Why I Started Tiktok

There are a lot of theories online about why I started posting on social media. I’ve seen most of them. Some are creative. Some are genuinely impressive feats of imagination.

I understand where the speculation comes from. The internet is very good at filling in gaps, especially when a story seems too neat, too fast, or too visible.

When something grows quickly, people assume there must be a hidden mechanism behind it. An agenda. A team. A plan. An industry plant.

The truth is much simpler, and also much less interesting.

I started TikTok because I wanted to see what would happen.

More specifically, I started it because I thought it would be fun to try to make my cat famous. That was the actual plan. I posted a cat video. It got maybe ten views. I’m fairly sure at least one of them was me refreshing the page.

At the same time, I was curious about the internet in a broader sense. I’ve always been interested in how people pay attention, what spreads, what sticks, what gets ignored. The sociology of it all. The way taste forms in public. The way status is negotiated in real time. TikTok felt like the most distilled version of that experiment.

I also liked the idea of sharing small pieces of my life with a limited audience. Outfits I wore to work. Things I bought. Gift guides. Fashion. Workwear. Nothing that felt particularly strategic. Just a visual diary for people who happened to be interested.

What I didn’t expect was for any of it to travel.

The second video I posted wasn’t planned either. It was an anniversary gift: my dad giving my mom a car. It happened to be a Rolls-Royce. I didn’t think much of it. It was a family moment I’d grown up around, not a content strategy. That video took off almost immediately.

And just like that, the narrative was written for me.

Luxury. RichTok. Whatever term people want to use. It’s not my favorite label, but it’s the one that stuck. That single video became the lens through which everything else was interpreted. Suddenly, the account wasn’t about outfits or cats or curiosity. It was about wealth.

I tried to diversify early on. I still do. I post finance basics, relationship observations, real estate explanations—things I genuinely enjoy talking about and things I’m trained in. I worked an 7- to-5 job in finance. I didn’t quit my day job expecting this to become anything. I live in Silicon Valley, where creators are still relatively rare compared to Los Angeles or New York. Social media was never the obvious path.

But the numbers are hard to argue with.

I track everything. I have an Excel sheet for my content performance. Views, likes, retention. And consistently, the same pattern shows up: people are most entertained by RichTok. They click. They watch longer. They share it. Even when they complain about it, they’re still watching.

That doesn’t mean I take every comment seriously. It also doesn’t mean a single hate comment dictates what I post. The feedback I follow is behavioral, not emotional.

Attention is a form of data. Engagement is a signal.

My channel exists for two reasons: entertainment and education. Luxury content does the first exceptionally well. Educational content does the second for a smaller but more invested audience.

People are multifaceted. Creators are too.

But platforms tend to flatten you into the thing that performs best.

I didn’t set out to become a RichTok account. I didn’t anticipate being called the queen of anything. I certainly didn’t expect conspiracy theories about how or why this happened. If anything, I’m still slightly confused by the scale of it myself.

But once the internet tells you what it wants from you, you can either ignore it entirely or understand it. I chose to understand it.

At the end of the day, this isn’t a morality play or a master plan. It’s an account built on curiosity, observation, and responding to what people clearly enjoy watching. Sometimes that’s a luxury unboxing. Sometimes it’s a finance concept. Sometimes it’s a thought about relationships. Sometimes it’s a cat.

That’s all it ever was. The rest is just the internet doing what it does best: turning a simple decision into a story much bigger than the truth.