Who I learned from · 2018–now
Daniel Snow
Daniel built RapTV into one of the largest hip-hop media brands on the internet, and in 2019 put it behind my first company. He is the coolest person I have ever worked with, and the thing I learned from him is that you do not need to hope for success. If you know how, you can make it happen.
- Who
- Daniel Snow
- Role
- Founder, RapTV
- To me
- RapTV’s founder, Limelight’s launch partner, and the person who showed me that you do not hope for success, you make it happen.
- When
- 2018–now
Who Daniel is
Founder and CEO of RapTV, the hip-hop media brand known for its orange-and-white news posts, which passed 25 million followers across platforms by 2021. Daniel also co-founded The Snow Agency, a performance-marketing firm for direct-to-consumer brands, and has built e-commerce ventures that generated tens of millions in revenue without outside funding.
How we met
In August 2018 I messaged @rap from the DailyRapFacts account with a rate card and a proposal to trade audiences. Within a month we were on the phone, then texting, buying and reselling each other’s posts for clients. That October Daniel offered me a job in New York running RapTV’s site and agency. I stayed in Ontario, but the conversation never stopped.
What I learned
That you do not need to hope for success. You can make it happen, if you know how. Daniel is a master of his craft, and the way he builds brands is incredible. He shared advanced techniques with me freely, like building lookalike audiences from the people who watched a video, because they tend to perform better. I have watched him run massive campaigns across many accounts at once, coordinated so precisely that he makes it look easy.
What he did for Limelight
Daniel was the first person I pitched Limelight to, in November 2018, and the first to explain to me how equity actually works. I had built the app over a summer with a beginner’s knowledge of software, and he put it in front of so many people so fast that it reached the top ten of the App Store’s Music chart. RapTV’s pages posted the launch for free in July 2019, and one @rap post that August took it from 3,900 users to more than 10,000 in a day. I watched a result most people would call luck get planned, scheduled and delivered, and I have never treated growth as a hope since.
How he backed me
Daniel put me in rooms and opened doors. He lined me up with opportunities that might fit me, like an introduction to Charlie Walk and an interview at a new company he was building, and when he heard a meeting had gone badly for me, he called them on the spot to stand up for me. He taught me Instagram growth while I helped him with Twitter, and then I watched RapTV overtake DailyRapFacts there. It was well deserved.