Josh Richards is a bonafide TikTok superstar, with over 20 million followers on the video sharing app and over 1 billion likes on his posts which are mostly himself dancing and lip-syncing to songs.
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| Photo: Courtesy of Josh Richards | Instagram |
Richards started immersing in social media when he was
just 13 years old. Right before getting into his freshman year in high school,
Richards got into posting videos of himself dancing to rap music on the
video-sharing app formerly known as Musical.ly. ByteDance which is the owner of
the TikTok app bought Musical.ly for $1 billion in 2017 and merged the two
apps.
Richards made a bet with himself that if he could
achieve 10,000 followers by the end of summer, he would keep doing video
posting; if not attained, he would stop and totally quit doing it.
I’m a very competitive guy.
– Josh Richards
A year after starting on Musical.ly, he started making
money at the age of 15 through song promotions, where he would promote music on
his posts. Subsequently, those deals turned into working with brands such as
Reebok, Cash App and Crocs, Richards said.
By the time he was 17, he decided to make social media
his full-time focus while attending high school.
Richards currently has over 20.1 million followers on
TikTok, 6.8 million on Instagram, 2.1 million subscribers on YouTube and 1.1
million follows on Triller.
Despite Richard’s colossal success on video-sharing
app TikTok, he announced on July 28th that he is leaving the app and
going to the rival Triller. His decision to leave TikTok has to do with
security concerns.
Furthermore, Richards is currently Triller’s chief
strategy officer and is an investor with an undisclosed stake in the business.
Triller app debuted as a short form music content app
in 2015 but has since added a social feature similar to that of TikTok. Last
year, the company raised $28 million in a funding round led by Proxima Media,
which has a majority stake. The app also celebrities-investors like Snoop Dogg
and Lil Wayne.