Welcome to Streamers on the Rise, where we find streamers who are growing their channels, content, and audiences in extraordinary ways. Each week we’ll talk with a creator about what goes into livestreaming–both on and off camera.
It was 2019, and Keats was having a bad time.
“I had a flood in my house. I got a nail in my tire, a speeding ticket,” he says. And he, mostly jokingly, knew just who to blame: Mercury. Ever since the planet had entered retrograde, more and more problems had cropped up for Keats.
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It was a coping mechanism, he says, to start thinking about how to make the whole situation into something funny. He was in the shower, conditioner in his hair, when he thought, What if the planets could actually talk to each other?
“The sun would run things because of gravity and everything, and then Mercury’s the closest, and then Venus, they would be friends,” he says. “Life is rough right now. Comedic relief. I was like, no, this is good. I turned off my shower and immediately got the notebook. It was all wet and everything, but I was finishing the script and then I filmed it that day.”
He posted the video on TikTok before he went to bed, and when he got up for his IT job the next morning, the video had over a million views. People loved it–and not only did they love it, they wanted more of it. TikTok only allowed 60 seconds’ worth of video back then, so Keats hadn’t managed to fit all the planets in the skit. People wanted to know where the others were. Why he hadn’t included their ruling planet. What was the deal, man??
Keats realized immediately that this could become an ongoing series. He comes from a family full of creatives, and has always been passionate about making things. Pre-TikTok, he was on YouTube for years, posting music he’d made. Now, thanks to the success of the planets series, his YouTube channel–and his music–have taken off, he’s doing well on Instagram, and he streams regularly on Twitch, another big passion of his.
Keats never expected one video to turn into his new career. But it has–and now he has big plans to take the planets series to streaming services.
Check out our chat with him below.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tubefilter: Great to speak with you! Let’s get right into it. For anyone who’s reading this and isn’t familiar with you, give me the rundown on where you’re from, cool hobbies you had as a kid, and how you ended up here.
Keats: I have a blessed background. Starting, my name is Kevin Jackman. I go by Keats. That was a nickname given to me in high school. One of my English teachers, Keats was a Romantic poet, and just came to me in my journey of life.
I grew up in a four-person household, mom, dad in Long Island, New York. Amityville, actually, to be exact, like the horror house. I grew up with my mom, dad, and my older sister by three years. Very young, very supportive family. Very happy. My dad had a good job. He was previously from the Bronx, but he worked for the telephone company and he moved us to Long Island and wanted to give us a better life than he had. He was very successful. We traveled a lot. We were always in the city. We were learning valuable skills and music was the pinnacle of our family. Alan Tusan, who is my father’s cousin and my cousin as well wrote Lady Mama Lied and then also a close cousin was Haywood Nelson in a sitcom called What’s Happening with reruns and all of that.
I come from a starred family and I really enjoy entertainment. I was a performer myself. I picked up the trumpet and I played the trumpet, I still do, and I excelled at that. I played in local churches growing up. The mayor personally requested me when I was in high school to play taps for all of the memorial ceremonies, like Memorial Day, Veterans Day, 9/11, things of that nature.
I was an Eagle Scout, I made Eagle, I was a volunteer firefighter in my town, but Amityville is a pretty small town. Long Island is a lot of small towns connected, so everyone knew everyone and I was friends with everyone and I had a great upbringing. Then I went to school for engineering in Florida. I went to Florida Institute of Technology, a private institution, and I thought I wanted to be a mechanical engineer because I knew I was a creator, but I went there and I slowly discovered that the numbers aren’t for me. But creation is.
I switched to marketing so I could focus on social media and creating my music. I was heavy into music production in this time. I would just produce, make music, do shows locally, and that spiraled out until I graduated, got my degree, and then moved to Atlanta to basically pursue a life as an artist while I used my degree for IT. I worked for a private IT company for three years, and then just before the pandemic, TikTok blew up.
