Hello everyone,
November is upon us! Thanksgiving and Christmas is right around the corner. Time flies! We have some exciting updates and announcements.
Free Trial Waitlist Update
We are still at 100% capacity, and the waitlist time is about 3-6 business days. We are hiring additional growth assistants every month. Like mentioned back in our August 27 update, the only personal growth assistants that will be assigned to new users are Jay Morrison and Esha Patel, as they are the ones who are overseeing the new growth assistant trainees. We plan to revert back to our accurate 1-to-1 system when capacity is decreased. All users still receive one growth assistant and one device per subscription, but the naming infrastructure in the dashboard is temporarily adjusted due to capacity. We haven’t had any major issues with this temporary adjustment.
Temporary Account Suspension Wave
About 1% of the accounts that we manage have got the “Account is Suspended” prompt in November. Please note that this is a false flag, and restoring your account to normal is very simple.
Instagram seems to be rolling out some algorithmic changes lately. A few times a year, Instagram rolls out changes that can cause some temporary suspensions to all users – regardless if they are using a growth service or not. This is very easy to fix. All you have to do is:
1. Complete the CAPTCHA puzzle on the Instagram app when prompted
2. Verify your email address
After those steps, Instagram will say that it is going to take 24 hours to review; but for most users, their account should be live again after 4-6 hours. There’s no need to panic, as we’ve never had any long-term issues with these temporary account reviews. It seems to be unrelated to our service, as Instagram does this a few times a year, typically in the fall or winter months.
When Instagram rolls out a large update, it induces bugs in the algorithm. This seems to have affected a wide range of accounts, and there’s no noticeable pattern of affected accounts that we can determine. Many accounts that don’t use a growth service also receive this strange prompt.
If you have any further questions, feel free to reach out to your personal growth assistant.
New Website Features Planned
A few years ago, Ascend Viral had one of the largest & most active private Instagram marketing forums. A few weeks ago, we deactivated our standalone forum as we prepared for the new website overhaul. To be honest, the forum was dated, unmoderated, and lacked useful Instagram information in 2023. We plan to integrate the forum beautifully into Ascend Viral with the new redesign. We also will launch a private-access forum that is available to members of the Turbo and Starter plan. Exclusive content will be created specifically for growth members, so we’re very excited about that. It should be awesome. It’s one of the most exciting things that we’ve done in a long time.
New Leadership Team Members
We are proud to announce that we are bringing on Josh Ryan to the Ascend Viral team. Josh Ryan is a popular Instagram marketing influencer, and he will help improve the content and consulting services on Ascend Viral. More information regarding this will be available at a later date.
In addition to Josh Ryan, we are also bringing Ryan Bethea to the content consultation team. Ryan Bethea is the host of the #1 religious podcast in the world, The Exorcist Files. His unique expertise on creating captivating content is something that our clients will surely appreciate. More information regarding this will be available at a later date.
Our Stance on Website Testimonials
The current testimonials on our site are extremely dated, so they have been removed from our current landing pages. I mentioned this in the “Ascend Viral Review” Youtube video that I put out on our channel a few months ago.
While creating the new site, I put out a Google Form in our Member’s Area for members to submit testimonials if they wanted to appear on our new website. In exchange for their testimonial (that we would’ve verified to make sure it was accurate), they were going to receive 6 months of Turbo growth in exchange for publicly sharing their Instagram handle on our website. This was only available to members who have used our service for over 3 months.
We decided not to use any of the testimonials submitted on that Google form, for various reasons. Primarily, there are so many bad actors in this space. Upon further consideration, we don’t want any of our customers to be harassed on social media, sent fake followers, or anything like that.
For some reason, someone on social media shared that link and suggested we were paying users for testimonials. I want to clarify that users who submitted that form were not receiving any financial compensation. They only would’ve received a free extension to their current Ascend Viral subscription. There also would’ve been a disclaimer that mentioned the user was compensated in membership credits for their testimonial.
Due to all the complications surrounding this, our new site will not feature any user-submitted testimonials. Instead, we’re going to work on building case studies that show the efficacy of our service. Keep an eye out for that if you are interested.
