From comedy on YouTube to a multi-6-figure Snapchat agency to finance on TikTok, Logan has done it all when it comes to social media!
Before we get into it, this is the longest article yet, so I’d like to give you three of the big takeaways right upfront. First is “the ecstasy of beginning,” which is the idea that starting a new venture is often the most fun part, so you shouldn’t fear new things. Secondly, never stop grinding. And finally- focusing on your health is one of the highest ROI investments possible. Alright, let’s get into it!
Content creation started for Logan back when he was eleven and started doing action sports, like snowboarding, skateboarding, cliff jumping, etc. He posted clips of his tricks on social media, and over time he started to get brand deals. There’s an argument you can make about whether he got these deals because he was good or because of his following. Logan said he was good, but had friends who were absolutely absurd and would make significantly less money from their sponsorships than he’d get from a post or two on social media. We see this today too, where your influence is significantly more important than your skill. The caveat to this is that skill can earn you influence, but only if you use it correctly.
Everything started back in high school when Logan got into YouTube doing vlogs, pranks, action sports, and all sorts of other content. The growth on that account was quite “meh” for a while, it was stuck at around 3k subscribers until Logan got onto TikTok. Just like many people back in 2019, Logan initially thought getting onto TikTok was a cringey idea, but when he finally did get on, it totally changed his life. Using TikTok as a funnel into YouTube led to crazy growth. As he was growing Logan started to get social media brand deals, the first of which was only $25. This was still exciting to Logan, being able to make money from a couple seconds of video on his phone, but this figure wouldn’t be able to hold a candle to the 5-figure deals he’d be signing just a few years later.
After 4 months of being on TikTok, Logan’s account reached 283k followers, which is an amazing growth rate, but it all came tumbling down in just one week. That week started out great, he got into famous birthdays (back when it was a big deal), was featured in one of KSI’s videos, fractured both of his legs while snowboarding, and woke up the next morning to his TikTok account being permanently banned! As if the week couldn’t get any worse, when Logan went to school (he was in high-school at the time), his classmates were making fun of him for getting banned and even the teacher brought up to the entire class saying things like “This kid’s a failure, this is what happens when your pursue these things instead of school!” It wasn’t all bad, though, because Logan could drop the “I made more money than you this year” card, which left the entire class with a blank fluoride stare.
This sounds like a massive low, but it ended up just giving Logan what he calls “the ecstasy of beginning,” since as an entrepreneur the start tends to be the most fun part. The main thing Logan took away from this is to always film your progress, because at this time he saved videos of himself saying that he’d get it all back and more, and now he’s gotten all of that 10-fold.
To make a comeback from his ban, Logan buckled down and committed to uploading one video every day, which felt like a huge deal back then, but isn’t much now. In just 3 and half months, Logan was back to 283k on TikTok. At this point everyone was saying things like “How did you do it again? You’re buying followers!” This was also around March 2020, when the world got shut down for COVID. Logan lost his $8/hr job, but it was actually a blessing because he was left with more time than he’d ever had in his life. With that time he dove head first into self-improvement, reading dozens of books like Atomic Habits and Deep Work. He also took some time to think through his strategy on YouTube, since for the past 3 years he had just been uploading action sports highlights. After looking for something that’s quick to edit, easy to get brand deals for, and effective to promote on TikTok, he landed on reaction content. It wasn’t Logan’s favorite to make, but you have to do what you have to do. He played up the reactions, like by jumping out of his chair at jumpscares, and the clips would go massively viral because of that. It was the reaction YouTube channel’s virality that made him realize how much money social media can really make.
Mid-summer, Logan decided that while the reaction content was successful, it really wasn’t what he wanted to be making. He says it’s not that big of a deal that he was doing stuff he thought was stupid, since no one really cares about things young people do and then grow out of. Even Elon Musk tweeted out pretty recently that you should look past everything someone has done up to 25. After giving his content pivot some more thought, Logan landed on pranks, since some of his favorite content creators like JiDion were making. After a few months of prank content, Logan decided that prank videos just felt wrong for him, and that you shouldn’t go all-in on making one type of video just because you like watching it.
On the TikTok side, Logan was uploading his daily hyper-original comedy content, and was also working toward getting 2 weeks of content stocked up in the backlog. Come February 2021, Logan’s TikTok reached 1M followers, which was a massive milestone with his past of getting banned and hopping between niches. He also decided to tone down his content’s intensity, because he used to be posting things that were very entertaining, but also very close to the ToS’s lines.
