Today we’d like to introduce you to Nathan Piland
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I got started on YouTube when I was 12 years old. I would post three Vlogs a week on my main channel, a fan made music video on my second channel; and I also had an international virtual content house YouTube channel with nine other creators around the world, and I would post on that channel once a week. Everyone had an assigned day to post on that channel, and I was Friday. Looking back, at 12 years old, the fact that I sourced and managed all those other creators, and those channels was very impressive. I think my biggest video back then had a Clickbait thumbnail of Nicki Minaj and it was a fan made music video; if I remember correctly, that video had 160,000 views. I did all of this just for fun, and at my peak I had about 500 subscribers.
I moved into making videos for random clients around town in high school. I got paid in high school edit videos for YouTube for local celebrities, for weddings, and for my school. I was also in a film club at my high school where we would create videos and present them.
My first taste of Internet success was when I was a senior in high school and I was “Tumblr famous” for a blog that I had around going to raves. That blog gained about 50,000 followers, and I only was using that blog for about three months, and then I erased it.
I then went to college, and I stumbled upon the app Musical.ly. My roommate and I were watching a Facebook compilation of Musicallys, and I thought they were so similar to the fan made music videos I used to make in middle school. I thought to myself that if I did this app I would absolutely blow up on it, then I thought “ well, why wouldn’t I do it?” And then I did.
I started making college based comedy skits, and each video started to go viral. After the first video went viral, everyone in my college wanted to be in my videos, so I had a cast of 10+ people in certain videos, all acting out college scenarios in our classrooms that we had available to film in.
I went from maybe having few hundred followers to having 250,000 followers.
Then I stopped for a year because everyone at my college was over the fad after three months, and I enjoyed the community of it all.
A year later I got invited to the first Musical.ly meet and greet in Los Angeles. I looked over to my roommate and thought that it would be silly to go since I hadn’t done the app in a year, but that it could be fun because it was in Los Angeles. My roommate said he would go with me and I bought my flight. he ended up having to pull out of the trip and I went alone and had the best weekend ever making over 50 videos with other creators who loved making videos as much as I did. I joined a content group that formed during that weekend, and about 75% of the creators at that meet and greet (who didn’t live in LA FYI) all moved to LA within six months. I also moved six months later. I dropped out of college to do so.
Then I was in LA. It was 2016 and the social media boom happened over the next few years through Covid.
Everyone in Hollywood that I had looked up to for years wanted us at their parties and events and music festivals so that we could post about it and also teach them how they could do social media as successfully as we were doing it.
Because of vine shutting down around the same time before I move to LA in 2016, it was very apparent that you couldn’t just stay on one platform and you needed to diversify your talents, so to speak.
I had always written as my own therapy and kept it to myself, but after freestyle rapping with many different artist at the parties I would go to, I was offered a record deal.
It ended up being a scam, unfortunately, and I lost a lot of money, but it encouraged me to figure it all out on my own. I released my first album in 2019 and my second album in 2023. I absolutely love music.
Musical.ly became TikTok, And TikTok loved my content so much that they worked with me for two years as one of their main creators. I was all over their press and commercials and front page for two years, and that was very thrilling.
One drawback of that time was every kid knowing who me and my friends were, so we had to stop filming videos in public, because we would get mobbed sometimes. I also did not like that every single person in my apartment complex knew who I was (word of mouth from the kids and parents of kids who knew me) and sometimes they would take pictures of me through my window.
Covid happened, and me, and my friend started a TikTok content house. We had a few different locations, but at one point we lived in a $9 million Bel Air Barbie house mansion. I say Bel Air Barbie house because we lived in Bel Air.
That lasted for two years, and after that business failed, I decided to get into social media marketing on the backend.
I now work for a company in Los Angeles, and I live in North Carolina, working for them remotely. I decided to move back to the East Coast for family and peace reasons. I also needed to live to write my next album. I plan on dropping another album in five years.
That’s me -Nathan Piland
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
It has definitely not been a smooth road.
There are multiple documentaries on Netflix about some of the things I went through. LA is a scary place sometimes.
On a less intense note, the industry in LA is full of a lot of people that are there with their biggest goal being success, and they were quick to clout chase and ladder climb and leave you once they were done with you. I actually learned through these fake friend experiences that I don’t hold my dreams higher than my friends, which was very insightful. I am very glad to have lots of great friends and I have lots of real friends in LA now
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I think the experiences I went through in LA, put me in a league of my own in a business sense. I can also spot someone’s agenda from a mile away.
I am most proud of the music that I have created, and the music videos, and all the arts surrounding that.
I am also proud to have created content that has probably received well over 10 billion views.
Is there any advice you’d like to share with our readers who might just be starting out?
Fail faster
Pricing:
- Consultation- $125 an hour
- Social media management – $75 an hour
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.tiktok.com/@nathanpiland
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thenathanpiland
- Youtube: https://youtu.be/QpkC1CMxkLc