That’s just condensing it down to a lot. I put music to the side a little bit and discovered that I could act and make these skits that were touching people all over the world. I have NASA in my DMs because of it, I’ve got so many opportunities that stemmed from there. I just tried to just maintain being a creator and figuring out ways to harness different talents and package them together to present so that we can just even further my career, and grow it.
That’s condensing everything down a little bit. Please let me know if you have any questions or what else you want to know.
Tubefilter: No, that was great! I know you said you recognized that you were a creator very early, but did you ever consider content creation earlier? What sparked your interest in TikTok?
Keats: I love these questions. I love doing this. I love sharing. The term “content” is so broad now.
Tubefilter: Oh, yes. Agree. It’s an industry term, but to be honest, I’m not very fond of using it.
Keats: Yes, but I like it because there are creators in– I’m the biggest advocate for not being in a box. There are so many creators, and all of it is content. It may or may not be for you, but it’s all content at the end of the day. Content, with me, my main focus of content was– I had a very narrow scope from what I knew, because all of this industry is very new. A lot is buzzing. I thought I was going to be a rapper, and I’d make music, and I produce my own beats, and I just keep dropping music until the shows got bigger and the money came in abundance but then life starts going and you find out new interests.
I was putting out music until somebody told me to get on TikTok. I just got addicted to it. 2019. Then I started trying to do lip-syncs. Well, I did lip-syncs successfully, and then that blew up. For the first time, I had a piece of content that was 600,000 views. Before maybe I had 50,000 views, but TikTok was like, “Oh, these are big numbers and I have to jump now.” I went into videos and skit-making right after that and then I came out with my most famed series, which is the Planets series. If the planets had a meeting. That propelled me to all new levels, like hundreds of thousands of followers a month, and TikTok became top priority at that point.
Tubefilter: What was it like for you to experience that viral feeling for the first time?
Keats: Part of it was, finally I have a chance, I have people looking in my direction so I can show them what I got. Then as it keeps going, it’s a learning process through and through. You learn how much people really like you, you learn how many people maybe didn’t like you, how many people come back around once their friends are talking about you too. It’s just the realization of, you have to move differently now.
That was the biggest thing. I remember I stopped asking, I went to Walmart one time, and there was someone who recognized me from my videos. It was a young girl, and she was very nervous and I was like, hey, do you want a picture? She was like, “No.” [laughs] I was like, “Oh! Okay!” I wasn’t offended. I was like, oh, that’s fine. I just kept in the back of my head, you know what? Some people may be nervous, don’t offer a picture, but always take one when they ask.
I don’t ask them if they want pictures. I leave that up to them. If they muster up the courage to ask, I’m always down. Because it makes them feel more awkward too if they’re like, “Oh no, I just told him no, and I really do want to.” It’s all fun.
Tubefilter: Yes. Oh, man. I’ve been doing this for six years, from the before TikTok days, and I spoke to so many YouTubers who have been trying for so long to build a sustainable audience. When they went viral for the first time, they were ready. They had been wanting it for years and years–and you said too you had that feeling of like, “Finally.” But there are so many people I’ve spoken to who went viral on TikTok or via Shorts and had no idea what to do. Were not expecting it, didn’t really want it, and didn’t know how to handle it after it happened.
Keats: Yes. It’s a lottery ticket at the end of the day and many people– Because there’s so many people that it happens to on accident, there are very few people that it happens to on purpose. Feels really fulfilling, because you have to know that this is a lifestyle you want. I can’t imagine being thrown into this and just saying, “Oh, well, I wasn’t trying to do this, but, well, I guess we’re on this track now.” It’s like, wow, if you’re not prepared for that, I don’t even know.
Tubefilter: I get it. So you had your viral video. The planets series was working. What was the point where you were like, “Okay, I’m going to commit to this”?
