okay so this is something i've been wanting to talk about for a while because i've seen quite alot of people asking why their accounts arent growing, why their bots arent getting as many chats or traction as they'd hoped or how to get more people to notice their work. AND HONESTLY I GET IT!! i understand the frustration and i'm not going to sit here and pretend that numbers don't matter to creators because let's be real for a sec, if you spend hours writing a character, their backstory, putting together a scenario and making sure everything looks presentable and nice, OFC ur going to want people to interact with your work. there's nothing wrong with wanting your creations to reach more people!! that's perfectly normal!!!!!!1!1

HOWEVER, i do think there's a lot we need to talk about when it comes to growth, expectations and how we and others treat ourselves as creators on this site. this isn't me trying to lecture anybody nor am i claiming to have everything figured out. i'm just sharing my own experiences and observations after being around jai since 2023 and posting my own bots since 2025. take what you find useful, leave what doesn't apply to you and please don't take any of this as me trying to put anyone down. i'm genuinely just tired of seeing creators beat themselves up over numbers and i figured i'd put my thoughts into one post instead of rewriting the same long ass message every time someone asks LMAO.

first things first: slow growth is normal. i know you've probably heard this a million times already but i REALLY need some of you to let that sink in. you can post an incredibly detailed bot, spend hours working on the writing, create an interesting character AND STILL not get the engagement you expected. meanwhile someone else can post a bot they made in twenty minutes and somehow end up with thousands of chats. is it frustrating? absolutely. does it mean your work is worse? NO. there are so many factors that influence how well a bot performs, including its concept, presentation, discoverability, timing, audience preferences and plain ol' lady luck. sometimes a particular trope is trending, sometimes a character concept happens to resonate with a lot of people and sometimes a bot gets picked up by an audience you weren't expecting! there's no single formula that guarantees success (well maybe there is if u post mafia bots or evil chars /joke i love yall) and anyone who tells you otherwise is probably selling something LMFAO

you can learn to present your bots better, experiment with different concepts and figure out what your audience enjoys but you CANNOT control every factor that determines how many people will click on your work. a bot performing poorly doesn't automatically mean it's a bad bot and a bot performing well doesn't automatically mean it's objectively better than everyone else's. engagement is a measure of how people interact with a creation, not a definitive measurement of your talent.

and please, for the love of everything, STOP COMPARING YOUR ACCOUNT TO THAT OF POPULAR CREATORS!!!!!!!!!! i'm SERIOUS. i know it's tempting to look at someone with thousands of followers and wonder why ur not there yet, especially when you feel like ur putting in just as much effort if not more. BUT, girl/boy/yourself/my loves, you are looking at their CURRENT position and comparing it to yours without knowing everything that happened along the way. they might have been creating for years, found a niche that works for them, had a bot go viral, simply gotten lucky with visibility or whateverthefuck!!! you don't always see the unsuccessful bots, the periods of stagnation or the amount of time it took them to build an audience. and even if they did grow quickly, so what? their journey doesn't establish a deadline for yours. you don't need to reach 1k in a week because someone else did and you definitely don't need to reach 10k in a month because another creator managed it. there isn't a creator leaderboard that determines who deserves to keep making bots based on how quickly they gain followers. well at least not one you should be treating as a measure of your worth. LET PEOPLE GROW AT THEIR OWN PACE. you're allowed to be proud of someone else's success without using it as evidence that you're falling behind.

now, speaking from personal experience, i started posting bots on jan 30 2025 and i still have the bot i posted that day, although it's privated now. i still remember having double digit followers and i was stuck below 1k for a LOOOONNNGGG time. my account only started growing more noticeably after i began posting more bots in late 2025 and early 2026. and no, i'm not going to pretend that slow growth never bothered me. it definitely did lols! i got discouraged, experienced burnout and considered quitting a few times myself. sometimes it felt like my work wasn't reaching the people i wanted it to reach and it was difficult not to question whether continuing was worth it. but i kept going because i still had stuff i wanted to share and characters i wanted other people to see. i didn't magically become immune to self doubt just because i decided to keep creating. i simply had something i still wanted to do, even when the numbers weren't what i hoped they'd be. so when i tell you not to give up solely because your account is growing slowly, i'm not speaking from the perspective of someone who never struggled with it. i've been there too. you can feel discouraged by the lack of engagement and still love creating. those two things can exist at the same time. i'm not asking you to pretend that the numbers don't matter to you. i'm asking you not to let them become the only reason you decide whether your work is worth making.

