I Posted 240 Tiktoks in 12 Days.

Here's What Happened.

Between June 22 and July 3, 2025, I posted 20 TikToks a day for my small skincare business, Sabbatical Beauty. This was an unhinged but deliberate effort to get more eyes on my small business and to hopefully increase sales.

The Sabbatical Beauty Tiktok account, July 2025.

When I polled folks on Substack and LinkedIn about what they most wanted to know about my unhinged experiment, the question that most stuck out to me was: “Are you okay?”

First off: I’m okay—but just barely. This experiment took a grueling amount of my mental and emotional energy, not to mention time.

And in this piece, I answer the rest of the questions that came in:

• Why Did I Do It

• My Brand History on Tiktok

• Why 20 Posts A Day?

• Here’s What Happened (Views, Followers, Sales)

• My Posting System

• Patterns of Engagement

• What I Learned

• Why Did This Experiment Fail?

• The Mental Health Toll

• Would I Do It Again?

Why Did I Do It?

2025 started out as one of the most abysmal sales years in the nine year history of my little Korean-inspired skincare brand, Sabbatical Beauty. Sluggish sales in 2025 isn’t something unique to my brand. Beauty industry pundits have widely reported a slowdown across the entire industry, going so far as to suggest that the “lipstick index,” an economic symbol that beauty was recession-proof, is now out of date.

But looking at my Q1 sales felt like staring down a barrel of a gun; I had to do something to radically move the needle, or I was going to be in trouble.

So I went back to posting on Tiktok in May.

My Brand History on Tiktok

A little context: I actively worked on and grew the Sabbatical Beauty Tiktok account to about 50k followers during the pandemic years — 2020 to 2022 — but stopped in 2023 due to the sheer amount of effort required.

Tiktok rewards volume. At the height of my brand account’s growth in those years, I was posting between 2 and 8 times a day. I couldn’t keep it up. So I stopped.

But Q1 financials got me super anxious, so I descended back down the Tiktok hole in May. Learning from my past experience, I followed a cadence for growth: posting between 2 to 8 times a day again.

And in May, I unexpectedly hit a few viral moments. One post hit 100k views, and within a week and a half another exploded to half a million.

@sabbaticalbeautyCome and try my Korean skincare in my south philly lab and see for yourself 💁🏽‍♀️ #phillyskincare #koreanskincare #phillytiktok #smallbeautybusiness #madeinphilly

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In those two weeks, my Tiktok account grew from 45k followers (I had lost about 5k in 2 years of not posting consistently) to 58k followers.

My May sales were the first month in 2025 where I wasn’t deep in the red. I also grew 300 followers on Instagram, and got about 300 extra emails on my email list in those two weeks.

But then the magic stopped.

In June, views on most of my content came to a screeching halt. I got stuck in what the Tiktok community calls the 200-500 view jail.

Even within this low reach, I still noticed that there were sales coming in via Tiktok — I would get comments and DMs enquiring about product recommendations, and sales soon after. So it seemed clear that Tiktok was still a viable channel for helping my small business.

Why 20 Posts a Day?

In mid June my For You Page showed me a creator stating that she had grown most of her large following by posting between 15-25 times a day. I then started seeing more creators say they experienced exponential growth once they started posting 20 times a day.

All this made sense to me given my own experience with Tiktok and its liking volume.

So I gritted my teeth, cleared my calendar, and on June 22 I decided to try to post 20 times a day on Tiktok. I lasted 12 days.

Here’s what happened (Views, Followers, Sales):

• I posted 240 Tiktoks over 12 days, 20x a day.

• I did not manage to go viral like before. My highest viewed Tiktok during this challenge hit 24.5k views. My lowest viewed Tiktok had 23 views. The average was 773 views.

• I increased my Tiktok follower count by 100 (58.4k to 58.5k).

• Because of the sheer quantity that I posted, my average daily views increased. Prior to the challenge my average daily views ranged between 1.5k-6k views. During the challenge my highest day was 27.5k views and lowest day was 6.9k.

• My Shopify sales for this time period decreased by 20% in gross sales and 7% in number of orders compared to the previous 12 days. (This was one of the most painful realizations of this experiment.)

My Posting System:

• I would post 5 Tiktoks 4 times a day (6am-8am, 10am-12pm, 3pm-5pm, 8pm-10pm). Sometimes I would post them all at once. It didn’t seem to matter to the algorithm.

• Every time I posted 5 posts, I would finalize or plan the next 5 posts. This would take me about 1-2 hours each time.

• Drafting and finalizing posts always involved swiping through my For You Page to see what was trending and if I could easily adapt any trends with my available footage.

• Batch recording — I didn’t always do this. A lot of the posts I made were made using footage I already had in my camera roll. But sometimes I would have to shoot for specific content (like lip syncing) or for a product release.

• I usually kept between 18-25 draft posts in my cache at any given time.

• After learning what the algorithm liked from my account, I would plan a mixture of posts that would include what I knew would do well as well as experimental content.

