Welcome to Creators on the Rise, where we find and profile breakout creators who are in the midst of extraordinary growth. Today’s installment is brought to you by VidSummit.
Rachel Meaders remembers her dad waking up at 3 a.m. every single morning.
He, like the rest of her family, is entrepreneurial to the bone, and when she was a kid, he left long before dawn each day to go prep the kitchen at his burger restaurant.
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“He was constantly working. My mom was the same way with her hair salon,” Meaders tells Tubefilter. So, growing up, the question from her parents was never, What degree will you get at college? It was, What business are you going to start?
She wasn’t sure, but in college, she started experimenting with YouTube. It “didn’t work,” she says, “but I knew that I loved creating content.” She did it on the side for a couple years after college. Then COVID hit, and TikTok‘s popularity surged. Meaders installed it and started watching, and before long, one particular video caught her eye.
“I think I had seen a video of a girl posting something from Walmart. It was a little toy or something, and it did really well,” she says. “I was like, ‘I have a couple of Amazon products that people absolutely need to know about. Because back then it wasn’t like everyone had two-day Prime shipping. Before the pandemic, it wasn’t as big of a deal to shop on Amazon as it’s now. I was like, ‘Maybe I should make a video.'”
She thought that, and then…didn’t do it. She almost did, but “talked myself off a ledge 100 times, probably for two months straight,” she says. Her husband was the one to jangle her a little, telling her if she wanted to do it, she should just try, and not care if anyone watched and/or liked what she made.
Turned out, a lot of people both watched and liked her videos. Now she’s got more than 2 million followers on TikTok who tune in to her videos (most of them unsponsored) spotlighting products she finds, yes, on Amazon, but also from small businesses just like the ones her family built.
Check out our chat with her below.
@rachel_meaders I have them linked in my bio!!👻🧡 #floatingcandles #harrypotter #halloween #halloweendecor #halloweendiy #amazon #amazonfinds #diyhalloween #floatingcandle ♬ Hedwig’s Theme – John Williams
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tubefilter: Hey there! Let’s jump right in: Tell us about where you grew up and your life before you became a creator.
Rachel Meaders: My name is Rachel Meaders. I’m from Texas, born and raised in Texas. I’m from the Panhandle in a town called Amarillo. I now live in Dallas with my husband. We just celebrated our three-year anniversary.
Tubefilter: Congratulations!
Rachel Meaders: Thank you! Then we also have a little boy. I say that we “just had” a little boy, but he’s eight months old now, so it’s been a while.
Tubefilter: Born in January, right?
Rachel Meaders: Yes. He’s moving and grooving. I set him down on the ground and he’s scurrying across and I can’t find him half the time. It’s crazy. It’s a whole new world for me. We live in Dallas currently. What I was doing before, this was my occupation. I graduated from A&M. I was planning on being a wedding planner. That was my original goal with everything. I really didn’t know what I was going to do while I was in college, but that was the route I wanted to take at the time.
Then I fell into doing marketing. I started running social media channels for some Texas country music artists out of Austin. I lived in Austin, and that’s where I met my husband, after I graduated, and then moved up to Fort Worth and started doing a bigger marketing role for my family’s iced tea franchise. Started the marketing team there. Then the pandemic hit, and I happened to post my first video, and everything took off from there.
Tubefilter: You happened to post your first video. How did that work for you?
Rachel Meaders: Back in college, I actually tried the whole makeup YouTube route that a lot of people were trying to do at the time, and it didn’t work, but I knew that I loved creating content. It was so peaceful to me to create content and to come up with new ideas. It was just an art for me that I really was attracted to, and it didn’t quite work out. I did that for a couple of years just for fun on the side. I didn’t tell any of my friends. Only my mom knew. It was just something I was just playing around with on my own and it didn’t work out.
Then when we moved to Fort Worth or Dallas now, and the pandemic was starting to hit and TikTok was on the rise, I had told my husband, I’m like, “I saw a video of a girl posting something from Walmart. It was a little toy or something, and it did really well.” I was like, “I have a couple of Amazon products that people absolutely need to know about.” Because back then it wasn’t like everyone had two-day Prime shipping. Before the pandemic, it wasn’t as big of a deal to shop on Amazon as it’s now. I was like, “Maybe I should make a video.”
