We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Trevor Ellis. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Trevor below.
Trevor, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?
I first realized I wanted to pursue a creative artistic path when I discovered some incredible, hidden mountain bike jump trails in Texas that almost no one knew about and it was difficult to find any videos of people actually riding the trails. Most of the YouTube content of Texas mountain biking was focused on boring cross country riding and was lacking the thrill and excitement of downhill and jump trails. So I felt like I had an obligation to bring greater exposure and popularity to those awesome trails by riding and documenting them in YouTube videos so that it could excite more people and bring awareness to such an awesome sport.
Since then I have documented most of the amazing trails throughout Texas and beyond and have started doing more races and events.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I am a Mountain Biking YouTuber out of Austin Texas. I make videos riding all the gnarliest and most difficult trails that I can find around Texas and beyond.
When I first started riding I thought that the mountain biking in Texas was all just the cross country style which focuses more on fitness and long distance where biking skills and having fun were optional. But to my surprise there is actually a small but very active community of riders dedicated to making trails that will push your biking skills and your sanity to the limit, and that was exactly what I was looking for. So to try and inspire more people and spread awareness to the awesome groups of people around Texas making challenging and very fun mountain biking trails, I decided to create my YouTube channel. I started making videos documenting all the great and gnarly trails around Texas and slowly became better and better at the sport until I made it all the way to the top as the #1 overall Enduro and Downhill racer in Texas, one of my proudest achievements.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
I started out on YouTube and built a lot of my audience by just riding all the local trails and posting the videos to other sites like trailforks so that people wanting to see a trail could click on my video and see the whole trail. That built up my foundational audience and from there I was able to expand to other types of videos including races and more shredit style videos.
I built my audience on Instagram by just having fun with it and posting videos of me doing stuff that I actually want to see. A lot of it was posting clips of me progressing on a trail, doing a new jump, or learning a new trick. A good way to tell if I made a good post is if I go back and watch it a few times because I want to see it again.
I feel like most people take themselves way too seriously trying to be professional and fit in with what makes things “popular” and using the right hashtags and music that everyone else uses. But what’s popular is usually lame and really boring, so I try to be different and goofy in a lot of my posts to make it interesting and have people actually interested in what I’m doing. It feels more real than the fake corporate social media posts that nobody actually cares about.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
One story of resilience was at one of the mountain biking races. During the race on one of the trails I crashed and snapped my handlebars in half. Luckily I talked to a bunch of different people at the race and someone was willing to give me a new set of handlebars to finish the race. I went back to the trail I crashed on and was able to finish the race in 5th place. You can watch the full video on my YouTube called “BROKEN HANDLEBARS || Texas Enduro Cup Sansom Park 2021”
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @ranked_mountain_biking
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@RankedMountainBiking
