Influencer
How Cost n’ Mayor Turned Platform Reach Into an IP Business Built to Last
Married choreography duo Austin and Marideth Telenko met on a dance job in New York, both working the city’s audition circuit when the COVID lockdown arrived. Their training backgrounds were unusually complementary: Marideth had built a foundation in street styles, including Waacking, Locking, and House, while Austin had come up through community theater, arriving at street styles later.
Together they carried a combination of vocabularies that had found no consistent institutional home in the available audition categories. When they began posting original choreography from Marideth’s parents’ house in 2020, the name “Cost n’ Mayor” came from how Siri had rendered their card-game nicknames in a phone note. They kept it because it fit like a stage name.
“The original goal was an online portfolio and maybe give us more leverage,” Marideth says, with the expectation that it would support a return to professional performance careers once the industry reopened. That return never came.
Cost n’ Mayor now counts 7.5 million TikTok followers, 2.6 million Instagram followers, nearly 200k YouTube subscribers, a Time 100 Creators List recognition, and a completed off-Broadway show. The operating logic behind all of it has remained consistent from the start: platform reach was the instrument, not the outcome.
Before They Could Share It, They Had to Get Through 37 Rooms
The audition circuit’s structure was designed, in Marideth’s account, to keep the work behind closed doors. Dance bookings routinely required commitment before any detail was disclosed. “Undisclosed artist,” she says. “You need to be available for this many hours, on this many days.” Dancers signed contracts without knowing who they would be working with. “You’re signing up for stuff that sometimes you don’t even know what you’re doing.”
To share creative work publicly, a choreographer had to secure representation, advance through a first meeting, then a second, then more. “You’ve got to get into 37 rooms before you can ever share anything that you’re making with the world,” Marideth says. For two performers carrying stylistic combinations that didn’t fit standard casting categories, that structure was not just slow. It was closed.
Social media collapsed those layers to a single action. “The only thing that stands between us and sharing what we make with the world is hitting post,” Marideth says. That reduction defined what Cost n’ Mayor became: an autonomous career structure that neither of them could have built through the industry’s existing channels.
Photo credit: Rebecca J. Michelson
A Style Nobody Was Booking, for an Audience Nobody Had Mapped
Cost n’ Mayor’s signature, the hyper-synchronized choreography the account is known for, emerged from two unusual training histories intersecting in one couple. Marideth came from a deep foundation in street styles. Austin came from theater. Each found the other discipline later in life, and when they worked together, the blend made immediate sense.
“That kind of just manifested itself in that very hypersynchronous, character-driven, but street styles foundation kind of movement,” Marideth says.
Their content extends the fusion into sound design. Rather than building to trending audio, Cost n’ Mayor choreographs to what Marideth calls “found sounds”: an iPhone text tone, a dryer’s completion jingle, sonic textures from daily life that belong to no recording artist. “We use sounds and movement that I think everyone can understand and relate to and have heard before, have felt before,” she says.
The breadth of the resulting audience surprised them. “We do not have a dancer-first audience,” Marideth says. Viewers range from elementary-school-age children to retirees, a spread the couple actively considers in creative decisions. “We love to make content that’s relatable to that wide range of ages,” Austin says. On Facebook, clean short-form choreography consistently outperforms behind-the-scenes process content. On Instagram, the mix shifts.
Photo credit: Rebecca J. Michelson
What TikTok’s Numbers Actually Deliver
Cost n’ Mayor’s biggest presence is on TikTok, built over a number of years of consistent posting. If the platform disappeared tomorrow, Marideth says, the business would largely survive.
The reasoning is specific. “Even though you might be doing meaningful numbers on TikTok, how meaningful is your result if you’re not engaging with a community that wants to be engaging with you?” she says. TikTok’s distribution model, in her view, delivers content into broad discovery rather than back to the audience that actively chose to follow. “I feel like TikTok does not give me a direct connection to the community I’ve built there,” she says. “It gives me just random reach.”
Instagram has become the platform they actually think they’re creating for first. Short-form content is now made Instagram-first, Marideth says, “because we are leaning into a deeper connection with our audience and not so much growth and numbers right now, but into a more intimate and close relationship with the people that are showing up to watch our content every day.”
In practice, Austin manages Shorts and Facebook while Marideth focuses on TikTok and Instagram. The distinction they’re drawing matters beyond their own account: platform reach and platform community are different resources, and they require different strategies.
How Far Can One Piece of Choreography Go?
The off-Broadway show that Cost n’ Mayor completed did not feel, from the inside, like a departure from their digital work. “We’re not strangers to that universe,” Marideth says. Both she and Austin came from performance backgrounds, and the production drew on the same creative voice the audience had followed online. At the stage door, she says, “people really saw that it paralleled.”
The show, “11 to Midnight,” also clarified an operational model the couple had been developing across platforms. The question Marideth says drives their allocation decisions is direct: “How far can one piece of choreography take me?” A piece developed for the show can be broken into 15-second clips, a making-of process video, a day-in-the-life vlog, a blooper reel, and teaching content, all from the same source material. “We can usually knock out a long checklist with a single piece of choreography,” she says.
Austin frames the same logic at a larger scale. IP developed in one format becomes a question of what other formats it can support. “Can we make merch out of it? Can we make long form, short form? Is there a book?” he says. “It’s kind of like taking that format and then blowing it up.” The couple describes the current phase of their career as the beginning of a longer pattern of the same kind of expansion.
Now They’re Writing the Brief
For most of Cost n’ Mayor’s history, brand partnerships arrived inbound, brands approaching with campaigns already in development and briefs already written. That dynamic is now shifting. “We are now much more heavily leaning into outreach than we ever have,” Marideth says. “If we have an idea for a brand, we’re putting together a pitch deck, and we’re going to them.”
The shift toward outbound pitching is an attempt to recreate the conditions of what she calls the early golden age of branded content, when brands approached creators with nothing but an open brief. “Like, what do you got?” Austin says, describing the tone. Cost n’ Mayor turned that latitude into comedy sketches and original compositions, what Marideth describes as “mini musicals about shoes or a cleaning supply product.” “That, in my mind, was the golden age of ad content,” she says.
For creators earlier in the same trajectory, Austin’s advice returns to the execution threshold he identifies as the actual dividing line. “Ideas aren’t the thing that is going to make you the money and get you the job,” he says. “It’s actually starting that idea and doing the work to bring even a fraction of it to life.”
The willingness to keep starting is not, Marideth adds, something that ends once a platform is established. “I think you have to get comfortable with reinventing yourself over and over and over,” she says.
Cover photo credit: Andrew Alstat
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