TikTok success stories have become more common in recent years. Vivian Tu leveraged her social media TikTok account to achieve millionaire status at the age of 27. Her channel regularly sees millions of viewers, and she puts out content advising others about what they should do to have good money management habits. She had to learn these herself working on Wall Street as a young woman.
Graduating And Finding a Place
Tu graduated from the University of Chicago and immediately found herself a job on Wall Street. Her mentor at J. P. Morgan taught her a lot about trading but also imparted life advice. It was from there that she got the ideas that helped her build her TikTok following. However, Wall Street was not the place of her dreams.
Much of Tu’s goals on Wall Street involved landing a job and striking it rich on the markets. However, Wall Street was not the same place she imagined it to be. The industry was contracting and she needed to find a way out before it closed on her and turned her into another one of the unemployed.
Pivoting to Tech
Realizing Wall Street wasn’t what she had hoped, Tu pivoted into working in a tech firm. While the work was engaging and fun, the real breakthrough moment happened when her coworkers realized she worked in finance previously. She immediately started getting questions like, “What’s a 401k?” and “How do I save for a house?”
Naturally, these were questions that Tu had worked with before, but she was surprised at how many things people didn’t know about basic finance. Little by little, she realized that many of the questions were the same. She started joking that she would start a channel on TikTok, and people could follow her there.
A Massive Following
Tu posted her first video on TikTok and used a few handy hashtags like #richtok, #budgetok, and #financetok. It seemed like these were the perfect combination to get traction, and her first video blew up overnight. In the space of a few hours, she had a ready-made following.
Since then, she’s been creating a lot of social media content and giving people what they want. She carved out a space in an industry that she didn’t even consider entering when she was in school. She’s an excellent example of finding one’s niche accidentally.
Don’t Judge Your Followers For Their Decisions
Tu says that she noticed a lot of the advice on TikTok regarding finance, and the decisions people made were judgy. Before giving advice, they spend a lot of time criticizing their audience for bad choices. Tu believes that while this might make for entertaining TikTok content, it’s less helpful overall.
Tu understands that her audience is probably struggling with their own lives. They don’t have time for a TikToker to upbraid them on things they know they should be doing. Instead, she gives actionable advice that her followers can actually use. She thinks that giving people options and solutions beats making them feel bad about their decisions.
Look At Problems, Then Find Solutions
As a finance TikTok, Tu encounters many things that highlight the state of people’s knowledge. Many of the things she learned as a young person are not things the average person today knows. She realizes that as more people crank out easy content, there’s less drive for people to learn new things.
To drive her traffic, she finds out about what her audience doesn’t know and gives them easy ways to enhance their knowledge. With so many people focusing on showing off and TikTok accounts selling people lifestyle dreams, it’s more important now than ever to figure out what people really need to know. Most people won’t be able to tell you.
Offer A Good Place to Start
Tu has received many disturbing messages that have hurt her heart. Individual situations like people being evicted or unable to make rent for the month are sad, but they are situations where she cannot directly help. Either because of the timing of the person’s message or their personal financial situation, the advice wasn’t helpful.
Instead of focusing on these negatives, Tu’s content tries to give people a good starting point. She advises entrepreneurs to offer advice that covers the most people. She knows she can’t solve every problem a follower may have, but that’s okay. She’s not there to solve every problem but to offer followers tools to solve their own.
Acknowledging When You’re Wrong Builds Confidence
Unlike a lot of TikTok stars, Tu knows she’s not always right all the time. Instead of trying to spin things to make her avoid admitting her fallibility, she embraces it. She says that failing is a natural part of being human, and TikTok entrepreneurs should not be afraid to do so. However, they should also be willing to admit they’re wrong.
Social media is a place where people can pretend to do or be anything they want. That makes it even more challenging for the users to know who to trust. Admitting you’re wrong is accepting the blame for something, and while it might lose you some followers, it’ll increase the confidence other followers have in you as a real person.
Lean into Discipline
Tu believes that delaying gratification as a creator is crucial because it helps to achieve goals positively. Knowing when to celebrate can be just as important as knowing when to set the next goal and aim for it.
However, setting goals as a content creator on TikTok is also a skill. Tu says that many creators aim too big and lose motivation because their goals are way more ambitious than they should be. Instead, she suggests looking at more short-term goals and delaying gratification until an entrepreneur achieves the big goal.
More Than Just a Pretty Face
While Tu is pretty, people follow her for more than just her looks. Her advice has helped many people find their way in the world financially. Many others have used her advice to get out of debt and to set up a solid foundation for their lives. She will likely remain one of the most popular finance content creators on TikTok for a long time to come.