Keats: The point where I said I’m going to commit is, so I made the planets skit. I was going through a really rough time, and I was in my shower, and this was right after I had gotten on TikTok, and I got the first 600,000 views video and I was getting more followers and stuff, and I was taking a shower and I was like, “Oh, man. Why is Mercury such a B word?” I was like, you know what?– because we were in retrograde. I had a flood in my house. I got a nail in my tire, a speeding ticket, and I’m like, yo, and I’m just conditioning my hair, and I’m like, you know what? What if the planets could actually talk to each other? The sun would run things because of gravity and everything, and then Mercury’s the closest, and then Venus, they would be friends.
Then I would just go through and I was personifying these planets and it was a coping mechanism just think about something funny. Life is rough right now. Comedic relief. I was like, no, this is good. I turned off my shower and immediately got the notebook. It was all wet and everything, but I was finishing the script and then I filmed it that day and I put on different clothes for the planets.
Now that was when TikTok, you could only do a minute. I had the sun pull everyone together, and then they start bickering and bantering and fighting. Pluto comes in late and the sun is about to punch Pluto. He was like, “Why are you late?” That blew up and it was a million in a day. I dropped it Sunday night, and I remember when I woke up to drive to work the next day, it was at a million in the car and I could refresh and it would go 1.1, and so on. After I saw the comments from that, and they were like– because I couldn’t include Venus and Neptune, so people were like, “Where’s my planet? Where’s mine?” That was the first time I had something personally that someone had a personal opinion on go crazy.
Like, “Oh, well, you didn’t include my ruling planet. You didn’t include this for me. What happened? We need a part two. Part two.” I was like, oh, you want to see part two? To answer your question, that was when I was like, okay, you want to see my take on Venus and Neptune? You want to see what part two of this would be? Intentionally doing it, knowing you want it? Okay. I went crazy. I took it as far as doing different hair for each character. Getting braids.
Tubefilter: That’s dedication. TikTok was where you went viral, but you’re also on YouTube, you’re doing really well on Instagram, and you stream on Twitch too. Actually, were you on YouTube before TikTok?
Keats: I had a YouTube, yes, before TikTok.
Tubefilter: With your music?
Keats: Yes, the music was posted on there. I used to do vlogs and things like that, and I would just upload things to it because hey, I’m a creator. Maybe a new beat. I remember when I was first making beats, I would upload my beats to YouTube and then I made a Pokémon rap years ago, and it got 40,000 views and I thought it was the world. I had a couple of thousand subscribers, I think. I’ve done my own podcast called Beatbox & Bull where I’d invite local artists over and I’d beatbox while they rapped.
I’ve just done so many types of projects on YouTube until I started to actually be on TikTok, and I have a series that people like, and then I started to be more consistent and focused with it.
Tubefilter: What originally sparked you to start going multiplatform? Because streaming especially is a big deal, to go from short-form to streaming.
Keats: Yes, it is.
Tubefilter: Starting a stream is a really big deal. So many people I speak to are like, “I am afraid of streaming because there’s no editing, there’s no polishing. It’s just there and raw.”
Keats: True. It was really scary. The thing about Twitch that took me so long to get on it, is because I didn’t really understand what it was, and I think there’s still a lot of people today that when you say “Twitch,” they don’t really know what it is, but if you have somebody show you some things and, hey, I think you might like this person. You understand what the vibe and the genre that is streaming.
I started with gaming. I’m a gamer. I’m not the best gamer, but I like to play games, and all this time being a creator making music, going to Atlanta in college, my friends back from New York, we used to play in high school, so I was like, you know what? I blew up on TikTok. I had merch and it was going well so financially I was good. I was like, let me buy a new PlayStation. I hadn’t gamed all these years, and let me get back into these lobbies with these guys and keep hold of the friendship.
I started playing and I was getting my groove back to how it used to be and they were like, “Yo, you should stream. Yes, you already got people, they know who you are, so go and stream.” Then I learned how to set it up and I went through so many different setups and streaming from Mac and then they were like, “You have to get a PC.” I had so many people that are big streamers I would say.
