TikTok Is Not Social Media. It’s Interest Media.

Two Years, Zero Dollars, One Fucking Experiment: How I Built a Business While Everything Around Me Kept Falling Apart

I have been saying the same thing to anybody who will listen, anybody who has walked through my door, anybody who has sat on my bed while I was ranting, anybody who has watched me stare at TikTok for hours and dissect what the fuck it is doing:

TikTok is not social media. TikTok is interest media.

I have been preaching that for years.

And now I am watching the platform change in front of my eyes in ways that make me look at my phone and say, Holy shit. I was right.

But this isn't really a story about TikTok.

Not entirely.

It is a story about the last six years of my life, and especially the last two years of trying to turn everything I survived into a business.

It is a story about my home.

My cottage in downtown Phoenix.

An old lady's house.

Tyler.

Steve.

Kristina.

Duncan.

My ex.

Rehab.

Relapse.

Homelessness.

A gas station.

A car.

An internet connection that became the fucking center of my life.

Black Friday.

TikTok Shop.

A business I built myself.

A brand I built from experiences nobody would voluntarily choose.

And the weirdest part?

After all of that, after two years of trying to build this thing, I still haven't made a single fucking dollar from it.

Not one.

And I am writing about that because everybody online loves to make entrepreneurship sound like a three-step recipe.

Start a business.

Post content.

Launch your product.

Be consistent.

Just keep going.

Okay.

I kept going.

And going.

And going.

And what happens when you keep going while the entire fucking floor keeps collapsing underneath you?

That's the story nobody seems to tell.

February 2020: The Beginning of the Mess

My story really starts in February 2020.

That was the beginning of a period of my life that eventually became so complicated that sometimes I have to mentally walk myself backward through it just to remember which disaster came before which one.

There were homes and people and relationships and attempts to get clean and attempts to stay clean and attempts to rebuild.

There was rehab.

There was relapse.

There were houses I never should have been living in.

There were people I never should have trusted.

There were people I loved anyway.

There were moments where I thought I had finally gotten my footing, only to have the next thing come along and kick it out from underneath me.

And somewhere inside all of that, I started becoming obsessed with something else:

What the fuck am I actually going to do with my life?

Eventually, the answer became a business.

Not because I had some polished entrepreneurial master plan.

Not because I had investors.

Not because somebody handed me a blueprint.

Not because I had a rich family waiting to bankroll my dream.

I built it because I had lived through enough shit that I had something to say.

And eventually I realized I could turn what I had learned into frameworks.

Into products.

Into a brand.

Into something that might actually help another person climb out of the kind of hole I had been in.

That became UNF★CKWITHABLE-ISH™.

And that became the beginning of the next chapter.

My Phoenix Cottage

At one point I ended up in a little cottage in downtown Phoenix.

That place mattered to me.

It was one of those rare periods where I had something that felt like mine.

Eventually, though, the landlord decided to sell.

So I went month-to-month while trying to figure out where the hell I was going to go next.

And this is where my story gets almost too ridiculous to sound real.

Because when I left my little Phoenix cottage, I ended up living directly next door to the house where three older men had lived—the place I had previously lived around before and after rehab for about eight months.

And that house had its own history.

There were people using drugs.

There were people struggling.

There were people living in survival mode.

And I relapsed.

I didn't want to be there.

I begged to get out.

I begged my ex.

I tried to find family.

I looked for another way.

Nothing worked.

Eventually, I ended up in the house of an older woman.

She was 78.

And that house became another chapter of my life that I still have trouble believing actually happened.

The Old Lady's House

I was trying to rebuild my life.

I was trying to build my business.

And I was trying to get my fucking internet working.

That sounds ridiculous until you understand what the internet meant to me at that point.

My phone was on a family-shared plan.

I didn't have a stable setup.

I was trying to build my brand online.

I was trying to launch.

I was trying to make TikTok Shop work.

And Black Friday was coming.

This wasn't entertainment for me.

This was my potential livelihood.

My business existed online.

My audience existed online.

My products existed online.

My future, at least as I understood it then, existed online.

And I needed internet.

The older woman wouldn't get it for me, even though she knew how important it was to what I was trying to do.

So Duncan helped me get the internet turned on.

We put it in her name.

I gave her $54.

And we specifically told her not to turn it on while she was alone because there were things that needed to happen with the installation.

She did it anyway.

And then, three days after I paid her, she turned the fucking internet off.

I lost my mind.

