- Cherie Luo is a Stanford MBA candidate and creator with about 120,000 TikTok followers.
- Luo has been creating content for three years, while keeping a full-time job and studying.
- Here’s the spreadsheet she uses to stay organized, and some tools she uses for time management.
For Cherie Luo, creating content has always been a passion project.
The 28-year-old began posting short-form videos on TikTok in 2020, while she was working as a product manager at LinkedIn. Since then, she’s amassed about 120,000 followers on TikTok, and some 67,000 on Instagram, with content that discusses tips to break into tech and gives sneak peeks into her life and career journey.
Today, Luo is an MBA candidate at Stanford, she’s doing an internship in Japan, has a podcast and a newsletter, and has started publishing long-form videos on YouTube on top of short-form ones on TikTok, Instagram reels, and YouTube shorts.
Over the past three years, Luo’s aim with content has been helping others and learning the ropes of building a business on social media, rather than making an income. She hasn’t monetized the content extensively — she only took about 10 brand partnerships in 2022, and just one in 2023, she told Insider.
“As I’m starting to get this off the ground, I want to be the type of creator who’s able to go through all the motions and each part of the process,” she said. “It feels very much like a startup, or an entrepreneurial path, in the sense that I’m doing everything. I’m my own makeup artist, my own lighting specialist, engineer, video editor, and business analyst.”
Luo plans to grow strategically and monetize her content more after she graduates from business school in 2024, and perhaps hire help if her business succeeds.
The spreadsheet Luo uses to manage her content schedule
Part of the reason why Luo has been able to post consistently is because her content documents her work and life, so she she can shoot and record her everyday tasks. But even so, she said keeping consistent on all platforms can be challenging.
To facilitate this process, Luo uses a spreadsheet where she tracks her content schedule.
“I’m someone who likes to stay very organized, and because of my background as a product manager, I am comfortable using spreadsheets,” she said. “I figured out exactly what my schedule is and what the right posting cadence is. It all starts with ‘What day do I want to release my content and launch it?'”
She chose Sunday as the day to publish her podcast, and Wednesday for the long-form YouTube vlogs. From there, she works backwards within each week to schedule the different tasks she needs to accomplish to meet the launch deadline.
Luo assigns a different color to each platform she posts on, and also has a way to keep track of the status of each post, and whether they have been published. She checks her progress on it daily.
“It’s motivation, because I can see what I’ve done in the last week and what I have planned for this week,” she said. “It tells me what are the platforms that I’m posting on most consistently, and what topics I’m covering.”
The spreadsheet also informs Luo’s understanding of how much effort each piece of content requires, and whether she’s meeting her objectives. To help her followers, she’s created a free downloadable template of the spreadsheet.
Tools for better time management
A key part of Luo’s strategy is maximizing her content by cutting clips from her long-form content and repurposing them as shorter videos on other platforms. An example of this is what she dubs “podcast promo” in her spreadsheet.
To speed up this process, she occasionally uses AI tool Opus Clip, although the quality doesn’t always match her expectations.
“I have a very high bar for the quality of content that I put out,” she said. “So I try Opus Clip, to see if it gives me something I want to post. If not, I’ll just go in and cut it myself.”
She also uses AI-trascription tool Descript to edit her podcast, and to spark ideas for written posts on LinkedIn and for her newsletter.
“When I have an idea, it’s much easier for me to explain it than to write it down,” she said. “So I film a video on my phone, I put it on Descript, create a transcript of it, and then I can use that transcript to create written posts. I’ll even put it on ChatGPT to summarize it.”
The “schedule” feature on different platforms has been helpful to ensure consistency with publishing, particularly while she’s doing her internship and traveling in Japan, and might not have time to actively post content every day, she said.
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