How Do You Get 150,000+ Instagram Followers?
Alex Crockford is a social media influencer with a difference. His story is one of commitment, tenacity and next-level entrepreneurship…
Social media influencers: vain, vacuous and, according to Vice Magazine, prone to mental health breakdowns.
Then there’s influencers like Alex Crockford.
A fitness expert and male model, Alex might be one of the most determined, down-to-earth and humble people you could ever meet.
His specialist fitness knowledge and accomplished homemade programmes, carefully curated on social media, has created a dedicated followership — 160,000 followers on Instagram alone! — and has led him to found his own company and engage Calcey Technology in the development of his own bespoke fitness app.
This is a story of success, millennial style.
“You’ll Never Make It!”
…was a recurring accusation during Alex’s formative years.
At around the age of fifteen, where he excelled at both football and basketball, he had to drop one sport to fully progress at the other.
“Despite not being six-foot like the rest of the team I opted for basketball; I was club captain and playing at county level [Surrey],” Alex told me in an interview at his home.
It was a fair decision given that height isn’t an integral element of being a successful point guard (Alex’s basketball position). Point guard’s are master ball handlers, tacticians, and always equipped with a match-winning three pointer. Throughout the 1990s and Alex’s early introduction to the game, Muggsy Bogues was the shortest point guard — and player — in NBA history at only 5’3”.
Inspiration indeed.
Yet, despite the facts, British coaches judged on stereotype: Alex wasn’t tall enough.
He now confesses that it is these naysayers that have motivated him the most:
“It developed my committed work ethic. I work to prove people wrong.”
Around this time he turned to the gym to “bulk up” and found a new vocation. He then embarked on a BSc in Fitness and Personal Training at Southampton University. Graduating in 2011, he instantly progressed to personal training (PT) at a gym back in Surrey.
As Alex’s body grew, so did his ambitions: he dreamt of being a fitness model. Like the basketball coaches before, the director of a established sport agency told him he’ll never make it as a fitness model, “because of the tribal tattoo on his left shoulder.” And, like before, Alex got hyper-motivated.
He started sharing his gym routines, weight repetitions, and, impressive “abs”, for a growing group of fitness fanatics online on Instagram. The coverage also simultaneously helped build his modeling portfolio, and, in 2015, Alex got his first magazine cover for a men’s lifestyle magazine.
It was a big two fingers up to that agency director.
From Fitness Model to Business Model
Following his first cover, Alex got “tons of requests” from his followers asking how do you achieve the optimum fitness model body?
“That’s when I naively wrote up ‘the crockfit cover model training programme’. I knew I had an entrepreneur streak in me… So I started a website. I got my first sale… and the beast was unleashed there.”
The initial training programme was a simple word doc: a three month timetable workout. It quickly graduated to a more professional-looking PDF once Alex commissioned his product manager friend, Beena, to help out on production. The PDF linked to the man himself putting his timetable into action with motivational videos that people really connected with. In many ways, his original product — or his earliest MVP — hasn’t changed much.
Pivotal to Alex’s rapid rise in follower-development has been his candid, portrayal of his actual life: a remarkable feat in an online world where product placement and phoney reviews are the status quo. Alex is himself every time he’s on camera. He talks of how hard it is to remain motivated, what he’s learnt, and his business decisions.
It means his public trusts him.
Growth Spurt
By summer 2016 orders on Alex’s three month programmes were growing steadily.
So much so that he quit his PT day job to focus full time on designing new programmes and content creation. He also registered his own Crockfit limited company to suddenly become a startup founder.
As a brand built on his own personal integrity, Alex also spends a lot of time talking to his followers and answering their fitness queries.
“For years my ambition for to get 10,000 followers. That’s the initial benchmark and that’s the hardest one to achieve.”
Then the floodgates opened. In the next two years Alex would see unimaginable growth. His instagram followers has rocketed to 164,000 and counting. His The Best 10 Minute Abs Workout! has over 890k views. His twitter account is more economical at a mere 23,000 followers.
But no one should think this hasn’t required an incredible level of hard work, talent, and dedication. Like the most celebrated NBA point guards, vision, control and knowing-when-to-strike is the key to greatness. It’s similar for Alex. Growing a loyal social media following in a niche fitness market isn’t a case of hammering out as many workout videos as possible. It requires a tactical plan, and it’s perfect deployment.
Its taken three years for Alex to produce his staple three products: #GymFit, #SheFit and #HomeFit. Each product has four three month programmes, meaning, in effect, there are twelve individual outright products for sale. That’s a lot of content.
Alex and Beena understood that a dedicated #Crockfit app would maximise their business opportunity and, also, give their customers the best product possible.
So, in early 2018 Alex used his personal approach again. On his own channels he made a call to arms for an app developer. At once, he was inundated by tech companies from “India, Russia, Pakistan… everywhere”, pitching for his business. Then, a friend, Joel Burgess, Founder and CEO of Healthy Eating app, Nutrifix, reached out:
“Joel said I should totally check his app developers: Calcey Technology in Sri Lanka… Getting a endorsement from startup founder in the UK app scene was the best recommendation I could have hoped for”.
App-etite for More
Now six months in the making the official #Crockfit app is only weeks from release.
“I’ve been very impressed with Calcey’s engineers and their ability to understand what I am looking to build”.
For someone who has made a business out of communicating online and building a diverse, global following, taking the leap to onboard tech development from Sri Lanka is a simple exercise in appreciating how technology easily collapses notions of time and space.
“We had update calls together every week and Calcey’s engineers can access all of my content through the cloud. The five hour difference isn’t a problem either as they are prepared to work around the clock and always meet deadlines. We’ve worked together very easily.”
The app’s imminent release, however, does not mean the intensity of Alex’s work ethic will decline.
His follower analytics indicate that he has a predominantly male market (75%) and their country of origin spans the globe. His top five followers’ nations are USA (20%), UK (10%), Brazil (9%), Mexico (6%) and Thailand (3%).
So what does that mean for you?
“It means that’s there’s plenty more people to help. When I was doing 1–2–1 personal training, I wasn’t fully satisfied as my dream is to inspire millions. And work anywhere in the world.
Two days after our interview Alex was jetting off to L.A. for several business meetings. He has certainly made the latter dream happen.
And who’d bet against him getting a over million followers?
Craig writes for Calcey Technologies, a boutique software product engineering agency with roots in the Silicon Valley, that lends its software development muscle to start-ups and scale-ups around the world. Calcey’s team of 100+ engineers, based at its development centre in Sri Lanka, serve multiple startups in London and are keen to engage with more. Calcey’s clients also use it as an R&D centre. Calcey’s client portfolio includes well known names such as PayPal and Stanford University as well as exciting startups in London such as Nutrifix.
