From some small successes on Roblox at a young age I had earned around $10k in my early to mid teens. For someone that wanted money so I could buy a PC, I didn't really know what to do with the rest and also kept it private from my parents so it kind of just sat there. Eventually I learned that the thing I was holding my money in, crypto, randomly goes up and down in price and I was curious how that worked. So I spent time reading: I started with all of major white papers -> reading about blockchains -> learning markets -> etc. I eventually got to the stock market and had a solid grasp of economics and modern finance. It's also worth mentioning here that when I was 12 I played a Minecraft server called HelloMiners with 150k players where I became one of the wealthiest on the server (if you played HM and are reading this email me at sensho@sensho.xyz, I was MrSuperRed!). The main way I got the wealthiest in that server relative to everyone else was that I ran a bank and did a bunch of financing, asset deals, etc. which is the unconventional path that hadn't really been done before at scale in the server. At the time I didn't really know I was doing modern banking but I ended up acquiring my way into owning some of the most valuable properties, owning the stock exchange, and a majority share of the commerce industry (GNR Inc!). When I quit for Roblox developing I gave most of what I had away and gave my properties to new users that were grinding.
I went on that little Minecraft story tangent because I think a lot of the interests ended up transferring over to when I eventually got to TikTok. I used the ~$10k that I had and some knowledge of markets to trade my way up, getting to around 20-30k (don't remember) and then starting making content about what I saw happening in finance and crypto. It was more an expression of my fascination with markets and systems at scale. I started learning a lot about storytelling, viral formats, retention, etc. and did quite well. In around 3 months I amassed near 200k followers and 50m+ views. The other (funny?) part was that I normally kept all of my "weird" personal ventures like Roblox and Minecraft servers at the time to myself, but because a lot of my videos went viral pretty much everyone at my school saw them over Christmas break and I came back to everyone asking me about it.
After a bit though, my original fascination with how markets worked had turned into making viral bait content and not a medium to be completely ingenuous. And unlike my experience with some of the AI and tech industry so far, there were not really people in it that actually enjoyed the theory and concepts behind what they were doing. Most of my content creator peers and those that got in touch with me talked about doing sponsored collabs, pumping coins, etc. and not "wow check out the applications of this paper on ...". It became a bit isolating and I started posting less and less frequently. I did really enjoy operating the business and my Discord server but the best way I can put it is "I liked operating the juice machine but not the juice that it produced".
My immigrant family that I financially supported at this point, alongside some friends, thought that I had literally lost my mind when I told them I was probably quitting TikTok. Coming from a gaming and online meritocratic platforms I straight up just told him when my Dad asked me why I wouldn't make the most of this opportunity that "if TikTok was the only way I could make lots of money then I don't have the skill to deserve it in the first place". Which is what 17-year-old naive/anime fueled Om genuinely believed and that if my TikTok success was a product of luck then I haven't actually progressed in life, and that the skills that let me make money can be applied elsewhere to something more enjoyable, since I believed "enjoy what you do so it doesn't feel like work" along with some other outcome achieving traits = ideal. I actually do think in hindsight that learning the skills and intuition of being a content creator while not pursuing it as a full time pathway, similar to other endeavors that I'm no longer doing, was extremely valuable because it allowed me to enjoy my interests even more long-term. I think if I leaned into it too hard I would've strayed down the path of materialism and clout chasing a lot of Gen Z'ers my age have mistakenly gone down. You know how there's the theory of "Lost Einsteins"? I think there's a good amount of that which can apply to people who derive status from social media and pursue it rather than deriving their pleasures through something that can ultimately be much more impactful. Social media is an incredibly powerful tool and at its limit is the ability to control attention, but that doesn't really matter if you're controlling attention to something (or someone) that cannot differentiate or find PMF in what they're offering long term besides just the ability to wield said attention. Nowadays I get to build the same systems I loved participating in (simulated environments) and test them with the best generalized AI models in the world and somehow make money doing it which is literally my dream encapsulation of all of the different types of backgrounds that I have lmao.
Tangent
The part that I initially was looking forward to when I got into content was meeting likeminded people like myself. I thought people in this industry were also curious about video formats, finance theory, etc. Unfortunately, that did not happen much. There were interesting people, but a lot of the people in that content niche are what you'd expect from finance content creators. More of the grifty and greedy archetype who were not enjoyable people to interact with for someone like me who does things out of interest/curiosity. I don't even have a problem with the greed, I understand it, it was more the lack of passion that made interactions uninteresting. After my initial optimism I eventually stopped talking to others in that creator space, and just focused on my own content.
Eventually, because my passion/interest for this field had been stretched into making baity/grifty content and sometimes needing to interact with people I didn't really care for it became boring to me. On top of this you apply the status value/expectations and everyone around me IRL telling me how great this is despite my dismay. I enjoyed distribution, memetic theory, growth hacking, system/constraint optimization, etc; I liked everything about operating the business but not what the business was actually producing. I've gotten told I should've kept going for finances, but I was thankfully in a position to not need to. College was starting up near this point and I got to enjoy the remainder of the last summer I had before school.
In early 2023 I got back into it for a month for two main reasons: 1) I had a friend that thought my earlier success with this was purely luck and I wanted to disprove him. 2) I wanted to see if maybe I'd enjoy the content itself this time and that things could have changed. I started posting on the account again and succeeded in disproving my friend. The second hope did not go well though, as I still found the industry grifty and cringe. I considered pivoting into a different niche or changing up content but I actually started enjoying the other projects I was working on a lot more at the time.
Since this project I haven't attempted content/distribution ventures like this and only post on social media for personal enjoyment, but this experience was extremely formative for me. Beyond just what I got good at while running the operation, I learned a lot about what I like, dislike, and schools of thought around fulfillment. It's helped me learn what I actually like doing now. Some of the stuff that I learned here around growth, distribution, and business development I still enjoy — but only in combination with the other stuff I've learned that I like! :)