day 15 / building in public — 17 sellers joined to thesolomarket.com, we are progressing
11.3
your replies per 1,000 impressions
120 posts · 5 May – 5 Sept 2026 · measured against Jack Friks at the same follower count
You're at 1,391 followers. Jack Friks passed that mark in early 2024. Same size, same build-in-public niche — here's the median post from each.
You are getting three times the reach per post that he did at the same follower count, on half the posting volume. Whatever you started doing three weeks ago is working better than the thing that took him to 69,000 followers. The rest of this is about protecting it and finding the one lever you haven't pulled.
Not a slow climb — a step change, and it started around 24 August.
Worth being precise about the timing, because it matters for what you do next: your posting volume didn't cause this. You posted more in the 17–23 Aug week (45 posts) than in either week since. Volume went down, reach went up 8×. Something about the posts changed, not the number of them.
This is the thing you've stumbled into, and it's the most valuable finding here.
Your posts pull six and a half times more conversation per impression than his did at the same size. On your biggest posts you're hitting 35 replies per 1,000 impressions. Your "do you believe 'luck' actually exists?" post drew 207 replies against 129 likes — more comments than likes, which is rare and points at how you're being surfaced.
Replies are weighted more heavily than likes in how X decides what to show. You've been optimising for the strongest available signal without necessarily meaning to. The practical implication: if you ever have to choose between a post that'll get likes and one that'll start an argument, take the argument.
Posts that ask the timeline an open question — median 1,216 impressions and 18 replies. Everything else — median 920 and 8. Your top posts are almost all this shape:
Short, no link, no image, genuinely open — no obvious "correct" answer for people to just agree with. That last part is doing more work than it looks like. Questions with an obvious answer get likes; questions people actually disagree on get replies.
The clearest fixable leak in the account.
Quote posts are 19% of everything you publish and they reliably underperform. Over the last two weeks, not one of your eight quote posts cleared 1,400 impressions — while your original posts in the same window regularly passed 4,000. The reply gap is worse than the reach gap: 6 versus 33.
My read on why: a quote sends people to someone else's post to understand yours, and the conversation happens over there. Your own posts keep the thread on your side. You don't need to stop quoting entirely — but the ones adding two or three words on top of someone else's idea are close to pure cost. If you have a take, post it as your own thought and let it stand alone.
The one gap in an otherwise better playbook than his.
I pulled all 1,245 posts Jack published between February and August 2024, the stretch where he went from roughly 1,000 to 3,000 followers. On almost every measure you're ahead of where he was. But his breakout posts came from somewhere yours don't.
Every one of his biggest posts in that window was a revenue number attached to a product he'd been building in public:
Be careful how you read this, because the honest version is less tidy than the headline. Of his 41 posts mentioning money in that period, the median did 505 impressions — barely above his 335 baseline. Most of them went nowhere. But the handful that did land are the only posts in seven months that broke 100,000, and they're the reason the account took off in September 2024. Revenue milestones weren't a reliable multiplier for him. They were the only category that ever produced a lottery win.
You have thesolomarket.com and you're posting about it — nine times since 1 August. But those posts sit right at your baseline: median 966 impressions, against 1,040 for everything else. They aren't hurting you; they just aren't doing anything.
The difference is what's in them. Yours count sellers. His counted dollars.
Your one product post that did break out is the one that read like a result rather than a status update:
Three sellers is a smaller number than seventeen. It went five times further because it was tied to a concrete cause — a week of networking, 40k views, three sellers. It's a story with a mechanism, not a counter ticking up.
Across 107 posts, you have never posted a revenue figure for your own product. That's the gap. Whether it's $0, $12, or a first sale, that category of post is the one thing that reliably produced breakouts for the closest comparable creator at your exact stage, and it's the one you haven't tested.
Ordered by expected payoff against effort.
First revenue, first paid seller, or first month's total — whatever exists. If it's zero, "15 days, 17 sellers, $0 revenue, here's what I'm changing" is the same shape and works for the same reason. This is the untested lever, and it's the one Jack's history says matters most at your size. One post, this week, and see where it lands.
You publish roughly four a week at half your normal reach. Turn each one into an original post carrying your take instead. Cheapest available win — no new ideas required, just a change in container. If your median holds or rises with quotes removed, you've confirmed it and can stop thinking about it.
This is already working, so the note is mostly "don't stop." The refinement: your best performers are the ones where reasonable people land on different sides — luck, fake-it-till-you-make-it, hiring a developer who won't use AI. Questions with an obvious answer get you likes. Questions with a real split get you 200 replies.