A few months ago, I started what was supposed to be a simple experiment. The original goal was not to build a social media channel. It was to leverage AI and see where this journey would take me. Read more about the faceless Instagram experiment here.

I was writing a book. The question I wanted answered was simple: Who is the audience for this?

Instead of spending months writing in isolation and hoping readers would eventually appear, I started publishing pieces of the content online. Small pieces, a single page, a single idea.

What happened next surprised me. Less than three months later, the account crossed 15k followers. Several posts reached half-a-million views.

The most interesting part is that none of this was planned. And perhaps even more interesting: the account remains completely faceless. No shortcuts borrowed from the influencer playbook. The experiment was never about me. It was about whether ideas could stand on their own and if I could leverage AI, because why not!

Consistency Is More Powerful Than Strategy

Looking back, there was no grand content calendar. There was simply a commitment to show up every day. Having completed the 100 day daily writing challenge, this was no big deal for me.

Most people dramatically underestimate what daily publishing does. Not because the algorithm rewards consistency, but because consistency teaches you things that planning never will.

• You start noticing patterns.
• You learn what people save and share.
• You learn which ideas create emotion and which ones are ignored.
• You even realise and learn about you. What parts of it you enjoy vs you hate.

I Started Publishing What I Would Consume

I experienced some frustrations about the IG algorithm itself, that I have written here. The breakthrough came when I stopped relying fully on AI and figuring out what I wanted to post, and the kind of content I would consume.

• One reflection.
• One illustration.
• One thought worth sharing.

Many of the posts that performed best were the ones I have used myself to learn or teach. So there was a proven way there that the kind of content itself helps and it was more about waiting for the time for IG to reward you based on the audience distribution, timing of the day and week, etc.

The Audience Usually Knows Before You Do

One lesson I did not expect was how often the audience identifies the strongest ideas before the creator does. There are posts I spent days thinking about that barely moved. There are others I almost didn’t publish that ended up reaching hundreds of thousands of people.

When something resonates, the audience tells you quickly. The job is not to predict every winner. The job is to notice what is working and keep exploring that direction.

Many of the themes that now define the account were not planned in advance. They emerged because the audience consistently responded to them.

AI Was My Safety Net, Not The Creator

A lot of people assume that if content is created today, AI must be doing the creative work.

AI helped remove friction. It helped turn ideas into publishable assets faster. It helped me experiment more frequently and faster.

But the ideas were mine. The concepts. The angles. The stories. The visual metaphors.

It really awakened the creator within me. Most pieces started as rough notes, sketches, or observations. AI helped transform those ideas into something that could be published consistently.

The technology increased velocity. It did not replace taste.

I often think of AI as a bicycle for content creation. It helps you move faster, but it does not tell you where to go.

Why Faceless Turned Out To Be An Advantage

One unexpected lesson was that anonymity removed a surprising amount of pressure. There was no need to maintain a personal image. No need to constantly talk about myself. No need to become the product. That forced the content itself to do all the work.

Every post had to earn attention on its own merits. If it resonated, great. If it didn’t, there was nowhere to hide. In hindsight, that constraint became an advantage.

It kept the focus on creating value rather than creating a persona.

The Most Important Rule: Enjoy Making It

This is probably the biggest reason the experiment survived long enough to work. I enjoyed the process. I still do, a lot. In fact, I feel I have come a long way with my editing and creative skills.

There was and is no pressure to monetize. No pressure to become an influencer. No pressure to optimise every metric. Atleast this year, I don’t have any such plans.

I like creating the content. That makes consistency possible. And consistency creates the data. The data creates the insights. The insights create growth.

Most people try to reverse that sequence. They chase growth first.

In my experience, growth is often the byproduct of making something you genuinely enjoy creating, long enough for other people to discover it.

6 months in, I still think of it as an experiment. The follower count is interesting. The view counts are interesting.

But the most valuable outcome is that I now understand the audience far better than I did when I started. And that was the original goal all along. The irony is that the book that started this journey still isn’t finished. But thanks to the experiment, I now know exactly who I’m writing it for.