The key here is quality of followers. If someone does the follow-for-follow scheme then you may as well be sitting at zero. F4F doesn't work when it comes to read times which is what actually gets you paid. I Don't understand these "writers'" thought process of 'just let me get my 100 followers first and I'll worry about the rest of it later' mentality.

Why do the work twice?

You jump through hoops to get 100 followers and now you've got to jump through harder hoops to get X number of followers that will actually ready wheat you've written in order to hit the $10 threshold in order to get paid.