Sidney Raskind tells Mashable the story of his 15-year journey to TikTok success

How are you doing today? Oh good, how are you? It's so good to meet you IRL. Yeah, for real. Thank you so much for thinking of me for this. This is great. I love Mashable

We love you too. Thank you for being here. Awesome. So I wanted to get started with talking about your content journey that started a long time ago

Long time ago. So you're known as a life hacks guy, but you've been around on the internet for a minute. Yes. So I was wondering if you could take us through when you started making content and kind of how that evolved over the years

So when I was graduating high school, I graduated high school 2007

And in 2006, 2007 is really when YouTube like really started like popping off

You started seeing shelf creators, you know, promoted creators on the YouTube page

And I didn't really have an idea of what I wanted to do after high school

I barely graduated high school, but I knew that I liked editing. I liked being in front of the camera

I was on the news team for my high school, like for three out of the four years

and I saw it and I was just like I want to be a YouTuber so at the time I just started uploading

videos they didn't go anywhere I didn't succeed but I knew that I wanted to be a YouTuber that

was like all I ever wanted to do and for a long time until recently you know I thought that that

was sort of like a like oh I don't know what I want to be when I grow up but then I realized like

oh no I always knew what I wanted to do and it was this so I posted videos on YouTube that failed

that failed that failed I went to college I failed out of college twice which is not easy to do but I

was making content right I was making YouTube videos and then I saw everyone moving out here

around 2011 2012 and I was getting some you know videos going well on campus I was pretending to

be different things like Pupid or a cat I got pet by one of the campus cops that went viral on

Reddit, which was cool. I cried the night I went viral on Reddit, which was really cool

But but yeah, so then I was doing that for a while. I moved out to Los Angeles

I kept on making videos, kept on making videos. I posted on Vine. I posted on Instagram when it

was still static imagery. I posted it on everywhere, everywhere you can think of

And then TikTok came around in 2019 And at the time I had been working at a YouTube production company for about four and a half years So I knew the sort of like lay of the land kind of thing

And then in 2021, I posted that I didn't know how to use a can opener in my 30s

And the internet lost it. So after 15 years of trying to be a content creator, failing, posting, failing, posting, understanding the business, understanding the output a little bit more, it worked

And now I've been a full-time creator for, oh my God, almost five years now, which is awesome

I did it. So like my dream came true. What do you think it is about the Life Hacks videos about the, I didn't know this till I was in my 30s, that broke through with people

I think that it was sort of like a barrier for entry that was broken, right

So when you see a white dude in his 30s, he's probably going to tell you how stupid you are, right

Especially on the internet. Sure. but when I came out and I had a little bit longer hair my hair was getting longer at the time

I was wearing tank tops and I was just like this kid with trauma that was like lol what's a toaster

right and I think that really like demystified a lot of what I was doing and I think that it

opened the doors to be like people wanted to share it people wanted to try it and people

wanted to also admit that they didn't know how to do something that is seemingly simple, right

And then also, I think like that consistent branding, I think like my knowledge of like

content creation in general at that time was sort of like, okay, I have an intro, I have a hook

and I know how to create content. So I'm going to say a hook at the beginning, I'm going to state a

thesis, and then I'm going to show you a thing that I don't know how to do, right? And that's

shareable that's likable and that's watchable yeah um and at the time in 2021 2022 it was such

a churn and burn kind of content creation world where I knew people wanted information and let me

make fun of myself a little bit so I think that it was just sort of like fun to watch and easy to

repeat yeah yeah you mentioned that you been a content creator for full content creator for five five years now Yeah I want to talk about your relationship to virality Yeah sure When you had your first viral Reddit moment you just said you cried

It was very meaningful to you. Having done this for a while now, having put out many, many viral videos

how do you feel like that relationship to having a viral video has evolved for you

It's definitely evolved. I think that when I saw my virality first, I thought, okay, I know for sure that I can do this

Right. I know for sure that it is possible to go viral before that

I wasn't sure before that. I was really just like, I don't know when it's going to happen

And then I didn't go viral again for 12 years. Right. But I had that sort of like feeling, you know, how comedians talk about like that itch of like, oh, I got a big laugh

I got to recreate that. That's kind of how it felt. but now and then when I went viral the first time when this all really started popping off

I didn't think okay cool I'm done I thought uh-oh I need to do it again tomorrow and then the next

day and the next day and the next day and then that viral video was actually after I had trained

TikTok that I was posting consistently every day for a year and a half so I started posting in 2019

knowing that nobody knew who I was. And I didn't even have a niche

I didn't ever want a niche, right? Right. So when I went viral in 2021

it was, okay, here's a thing. Here's a repeatable format. Do it again

So my relationship to virality has very much changed. I am always looking for the next 15 million video

But I know that that 15 million video is more of a feeder to my overall library rather than the answer to all of my problems

Right. You are the life hacker guy, but you also talk about politics

You also talk about your health. You also talk about your family. Yes. So how do you approach..

Which one would you like to go into first Tiffany Well as kind of a blanket question how do you approach this idea of having a platform now that you have an audience and the power that that platform has to create and foster community

Yeah, I mean, I think community is a giant part of it, but I think it takes a lot of self-reflection to create the community that you want when you do have a platform

I think that these days, and I think always on the internet, no matter how far back you go, community has been created around the person that is barfing out their words, right

So for me, especially in the past year, after my stomach was taken out, after my cancer, after I lost my daughter, it felt to me like I was more comfortable with exposing certain aspects of my life that I wasn't comfortable with before

and the community response was really great. And now getting into more of like the

you know, I got an award from the Congressional Dads Caucus a couple of weeks ago for being a good dad, which was great

But I did have to leave my wife and two small children to get it

So that was weird. But my wife was a champion. She's incredible

If you have any advice for anyone who's in that years-long content slog

that you were in of like, I'm going to make it, I want to make it, but I don't know where the light at the end of the tunnel is

If you have any advice for those people. I think that now, you know, we always hear this from content creators

but like I think one of the biggest reasons why it finally worked for me

was because technology caught up to my ability. Or like I do not edit on Premiere, right

I do not, I did not have any lights. I did not have a tripod

I did not have any of that. But my biggest piece of advice is something that Seth Rogen said, which is

if you stop, you will always not get there. But if you keep trying and you

keep going, then there is a possibility that you will get there. It took me 15

years to figure out a content format and general understanding until it worked