I built the media brand I wanted to see when I was a teenager.
Teen Star started as a youth culture website.
I turned it into a digital media business built around social content, video, creators, community and an audience that had very little patience for boring content.
Starting point
The rebuild
Result
Having an audience and having a modern media product aren't the same thing.
The site was becoming outdated. The audience was moving to social. And publishing articles wasn’t enough anymore.
So instead of trying to make the old thing slightly better, I rebuilt the ecosystem around how young people actually consumed media.
Don't build another website people visit because they have to. Build something they want to come back to.
That meant treating every part of the business as content: the website, Instagram, TikTok, video, quizzes, creators, original formats and community.
An original video arm for the brand.
Interviews, series, quizzes and behind-the-scenes content. The goal wasn’t to make branded-looking content. It was to create formats people would watch even if they didn’t know or care about Teen Star.
More visual. More reactive. More experimental.
Instagram became a completely different experience. We broke the grid, introduced quizzes, created recurring formats and tested constantly. TikTok gave us another playground.
An operation that didn't depend on me.
I recruited and worked with creators, journalists, marketers and contributors to make the whole thing run.
A much better mobile experience.
I also built the Teen Star mobile app, translating the WordPress content into something built for mobile, with particular focus on our strongest formats: quizzes and video.
You can't manufacture attention just because you've decided something is important.
You have to make something people actually want. Teen Star taught me that, and I still use it everywhere.