A One-Person Social Media Empire Making $40,000 Monthly
How this solo founder is growing a social media empire and building an agency on top of it
Hello! Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your business?
My name is Zach Williamson. I'm a 29-year-old social media strategist and content creator based in San Francisco.
I specialize in building and managing digital brands with a focus on social media.
I own and have developed Culture Crave and Latest in Space, both of which have over 1M followers across their networks. They also have Snapchat Discover shows.
I also provide consultancy, account management, graphic design, paid social campaigns, and editorial services for high-profile clients such as Rolling Stone and Friday Beers.
How did you start this business? Take us through the process.
I started building social media accounts when I was 18 years old.
This led to me creating gallery sites, learning SEO, and then monetizing these sites with Google Adsense. What motivated me was seeing other accounts posting links that I knew they were being paid for, and thinking 'Well, I could do that.' It took around 4 months to gain my first 100K followers, 8 months to hit 1M followers.
At first, I largely built on Twitter and Instagram.
Over the past decade, my approach has evolved into a more sophisticated and refined strategy encompassing many platforms, though a lot of the growth tactics I used early on work to this day.
How did you get your first initial customers?
I started out doing a lot of affiliate work before making my own sites. PPC / CPM marketing.
This was 2012, influencer marketing was in early stages compared to now, it was much tougher to carve out space in the market.
I then took an internship at CollegeHumor which turned into me working with them. CollegeHumor was huge at the time on YouTube, but their social presence needed work.
After building up a couple of their social channels, their team assisted with introing me to several other companies. I'm super grateful for that opportunity and the people I worked with like Ricky Van Veen, Kai Hsing, and Dave Rosenberg for taking a chance on me. Working with CollegeHumor made me realize social media could become a career and not a little side gig to pay through school.
After that, I landed a marketing contract with Cycle & ESPN for their collab project called Buckets, a short-form Twitter show. At the time, I had a large network of sports channels and would push the show across that and other affiliated accounts. That came from a cold DM. Cold DMs can be so valuable if done in the right way.
Since launch, what are your marketing strategies or channels to get new customers?
Our agency's website is currently under development, but word-of-mouth and the visibility of brands like Culture Crave has generated considerable interest.
Culture Crave is a news source that covers the latest in movies, TV, and video games.
It was relaunched from the ground up in June 2023, and the core account has swiftly gained over 300,000 followers, receiving over 1B impressions a month.
I also still pitch myself regularly via cold DMs, slack groups, emails, and job applications.
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How does your business make money?
I've settled on the name From the Drafts for the agency, and everything falls under it.
There are the brands we own like Culture Crave and Latest in Space. Those monetize with Snapchat Discover shows, sponsored content going out on socials, and Twitter ad revenue / Amplify.
The concept behind the strategy was to build brands that lived largely on social because that is where people get their news and work backwards once the community is built up. By that, I mean build newsletters, a website, and an app. Moving into that phase now.
Separately, there is management, consulting, graphic creation, and paid social that we do for businesses.
Varies a lot depending if campaigns come in. We have some places that come back a few times a year. Now that the Hollywood strikes are over, there's going to be a bigger focus with Culture Crave specifically on working with studios and streamers to market upcoming projects.
For 2023, the business’s revenue ranges between $20K and $40K a month. Cost of running it is ~$5K a month.
Where can we go to lean more about you and your business?
Some of my brands are twitter.com/culturecrave, twitter.com/latestinspace, and twitter.com/factsonfilm.
latestinspace.com has our first newsletter.
My personal account is twitter.com/mytweetsmid.
My email is zach@fromthedrafts.co If anyone is interested, I do free evaluations of your socials. Let's chat!