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🔴 125 days to reach $10k/month
How creator Thomas Yeum learned to make performant short-form content, octupled his Instagram following in three months, and landed his dream job
Francis Zierer
April 04, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 15 minutes
Your guide to creatorland — new stories every Friday. Brought to you by beehiiv.
Today’s guest is Thomas Yeum, an ambitious video creator who started on YouTube four years ago. He then shifted to Instagram and grew his audience there 8x in 125 days over the course of a building-in-public challenge. Then he co-founded a social media consultancy and is now joining the digital-storefront-for-creators company Stan to run social media.
Most of our guests in 2025 have been millennials with a background in media; Thomas is firmly Gen Z with a software engineering background who came into creatorland through passion projects. I hope you enjoy the different perspective.
In this issue:
💵 How an Instagram challenge to make $10k/mo in 125 days panned out
💻️ Forgoing a career in software engineering to make content
🎒 “Throwing your backpack over the fence” as a content style
In the Steal This Tactic section
📧 How to grow a 12.5k+ newsletter subscriber list with Instagram Reels
📈 Amalgamation, replication, and 3%ing as a method for learning
— Francis Zierer, Editor
125 days to make $10k per month
In the summer of 2020, 19-year-old Thomas Yeum decided he would do two things: learn how to take better photographs and make a YouTube video about how to do so. He uses a metaphor in that video that he used again when I interviewed him recently: you have to throw your backpack over the fence.
Three-and-a-half years after making that YouTube video, Thomas was a senior at Columbia University, studying computer science. In the fall of 2023, Thomas took a gap semester. He’d tried to convince his parents to let him quit software engineering for content creation; no dice. The solution, he decided, was to prove he could still make a good living through content.
If he could make $10k per month, he thought his parents (and he) would recognize and respect content creation as a viable career. On January 19, 2024, Thomas kicked off his series.
“I’m going to attempt something I didn’t even know was possible.
In 125 days, I’m graduating from college.
And by then, I’m going to be making $10k per month from content alone.
But there’s a big problem, ‘cause I don’t have a large following right now; I make about $52 a month from old YouTube videos.
At the time, he had “around 2.5k” Instagram followers. By the end, he landed “around 20k.”
Every week over the proceeding 125 days, he would post a brief Reel — usually between 5 and 10 seconds long — with a longer caption updating his audience on the journey. The second-best-performing video, published with 77 days left, has 805k views at the time of writing. Nearly halfway through his challenge, Thomas had made $1,400, 14% of his single-month goal over one-and-a-half months.
The best-performing video in Thomas’ series was, unsurprisingly, the finale, with 833k views. It’s much longer than the others and contains the full story. Most importantly, he surpassed his goal of $10k in one month.
In a video posted to Instagram in August 2024, after his $10k-per-month challenge wrapped up, Thomas describes “three secrets” to making $10k per month and getting 4 million views (the amount he reached throughout that challenge):
Stakes
Building public
Being an expert
The first two formed the basis of Thomas’ $10k series — it’s a 125-day race for him to build to that dollar number. The expert factor came through in the videos; they looked good, and he was evidently a capable content creator.
Revenue in one month is different than revenue per month
“I wasn't building any true systems. I was just doing whatever I [could]. And every extra effort means this much output.
I didn't really build the systems or the structure to make sure that this ball would keep rolling. So it stopped rolling after [the challenge] stopped.”
It’s not monthly recurring revenue unless it recurs. After graduating, Thomas’ content-related work dried up, and he landed a tech job … then resigned a week before he was due to start. His success in setting and completing his challenge was enough for his parents to give their blessing, and he spent the summer working on videos.
He quickly linked up with a friend who’d also been working on videos and building an Instagram audience, Ryan To. Together, they launched Creatorverse, a newsletter “breaking down B2C marketing strategy of brands shaping tomorrow's culture on social media.” They grew the audience quickly — 1k subscribers in the first month and 5k before sending their first issue. (More on how they did this down in today’s “Steal this tactic” section.)
By March of this year, the two of them had grown the audience beyond 12k and, in February, brought in $27k in revenue, mostly consulting with companies on their social media strategies, especially around short-form video.
One year after starting his $10k challenge, as half of Creatorverse, Thomas had achieved and surpassed his goal — he’d started to consistently bring in $10k per month. So, of course, he announced a new challenge: 365 days to make $100k/month. Here’s how he anticipated reaching that goal:
$15k: Brand deals and UGC
$60k: Building The Creatorverse
$10k: Monetizing his newsletter
$5k: Speaking engagements
$5k: Artwork
$5k: Client work
The brand deals have been flowing; he’s landed partnerships with Anthropic and Disney. In his January recap video, he breaks down a total income of $11,190.62. One of those clients was Stan, the company making digital storefronts for creators whose CEO, John Hu, I interviewed late last year.
After working together on contract, John offered Thomas a full-time position leading up Stan’s social team and writing their newsletter.
Backpacks and fences
When I asked Thomas why he started his $100k/month challenge, he described it stylistically as “throwing your backpack over the fence” content.
