Catherine Colombo on Getting a Startup to 100K Followers Before Launch

Last fall, a client hired Catherine Colombo to build an audience for a boutique bed-and-breakfast that didn't exist yet. A 100-year-old mansion, mid-renovation, no rooms available for booking.  

According to Colombo, the account had a combined 110,000 followers ninety days later. One video alone brought in 37,000.

Colombo, 24, is the founder of Muse of Media, a social media agency that specializes in what she calls pre-launch audience building: getting people invested in brands before there's anything to buy. It's a niche that's become increasingly valuable to venture-backed startups, where early traction can make or break a fundraising round.

She started working in social media in 2017. After a year studying marketing in college, she took an in-house role to get direct operating experience, then started building an agency on the side. When client demand outpaced her in-house work, she went full-time.

"Everyone's obsessed with virality," Colombo says. "But if you don't have a system behind it, virality is just noise. The question is whether you can turn attention into something that actually compounds."

That thinking shaped how she approached Instagram's Trial Reels, a feature she started testing right after its rollout. It serves your content exclusively to non-followers. That's a completely different distribution game, and what works for your existing audience won't necessarily land with a cold audience.

Most brands were just repurposing their regular posts. Colombo built a testing framework specifically for cold acquisition: different hooks, different pacing, different success metrics. The mansion restoration project was the proof of concept.

As Colombo notes, the video that brought in 37,000 followers used what she calls a two-hook structure: an initial pattern interrupt to stop the scroll, then a bridge hook that locks retention for a user that has no idea who you are.

That approach is part of a larger content system Colombo calls The Viral Stack. At the top is anchor series content: episodic storytelling that turns casual viewers into people who actually care what happens next. For the mansion, that was the renovation told in chapters. Below that, spinoff content: standalone videos that expand reach without diluting the core narrative. And pulse content: lighter, trend-responsive posts that keep the algorithm fed between bigger swings.

Colombo recommends founders start building their audience months before launch, so there's already a supportive community eagerly waiting.

"Building in public is the new launch strategy," she says. "That's where the real fans come from."