Case study: Fares Akhmedov
Goal: drop cold outreach and make Threads the main, predictable source of leads for the agency.
“The personal brand became the agency's main source of clients — without a single ruble on ads”
Fares Akhmedov, CEO IMPERVIR
- Threads
- Personal brand
- 2 months
How we got 13,000,000 views and almost 10,000 Threads followers — on our own blog.
Whoever I've worked with and whichever expert I've delivered results for, I consider my own Threads blog my strongest case.
The reason is simple: delivering results for yourself is far harder than doing it for someone else. With a client there's a deadline, a guarantee and someone else's money — those keep you disciplined. Your own blog can always wait until Monday, and that is exactly why the founder's blog is dead at most agencies.
This case study is about how we stopped being that kind of agency.
Where attention is cheapest right now, and why the window will close.
One collects reach, the other turns it into trust. Separately, neither works.
What stands between «read the post» and «left a phone number».
I'll cover both what produced the explosive result and what didn't work.
We had clients. But each one cost too much — not in money, in energy.
Before we worked on the personal brand we got production enquiries in various ways. The main one was cold outreach in Telegram DMs.
The mechanic is clear and, at first glance, fair: you write to a hundred people, a handful reply, and some of them make it to a call. Clients did come from it — the question was at what cost.
The problem with cold traffic isn't conversion, it's who you are talking to. A person you messaged first knows nothing about you. They haven't seen your work, they don't understand how you differ from a dozen other agencies, and they assume by default that they are about to be sold to. The whole conversation goes into clawing that minus back to zero — and only then does the real conversation start.
Hence the feeling of endless rowing: to get even a minimal conversion into calls, we had to spend a lot of time and energy.
There was a second reason, less obvious. The blog had no solid positioning. Someone who did land on the page couldn't tell in ten seconds who we were and what we were strong at — so the result stayed low even where the attention had already been won.
Stop the chaotic posting and make Threads the main, predictable source of traffic and enquiries for the agency's services.
The key word here is predictable. Outreach did bring enquiries, but their number depended on how many messages we physically managed to send. You cannot plan a flow like that, and you cannot scale it without hiring people.
On a call with the team we decided: we go all in on Threads. The logic was the arithmetic of attention — back then there was almost no competition for reach in Threads, and the same text collected many times more eyes there than on any other platform. A window like that doesn't stay open long, and we decided to step through it.
If clients only come through cold outreach and personal connections — let's look at how to move your enquiry flow onto content.
Choosing the formats
Two formats that only work as a pair.
We ran a deep personality breakdown and a detailed competitor analysis. The task wasn't to «come up with content pillars» but to find formats that solve two different jobs — and to stop trying to solve both with one post.
I. Trigger posts. These are posts that provoke a strong emotion about the content: disagreement, recognition, the urge to argue. The algorithm doesn't see the emotion, it sees its traces — comments, reposts, time spent on the post — and pushes the text further.
A trigger post doesn't sell, and it shouldn't. Its job is to bring you people who would never have heard of you otherwise.
II. Expert posts. Here we open up the expertise: we explain our methods of building a personal brand, growing views, automating content with AI.
A post like that almost never collects the reach of a trigger post. But it does something else: the person who came for the emotion gets proof that there is substance behind it. People subscribe after the expert posts — and those are what make an enquiry warm.
Trigger content alone gives you reach and zero trust — the audience arrives and leaves. Expert content alone gives you trust and zero reach — there will be nobody to read it. Only the pair works: the first brings people in, the second keeps them.
Testing the hypotheses
How forty thousand in a week became thirteen million.
For the first week we published trigger content only — we had to find out whether the platform responded at all. In seven days the profile collected 40,000 in reach. Starting from zero, that was the signal that the low-competition hypothesis was right.
We deliberately held back the expert posts for the first three weeks. Talking about your methods where there is no audience yet means wasting your best material. First you fill the room, then you step on stage.
Three weeks in, we started publishing expert posts with a call to action at the end of each. They collected steady views — not record-breaking, but even, and that was exactly what we needed.
In two months of running Threads we did 13,000,000 in reach — organic only, without a single rouble on ads.
In parallel we moved 1,300 targeted, solvent subscribers into the Telegram channel from scratch. That number looks modest next to thirteen million — which is exactly why it deserves an explanation.
Threads is a place for reading, Telegram is a place for relationships. In Threads a person scrolls and forgets. Someone who took an extra step for you and moved to the channel is already a different person: they agreed to hear from you regularly. Out of thirteen million views we didn't need all of them — we needed these.
Threads still gives reach cheaper than any other platform. We'll build your content so that views turn into enquiries.
A system. Working formats that bring steady views and targeted enquiries for our products. Not one good month, but a repeatable order of actions.
Reach. 13,000,000 views — organic only.
Loyalty. Almost 10,000 targeted Threads followers. These are people who subscribed to the expertise and the values. You don't gather an audience like that with one viral post. Plus 1,300 subscribers in the Telegram channel.
Automated funnels. Set up so that an expert who lands on our post becomes a lead and buys a service or a product — without manual involvement at every step.
We didn't stop messaging people first. We stopped being the ones who message first — and became the ones people message. It's the same work, just from the other side of the table.
If you want a strong result in media, a personal brand built properly and content as your main source of traffic — leave a request.
I'll get in touch if there are open slots right now. Usually there's a queue and you have to wait.
