You’ve heard of serial entrepreneurs, but what about serial creators? Alex has scaled multiple Instagram and TikTok pages from their first couple followers to large communities, and now he’s making finance interesting for hundreds of thousands!
Alex got his start in entrepreneurship back in high school, when he was trying out various side hustles. Most of them didn’t work out and he has plenty of failed dropshipping pages, but the best one was flipping phones, which made him around $5k. TikTok was added to Alex’s list of hustles back when all the reddit storytelling pages were starting to pop up. He joined the wave early, made his own page, and got 50k followers in the first week! After building the reddit page, Alex saw finance TikTok pages getting brand deals worth thousands of dollars, so he opened an account there as well. Finance had always been an interest for Alex, hence his day job as an associate banker, so the potential earnings were just icing on the cake. As you’d expect, his finance page is also growing quickly with 324k followers and counting!
In addition to TikTok, Alex has been putting in the work on Instagram. Over the years, he’s seen a massive shift in the difficulty of trying to get those first couple thousand followers on a new account. About 3 years ago, Alex grew a surfing page to 30k followers, but the first 5k followers took months! The early followers mostly had to be grinded out through manual means like follow for follow. Recently, he went back to make a reddit storytelling page on Instagram and was able to hit that 5k follower milestone in only 2 weeks. This just reflects how the algorithms that power social media platforms are moving toward viral growth, which makes it easy to gain followers organically but hard to reach them consistently. That’s a problem Alex is working through right now, since TikTok is in love with his Shark Tank analysis videos, but won’t push much of his other content to his following, making many of those other videos kind of flop.
The other major video platform, YouTube, fits interestingly into this algorithm talk. Alex sees YouTube as trying very hard to bridge the gap between longform and short form content with their YouTube shorts and traditional YouTube videos. Now he sees them recommending traditional videos to creators’ short form content, enabling Shorts to act as a sort of funnel into longer content. If done right, YouTube can be the perfect mix for your building an engaged audience!
Getting a healthy mix for his community is exactly what Alex is looking to target next, so that he won’t be entirely reliant on TikTok, his main platform. In the coming months, he wants to add a focus on longform content, since you can’t really build a relationship with a viewer through a 30-60 second clip, but you definitely can through a 10-15 minute video. If you want to come with Alex on this journey and see some finance videos that are actually interesting, you can find his main TikTok @alexpesos, Instagram @alexpesoss, and YouTube @alexpesos3001
