300 Followers in a Week, and the Dip Was the Useful Part

A fortnight ago the FlashFX account passed 100,000 views on X inside a single week, which is now on the timeline as a real event. This is about the number underneath that one. Views are a measure of how far something travelled. Followers are a measure of whether anyone wanted it to happen again.

Last week the account reached 300 followers. Seven days. What I did not expect is that the interesting part would be a day in the middle where the number went the wrong way.

The shape

Up sharply at the start. Then a day where the count went backwards instead of forwards. Then up again, past the dip, to 300 by the end of the week.

I want to be precise about how that felt, because the feeling was wrong. On the day it dropped, the obvious reading was that I had posted something bad and was being corrected for it. That reading is almost never right, and it is worth knowing why before it happens to you.

Unfollows lag follows, and that is the whole explanation

A follow is a reaction to one post. It happens seconds after reading, from inside the post, with no other information about the account.

An unfollow is a reaction to the account, and it cannot happen until the account has shown up in that person’s feed a few more times. That takes days. So the follows from Monday all land on Monday, and the verdict on those same follows lands on Thursday.

A dip in the middle of a spike is not an audience leaving. It is the first group finishing its evaluation. The two lines are the same people, three days apart.

Which makes the dip the earliest honest feedback available. It is the first moment anyone has judged the thing I actually run rather than the one post that happened to reach them.

The floor is the number, not the peak

If I had recorded only the highest point that week, I would have learned that one post did well. I already knew that. The number worth writing down is the floor after the dip: the count of people who saw a good post, then saw the ordinary ones, and stayed anyway.

That is the only figure with any predictive value, because it is the only one measured after the thing that caused it stopped running.

The practical version: measure a spike about a week after it ends, not while it is happening. Everything you read during it is the peak, and the peak is a description of one post’s distribution, not of your account.

The second rise is what separates a spike from a start

This is the part I would have missed entirely if I had stopped looking on the bad day.

If the count climbs only while one post is circulating and flattens the moment it goes cold, then nothing was gained. Attention was rented for a few days and then returned. If it keeps climbing after that post is finished, something else is doing the work: the profile, the other posts, the product at the end of the link.

Mine kept climbing after the dip. That is the only reason this is worth a newsletter issue instead of a line in the devlog.

300 is small, and I know it

Nobody should be impressed by 300 followers, and I am not writing this up because the number is large. FlashFX has more than 8,000 users. The account has 300 followers. Those two figures are three orders of magnitude apart, which is the correct way round for a company that spent two years building and almost no time telling anyone, and it is exactly the imbalance launch day was supposed to start fixing.

What makes the week worth recording is not the size. It is that it is the first week @FlashFXeditor had a finished product to point at, and the first week the count went up for a reason that outlived a single post.

The test for next week is boring and I already know what it is: keep the same cadence through seven days with no spike in them, and see whether the floor moves. A floor that rises without a peak above it is an audience. Anything else is weather.