– By combining those things, having those elements of polarity is what sparked the conversation that got my videos off the grounds and into the algorithms ultimately. (bright music) – Today, I'm very excited
to be joined by Kat Norton. If you don't know who Kat is,
you need to know who she is. She's a content strategist and coach who helps businesses effortlessly
scale their business. She's also the Founder
and Chief Excel Officer at Miss Excel. Kat, welcome to the show. How are you doing today? – Thank you so much for
having me, I'm doing great. – I'm super excited
that you're here today. And what we're gonna explore today is how to create viral content
on TikTok and Instagram. My notes said virtual, I'm
glad I didn't say virtual, but I'm going to say viral, and we're gonna keep that in there. So Kat before we go down
the fascinating trails that I know are gonna
be absolutely amazing when people hear everything
you've been doing.
I wanna back up a little bit
and talk about your story, 'cause I think your story in its own right is absolutely amazing. So tell everybody how you got into TikTok, start wherever you wanna
start, I can't wait to hear it. – Absolutely. So this is my favorite story to talk about and it really begins
back in March of 2020. So with the start of the pandemic, I found myself no longer traveling every week for work with my day job and I was really back in my parents' house and questioning what I
was doing with my life, what's my purpose, what lights me up.
And since I was no longer traveling, I had all this extra time on my hand. So I went deep into a rabbit hole of improving myself, reading
books, doing meditations and all different things
to try to eventually reach a higher version of myself. So I'm down this rabbit hole. It's March, April, May. And all of a sudden I start
getting these intuitive hits for business ideas. And I'll never forget I was on the phone with one of my best friends, Anna and we were talking about
different business ideas, things I could do to take on a side hustle now that I had some more time on my hands.
And I remember her being like, what if you put the Excel tips on TikTok. 'Cause backstory at my day job on top of doing the
securitization reviews for banks, I was also hosting Excel
trainings internally for the company because it was something I had always loved to do. So she was like, what if
he put the tips on TikTok? And initially I had a lot of resistance. I was like, TikTok, I'm
27 with a corporate job I can't just start dancing on TikTok. But my gut was like, make the TikTok. So for the next like 48 hours, I remember my brain
and my gut were at war. It was like my brain being like, you absolutely cannot do this. And my gut was like, you must do this.
And I'll never forget it
was a Friday afternoon, my schedule magically
clears like three o'clock, calendar invites fallen off. And I was like, all right, I'm going to do a dry run of this whole TikTok thing. And this is early stage pandemic. So I was not doing my hair
or makeup for anything at that point. So I'm like, all right, I'm
just gonna do a test run.
I'm in my childhood bedroom, I move the furniture out of the way. And I film myself to
this vision that I had, which was me teaching the
left and right functions in Excel to that Drake
song, the "Toosie Slide". Left foot up, right slide, to the left and the right function. So I record this video and
I look back and I'm like, oh, this is actually really cool. And if you haven't seen my content before the typical style or
least way it started out was me dancing to a trending song with the Excel screen above my head and step by step showing what it is, kinda tapping into that type of content. So I love the video I made and I'm like, you know what, I'm just gonna make 10 more right here right now. So I go in the bathroom,
I do my hair, my makeup, I run back in my room and
I film these 10 videos and start editing them
till late in the night 'cause at this point I was so
lit up by what I was doing. Something in me was just
pushing me to keep going, keep doing this, Friday night activities.
So I decide, it was
like a day or two later to post that video. And it was actually, it
was the next morning. I was half asleep it's like
six o'clock in the morning and something wakes me up and
I turn to Mike, and I'm like, my boyfriend, and I'm like,
"Miss Excel, that's the name. "Miss Excel." And he's like, "What?" And I'm like, "Miss Excel." And I like grab my phone
and I check the handles and they were available
on TikTok, Instagram.
