What a crazy year!

I started 2020 with a brand new Tiktok account and an Instagram account that had 1900 people. I couldn’t actually get the FlyWithKay name on Instagram, so it was spelled differently. After some negotiation, I was able to buy the FlyWithKay name on Instagram but lost most of my followers switching over. It’s always hard to make changes like that.

I should hit 5000 followers on Instagram today (12/21/2021) which is a big milestone on that platform. If you can give me a follow you might be the one that does it!

https://www.instagram.com/flywithkay

Since I was flying regularly it was very easy to post a lot of videos. Once I hit my first 10k on Tiktok, I really doubled down on working toward making it a success. There were times I wanted to give up but I kept on plugging away at it.

There were some big milestones over the year. Lets take a look at some:

My first big LIVE broadcast was from the Sun N Fun airshow. I got all the way up to 500 people watching the show with me. At the time that was a big number and I was super excited. My LIVE broadcasts are well in to the thousands now and I average over 20k per hour but back then, WOW! Two days ago I broke my own record and had over 50,000 people watch my Live in just 42 minutes! How cool is that?

In the middle of the year I hit 750 hours of flight time. Again, 1500 is the number you need to work for a major airline. I had a celebration and now, as of this writing, I’m at the big 1000 hours! Only 500 left to go!

After a long trip in Lil Red to Port Angeles, Washington, I got my first publication in a newspaper. Front page of the Sunday edition. So exciting. You can see that here:

FlywithKay lands in Port Angeles

At the OshKosh airshow I hit 100k followers! Not long after that I got my first sponsorship deal with, “thecoldestwater,” company. Things felt like they were really taking off.

Things were really moving quickly but there would be bumps in the road. It took me 7 months to get to 100k followers, and 2 more months to get the second 100k. Can that type of growth be sustained? The answer is complicated. Why?

Because all of social media tanked in October. Does anyone remember that Instagram and Facebook were having problems? Tiktok wasn’t really mentioned but that day my Lives and videos went to almost nothing. While I was averaging 1500 people watching my LIVE broadcasts every day, it went down to about 15 people. I couldn’t get near 100. My videos we’re all hitting over 100k views within a day or two, and then I couldn’t get 1000 views. Lots of people we’re complaining about Tiktok and heading back to Instagram.

It took over a month before the numbers started to return to normal. I have a theory that Tiktok migrated all it’s users to a new backend system which took time. It makes sense to me because they would start with top accounts and work their way down. Right after my numbers dropped significantly, I noticed that the only people showing up on the ForYou page were celebrities. Well-known people with very big accounts. Almost no smaller creators were coming up anymore. Slowly, this worked back to normal and like a light switch being turned on, my numbers came back at about three weeks. Whew, what a tough month!

Having said all this, I’m optimistic about the future as I have a lot of companies and people reaching out to me. Airways Magazine just published an article where I answered questions, I already have Sun N Fun and Oshkosh (airshows) lined up and probably the Reno air races. I’m going to hit my 1500 hours this year and be ready to get to work.

Thank you to everyone that has supported me along this journey and I hope you’ll follow me as I keep moving forward!

Kay.