another thing i want to address is the idea that you need to post constantly to grow. look babe, consistency can help people recognise your account and give your audience more opportunities to discover your work, but consistency doesn't mean you have to upload a new bot every other day until your fingers fall off. PLEASE, YOUR KEYBOARD IS NOT GOING TO FILE A MISSING PERSONS REPORT IF YOU TAKE A WEEK OFF. create at a pace that works for you!! if you can comfortably post every week, great! if you can only manage one bot a month, that's fine too! if you disappear for a while because you're busy, exhausted or simply don't have any ideas, ur allowed to do that. not every creator has the same amount of free time, energy or motivation. some people can write for hours every day, while others need several days just to finish one bot. well, neither is inherently better. and if your account grows more slowly because you aren't uploading as frequently, that doesn't mean you should force yourself into a schedule that makes you miserable. you might gain more visibility by posting more often, but that doesn't guarantee that every upload will perform well either. burning yourself out for the sake of consistency is not a sustainable growth strategy. if creating starts feeling like a chore you dread rather than something you enjoy, it's worth taking a step back and asking yourself whether the pressure you're putting on yourself is actually helping you. :)

on that note, please don't feel like you have to turn every single bot into a calculated attempt at getting more chats!! it's perfectly fine to pay attention to trends, experiment with popular tropes and learn what kinds of concepts attract an audience. there's nothing wrong with wanting to improve your reach, but if you start abandoning every idea you genuinely love because you're afraid it won't perform well, then what are you creating for anymore? you don't have to follow every trend, write every popular trope or change your entire writing style because another creator is doing something that seems to work. maybe your favourite character concept is niche. maybe you enjoy writing lengthy, detailed intros when other people prefer shorter ones. maybe the bots you want to post aren't what happens to be trending this month. that's okay! you can explore what works without abandoning what makes creating enjoyable for you and if ur interested in growing, take the time to look at your own work objectively. is your bot's intros and scenarios engaging? is the premise clear? does the profile give people a reason to want to interact with the character? is the presentation easy to understand? these are things you can experiment with and improve over time. but don't confuse improving your work with changing everything about it to please strangers. learn from your results but don't let your results dictate your entire creative identity.

since we're talking about growth, let's discuss interacting with bigger creators and the community cus it seems to be a hot topic for some and I gotta give a little reality check on that. :) does networking help? yes, it can! being active in community spaces can help people become familiar with you, introduce you to other creators and give your work more opportunities to be discovered. but i want to be very clear about something: being friends with popular creators does not automatically make you popular too. i'm saying this as someone who has interacted with plenty of bigger creators, been active in the official jai server, and become known in some circles for my css guides and templates. i didn't even start joining other creators' servers until the later months of 2025, when i was already around 1k followersy. before that, most of my interactions with bigger creators were fairly limited, aside from people i'd met through the community whom i met in the j.ai server and eventually befriended. i've also been recommended by bigger creators a few times (like 4, that I know of) but those recommendations happened when i already had over 3k followers. so no! i didn't get my initial following simply by surrounding myself with popular people. community engagement can help, but it isn't a magic button that suddenly gives you thousands of followers. you can join every server, participate in every collabs and be mutuals with half the site without seeing the growth you expected. and that's not necessarily because ur doing something wrong! networking and creating are two different things, and while they can complement each other, one doesn't guarantee the success of the other. interact with people because you genuinely enjoy their company, support their work because you appreciate it and make friends without treating every relationship like a potential marketing opportunity. you don't need to collect popular mutuals like they're limited-edition trading cards. let friendships be friendships. if someone recommends your work, that's lovely, but don't enter a relationship expecting them to promote you. the healthiest approach is to build genuine connections while continuing to develop your own work and audience!! :)

i also want to talk about the pressure some creators feel to be recognised by bigger names in the community. i understand why it happens. when a popular creator likes your bot, recommends you, or even acknowledges your existence, it can feel like a huge milestone! especially when you're still relatively unknown. there's nothing wrong with being excited about that! but PLEASE don't start treating recognition from bigger creators as proof that your work is finally worth something. your work was worth making before they noticed it, it doesn't suddenly become better because someone with a larger following approves of it and it doesn't become worse because they haven't interacted with it. popular creators are people with their own preferences. they cannot discover or promote every creator on the site and they aren't responsible for making everyone else's account grow. likewise, smaller creators aren't obligated to become active in every community space just to prove they're serious about creating. find a level of participation that feels comfortable for you. you can build an audience without being constantly visible in every server, and you can be an active community member without every interaction translating into new followers. both are perfectly possible.