Because to somebody else, that might sound like an annoying household disagreement.

To me, it was my business.

It was my launch.

It was my connection to the outside world.

And I was already hanging on by a thread.

Then the social dynamics inside that house got increasingly bizarre.

There was Tyler.

There was Steve.

There was Kristina.

There was the older woman.

There were relationships and loyalties and jealousy and drug use and people coming and going.

I felt like I was constantly walking into somebody else's drama.

And I was trying to build a fucking company in the middle of it.

Tyler, Steve and Kristina

Tyler was around 49, as I remember it.

He wasn't working at the time.

The older woman seemed extremely attached to him. In my experience, she favored him, spent a lot of time with him, drove around with him, and paid some of his bills.

There was a dynamic there that I never really understood.

Then there was Steve and Kristina.

They were dealing with their own problems, including fentanyl use as I understood it.

The entire environment felt unstable.

And there was another layer to it.

The older woman seemed intensely jealous whenever younger men came around to visit me or check on me.

I had male friends who were 35 or 40 years old who would come by.

To me, they were friends.

People checking on me.

People I knew.

But the jealousy became so intense that I started feeling like I was living inside somebody else's soap opera.

There was an ongoing suspicion that Steve and I were together.

We weren't.

But it didn't matter.

The drama existed anyway.

At one point, I remember looking at that bedroom and thinking that I couldn't fucking take it anymore.

I was in such a dark place that I was thinking about dying.

I want to be clear about something: I am telling you what that period felt like from inside my own head. I am not romanticizing it.

I was not being dramatic for content.

I was not making a TikTok.

I was not building a brand.

I was trying to survive.

The Internet, Black Friday and the Plot Twist

Then came the part that still makes me shake my head.

I was preparing to launch my brand on TikTok Shop around Black Friday.

And then TikTok Shop shut me down.

The timing was brutal.

The day before Black Friday.

My business wasn't established.

I wasn't making money.

I didn't have a giant audience handing me sales.

I was trying to get the fucking machine started.

And the machine kept breaking.

Meanwhile, the internet situation at the house had gone sideways.

I had paid.

The internet got turned off.

I was sitting in that bedroom trying to figure out what the hell I was supposed to do next.

Then I got kicked out.

And almost immediately, the entire situation became even stranger.

People stopped talking to me.

The energy changed.

Everyone became weird.

My gut was screaming that something was wrong.

And then I ended up outside.

The Gas Station

There was a period where I was essentially stranded.

I remember being at a gas station.

Not metaphorically.

Not in some inspirational "I was sleeping in my car and learned the value of hustle" bullshit story.

I mean I was literally trying to figure out where I was going to exist next.

Steve eventually saw me at the gas station.

Instead of leaving me there, he let me sit in his car.

For something like 32 hours.

Thirty-two.

Hours.

I sat in that car because the alternative was worse.

Eventually my ex, Tom, picked me up and I went to live with him.

And then I learned something that made the entire situation feel even more surreal.

According to what Steve told me, less than 24 hours after I was out, the older woman had the internet turned back on.

And Tyler had his homeless, alcoholic sister brought into the house.

She had apparently been living around the canal for about a year.

And somehow, less than 24 hours after I was gone, she ended up in the bedroom I had just been kicked out of.

That's one of those moments where you stop and stare at the ceiling and think:

What the actual fuck just happened?

Because when you're inside a situation like that, you don't know whether you're watching coincidence, dysfunction, manipulation, or some combination of all three.

You just know you're gone.

And they're moving on without you.

Meanwhile, I Was Still Trying to Build a Business

This is the part people don't understand.

I didn't stop.

I didn't have the luxury of stopping.

I kept building.

I kept thinking.

I kept designing.

I kept posting.

I kept experimenting.

I kept trying to figure out TikTok.

I kept trying to understand why some videos moved and others died.

I kept watching.

And watching.

And watching.

Eventually I realized that I wasn't just watching TikTok as a user.

I was studying it.

I started seeing patterns.

And that's when my whole theory about TikTok became bigger.

**TikTok is not social media.

TikTok is interest media.**

Two Years of TikTok and Zero Dollars

For the last two years, I have been trying to build a business.

I have tried to launch apparel.

I have tried to push my frameworks.

I have built websites.

I have built TikTok accounts.

I have experimented with content.

I have tried affiliate marketing.

I have tried TikTok Shop.

I have tried to figure out how to turn attention into actual money.

And after all of that?

Zero dollars.

