The concept of content creation has seen immense growth in recent years. The era of the internet has redefined it and has given the people an ability to create content and publish it on social media. In previous years to create videos of different types, one needed corporate backing, a movie studio, a music label, or a venture capital firm. But ever since the era of smartphones things have changed. Arya Toufanian built an empire using viral content and published it on social media.
At the age of 18, after dropping out of The George Washington University he built 'I'm Shmacked', a digital media empire that has created multiple viral videos of the college party scene broadcasting them on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube successfully. The happening shots of college campuses tempted many students as the video showed the campus and the academic environment as well as the party scene of their potential college choices. Arya signed a deal with a management company in NYC for a whopping $300,000 a year after which he achieved tremendous success. He was the first to film the colleges and publish the videos. The videos shot by him took everyone's attention and many top publications in New York published the articles about his company.
Through his videos, the content creator made it easier for the students to choose the right college and university for them. However, his firm a couple of years ago faced backlash by a small group of students who launched a competitor business and tried desperately to ruin his business using false accusations and hate campaigns. Explaining his work, he said that the brand ambassador program launched by him was a program meant to help provide supplemental income to college kids around the country. He details his plan of creating around one hundred brand ambassador pages, one for each major college market he operated in. The goal was to use his main Instagram account which had over 1,200,000 followers to help them grow, eventually making a profit off of local promotions, merchandise, and business dealings with vendors. Toufanian had many applicants but no way to understand who was serious and who wasn't so he put a price barrier to help filter the less serious candidates.
He charged between $300 - $500 as a franchise fee which he thought was reasonable enough for use of his trademark without ostracizing the college market, he says, "I came to that number by basically realizing it is $10 to $16 a day for a month. It's a one-time payment and the business model allows them to recoup rather quickly if they work." To begin the brand ambassadors would post content at their college and quickly they grew thousands of followers in the first month. They could sell $11 promotions, ideally three a day resulting in $1,000 a month in total sales. The pages would eventually scale and Toufanian's vision was to see around one hundred I'm Shmacked sub-pages creating $3,000 - $5,000 a month where the business would generate gross revenue of $300,000 to $500,000 monthly while building its infrastructure around the nation's colleges. The business has little overhead costs as we operate on Instagram which gives us the chance to support our small businesses without heavy cost, it was a model that would've been able to sustain my business alongside the franchisees. Toufanian built a business in college so he understood how important it was to start young and work for something he believed in. Toufanian was operating a small team and this idea was what he believed he needed to expand quickly into his major markets as he was understaffed and overwhelmed. Many students succeeded, today @ImShmackedChico has over 16,000 followers. @ImShmackedBuffs has over 10,000.
We have interviewed a few brand ambassadors and found mostly positive results with a few that seemed determined to attack Mr. Toufanian though admitting they did pay Toufanian and were given access to use a page on Instagram, access to a Discord channel with contractors Toufanian had to help them succeed, and an instruction manual to begin. Their distaste seemed to come from Toufanian not answering a few of their texts. Toufanian claims they would text him at 9AM eastern and it would be 6AM for him, he would wake up to frantic texts if he didn't respond immediately and some of the students thought that by paying for the franchise program they would be entitled to speak to me whenever they wanted. The job is simple. You post content actively on your page, it grows, you sell promotions and we expand in a timely manner. It doesn't entitle you to own me as a person, I am busy working on my business and I provided all of the information in the Discord hiring people to help fill in the blanks which are few.
