Case Study · Software · Photography
Luminar Neo is Skylum's AI-powered photo editor. Skylum gave us a number — 100,000 followers. We gave ourselves a condition: every one of them would be earned.
Photographers are trained to spot what's false — it's the job. So when a software brand talks at them, they scroll past. They've seen every editing app promise the same magic, in the same saturated feed, with the same stock enthusiasm. Winning this audience means speaking their language without an accent.
And there was a harder constraint underneath. Any account can reach 100k by buying its way there — bought followers, boosted vanity, an audience that never opens the app. Skylum wanted the opposite: a following that actually edits photos. The account stood at 42k. Everything from there to 100k had to be organic.
This partnership didn't start with a pitch deck. It started with an editing contest we ran together — Nomadict's community, Luminar's tools. It worked, and Skylum asked us to stay.
The logic was simple. Nomadict's 530k community is made of photographers and videographers who edit their own work — not adjacent to Luminar's audience, but the audience itself. We didn't have to find Luminar's users. We were already talking to them every day.
Growth came from three directions at once — each built around what a photographer actually wants from their feed, not what a brand wants to say.
Content
Near-daily publishing — 26–31 feed posts a month, targeted and organic, built around real work and real edits. The audience gets images that respect their eye and captions that assume their intelligence. Luminar Neo appears the way it should: inside the work, not in front of it.
Influencer
Collaborative posts placed @luminar_global directly on creators' feeds — 135 appearances in the first six months, with 87% of our curated posts landing there. That's not an ad; it's a photographer they already follow, showing how they edit. Several collaborators went further than the brief — adding @luminar_global to their bios, unprompted.
Campaigns
Editing contests turned followers into users. Photographers like @merrwatson supplied the RAW files; the community downloaded, edited, and published their own versions. The audience gets something rare from a brand account — not something to look at, but something to do.
Ten years documenting the craft. A community of 530k photographers and videographers. When Nomadict talks about editing, the audience is already listening.
The results
Eight months. No shortcuts. All organic.
There are faster ways to put a number on an account. There is no faster way to build an audience that edits.
The proof
The clearest sign the work landed wasn't a metric. Creators we'd collaborated with began promoting @luminar_global on their own bios and feeds — unpaid, unasked — telling their audiences what they liked about editing with Luminar Neo. The campaign model drew others in too: the February editing contest brought ViewSonic's ColorPro on board as a partner brand, extending a single Instagram account into a multi-brand event.
The goal was a number. The deliverable was a system. We designed the content pillars and growth strategy so that reaching 100k wouldn't be a peak — it would be a pace.
When the milestone passed, Skylum didn't change course. They kept building on the same foundations — because the foundations were built to hold.