I talked to myself off a ledge 100 times, probably for two months straight. Then one day in May, we were driving to go on a walk with our dogs, and he was like, “Just make the video and post it. I don’t why you’re being silly about this. Who cares? Who sees it? Why aren’t you just trying?” I did. It probably got a couple of maybe 10,000 views. I was like, “I have zero followers.” I had zero followers. I was like, “This is crazy.” It was really fun to find more products and do more videos.
Probably by the 10th video, we had many millions of views, and within a couple of months, we hit a million followers, which was insane to me. I still can’t fathom that kind of a number. Since then it took off. I didn’t even know I could make a living from it at the time either. It was just for fun. Then eventually we realized there was an affiliate program with Amazon, and it became both of our jobs.
Tubefilter: Oh, both of you. That’s very cool.
Rachel Meaders: I ended up quitting my job about a year into doing social media once I realized that we were making enough to sustain our lives. Then when we realized that I needed more help with filming and getting products. It just wasn’t ideal for him to be going into a job every day when I needed extra hands here to help me film and produce content, because we were making content every single day. I think about a year and a half in, he ended up quitting his job, and now it’s what we both do full-time.
Tubefilter: Very cool! I know you post across multiple platforms, with TikTok as your main. Can you talk a little bit more about your strategy there?
Rachel Meaders: I would say at the beginning, yes, TikTok was where everything started. Instagram Reels hadn’t launched yet, so TikTok was mainly the only short-form video at the time. There was no YouTube Shorts, there was no Reels. TikTok was it for about eight months. Then once they started talking about the idea of TikTok being banned in the U.S. we were like, “Oh no, we just started. We’re just getting the hang of things. What do we do?”
Everyone’s idea, once you go viral, in a sense, is how do you diversify your audience? How do you push your audience to other platforms just in case anything was to happen? You could have multiple streams of revenue at the same time and just touch all the bases. About the same time that TikTok was talking about maybe not being allowed in the U.S. anymore, Reels came up. We started repurposing old content into Reels, but then also producing the same content, but posting them to both platforms. Different videos did well on some and different videos did well on the other.
Now I would say TikTok, it’s kind of…Everyone has gotten the hang of TikTok and how to go viral and what the recipe is there. Reels is still very fresh, in a sense. One video doesn’t go viral in both every single time. It just gives and takes. You have to play with your videos and how you do your intro and how you do your voiceover and different things of that nature. We started to diversify probably about eight or nine months into doing this as a job and that took off pretty quickly once Reels came up.
Tubefilter: That’s good. I feel like there’s such a split with Reels. People are either doing well with it or they’re like, “I have no idea. I have no idea what I’m doing.” I’m glad it’s working for you.
Rachel Meaders: Yes, some days. Sometimes it doesn’t, but Instagram is different in the fact that it shows your content to your followers, and it actually does. On TikTok, I have 2.3 million followers and I can post a video, and no one will see it. I have followers all the time comment and be like, “Oh my gosh, you had a baby. I had no idea.” Just because you’re following someone doesn’t mean that you’re ever going to see their content again unless you’re engaging with that type of content. It’s just a toss-up on TikTok, but Instagram you’re more, not guaranteed, but you’re more guaranteed to get more of your followers to view the video and then to have that be the base before it starts getting other people who don’t follow you to watch your videos.
Tubefilter: Yeah, totally. I wanted to ask, what makes you so passionate about finding and testing these products and presenting them this way? What makes you passionate about this niche?
Rachel Meaders: I think it’s fun. It’s so much fun for me. I come from a family of entrepreneurs where it wasn’t really– When I was raised, it wasn’t really like, you’re going to go to college, you’re going to get a degree in what you’re going to do, and you’re going to go do that job. It was more like, eventually you’re going to start a business, so what are you going to do?
My dad woke up every single morning at 3:00 AM. Was at our burger restaurant until 8:00 AM prepping every single day. He would come home to eat breakfast with us before school and then would head back and be there all day. He was constantly working. My mom was the same way with her hair salon. I’ve been around people who are just hardworking and trying to grasp what marketing is and how to market for certain type of products or certain type of businesses. I love the show Shark Tank because it’s people who have small businesses that have worked so hard for their entire lives and are just waiting for a break. I think that’s where it started.
I love creating content and I love finding these cool products, but also, I feel like so many of these products deserve so much more recognition than they’re given. Or they deserve to go viral, but maybe they don’t know how to go viral or don’t know how to present a product to people that’s going to be attractive and make their views go up or make people find them easier.