And the cool thing about
the TikTok space too was when I first started this, there was no one else really
teaching Excel on TikTok, which was in my evaluation process. But I'm like, do I do this? Do I not? That was a key factor, I was like, okay, either the audience on TikTok is just not interested in Excel or it just has not been done before. So I grabbed the handle
and I started posting on June 7th, 2020, my first video. And by my 4th video, I
was doing one per day it reaches a hundred thousand views and it was this one to the X look up to that song by DMX,
"X Gon' Give It To Ya". And all over a sudden it hits
a hundred thousand views. So at this point I'm just like,
whoa, my phone's blowing up.
And by my 6th video, the CEO
of an IT company reaches out and is like, "Hey, I
love your teaching style. "I'm looking to create
trainings in G suite products," so the Google version of
everything I was doing, "For students, parents and teachers." Because this is when the schools were all starting to go digital. And I was like, okay,
clearly I'm a Microsoft gal, but the products are
similar, I can teach myself. So I formed an LLC, bought a
green screen and a ring light. I moved my childhood bedroom furniture into all the corners out of the way, I had a little 12 by 12 room. And I started filming this content and selling it back to this guy. So by my six day on TikTok, I had a paying side hustle. I was still working my day job, like 40, 50 hours a week. And then I was also creating
the Miss Excel content because at this point I'm like, well, it's helping a lot of people, it's an opportunity magnet.
So I kept pushing the content out. And then it was around the third week where I had my first video go viral and it reached 3.7 million views over a span of a few days. And I'll never forget the feeling of picking up my phone and just seeing all these notifications. Every time I would pull
down and hit refresh, it would be 15 new
followers, 15 new followers, like the whole screen was filling up. And by the end of that time period, I looked down and I had a hundred thousand followers on TikTok. And I was like, whoa,
like now what do I do? 'Cause I was never the influencer type. If you looked at my
personal Instagram account, you'd be like, all right, this girl does not know what she's doing.
So at this point I'm like,
okay, I need to learn, I need to learn more about these platforms 'cause I'd been editing everything off the apps as well. And this was all around
the time where TikTok was potentially getting
banned in the United States. So… Yeah. So, I had a lot of people being like, TikTok, good luck with that, your whole thing's about to go away. And I'm just like, best to hedge my risk and create an Instagram then. So I create an Instagram
account and to my surprise, only 2000 people pulled over. So very different audiences,
a lot of them didn't convert. So I was like, okay, I'm going to need to go viral on Instagram. So this was around the
time when Instagram reels were coming out. So I started transferring the content from TikTok, pre-watermark. So I was editing everything
off the platforms and posting them on
Instagram reels as well. And within a few weeks on that platform, it went viral as well and I
grew 50,000 people in a week. And then I just kinda kept
going viral on both platforms for the next few months and
just growing a following.
So now at this point I had probably around like three, 400,000 followers
across the platforms. It's October of 2020 and Miss Excel, isn't making any money yet, I still just had my side
hustle and my day job, but the actual Miss
Excel accounts weren't. And so many people had been asking me to create an Excel course. And I didn't know the first
thing about course making. So I'm googling around
I'm just like, okay, easiest course platform,
easiest video editors, trying to kinda learn the ropes. So I'd be at night I was
teaching myself these things. And around October, I
was like, you know what, I need to make this course. Everyone's asking for it, it
would serve the community, it could also create an income stream where I could potentially leave my day job and run my own day and my own business.
So I took two weeks off from my day job on a vacation in my living room and I mapped out the most
fun, creative course on Excel that I possibly muster up. I sat there with that outline, just infusing it with as much creativity in every video as I
could, because I was like, this has to be on brand
for Miss Excel, right. I cannot have a boring course after having the type
of videos that I have, where we're mixing
dancing and music and fun. So I sat there, mapped out the course, was a hundred training videos. And then I filmed all hundred videos and edited them all myself as well. And then I started selling it. Before it was ready, which is a nice, fun, anxiety, inducing method to make you get your courses
done, highly recommend. And so I started selling
them Black Friday. So it was November of 2020. I started selling my Excel course and by January of 2021, two months later, the passive income from the
course sales every month was greater than what I was
making per month at my day job. So at that point I was like, all right, I need to rethink about priorities because my day job was
getting 40 hours a week, 50.
