Today we’d like to introduce you to Heather Maldonado and Jaicob Feliz
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?
It all started at the tail-end of the lockdown in 2020. The Pandemic helped us realize life is short and we wanted to stop living our lives for others at our 9-5 jobs. We spent so much time indoors with each other talking about our dreams and the way we wanted to live when the world went back to normal. We saw the success of other TikTok creators and thought to ourselves, “what is stopping us from joining them?” From there we went on to make 8 TikToks every day for 6 months straight. We had a clumsy start, but we found our rhythm the more we did it.
We started investing in our growth and developing our skills to better understand the platform’s algorithm and analytics. Over these past two years, we’ve continued to cultivate our talent for short-form content and have since also expanded to all other mainstream social media platforms. Today we have amassed an audience of over 200,000+ beautiful couples who can relate to our videos and are on the verge of making this our full-time job.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
We have a list of top 3 struggles we continue to work through along our journey:
1. Work-Life Balance. The biggest struggle has been balancing our work, content, and relationship. We both work full-time so finding the opportunity to create content requires strong scheduling and planning. Our personal relationship and health are just as important to us as our future work.
2. Putting Ourselves Out There. Another struggle is openly sharing our desire to become full-time content creators and influencers with our friends and family. Influencing requires a lot of research and understanding of the business and finance side of things. Eventually, we became confident in the content we were making and our growth started to match. There came a time when we even showed up on our friends’ For-You pages and they asked “is this you?” and there was no point in hiding anymore.
3. Feeling Undervalued For Our Knowledge & Expertise. The last bump in the road is sometimes not being compensated equal to the amount of effort we put into the content creation. We have built a craft that prioritizes audience retention and we pride ourselves in our work. Many people believe that making short-form content is as easy as opening the app and recording a quick 30-second video. But it’s far more intricate. We also spend our time researching content and hashtags, getting to know our audience, and staying up-to-date with what’s trending in our niche. For us, there have been times when a 7-second video has taken us 10-takes which could add up to a whole hour; just for a 7-second video! Other times the post-production editing of footage could take up to 3 hours. We think as short-form content becomes more valued, platforms and brands will start to pay the equivalent and we are starting to see that trend now.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
Sure! We’re Heather and Jaicob, a fun-loving influencer couple and content creating duo with a deep understanding of social media and media production. Our jam is creating scroll-stopping videos that portray dating and relationships in a funny and relatable way. We are unique in that we have a community-first mindset and care for connecting and building a strong community.
Is there any advice you’d like to share with our readers who might just be starting out?
Our top advice for anyone starting out would be to post consistently and make GOOD content that you’re proud of. There is no secret algorithm. Good videos will perform well. Focus on making better content and the rest will follow.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.tiktok.com/@heatherxjaicob
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/heatherxjaicob/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HeatherxJaicobOfficial
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuiUK1KkqczENhSNjzdXMlw?sub_confirmation=1
- Other: https://www.snapchat.com/add/heatherxjaicob
