Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Aimed for 20,000, reached 350,000
A modest goal
Claire started posting about tech and startups on TikTok in March 2025 and on Instagram in June 2025. She came to it from six years in venture, starting as an associate at a firm called GSV, along with a Substack at her previous firm that grew to 15,000 readers and a Tumblr following of around 20,000 that she built as a middle schooler. The goal was 10,000 to 20,000 people who care deeply about tech and innovation.
The series that worked
Her best-performing series is Hot Startup Rounds, a weekly look at two to three startups worth noticing. They don't have to be the largest fundraisers. Most people hear about the OpenAI and Anthropic mega-rounds but have no view of what is being funded at the earliest stages, and those videos did very well.
Companies come calling
The audience brought in companies. Vanta, Perplexity, and Meta all came asking her to share what they were building with her audience and to set up formal partnerships. These were companies she had been tracking, and now her small window was the one they wanted.
Why do short videos reach strangers so fast?
TikTok's For You feed recommends videos by predicted interest rather than by how many followers an account has. TikTok has said the signals include watch time, likes, shares, and comments. A new video is typically shown to a small test audience first, and it is pushed to larger groups if that audience responds well. This is why a small account can reach far more people than the number who follow it.
Why do brands court small niche audiences?
A small account built around one topic gives a brand direct access to people who already care about that topic. Marketers have a vocabulary for this: accounts under about 10,000 followers are often called nano-influencers, and those up to about 100,000 are called micro-influencers. Brands often value them for trust and relevance rather than raw reach. Influencer-marketing platforms such as Aspire and CreatorIQ built tools around finding these smaller accounts.
Why does posting daily compound over a year?
Each post on a recommendation-driven platform is a fresh test of whether it can find an audience. Accounts that post often get many more tests, and each success adds followers who see later posts first. A video series with a recurring format also gives returning viewers a reason to come back at the same time each week. Nielsen Norman Group's research on habit formation in media shows consistent schedules help audiences build a viewing routine.
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