TOF/MOF/BOF Playbook for Growing Your Audience

Many creators struggle to grow their audience because they focus on producing advanced, high-quality content right from the start.

However, the most effective strategy often begins with a counterintuitive approach: creating simple, beginner-friendly content.

This strategy is how some of the biggest influencers have successfully grown their social media followings.

Why Boring Content Works

The majority of people are beginners. They often find high-level concepts overwhelming but can easily connect with basic, entry-level content.

This type of content serves as the Top of Funnel (TOF) material, which attracts a broad audience.

To sustain growth and conversion, creators also need Middle of Funnel (MOF) and Bottom of Funnel (BOF) content.

The $70 million DM strategy provides examples of these 3 content tiers:

1. Top of Funnel (TOF): General, widely relatable content like "If you're a new dad, you can make posts relatable to dads—one of the largest audiences in the world."

2. Middle of Funnel (MOF): Slightly niche content, such as "Being a dad content creator is one level smaller than speaking to all dads globally."

3. Bottom of Funnel (BOF): Highly specific, conversion-oriented content, such as "Target dads looking to improve their parenting or buy specific products for their kids. Pitch items like parenting courses, toddler toys, or gadgets that simplify dad life."

This progression narrows the audience naturally:

• TOF: All dads (a massive general audience)

• MOF: Dad content creators (a specific subset)

• BOF: Dad content creators focused on monetization (a highly targeted group)

Creators need a balanced combination of TOF, MOF, and BOF content to build an audience and convert followers into clients.

Real-World Examples

Brett Adcock: Beginner-Focused Content for Rapid Growth

Brett Adcock from Figure Robot grew his social media following to over 200,000 by posting simple, beginner-oriented content.

His posts resonated with a broad audience, generating high engagement and signaling value to algorithms, which further amplified his reach.

Brett had even more cringe threads titled "Twitter is a free university" but those are all deleted now from his account.

However, you can find a few of these via TweetHunter X's Sidebar.

Practically, almost every influencer on X grew using these. You can grow without them but it just takes 3-4x longer.

Newbies don't care about how you got your big following. They only care to follow you if you have a big following due to herd mentality.

Most of the world follows Kim Kardashian but don't know or care how Kim got famous.

Once Brett built his audience, he transitioned to creating high-quality content about humanoid robots, regularly achieving over 10 million impressions per month on X.

Liam Ottley: AI Videos for Beginners

Liam Ottley applied a similar strategy on YouTube.

His early videos were beginner-friendly, focusing on accessible topics like:

1. 7 Best Businesses To Start With ChatGPT in 2023 [Early Mover Advantage]

2. 5 Best AI Powered Business Models for 2023 [Build & SCALE]

3. 7 AI Tools for Entrepreneurs to Crush 2023 (10x Productivity)

These videos appealed to a broad demographic, laying the foundation for his channel’s growth.

Over time, Liam began producing more advanced content targeted at experienced viewers.

Ali Abdaal: Productivity Tips for Beginners

Ali Abdaal initially focused on beginner-friendly videos about productivity and passive income.

Examples include:

1. 9 Passive Income Ideas - How I Make $27k per Week

2. How to Invest for Beginners

This relatable, straightforward content helped Ali attract a wide audience, which he later leveraged to explore more complex topics for both novice and advanced viewers.

Alex Hormozi: Netflix-Style Pacing to Maximize Engagement

Alex Hormozi used Netflix-style pacing with quick cuts and dynamic editing to capture and retain his audience’s attention.

For example, his mentorship video demonstrates how fast-paced edits can keep viewers engaged.

His early content was designed to be easily digestible, attracting millions of viewers with TikTok-attention span.

This was essential to reach a wider audience and grow his YouTube Channel to over 3 million subscribers.

Once he built a large audience, he shifted to creating more in-depth, high-quality content for business owners without the Netflix-style cuts.

You can see the difference between his videos from 2023 and the ones towards the end of 2024.

Alex Hormozi always delivered quality content but the packaging was fast-paced Netflix-style edits to please the audience, and by extension, the algorithm.

The Strategy for Sustained Growth

The key to this approach lies in understanding your audience.

Beginner-focused content appeals to the largest segment of viewers, ensuring high engagement and signaling value to algorithms. This increases the likelihood of wider promotion and reach.

As your audience grows, transitioning to advanced, niche content allows you to deepen engagement with followers who have progressed along the funnel.

The likes and engagement from beginners attract the experts with deep pockets.

A well-balanced mix of top-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel content is essential for sustained growth, ensuring broad appeal while converting casual viewers into loyal fans and paying clients.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Build your failure resume. The brain is smart enough that it eventually figures stuff out.

You just need to fail enough times to find the successful solution. Best part is you only need to succeed once.

2/

Google Chrome, Google Admob, and Google Analytics were a master move for their ad business.

It took 2 decades for everyone to know what Google was cooking only because of the Google Algorithm Leak.

Ultimate chessmove!

3/

Claude vs ChatGPT shows that the biggest battle isn't building a 1% better model but its rather winning the mindshare.

Once you lose the mindshare battle, you lose automatically.

In the programming world, there are better and faster frameworks than React.js but React.js won the mindshare game and dominated since 2015. Currently, Bun is beating Deno easily mostly due to mindshare.

Ultimately, the 10x breakthrough product only wins the first time. Also known as the first-mover advantage but you can't do a 1% improvement on the 10x breakthrough as a #2 product to take over the whole market. You will always be #2 unless the #1 causes a self-inflicted wound.

Buying original is also a status thing, especially if its expensive.

Rabbit Holes

1. "Hyper Personalization for Hyper Growth" (Apple, Mention, Segment, Drift) by Guillaume Cabane

2. How I Find 1,000s of Low Competition Keywords in Minutes by Ian H

3. We sold a 3 month old autopilot Micro SaaS for $30K - Micro Acquisitions 101 by Rushab Tated & Vatsal Sanghvi

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