and while we're on the subject of people, please remember that you don't need to be popular to be a good creator and you don't need a large following to deserve respect. follower counts can be useful if growth is one of your goals but they aren't a hierarchy of human worth. a creator with 200 followers can put just as much care into their work as someone with 20k. someone who has only posted three bots can have an incredible writing style and someone who's been creating for years can still have things to learn. there's no reason to treat smaller creators as though they're automatically less skilled, less interesting or less deserving of attention. and if you're a smaller creator reading this, please don't assume that nobody cares about your work simply because your account isn't growing as quickly as you hoped!!! you may not have reached a large audience yet but that doesn't mean you never will. growth takes time and sometimes the people who will genuinely enjoy your work simply haven't come across your account. you can't force that discovery to happen overnight but you can keep creating, learning and making it easier for people to understand what you offer.

at the same time, i want to be realistic: not every account is going to become huge and not every bot is going to receive thousands of chats. that's the part people don't always like hearing, but i think it's important to acknowledge. you can work hard, improve your writing, participate in the community, and post regularly without becoming one of the site's biggest creators. there are things you can influence and things you can't. you can influence the quality of your writing, how you present your characters, how often you create and how you respond to feedback. you cannot guarantee that a particular bot will go viral, that people will follow you after interacting with your work or that the algorithm will consistently show your bots to the right audience. effort matters but effort doesn't guarantee a specific outcome, and that doesn't mean effort is pointless. it means you need to decide what success looks like for you beyond a number that is partly influenced by factors outside your control. maybe you want to build a community of people who genuinely enjoy your characters, maybe you want to improve your writing, maybe you want to experiment with different genres, share your ideas orr simply have fun creating. you can still aim for 1k, 5k, or 10k followers ofc. there's absolutely nothing wrong with setting goals! just remember that reaching those milestones is not the only way to make your time as a creator worthwhile.

now, negative comments. unfortunately they're part of putting your work out there and no matter how good your bots become, you won't be able to please everyone. some people will dislike your writing style, some won't enjoy your characters and some will have genuine criticism that you might find useful and then there are people who seem to have woken up that morning and decided to make being unpleasant their full time occupation. those are the people i'm particularly uninterested in entertaining LMAO. seriously though, i know it's easier to say "just ignore them" than it is to actually do it, especially if you're sensitive or already struggling with self doubt (like myself). a single nasty comment can stay in your head long after you've closed the site. you might find yourself rereading it, wondering whether the person has a point or questioning your abilities because of something a stranger said in thirty seconds. i've seen how much these things can affect people and i don't think being sensitive makes you weak. but i do think it's important to learn how to distinguish useful feedback from someone simply trying to hurt you. if someone offers specific, respectful criticism, you can consider it and decide whether there's anything worth learning from it. you don't have to agree with every opinion and you don't have to change your work to accommodate every preference. if someone is insulting you, harassing you or deliberately trying to provoke a reaction, you are allowed to delete the comment, block them and move on. you don't owe strangers a debate about your own creations. you don't have to prove that you're a good creator to someone who has already decided to be nasty. not every opinion deserves your attention and not every criticism deserves to become your inner monologue. protect your peace!! your comment section is not a courtroom and you are not legally obligated to defend your characterisation of a fictional man to a random person on the internet

for creators who are already established, i want to say something here too: please remember what it was like when you were starting out, it's easy to forget how intimidating it can feel to put your work out there when you have very few followers, especially when you're surrounded by people whose accounts seem to grow effortlessly. if you have the time and genuinely enjoy doing so, leaving a kind comment, sharing someone's work, or offering constructive feedback can mean a lot to someone who's just starting. you don't have to promote every smaller creator you come across obviously and nobody should feel entitled to your audience or your attention, that's not what i'm saying. you have your own work and life to manage too. but i do think the community benefits when creators support each other without turning everything into a competition! :) you can celebrate someone else's success without feeling threatened by it and you can acknowledge a smaller creator's work without needing to gain anything in return. there's room for more than a handful of people to succeed here, another creator getting attention doesn't mean there's less room for you and someone else's growth doesn't diminish what you've accomplished. let's try to make this a space where people can learn from each other and enjoy creating rather than constantly feeling like they have to compete for recognition.

