
Instagram influencer with 2M followers fails to sell 36 t-shirts - iafrikan
https://www.iafrikan.com/2019/05/31/an-influencer-with-2-million-followers-fails-to-sell-36-t-shirts/
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dmix
> "But I was getting such good feedback that people loved it & were gonna buy
> it"

Welcome to creating your own business/project 101. Never trust feedback from
friends, or basically anyone not handing you money or committing their own
time to it.

This is the first hard lesson you learn and probably the most important one.

Also the fact she "flew out" a photographer and makeup artist was a
questionable business choice for something that could have been tested for
free, considering her apparent reach. Either way even bad press like this is
good for business.

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basch
probably would have been a better business decision to eat the cost of 36
shirts, than fly a photographer and makeup artist out. now nobody gets shirts?

id also argue that influencer is the wrong word for a person with 2.6m
subscribers but no influence.

~~~
thatoneuser
Well it's mostly a fluff/bs term that people bestow on themselves to influence
people into paying them anyway.

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winkelwagen
Second time I’ve seen this article, what I fail to understand why this person
receives so much attention for this. My gut instinct was that this was just a
marketing campaign. Everyone wants to see a person with that many followers
fail. Seeing them fail makes us feel like we are more similar. Same as
articles/memes that talk about bill gates standing in line for something. In
Dutch we say as reaction to that, “Hij is zo lekker gewoon gebleven”. It
translates to something like that he didn’t let the fame get into his head.
But the Dutch version is more often then not used as sarcasm.

I sometimes worry a bit when reading these kind of articles, is there an
agenda behind it? Is it actually true? Can recommend the podcast: Benjamin
walkers theory of everything.

Anyway it’s hard to understand what kind of influence influencers have.
Perhaps you are better off with 100 followers that really are invested then 2
million followers that mindlessly like your grams to forget about their own
lives for half a second. I think it’s similar to buying a lottery ticket, you
buy the ability to wonder what kind of person you would be if you win. Or in
the case of influencers, what it would be like to have their lifestyle.

~~~
ASalazarMX
> Anyway it’s hard to understand what kind of influence influencers have.

Most have none, as they're entertainers rather than actual influencers.

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show-some-skin
What. No picture of the shirt?

How can we assess the circumstance without the shirt?

If the shirt was weak it would be unsurprising that it failed to sell. If her
audience is girls, it would need to be a girl's shirt that aligns with the her
style, presuming it's one her followers would seek to emulate. If her audience
is guys, it needs to appeal to guys, such that they'll probably wear it in a
working rotation of commodity utility t-shirts.

Providing that she's attractive and offering a certain type of appeal, her
followers are probably guys cruising Instagram for the bikini shots. Quick
guess: her audience would only want t-shirts that appeal to a form masculinity
that speaks nothing to whether they're there to beat off to her pictures.
She'd need to dance around that, in order to craft a product that she can move
into their hands, such that they'll understand they're funding more bikini
photo shoots.

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ilikehurdles
Fraud or no, I'm guessing that FB isn't going to simply let free posts be able
to reach near the same number of impressions as a "Sponsored Post". This is
why we don't see chronological or unfiltered submissions in timelines/news-
feeds -- free users reaching intended consumer audiences more effectively is a
threat to the business models of the advertising companies that host their
social networks. In other words, why would I pay for a sponsored post if it
were cheaper and more effective to reach out to my own network or work with
another user?

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codedokode
You want to pay for a sponsored post to reach people who are not your
followers.

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LargeWu
Instagram is a big shell game. Most of the likes and follows these so-called
"influencers" get are from other wannabe influencers. If I can like your stuff
enough, maybe you'll like and follow me back. Even if a fair number of
followers have real people on the other end of them, the engagement is often
quite superficial and transactional.

