Monday Mention: How a creator amassed 2M followers on TikTok thru Star Wars remakes

Welcome back to Creator’s Digest. We’re changing up the format here with shorter editions but more frequent newsletters. 

Here’s what to expect:

Monday Mention (short edition on one creator and what they’re doing)Tuesday Teardown (short edition of a platform’s feature/launch, new thing)Wednesday Mid Week Creator News Roundup (longer edition on creator news)Thursday Tidbit (short edition on something random)Friday Feature (short edition where I feature a different creator and link their work)

Saturday’s are off (no newsletter)

Sunday Deep Dive (longer edition for paid subscribers, deep dive story of a creator)

Today’s feature is Lea Martinez known as “@slayeas” on TikTok.

What Are They Known For?

Lea is known for making Star Wars related TikToks where she often does lightsaber spins, cosplays as many characters including Leia, Rey and many more.

She often features lightsabers in her TikToks, most of them from Art Sabers which provide custom lightsabers and honestly just a bunch of cool character equipment for anyone interested in cosplaying or collecting sabers. Each saber is based on the actual sabers used in Star Wars.

How’d They Build a Following?

Lea did cosplays of many different characters from Velma to Freddy Kruger to the Joker but the one that catapulted her following was this chillingly cool TikTok of her dual wielding sabers (this just sounds cool) to an audio mashup of movie dialogue and Lil Nas X’s song Industry Baby. It’s got almost 30M views.

This TikTok was uploaded on October 3rd. You can see from this chart that on the 3rd and 4th, she had 1.3M and 2M likes pour in, clear outliers in terms of engagement and fairly consistent growth thereafter.

Famous Collabs

While she’s done some collabs with other cosplayers and star wars oriented people, her most recent collaboration (from yesterday) with David Dobrik will bring a whole new audience to her content.

That’s the power of TikTok, you never know who is watching and where it might lead.

Lea, an 18 year old, is a huge fan of vlog squad members Zane, Heath, Mariah and Matt, the co-hosts and producers of the podcast Zane & Heath: Unfiltered and all creators in their own right with millions of subscribers and fans.

So naturally, Lea collabed with David and then was surprised by meeting the crew.

Takeaways

-Find your content niche and get really good at it.

-Use props as needed. I still can’t get over how cool the purple Kirby saber is.

-Teach & show instead of telling. Lea’s saber spinning skills are universally cool.

That’s it. See you tomorrow.