  • 5 posts:

    • 1-2 trends

    • 1 heavy text informational post

    • 0-1 original content (voiceover/talk to camera/customer reactions)

    • 1-2 founder story

    • 0-1 ‘things I wish you knew’ skincare insights long text post

• Important things I did daily:

  • Regularly reviewed posts from previous days to gauge performance

  • See if I could adapt posts that were performing well to repurpose for additional content

  • Regularly scan for trends I could adapt for my small business

  • Look for comments I could respond to for original content

Patterns of Engagement

The posts that did the best on my account were generally text-heavy posts that were either linked to trends, or spoke to a “founder hook” — reasons why I created my business.

The most popular post I made included all of these elements — trending music, the hook “sometimes I can’t believe,” and on-screen text which had a founder hook and was long enough to encourage people to stop, read and increase watch time.

@sabbaticalbeautyThanks I look happier because I quit being a professor #soupedupkoreanskincare #koreanskincare #happier #phillyskincare #bestskincare #indieskincare

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The types of posts that unfortunately didn’t do as well were my pieces of original content — voiceover storytelling content, or content where I spoke to the camera.

This included all the content which I made where I talked to the camera about the challenge:

@sabbaticalbeautyYour small business girlie is hustling 😓 Ty for the support! #smallbusinessowner #smallbusiness

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What I learned:

• I learned to create content a lot more quickly. On Day 1 I spent about 8-10 hours a day; by Day 12 I was down to 5-6 .

• I learned that the Tiktok algorithm makes no sense at all. It seems almost like a human being with emotions. When it feels coldly towards you, all your content will die on the vine. When it feels warmly towards you, it will push your content. In these 12 days I experienced an extremely cold phase (days 4-6 a lot of my content struggled to hit even 100 views), which slowly warmed up by Day 7.

• Want more proof that the algorithm makes no sense? I experimented with reposting the exact same piece of content a few times to see how it would do. This was a piece on the “a little something to take the edge off” trend, where people would grasp something between two fingers, simulating a cigarette, expressing something that helped them relax (a lot of beauty brands used their products, I also saw people sandwiching their dogs’ nose between two fingers). I reposted the same content four times with four completely different results:

  • 1st post - 392 views,

  • 2nd post - 1723 views,

  • 3rd post - 1249 views

  • 4th post - 274 views.

  • I noticed the most views happened when I saw the trend popping up the most on my FYP, which indicated to me that sometimes it’s not always great to be early to the trend, because Tiktok is more likely to show your trend content when the trend is at its peak.

• I also learned that virality isn’t always immediate. The only post I created during this challenge started taking off the day after I posted.

Why Did This Experiment Fail?

In terms of my business objectives, this experiment itself was a failure. Follower growth was negligible given the sheer amount of effort and energy it required, and sales were down 20% during this experiment.

However, because of the volume of my posts, views on my account did increase, which meant more eyeballs on my brand and its mission.

Why did this experiment fail while I was being fed content about creators who were succeeding with the volume technique?

My hypothesis:

• Most creators I saw who were posting 20x a day were simply posting about their challenge and its results. My focus instead was on brand content.

• The algorithm seems to reward creators who post about their posting success. If you post about not being successful, it won’t get views.

• My original content still needs work. I think if my original content had started taking off, this would have helped my account in general.

However, when I zoom out and compare revenue from the two months I was actively posting on Tiktok (May and June) to the two months prior, my gross sales were up 13%. That 13% is the difference between running into the red and staying in the black.

So while high volume posting didn’t work out, the data still indicates that showing up on TikTok is important for my business. Since my challenge ended, I’ve returned to my former cadence of 5 to 10 posts a day.

The Mental Health Toll

This was one of the hardest things I have done, because I was creating content while also juggling the full-time job of running a business. My partner reported that I was very stressed out and grouchy and started taking time away from self-care just to complete the challenge.

I also noticed as I was doing this that my anxiety levels increased. The longer the challenge wore on, the more I felt I didn’t have time to be creative or to try new experiments — especially because my original content took the most time and systematically was not appreciated by the algorithm.

My attention span shrank to that of a fruit fly. I’m usually a person who watches long form news broadcasts and I found myself unable to concentrate, turning to Tiktok instead.

Finally, to be completely transparent, the hardest thing that resulted from the challenge was facing the poor results. It made me feel that all the effort I put into this was for nothing.

Would I do it again?

Was it a complete loss, given the toll on my mental health and the disappointing results?

No. I learned a lot overall. I learned how to be a faster creator, I learned to take more risks and experiment more. I pushed myself to make more voiceover and talk to the camera videos, which aren’t native to me and which make me uncomfortable. While none of these did well in terms of views, I’m proud of myself for trying to learn a new skill.

However, given the Reuters report that Tiktok is planning to create a different app for the US market in September and planning to sunset the US app by March 2026, I am not sure how much effort it is worth to keep growing my brand following on the current version of Tiktok. (For what it’s worth, Tiktok itself has disputed the rumor.)

But whatever happens to Tiktok, one thing is clear: short form video is here to stay. And like it or not, it’s imperative for bootstrapped founders to show up, build awareness and earn community trust.

In the end, this isn’t a story about virality — it’s a story about how I’m finding my own resilience. Especially in one of the most economically frightening climates most of us have ever lived in. The platforms may change; the algorithms may be fickle. But I’ll still be here, building on what I believe in.

Enjoyed this Substack? I post on occasional Sundays.

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