Kamiya Jani’s world of food, travel with Curly Tales
In a recent conversation with YourStory’s Influencers Inc, Kamiya Jani, a journalist-turned-creator, talks about building her platform Curly Tales.
There are creators who make a name for themselves and then go on to build a brand. Then, there are creators who build a brand and in the process of it, gain fame. Kamiya Jani is one such creator who has entered the content space via journalism. She built her platform — Curly Tales — and then became a popular face through its traction.
Kamiya says her journey has been quite eventful with stages of being a journalist, writer, producer, anchor, and then finally creator. Her platform Curly Tales, which has 654,000 followers on Instagram and 1.47 million subscribers on YouTube, was created out of Kamiya’s passion for exploring new places and trying different cuisines.
She mentions that the creator's space is extremely crowded and competitive and to make one’s own name in such a landscape is often a challenge. Kamiya adds that passion plays an important role in becoming successful. “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life and the only way to have a great career is to do something that you truly love,” she says.
Kamiya Jani
“Create expertise in one particular space so that you create a circle of influence where brands as well as audience are coming to you looking for solutions,” she says.
Kamiya mentions that for Curly Tales, she always follows an audience-first approach to content creation and the priority is always given to editorial content. Curly Tales has created buckets of content to focus on topics in a strategic manner.
Curly Tales has become a digital brand. “For us the journey was the other way around-we built a brand first and along the journey I got built out as an influencer which was never the intent but I am happy that it turned out to be that way,” she says.
Commenting on the monetisation aspect of content creation, she says that it is a competitive landscape and thus sometimes it can be difficult to earn money through content. This is why her strategy was to build a brand rather than a persona.
She shares that during the pandemic, it was quite difficult for her as a travel-based creator. But as a content platform, Curly Tales tried to keep the sentiment positive by creating wholesome content that made their audience happy.
Lastly, Kamiya shares that social media plays a very important role in every creator’s journey. Facebook in particular, played an essential role in the birth of Curly Tales as a platform. However, she feels that social media cannot be the only source of reach for a creator, it should rather be a place of discovery which directs the audience to a creator’s platform.
In the rapid fire round of the interview, Kamiya talks about her favorite places from her travel diaries, cuisines and much more.
Edited by Affirunisa Kankudti
