How a high-schooler gained 100K+ TikTok followers in 6 weeks

Happy Friday!

For this week’s newsletter, I connected with Elle. She’s a BETA Camp alum and a prolific TikToker who just amassed over 100K followers in only six weeks!

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💡How one high-schooler amassed over 100K followers on TikTok in just six weeks

Elle is super passionate and believes she really can build a billion-dollar company. She empathizes with parents’ fears around online harassment and the dangers their teens face from going on dating apps underage — so she decided to start giving positive teen dating advice on social media.

She started on Twitter but failed to grow for months. Instead of giving up, she pivoted to TikTok, where her following took off. The key here is to learn from what’s not working — so you can find what does.

I have even more great takeaways from our conversation to share — so, let’s dive in!

Elle joined BETA Camp because she wanted to build something that would help her stand out in a sea of students who are all doing, well, just about the same things:

“There are tens of thousands of kids with good grades,” says Elle. “But there are only 10,000 people on TikTok who have more than 100K followers. So do you want your kid to be one of the top 10,000 people in the world? Or just the top in their school?”

Elle’s audience is impressive — her TikTok on teen dating advice has earned her 100,000 followers and she gets over 5 million views per day.

But this isn’t just helping her stand out in college admissions or job applications. This is creating a platform that will skyrocket anything she chooses to do next.

What your kids can learn from Elle’s story:

1. Build an audience first — everything else comes after.

Instead of building a business idea and then trying to get people on board, Elle built an audience first — and now, she can direct their attention anywhere she chooses.

Right now, that looks like launching an AI chatbot that she’s trained on her own content so her audience can ask her direct questions. In just two weeks, the chatbot has already received over 7000 messages. Without her audience, it would’ve been much harder to get that kind of traction so quickly.

“Once you have an audience built around something you’re passionate about…you have so many different paths you can take for the rest of your life,” says Elle. “It’s setting me up for success.”

2. Create your own credentials

To get into the business of teen dating advice in the past, Elle would’ve had to rely on other institutions to lend her credibility — she’d likely have to land a job with a reputable media company and just hope they’d let her have creative control over her advice column.

But why wait for someone else to hand you credibility when you can simply create your own?

After building her audience, Elle realized: “You suddenly have credibility. Five million teens listen to my dating advice daily, so now, anything I want to do is possible.”

3. Don’t be afraid to pivot.

Elle didn’t find success on TikTok right away. “I was on Twitter first. But it wasn’t working — I tried for almost 5 months and wasn’t getting a following,” says Elle.

But instead of getting stuck in what wasn’t working, she pivoted to TikTok — and then everything changed.

Elle’s a master at focusing on what works and scrapping the rest. She honed her skills on TikTok by filming around 10-15 videos per day, noticing what performed well, and then capitalizing on that.

“When you’re starting out, you have to try every different thing and see what lands,” says Elle. Being able to iterate quickly made it possible for her to grow insanely fast.

4. Do what you can to lower the barrier to getting started.

When Elle first started posting, she said that she was self-conscious. “I literally blocked all my friends because I didn’t want them to see it,” she says.

This one simple change freed her to go all out on her project — allowing herself to make mistakes, have videos that flopped, or even look silly.

Most people think that in order to be successful on social media, you have to let go of what people think of you. But especially in high school, it’s normal for kids to care about what their friends think of them! If that means they’re holding themselves back from doing something they’re really excited about, do what you can to help them clear that obstacle.

“If you’re waiting to stop caring what people think of you before you start, you’ll never start,” says Elle.

5. Show your kids you care about what they’re doing.

Elle says that the best thing parents can do is show your kids that you believe their goal is possible. Sometimes that’s all kids need to set an ambitious goal for themselves!

And when they succeed, don’t forget to help them celebrate. When Elle got her first 1000 views on a video, her dad celebrated with her. This made that milestone feel even more special.

You can find Elle on Instagram (where she’s creating content geared toward parents) and TikTok (where she’s giving teens helpful dating advice) — and you can check out her new AI chatbot here.

⚡️ Ivy’s Top Links:

1. 6 skills the rich teach their kids (link)

2. The impressive, record-breaking results that come from “believing you can” (link)

3. Learning how to speak in public = more confident kids. Here’s how! (link)

🚀 Community Highlights

We hosted a Buildathon at BETA Camp, an event where kids built and presented an idea in just 24 hours.

• Check out the team who won first place for their idea to reduce overfertilization in farms.

• Plus, meet the team whose business earned their first sale after just 12 hours on Shopify.

Thanks for reading!

Until next time,

Ivy
CEO Prequel, BETA Camp, Apollo
Follow my journey on LinkedIn