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Hey! I'm John Heymans, a 5000m runner and Olympian representing Belgium. Every year, I target the major championships: European Champs, World Champs, and the Olympics in 2028.
Four years ago, I started posting on social media with the goal of creating an income source for myself as an athlete. And it's going great! Up to now, each piece of the team has worked fairly independently. Now we're starting to operate as a real team, with clear roles: a head of media, a filmer, someone leading YouTube, and an Instagram specialist (and that's exactly the role I'm hiring for)
I am therefore looking for someone who can be fully responsible for my Instagram and its growth. First, this person will be a short-form video editor. Secondly, this person will plan, strategise, and experiment with different content formats. The goal is to take my Instagram account to the next level. In the past 4 years, we grew from 0 to 100K followers. The next step is to reach 500 000 followers.
You won't be doing this alone. You're joining a personal brand team, who will cover the general direction, YouTube long-form editing, filming, and partnerships, so you can stay focused on Instagram. If you love short-form video editing and you enjoy content planning, creative ideation, and doing data-driven tests of your ideas - keep reading.
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You own my Instagram and its growth, with the goal of bringing the account from 100K to 500K followers. That doesn't mean you work in isolation. You're part of a team building my personal brand, and your ideas pull in the same direction as the wider vision of that brand.
At the start, the head of media will work right alongside you to bring you into the team and the way we work; over time, you will grow into running the account fully autonomously. You'll also work closely with the YouTube lead - we all push each other to be our best.
Your job isn’t just to edit. Your job is to create a data-driven content creation system that leads to explosive growth of the Instagram account.
After receiving content from the filmer via Dropbox, you will be the person editing the short-form videos with the clips that the filmer gave you, and you will be responsible for turning them into an awesome video. :)
But before editing, in a first stage, your responsibility will be to continuously come up with ideas for storylines, hooks, editing styles, etc. that we can test out. The key here is to be creative: copying what works on Instagram is not enough. We want you to come up with truly new ideas that haven't been tried yet on Instagram.
There will be a lot of communication required between us, because some ideas need my involvement, for example when you want me to film specific shots or say something specific to the camera. Other ideas don't require my involvement, for example when you want to test out different editing styles.
A core challenge of working with a pro athlete The challenge of working with a professional runner is that training, competing, and recovering are my priority. This means that my schedule is defined by training and recovery needs, and filming/content creation has to adapt to this schedule. For example, we can't organize a running challenge, as this requires me to change up my training and plan my day around that challenge.
How do we know which of your creative ideas have worked and made the account grow? This is where your role as experimenter comes in. For every piece of content you produce, you will decide on a creative idea to test out and produce 2 or more versions of that content. You will then publish these content pieces via Trial Reels, and if things go well, in the future you will receive a budget to test with Meta Ads as well. Once we know which version of the content works best, we post the best-performing version on my Instagram feed, and you write down the conclusion of the experiment. That way, we make the content 1% better every day, and in the long term, we create a winning playbook.
I don't care if one of your ideas fails. I want you to fail... A LOT. What I care about is that you can take conclusions from the experiments, which makes the content better over time.
You are responsible for taking the account to 500K followers. The only requirement is posting at least 5 times per week. Some videos require very little editing, while others, such as vlogs, require more editing. This is a part time-job, meant to become full time in the future if you drive results.