And Miss Excel took me like 10, 15 once the courses were done. So I was like, I would be dangerous if I freed up 40 more
hours in my week again. Like I could scale this
thing, I could go off. So in January of 2021, I
put in my two weeks notice, which was an amazing and wild time because half the company
knew about my TikTok, my securitizations group and they're just like, oh, cute TikTok. And then the other half had no idea. So it was a really fun day actually like kinda coming clean, it was kinda like my in Montana moment. I feel like I had a secret
life on the internet that no one knew about. So I was able to come
out and tell everybody, here's what I'm doing and it's working and I'm gonna pursue it full time, and they were so incredibly supportive. The company actually hired
me back now as a vendor where I teach Excel
routinely to their employees, which has been awesome. But everyone was super supportive, they're like, get your dreams. And I left. So by February of 2021, I was on my own running this business.
We had barely made our first six figures, still in the baby phases. And I was like, okay,
everyone wants more courses. They want advanced Excel courses, they want PowerPoint, Word, Outlook, OneNote, Teams,
Google Sheets, a kid's course. So over the next few months in that span, I proceeded to start whipping
out all these other courses. And now in April, that was
another pretty big milestone, 2021 was when I got my
first press article. So this was Business Insider
reached out, and side note, all the press that I've received, I've never worked with a PR firm, it's all just been organic traction like writers will reach out
to me and we do the stories. 'Cause I honestly, I had
no idea how press worked. I didn't realize people work with PR firms and things like that. I was kinda just flying
by the seat of my pants and creating and doing what lit me up. So I had my first big
article on Business Insider and then that started trending.
So I created more courses,
the business starts scaling. I did partnerships with Microsoft. All these things start coming into play. And at that point I
had three courses going and October is when it really,
of 2021, started lighting up. So around October I did a podcast with the "Verge" with Nilay Patel. And that episode ended up
being turned into an article. And then the article blasted out to like 50 different
outlets across the globe. All this press was coming in. So many more people were
finding the accounts. I was still going viral
about every month or so between the press and
TikTok and Instagram. So I just kinda kept growing the audience. And at the same time, I also introduced webinars
into my ecosystem. So I started doing these hour long power packed Excel classes. And at the end I would
offer an awesome discount on my courses if people wanted
to keep learning with me. And that's how I was able to create those occasional six figure days was through the webinar process.
So I really started
honing in on that craft. I built out seven more courses, so I now have 10 across
the Microsoft Suite, Google Sheets and a student course as well and bundling the courses together to get up to a little higher price point. And that's how the business really went from six figures to
seven figures in about a year.
And the whole thing has been just the absolute time of my life. It has been so much fun to now start to like take on new projects. I finally started hiring
people which helped. So I hired a virtual assistant,
I have a graphic designer. I hired my boyfriend as
my VP of sales and CFO. So he's been doing all my corporate deals 'cause I also do corporate training. So live virtual custom Excel sessions and we do bulk sales and I
also retire hired my mom. So she's officially my mama-ger now. So I retired her from her day job. So she's kinda on call
for things like that.
And yeah, it has been the
time of my life over here. – I love that, mama-ger,
I've never heard that before, but that is so cool. So Kat there's so much there so fascinating to see how you went from just a crazy idea to
creating short videos, to ultimately building
an incredible business specifically on the back
of short form video, TikTok and Instagram. So there are some people
listening right now who maybe are thinking
to themselves, all right, maybe I've got something inside of me that I can teach people
or maybe someone inside of the business could teach people. And it's fascinating
how Kat took something that doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, which is Excel, right. And TikTok and combine them together and it just shows you that you
can do some amazing things. But what do you wanna say
to people that are not sure, even though they heard your story, why should they consider short form video on TikTok and/or Instagram? What's your thoughts to tell
them if they're skeptical? – It's so easy to get into.
