Creatives By Julianna x Tapestry.dev: How One Instagram DM Turned Into a Multi-Year, Multi-Product Partnership
- Julianna Woodland
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
TL;DR — The headline numbers
4,000 → 10,000 Instagram followers in under 6 months for @primitives.xyz, driven primarily by organic strategy with limited boosted posts.
3 product cycles, 1 partnership: primitives.xyz → zumigames → zumichat — full social ownership across every pivot.
Owned end-to-end socials lead across Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube — plus blog contributions, creator program build-out, App Store launch creative, and the handoff into paid via valid.co.
creativesbyjulianna x usetapestry.dev The partnership in one sentence
A long-term creative partnership across multiple products, organic and paid social, plus launching a creator marketing community — all from a single Instagram DM that landed in July 2023.
How it started
In July 2023, the marketing/product lead at primitives.xyz reached out on Instagram and scheduled a call to walk me through the platform.
I wasn't going into that chat looking for a job. It was a product call — Sydney and a few others on the primitives team showed me around, and I gave honest beta-user feedback on what I loved, what I'd change, and how the platform could connect more deeply with its audience and community.
What they actually needed: someone to cover an upcoming in-person NFT gallery event on socials, plus general community management. I was free to cover the event. That was the start of the creativesbyjulianna x tapestry.dev collaboration.
Phase 1 — primitives.xyz: a boots-on-the-ground organic growth story
After coverage of the event - I came on as the full social lead for primitives across Instagram, TikTok (sparingly), and X, contributed to the primitives blog, and stayed active on the NFT platform itself.
The result: the primitives Instagram went from 4k to 10k in under 6 months, primarily through organic posting, messaging and tagging strategies, and a limited use of boosted posts. This was a true boots-on-the-ground growth play, run shoulder-to-shoulder with the product growth lead.
What actually moved the needle
Pop-culture and trend adaptation — proactive hashtag and social-moment hijacking, not reactive
Artist outreach as a growth lever — proactively tagging artists and creatives to join and mint on the platform
Weekly DM funnel — messaging and tracking potential platform members from new followers, plus following more suggested accounts to keep the discovery loop alive
A very specific post mix — platform education, current artist highlights, artistic aspiration, vibe curation, and light web3 — never one note for too long
I built repeatable series and sharable content threads during this era that included artist features, the "imagining how world-famous artists would collect on primitives" series, women of web3 features, art-x-sustainability angles, and ongoing art news + updates digestible enough for a non-web3 audience to actually read.
The bigger context
primitives.xyz was always meant to be a proof of concept of the development capabilities of tapestry itself — primitives was a social app built on tapestry. The headline tapestry team published it as "primitives pioneers social-first NFT marketplace with community-driven monetization." Translation: my job was to make a proof-of-concept feel like a destination.
The pivot — January 2025: enter zumigames
In January 2025, tapestry officially launched their new project — the web app zumigames — and shifted the primitives Instagram to market it. Creatives By Julianna stayed on, assisted on the Product Hunt lead-up and launch, and pivoted from primitives social lead to zumigames social lead.
The product itself was in an experimental phase: first a gaming platform with an AI component where users would mix and create their own games, before the AI pet was ever introduced. Vibe coding was a huge marketing surface area at this point — game-making was the hero feature.
The KIPP NYC student program
During the transition, I also helped facilitate a tapestry x KIPP NYC student program — building out internship guidelines, digital messaging, posting student-created social assets, and reporting insights back across stakeholders. View some of the results and process of this work shipped under "Week 02 with KIPP Interns: Building Brand Identity & Social Strategy for Zumi Games."
Phase 2 — zumichat: AI pet, AI friend, AI companion
Once zumigames evolved into zumichat, marketing pivoted hard toward AI pet, AI companionship, AI friend chatting, and world-building.
This was a different audience entirely. We rebuilt audience development from the ground up to support the transition from primitives → zumi.
I tracked everything against trend predictions and saved searches — e.g. "best AI apps you can talk to," search popularity 290K, +33.4% over the previous 7 days — and used those signals to pre-pick content angles instead of chasing what already peaked.
TikTok — full ownership, always-on, trend-led
TikTok was the most fun surface area for zumi. The team handed over full ownership and was eager to lean into always-on marketing and trend-hopping for mass attention.
The North Star was never followers on platform — it was app downloads. Brand-name recognition came along with social growth, but it wasn't the metric being optimized for.
Ads were not a major part of the strategy at this stage — mostly boosting posts that were organically taking off. TikTok itself reached out to highlight some of these as great ads.
I also launched the Zumi Chat YouTube account, posting primarily AI-generated shorts to broaden surface area beyond TikTok and IG.
Several high-performing videos capitalized on trends including: Italian brainrot, zumi calling out c.ai, and The Summer I Turned Pretty.
The creator program
Strategy leaned hard into campus creators and the start of a real zumi creator community. Creatives By Julianna helped launch the zumi creator program end-to-end:
Sourcing the right creator demo
Briefing the initial creators
Building the strategy for mass content briefing and format variation
Seeding early concepts and ideas for creators to adapt and emulate
The four content formats I briefed:
Format 1 — Phone face-cam + voice chat: showing yourself interacting with your zumi, your face on screen, phone on screen
Format 2 — iPad face-cam + voice chat: same setup, larger screen, different vibe
Format 3 — Green screen overlay: any feature, your face, with app screens layered behind
Format 4 — Faceless app/screen interaction: hands typing, text on screen telling a story — sprinkle in minimally
App Store launch
Creatives By Julianna stayed on through the launch of zumichat on iOS. Several elements of ios launch creative were designed by Creatives By Julianna and subcontractors, briefed and directed in-house.
Paid era — handoff to valid.co
After launching the creator program and going live on iOS, Creatives By Julianna led creative strategy for paid ads for zumichat, then referred them as a client to valid.co.
That referral became a happy networking loop: Creatives By Julianna had already been contracted by valid.co for other clients on strategy, and this kept the project with zumi continuous through the paid phase.
What I'd take from this partnership into your project
Organic growth still works when the strategy is specific. "Post more" isn't a strategy. A weekly DM funnel + artist outreach + a deliberate 5-bucket content mix is.
Pivots don't have to break momentum. primitives → zumigames → zumichat happened across the same handle, the same playbook, three different audiences. Build the muscle, not the campaign.
Optimize for the metric that actually matters. For zumi, that was app downloads, not followers. Naming it out loud is half the work.
Trend-hopping isn't a personality, it's a system. Saved searches, query tracking, pop-culture calendars, and a fast briefing pipeline.
Know when to hand off. Bringing in valid.co at the paid stage kept the creative strategy in-house while scaling spend with specialists.
Want to work together?
Working with the tapestry team has been one of the most fun creative challenges of my career — and I am so glad I opened that DM a few years ago.
If you liked this collaboration and want to work with Creatives By Julianna, reach out.
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