Nicholas John hid his Instagram account from his friends until it hit 100,000 followers. Today he’s past 1 million — and he’s never taken a single brand deal.
In this episode, I sit down with Nicholas to unpack how he walked away from a career as an actor, model, and songwriter in Nashville (he opened for Mac Miller in college) to build one of the fastest-growing faith-rooted encouragement brands on social media — shot almost entirely on an iPhone, with a bedsheet over a window standing in for a lighting rig.
My biggest takeaway from this conversation: Nicholas isn’t guessing. He studies his audience — reads constantly, absorbs everything he can — and then strategically serves them the best of what he’s learned. That’s the real engine behind the growth.
We get into:
• Why he built anonymously before ever telling anyone what he was doing • How studying his audience deeply shapes every piece of content he makes • Why encouragement content is outperforming outrage content at scale • The “give value for free for years” approach that let him skip sponsorships entirely • How he turned trust into three self-owned products — a journal, a card game, and a course • His advice for anyone sitting on an audience but hasn’t built anything to sell yet
This is Make Belief — where we turn passive dreaming into intentional action. If you’re a creative entrepreneur trying to build something real instead of chasing a moment, this conversation is for you.
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