Elbflow Agency

Elbflow did not start as an agency.

In August 2023, a friend from school and I started filming street interviews and posting them on TikTok. There was no business model behind it. We simply wanted to create content people would actually watch.

It worked.

Over time we built a community of around 40,000 followers and generated millions of views and likes. Some videos performed far beyond anything we had expected, and as the account grew, companies started reaching out.

At first these were simple product placements and collaborations. But they changed the way I looked at the account. For the first time, something we had built for fun had an economic value. Attention could be turned into revenue. We started making our first money through TikTok.

From creating content to understanding it

The more content we produced, the more systematic the process became.

We learned what made people stop scrolling, how the first seconds of a video affected retention, which formats people shared, how trends could be adapted instead of simply copied, and how differently content performed depending on the audience.

None of this came from a course. It came from publishing again and again, watching videos fail, seeing others reach hundreds of thousands of people, and gradually understanding why.

At the same time we kept growing our own personal brands and experimenting with new formats. The street interviews were performing better than ever.

Eventually we realised that the skill we had developed for ourselves could become a service.

Building Elbflow

That became Elbflow Agency.

We started as a fairly traditional social media agency, helping businesses create short-form content and build their presence on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. The difference was that we had already done it ourselves.

We were not selling social media based on theory. We had built an audience from zero, generated millions of organic views, worked with brands, and learned how to create content through hundreds of real posts. Now we started applying that knowledge to clients.

What had started with two students filming people on the street had turned into a business. We acquired clients, produced content for them, kept growing our own channels, and started making meaningful money from both sides.

For a while, everything was moving in the right direction.

Then it broke apart

As the business grew, the relationship between my co-founder and me deteriorated. Eventually the disagreement became serious enough that we could no longer continue building the agency together.

That created a very different problem from anything I had encountered while learning social media.

Building an audience had taught me how to get attention. Working with clients had taught me how to turn a skill into a service. Building Elbflow with someone else started teaching me something harder: a company is not only the product you sell. It is also the structure, responsibilities and relationships behind it.