Making Lemonade is a series of conversations with young entrepreneurs who have overcome obstacles, embraced change, and turned lemons into lemonade.
My guests today are two successful social media influencers and content creators, Yesenia Hipolito and Mike Rodriguez. Via their YouTube channel and Instagram account, Yesenia and Mike document their day-to-day lives – namely, their big love of food! They are most well known for their mukbang videos on YouTube. Yesenia decided to begin taking her YouTube career seriously in 2015. Around this time, Mike went through a horrible car accident that caused him to lose his trucking business. He pivoted to help Yesenia with her social media content to help pass the time and recover from the accident – working mostly behind the scenes, at first. However, Yesenia invited him to join her and make a video to tell the story of how they met. Mike struck an instant chord with the fans and the rest was history!
Yesenia and Mike have been able to monetize their content and partner with brands such as Pandora, PUMA, Benefit Cosmetics, and more. What made it all work was hard work, with passion and dedication to transforming creative content production into a full-time YouTube content creator career, with unique mishaps and success stories along the way. Persistence pays off! @Yeshipolito has garnered over half a million subscribers across all their platforms and a large, dedicated fanbase. Mike and Yesenia’s story shows us just how passionate and dedicated you have to be in order to succeed as a social media content creator, and in order to pursue any career that takes you off the beaten path.
“Passion is the one thing you are going to have to have, because if you’re going to do it just for money, honey – that’s a lot of jobs that you are going to have to learn to make it work.”
-Yesenia Hipolito
