May 18, 2023 · 47m · startup-ideas
Roberto Nickson Grew 400K+ Followers In 100 Days: Here's How
0:00 / 0:00
▶ Watch on YouTube →
gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this in-depth conversation, entrepreneur Roberto Nickson joins Greg Isenberg to break down his frameworks for rapid audience growth, the leverage of personal branding over faceless channels, and his vision for scaling his generative AI platform, Aluna.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Greg holds 30.3% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Greg as informed peer 4.5 Guest teaching 4.0 Guest disagreement 0.6 Greg pushing back 0.8
speaking balance: gold is Greg, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 26:05 Roberto dismisses the media conglomerate model
Roberto directly pushes back against Greg's suggestion of copying the Doing Things Media playbook, declaring that he dislikes the media business and only cares about product development.
Hardest push from Greg ▶ 20:01 Greg calls out Roberto's rapid follower surgeGreg directly confronts Roberto's 'build slow' philosophy by citing Roberto's actual track record of adding 400k followers across platforms in a single month.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 44:19 Roberto corrects quote attribution and shifts AGI paradigmRoberto corrects Greg's attribution of the AI skepticism quote to Charlie Munger and explains how the consensus among AI researchers on AGI arrival has shifted from decades away to this decade.
Greg holds their own ▶ 3:39 Greg outlines brand alt accounts using Nathan Lands case studyGreg presents a novel thesis on edgy brand alt accounts and reveals Nathan Lands' Boris persona, teaching Roberto a distribution tactic he was completely unaware of.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Greg as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Greg pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Personal Branding vs. Faceless Media Brands | 4 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Greg asks Roberto to reflect on building faceless media brands versus personal branding. Roberto explains that personal brand inbound delivered 100x more leverage than his previous 10M-follower portfolio. | |
| The Rise of Brand Alt Accounts and Memes | 6 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Greg introduces his thesis on brand alt accounts and reveals that the edgy Boris account is run by Nathan Lands, which surprises and impresses Roberto. | |
| Launching Aluna and the Open-Source AI Thesis | 4 | 6 | 1 | 2 | Roberto breaks down the open-source Stable Diffusion thesis versus ChatGPT platform risk. Greg interrupts to clarify whether product vision or audience aggregation came first. | |
| Overcoming Insecurity and Starting as a Creator | 5 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Greg shares his view that MVPs can be simple group chats and recounts his own early posting struggles, while Roberto details overcoming insecurity and starting messy. | |
| Building High-Converting Audiences Over Empty Follower Counts | 4 | 5 | 1 | 3 | Roberto emphasizes building slowly and focusing on commerce over empty follower counts. Greg pushes back by pointing out Roberto's own massive 400k growth in just weeks. | |
| Cracking YouTube and the Visual Content Dilemma | 5 | 3 | 0 | 1 | Greg shares learnings from his Austin Lieberman episode about reverse-engineering YouTube search recommendations, and asks Roberto why visual content creation is hard to delegate. | |
| Why Roberto Prefers Software Over Media Conglomerates | 5 | 4 | 2 | 1 | Greg proposes the Doing Things Media rollup model of acquiring meme accounts to aggregate talent. Roberto rejects that path, stating he dislikes the media business and prefers building software. | |
| Building Aluna as the Instagram for Generative AI | 4 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Roberto details Aluna's roadmap including Deforum motion blending, GPU infrastructure hurdles, and his vision of an Instagram-like prompt feed. | |
| Customer-Obsessed Strategy for Navigating AI Competition | 5 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Roberto describes a Bezos-inspired customer obsession framework to ignore competitors, and Greg reinforces this with his spoke-in-the-wheel analogy for entrepreneurship. | |
| Workflow AI Tools and Niche-Specific Software Suites | 6 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Roberto highlights high churn in single-purpose AI wrappers. Greg formulates the thesis that vertical-specific AI software suites will win the market, which Roberto strongly agrees with. | |
| The Human Aura, Future of Entertainment, and AGI | 5 | 6 | 2 | 1 | Roberto explains art aura theory and corrects Greg on a Charlie Munger quote, detailing how leading AI researchers have pulled AGI estimates from the 2070s into the 2030s. | |
| Podcast Conclusion and Guest Plugs | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Greg wraps up the conversation and asks Roberto to plug his channels, leading to a friendly mutual endorsement. |
Statements from this episode (21)
Nickson: Built and sold Instagram communities totaling over 10M followers
“And I've built and then sold now a lot to a lot of communities, specifically on Instagram, because that's just where I've sort of like, almost like I probably spent my most time You know, on the internet, on Instagram, so I built a ton of communities, you know…”
Nickson: Personal content inbound is 100x higher than faceless media brands
“My inbound for my personal content has been a hundred x, even, even metaverse to the bull run, a hundred x what that inbound looked like”
Nickson: Audiences prefer information filtered through individuals over faceless media
“People buy from people, people want their information filtered through people, not these faceless media brands or media giants.”
