"You Need One Viral Hit"

Not long ago, I was invited to an "influencer night" at a magic show. With under 10,000 followers, I'm technically just a nano-creator, but I'd already been invited to events like this a few times.

Before the show started, people were chatting over drinks by the bar, and the organizer came over to join us. A young woman who had only been on Instagram for a few months was enthusiastically sharing her experience. One of her reels had blown up out of nowhere. She wasn't entirely sure why, but ever since, everything she posted got thousands of views instead of hundreds. So she offered the organizer a confident tip: "All you need is one viral hit."

I stood there sipping champagne, quietly shaking my head, though I didn't say a word.

Just a few months earlier, I'd had two viral hits of my own, and I knew firsthand that things didn't work like that at all.

Two Viral Hits, and Nothing Changed

Besides my personal account, I have a second Instagram account, @love.in.hongkong, dedicated to exploring the city. As I wrote in What Is a KOL Anyway, for the first year I only posted what I called "moving postcards": pretty footage set to music, no voiceover, and hardly anyone watching.

Then I made a reel about the Noon Gun in Causeway Bay. It's a real artillery cannon by the harbour that gets fired every day at noon. A lot of people living in Hong Kong have no idea it's there, let alone that it fires daily. Completely out of the blue, that reel took off.

At the time, it shot up to 20,000 views. That might not sound like much compared to the millions you see online, but compared to my usual 300 views, it was a world of difference. Surprised, I asked an AI why. It told me that introducing a lesser-known place creates value for people. I don't remember the exact words, but that was the gist.

A few days later, a second reel went viral, breaking 100,000 views in days. This one featured a retired MTR train resting on the Wan Chai waterfront. A friend and I walked through the carriages just like our daily commute, but when we stepped out of the doors, there was Victoria Harbour at sunset instead of a cold underground platform. I edited it to feel like an actual train ride, mixing the background sounds of an MTR station with another track for an energetic, slightly chaotic vibe.

Looking back, both reels had clear common ground: neither showed typical tourist spots, both opened with a hook that made people curious, and both moved fast enough to watch without getting bored. But back then, I had no clue that was the key. I figured it was just the locations—those spots were naturally interesting, and you can't exactly duplicate that. After all, there's only one Noon Gun.

Without knowing why they worked, I went right back to making pretty, voiceless moving postcards. The views were slightly higher than my old 300, but they hovered around 800. They certainly didn't stay in the thousands.

Two viral hits had come and gone, and my account hadn't changed at all.

Front Row, Upper Deck

The turning point came that same week.

One night, after an event, I hopped on a tram home. The tram wasn't crowded, so I snagged the front seat on the upper deck—shotgun, my favourite spot. Sitting there with nothing blocking my view, I could quietly watch the city's nightscape unfold.

Not long after I sat down, a guy walked over and took the seat next to me, talking on his phone. The first second he opened his mouth, my ears pricked up: wait, he's Taiwanese! I know that accent too well, and abroad it stands out even more. I listened in quietly, just to be sure.

Yep, I was right.

He was on the phone with his crush, chatting about things back in Taiwan, completely wrapped up in the conversation, even asking her to turn on video so he could show her the city outside. Sitting right next to him, I had a funny thought: should I wave at the screen? A fellow Taiwanese on a tram in Hong Kong. But at the same time, I was slightly annoyed. After a long day, did I really need front-row tickets to someone's flirting on my way home?

Then he pointed his phone towards the window and declared:

"Look, this is Causeway Bay—no one is here!"

I looked out the window.

Down on the street, literally hundreds of people were bustling along the pavement.

I almost burst out laughing. I loved his enthusiasm, but honestly, getting on that tram exhausted, all I had really wanted was a quiet ride: just me, the tram, and the city lights.

The Only Way Was to Tell It

That kind of absurd, endearing moment was exactly the story I'd tell a friend the next day, and it seemed like great material for Instagram. But back home on my sofa, looking at the clip I'd shot, I hit a wall.

How was I supposed to turn that into a reel?

All you could see on screen was the street view out the window. The guy, his phone call, the crowds outside—none of it was in the video. And nobody on Instagram is reading an essay in a caption.

The only way to share it was to tell it out loud. Really and truly "tell it", in my own voice, the way I'd tell a friend a funny story.

Which meant doing a voiceover.

I'd thought about adding voiceovers before, but I always put it off. I had a lot of friction and anxiety: my English wasn't good enough, what if I stuttered, what if my accent wasn't great, what if my voice sounded weird. And I didn't even own a proper mic.

Yet that night, pushed by that ridiculous little spark, I gave it a shot.

I wrote the script, picked up my iPhone, and recorded my first voiceover straight into the phone.

Listening back, it was actually not bad. Looking at that reel now, the script feels a bit stiff and my delivery is slow, but that little experiment showed me that recording a voiceover wasn't hard at all. It was so simple that I felt silly for having spent so much time holding myself back with needless worries.

I guess the first step is always the hardest. Most barriers are just hurdles we stack up in our own heads. Once you take that step, things follow, good or bad.

Like Telling a Friend a Funny Story

From that night on, I began using my voice to tell little everyday stories, the way I chat with friends about daily life.

Like the time I was buying vegetables at a street market in Central and overheard a young woman tell a vendor in Mandarin: "I can't get any of these up in the mountain." The vendor gave her a puzzled look: "There's none of this up in the mountain?"

Hearing that, you'd think she had trekked down from some remote hilltop village just to buy groceries.

Nope. The "mountain" she meant was the Peak—mansions, rich people, no street markets.

Standing there looking at her Balenciaga tee and Alo leggings, I had to smile. Life up on the Peak must be rough, having to come down to shop with us regular folks. Her driver probably dropped her off for a quick "down-to-earth" grocery run before heading back up.

As she left, the vendor called out cheerfully: "Come down the mountain again soon!"

That conversation became another of my voiceover reels. Like the others, it settled into a few thousand views. Nothing viral, but compared to the 300 views of that quiet first year, it was plenty.

I didn't start doing voiceovers because of some grand epiphany, or because I had studied marketing strategy. It was just a tiny spark. Like I wrote in The Destination Is Not the Destination, when a spark hits, I often dive in without knowing where it leads. I just used reels to do what I've always done: tell a friend a funny story from my day.

That night on the tram was the first story I told. What came next is another story.