I think one of the very first videos that really went viral for us, I think it ended up getting almost 30 million views on TikTok, was this Bondic stick. It’s a liquid resin that basically molds things together, and you can fix anything with it. I remember I posted that video and then I got an email a couple of days later from the person who runs their Amazon sales.
He sent me a video of their warehouse of these tickets coming off the printer, hundreds and hundreds of tickets. He was like, “You don’t understand. These people were on the verge of not being able to work here anymore because we’re in the middle of a pandemic and it’s so hard to get sales. You just basically made that possible for them to keep their jobs. It completely came full circle.”
I was crying with my husband and my parents. I was like, “This is what I’m meant to do. I’m meant to shine light on these entrepreneurs or these products or these businesses that need recognition that actually are making products that help people in their everyday lives, but just don’t quite know or quite have a grasp on how to do it,” because marketing and social media changes every single day and it’s so hard to keep up with it. I think it just goes back to, I’m from a family of entrepreneurs and they work so hard to figure out how to get to that next sale and so for me just to be able to help other brands and other people do that is just all I need.
Tubefilter: I get you! It’s cool that you get to spotlight these small companies.
Rachel Meaders: It’s a lot of fun.
Tubefilter: It’s interesting, before the pandemic, I mostly spoke to independent creators, and then during the pandemic, a lot of small businesses started going viral. I was encountering a lot of small business owners who either had their own video go viral, or they had somebody talk about their product and go viral. It completely changes their lives. It’s just very cool to see.
Rachel Meaders: Yes, it’s great. It’s so different than it used to be because now with TikTok and Instagram Reels, you’re actually able to discover new content. Before it was only influencers who had a good following, and that was your only hope as far as marketing went with influencers. Now anyone can go viral with zero followers. It’s just a completely different world as far as getting discovered or rediscovered than it was before the short-form videos were created.
Tubefilter: Can you talk about how production works for you behind the scenes? Because obviously, you’re getting in a ton of products. You’re managing a ton of products. You’re filming a ton of products.
Rachel Meaders: You don’t want to see my house. [laughs]
Tubefilter: I can imagine! What’s the average week look like for you in terms of producing videos?
Rachel Meaders: It’s different than it used to be. It used to be like, we were churning out content constantly. It was a post every single day, no matter what, don’t skip a day. If you skip a day, our views would go down slightly, and we’d have to build it back up. It used to be every single day, because no one really was doing what I was doing, and almost every single time got a ton of views. Now a lot of people are doing Amazon finds, a lot of people are doing what I’m doing, and so it’s more strategic than just pumping out content.
We have to do a lot more research as far as what goes into what products we want to post because a lot of products have been posted about now, obviously, and so trying to find new products that people haven’t heard about that actually help people or that solve a problem in their everyday lives a lot of the time is what we’re doing. We’re sitting on our computer just researching, trying to find something that helps you or thinking of problems that you have in your everyday life. Just like you’re inventing a product and trying to think of something and finding a solution on Amazon or just online in general.
That’s a good bulk of what our week consists of, but outside of taking care of the baby, we switch off taking care of the baby, and then I’ll be posting content on Instagram throughout the day, and then usually during nap time, we both tag team as far as creating a video. When we used to be posting every single day, now we probably try to get three, maybe four videos up a week, just because the filming takes longer. We have to be more intentional with how we show products. We still want it to look organic and natural, and not like a sale, and showing how the product works. Also, we have to test out the product before we post it because we never will share a product that doesn’t actually work.
That happens a lot of the time. Half the products that come in don’t work. Testing out the products, I would say probably three to four videos a week. From start to finish, from research to the end, probably, each video takes fiveish hours to get posted. Probably an hour of filming, maybe 35, 40 minutes of editing, and then you do a voiceover, and then You have to add the text at the beginning, and then you have to actually post it and link the product and there’s a lot that goes into it.
Usually, our peak hours for posting are at the end of the day, like right after the baby goes to bed, and so it’s usually from like eight o’clock to 10:00. That’s the sole time that we’re posting a video and then before eight o’clock is when we’re trying to create content throughout the day and trying to film for the next video that’s going to go up in the next day or two and try to get that prepped so that we’re not like filming the same day that we’re planning on posting a video.