Not one penny.

And before somebody reads that and thinks I'm embarrassed:

I'm not.

I'm fucking furious.

There is a difference.

Because I have learned more from two years of making nothing than a lot of people learn while making money.

I learned what happens when you don't have a safety net.

I learned what happens when a platform controls your distribution.

I learned what happens when an account gets no reach.

I learned what happens when the infrastructure you depend on disappears.

I learned what happens when your supplier gets hacked.

I learned what happens when your bank situation is fucked.

I learned what happens when your housing disappears.

I learned what happens when people you thought were friends turn out not to be.

I learned what happens when you're trying to build a business while simultaneously trying to rebuild yourself.

And I learned TikTok.

Or at least, I learned how to watch TikTok.

TikTok Is Interest Media

People still call TikTok social media.

I don't think that's accurate anymore.

Facebook was social media.

Instagram grew out of social media.

TikTok became something different.

TikTok is an interest engine.

You don't necessarily go there to see your friends.

You go there to see shit you are interested in.

That's fundamentally different.

The algorithm doesn't need to know who your friends are.

It needs to know what holds your attention.

What makes you stop.

What makes you watch again.

What makes you comment.

What makes you search.

What makes you stay.

That's interest media.

And I think TikTok is building something much bigger than a social platform.

I think it is trying to become an enormous media hub.

The next radio.

The next television.

The next news feed.

The next late-night entertainment channel.

The next place people go when they want information, entertainment, shopping, local recommendations, personalities and live broadcasting.

And I've been saying this for years.

Then August 9 Happened

Then came August 9.

I opened TikTok and immediately noticed UI changes.

And my first reaction wasn't:

"Cool, new feature."

My reaction was:

Oh fuck. Here we go again.

Because I could see the direction.

The platform keeps getting more structured.

More controlled.

More standardized.

More demanding.

And suddenly I'm seeing things that confirm the theory I've been building in my head for years.

One example was the thumbnail situation.

The way you can control or change things after posting isn't the same as it used to be.

Then there were the zero-view videos.

I watched people I had tried to recruit—people I wanted to bring into this with me—post videos that simply went nowhere.

Eight videos.

Zero views.

Again and again.

And that was when I started thinking about something much bigger:

Bots.

Bots now dominate huge portions of internet traffic.

That's not some wild science-fiction concept anymore.

The internet has been transformed by automation.

And TikTok is operating inside that reality.

So when I see zero-view videos, aggressive content testing, account-level restrictions, stagnant accounts dying, and creators being forced to work harder for distribution, I don't automatically see random bugs.

I see strategy.

I see filtering.

I see TikTok trying to figure out:

Are you real?

Are you useful?

Are you worth showing?

Will you actually work?

Will you adapt?

And if the answer is no?

Goodbye.

TikTok Is Cleaning House

This is where I think people are missing the bigger picture.

TikTok doesn't necessarily need everybody.

It needs the right people.

It needs creators who will keep producing.

It needs people who understand retention.

It needs people who understand storytelling.

It needs people who will go LIVE.

It needs people who will sell.

It needs people who will respond.

It needs people who will keep the ecosystem alive.

And that means the lazy creator is becoming less valuable.

The stagnant account becomes less valuable.

The troll becomes less valuable.

The person who posts three videos and disappears becomes less valuable.

The person who refuses to learn becomes less valuable.

That's why I think some of what people call "shadow banning" or suppression may actually be a much larger filtering system.

I'm not claiming I have access to TikTok's internal code.

I don't.

I'm telling you what I've observed after obsessively watching this platform for two years.

There is a difference.

Then TikTok Gave Us the Prompt

And then came another thing that fucking jumped out at me.

TikTok started pushing a new prompt system.

A translucent overlay.

Text scrolling slowly enough for you to read.

And the platform essentially hands you a structure:

Hook.

Plot twist.

Call to action.

Hashtags.

Think about what that means.

TikTok isn't just distributing content anymore.

It's beginning to teach people how to manufacture content that fits the platform.

That's enormous.

Because if millions of creators use the same underlying structure, TikTok gets something it desperately wants:

Consistency.

Clean messaging.

Clear visuals.

Predictable structure.

Better readability.

Better retention.

Better hooks.

Better calls to action.

The platform becomes easier to consume.

And easier to manufacture for.

That's not just a feature.

That's a strategy.

The Local Tab

And then there was the Local tab.

This one really got me.

Because I had been telling people for fucking ages that TikTok needed a local tab.