People that are with Logitech and stuff, just from my skits and knowing me on TikTok, they were more than happy to help me. They were helping me build PCs, they were saying, “This is what I want. No, you want this graphics card, you want this one.” I just had so much support. People wanted to see me stream, so even today, I have a very day one community on Twitch, so I love Twitch for that.
Tubefilter: It’s interesting to see your spread of hobbies. I am a day one Apex player, so very glad to see that you partake.
Keats: Who’s your main?
Tubefilter: Hound, from the beginning. Then it was Revenant, but now that his kit has been changed, I’m playing a lot of Bloodhound again. And a lot of Vantage.
Keats: Oh, whoa. Okay. Surprised you don’t like the new Revenant kit.
Tubefilter: Yeah, it’s just…I miss Silence. Who do you main?
Keats: I’m a sweaty Wraith. I just gotta say.
Tubefilter: Of course.
Keats: Yes, main character energy for sure. I did switch over to Bang, though, because those smokes are so useful. I solo queue, so I needed some type of protection.
Tubefilter: That’s fair. Yes. People have realized very abruptly how good Bangalore is. It’s like when Seer took off. ALGS fever.
Keats: Yes. I found out about Apex late. Some people in the community told me about it. All I used to know was Warzone. I was one of those guys, that’s it because I had missed Fortnite, I had missed everything that came out so people were saying that Apex, do Apex. Also I would drop skits on TikTok and they be like, “Hey, do you play Apex?” I’d see it in the sea of hundreds of comments, but I’m like, What’s an Apex? Then I’d keep going so I knew about it. Yes, somebody taught me how to do it and I just got very competitive very fast.
Tubefilter: That’s really interesting. I played Titanfall 2 before Apex, so Apex was a very fluid pickup for me. I am really curious about the perspective of somebody who had to learn this game late. Was it different more difficult to learn compared to something like Call of Duty?
Keats: Absolutely. I don’t even have to think about it. Yes, 100%. I think that Apex has the highest mental requirement to really get because just looting is one thing, knowing what your gun needs, and that moment where I couldn’t tell a shotgun bolt from a barrel stabilizer, so there’s just learning that, learning the different guns and how your menus work and how many grenades should I keep, how many heals, how many smalls, how many medkits? That whole math of what to pick up and looting fast to get into the fights and obviously protect yourself. The shield-swapping, looting boxes…
Tubefilter: Is that different compared to other FPS games? Apex is really the only one I play.
Keats: Yes, 100%. Because in Call of Duty, it’s very surface level. Bang, you get shot, put plates on. Oh, no. I have no plates. It’s not, should I pop a full bat or cells? You have to take into account other team comps, and then all of the abilities. All of the compositions that you can create, it’s a lot to learn. Game sense is so important. Call of Duty, you die every three seconds and that’s normal business.
Tubefilter: That’s so strange to me. Semi-related, but I’m on your Twitch page right now and I noticed your banner is Yu Yu Hakusho.
Keats: Yes.
Tubefilter: You’re also an anime fan.
Keats: Yes, I’m a huge anime fan.
Tubefilter: What’s your one recommendation?
Keats: My one recommendation?
Tubefilter: Yes.
Keats: That’s tough.
Tubefilter: For someone who’s like, “I don’t know what anime is. I’ve never seen it.” What do they watch first?
Keats: I always give a short quiz. What do you like? Because it’s so broad. It’s like, oh, I like movies. What should I watch?
Tubefilter: That’s fair.
Keats: I do prep them, but most of the time, it’ll fall within either Hunter x Hunter or Sword Art Online. Just the first season of Sword Art Online, though, just the first season. Stop and then come back to me. It gives you all flavors at once. There’s romance, there’s action, there’s journey, fighting, girls, guys, MMORPG, video games. If you’re into that type of stuff I put my faith in that. Hunter x Hunter is a little long. That’s why I start with Sword Art Online and then I might go to Death Note.
Tubefilter: Classic, very classic. I always go with Fullmetal which I feel like is maybe an intense recommendation.
Keats: I missed Fullmetal Alchemist. I didn’t watch it growing up.
