In 2021 I started a French language personal finance brand with no audience and no budget. Three years later it has 54,200 followers and sells a course. Here is what I actually did, including the part I got wrong.
2021Launch, in the middle of the crypto bull run
Year 110,000 followers
Year 250,000 followers, and the first sale
Year 3Roughly 1,000 videos, one a day
NowWeekly, with the weight moving to YouTube
The starting point
It was 2021, in the middle of the crypto bull run. Money and attention were pouring into anything that explained investing, and I could see the window was open.
I was already investing my own money, so I had a head start on the subject, and I kept learning as I published. Noticing that momentum mattered more than anything else I did afterwards. You do not create a wave like that. You spot it and you move.
What I was actually after
Not followers. A community.
The plan was to build in public: share what I was learning while I was learning it, and let people follow the process instead of a finished product. That framing shaped everything, because it meant I could start before I felt ready.
The method: publish every day, for three years
I published daily for three years, roughly a thousand videos, while teaching full time. That was 15 to 20 hours a week on top of the job, sustained because I genuinely enjoy the work.
I tested every format going. What worked was putting myself in frame. In a niche where most accounts hide behind stock footage and a voiceover, being the person who says it out loud is the thing that separates you.
~1,000videos published in three years, while teaching full time
Consistency was not a discipline problem. It was a format problem. Once the format was something I could produce in one take, publishing daily stopped being hard.
The decision that changed the output
Early on I spent a lot of time on visual polish. I stopped, and moved that effort into storytelling: structure, hook, payoff.
This is a rule, not laziness. In personal finance people come for the substance, so the form can be plain. On my travel brand Ju.en.vie I do the exact opposite, because travel and sport are judged on how they look before anyone reads a word.
Same operator, opposite priorities, decided by the niche rather than by taste.
Platform strategy: reach first, then authority
I built on TikTok because I understand how virality works there. From a standing start it is the fastest place to get reach, and it took the account to 50,000.
I am now shifting weight to YouTube. It is slower, but the content keeps working for months instead of days, and in personal finance it carries more authority. TikTok won the audience. YouTube is what keeps it.
Publishing went from daily to once a week when the goal changed from reach to depth.
A YouTube thumbnail. This is where the visual effort goes now, because the platform rewards it and the content has to last.
Results
54,200followers across TikTok (50,000), Instagram (2,200) and YouTube (2,000)
1 yearto the first 10,000 followers
2 yearsto 50,000
13paying students on the course, De 0 à Investisseur, at 147 EUR
~1,000videos published, one a day for three years
2 yearsbetween opening the account and the first sale, which is the mistake below
How the course actually sold
Nothing sophisticated. A link in the bio, and I talked about the course inside the videos themselves rather than treating selling as a separate activity.
Almost every student came from TikTok, because that is where the reach was. But a good number of them only decided after a direct conversation on Instagram. Reach happened on one platform, the decision happened in a quieter one.
The real lesson took me two years to see: personal branding is what sells. People bought because they had watched me for months, not because of anything on a sales page.
That reframes the format choice completely. Putting myself in frame was not a content preference. It was the commercial decision, I just did not know it at the time.
What I would do differently
Both of my mistakes were commercial, not editorial.
I would launch paid products far sooner. Two years passed between opening the account and my first sale. I spent that whole time building an audience before asking it for anything, and the patience cost me more than it earned.
I also waited too long before approaching brands about partnerships. I had the audience to justify those conversations well before I started having them.
The content was never the bottleneck. Monetising it was.
