Six years of making the thing myself

01 — Comedy

400K followers before I understood why

Across two Instagram accounts, two TikTok accounts and Facebook, I built a combined following of about 400K, most of it making comedy. No deep audience relationship, no narrative arc, but a decent instinct for what made people send a video to someone else.

It taught me what pure distribution feels like, and that reach and resonance are separate problems. I got interested in the second one.

02 — The anonymous account

A breakup, in public, with no plan

After a bad breakup I started an anonymous TikTok to process it out loud. For months nothing landed. Then I found a format — minimally edited, no effects, just the thought — that could carry nuanced emotional content in a way I wasn't seeing elsewhere.

That became around 60K followers, 2M likes and an 8M view video. The number I actually care about is different: two years after I stopped, people still comment asking where I went, or telling me the videos helped them through their own breakup.

03 — And since

Documenting the awkward parts too

After graduating from UCSD I documented trying to break into an industry I had no credentials for. An unscripted rant about being unemployed did 400K views and a YouTube video crossed 100K. Useful practice in making an uncomfortable situation legible to strangers without making it alarming.

04 — The clearest example of the craft

800K views by counter-positioning into a new niche

I spent six years building humor content, including breakup videos that taught me how to tell stories, build emotional tension, and hold attention. When I entered finance, I noticed most creators relied on charts, indoor setups, and CNBC-style delivery.

So I brought the opposite: casual delivery, the storytelling instincts I'd developed through breakup content, and my existing comedic style. Instead of simply explaining the SpaceX IPO, I made a bold claim: it might be one of the biggest rug pulls in history. I layered in Vine booms and irreverent humor.

The result was an 800K-view video in a niche where I had no established track record. I didn't win by knowing more about stocks than Bloomberg. I won by communicating a topic people cared about in a way other finance creators couldn't easily replicate.

I kept running the same format. A month later, on the Leopold Aschenbrenner news, it did 800K again.

The breakdown, on videoHow I went viral in a new niche →