I wanted a place where people could find creators, businesses and information based on where they actually live.

Then one morning I logged in.

February 11, 2026.

And there it fucking was.

LOCAL.

I just stared at it.

Because this was another prediction I had made before I saw the platform actually implement it.

And then something happened that proved to me how powerful it could be.

From February 11 through July 1, my content generated more than 350,000 views, with roughly 89% of the traffic coming from Arizona, according to the analytics I was seeing.

Arizona.

My backyard.

My market.

My people.

I tag Arizona.

I tag my brand.

I am building a local identity.

And suddenly TikTok had created the infrastructure to make that matter.

That changed my trajectory.

Not because I became an overnight millionaire.

I didn't.

Remember?

Zero dollars.

But attention is data.

Attention is proof.

Attention tells you something.

And 350,000-plus views from the place where I actually live told me that the local-interest model could work.

Now They're Pushing LIVE

And now I am watching TikTok push LIVE harder.

And again, I don't think LIVE is just another feature.

I think LIVE is a fucking science project.

That's my term for it.

The science project.

Because LIVE gives TikTok something edited videos can't:

Real-time behavior.

They can watch what people do.

They can watch when people leave.

They can watch when people stay.

They can watch what makes people interact.

They can watch which creators generate community.

They can watch what people buy.

They can watch who comes back.

LIVE gives them behavioral data.

It gives them a laboratory.

Creators are participating in the experiment whether they realize it or not.

TikTok is learning.

We're the subjects.

And the platform is the scientist.

And Meanwhile, I Built Everything Myself

Here's another thing I want people to understand.

Nobody built this for me.

I built my Shopify myself.

I designed my shit in Canva myself.

I set up my affiliate marketing myself.

I built my website myself.

I developed my UNF★CKWITHABLE-ISH™ 101 Master Class.

I created the frameworks.

I built the brand identity.

I created the online presence.

I learned the systems.

I learned the platforms.

I learned how to put the pieces together.

And the reason the frameworks exist is because I lived the shit they came from.

I didn't buy some $7,000 guru course and suddenly become an expert.

I didn't wake up one morning with a perfect entrepreneurial mindset.

I came from rock-bottom shit.

Tweaker houses.

Survival mode.

Rehab.

Relapse.

Homelessness.

Starting over.

Starting over again.

And again.

And again.

Eventually I took what I had learned and started turning it into actual frameworks.

That's where UNF★CKWITHABLE-ISH™ came from.

Not theory.

Not trends.

Not some fucking Canva quote that says "Believe in yourself."

Real life.

Real consequences.

Real rebuilding.

I Tried to Bring People With Me

And I genuinely tried to bring people with me.

I wanted friends to start businesses.

I wanted people around me to make something.

I wanted to saturate TikTok with real people building real shit.

I wanted to prove that you didn't have to be born into the right family or have a perfect life to create something.

But then TikTok showed me something brutal.

Some of the people I tried to bring with me couldn't even get their content moving.

Eight videos.

Zero views.

And I started realizing that this ecosystem isn't necessarily going to carry everybody.

You have to work.

You have to learn.

You have to adapt.

You have to create.

You have to understand your audience.

You have to keep showing up.

And you have to build something people actually want to watch.

TikTok isn't going to do all of that for you.

The $34,000 in a Shoebox

There was a point in my life where I had approximately $34,000 in cash sitting in a shoebox because I didn't have a normal banking setup I could rely on.

Think about that sentence.

Thirty-four thousand dollars.

In a fucking shoebox.

That is not the glamorous version of entrepreneurship.

That's survival.

And that is the background from which I eventually tried to build a legitimate business.

So when someone tells me:

"Just start a business."

I want to scream.

I DID.

I just didn't start one from a fucking coworking space with a MacBook, venture capital and somebody paying my rent.

I started one while rebuilding my entire life.

The Sabotage, the Shutdowns and the Things That Kept Breaking

Over these years, there were so many things that went wrong that eventually I stopped being surprised.

Housing problems.

Internet problems.

Banking problems.

Supplier problems.

Platform shutdowns.

TikTok Shop problems.

Printify issues.

People disappearing.

People betraying me.

Relapses.

Homelessness.

The cottage.

The old woman's house.

The gas station.

The car.

The bedroom.

The internet being turned off.

The Black Friday shutdown.

The constant feeling that every time I got three feet forward, something came along and shoved me eight feet backward.