Our Stance on Marketing Ascend Viral on Various Social Media Platforms
The only social media platform that Ascend Viral uses for marketing materials is our YouTube channel. We do not actively post or use any of our other social media channels in any kind of marketing capacity. Our LinkedIn page, Instagram page, and our Twitter / X page are not used for promotional purposes.
A few years ago, we regularly posted on our company’s Instagram page. However, for various reasons, we do not want that to be seen as a representation of our growth service. We do not use that page in any advertising or promotional material. The last time we posted on that page was in 2021. That page has always been used for internal company experiments.
If you’d like to follow a page that we recommend for quality Instagram marketing content, feel free to follow Josh’s Instagram page.
Regarding our LinkedIn, it’s important to note that we have offices in various countries. Our international offices operate with an exclusive partnership with Ascend Viral; however, the international offices use different operating names. Our LinkedIn page doesn’t serve any kind of real purpose. We currently have over 100 team members that work exclusively for www.ascendviral.com, and we have various legal agreements between the different companies in order to ensure the safety and security of our clients. This is relatively common for online operations. An ecommerce store may have an exclusive partnership with a overseas supplier, but the supplier likely uses a different business name than the ecommerce store.
I also don’t use LinkedIn. I’ve been an entrepreneur since before I was a teenager. I’ve always viewed LinkedIn as a site for people who want to get a corporate job, and it was never something that I viewed as a necessity for myself. Perhaps I’m wrong about that, but that’s how I’ve always viewed that platform.
Some Personal Thoughts
If you know me in real life, you know that I can ramble a bit.
This might seem like a surprise to some people, but I don’t care if some of our team members decide to use fictitious names, pseudonyms, aliases, and so on. I let them do that if they want to. Let me explain.
I’ve been in this industry for a long time. The majority of my life (not an exaggeration, by the way) has been dedicated to online marketing. Unethical competitors and bad actors in this space have not only made personal violent threats against me, but they’ve made threats against my immediate family members. They’ve harassed my team members. They exploited me for thousands of dollars. They’ve created lies about me. They’ve written fake negative reviews of my businesses. They’ve sent me completely unjust legal threats.
All of this has been because I’ve been one of the most vocal advocates against unethical Instagram growth services. This industry is significantly larger and more unethical than people realize.
I don’t care if my employees decide to use fake names for this reason. I do encourage them to use partial versions of their name; if they’re comfortable with that, but I never expect them to fully reveal their identity if they’re not comfortable with that.
Also, just to be clear: We don’t include personal growth assistants on our About page, and we likely never will. While there are a lot of reasons for this, the main reason is: There’s too many of them.
One more thing to add: There’s no personal interaction growth service that has their assistants operate in the United States (or any highly developed first-world country) at this scale. It’s not financially possible to offer this service at $139 per month, even if you pay minimum wage.
When I initially started offering this service in 2019, there was a small group of American college students that were managing the accounts. We also charged $399 for this service (and that wasn’t enough). At most, we were collectively managing 30-40 accounts.
As of 2023, we have thousands of active clients. This wouldn’t be possible if we only had growth assistants in the United States. While our current website doesn’t discuss our international operations, we do intend on clarifying that when our new website redesign is launched. We also have never denied our international operations when asked by clients.
I want to emphasize that moving parts of the operation internationally didn’t negatively affect the performance or quality of our service. It actually improved it, and it made our service significantly cheaper. It was a win-win for everyone.
While we do have team members in India, Algeria, Spain, and the Philippines, it’s important to note that the standard of living for our team members in these countries is significantly higher than average. I have visited our international offices, and I was impressed with the working conditions. I trust the managers of these offices with my life, and in the 10+ years that I’ve been doing internet marketing, they are the best people that I’ve ever worked with. The only reason we are consistently at maximum capacity is because of those team members that dedicate their 9-to-5 to Ascend Viral.
If anyone ever wants to get in touch with me, shoot me an email at team [at] ascendviral.com. I am always available to answer questions.
Thanks for reading!
I’m sorry if I ramble sometimes. 🙂
Ethan