblog

🛠👀 On the 23/09 I challenged myself to go from 2.95k followers to 4k by the end of the month 😱

That was +1.05k followers (+36%) in 7 days.

On the 1st Oct I woke up to a little over 6k followers 🎉🔥 that's INSANE!

Thanks for your support!

Here's a recap of these days 👇🧵

First off, for reference, here is the original tweet with the public challenge:

https://twitter.com/mathsppblog/status/1441114772691243012

In the original tweet I said that my strategy would be to publish a high-value thread each day.

For my challenge to be met, I had to grow ≈4% each day.

Here's a breakdown of the number of followers I woke up to each day, with the % change relative to the previous day.

My strategy to reach ≈4% growth/day was to write a high-value thread each day.

That's what I did, mostly...

On the 27th I had a terrible headache and couldn't sit at the computer.

The numbers clearly show that that hurt the challenge, being the day I grew less.

Other than that, I wrote some kick-ass threads, if I may say so myself, and released a couple of cheatsheets.

One of them about list comprehensions:

https://twitter.com/mathsppblog/status/1441476792670298112

And another one about the new `match` statement:

https://twitter.com/mathsppblog/status/1442264814865326080

Even so, on the 29th I woke up to 3500 followers.

That meant that in the last 48h of the challenge I “had” to get 500 followers, half of what I had to get in the beginning of the challenge.

At that point I knew I was not going to make it, but...

to be 100% honest with you, that didn't bother me too much.

When I set the challenge I knew it was almost impossible to meet it.

Even so, I kept publishing my great content.

And then, something quite curious happened!

I saw @PrasoonPratham publishing a tweet that reminded me of a tweet that I had seen @__mharrison__ publish a couple of times in the past.

I found that curious.

Later that day, I started listening to a podcast where Matt says he analysed and studied his Twitter data...

And later that day, I saw Pratham complain about the Twitter algorithm.

I thought “Matt found out that Twitter really likes a specific tweet "template" and Pratham also tried it out!”

Little did I know that Tech Twitter spent the whole day tweeting that same “template”.

So I decided to take the tweet "template", modify it a bit to better reflect my presence on Twitter, and tweeted it.

And then 💥💥💥

Twitter loved it and I got 2k followers in a day, or something like that.

Here's said tweet:

https://twitter.com/mathsppblog/status/1443325121297534980

So, all in all, my challenge was completed successfully, but I was left with a bittersweet taste.

While it looks like many followers found me because of a “silly” tweet, I like to think that they hit that “follow” button because I had paved the way with lots of quality content.

So, this is what happened in the 7/8 days of the challenge.

I'll be happy to answer any questions, if you have any.

Other than that, I'll see you around, as I keep publishing quality content just for you 😉👋