We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Alissa Schow a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alissa, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How did you scale up? What were the strategies, tactics, meaningful moments, twists/turns, obstacles, mistakes along the way? We’d love to hear the backstory the illustrates how you grew your brand.

I had been on social media for about 4 years before I started growing fast. I had 30k followers and hadn’t grown much- I would lose and gain followers and not really get any momentum. I’d had a couple brand deals here and there but then they all just stopped or wouldn’t pay my rates and wanted to give me free product- which I wasn’t interested in anymore.
In spring of 2023 i decided i was going to take a break with grand deals and just start creating quality content that would serve my followers. I only wanted to post reels that others would save and share. Before I made a reel I would ask myself what the point of it was. If it wasn’t serving or teaching my audience something I didn’t create it. I did a couple reels on spin mops and creative uses for them and my audience loved them. I started to grow and get this momentum – I created a series with about 5 different spin mop reels mixed in with cleaning tutorials for keeping your house clean. By May I had hit 100k followers (a goal I thought I would never achieve) I kept this strategy through the whole year and kept growing my audience. By December I think I was at about 400k followers. I had reels going viral constantly from the shares and saves I was getting.
In 2024 I decided I was going to keep my same strategy of serving my audience while at the same time making money on every reel I put out. I got asked the same questions over and over “what’s the best way to clean grout” “how do you wash baseboards” etc and I decided to create small ebooks. I had a freebie and 4 other digital products followers could purchase. I would make a reel and use Manychat to send a link to an ebook and a link for the products I used in the reel. In every reel I post there is a key word followers comment and 2 different links. So I had 2 different ways of making money- cleaning guides and affiliate sales on the products I was showing. My business was bringing in so much more money than I thought possible. I’d worked for free as a creator for so long in the previous years and now I had actual momentum. I started making money from brand deals, digital products, and affiliate sales. My income increased 750 percent from 2023 to 2024.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

When I first started my page , my husband and I were diyers – going from project to project renovating our home, after 3 years of this our house was done and we were exhausted. I hated living in the construction mess and was so excited to be done. I have influencer friends that invent projects to do or drag out content for a full year on diy. I knew I couldn’t do that- I would get too bored and I also didn’t want to keep inventing home projects when I felt like ours was complete. I shifted my page and decided to learn how to clean all the new surfaces we’d just installed- marble and concrete tile, laminate floors, quartz countertops, glass on all the new showers. I started sharing what I had learned and the response was huge.
We used to do these incredible projects- brick walls, brand new bathrooms, knocked out walls and create a mudroom but guess what … me getting a new bathroom did nothing for my audience – my sharing how to clean the bathroom did. Everyone wants to know the most effective way to clean their house. The best products to use, cleaning hacks, diy cleaning recipes, etc.
it was a better fit for me and it shines through in my reels.

Have you ever had to pivot?

I had to pivot my account 3 different times. I first started it as a small business owner selling letter boards off a website and on Amazon. Once covid hit we couldn’t import them anymore and the market was saturated. Like so many people at that time we decided to start renovating our home. So my page became where we showed house projects. The DIY influencer world is very competitive- brand deals are hard to come by that pay not just give free product. Once our house was finished I decided DIY was not a good fit for me anymore and I pivoted again and transitioned my page into cleaning, hacks, and home finds. It was so scary to make this decision because I’d done only diy for a few years. I wondered what people would think if I wasn’t doing projects anymore and was very nervous for the change. But it turns out it was the best thing I could have done. The content was faster and easier. I didn’t have to live in a construction mess and it was helping so many people when I shared my cleaning content with them.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

The biggest key is consistency. Make sure you are creating high quality content that serves your audience. Have a strong bio that tells what your page is and don’t stray from that bio.
What content can you put out that will serve? Would someone save or share this? Would someone be interested in the product I’m selling?

Contact Info:

• Website: Under construction!
• Instagram: home.and.chaos
• Other: Pinterest- homeandchaos

Image Credits

Alissa Schow