The Evolved Founder · B2B · coaching for startup founders
Test two hooks as Instagram trial reels, then post the winner to your feed
Winning hook hit ~50K views vs 500; ~3,000 new followers in a day
Workedorganic-short-videofounder-brandexperimentation
What they did
Posts the same video with different hooks as Instagram Trial Reels, which show only to non-followers. Lets them run a few hours, then promotes the best-performing version to the main feed, and keeps the losing version up in trial reels because it keeps reaching non-followers. Hook drives watch-through. Winning hook opened a question ('Raise VC money. You can make $50 million and still be broke') while the loser answered it ('I teach people how to fundraise, but I wouldn't raise a single dollar today').
What happened
Curiosity hook reached about 50,000 views vs about 500 for the answer-giving hook, and brought almost 3,000 new followers in one day.
- Stage
- Pre-launch (audience-building)
“Yeah, so there's a a feature on Instagram called trial reels where you basically push videos out to your non-followers only. And so you can A/B test your hook”
“I let it run for a few hours. I see which video format does the best, and then I promote the video that does the best to my main feed. I still keep the old video. I don't delete it from my trial reels”
“I just A/B tested a hook where uh one video got like, you know, 500 views, and the other one is like at like 50,000 now, all right?”
Related topics
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