We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Ryan & Katy Smilko. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Ryan & Katy below.
Hi Ryan & Katy, thanks for joining us today. So, let’s imagine that you were advising someone who wanted to start something similar to you and they asked you what you would do differently in the startup-process knowing what you know now. How would you respond?
It’s hard not to answer this with “everything.” It feels like it was such a long road to get to where we are today, 6 years in, and that we still have a long road ahead. That being said, our answer to this question may also change as we continue to grow in our business and industry. If you work in social media in any capacity, you know that it is an ever-evolving world. One day you can feel like you have a grasp on the algorithm, and the next day you’re not getting anything.
1. Don’t fight the direction of the industry. When the Reels feature was first launched on Instagram, we boycotted. I mean we pushed back – hard. Video wasn’t our thing, we didn’t have a library of content to pull from to keep up with trends, and we didn’t feel like it showcased what we liked to capture. So we didn’t post them, ever. And all the while we continued to wonder why we weren’t growing, reaching new audiences, or getting paid work. Looking back it’s easy to see that this was a huge miss for our business. If we’d tried to make reels work for us instead of fighting it, we’d be much further along by now.
2. Be flexible. No matter what industry you are in, it is important to stay flexible. Saying yes to opportunities and trying new things is one of the key elements in a successful small business. The industries, markets, climates, can all change rapidly and you have to be able to adapt and pivot when necessary. You also have to be willing to learn new things and push yourself so you can be flexible.
3. Niche down. When we started out creating content, we had no idea what to share. We’d share trips we took, meals we cooked, dog-friendly activities, brands that sent us free products, van build info… There was no way for anyone to know what they’d be getting from us in any given day or week. Over the years we’ve spent in this field, we have found that repetition of similar content is great! But that likely means having a niche where you can create the same type of content so your followers know where to come for what you’re offering.
4. Do 10x more than you think you need to. This is something we learned from coaches that recommended we read a book titled “The 10x Rule.” If you want to succeed as an entrepreneur, at some point it will be a numbers game. The more you pitch and outreach, the more ‘yeses’ (and ‘nos’) you will get. The more content you post, the more reach you will get. The more you put out, the more you get back. When we first started, we would reach out to one – YES, ONE – tourism board at a time. We were worried that if we reached out to multiple, that we would get two contracts at the same time and have to turn one down. So when it comes to our blog, sharing affiliate links, brand outreach, or creating content, we now do it 10x.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
We are Ryan and Katy Smilko, the folks behind Smilkos Lens, a full-time content creation business. We are dog-parents, van-lifers, and professional soft adventurers. Ryan grew up in Illinois and moved to San Jose California in 2015, where he met Katy who was born and raised there. In 2016 we got married on Maui, and then for our 1-year anniversary we took a trip. Landing in Bangor Maine, we spent 11 days driving down the east coast hitting New Hampshire, New York, down to Philadelphia and D.C. That’s when the travel bug set in for Katy — Ryan always had it. From 2017 and on, our priority became travel. Both of us having full time jobs; Katy in finance and Ryan in tech, we used up every hour of Paid Time Off and utilized credit card points and loyalty programs to make travel more affordable.
We did another U.S. roadtrip in 2018 in Utah and Arizona, and then we took it international. Visiting places like Bali, Hong Kong, New Zealand, and Belize. We also planned trips to Borneo, Japan, and the United Kingdom – but 2020 canceled all of those dreams. Somewhere along the way in our travels, Ryan found out that it is possible to make money on Instagram and blogging as a content creator. It became a hobby of his to take photos on our travels and post them, and somewhere deep down we both knew we would love to travel full-time. But we also knew we weren’t going to leave our 70lb dog behind, who was 10 years old at the time.
Being on lockdown, working from home, and having to put all travel on hold started turning our wheels on how we could finally make the leap to full-time travel. We had a few things decided: 1) We no longer wanted to put off living our dream. 2) We wanted to quit our jobs and build a content creation business, and 3) We needed to find a way to travel with the dog. Katy came across an article on Pinterest about vanlife, and within days we were shopping for our own van. We purchased our van sight-unseen online from a dealership in Oklahoma in September 2020. It took about 18 months of weekends to build out (with a TON of help from Katy’s carpenter father), and in December 2021 we hit the road as full-time vanlifers!
This is when we started to dive deeper into reaching out to tourism boards of counties, cities, states, and creating content around the United States in hopes of becoming a travel resource, and earning an income. And in 2022, we officially formed our business: Smilkos Lens which is a play on words referencing our last name “Smilko” and “Lens”, as our followers, audience, and clients are seeing the world through our lens. Literally. We would visit national parks, breweries, wineries, campgrounds, you name it! We thought between the beautiful places we were visiting and the amount of knowledge we had, our business would take off in no time. Although it has been a much slower burn than anticipated, we continue to grow as content creators and travel bloggers. Our website continues to expand as we publish blog articles on all national parks we went to, our favorite towns, and of course soft adventures! We also continue to connect with tourism boards and brands to create content for their social media, marketing, and websites.