At the end of 2020, Logan started to branch out to different business models, the first was dropshipping. He got into e-commerce because he realized that many of the brands that were sponsoring his pages were just dropshipping and he could just do it himself. Logan’s first dropshipping effort was with “sunfolds,” some sunglasses that he was building a brand around. He was all over the place hyping them up, with a pair on his wrist like “yeah you know what’s up, I don’t need a Rolex I got my SUNFOLDS!” Now fast-forward post-release and they didn’t end up being profitable, but learning from the entire process was still extremely valuable. Because of his concerns about getting his TikTok presence banned, he decided to continue to work on the e-commerce businesses because that’s something no platform can take away. Over time, he worked toward scaling stores through 5-figures and beyond.
Another business model he saw massive success with was with his Snapchat agency. At the beginning of 2021, Snapchat dropped spotlight, a fund that paid out $1M (total) to the creators of the top 100 videos of that day. He immediately saw friends making $20k here, $30k there, and even $200k from a random clip from their photo library. In an attempt to jump on the trend, Logan just started downloading videos from TikTok, watermark and all, covering the watermark with Snapchat edits, and then posting them. While he had a couple videos pay him a good amount, Logan had to stop that method because it was against Snapchat’s ToS and could get him banned.
Instead of making his own content, Logan turned to the people who are making content but didn’t know about Snapchat Spotlight: basically everybody. He reached out to creators with a simple proposition “I’ll make you a creator account on Snapchat, you send me your content, I’ll post it and take a cut of the profits and you make money from doing basically nothing.” This blew up, with Logan signing 100+ clients, hiring a bunch of VA’s and going to town on Snapchat’s spotlight fund. The agency was massively profitable for Logan too, hitting multi 6-figure profits in both 2021 and 2022! Unfortunately, Snapchat’s creator fund has dwindled over time, falling from 1M a day to 1M a week to 1M a month to 1M a year as their stock price fell to where it is today.
Looking back to the period where Logan was running TikTok, the Snapchat agency, and e-commerce all at the same time, Logan thinks about what could have been if he doubled down on just one. If he went all-in on TikTok there was the potential of getting banned, all-in in e-commerce would lead to him losing agency clients, and all-in on Snapchat would make great money, but stagnate his other two income streams. His decision to keep going on all three also plays into how he’s avoided burnout all of this time. Logan is constantly starting new things, whether it’s a new store, new niche, or new account, he always has something fresh on his plate. This makes it easy to avoid burnout, since when I talk to creators who burn out, the most common reason is that they spend too much time working on content that they don’t actually love.
At the end of summer 2021, Logan found himself working in the finance TikTok, a niche where TikTok definitely wouldn’t ban anyone… right? Wrong! He got banned THREE TIMES while first getting into it! First Logan was making skits talking back and forth to himself like Mark Tilbury, but tried to put some more comedy in since that’s where he came from, but those didn’t really work. After some trial and error, Logan found success in finance quickly, getting to 100k in the new niche in 3 weeks, after getting over the bans, of course. He attributes this largely to the fact that the skits he was doing had an easy call to action of “follow for more advice” that’d help boost engagement numbers.
As the finance page was ramping up, Logan started to slow down his larger comedy account, moving toward exclusively doing sponsored posts. He found that it’s actually pretty crazy how much you can make without posting any non-sponsored content. He also took his foot off of the gas on the e-commerce business, electing to focus all-in on finance, since he could do e-commerce through courses through the finance later. While diving into finance, Logan asked a larger creator in the finance space for advice on how he can improve, and they said “Just watched your video- the editing is great, the information’s great, but you’re screaming at me.” Logan is probably one of the few people whose camera presence suffered from too much energy instead of too little, imagine Terry Crews from an Old Spice commercial but he’s telling you to invest in your ROTH IRA and you pretty much get the picture.
This takes us to 2022, which is a year that started out with Logan doing a whole lot of work for the first four months, but not getting much done. The Snapchat agency was running great (until the crash), and that alone was carrying most of his income. Even though he stayed inside and worked, Logan probably could have gone out and shredded at skate parks all day and gotten about the same result. While he didn’t make that much money from spending heavy amounts of time working on e-commerce stores and making finance content, it was still worthwhile for the learning experiences.
After some more YouTube/TikTok growth and a wild trip to New York (one that deserves its own article) we arrive here, January 2023. In the coming months, it’s full speed ahead for Logan on all fronts, along with another goal that’s so secretive he couldn’t even tell me about it on the call, at least not yet. If you want to come along with Logan for the ride, you can find him on Instagram @loganskifinance, YouTube @LoganSkiFinance, and TikTok @loganskifinance. Now I want to leave you with Logan’s words for anyone who feels like they can’t find the motivation to put in the work to achieve what they want- “You’re not fat, lazy, and broke because you’re depressed. You’re depressed because you’re fat, lazy and broke.” Fix yourself to fix your life.