Isenberg: Every brand will have an alt account
“I have this new thesis. It's like a work in progress thesis. Curious your thoughts that every brand will have an alt account.”
Nickson: Posting gimmicks on company accounts protects personal brand equity
“Sometimes it's a little bit gimmicky, you know, like here are 10 apps that you can use to harness the power of generative AI to You know, boost your business or whatever. And I'm like, I don't know if I want to post that as a little gimmicky, but I got metaver…”
Nickson: Open source will prevail as AI's winning foundational layer
“I'm a big believer that open source will prevail and that'll be sort of like the winning Foundational layer that AI is going to be built on top of”
Nickson: Building on ChatGPT carries excessive platform risk
“ChatGPT, I feel like every update, it gets neutered a little more and more and more and more. So like, as a builder, I feel a little bit, I don't know if I'd want to build on ChatGPT, right? They have too much leverage. It's too much platform risk.”
Isenberg: 95% of MVPs could just be a WhatsApp group
“95% of MVPs could be a WhatsApp group. You know, like, or an Instagram or a TikTok or a Twitter account, you know, it's a free account that you can just start inviting people and start with your friends.”
Nickson: Driving commerce is the best indicator of audience quality
“To me, like the sort of the best indicator of a quality audience is how much commerce you're able to push, right? Because ultimately, you know, people don't like to admit it, but like social media really is kind of a status game. And at the bottom of it, like …”
Nickson grew personal and brand accounts by 730K followers in 100 days
“Yeah, I think for my personal, I've gone maybe 400,000 across all all my personal socials in the last hundred days. And then again, like a Luna in the last hundred days You know, 230 K followers. I think metaverse has added another 100,000 or so over the last …”
Isenberg: YouTube views come from recommendations and Shorts, not subscribers
“The biggest takeaway I had from the Austin Lieberman chat was that the people, like, I thought the people that were watching the Where It Happens YouTube show were subscribers of the Where It Happens YouTube show, and I was completely wrong. It's, You know, a …”
Roberto Nickson: Top Content Creators Inevitably Leave Agencies to Build Their Own Brands
“If I find somebody who's a killer, who knows how to do it super, super well, why would they come work for me? They're just going to do it on their own for their own, you know, their own faceless media brands or their own products or their own, whatever it is. …”
Roberto Nickson: I Use Media Brands Purely to Drive Distribution for Software Products
“I think for me, like, honestly, Greg, like I like media, I like creating content, but I don't necessarily like the media business. I really love building product, right? Like that's what I've been doing over the last 10 years. And so that, that's kind of reall…”
Nickson: No good GPU cloud services currently exist on the market
“There is, for some reason, there's no good GPU cloud service out there right now. So if anybody wants to build that, that's a great business to get into.”
Nickson: Prompt engineering is a fleeting trend, soon comparable to Googling
“I actually, I'm not as bullish on the idea of a prompt engineer as most, right? I think it'll be like knowing how to use Google or Excel. It's just like a particular skill that'll be helpful. But no, I think the pro I mean, like one of our main ambitions too, …”
Nickson: Standalone AI tools face major threat from incumbent software integration
“I think the most fierce competition are going to be the incumbents, you know, like a lot of this technology is going to be built into the products that we know and love and use today. Right. So eventually like you know, even, even mid journey, I think they're …”
Nickson: Generative AI apps will suffer high churn without daily utility
“I think there's going to be a lot of churn on a lot of these products because it's really cool. It's fascinating technology, but some of them are not just so helpful in the day to day, right?”
Isenberg: Niche AI software suites will emerge within 12 to 18 months
“But I think in 12 to 18 months, what we'll see is some of these suites come up. Of course, some of them will be from incumbents, like the Adobe's already starting that Microsoft Microsoft courses already starting that Microsoft designer, et cetera. But there's…”
Nickson: Users will soon generate custom software, games, and entertainment on demand
“What I think is going to happen, and I made a video about it today, actually, I just posted it, but like you are going to be able to generate anything that you want, enter any entertainment medium that you want. Curated to your taste. So like, yeah, maybe, may…”
Nickson predicts fully AI-generated streamers and influencers by late 2023
“Obviously by the end of the year, we're going to have fully AI generated streamers, influencers, et cetera.”
Nickson: Audiences will crave human creators over purely AI-generated entertainment
“So I think the same thing is going to happen where like, there's going to be these incredible AI generated movies and scripts, but I just don't think there's going to be an as large an appetite as people think of for audiences to consume this. Cause like what …”