Instagram Pages

A script in a school corridor

In 2018 I was walking down a corridor at Lancing College, revising for GCSEs, when I overheard a classmate complaining about accepting thousands of follow requests by hand on his private Instagram page. I offered to write him a basic Python script. That was it for me.

In return, he showed me how niche pages grew: post-for-post swaps and shared audiences, a whole network running on mutual ambition. It was an underground world of people who wanted to build something bigger than themselves, and had found a way to do it outside any traditional structure. I was hooked.

It's also where I met some of my closest collaborators. Tobias Andersson and Matthew Dance later co-founded MrCoco with me. Ben Clark and I lived together for two years and worked side by side at ESL FACEIT Group and Flighthouse Media.

What it taught me

From 2018 to 2023 I built up a sense of taste: an instinct for what would perform, from thousands of hours of watching and testing.

• Tension holds an audience. MinecraftDailyBlock placed one block a day in a Minecraft world, and people stayed to see what it would become.
• Use the platform's own tools. I built puzzle formats on Instagram Stories around native features like poll buttons. People stayed longer, and the algorithm pushed them further.
• Test everything. Most of what worked only looked obvious in hindsight.
• Growth is a network. Pages grew by sharing their audiences with each other.

It was an unconventional education. I ran meme campaigns across millions of accounts and negotiated with brands and celebrities who wanted promotion. I also built the automation to handle posting and followers at scale. Most of that work no longer exists. The instincts have followed me into everything since.