back · yt channel · inspo · summer '26
As my second semester at UMich and first semester in Shift Creator Space came to an end, I've had the opportunity to reflect over my time in Ann Arbor over the last couple weeks. Coming into Shift, I had one goal: help build up community storytelling. This article will go deep into my philosophy behind this goal, what I've done in the past semester towards it, and what I learned from it.
This is the core question behind all the work I do. Why do I pursue community building? This ambition towards bringing people together really started last year when I was working on my fashion brand, OOTD. My freshman year of college, I started building up a fashion startup with a couple of my friends. One of the key marketing strategies we used was hosting photoshoots and fashion meetups. This involved working with photographers, venues, and creating marketing material. I distinctly remember my first meetup we hosted at Jollibee, a filipino fried chicken restaurant. The feeling of bringing together 30-40 people just for some food and good times was surreal. We started hosting more events. We connected ~20 models for our app launch shoot. We hosted a Daft Punk themed photoshoot where I met Detroit artists and photographers.
Through all of this, I realized how much community means to me. I loved how through my work, people sparked new connections and relationships. I loved how those relationships grew and the people who met through events run by OOTD began working with each other. Viewing this in real time helped me realize why I work in the first place: to meet people, connect people, and build relationships and perspectives with people.
This background of building a community through fashion inspired me to seek a greater goal of building a community through storytelling. One creator I started watching in pursuit of this goal was Simon Kim and Creator Camp. Creator Camp started with a community of storytellers (mainly through YouTube) who hosted retreats to connect and explore new ideas. The once online discord community eventually evolved into a company that produced films with indie directors, a startup marketing agency helping build up companies such as Wabi, and maintained its homegrown, community building aspect at its core. This is what I wanted to build.
Inspired by his work, I reached out to Simon for a chat (if you want to see the whole convo, click here). I was mainly curious about finding the line between authenticity and virality in marketing. I wrote a little piece about this you can view here, but to summarize my conversation with Simon, he basically told me you need to play the game a bit in order to scale your impact. He also told me how it's important to find the personal line between sharing and not sharing online that results in the most personal fulfillment. At this point, my mentality behind creating videos shifted from copying hooks and seeking virality to chasing personal fulfillment whilst still playing the algorithm a bit to maintain impact.
Around this time, my second semester at UMich had begun, and I decided to apply to Shift again, but with a new mentality towards creating for myself. Under Shift, I started a series of short videos under a new personal brand called costoftrying. The philosophy behind the brand being to continuously produce output without much worry of the cost or results: creating purely for the love of the game. I began with creating poems about my personal experience, then wrapping these poems around cinematic video. Some of my favorites include this poem called Ocean Eyes and this poem about love.
Throughout my entire time at UMich, I was also involved in a Shift adjacent community run by Adhav and Tyrus called The Midnight Collective (TMC). It was basically a weekly group of curious minded people that met up every Sunday night to work on their personal projects. Adhav asked me if I wanted to help host a retreat for TMC (similar to creator camp's initial retreats).
A couple key things from TMC resonated with me. One was the inclusivity aspect of it. Another was how wholesome it felt. When people shared what they were working on, no matter the scale or technical difficulty, they were always met with curiosity and interest from each other. These were the biggest reasons I kept attending, and going into this retreat, I wanted to market these main aspects.
The idea of hosting a creative retreat also inspired me to start looking into similar communities that ran these types of events. One company in particular that I reached out to was Verci in NYC. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend Verci while in New York on a V1 Trek, and I connected with Anant one of the co-founders. My main takeaway from meeting Anant was how marketing it properly was essential. Anant emphasized how they seek quality applicants over quantity, and looking back, I think this is one aspect I could've improved upon towards marketing TMC's retreat.
Nevertheless, through a couple weeks of social media marketing, DMing, and meetings, we were off to the retreat with over 20 people (90% of whom were complete strangers to me). We spent a weekend co-working, staying up late, and connecting over deep topics. One of my favorite moments of retreat was when we wrote "warm and fuzzies" which were short, wholesome messages to people you met at retreat. Being able to connect with new people who I normally would've never talked to was an extremely fulfilling experience, and it was one of the first times I've seen an impact of my work first-hand.
Around a couple weeks post retreat and after a reflective conversation with Bobby Housel, Verci's head of community, there were a couple things I think I would try to do differently. One, I'd focus more towards in person marketing through posters and word of mouth. I'd also try to start the retreat with a "hard thing". Something uncomfortable like a cold plunge that sparks connection right off the bat. This is definitely a project I'd want to try again going into my second year at UMich.
Where do I envision the work I'm doing right now contributing to my lifelong goal of community building in the long run? Going into this summer with a new major and a new passion, it feels like the perfect time to reset and reflect upon my goals.
As far as my personal brand, costoftrying, I've started to shift this into a personal storytelling project. I realized after a long semester of building the brand, I started to disconnect with the original philosophy of output no matter the result. I was trying to squeeze out deeper meaning out of my creative work when I didn't even have creative work to derive meaning from. Because of this, I've started documenting my life in long form vlogs.
At the same time, my clothing brand, OOTD, started gaining more traction for our merch, and our team decided to continue building towards our second drop. Through this, we are building community through DJ events and pop-ups planned for the fall.
After a long stretch of creative burnout and lost direction, I'm excited to be building again.