About two years ago, at 39, I started posting short videos on Instagram and TikTok, and I sort of became famous in Spain. Not Rosalía famous, but people would often recognize me on the street and say they were fans. It was super weird, but very cool. Here’s how I did it, the pros, and the cons.
I still have the first short videos I published set as public, even though they make me cringe. They had a “fake-podcast” setup, which I thought was popular at the time. And I’d follow some advice from gurus, trying to talk about things I knew about, and explaining how I do things, and not how people should do things. Great advice in theory.
I’ve run a Spanish language school for adults for 13 years. So I started making videos about marketing, SEO, controlling costs... That type of stuff. They were boring, and my delivery wasn’t great. And when I’d add some sort of attention hook, people would often think I was trying to sell them a how-to-get-rich-quick course.
Going viral
Eventually I had my first viral hit. It was a video I recorded after coming back from a run, wearing a white tank top, and explaining Russell’s paradox.
People started sharing, commenting, and liking like crazy, and I didn’t know what to make of it. I analyzed it. It had a hook: “Esto te va a volar la cabeza,” literally “This is going to blow your head off,” meaning “This is going to blow your mind.” Then I said the video required some deep focus, and I proceeded to explain the paradox in detail, talking kind of fast.
Since I run a language school, I studied semantics and pragmatics years ago with Sam Al Khatib in NYC, and I’ve written several books on Spanish grammar, I thought people would enjoy “difficult” content on linguistics if I packaged it right, since it was somehow similar to set theory logic. And this I could replicate. There aren’t many paradoxes like Russell’s, but there’s lots of stuff to say about references, elided syntactic elements, and Paul Grice.
I’d have different video “templates,” in a way, although they were all different, and I’d spend a fair amount of time writing the scripts for each one. Some would have some sort of crazy story in which some syntax or semantics concept would be embedded, some would make some connection between some deep philosophical question and some linguistic concept, and some would just be a long and hard-to-follow setup for a punchline.
I eventually reached 65k+ followers on Instagram. Nothing crazy, but pretty good. And I’d be having drinks with friends, or eating lunch at my regular spot near my office, and people would say to me: “Oh, Dan Berges! I’m a big fan!”
The algorithm
I enjoy making these short videos, but with the way the recommendation algorithms work, you don’t have full creative freedom, and you have to follow some principles. You need to hook, retain, and reward. That means stopping the scroll, convincing people to watch the whole video, and leaving them with a good feeling so they’ll watch your next one when it shows up on the For You page.
Back in the day, you’d get subscribers on, say, YouTube, and the platform would heavily show your content to people who followed you. TikTok changed the game. Its algorithm clearly works per video. Being a famous influencer helps stop the scroll, but it doesn’t guarantee virality, while the first video posted by a new account can get millions of views if it’s good, as per the algorithm’s definition of “good.”
Meta and Google had to adapt, and although Instagram and YouTube still seem to have a bias towards showing content to followers, individual pieces of content get ranked on their own a lot more than, say, 8 years ago.
Virality is a double-edged sword
Some of my videos reached more than a million views. And that usually translates into getting a lot of new followers, but that’s it. The first time I had a viral hit I had nothing to sell. Eventually I published a book for a general audience, which is linked on my profile. The thing is, viral videos now sell very few books, while sometimes more niche, nerdy videos generate a lot of sales.
Branding expert Caleb Ralston advises creators to actively stay away from virality. In my experience, some virality can help. Vanity metrics like followers and likes do help your “brand.” But yeah, exclusively chasing virality can possibly harm you while not generating actions (sales, signups, whatever) in any meaningful number.
Money talks
For me, the ROI isn’t there. I haven’t done any brand deals. In book sales, I make something between 100 and 400 euros per month in royalties, depending on the season and the performance of my last videos. I’ve been invited to a couple of cool speaking engagements, and even though I’m not great at public speaking, I always accept them and try to say something of value. And I’m followed by people that I admire. High school teachers, people in academia, famous actors and broadcasters...
Actionable advice
I don’t like to give people advice, but here’s what worked for me.
I picked a topic I knew about.
I focused on humor and creativity to make something unique and shareable.
I analyzed what worked and what didn’t, and tried to improve every new piece of content based on that data.
So was it worth it?
For me, yes. But it’s not a silver bullet for anything. For an account to work, it has to be mostly non-promotional. And burnout is real. The algorithm is exhausting. Even if you take the stoic stance of not worrying about externals, i.e. things that you can’t control, these companies are really good at getting people hooked on the apps, both as consumers and as producers. So you keep looking at the analytics, wondering what went wrong on the last video, and what the next hook could be.
The other thing is you can’t stop doing it. Competition for attention is brutal in this day and age. Here’s Alex Becker’s take on “creating a personal brand” in big 2026:
Keep in mind. At 40 you will not just have to maintain this. You will need to be shaking your ass 5x harder, every year, as the competition to be relevant gets harder and harder.
So do you need a personal brand? I don’t know, I’m 41 now and I keep dancing. But I make sure to enjoy it, and I’m fortunate enough to not depend on it for my income. If that’s also the case for you, I’d give it a try. It has a lot of non-monetary perks. It’s creative, it forces you to think and write, it has fairly fast feedback that you might not like sometimes, it makes you good at speaking in front of a camera, and, most importantly, it forces you to overcome your fears of failing in public or being cringe, which is an amazing skill.