Kenobismo

Although I had previously run a few accounts focused on football content, I consider my career as an entrepreneur to have begun in 2020, when I opened an Instagram account dedicated to posting curiosities and news about Star Wars: Kenobismo. It was the first time I was consistent with content and took it a bit more seriously. I didn’t do badly in terms of followers and metrics, but I was 16 years old, the consistency overwhelmed me, and I didn’t really see any benefit in continuing. Before the account reached its first anniversary, I ended up closing it to take a break for an indefinite period of time. Months passed—more than a year, perhaps—and in 2022 I came across a key short video that talked about an app for mining Bitcoin. (It may seem like this has nothing to do with Kenobismo, but bear with me.) I had already been interested in crypto before, but never beyond watching Bitcoin go up and down. After fascinatedly downloading the mining app and starting to use it, a new obsession was born: cryptocurrencies. I watched videos, charts—everything. A classmate asked me what I would do when I turned 18. I thought for a few seconds and replied, “Open a Binance account.” And that’s what I did, although I didn’t really use the Binance account at all. In the end, I bought crypto at an ATM and put it into a wallet. No exchanges. All this interest in cryptocurrencies eventually led me to learn more about investing in general, personal finance, and most importantly: entrepreneurship. That, in turn, brought me back to Kenobismo. I had a good audience, I could take it more seriously, and I could make money from it. I relaunched the Instagram account with force: consistency, quality, and a clear goal. I also started posting short videos, which I reuploaded to TikTok and YouTube (using artificial voice, not my own). So at that point, I officially decided to become an entrepreneur (even though the project had already been started before). Instagram and the other platforms began to grow quite well. After some time, TikTok even surpassed Instagram, and I had some amazing months, with figures of up to 50 million views. Monetization—at least on TikTok—was just around the corner. A few months later I was able to apply for it, although if I remember correctly, I had to wait one or two months to receive my first payment. To be able to collect it, I opened my first bank account, with Revolut. That month the views weren’t great, but I earned around €40–50, which felt incredible. The following month I earned around €20. And the month after that, my videos went from a minimum of 10,000 views (with an average of 50,000) to all staying below 1,000. I got shadowbanned, possibly due to movie-related content. I kept uploading content hoping it would be fixed, but it never was. As a response, I stopped posting short videos on Kenobismo and started uploading to a new set of accounts dedicated to cinema in general, not just Star Wars—this time using my real voice. I uploaded exactly 100 videos. I did it as something temporary, to give Kenobismo’s shadowban time to recover. I didn’t manage to generate any income from this project. After those 100 videos, I went back to Kenobismo. I decided to start uploading general cinema videos there as well—not only Star Wars—and I also stopped publishing other types of posts to focus exclusively on short videos. I stayed like that for a few weeks. But the TikTok shadowban continued. I decided something more had to be done. I would expand into long-form videos on YouTube. I started preparing everything for it, but just the day before recording the first long Kenobismo video, I came across another key video for my trajectory: The Wild Project #219 ft Jordi Maquiavello. An episode of the podcast talking about cinema for almost five hours. I had never watched such a long podcast from start to finish. This was the first one, and I really liked it. But I came to a harsh realization: I had no real idea about cinema—at least not enough to “teach” it. After thinking about it a bit more, and seeing that this didn’t really have much of a future anyway—and that I also hated recording myself—I ended up quitting. However, just the day after that reflection, a new idea came to my mind — EliteBara.

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