Read the full case study: Sam Stoffel: 0 to 500,000 followers in 10 months
Tom rebuilt Sam Stoffel's content team, found three formats and built a system that posted three times a day, and Sam's personal brand went from 0 to 500,000 followers in 10 months, mainly on Instagram, then TikTok.
Client: Sam Stoffel (Stoffel Media Group)
Tom's role: Head of Content and Content Consultant, Stoffel Media Group (Jun 2025 to Apr 2026), employed through SubSpot. Also Content Consultant to Liquidity Media (Jan to Apr 2026).
Years: Jun 2025 to Apr 2026
Platforms: Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube
Key numbers
- 0 to 500,000: followers in 10 months, mainly Instagram, then TikTok
- 1,500: followers after the seven months of content before Tom arrived
- 150,000: followers six months in, with a team of 6 full time
- 3: posts a day, the cadence the system was built to hold
Sam Stoffel is a founder who built his first business with his face on it. He started Profit Accumulator in 2014 and sold it in 2024. Tom ran content for his personal brand from June 2025 to April 2026. In that time the brand went from 0 to 500,000 followers in 10 months, mainly on Instagram, then TikTok. Tom's title was Head of Content and Content Consultant. He was employed through SubSpot, the creator software company Sam also founded. He left when Ben Heath recruited him to build the Heath Media content team.
The starting point
Sam had been posting for about seven months before Tom arrived. In that time the account reached about 1,500 followers. Output was two to three short form videos a week. The team was a content strategist, a photographer and videographer, and an editor with no experience. There were no systems and no production work. There was no strategy and no clear direction. The content told Sam's story with nothing in it for the audience, and no mission, purpose or enemy. Tom pitched his own role after seeing how little seven months had produced.
What Tom did
Tom rehired the team. The first two hires were a script writer and producer, and a content producer and creative director. Freelance specialists covered scheduling and LinkedIn. He found Sam's moat: more than a decade as the face of his own business, telling his story to make money online. He gave the brand a mission and an enemy. The mission was making money online and building a personal brand to do it. The enemy was the people who said you could not, the 9 to 5, and staying broke. He built the system that let the team post three times a day. He built AI tools himself to run and scale the operation. He also consulted for Liquidity Media on content strategy from January to April 2026.
How it worked: formats, cadence, team, systems, decisions
Formats. Three formats carried the growth: selfie videos, podcasts, and reviewing personal brands. Each one met an audience need, told through Sam's own insight and in his register. That register is flashy: the helicopter, the cars, the house and the holidays.
Cadence. The target was three posts a day. The rule came from a consulting session Tom bought for Sam from Michael Lim in December 2025. Lim had led media and content for Alex Hormozi. The advice was to overwhelm the algorithm and keep momentum, because a flop costs nothing. The public feed shows the change. Sam posted 28 reels in November 2025, 56 in December, 66 in January 2026, 85 in February and 90 in March.
Measurement. The team logged views and new followers on every video. They tracked views per new follower by format, and cut it from 24 to 14 by iterating on format and hook. One video did 700,000 views and brought in 40,000 followers.
Team. The team grew to 8 full time. Six months in it was 6 full time, working across YouTube, short form and LinkedIn. Each platform had a content lead who owned its growth number.
Decisions. Tom chose to replace the team before testing a single format. He chose volume first, then looked for the hero pieces. Sam kept going because he was building a product behind the scenes and an audience to launch it to.
The results
0 to 500,000 followers in 10 months, mainly on Instagram, then TikTok. Tom confirmed the figure on 18 Oct 2026. Six months in, the count stood at 150,000. The public feed holds 397 reels from October 2025 to April 2026, with 25,946,257 Instagram plays between them. 8 of those passed 600,000 plays and 5 passed 1,000,000. The most played was 4,604,974 plays on 21 January 2026. On 25 October 2026 Sam had 519,126 Instagram followers and 225,476 on TikTok. Across seven accounts he had 961,836. Those counts are from after Tom left, so they are not the tenure figure. Sam's own site claims 600K+ followers in 18 months.
More case studies: tomsharman.com/case-studies