Tubefilter: Did you really?
Keats: I did. I missed it because I was very limited to the amount of shows I could watch, so that didn’t make the cut and One Piece didn’t make the cut, but I did catch back up on One Piece. I never did with Brotherhood.
Tubefilter: I never caught up with One Piece, but I will say I watched the Netflix adaptation and it was good.
Keats: That was good. I thought it was good.
Tubefilter: I’m getting us off track, I’m sorry. So you stream, you’re also on Instagram, you’re across all these platforms. What is your average production schedule like now per week? Do you aim to do a certain number of videos, a certain number of streams, or is it just what you’re feeling?
Keats: Right now, at the moment, I went through a soul search with content creation because I’ve been making a bunch of content. I would make skits, I call them when type of skits when your girl’s an over sleeper, things like that. They brought me to a certain point where they were fulfilling, but it’s the same thing. You find a relatable scenario, you do your take on it.
That started to get very simple to me. I went to Japan and I did a music video out there in Japan. I got this great camera, Sony A7S III, and I started shooting my own music videos. Then I came back and I said, you know what? The planets– now I had done 25 parts of the planets and I said, you know what? I’m going to turn this into a TV show. I have live mics. I have everything I can do to make my own YouTube series.
Right now, I’m up to episode five to be released for my independent self-filmed, edited, scored TV miniseries that I have, which is an expanded version of what is happening if the planets had a meeting skit. It’s the same characters, but they teleport now, there’s a deeper storyline. It actually satiates my desire to write at a bigger capacity, because I’d love to work with bigger productions, be with an agency, and I would love to write on a team. I love working with teams, but right now I do mostly everything myself because one, lack of budget, and two, I go very fast.
It’s the worst when, even if I have somebody I want to say a line in my story or my video, I have to wait. It’s like, what do you mean I have to wait till tomorrow? I always try to figure out a way to do it. My schedule is basically, I get up and I continue what it is from yesterday, which is either most likely music production or editing in Premiere for my planet episode. Now, it depends on where I’m at with it. Also, I have a dog, a dog named Zuko, he keeps me grounded. I have to take him out. He is a character, to say the least.
When I feel like it and I have time and I’ve done a lot of work and I want to pivot to something else, I’ll pop on OBS and I’ll stream for a little bit, play some games, wind down. I’ll check my socials and keep myself fed, get the meals in, go to the gym if I’m in that state of productivity. Usually, when I finish big projects, I get in the gym, but I go hermit-wise when I’m on these big editing binges and I’m just two memory cards deep. I definitely get out the house and go see friends. Oh, my goodness. I’m actually supposed to be getting Korean barbecue tonight. You just reminded me.
Tubefilter: Now I want Korean barbecue. Enjoy it for me. I wanted to circle back to, you’re still doing music. Is there a split between creation for you in terms of music and content or do you view it all under one creative umbrella?
Keats: It is easier if I do partition it, but I always– It’s a corny answer, but anything that I’m doing, music always exists. What I mean is, for instance, if I’m in planets mode and I’m editing a video for YouTube that shouldn’t have anything really to do with music, but I have to score it, I may need to come up with the type of music for these planets to talk over or maybe it’s a really hype moment, I need a dope chat beat, so I’ll score everything.
Even if somebody’s on the phone and I need to act like these characters are talking, I’ll need to put a low pass filter on that, which I learned from mixing music. Music is within everything. It’s like you ever leave a video game, you’re having a hard time trying to beat a level. You leave it, maybe you don’t come back to it for a month, and when you come back, easy breezy. A lot of times when I go to make music and I have been away from it for a little bit, it’s even easier because I’ve had time to just think about things. You have to experience it, sitting with music. Music is like a faucet you turn on. If you’re not having experiences in between that, there’s no more water, there’s no more. What are you going to talk about? I put that all on the last track. I haven’t done anything. I haven’t had a heartbreak since. I haven’t had met new people. I haven’t gotten new inspiration.
