In a Leveling Up Founders private event presentation, Kimberly Moffett shares how she grew her TikTok account from zero to one million followers within a year. Drawing on her doctoral research into the emotional psychology of entrepreneurs—particularly the pervasive fear entrepreneurs face—she frames social‑media growth as a psychological challenge. She recounts her earlier success on YouTube (≈700 K subscribers) built through disciplined, scripted video production. Applying a 10X mindset, she shifted focus to TikTok, emphasizing quality over sheer posting frequency: for every published video she creates roughly twenty drafts and only releases content she deems the best possible. She describes a systematic creative routine—daily reflection, idea generation, and storytelling refinement—that eventually yielded a repeatable formula. Moffett distills her approach into three actionable pillars: (1) start each TikTok with a hook that directly addresses the audience’s pain point and establishes credibility; (2) use expressive facial and vocal delivery, as research from UC Berkeley shows higher facial expressivity correlates with more follows, likes, and views; and (3) actively solicit and incorporate audience feedback, treating both fans and haters as data for iteration. Throughout, she stresses authenticity, emotional connection, and relentless self‑editing as the engines behind her rapid follower growth.
This next session is with Kimberly Moffett, and she talks about how she grew her TikTok from 0 to 1 million subs in 12 months. This is from our Leveling Up Founders private event that happened in August. Hope you enjoy it and let me know what you think.
Have you ever wondered what it would feel like to have a million followers? Have you ever thought it would be hard to get a million followers? Maybe it's been a bit of a slog. Maybe you're following all the tips that everyone's telling you to do, and you're like, I'm doing everything right, but it's not coming. It's just not happening. I'm creating all this content, and it's not working. What's going on? What if I told you there were some psychological things that you could do that could actually explode your following? They're not even hard. They're not hard at all. So I went to school for a really long time and studied psychology because I felt so interested in how people process their emotions. And so I decided to do my doctoral thesis on the emotional psychology of entrepreneurs. So I studied this for 7 years. And what I found was that the primary emotion that most entrepreneurs face is fear. Basically every entrepreneur is afraid for the most part. So we face a lot of things. Fear, rollercoaster of emotions, anxiety, isolation, uncertainty, and we have to deal with all of these things and feel very misunderstood because we might have family members or a spouse or people in our lives who just don't understand what we're going through. And so it can be a very isolating journey if we don't have events like this to come to where we can really relate to other people. I want to have something of my own where I can say what I really want to say and do it in an authentic way. So enter YouTube. I thought, okay, you know what? I think I can probably start uploading like little YouTube videos from my office in between clients. And so I got like a ring light. This is 2014, so it's like before ring lights were popular. And I set it up in my little office, and every time I'd have like an hour break, I would create a script and I would put a video up on YouTube. Within a few years, my channel had about 700,000 subscribers. So that was really fun, and I built my audience that way. I just really loved the idea of putting together a video and being like, I know I can make this viral. It was like this passionate experience where I would spend hours tweaking these things to just know exactly how they would hit and the emotions required to get that response from my audience. I loved my audience. I would want to answer all their questions all the time and really get the most for them that I could. This is where TikTok enters the picture. As soon as I found out about TikTok, I was like, this is the future. Literally, this is the future because this is where all the kids are spending their time. And so this year I made some big personal goals for myself. I decided I'm really into fragrances, so I thought, okay, I want to have the biggest fragrance brand in the world. Like, that's my goal. I want to do like the whole billionaire Kylie thing with lip kits. I want to do that with fragrances. And I love social media. I love making things viral. So the first thing I need to do is just get a shit ton of TikTok followers and do it in a way that's authentic to me. So as of January this year, I was like, okay, I'm gunning it. I read Grant Cardone's 10X Rule, which I know there's some mixed feelings on that in the room, but I absolutely loved that book. The philosophy is to just set your goals 10X higher than you would normally and just work 10 times harder than you think other people expect you to. And that really was like my own internal philosophy anyway, but I just think there's a lot of pressure from people