hi, i'm raza

i make videos for a living. over the last decade that's turned into 1M+ followers and 1B+ views across my own content and the brands i've built with. this page is the short version of how i got here, what i'm doing now, and who i'm looking to work with next.

Raza North

i started on YouTube at 12 making minecraft + league videos → hit 5k subs. then my family needed cash, so i pivoted and grew instagram theme pages (motivation, food, luxury) to 500k+ followers each, flipped a few, and kept the rest for recurring ad revenue before selling them two years later.

at 16 i went after bigger businesses to run their social, and got laughed out of the room. so i spent 308 days writing and self-publishing a book at 18 called the social media specialist (this was before AI existed), and used its virality to land global clients. you can still read it for free here.

that same year i built a boutique agency, Mysterious Media, that helped pay my way through UT-Austin CS. when the work started feeling repetitive i sold off the client list and went back to my roots of making videos, right as TikTok was taking over.

after graduating, i took nine months at Procter & Gamble to rebuild my cash. remote work during the day, filming at night. once the stack was enough to buy me real time, i quit. haven't looked back in four years.

creator era

honestly, the last four years have been a long experiment in figuring out what actually travels online.

  • crushing it podcast → 20 eps on student-founders and the stuff nobody else was covering, since everyone was only telling the big guys' stories.
  • tiktok blew up after i counted every brick on UT's speedway. that was the sign to go all in.
  • ran a series where i tried to break into bryce hall's sway house. the stunt: i negotiated a $50k billboard disney uses on sunset blvd down to $15k to challenge him. the series gained me 300k+ followers on TikTok in 7 days.
  • launched a street show, free therapy, where strangers told me what was actually going on in their lives → audience crossed 1M+ across platforms.
  • launched a blind dating show to test a theory about how YouTube actually rewards content → 57k+ subs and 20M views off ~14 videos.

what i do now

these days the work has narrowed into three things i care about.

  1. premium UGC for brands that actually convert (minimum $10k/month for 10 videos). click here to work with me
  2. advising brands and creators on human-first marketing in the ai ugc era.
  3. building a community and a system so up-and-coming creators can upskill and charge what they're actually worth.

my thesis: as ai floods feeds with copy-paste ads, human stories are going to 3-4x in value. duolingo losing half its audience after flaunting "ai first" is a preview of where this is going. in five years, premium human-made UGC will feel like organic food next to processed. brands will pay a premium for content that's handmade, risky, and emotionally alive. i'm building for that future now.

looking for:

  • creators who want the playbook to land $10k+ UGC retainers consistently.
  • brands that need vetted UGC creators to become the face of their product and test tons of content, fast.
  • startups that need a creator-led UGC engine (founder equity, idc about 2% unless you're on track for a $10B+ valuation).

relevant links

  • [UGC Portfolio] – google-drive folder of brand work (videos, case studies)
  • [Demo Reel] – for brands that want to work together
  • [Channels] – tiktok, youtube, ig, twitter
  • [Book] – download the social media specialist (wrote when i was 18)