and to the smaller creators specifically, please don't feel like you need to apologise for being new, having a small audience or asking questions! everyone starts somewhere :). you're allowed to ask for advice, seek feedback and learn how to improve. just remember that advices isn't a guarantee and what works for one creator might not work for you. experiment, take what helps and give yourself enough time to figure out your own approach. don't feel pressured to imitate a popular creator's entire style because their bots perform well. you can learn from their presentation, writing or character development without copying what makes their work recognisable. find the things you admire, understand why they appeal to you and incorporate what you learn into your own creative process. your goal should be to develop your skills and discover what YOU enjoy, not to become a carbon copy of somebody who already has an established audience. there is a difference between learning from creators you admire and believing you need to become them to succeed.

lastly please take care of yourselves!!!! i know that sounds like the obligatory advice people tack onto every post but i mean it in a very practical way. if looking at your statistics makes you miserable, stop checking them every few hours. if comparing your work to other people's accounts ruins your mood, take a break from browsing those accounts. if you're burnt out, let yourself rest instead of forcing yourself to publish something just because you feel guilty about being inactive. if you need to step away from jai for a while, do it! you are allowed to have a life outside of creating bots and you don't have to turn every free moment into an opportunity to be productive. you don't owe your audience constant content and you don't have to sacrifice your enjoyment of writing just to maintain a certain level of engagement. your account can wait, your ideas will still be there when you're ready to return and if you eventually decide that creating isn't something you want to pursue anymore, that is your decision too. i'm not saying everyone must keep creating forever, i'm saying that if the only thing making you want to quit is the belief that your work isn't good enough because your numbers are low, please give yourself a chance to reconsider that belief before you walk away. at the end of the day, create because you have something you want to share, not because you feel like you need to prove something to everyone else. it's fine to want recognition. it's fine to want more followers. it's fine to feel disappointed when a bot doesn't perform as well as you hoped and it's fine to celebrate when one does. you don't have to pretend you're above numbers or that engagement doesn't matter to you,just don't let those numbers become the only reason you create and don't let a slow month convince you that all your effort has been wasted. there will be successful bots and unsuccessful ones, periods of growth and periods where things seem to stand still. you might discover a new audience, change your writing style, take a break or realise that your priorities have shifted. all of that is part of being a creator! :) you don't need to have everything figured out right now and you don't need to follow someone else's timeline to prove that ur doing well.

this post isn't me saying that everyone should stop caring about growth and magically become content with having five followers. i'm not THAT delusional LMAO. i'm saying that there's a difference between wanting to grow and allowing growth to determine how you feel about yourself and your work. keep your goals, learn from your experiences, improve where you can and celebrate your progress. just remember that you're a person creating something, not a content machine whose value is determined by engagement statistics. whether you have 50 followers or 50k or 100k, whether your latest bot has ten chats or ten thousand or a billion, whether you've been here for a week or several years, you deserve to enjoy creating without constantly feeling like you're falling behind! give yourself room to learn, room to experiment and room to make things simply because you want to. support other creators when you can, accept that you won't appeal to everyone and remember that your journey doesn't have to look like anyone else's.

anyways that's all from me :) if you've read this entire essay, congratulations, you deserve an honorary degree in listening to me yap LMFAO. i hope at least some of this helps someone, whether you're a new creator trying to reach your first 100 followers, someone who's been stuck at the same number for months or an established creator who's starting to feel the pressure of maintaining your audience. we're all here making things, learning as we go and trying to find people who enjoy what we create. don't turn something you love into a competition you can never win. keep creating at your own pace, and remember why you started in the first place.

— written with love, zach/milo.