When TJ Palma was eliminated from “Love Island USA,” he had roughly 20,000 followers. He came in midway through Season 7, was given limited airtime, and left with a following that most castmates with more screen time had surpassed. His departure, rather than ending a moment, opened one.

TJ is a lifestyle and men’s grooming creator, a former collegiate baseball player who won a national championship at the University of Tampa, and an entrepreneur building a real estate portfolio alongside his content business. His platform, anchored on TikTok, grew considerably in the months after “Love Island,” and today he describes himself primarily as an entrepreneur. Content is both the product and the vehicle for building something more durable.

“Entrepreneurial entrepreneur is the most correlated to me right now,” he says. 

Film What You Are Already Doing

Sustaining momentum required a clearer framework. TJ found one in a principle he absorbed from a creator he has since forgotten, who made the case for documenting life rather than manufacturing ideas.

“Instead of trying to sit down and think of 10 ideas that I need to make up this week for videos,” he says, “it’s kind of, ‘Hey, what am I doing right now? What am I doing in my life that I could just video?’”

He built a multi-part series around constructing a sauna in his backyard. He films the design and renovation process at an Airbnb property he is currently preparing for listing. His grooming content grew from documenting his own routine. In each case, the subject matter already existed. The camera came second.

“I feel like my niche is, you know, me,” he says. “It doesn’t feel like I’m specifically going down these lanes. It’s kind of just like what I am, who I am.”

Why TikTok Allows for Risk That Instagram Doesn’t

TJ names TikTok as his primary home, and his reasoning is architectural. The platform’s content distribution model, he argues, works fundamentally differently from Instagram’s.

“Instagram, I feel like a lot of your content goes straight to your followers first,” he says. “So your followers are always getting bombarded by what you’re posting. And if you’re not posting like super high-quality stuff, you may lose some followers.”

On TikTok, new content routes to non-followers first, giving weaker posts room to fail without damaging his relationship with the audience he has already built. That buffer supports the kind of testing he actively pursues. During a recent trip to the Bahamas, he filmed the same golf footage three ways: voiceover narration, ambient music, and a version featuring a ball-tracking shot tracer. The goal was to identify the format worth cross-posting before committing to it.

He remains skeptical that anyone fully decodes the algorithm. “You’ll never figure it out,” he says. “You just gotta keep adjusting.”

What Spreads Is Not What Sticks

TJ draws a clear line between content that accumulates views and content that builds lasting audience relationships. Conflating the two, he argues, is one of the most common mistakes creators make.

“Viral, trendy content, like if there’s a trending dance or something like that, might get a lot of views,” he says. “But it doesn’t make people trust you. It doesn’t make people respect or understand your opinions on things.”

Specificity builds trust. For instance, when he demonstrates his beard routine, viewers ask which razor he uses. When he recommends a product, that recommendation carries weight precisely because it was earned through consistent, personal content over time.

He also uses a comment-scraping tool to surface recurring questions from across his videos and incorporates those answers into future content. “If they feel, like, heard and you’re answering their questions,” he says, “that’s how you build that cult fan base.”

His TikTok audience skews heavily female, roughly 80%. Much of the engagement around grooming and fashion comes from women asking on behalf of partners. “What do you use for your hair? For my boyfriend, like, my boyfriend has the same hair as you,” he says. “I want my boyfriend to dress better.” His real estate and Airbnb content draws a broader demographic, which he sees as an advantage.

The Brands Were Already in the House

TJ’s partnership history is less a sponsored post calendar and more an inventory of products already in his daily life. He grew up on Hellmann’s mayonnaise. He borrowed Garnier hairspray from his mother’s bathroom at age 12. Hospitable, an Airbnb management software, runs his rental business. Orgain protein shakes were in his fridge before the deal materialized.

“It’s crazy that all of these brands, like, really do line up,” he says.

Alignment, not reach, is his primary evaluation standard. “Nowadays, people put a lot of trust in influencers, and I think the best thing I could do in my position is to try to be as morally responsible as possible. Not promote just anything or things that I actually wouldn’t use.”

He applies the same logic to the brand side of the equation. Chasing follower counts over product fit produces inauthentic results that audiences can identify. “It’s in both the creator and the brand’s best interest to [be] focused on people, products that align extremely well with their content, their lifestyle, who they actually are.”

Using Content Income to Build Real Assets

TJ believes that what distinguishes him from many lifestyle creators in his category is how he treats the income. Brand revenue is not an endpoint. It is capital for building businesses he expects to outlast the algorithm.

He is launching a design company with a business partner, offering end-to-end furnishing and staging services for Airbnbs, private homes, restaurants, and hotels. A potential hotel deal in Fort Lauderdale is also in development for his Airbnb portfolio. Each project extends the documentation strategy that built his audience: every property becomes content.

“Taking that and investing in companies for real, building my real estate portfolio up and building real businesses that’ll last,” he says. “Because who knows where this ends or how it ends?”

Men’s grooming and fashion, the categories in which TJ operates, are expanding. He has a prediction about where male aesthetics are heading, though he acknowledges the bias of someone who recently changed his own. More men will grow out their hair and their beards, he believes. He had a fade until recently, and says he cannot look at old photos of himself now.

The framework, for TJ, has not changed since he came off “Love Island” with 20,000 followers and figured out who he wanted to show people he was. “Documenting is going to be the ultimate ride to get me where I want to go.”

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