Richard Eats!

“I love to eat, but for the first 26 years of my life, I couldn’t boil a pot of water. But then 2020 happened, and not being able to rely on grandma to bring us over meals, I started making some simple, easy things for my family.

I've always loved creating content. Anybody that knew me through high school knew that I was the guy that was always carrying around a little pocket handheld camera. I was just recording everything. So, when I started playing around in the kitchen, I just put the two together. I started posting on TikTok sometime in the fall of 2020.

My fifth video on TikTok is when it blew up: two and a half million views within three hours, and over 100,000 followers in three weeks. It was a video about making loaded French fries in an air fryer: it was a bag of frozen French fries with shredded cheese and some bacon bits. It wasn't even real bacon! But people loved it. I remember Dave Portnoy from Barstool Sports even commented on it that night. The only thing that was going through my head was, ‘I have to keep going. What am I posting tomorrow?’ The rest is history. Today, I have over one million followers and reach over 150 million users monthly.

December 14th was the day I became full time self employed. It's scary, for sure, but it's worth it. Time is such a valuable asset to me. The most important thing to me was that I had more time for my marriage and my kids. My wife has always been supportive. I would not be able to be where I'm at without her. There were so many late nights coming home from my corporate job at 4:30pm, then going to the store to get the groceries, come home, film it, post it, do the voiceover, etc. Sleep was nonexistent.

Today, I really just try to make my next post better than my last post, and that tomorrow's post is better than today's. That's really what I live by. The number one thing that I tell anybody that is interested in doing this, is before you start thinking about a niche, what you're interested in, or making money, is that you have to get used to showing up every single day.

Then there's another part of it too, just because I had huge success on TikTok, that didn't mean that I had the same success on Instagram and Facebook. Not every video is going to be a banger, doesn't mean that your audience is going to feel the same way. It hurts when you put your heart into something, post it and then it doesn't get any traction, but you have to accept that not every video is going to perform the same way.

Then as far as negativity, you just have to believe in it and have a strong support system. You need people around you telling you that you're on the right path and you have to believe in yourself. You have to keep going. That is what I live by.”

- Richard Hagen, Richard Eats