How founders can tell whether their content is reaching buyers
Technical founders tend to judge content the way they judge a launch day, by how many people showed up. Views are the easiest number on any dashboard to read and the most pleasant to report. They say very little about whether a potential customer saw the post.
Two of my own reels made this obvious. One passed 4 million views and mostly brought in new followers. The other stalled at around 200,000 views and drove roughly $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Had I judged them on views alone, I would have made more of the wrong one.
Find Out Who the Strangers Are
Reaching people outside an existing network is harder for technical founders than most expect, even with a product that solves a real problem. Early followers are usually former colleagues and other builders, and platforms tend to test a new post on those followers first. Content that lands with peers can look like traction without ever leaving the room.
Non-follower views are the first sign an idea has escaped. In one recent month, 73% of my Instagram views came from people who did not follow me. Facebook surprised me more. It delivered 21.8 million views and became my largest audience on a platform I had treated as an afterthought. Reach by platform shows where an idea travels, and it is rarely where a founder would have guessed.
Strangers are still strangers, though. To see whether that reach points toward buyers, look at who arrives afterwards. Take a sample of new followers, commenters, and people sending DMs, then compare them with your paying customers. Do their job titles match? Do they describe the same problem? If not, the views are real and commercially empty.
Count What Happens After the View
Most of the money in content is made after the view. My 4-million-view reel entertained a broad audience. The smaller one spoke to a specific problem my buyers have and ended with one clear next step. Fewer people watched, and far more of them acted.
My shorthand for this: reach you do not convert is reach you rent. A platform lends you an audience for a few seconds, and the loan expires unless some of those viewers click, sign up or get in touch.
So the metrics I watch most closely are clicks, signups and inquiries per post. Expressing them per 1,000 views puts a viral post and a modest one on the same scale, which is usually where the surprises show up. The tracking takes an afternoon to set up. Give each post or platform its own link and add a “where did you hear about us” field at signup. A DM keyword tied to a specific post does the same job for inquiries.
Turn the Weekly Review Into a Decision
Every week I review my posts by platform and format, looking at non-follower share alongside what people did after watching. Each line has to end in a decision. When a post reached the right people and produced few signups, I keep the topic and rewrite the call to action. A topic that converts gets repeated in other formats and on other platforms to see how far it stretches. And a format that underperforms across several topics gets dropped, however much I enjoy making it.
The same review sharpens positioning. Posts that convert show how buyers describe their problem, usually in plainer words than founders use, while the questions arriving in DMs reveal what people still misunderstand about the product. That language belongs on the homepage and in sales conversations. Repeated questions can also flag a use case worth building toward, or one that simply needs explaining better.
Technical founders already instrument their products. They track activation and retention and change course when the numbers say so, yet many still measure content by applause. Pick one post from last week and trace what happened after the view, including who arrived and whether any of them resemble the customers you want. Then decide what to make next.
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