I don’t like marketing myself. Despite this, I decided to challenge myself and post on TikTok for 100 days and see what happens. The reality of our present situation is that personal branding and social media are extremely powerful. If I could accumulate some sort of following, it would help me find customers more easily, create social proof, and generally lead to more social and professional opportunity.
For my first video I spoke to the camera from my desk and laid out my current situation, what I was building and what I was planning to do. I tried to put my ego and perfectionism aside and just post something reasonably presentable despite glaring imperfections. Surprisingly I got quite a few views, followers, and positive feedback from this first video:
- 1.6k views
- ~40 followers
Over the course of the next 29 days, I posted a variety of content, of varying quality. I posted guitar covers, experiments with paid advertising, project updates, poems, and AI content. Every video got between 200-400 views. I reposted one guitar cover which got twice as much reach the second time (~750 views).
I stopped short of my 100 day goal because it was distracting my focus from other work I wanted to be doing, namely building stuff. I deleted the app since it was becoming more of a distraction than a tool. Writing this now, a part of me wants to go back and continue making content. However when/if I do go back, I’ll approach it more organically and post when it feels right instead of forcing myself to do it every day. That’s probably a more a sustainable burden to put on myself.