Today, it’s our goal and mission to help tourism boards, local businesses, and brands draw more and new customers by creating engaging and high-quality content that they can use on their media channels. It initially started as just photography, but has largely transformed in to video creation as that is what is driving the industry forward right now. In addition to this, we want to be experts on all the soft adventures and best places to visit in California, and to be resources for others who have a desire to travel and spend time in the outdoors and exploring new places.
We’ve had some major accomplishments and hit major milestones that we are incredibly proud of, whether it be landing multi-figure contracts, or having content that we created for a brand go viral, to having roadtripped to all of the lower 48 states and visited 40+ national parks. But I think to this day, the thing we are most proud of, was simply taking the leap and chance to quit our jobs and pursue our dreams. At the end of the day, whether we succeed or fail, we know we didn’t sit around waiting for our dreams to come to us, we took the chance to make our dreams become a reality, and we didn’t wait to do it. That is something we will forever be proud of.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
Yes, absolutely! Our goal and mission are intertwined and really cannot be separated. And that is: Live Life Now. You are only given one life, and there’s absolutely no reason to not make the most of it. We believe this looks different for everyone; it does not require living in a van, traveling full-time, or hiking. It can mean taking control of your health, quitting that job you have hated for years, creating new friendships — anything! So long as you aren’t putting it off and saying “I’ll do it someday” … then we are here for it! For us, living life now means traveling around, exploring new places, hiking as much as possible, and creating endless memories so that when we look back on our lives one day, we have no regret, and an abundance of wonderful memories.
This same mission inspires us to continue to share our soft adventures. Sometimes social media can be a place where you see people out doing extreme and incredible things like backpacking or rock climbing – but that can feel unattainable to the person who wants to start getting outside more. We hope our soft adventures reach those folks and help them see that there’s many ways to get out and start living life now. Even if we can inspire someone to find their own local soft adventure – we’ve accomplished our goal!
What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?
In 2018 we started the journey to make money from social media and blogging as a side hustle. We both had full-time jobs and were simply using our iPhones to take photos when we would travel and post them on Instagram. This lasted about a year until we bought a used camera from some friends in 2019. From there, Ryan utilized “YouTube University” and blog tutorials to teach himself how to take photographs with manual settings. He learned composition, aperture, editing – everything self-taught. He would practice and practice and through trial-and-error, perfected his style.
Over the next couple years, we continued to travel and take travel photos. We visited all the “Insta-famous” spots that we could and shared them on social media. During that time, we met and connected with so many fellow travelers, influencers, and content creators. From them we learned new tactics, discussed growing our platforms, the struggles of the industry. We shared our love of traveling and even visited new places together. The dream began to take hold that we could someday turn this side-hustle into a full-time job.
The big hurdle we had not yet overcome was getting paid for our work. We bought e-books and took online courses from other successful content creators on how to reach out to brands and tourism boards to get hired. We were reaching out, but not having much luck. A few unpaid hotel collaborations was all we were able to land.
In 2020, Ryan upgraded his camera set-up and things got more serious. Of course, not being able to travel made “travel blogging” a very difficult career path. We explored California when we could and when we felt safe doing so. Everyone was navigating a new world at that time, but we found it to be a catalyst to make a change. We decided that we would never be ‘returning-to-office’, and made the leap into being business owners. Building our tiny home on wheels was in our minds, our way of being able to continue traveling, with little overhead costs like rent or a mortgage, while being able to focus on building our business. We established our LLC, rebuilt our website, and started reaching to countless hotels, tourism boards, and brands daily.
December of 2021 we finished our van build and took off to travel around the country. We were able to get contracts with a few tourism boards, hotels, and brands along the way – but this time it was our main source of income and our livelihood depended on it. After continuing to struggle with finding work and had several set-backs with van breakdowns, we enrolled in a coaching program in the summer of 2022. While we felt confident in our product, we didn’t have the pitching and business aspects perfected. The goal of the course and coaching was to narrow our focus and find clarity with the direction we should be going with our business. It really helped set the foundation for where we are today.
For the next year and a half, we continued to roadtrip around the U.S., all while trying to connect with tourism boards and brands. What we ended up finding out and learning, was that the constant change in location, made it harder to find work. Even if we did connect with a brand or tourism board, the likelihood that they’d be in need of content, or have budget, during the very small window of time that we were going to be in their location… Almost zero. There was no consistency with where we were, who we were reaching out to, or with our content. It ultimately took returning back to our home state of California to really niche down and find a rhythm and routine. And this isn’t to say that you can’t be on the road full-time AND be a successful content creator, we just found that at the pace with which we were traveling, our personal goals and our business goals did not entirely align.
In less than 6 months of being back in our home state, we’ve already surpassed what we’d accomplished as a business over the course of the 2 years that we were on the road. And while we can’t say that we are wildly successful, we can say that the outlook is very positive, and we’re incredibly excited and optimistic for what our future holds for us, and we’ve come such a long way from our side-hustle days.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://smilkoslens.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smilkos_lens/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/smilkos.lens
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/smilkos-lens/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC58v82eT3HX8WHGq9MFlOA
- Other: https://www.rexby.com/Smilkos_Lens/unitedstates