Tubefilter: Have you gotten any sponsorships? What would you say is the percentage split between sponsored brands that you’re working with and then products you’re just finding out there yourself?
Rachel Meaders: I honestly probably have done five or six paid partnerships on TikTok and Reels. I think a lot of that goes back to the fact that my brand is showing products that solve a problem. I do want to diversify. I do want to start showing more personal things in life, and I’ve got into that when I was pregnant and having the baby and just talking about personal things. Outside of that, when I’m showing actual product videos, sponsored videos, I’ve only done five or six of them because I’m really picky as far as what I want to post.
I think a majority of people follow me because they know when they see the intro of me and my husband or now me and my husband and my baby. It’s the same intro every time since day one. That solidifies, “Okay, I know I can watch this because every time she posts a product, it’s a cool product. It works. Anytime I’ve ever bought any of her products, they’ve worked. She always tells the truth like it’s genuine.”
I never want to post something just because I’m getting paid for it because that diminishes the value of my brand, if that makes sense. I want people to know that I’m never going to post a product that I actually haven’t tried out, that doesn’t work. I just want it to be very genuine. I very, very much pick and choose very carefully as far as what products I’m actually going to post. If it’s a paid partnership, it’s very, very slim that those get through and actually go up, if that makes sense. Money is attractive, obviously, but long-term that wasn’t ideal for me.
Tubefilter: Gotcha. I wanted to ask a little bit about the Amazon affiliate partnership. You said that was a big part of you guys becoming financially stable in this business. Can you tell me more about that experience?
Rachel Meaders: 100%. When I started, I didn’t know that was even a thing. It probably took about six months. Actually, it probably was around September, I think I got a comment on one of my videos that was like, “If you’re not making money from this, what are you doing? I know you’re selling millions and millions of dollars of Amazon products every month, you should be making a cut from this.” I was like, “Yes, I should.” I didn’t even know that was the thing. I’m putting all this effort into it. That would be crazy if I could make a living from it.
I figured out that that was a thing. They had an affiliate program. It wasn’t very known at the time. It took a while to get approved or accepted into the program. Now it’s just like you apply and you get in, but back then it was very much more strict, I would say. With being in it, obviously, you make a small percentage of all the sales that you make on Amazon. It’s changed a lot since the beginning because as far as certain platforms are regulating whether it opens the Amazon app on your phone or not.
Sometimes it will open in a browser from TikTok instead of the Amazon app because they don’t they don’t want you to leave the app, so they want to keep you on TikTok and they don’t want you to go off onto another app. TikTok has recently, in the last year or so, not allowed you to open the actual Amazon app where Instagram you can with your links. I think a lot of TikTokers have had a hard time getting their sales through TikTok with the Amazon affiliate program in specific because it was driving so many people off the app. You make a small percentage based on your sales, whatever is in their cart, you’ll get a certain percentage depending on what category it’s in. That’s pretty much how it works.
Tubefilter: To wrap up, do you have any plans or goals you’re aiming for? A trajectory for the future you want to talk about?
Rachel Meaders: As far as on social media? In general?
Tubefilter: However you want to answer!
Rachel Meaders: We want many kids. We want a big family. Both of my brothers are 18 years and seven years older than me, and so I grew up almost like an only child in a way. Not really, I’m still very close to them, but we both want a really big family. That’s obviously in the cards for us because we’re still pretty young, I would say, but as far as social media, I mean, riding this thing as long as it lets us go. I mean, you just never know. Everything changes so quickly that it could drop off tomorrow, but we’re trying to invest in other things and have other bigger investments going on in our lives that can sustain us depending on where God takes us really.
In the future, just having a big family and trying to work for ourselves. We love working for ourselves. It’s so much fun being able to raise our kid together but also not having to work for anyone else. It’s just it’s so nice to have your own creative freedom and do exactly what you want to do when you want to do it. I mean, that’s just been the biggest blessing in general.
It’s just us being able to work for ourselves and be able to make our own calls and do exactly what we want to do when we want to do it and not having to answer to anyone. Continue to work for ourselves, continue to grow our family, grow our business, whatever avenue that takes, maybe build a brand one day of our own. I mean, I don’t know where that’s going to go, but eventually, that would be nice to actually have our own product, our own line of something.
Tubefilter: Well, it runs in the family.
Rachel Meaders: I know. It would be great. I have good mentors in line that can help me out for sure. Yes, that’s the plan.
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