Lilman, who recently passed one million followers on
TikTok and is now focused on growing both his audience there and his audience on YouTube.
When Lilman–who’s 17 and based in Birmingham, England–joined TikTok in November 2019, the app was an escape from real life and the rest of the internet. He’d been trying to get a dance-focused YouTube channel and
Instagram account off the ground, and trying to balance time-consuming, cross-platform, long-form content creation with high school classes was proving particularly stressful.
TikTok was a window out of that stress. It was also, he discovered, fertile ground for virality: By December 2019, he’d found a viral hit in his humorous