Mike DeVries, a 20-year-old Vancouver Island University student, is the man behind the @yomikez TikTok account.
His most-watched TikTok shows viewers how to make one’s breath appear to look like smoke.
He built up a base of followers rapidly, but then he met his girlfriend and put the account aside for a couple of years before recently revitalizing it.
He’s seen his videos go from 10,000 views to 100,000 views in a matter of minutes and said it’s “like a high” when a video goes viral.
“Anything that’s new and popular and is getting a lot of views, you really want to jump on that,” DeVries said.
DeVries is in his first year studying electrical trades at VIU, but would love to see where he can go with content creation, too, and is hoping to diversify his brand to YouTube and Instagram.
“Expanding your business like that, you’d really have to step up your production quality and try and tailor your videos to a specific audience and that’s really hard to do,” he said.