A 20-YEAR-OLD college student had taken a leap of faith, giving up the steady promise of a degree in favor of a risky yet rewarding career in social media.
The young entrepreneur makes up to $47,000 each month on TikTok, but admits each time she posts it’s “like a lottery ticket” and she’s unsure if she will win.
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Grayson Finks (@grayson.finks) is a 20-year-old TikToker who has risen to popularity for her fashion content.
She has mastered the art of selling through TikTok Shop, sharing more than 10 shoppable outfit videos on a daily basis with her over 175,000 followers.
Finks is an inspiration in more ways than one, turning her sobriety journey into a multi-million dollar fashion content creation business.
Raking in more than $3 million in product revenue across the past two years, the TikToker spoke exclusively with The U.S. Sun on how she ditched her “party girl” lifestyle and turned her passion into a profit.
Read More on Side Hustles
A FRESH START
Grayson’s path to success wasn’t an easy one, she told The U.S. Sun.
Just two years ago, the content creator was in rehab, working to overcome an emotionally and physically draining alcohol addiction.
Flash forward to today and Grayson has completely shifted gears, turning her former partying lifestyle into inspirational and engaging fashion content that highlights her faith and newfound focus on wellness.
The entrepreneur’s success started when she was studying at the University of Tennessee, when a friend approached her and asked to buy her TikTok account, as he had a health journal that he wanted to promote and sell through the app.
Grayson, with enough TikTok followers at the time to be in the TikTok Affiliate Program, instead offered to promote her friend’s health journal on her account.
“I was going through a health journey process at the time,” she said. “I just quit drinking and I was losing some weight, so I used the journal to my advantage during that transformation and kind of documented it and helped others do the same thing with the journal.”
Grayson saw some success selling the health journals before the sales plateaued, pushing her to invest the profits and some of her own money into a ton of TikTok Shop clothes for a new business venture.
She would search through the TikTok Shop tab and find trending products that were up-and-coming.
“I started promoting those on my own page and that picked up very quickly,” she said. “I realized that the more videos that I posted, the better chance I had of earning the kind of money that I wanted to be earning.”
Side hustles and tax implications
Extra income you make from side hustles may need to be reported to the IRS.
If you receive more than $600 in gross payouts from a selling platform like eBay, the site will issue you a Form 1099-K to use in your tax return.
Individuals should calculate their adjusted gross income, taxable earnings, and deductions for the year.
Once they have that, they can use the 1040-ES form to calculate estimated taxes.
Grayson has been capitalizing on TikTok Shop for roughly one year now, even dropping out of college to focus on her content creation full time.
The 20-year-old has generated around $3 million worth of product on TikTok over the past two years, making 10% to 20% commission from that.
She posts roughly ten videos each day, with at least five of the videos on average featuring new clothing pieces – which she now receives free from brands in exchange for videos.
In addition to a closet chock full of trendy clothing pieces, Grayson’s success on TikTok has made her a pretty penny.
She has made upwards of $300,000 over past year – an impressive salary for a 20-year-old.
ROLL THE DICE
Despite the crazy profit potential of TikTok, Grayson emphasized that making a living on social media is not all fun and games.
“It fluctuates and that’s kind of a scary thing,” she said. “It really fluctuates depending on how much effort you put in.”
The content creator shared that her salary is highly volatile, seeing months where she has pulled in $20,000, and others where she has made up to $47,000.
“Every single video is a lottery ticket,” said Grayson. “Every video that you post – you have a chance to earn a lot of money.”
For example, the content creator had a video about the health journal blow up, pulling in 16 million views and earning her around $10,000.
Every single video is a lottery ticket. Every video that you post – you have a chance to earn a lot of money.”
Grayson Finks
TikTok is a goldmine for content creators, with a variety of features that allow users to generate significant revenue, such as the popular Creator Rewards Program.
A special program that pays eligible creators based on their views and engagement, it hands out between $0.40 and $1 or more per 1,000 views.
The social media platform offers a handful of other routes to profitability, including the TikTok Affiliate Program, allowing creators to earn commissions by promoting products through affiliate links.
CONSISTENCY IS KEY
Consistency is key when it comes to turning a profit via TikTok Shop, said Grayson.
“Those ten videos a day – that is just as important as brushing my teeth in my mind. Social media is a very easy thing to let slip away, so you have to hold yourself accountable the same way you would in a nine-to-five,” she said.
A career in social media has come with its own unique challenges, said the content creator, such as the potential to completely disappear in the blink of an eye.
Grayson explained that the temporary TikTok shutdown in January, coupled with a handful of recent updates on the platform, has made an already unsteady gig even more so.
How would the TikTok ban work?
TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, has until April 5 to sell the beloved app or it’ll be banned over national security concerns.
In April 2024, President Joe Biden signed a law giving ByteDance 9 months to divest TikTok due to concerns the Chinese government could spy on Americans and manipulate content on TikTok.
After winning the election, President Donald Trump extended the sale deadline to April 5. Vice President JD Vance was tasked with coming up with a plan to save the app.
If ByteDance doesn’t sell TikTok to a government-approved buyer by that deadline, app stores will be forced to stop distributing or updating TikTok.
Companies like Apple and Google would be banned from helping to keep TikTok going, essentially forcing the app to die out.
While TikTok likely won’t be removed from phones, it’ll slowly degrade without any upkeep and eventually become unusable.
“It’s terrifying,” she said. “It’s all fun and games – just get to say you do social media for a job – until you wake up and your job is completely gone and you still have bills to pay.”
She has seen much success on the platform despite the uncertainty of her work, attributing it to her consistency and staying true to herself in the process.
“Having your own charisma, caring about your followers, and having genuine relationships with them is the most important thing,” said Grayson.
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