Daniel DiPiazza built 233,000 Instagram followers and turned them into a business engine through Alpha Mentorship, a platform offering entrepreneur training and angel funding. He uses multiple channels beyond Instagram—email, YouTube, Facebook, live broadcasts—to reach his audience where they are, and focuses on launching his own products rather than just taking sponsorship deals.
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Okay everyone, again we're here with Daniel DiPiazza from Rich Twenty-Somethings.
I'm so impressed that you pronounced that name correctly without me having to tell you. Can I just say that?
You know what, it's, you know who played Dodgers baseball? Mike Piazza. Exactly.
Yeah, but that's why I know you're a senior millennial because you know that, but young people wouldn't know Mike Piazza. Most people don't. Most people don't. He did play Dodgers baseball. Yeah. So congratulations to you and thank you for being able to phonetically understand a very simple name.
But rich 20-something. So you have built your Instagram brand to 250,000, a quarter million plus.
233,000, but we're not counting.
Close enough, right? Let's just call it 250. Let's give it to him, right? Give it to me, give it to me. 250K, and what has that done for you? 'Cause what I've seen with a bunch of people out there with large Instagram followings is they're starting to go live a lot, and that also, that almost becomes like their way of generating leads, and it generates sales, for example. So what are you doing exactly with that following, first and foremost?
It's really cool. You know, the thing about it is, I was watching a video earlier today by this author Alex Wolfe, and she was saying that the interesting thing about social media now is that it used to be that brands had— the reason why brands were so attractive is because they had a unique brand perspective, and customers and consumers would go to those brands to consume the content that they wanted from their preferred brand perspective. So like MTV has a certain perspective on the world, and they create content around that perspective.
Mm-hmm.
Well, now Content creators, i.e., influencers, are the channels, and we are the ones with the branded perspectives. So people come to my Instagram channel because there's a certain way that I view the world that they vibe with.
Mm-hmm.
And I didn't really know that that was going to be the result of starting a social media channel, because you have to understand, starting Instagram 2014, I had a reference of social media that was like 2010, '11, '12. And at that time, social media, at least for me, since I wasn't an influencer, was like posting to your friends and family. And I didn't really know how it would, affect my life, but now I see that it has become something that allows me to create something out of nothing. Because as a content creator, as an— I don't even know, can we— I wanna stop using the word influencer, but that's the word we have for now. As an influencer, as someone who's in the public space, now because of that platform going live, all these different products Instagram's coming out with, IGTV, stories, posts, I can put an idea out there, I can instantly validate it, I can find customers immediately, and this is something that wasn't really available to individuals that weren't heavily entrenched brands even 5 years ago. Right.
You see a lot of influencers out there, they got like millions of followers, like 2 million, 10 million, whatever, and it seems like all they know how to do is sell the sponsorships, but I know for you for a fact, like, you've actually looked into what you can do beyond that, right? How are you leveraging that following right now to help with your business?
That's a good question. So, you know, I made kind of a pivot recently, and Rich20Something is still, I mean, it's still a website, and it's still a brand, still like exists as a corporation, you know. It's actually the parent company of my other stuff, but we've started a new company called Alpha Mentorship, and Alpha Mentorship is—
I like that.
Yeah, it's a platform to both train and invest in the new generation of entrepreneurs. So what we're doing is we're creating a company that does hands-on training with entrepreneurs and then redistributes part of our revenue as angel and VC funding to those same— the same community that we're building. So I'm using my personal brand to direct public attention to the new company we're building, even though I'm not the face of the new company. And I think that's— the really smart influencers will see that the biggest opportunity isn't in them pushing other people's brands, it's in building something and creating something new. But that's harder. It's harder. So I can see why.
100%. And so, just to give everyone an example, I mean, the other people I'm seeing, I was talking about earlier, they'll do a live, and that's almost like doing a live training, and you've got 10,000 people coming in, and you can just direct them to, hey, go to this link, swipe up, and then you can go check out whatever we're offering. Is that kind of what you're doing?
Yeah, I mean, that's part of the strategy. I think one of the things that I think is interesting is that It's not just one channel. This is IG that we're talking about, but really the real way to connect with your audience now, it has to be a multi-channel approach, you know, because everyone is so distracted and they're everywhere too. So usually what happens is you start with one channel that gets really big, and then you have to expand by taking that audience and growing other auxiliary channels with that one main channel. So I might do a live where I direct them to a link, you know, or like for instance, I'm doing I'm pimping all my own stuff now. Here, I'll put your mug out like this, and I'll pimp out my own stuff.
Check it out, singlegrain.com.
So, I'm doing a CreativeLive presentation in September, which I'm really excited about, and so I did a live on that. I was like, hey guys, special announcement. I'm doing CreativeLive, and here are the dates, and here are the details, and people will then DM me, and it creates a real conversation, but it doesn't mean that you also don't use the email list. You'll use Facebook, you'll use YouTube, and we're on YouTube right now, And it creates an ecosystem where if you're doing it correctly, people feel like you're in every place that they are.
I love that. And we're gonna talk about that actually in the next video. So we're gonna talk about that, and we're gonna talk about how Daniel got his following to quarter million followers.
I'm not gonna reveal that.
He's gonna reveal it in the next video. See you there. All right, Daniel, thanks so much for doing this. And for those of you watching, don't forget to watch the next video in the playlist over there.
Watch it over there, it's somewhere over here.
And then?
Subscribe.
Subscribe over there.
Oh, oh, I gotta tell you guys too. Daniel DiPiazza TV. Type it up on YouTube right now after you subscribe to his channel. I need you on mine. I need to get to 10,000.