to like not work so hard and I just don't buy it. So, So I just started gunning it, not in terms of frequency of posting, but I really just, I really, really focused on the quality of what I was posting. And that was the mo— I might post once a week, I might post 5 times a week, I might even get 3 in a day if I'm really excited, but I never worry too much about the frequency or any of those things of what I'm posting. The real thing I gunned it on was quality. And I, every time, I probably have 20 unpublished videos for every one that I actually publish. And I'm so picky and so savage about the content that I actually use, because every time I publish, I ask myself, I'm like, is this the best thing I've ever created? If a million people saw this, would I be proud of it? Like, would I be able to look back and say, like, that's something that I'm really, like, glad to offer the world? So that was how I did it. And I would always, like, think about concepts. You know, I'd give myself an hour to think, like, every day or more. I would just sit by my window. Like, have little conversations with myself. And so, like, what's the difference between love and limerence? Or, like, something that I discovered. And I would sit there thinking about it and try to formulate into how I can make it the best story I can make it. And then publish it. And so I experimented for a while. Like, I published a whole bunch of different things, like, in different areas that I thought were good. And then once I got a formula that really worked, it started exploding. And then— Again, I just kept going with that method and I never looked back. So today, in the spirit of relationships, I thought I would put together a few key things that I did, that I would say if there's any takeaways from today from my presentation, it's these 3 key things that I did to grow to a million. In a TikTok, it's really important to start your TikTok with something that connects. I can't even tell you the number of people that just think they can talk about whatever they think is important. It's like, no. What is important to your audience? Like, what do they care about? Ask them a question, something that means something to them, and also get them to trust you. So address their pain points. What kinds of questions are they asking? What's hurting them right now? What are they stuck on? And Also, put out your credibility. So if you are an expert in something, you have to tell them after you've asked the question, address their pain points. How can you help? What do you know? So that's kind of like the perfect opening to a TikTok is: Have you ever wondered da da da da da da da da? Well, if you have, you've probably felt like blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Well, lucky for us, there are three easy things that we can do that can fix that problem for you. My name is Kimberly Moffett, and I'm an expert in da da da da da da. So you're really presenting the problem and showing them how you can actually give them a solution. A recent study at the University of Berkeley that actually studied TikTokers showed that the people who had the most expression on their faces. Got more follows, more likes, and more views overall. So if you haven't practiced using your face or using your voice, I know it can be a little scary sometimes, like if you're first starting out. I remember when I started on YouTube, I like, I wasn't good. I was like too stiff and professional. I felt like I was on a TV show and I was just like sitting there giving my advice, and it took me like years to just relax into it. But once I did, I wasn't afraid to start making expressions and use my voice and face. It just shows the importance of being able to emote and how that actually captures people and brings them in and allows them to trust you. I think that's so important. So finally, you have to meet your audience's needs. Okay? Your audience on TikTok and any other social platform is going to ask you questions and they are going to pipe in and give you feedback constantly. If you are successful, you are gonna have haters too. You're gonna have people that say, I don't like what you're doing. It's very important to take the feedback and use it. So it doesn't mean listening to your haters, because if you have haters, it's actually a good thing. I have lots of haters. If you have genuine fans that offer you advice or feedback on like what worked and what didn't, listen to it, because those are the people that are watching all your videos and that care about you. Listening and understanding the person and asking questions is so Super important.
All right, so that's it for this session. Hope you enjoyed it. If you are interested in learning more about the Leveling Up Founders Private Event, it's basically an annual thing where we gather the top founders and also the top speakers and ultimately just help each other grow our businesses faster. Last event was rated a 9.8 out of 10, and everyone said it was more so about the people. The speakers were amazing, but the people are even more amazing. So you can go to live.levelingup.com to learn more. if you are interested, and we will, we'll catch you later. Bye.