It is good, I think, to go back to music every once in a while, but I’m getting trying to 50/50 that thing up because so many people are asking me for new music and I love doing it.
Tubefilter: Understandably. It’s really cool that you’re able to score your own stuff too. Is content your full-time thing now?
Keats: Yes. This is full-time.
Tubefilter: Deciding to quit your job is a significant moment. Do you remember that moment and what it was like for you?
Keats: Yes, so I was in a very good position to quit my job, I’ll say. What really did it was this right here, the merch, this has Neptune saying, “It rain diamonds over here cuhz.” When I started coming out with the planet skits, I was really good. I was one of the first people to create different entities within myself. I call it single-actor, multi-character. I was doing that on TikTok, and for each planet, I took the most notable quote, their most famous lines, and I put them on a crewneck.
I sold them one week at a time and I opened the website up for an hour or two. They would sell out and then I would close them and I would just order those and I’d pack them up, ship them out, pack them up, ship them out. I was talking about one day, three runs, filling up my car to the post office. It got to the point where my local post office, I would just go through the back because I’d have too many packages.
It was a point where my work was clearly slipping and I was great at my job in IT. I was a client manager, so I was in charge of getting the engineers out on-site to these law firms. I managed 35 law firms, and anything could happen. I was supposed to get them new laptops, I did a lot of work, but I was missing emails. Nothing detrimental, but it was like, “Yo, you’re usually on fire. You’re lukewarm right now.”
I told them what I was doing. It’s like, yo, this is taking a lot of me, packing all this stuff all night. I said, you know what? I think it’s time. I talked to some family about it and I said, I think it’s time. My job always fully supported me because I was with them for three years before I became full-time. That saw it coming. They even bought some merch from me to support but they were like, “We know you want to dive into this. You’re bursting as a creator.”
I actually went out to lunch with both of my last bosses. A couple weeks ago, we just grabbed lunch and just talked about how it’s going. They let me use the office for a short film that I did. Any time that I needed, I did an Apex headquarters video where they were making some changes this season. I used their office to do that. They were very supportive.
Tubefilter: That’s so cool. That kind of support is so rare.
Keats: It is very rare.
Tubefilter: To finish up, here’s a broad question: Where do you go from here?
Keats: It is broad, and it’s something that I like to think I’m prepared to answer because I’ve thought about it. Right now, I’m in a more state of consistency with my brand with the planets. I started this YouTube series, and I’m taking the Issa Rae route, I would say, where I have all of these characters and I’m creating a dedicated series independently on YouTube so that my fanbase and the community that loves the planets can see this in a more drawn-out long-form fashion.
As this goes, I’m working on my story bible to potentially get it picked up by a streaming service. In between that, we’ll be working on new music, because I want to do live concerts starting 2024, get back into that, because a lot of people want to see me perform some of the new music I have, and still it’s just all working in tandem. In between that, I’m also an esports host, so I’ll be doing that.
We’re just going to keep grinding: planets, music, streaming when I can, and we’re going to go until the next opportunity happens. Basically, elevating the Keats Productions brand to more writing credits, getting shows picked up, collaborating with people that are higher in the industry that can give me new experiences. That’s my goal right now.
Tubefilter: Perfect. What has been your favorite part of this whole journey, of this whole being online thing?
Keats: What’s the most humble answer? [laughs] I’m not sure. It is great. Something that I can’t– I don’t know if this– but it keeps popping in my head. It’s so rewarding when I’ll be out and about maybe with friends and somebody will come up to me and they’ll say, “You know what? You’re the reason that my kids know their planets.” They’ll just drop a bomb on me like that and it’s like, yo. I have a responsibility, not only the privilege, but I have a responsibility to keep things authentic.
Sometimes people say I’m very educational or wholesome, but that’s what I like to do. That’s me. There’s a lot of different sides to me. With the planets, I can’t give that up without wrapping it up neatly, but I have to just continue being myself and inspiring others. I think I have a responsibility to inspire.
