Going Viral Without Losing Yourself: A Content Strategy Lesson

One of my first strategy clients was also one of my closest friends. Ian makes music under the name Stone Sneakers, and I'd already been shooting his music videos and visualizers for a while before FroMotion was even fully off the ground. He became one of my first real strategy clients too, and honestly, he's the reason I structure almost every client conversation the way I do now, always circling back to the internal mindset behind the content, not just the content itself.

Ian came to me wanting to build a TikTok presence, but not really about the music. He wanted it to be about his personality, with the music as a piece of who he was rather than the whole pitch. And he wanted virality. A big goal, and a fair one.

Here's the thing about Ian though. He was working 12 to 14 hour days at his day job, on top of a commute that ate up hours on its own

Whatever we built had to actually fit into a life with almost no spare time in it, or it wasn't going to last no matter how good the strategy looked on paper.

He also had no shortage of ideas. Every single meeting, he'd show up with something new, which is a great problem to have and also, genuinely, a problem. He kept trying to chase the energy of channels like MrBeast, or whatever the top three biggest creators were doing that month, instead of leaning into what was actually his. His whole vibe is quirky, a little deep fried, meme-brained in the best way. I kept telling him the same thing over and over: keep it simple, stay true to what's actually you, and focus on the community you actually want. Performing for an audience you don't even like is exhausting, and it shows.

So we used the same values-based approach I use with every client. I asked him what he was genuinely into, no filter, just his real top interests. Then I asked what was actually popular right now, the stuff already moving culturally. The overlap turned out to be A24 films. So in his own voice, his own style, he started making movie summaries of A24 movies.

Three or four weeks later, he messaged me. One of the videos had popped off. I was so proud of him I could've cried a little.

What actually happened after that is the part I think about the most. Ian has a genuinely wild schedule and some very specific, kind of niche interests, but it turns out plenty of other people are into those same things too. Once we leaned into that instead of around it, people started finding him and then going back through his whole catalog of movie summaries, one after another. That's the actual power of a content series. When someone finds you through one piece, they go looking for the rest, and along the way they see your passion clearly enough to feel like you actually get them.

Ian learned how simple this could be. Not simple as in easy, but simple as in true. And once he saw that, he stopped second guessing every idea and started building with a lot more confidence.

That's the lesson I keep handing to every client since. Stop performing whatever you think virality is supposed to look like. Find the overlap between what you actually love and what people are already paying attention to, then build from there in your own voice. The rest tends to take care of itself.

Now I actually want to hear from you. Have you ever caught yourself chasing someone else's version of success instead of building your own? And what's something you're genuinely, maybe a little weirdly, into that you haven't leaned into publicly yet?

If you want help figuring out what your own version of this looks like, come explore fromotion.com or book a chat with me. Talking through ideas with people is genuinely my favorite part of this whole thing.

If any of this has you thinking you might want to try something like the Ultimate Blog Challenge yourself, it's still open all month. Anyone can jump in and start posting daily right alongside the rest of us. You can check it out at ultimateblogchallenge.com.