That's the first big part. I knew nothing about the platforms. All of the information is
really at our fingertips and that's incredibly empowering, right. So I remember literally
sitting in my childhood bedroom being like, what do I
wanna do with my life? How can I create things? How can I get things out of my head and get them into a cool piece of content? And that's really the amazing thing about short form video, right? We can also go in and test lots of things. So it's not like you have to create an hour long YouTube video
explaining all these concepts. These shorter videos allow
you to hop onto trends to get creative, to try new things because it's less of an investment in, okay, I need to map out this whole video and then edit the whole
thing and all that. It just really allows you
to be so much more nimble and it really helps you play
into the algorithms too, in terms of TikTok, it's
a lot easier to go viral and Instagram and things like that.
So for me, it's just the
way I was framing it. So I really just look at it
as an outlet for my creativity and then go in there and
create things and that's bam. – Fascinating. And for folks that are
here in the ambiance, in the background, there's a little storm
going on where Kat is, which is kinda cool to hear it 'cause where I am, we don't
get those kinda storms. Okay, so one of the questions I've got is, are you finding that some
of the very first videos you've done are still being watched today? – Oh yeah. So especially through press articles, a lot of them get linked up again or we created a whole new product, this amazing newsletter
with life tips and tactics. And in that we are linking on occasion like certain videos where I'm
demonstrating the tech tips. So some of those end up
back in the algorithm again. – Very cool, okay. So a lot of people wanna
know, what is your strategy? How is it…
And let's start at a macro level, how is it that you go about
creating this content? Because my guess is someone else could go create a video
with the exact same words that you created, right, and maybe even with the
Excel thing behind it, but it might not be the
same as what you do. So what is it about the way you do videos that we can learn from
like at a macro level? – Yeah, so I mean, with my strategy, there are three main pillars.
There is polarity, creativity
and energy management. Which polarity is more so having content that has that duality to it
that sparks conversation. Creativity obviously is having things that are cool and different and an authentic expression of you. And then energy management is how we are showing up in the world. And that is just what
has allowed my business to flow and grow so effortlessly versus having that like hustle mentality, because I've been able
to manage my energy. – So let's dig in on every one of these, let's start with polarity. Let's start with defining
what you mean by polarity and why you feel like this is important, then we'll get into
like the how side of it. – Yeah, so I love to have
videos that have a healthy, I like to go a healthy element
to polarity to them, right. 'Cause polarity kind of a
negative connotation at times. But for me, the polarity
in my content for example, was when I combined two
things that were traditionally never combined like Excel and dancing, by combining those things, having those elements of polarity is what sparked the conversation that got my videos off the grounds and into the algorithms ultimately.
Because if you were just
scrolling through TikTok and saw a plain Excel
screen early on before being an Excel influencer was a thing. If you were scrolling through
and it didn't apply to you, you weren't gonna comment
like, oh, an Excel tip, you would just scroll on by, right. You wouldn't have anything to say. And if it applied to you,
you may comment on it. When it has the element of polarity to it, that's what really sparks a conversation. So I had people who absolutely
loved what I was doing. They were like, wow, I
would've never thought to combine Excel and dancing and music. And then you had people
who, hey, what you're doing? And they're just like,
what is this girl doing? And then you have these people in between who are just so like,
what is happening here? And so it just kinda generates this whole other level of emotion yet it's in a healthy way, right.
It's just by combining two things that aren't traditionally combined, but it's something people have never seen. And by having that element to it, is what allowed it to really
pick up in the algorithms. Because people were
talking about my videos, my videos were getting press, people were sharing them. People were like, whoa, did you know about this trick? Whoa, did you know what she's doing? Whoa, I never thought to
do something like that. Like there were so many elements to it verse a more traditional format. And the key with polarity as well that I like to mention
is it has to be things that are authentic to you, right. Because if you hate dancing and you post yourself
dancing to a left function, it most likely will not go viral because you are not in
your authentic self.
