My breakup went viral on TikTok so I built a career as an influencer. It has lasted longer than the heartbreak.

• A video of Bridgette Vong, a former marketing specialist, breaking up with her partner went viral on TikTok.
• She leveraged the engagement to create a side hustle and then a full-time career as an influencer.
• The breakup was the "best thing that's ever happened" to her, she said.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Bridgette Vong, a 26-year-old content creator based in Toronto. It has been edited for length and clarity.

In July 2022, I posted a TikTok video of the final hug my ex-partner of five years and I shared before we broke up. Two years later, the breakup and posting about it are possibly the best thing that ever happened to me.

It never crossed my mind that recording our final goodbye wasn't a "normal" thing to do. I was into recording little moments of my life as sentimental keepsakes. I have a background in marketing and content creation so it was a creative outlet of mine.

I posted it to my few hundred followers and used hashtags — like #healingjourney and #postbreakup — but didn't expect it to blow up.

When I woke up the next day, I had 22,000 followers and the video had a million views. I thought it was a one-off, but the next few videos I posted, about how I was feeling and our last moments, also got millions of views.

People started sharing their breakup stories with me and asking for tips on how to stay strong. My content was inspiring, comforting, or relatable.

I had never seen anyone post about their breakup journey on TikTok before, but I thought I'd keep documenting my healing process to help all the girls who were sending me comments and asking for advice. It gave me so much purpose.

I knew I couldn't waste the opportunity

I thought to myself: "Okay Bridgette, you have some choices here. You have 30,000 followers all of a sudden, your comments and DMs are going crazy, you have always wanted to be Kylie Jenner — why don't you just keep posting?"

With a background in marketing, I knew I would be an idiot not to do something with the opportunity.

So, I started posting regularly. I didn't hope for financial gain or a career out of it, I just wanted to show people my journey and help those who resonated with it.

Even if the video hadn't gone viral, I would have kept posting regardless — I was just so passionate about encapsulating emotions into little videos. I wanted to document myself every day and see the progress I was going to make in my heartbreak journey, so that one day I could look back and see how far I had come.

I was 100% authentic and just shared how I was feeling that day, something my therapist said, or what was working for me at that moment. It was fun to do, and never felt like a task.

I owe my life to posting those silly videos. It gave me a project to dive into, and the community I found was single-handedly the most amazing resource for healing from the breakup.

I started to take it more seriously and earn money from influencing

Because marketing was my job, I already had a tripod, and knew to tag brands in posts and do simple things like have my contact email in my bio.

I was going to the gym a lot trying to "glow up" after the breakup, so I tagged lots of activewear brands in my posts in the hope they would repost my content. That's when brands started reaching out to me to invite me to events.

I got my first brand deal with Notion — $100 to use a product that I used anyway. Two months after it all kicked off, an agent reached out to me. I put my marketing hat on and started to think about how I could make a few hundred bucks a month as a little side hustle.

For the first year, I'd maybe get two brand deals a month. I was posting consistently, sometimes twice a day without really thinking about it, which built my personal brand and kept the followers coming.

By April 2023, I had healed from the breakup, and I didn't want to keep talking about it.

So I started posting more content about living alone in Toronto. I would still answer DMs about breakup advice, and the original video was still gaining traction, but I didn't want to be known as the "breakup girl."

I posted a video about my $15,000 of credit card debt, which blew up and got brand interest, so I was super strategic and used that to finally move away from posting about the breakup.

I started spending more time on my social media feeds than on my full-time job at the time, and it went incredibly well.

By January 2024, I realized I either needed to quit my full-time job or scale back on my content because I was spreading myself too thin. I took the chance and quit.

I've paid off my debt, do five-figure brand deals, and am making more than my corporate salary while working way fewer hours on my own schedule. It took a while to get used to, but it's been incredible, beyond my wildest dreams.