And yet somehow I kept rebuilding.

That's the part I don't think people understand.

The business isn't impressive because I made a million dollars.

I didn't.

The business is impressive because I built the fucking thing while my life kept trying to destroy the conditions necessary to build it.

And That Is Why I Am Still Here

Two years.

Zero dollars.

That's the headline people might see.

But that isn't the whole story.

Two years.

Zero dollars.

And thousands of hours of observation.

Thousands of hours learning.

Thousands of hours designing.

Thousands of hours posting.

Thousands of hours trying.

Thousands of hours watching TikTok evolve.

Thousands of hours trying to understand why something worked one day and died the next.

And underneath all of it is something I can't ignore:

I predicted things.

I predicted the importance of local.

I predicted TikTok becoming more like a media hub.

I predicted the shift from social to interest.

I predicted creators would be pushed toward more standardized content.

I predicted the platform would become increasingly structured.

I predicted LIVE would become more important.

And now I'm sitting here watching it happen.

Not perfectly.

Not because I have some magical crystal ball.

Because I have been watching.

Really watching.

The Internet Isn't What It Used to Be

The internet used to be about people.

Then it became about platforms.

Now I think it is increasingly about systems.

Algorithms.

Automation.

Bots.

Interest graphs.

Behavior.

Retention.

Recommendation engines.

AI-generated content.

Live behavioral data.

Commerce.

Local discovery.

And the platforms are learning how to control the entire pipeline.

TikTok doesn't just want you to upload a video.

It wants to know what you are interested in.

What you will watch.

What you will buy.

Where you live.

Who you trust.

Who you follow.

What keeps you there.

And increasingly, what kind of content you should make.

That's why I don't call it social media anymore.

It's interest media.

This Is the Part Nobody Can Fake

People can copy my logo.

They can copy my slogans.

They can copy a product.

They can copy a TikTok format.

They can copy a framework.

They can copy an aesthetic.

They can even copy my fucking language.

But they cannot copy the story underneath it.

They weren't in that cottage.

They weren't in that bedroom.

They weren't sitting at that gas station.

They weren't sitting in Steve's car for 32 hours.

They weren't begging their ex for help.

They weren't trying to figure out where they were going to sleep.

They weren't trying to launch a business while their internet was being shut off.

They weren't watching their TikTok Shop disappear right before Black Friday.

They weren't rebuilding after relapse.

They weren't carrying everything they owned through another transition.

They weren't building Shopify at the same time they were rebuilding themselves.

They weren't sitting there wondering whether the next TikTok was going to get zero views.

I was.

That's why this story belongs to me.

So Here I Am

I'm still building.

I'm still watching.

I'm still testing.

I'm still learning.

I'm still posting.

I'm still trying to sell my apparel.

I'm still trying to get my frameworks in front of the people who need them.

I'm still trying to turn UNF★CKWITHABLE-ISH™ into a real fucking business.

And yes:

I still haven't made a dollar.

But I'm not done.

Because I don't think the point of the last two years was to prove that I could become an overnight success.

The point was to prove that I could survive long enough to become something.

I started with chaos.

I started with addiction and recovery and homelessness and unstable housing and people and places that nearly swallowed me.

I moved through the cottage.

I moved through the old woman's house.

I moved through Tyler, Steve, Kristina, Duncan, Tom and all the other characters who became part of this bizarre fucking timeline.

I lost things.

I rebuilt things.

I learned things.

I watched the internet change.

And while everybody else was telling me to just post more, I was sitting there trying to understand the machine.

Now I think I understand it a little better.

TikTok isn't your friend.

It isn't your enemy either.

It's a machine.

And machines have strategies.

The question isn't whether the machine likes you.

The question is whether you understand what the machine is becoming.

Because TikTok is becoming something much bigger than an app where people dance in their bedrooms.

It's becoming a media infrastructure.

A local discovery engine.

A shopping platform.

A live broadcasting network.

An entertainment channel.

A search engine.

An interest engine.

A behavioral laboratory.

And possibly one of the biggest media hubs the internet has ever created.

I said it years ago.

**TikTok is not social media.

It's interest media.**

And I'm going to keep watching.

Because after everything I've survived, after two years of building a business without making a single fucking dollar, after every shutdown, every setback, every bizarre plot twist and every night where I had absolutely no idea what the next morning was going to look like—

I'm still here.

And I'm still fucking building.

That, more than anything else, is the story.

This isn't the success story yet.

This is the part before it.