TikTok - Rohan Kumar

TIKTOK

In December 2024, I decided to run an experiment to see if I could "go viral" in 30 days.

1) Creator (+1M followers) DMed me and now we're good friends
2) Broke an unarticulated belief that I couldn't go viral
3) This is a cool story
4) Generated upwards of half a million views
5) Immunity to digital hate
6) Excuse to learn interesting things
7) Reduced content creation time from hours to ~30 minutes
8) Jay Hoovy liked one of my videos
9) Random Cornell students tell me they've seen me on TikTok
10) Better use of time than League of Legends

None of my videos went viral, the most got ~125k views, but, I still consider this experiment a success!

process:

My first few posts flopped. Then one hit 5k. Then one broke 10k. Then 100k. Easy and fun in hingsight, but I was sinking hours drafting and filming each 45 second video, not to mention the time spent editing, watching, learning, analyzing, thinking content — all this to say — every 500 view flop hurt more than expected.

context:

My Big Red Beds content converted at an RPM of ~$300 ($300 revenue per 1000 views or 'mille'). In hindsight this is insane, a great mobile app will have an RPM of only a few dollars. However, at the time I assumed all content had such RPMs. So, naturally, I wanted to crack the code to viral content so I could get rich. Also I've seen so many successful advice bros on TikTok and thought I had some good things to say.