How to gain your first 10,000 followers from scratch in 2026

Last week I shared everything I did to make six figures from TikTok, leave my 9-5 and go full-time from a year of consistent posting.

This week I’m breaking it down even further: how to get your first 10,000 followers.

I want to share this because content changed my life, and I know there’ll be people reading this who will completely redesign their life from posting on social media, too.

You just need a helping hand to get started, and that’s what I want to share with you today: all of my best tips for that first 10k.

At the end there’s a summary that pulls it all together, so you can screenshot it when you’re ready to get started.

Let’s get into it.

Some harsh truths need saying again and again until they sink in:

Lifestyle influencers are a dying breed, and niches grow 10x faster.

Yet so many aspiring creators make this one mistake: worrying about something before it’s even happened.

It’s very common to be scared to be tied to a niche forever.

The hard truth is that you shouldn’t worry about being tied to a niche far into the future, when you don’t even have an audience to begin with now.

That’s like worrying you’re going to run out of stock before you’ve even sold one unit.

You need to see the niche as a vehicle for momentum.

Niches allow you to grow first. Growth brings money. Lifestyle content can come later.

I won’t spend too long on this point because I laboured it in the last post, but if you’re struggling to pick your niche, refer to the tips in that post. Ideally, you want one core topic with 2-3 supporting pillars.

I spent way too long keeping a messy list of content ideas in my notes app.

It worked for me at first, but as I grew, it became disorganised. Months would go by, and my best ideas would get lost in the list.

Great ideas are useless if they never turn into a posted video. And when video ideas are your entire business, using the notes app for ideas is like managing your finances with a child’s piggy bank instead of online banking.

Had I organised my ideas like a business sooner, I would have grown much faster. So please, learn from my mistakes and organise your ideas the moment you have them.

These are the two key ways I organise my ideas so that I never run out of videos: