🔴 From anonymous TikToks to six-figure-profit months

Kane Kallaway is not the first creator we’ve interviewed who spent years working in management consulting.

There’s a pattern among these guests — they tend to excel at building content production systems that repeatedly attract attention at scale. They also tend to be good at monetizing that attention.

That pattern certainly holds true here.

In this episode:

— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor

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By Natalia Pérez-González

Buried deep in Kane Kallaway's TikTok archive is a Figma design tip video. He shows us how to change the color of any logo in five seconds. The audio is poorly mixed, his vocal fuzzy and quiet. There's no studio, no lighting rig. You barely see his face.

It’s amateur, anonymous. Just some guy making a tutorial in his bedroom. This video, at the time of writing, has only 7,564 views.

He’s come a long way fast. The most popular video on his account, published 25 months later, has 11.3 million views and 1.3 million likes. The audio is perfect, the lighting careful, the video quality crisp enough to indicate he used a proper camera, not a phone. Every detail is intentional, an inverse of his earlier work.

Today, Kallaway has 1.3 million followers across platforms. Additionally, he’s leveraged that audience to launch a SaaS product he told us has over 43,000 users, and across his ventures, he say’s bringing in a six-figure profit every month.

Before going all in as a creator, Kallaway worked in management consulting. He excelled, sticking with the same company for over seven years, but he was always looking for a way out, working on side projects.

None of those ventures stuck. He called them "the four horsemen of awful businesses:"

The throughline was always the same: no distribution. He could build the things, he just couldn't draw attention to them. For his next venture, he decided to flip the model — build the audience first, then figure out what to sell them.

As he put it to us:

To find that attention, Kallaway chose short-form video over long-form. YouTube demanded 30+ hours per video, while short-form took just a couple; he could learn faster. For someone who needed quick wins to stay motivated — and who decidedly did not want to become a video editor — it was an easy choice.

Within “six to eight months,” he'd grown to 300,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram for his tech-focused videos.

He picked tech specifically for the brand deals; it’s a high-value niche with lucrative sponsorships. But when he looked at what he could actually sell his audience — premium media, a course, software — nothing felt quite right.

Not deep enough in the weeds to build tutorials like some of his peers, Kallaway didn't want to double down on more media, and he wasn't a developer; he couldn’t build a software product. Brand deals, his only viable avenue, could pay well, but the ceiling was fixed, by his estimation, between $1-2 million annually.

Kallaway didn't abandon tech — he still makes short-form content on the topic today. But he needed a different audience he actually could build products for.

Having learned how to build an audience, he could start with a product this time. Specifically, a software product to help other people create better content and capture more attention.

Building a new audience to market this product was much easier the second time around. He launched another YouTube channel, now focused on marketing and short-form strategy. This time he hired a team from day one: researchers to identify high-potential concepts, editors to cut the footage, and thumbnail designers to optimize every launch.

In the background, quietly, he launched The Academy, a paid cohort where business owners could learn his short-form frameworks. Student-members produced learned to produce better content for his businesses, he brought in revenue, and, more to the point, he had a pool of beta-testers for the software product.

During Kallaway’s first two years as a creator, his earnings were negligible. Then, around October 2024, the same month he published that 11.3-million-view TikTok, he finally earned more in a single month than his old consulting salary. Profit that month was around $24K.

In just over a year since, he's says he’s quadrupled that number, clearing six figures monthly and tracking toward the goal he set when he started: $1 million a month in net profit within a decade.

Every serious short-form creator, as Kallaway put it, has some version of this research process:

It's effective. It’s also hours and hours of tedious scrolling, note-taking, and pattern matching. Kallaway got tired of doing this by hand; his software product, Sandcastles, was built to automate it.

Users can search for performant videos across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube and sort any creator's content by outlier score — a measure of how much a video outperformed that creator's average — to surface winners. The app transcribes top-performing videos and lets you save hooks and story structures as templates, giving you Mad-Libs-style frameworks you can adapt for your own scripts.

The product, Kallaway told us, has been profitable since day one. He has not yet had to pay for distribution — users come from his YouTube channel, Instagram, and word of mouth. In his videos, instead of selling mid-roll ad spots to brands, he runs ads for his own product.

It's just him and a technical co-founder building the tool, and his cohort at The Academy helps de-risk the software. The end vision is what he calls "distribution in a box:" type in your niche, and the tool hands you a script optimized for virality; you just have to hit record.

Analysis is one thing. Users still have to know how to record and edit high-quality video, or have people on payroll who do.

For Kallaway, at least, that unpolished, low-view Figma tips TikTok is long in the rearview.

In one of his most-watched YouTube videos, Kallaway breaks down his most popular question from brands and viewers: what causes content to go viral?

Six ingredients, by his reckoning. The last one, of course, is luck; the first five are in your power.

Viral videos either cover a common idea before anyone else or introduce a new, uncommon angle. You don’t want to be the fifth person to cover the same topic.

Being first to market with a common idea, however — such as reacting to a major product launch — doesn't guarantee virality on its own. But it's a start.

The edge is in the uncommon idea: a story, framework, or concept no one else is covering. To find these, Kallaway looks in under-viewed places — niche blogs, small YouTube channels, industry newsletters. Many of his most popular videos repackage niche topics for a mass audience.

Arguably the most important ingredient. Your idea needs to resonate with enough people to travel. Niche is good, but go too narrow and you've capped your upside before you start.

Common ideas go viral precisely because the total addressable audience is massive. There needs to be enough people who would not only watch, but also share.

The sweet spot: an uncommon idea layered onto a large audience. Kallaway cites a video about the 3D stage construction for Taylor Swift's Eras Tour — uncommon angle (stage design), but aimed at one of the largest fanbases on earth.

Even if the topic is broad, your perspective needs to feel distinctive. If your video could be made by anyone, it probably won't stand out.

Kallaway's formula for his own content: take a common idea, target a large applicable audience, then layer on a unique point of view. That third ingredient is what sets your video apart from everyone else covering the same topic.

One counterintuitive note: an uncommon idea plus a unique POV doesn't have the multiplier effect you'd expect. It's actually too niche — not enough people will react. If you're going uncommon, pair it with a large audience and a more straightforward perspective.

The first few seconds determine whether anyone watches the rest. Kallaway breaks hooks into three components:

All three need to align to earn a viewer’s attention in the unrelenting feed. Kallaway recommends spending 80% of your effort on the opening.

Videos need narrative momentum. Kallaway identifies several story types — case study, breakdown, listicle, personal narrative — but the underlying rhythm is the same.

Give a little context, introduce a conflict, keep viewers engaged. Then re-hook them. Add more context to resolve the first conflict, and introduce a second one. It's a dance: tension, release, tension, release — all the way through.

Some of this is out of your control. The algorithm is unpredictable. Timing matters in ways you can't plan for.

But luck favors volume. The more optimized videos you publish, the better your odds of catching a wave.