Cracking the Algorithm After Hours

Brief

Fins & Feathers is a hand-illustrated deck of fifty-four Florida birds, fish and aquatic animals, drawn at actual card size in pen and ink. I was raised by two engineers and started college in engineering before switching to business to prove to myself that I could persue a creative career if I understood the business side of it.This deck of cards is the first of its kind and the first time I’ve brought all my technical and creative skills together in a single project.

I’ve posted art for years as a hobbyist, but I’ve learned a lot from my day job working in marketing and design so I’ve decided to give it a more professional approach for this project. The process has been a challenge for sure. Starting off I had a stale 800 followers (many from over a decade ago), no budget, no existing reach in the wildlife niche, and roughly an hour a day. Yikes indeed.

Discovery

• Sixteen static posts across four months produced two new followers between them. I’ve made videos and interviewed other people before through my work but I decided I needed to get in front of the camera myself this time. Videos produced 730 of the 732 new followers after I committed to the new format as my main strategy. Sunk Cost FallacySunk Cost FallacyAssuming that because I've already invested time and effort into a particular approach, I should continue with it even if it's not working.
• Engagement rate turned out to be the wrong thing to optimise for. The algorithm has changed. Instagram no longer cares if people comment or like posts as much. What matters now is how long people watch the video and if they share it with someone else.
• Instagram’s Trial Reels solved 2 of my major challenges. 1. I put my content in front of non-followers before I shared it with my stale followers (who would have killed watch-time metrics) 2. It also helped me read a results better by showing which metrics to prioritise. Holdout testingHoldout testingMeasuring a change against an untouched group, so the result is attributable rather than assumed.

Design

• Now my process starts with a minimum of two videos that differ only in the opening seconds and minor themes, so any difference in reach is attributable to that change and not to the subject, the day or the caption.
• The hook has been the biggest lever for success. A stranger scrolling past knows what they are about to see inside two seconds leading to higher retention and therefore reach pushed by Instagram’s algorithm.
• Because my artwork and video style follow a formula, I can track the performance of each video systematically. As I progress my speed improves and I still maintain a high level of quality in my content.

Delivery

Each card moves through the same eight steps: gather references, sketch using a 3D printed guided template, ink with Micron and gel pens, scan, trace in Procreate, convert to vector in Illustrator, fit the frame in Figma, then build the compositions for thumbnails and print.

Five systems hold it together:

• My computer keeps the working files, the scans and the Premiere template project.
• Notion is the source of truth for all fifty-four cards and the content calendar.
• Google Drive is the published archive, reconciled against Notion by script so the two cannot drift.
• Buffer schedules and publishes to Instagram, YouTube and TikTok.
• Shopify carries the public card pages and products, filled by sync rather than by hand.

Results

On 30 July I published the same episode two times across only a couple hours. Mostly the same footage. All of them sixty-one seconds. The opening clip was the main variable.

Posted	Opens on	Views	New followers
7:18 pm	Mid-process	1,883	14
9:43 pm	Title card	35,533	242

Both cuts of each opening landed in the same place, so this is a result that happened twice rather than a single lucky post. Between the best of each pair, average watch time rose 61%, skip rate fell from 39.2% to 27.3%, and shares went from 6 to 97.

The account had about 800 followers at the time. The version that opened mid-process reached about 1,800 people, which was fine, but not great. The version that opened on the title card reached over 35,000. The footage, the card, and the sixty-one seconds behind both of them were identical. Only the hook changed, and the hook is what Instagram’s algorithm used to decide how far to push it.

That single night produced over 240 new followers, and the new process has doubled my audience since.

Impact

This new process has just begun. As new followers stay and engage the effects will compound over time.

While my audience has doubled in the past 90 days. Only 10 of the playing cards have been revealed and there are still 44 more to go.