🦅 Zero Followers at 35. Two Years Later: 300,000.

Zero Followers at 35. Two Years Later: 300,000.

When Trung Phan got hired at The Hustle as a writer, his boss encouraged him to build an online presence.

Two years later, he had 300,000 followers. Today, he has over 700,000.

Everyone calls it overnight growth. But Trung had spent 15 years reading, failing, and working in fields that had nothing to do with social media before he posted his first tweet.

1) Your Life Already Gave You a Point of View Nobody Else Has

Trung didn't start with a content strategy. He started with a messy career.

• Wanted to be a doctor. Failed pre-med.

• Moved to Vietnam. Couldn't get hired to teach English because the schools wanted Caucasian teachers.

• Wrote a comedy screenplay instead. Fox bought it but it went straight into production hell.

Then finally, a bit of luck: a friend suggested he apply to The Hustle, and he got hired as a writer.

None of these steps were part of a plan, but each one deposited something: diverse life experiences.

Combined together they shaped an original point of view. A point of view that allows him to combine ideas in original ways.

He writes about business, like thousands of people on 𝕏. But most business content is dry. His threads are different because he filters everything through comedy and unique angles based on his specific background.

The lesson isn't "have a weird career." It's gain life experience, try things, follow your interests. And don't chain yourself to a niche.

Pick a broad topic. Then personalize it with the point of view only your path could produce.

2) If You Read What Everyone Reads, You'll Write What Everyone Writes

Having a unique perspective is only half the equation. You also need to feed it with inputs nobody else is using.

Trung's entire daily research routine takes 30 minutes. Most of that time is spent reading comments, not articles.

Reddit comments, specifically. His reasoning: when you go in the comments, you can find experts who will never write a blog post but leave first-hand knowledge buried in reply threads.

His process: go to relevant subreddits, sort by trending, skip the post, read the comments. A single thread can generate 10+ content ideas. If something already has upvotes, it's been pre-filtered for quality. Then he layers his own research, humor, and narrative on top.

When it comes to originality, you can only squeeze so much from the same newsletters, articles, and threads everyone reads.

Instead, try to dig where other creators never bother to look: comment sections, podcast footnotes, obscure forums, expert threads buried three clicks deep. That’s where the real raw material for original ideas lives.

3) The Creators Who Chase the Algorithm All Sound the Same

A unique point of view. Original sources to feed it.

There's one more piece: what you do with all of that.

He credits Rick Rubin's The Creative Act as the book that changed how he works.

The core idea: you cannot create with the audience in mind. Predicting the preferences of millions of people is impossible. Trying to do it leads to safe, generic, forgettable content.

Trung's goal is to make people laugh. The business analysis is the vehicle for humor, not the other way around. That's not a positioning strategy he reverse-engineered. It's who he actually is.

The creators who build the most loyal followings aren't the ones who optimized for the algorithm. They're the ones who follow their own curiosity and let the audience form around them.

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That’s it for now, everyone! We’ll meet again next week to discuss more of this!

Don’t forget to try Hypefury (for free) if you haven’t yet.

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Cheers,

Yannick Veys
Co-founder and CMO of Hypefury