I Got 500,000 Followers Making Videos Online, Then I Retired
In 2017 I discovered Casey Neistat’s vlog.
It was the coolest channel I’d ever seen.
This guy was cool. He rode around New York City on a boosted board. He made videos about his life. Somehow he made the monotonous wildly entertaining.
In a flash I knew what I wanted to do with my life..
I wanted to be a video creator. Or a vlogger, for short.
So I bought a Canon 70D off Craigslist in March of 2018. Then on my birthday I released my very first vlog.
I was all excited. I was headed for stardom. I knew it would take me at least a year to gain a following online, but I was ready for it.
My First Viral Video
Four months into my vlogging journey, I struck gold with a viral video titled “The Philippines Is Not Poor.”
The first day it went live it garnered over 400,000 views. I can’t explain how incredible it felt.
It’s such a gigantic number that it’s hard to wrap your head around it. Imagine winning the lottery. That’s kind of how I felt for me.
I knew the formula at this point..
Make videos about the Philippines and get views.
So that’s exactly what I kept doing.
I moved back to the Philippines in late 2018 and proceeded to spend the next two years of my life there. I went on so many fun adventures to Bohol, Sumilon Island, Dumaguete, the Mountain Provinces, Camiguin Island, and Mindanao.
I made videos about all of my excursions, and my views kept increasing and increasing.
My Facebook Page passed 200,000 followers by the end of 2018.
Getting Noticed In Public Places
“Are you Tom?”
F*ck.
I turned around and saw a complete stranger in front of me.
“Opo, I am,” I said, in Taglish, completely weirded out by this experience.
The rest of the story doesn’t matter. What matters is that my vlogging got to a point where people would literally recognize me in public places.
That was odd for me.
It was at this point that I started to wonder whether vlogging was even worth it.
Every time I went to public places I felt like I was walking on eggshells. First of all, everybody stared at me and I wasn’t sure if they were staring because I was a foreigner or because they recognized me.
Now everywhere I went, I was tense and anxious.
I Started Getting Disillusioned By It All
After a while I started feeling really weird about the “fame” of vlogging.
Going viral became normal, which took the fun out of it.
All that influence wasn’t really changing anybody’s mind.
It wasn’t all that profitable, in reality.
Millions of views started feeling like nothing.
You see, part of why I wanted to be a vlogger was the influence that could come from it.
I wanted my message to reach people and change minds. I wanted to make the world better.
As I started dabbling in more “controversial” topics, I realized it didn’t change minds — it just galvanized people on one of two sides:
For me.
Against me.
There was hardly ever a middle ground.
The toxicity fed my desire to retire, along with the other stuff.
Was It Worth It?
After 2020 ended I had over 500,000 followers on Facebook.
I stopped making videos the following year. I just couldn’t freaking do it anymore.
In total my vlogging career lasted about two and a half years.
What did I learn from all this stuff?
Well, fame on social media is way overrated. I saw a poll somewhere saying that a ton of kids these days want to be famous Youtubers or influencers instead of Doctors or Teachers.
That’s depressing. This lifestyle — the one where you put your entire private life online for everyone to see — isn’t that glamorous and comes with a lot of baggage.
I wrote this on LinkedIn a few years back.
“Money and fame and free traveling are meaningless when you’re not loving it.
Sometimes after you get exactly what you want you realize you don’t ACTUALLY want it.
That’s life. It happens to a lot of people. I’m lucky I found something in writing that has never gotten old in the last eight years.”
Vlogging got old for me. The fame got old. Staring at timelines on a computer screen for 8 hours a day got old.
Sometimes it’s best to cut the cord on something that’s working for your own mental health.
Get my free 6-day course ‘How to get 100 subscribers on Substack in 30 days’ right here. Let’s keep real writing alive together.
This was very real and honest and I appreciate your transparency across everything.
Your point about polarizing people is spot on: you are not going to change people's find. Everyone has confirmation bias and we are looking for our opiniong to be "the right one."
It's still really cool you had that experience and that's probably what opened the door to writing.
Likewise, I don't regret my years in the corporate world: they gave me tons of experience I can transfer across as a solopreneur.
Great stuff, Tom!
I find it really refreshing when people are honest about the downsides of these seemingly glamorous lifestyles, thanks for sharing