London Lazerson makes a living impersonating Macaulay Culkin on TikTok: And now he's educating the next generation of TikTokers.

• Author: Swanson, Jacob

AT THE TIME OF THIS WRITING, London Lazerson has generated 8.9 million followers and 123 million likes on his TikTok account @londonlaz--and it all started with a series of posts he did impersonating Kevin McCallister from Home Alone. Several years later, that content remains among his biggest hits.

It all started with a failed attempt to make a name for himself as a comedian on Instagram. In 2019, Lazerson posted 100 comic posts to the platform in 100 days. He thought he'd have 100,000 Instagram followers by the end of that summer. He didn't. After all that work, his Instagram followers had only grown from 800 to 1,200--not quite the explosion he was expecting.

But he wasn't about to give up. In March of 2020, Lazerson decided to try going viral on TikTok. He vowed to publish three TikTok videos every day for one month and gained 100,000 followers by the end of it. Motivated by his success, he kept up the pace, posting three videos per day through December 2020 and netting 2.5 million followers in the process.

Not every idea worked. Some of Lazerson's videos flopped; others were more well-received. One day he poured a jar of hot sauce on the white seats of his Tesla to test whether it would stain--that video saw 5.4 million views. A few days later, he returned to the Kevin McCallister bit with 9.9 million views.

Lazerson says quantity beats quality for new creators.

"Stop thinking about it and just pump as much content out as humanly possible," he says. "Because what's going to happen is, not only are you going to get better at making content, you're going to also understand what works, what doesn't work, what people want to watch and what they don't want to watch, and what you actually like doing--and you need to do that as fast as possible."

Now, Lazerson mentors budding TikTok creators and expects them to follow in his footsteps, making 100 videos a month to kickstart their growth.

"When people sign on to me, I say, 'You're done if you miss a day of three posts. We won't talk,"' he says. "It's very harsh because I don't want to work with people who don't have what it takes."

Some of those videos flop, and that's just part of the game. Even with millions of followers, Lazerson will see low-performing videos with only tens of thousands of views. But he doesn't feel the pressure to smash it out of the park every time--he aims to entertain.

"If I have a video with just 30,000 views, most content creators my size would've been like, 'Oh, my...