On April 10 I posted my first TikTok.
I posted about it on the blog. I shared it on LinkedIn. And then I let it run on its own.
Thirty-eight days later I have 13 followers and 3,300 views. I'm going to tell you exactly what that means and what it doesn't.
I'm building a course called The First Five. It's a website strategy course for indie creatives and small business owners who built something real and need a home base on the internet that actually works for them.
To sell that course I need an audience. And I wanted to understand what building one from scratch actually costs before I teach anyone else how to do it.
I posted about it on the blog and shared it on LinkedIn once. Two followers came over from that post directly. Everything else has been pure TikTok, zero Meta crossposting — a deliberate choice. If I share to an existing audience, even a small one, I lose the ability to see what the platform actually does on its own. I wanted that data before I pointed anyone at it.
So I started with nothing. Twenty-five videos. Whatever the algorithm decided to do with them.
This is what I found out.
25 videos posted. 13 followers. 3,300 views. 75 likes. 17 comments. 4 shares.
The view-to-follower ratio is 254 to 1. Every single one of those views came from someone who had no idea I existed before TikTok put my video in front of them.
My top video pulled 391 views. I was sitting inside a record shop on a Saturday helping plan a September event. No script. No strategy. I picked up my phone and filmed it because that moment felt worth capturing.
Twenty-four of those 25 videos are confessions. Small Business Confessions. Real small business owners telling the truth about what it actually looks like to run something you built yourself.
Not the highlight reel. The actual thing.
EricaNicole from Sound Suite confessed she only bought one album on Record Store Day. Franklyn, a professional ice skater, confessed that no matter the session he always starts it with gratitude. I confessed I was spending my Saturday working from a record shop, planning an event, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.
The one video that wasn't a confession was from a Cavs playoff game. Good energy, great seats and 175 views. The Saturday-in-a-record-shop confession pulled 391. Make of that what you will.
I still haven't done an introduction video. No "hi I'm Jessie, here's what I do." I went straight into the confessions and let the content do the introducing.
I'm going to be straight with you. LinkedIn went quiet. The blog went quiet. I disappeared for 26 days.
Running a small business is hard. Really hard. There are stretches where the content stops and the client work or the life stuff or the sheer weight of doing everything yourself takes over. And then you come back and the gap is still sitting there.
What brought me back was the weight of it. That feeling of bricks on your shoulder saying hey, you need to prioritize your business too. Treat it like a client. Carve out the time. Stop letting it be the last thing on the list.
So I carved out the time. And here we are.
The TikTok kept going through all of it because I'd built it as a separate experiment with its own rules. One platform. Organic only. See what happens. That container made it easier to keep going when everything else stalled.
The algorithm will push your content to strangers if the content earns it. You don't need a following to get views. You need something real enough that TikTok decides to test it on people who don't know you yet.
The confessions earned that. The moment in the record shop earned that. The honest ones earned it every time.
That's the same reason the five pages I teach in The First Five work. People don't trust polished. They trust specific. They trust honest. They trust the version of you that shows up before everything is perfect.
Thirteen followers. Three thousand three hundred views. The experiment is ongoing.
Better than the follower count suggests and exactly as hard as building anything from scratch.
If you're building something real and trying to figure out how to get people to find it, that's the exact problem The First Five exists to solve.