So for me personally, if
you knew me like growing up, I'm obsessed with dancing, I'm always just dancing
around, that is my thing. I worked on my high school radio station. I've always loved music,
all different genres. So that was always my thing. And then Excel is something that I've been incredibly passionate about and I've been teaching on
the side of my day job. So it was kinda just
things that I loved already and that were also authentic to me, so that way when I showed up on camera, I was in my full
authentic self verse being kind of a shell of myself
or forcing myself to do it, or just feeling kinda uncomfortable because the reader is really able to see through that, right. So like the person, the
recipient of your video, if you look slightly
uncomfortable, they can tell, even if it's on a subconscious level and it won't resonate with them as much.
So it's really important to find things that are authentic to
you and not force them if you are looking to create
that polarity in your videos. – I'd love to… I think I understand what you're saying and lemme echo back to you. Polarity is when two things that don't normally go
together are used together and it kinda stop… And the reason why it works is because it stops people that's strange you know what I mean, there's something different about that, I wasn't expecting that. I would love to talk about some examples that maybe don't involve dancing, just 'cause I know so many people are not just dancing on TikTok. What are some examples of polarity that we could be thinking
about on Instagram or TikTok that could somehow accomplish
the very same things? Do you have any thoughts on that? – I think it really just
depends on what you love, right.
And just being able to combine things and think outside the box
from a creative perspective. Like if you love golf and real estate, you can find a cool creative way to combine both of those, right. Like maybe hitting the golf swings, you're like popping out, you're
hitting a real estate tip or just like having
something creative to it. No matter what the subjects are, it's really a matter of
tapping into that creativity and finding ways that these things that you love kinda locks. 'Cause for me, if I was
designing my dream job, I'm like, okay, what are
all the things I love? I love to help people, I love
Excel and I love to dance. So that just went in and I
essentially created my dream job and threw it on a platform
and built it up from there. So if you were at the ground level and you are creating your dream scenario, what do you want included
in that scenario? And it's interesting to try to challenge the traditional norms in that space because your conscious mind may be like, oh, you can't do that,
you can't have it all, you can't combine all these things, but I would challenge that notion and have you really tap
into your creativity to figure out ways that
there can be overlay because most likely when you are playing in that polarity realm,
you are creating things that people have not seen before.
And that's what creates
the polarity, right. Because if people have
traditionally seen it together, like peanut butter and jelly, you are not creating that polarity. So it's really important
to kinda take a step back, consciously understand that
it is probably something you have not seen before, right. And then have that confidence in yourself and self worth to be able
to go in and give the go. – I'm thinking about
myself as I'm listening to and what I really love
talking about is marketing and entrepreneurship and business.
These are things that I
absolutely fascinated by, but I'm also into NFTs and crypto, right. So I started this new show called the "Crypto Business" podcast. I took crypto and business
and combined them together because not many people
are talking about business in the world of crypto. They're talking about finance and they're talking about tech. So I would imagine that that's an example. And if I was to apply
that to short form videos where everybody else is
talking about finance, when it comes to crypto and
I'm talking about business, all of a sudden, that's kinda
what you're talking about, isn't it? – Absolutely and I
absolutely love that podcast. I was binge listening
to it over the weekend. And I just love that you bring that angle to the crypto space.
'Cause for me being in business, not particularly finance is something that opened
a lot of doors for me. Like seeing the different
ways that blockchain could be applied in
different business scenarios, I thought that was really eye opening. – Very cool. All right, so we talked about polarity, let's talk about the other second one and I don't have it in front… Oh creativity.
– Yes. – Clearly you are very creative, but let's talk about some… Let's talk about, you've got something to your process when it comes to creativity,
so let's share what it is. – So when it comes to creativity, I find that a lot of people get held up in limiting beliefs around the subject with the notion that
like, I am not creative, and I would argue that and think that we all have a creative
element to ourselves, but it's just a matter of
unlayering the conditioning to allow that creativity to flow through and providing an outlet
for that creativity to be applied on. So for example, I was
a very creative child. I was always drawing and I was dreaming of having like an art
studio in my backyard, and like all these different things. And then I hopped into corporate and the extent of my creativity was making beautiful corporate PowerPoints that were just, love my PowerPoint.