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codedokode
First I thought that it would be an article making jokes about her
"influence", fake followers and so on, but after reading I felt sympathy. She
tries to create her own clothes brand, maybe she doesn't know anything about
it, maybe she has failed this time, but it is a valuable experience. It is not
like you are going to succeed from the first time, but it is better to do
anything than nothing. Don't understand the negative comments. Maybe they are
from people who have no followers?

~~~
Nextgrid
> She tries to create her own clothes brand

She did so without doing _any_ research into how hard it is and without any
kind of business sense. I really can’t feel bad for someone like that. I would
understand if research was done and it still failed, but this girl literally
wanted to post a picture and expected everyone to hand her money on a platter.
Sorry, the world doesn’t work like that.

It is however a nice wake-up call for her and people alike - selling clothes
(and making a viable profit on them) is not easy. Some of my friends are into
this and it breaks my heart seeing them pour insane amounts of time & expenses
into it without even realising that after all the expenses are accounted for
their net profits are less than minimum wage.

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dheera
I'm surprised people are commenting on fake vs. real followers. Even if the 2M
followers are real, that would not necessarily translate into selling
T-shirts.

Do the T-shirts even look good? Is a T-shirt what people want? Why do I want
another T-shirt when I have dozens of good-looking free ones already? These
are the real questions.

~~~
jandrese
Also, are they simply overpriced? Is this "Instagram influencer" simply
delusional about the value of their name?

She claims she only needed to sell 36 to "kickstart her brand" but is that 36
at $10,000 each? She's not Coco Chanel, you can't arbitrary decide to start at
the top.

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ltbarcly3
Probably because of fake followers. You can buy a few hundred thousand at a
time on fiverr. They no longer 'sell followers' probably due to fiverr ToS
changes, but they will 'promote your account' which I'm sure is the same
thing.

As a gag I once bought a million twitter followers for around $400. They
decayed at about 5% per month until only a few thousand were left when I
closed my twitter account.

example:
[https://www.fiverr.com/search/gigs?utf8=%E2%9C%93&source=top...](https://www.fiverr.com/search/gigs?utf8=%E2%9C%93&source=top-
bar&locale=en&search_in=everywhere&query=twitter%20followers)

~~~
codedokode
In comments she said that has never bought any followers.

~~~
ltbarcly3
I've never posted to hackernews.

~~~
Nextgrid
Although in this case I’d tend to believe her. Surely she would know whether
her followers are fake, and not attempt to sell anything if that was the case?

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wasd
I’ve seen this variations of this article posted on twitter. While I think
there’s lessons to learn, I think there’s more to be unpacked here. For
example, what clothes was she selling? For how much? I’ve read she did very
little advertising (only one or two posts) but to be honest, her IG is pretty
bare. I’m surprised she has 2m followers at all.

~~~
ishjoh
I know people get to large numbers of followers by buying bots etc, maybe
that's a route she took (no idea), or maybe her relevancy with real users is
the issue. If people were no longer getting her content in their feeds because
instagram decided here posts weren't getting enough interaction she could have
a huge number of followers but no reach. So maybe that's the more important
metric, interaction instead of followers.

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ydnaclementine
Is this more or less crazy than: 'Company worth 100 billion dollars fails to
make profit'?

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raleigh_user
1% engagement is a good metric to hit on social for _real followers_.
Obviously not a 100% always accurate rule but apply and you’ll see instantly
who bought fake followers.

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netwanderer3
Influencers with million of followers are no longer where the money is because
their audiences have been desensitized towards those ads and messages, and
they have learned to completely tune it out. Micro-influencers are where the
actions take place nowadays.

In my opinion, much of future online shopping will be done on social media
platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, etc... where you may see a demo
photo/video of a product, you simply click buy and complete the transaction
right there without ever having to leave the platform to a third party
website.

I believe Instagram already has this feature up now, but its availability is
limited to only big brands. They are probably using it as a pilot to collect
relevant data and to optimize those metrics before launching the feature
platform wide.

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microtherion
I've recently seen something similar when Paul Rigby launched his crowdfunding
campaign for "Don't Do That, Donald" [https://unbound.com/books/dont-do-that-
donald/](https://unbound.com/books/dont-do-that-donald/). With tens of
thousands of followers, many teaser images posted over more than a year, an
apparently well designed products, and a widely talked about subject, I
thought he would hit his funding levels trivially, but it seems to be
surprisingly slow going.

~~~
Bakary
The "dumb orange man" line has run its course at this point. That seems like
the more obvious reason for the slowness.

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booleandilemma
So will she have to get a real job now?

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sys_64738
I confuse ‘influencer’ with attention seeker.

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brokenmachine
That's not confusion.

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pixxel
Fake followers/likes no doubt. Hell I could knock on 10 doors and sell one
tshirt.

~~~
NonEUCitizen
Please report back after actually knocking on 10 doors and selling one
t-shirt.

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mocha_nate
I love this story