“Publicly announcing this type of thing is great for motivation. I recommend it for anyone who wants to push themselves and go 100% in one direction.
The problem I've noticed is deep inside, I don't think I'm as motivated by the money aspect. [The 100k framing is] more of a viral tactic. I think what I care way more about is the learning aspect.”
I pointed out that this was the same framing he’d used in his first YouTube video about photographers four-and-a-half years ago. There’s a saying that most authors write the same book over and over again; I posited that this is what Thomas has been doing. His content is about learning, and the stakes that drive it and attract an engaged audience are there to watch him learn and see if he can gain expertise. It’s those three content pillars he described earlier: stakes, building in public, and being an expert.
Thomas talking about throwing backpacks over fences in an early YouTube video.
His move to Stan strikes me as an attempt to write a new book; to learn in a new environment.
Thomas will turn 25 later this year. He spoke to me about realizing he is not an expert in everything he wants to be an expert in yet, and that he believes the way to do that is by joining a company like Stan. That he’s steeped in tech and startups while being a self-taught creator makes him well-suited to run social media for a company selling to entrepreneurial creators.
Throughout our conversation, Thomas shared many helpful pieces of advice gleaned from his years making videos, building an Instagram audience, and growing a newsletter. We’ll get into some of that in the “Steal this tactic” section down below, but I’ll leave you with this:
“The most important part about content creation — and no one talks about this — is recalibrating.
After you finish that first video, you have to analyze it and see what you need to change to make the next version of the same video. That's the only way you'll learn to get better.
Most times, people have this great idea, they try it, and it doesn't do well. Maybe the video idea was perfect, but your execution wasn't the best.
You have to try it multiple times. For many of these people who are successful online, that first skit they made was probably terrible. But, after 10 iterations of that skit, they slowly push that curve to success.”
Connect with Thomas on Instagram.
Read and subscribe to The Creatorverse.
🎙️ This was a great conversation. Thomas has a strong grasp on what it takes to produce successful Instagram content and grow an audience there; as always, there was no way to fit everything he had to say into the newsletter. Here’s everything we talked about in the podcast, with links to the timestamps on YouTube:
00:00 Introducing Thomas Yeum and his creator journey
06:39 Challenges with modern consumption habits
10:03 The creator economy is the new American dream
15:48 Finding a career that fulfills personal values
19:22 125 days to make $10k/mo
26:07 The 3% rule: How to utilize inspiration
27:39 4 steps to making a great video
33:57 Balancing art and business as a solo creator
36:29 Making $100k/mo in 365 days
39:03 A bad video does not equal a bad concept
45:48 Building 12k+ subscriber newsletter from scratch
49:28 Bridging the gap between traditional media and the creator economy
53:15 Advice for aspiring creators
The recipe for an engaging video series
Thomas shared the method by which he and Ryan grew the Creatorverse email list. It specifically applies to Instagram Reels, but I could see versions of this extrapolated to other platforms:
Create a short-form video case study about a specific creator or brand’s social media strategy.
Include a CTA to comment a specific word on the video in order to receive a full-length case study about that subject.
Create an automation to DM people who comment that specific word a link to a piece of gated content; if they sign up, they’ll receive the case study. The software stack to make this automation happen, Thomas said, is:
Manychat to handle direct messaging
Make.com to send the email over to …
beehiiv, where the person is added to a mailing list
The Creatoverse newsletter, Thomas said, had around 12.5k subscribers at the time of our interview, the majority of whom came from this strategy. The rest came from referrals and digital products.
These videos are well-produced; Thomas said they can take more than a day’s work to produce. The scripting part is the hardest; achieving brevity takes time, and the videos need to be less than one minute long.
Before they even sent their first newsletter, the Creatorverse list had over 5k subscribers — largely thanks to this play.
Mix three sources + tweak by 3% = profit?
The workflow above, aptly, is not something the Creatorverse team invented — Thomas referenced creators like Steven Bartlett from Diary of a CEO, Jerry Lee, and June Quan who all run the same play.
When I asked Thomas how he learned to make videos, he referenced Virgil Abloh.
“The 3% rule is something he popularized. You take three of your favorite creators, the people who inspire you, create an amalgamation of their styles, and you change it by 3%. […]
Then you iterate and see what you like and don't like. That's essentially how the learning process went for me.”
Thomas’ top three inspirations he applied this process to, he says, are Gawx, Casey Neistat, and Wes Anderson.
It’s a good way to learn — take what you like, replicate it, and tweak the recipe. The challenge is staying ahead of the pack. I joked that I was going to “3%” their specific video style and Instagram-to-newsletter-subscribers play. Other people have, of course, already done this, Thomas shared:
“[A few of the early videos] did very well. As a result, we noticed that everyone started copying it […]. We got three-percented; people literally went word for word, and then that pissed us off. Social media, right?”
Tasteland is the weekly podcast about media, tech, and business hosted by Spotlight editor Francis Zierer and Dirt Media CEO Daisy Alioto. This week, Future Commerce came on our show, and we went on theirs.
We worked with The Webby Awards this season as they launched their new creator categories. Public voting is now open (for two more weeks). Go vote!
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