3 years of making content: talking money, growth, and time commitment

How the Tremont Home sausage gets made

In August, it will be three years since I started my Tremont Home Instagram account. In the time since then, I’ve added other platforms to the Tremont Home universe, so my current standing looks like this:

• 74k Instagram followers

• 29k TikTok followers

• 1,700 Substack subscribers

• 1,250 YouTube subscribers (I tried YouTube for 6 months and it was a bust! I couldn’t keep up with the amount of time it took to film and edit)

• 660 Facebook followers (I’ve recently been incentivized to start posting on Facebook because they invited me to participate in something called the Breakthrough Bonus Program, tbd how well that’ll stick)

My yearly Instagram-iversary provides a natural opportunity for reflection on what another year of content creation has wrought, what has changed, and what I’m working towards (if anything?!? jk).

This nascent, still somewhat experimental Substack seems like as good of a place as any to formalize this reflection. It’s helpful for me personally, but I also suspect it’s interesting for others. I always want to know what other people are doing on social media — how they’re making their content, if they have a manager or are signed to an agency, how much money they’re making etc. This is my contribution to the public time capsule for nosy people like myself.

In this post, I’m talking about:

• Why I started making content

• Account growth

• My creation process and time commitment

• The money!

Let’s get into it.

The beginning of Tremont Home

The impetus for starting my Tremont Home Instagram account was Alex and I moving into a rental house in Charlotte, NC. I even named it Tremont Home because we were living on Tremont Avenue at the time.

We moved temporarily (we thought) from the East Village in Manhattan to Charlotte at the start of the pandemic and lived with his family. It took a year and a half to commit to living in Charlotte permanently and sign a lease. Our New York City belongings felt like doll furniture in the 1920’s bungalow we rented. Because of how wary and unsettled I felt about moving to Charlotte, I wanted to make our rental feel familiar and like a home stat. I quickly became fanatical about Facebook Marketplace.

Furnishing our rental, shopping cost-consciously, and identifying what pieces felt like my style (it would be disingenuous to say “our style” — while it is my and Alex’s shared home, he is content to let me be the creative driver of our interiors) unlocked a creative enthusiasm I had been missing in my career as a graphic designer for years.

I started my Instagram account as a place to document my process and curate my stylistic POV, like a digital scrapbook that also happened to be public. I didn’t set out with the intent to become a creator or influencer.

Early growth

I had two videos take off within six months of starting my account that I think contributed to a flywheel of account growth (which I try not to think about too much because if I do, it feels like a fluke).

On Instagram, my first ever post was in August 2022. In February 2023, I posted about making custom matchbooks for my house (currently at 360k views), and three weeks later I posted some clever, low- and no-cost styling ideas, which is still my highest viewed post at 2.7m views. (This is another thing I don’t like to think about otherwise I’m like, “how have I not had another post blow up like this in the TWO YEARS since?!” A truly useless train of thought).

Instagram insights aren’t available for those posts anymore, but I think those two videos combined got me from around 5k to 15k followers over the course of a month. It was thrilling, nerve wracking, and pressure-inducing. I felt like I needed to hurry and capitalize on this growth by posting as much as possible, but I still hadn’t found my groove with ideating, filming, and editing. I reminded myself constantly that I was running my account for PLEASURE and so I should keep posting to the schedule I could maintain without it feeling stressful — that was 1-2 reels and 1-2 photo carousels per week.

Long term growth

Getting from 15k followers to where I’m at now (*nearly* 75k) has happened in fits and starts. It seems like once a quarter I’ll have a reel perform abnormally well and give me a follower boost that flows in for a month afterward.

However, this spring I did languish around 50k followers for a few months and it was the longest period of growth stagnation I’ve experienced since starting my account. Try as I might to not let this bother me, it did (boohoo, babe! You’ve got 50k followers! BUCK UP). I tried to address this in two ways: