“Because of the video you made, I saved $35,000 on my medical bill. It was going to crush me—I didn’t have the money. Because of you, it was completely waived.”

That note landed in Vivian Tu’s Instagram inbox, one of countless ones she’s received as the creator and personal finance powerhouse known as YourRichBFF.

With 7 million followers and brand deals that bring in more than $3 million annually, Forbes estimates, the former Wall Street trader has built a brand answering her audience’s (many of them young and female) pressing money questions. Ask her about her “I made it” moment and she won’t point to magazine covers or her face lighting up a Nasdaq billboard. She’ll say it’s messages like this.

Tu has harnessed her devoted community to hit the New York Times bestseller list, now for the second time, with her personal finance book Well Endowed. Her next venture? Ask Dolly, an AI chatbot designed to be a personal wealth advisor in your pocket.

“I was getting very literally a thousand DMs a day of people asking me questions,” Tu told Forbes. “I thought, ‘I feasibly don't have time to answer all of these. I can't get my job done. How do I essentially scale me?’”

Social media fame is fickle. Tastes constantly change–so do the algorithms that can make or break a creator’s brand. Creators are now launching companies, products and brands to take advantage of fleeting fame and serve as a bridge to new and more dependable revenue.

“They’re already entrepreneurial by nature, but now, every single creator is trying to diversify revenue streams and go beyond just creation—the fact is that you're at the whim of the algorithms,” says Keith Bendes, chief strategy officer at influencer marketing firm Linqia. “For some, that's products, or for some that's going on the cap table of brands.”

The Forbes Top Creators list, which Tu appeared on in 2022 and 2023, illustrates that shift. MrBeast, ranked No. 1, runs multiple startups alongside his 600-million-follower-rich content empire, from chocolate brand Feastables to ghost kitchen chain MrBeast Burger.

Alex Cooper, host of Call Her Daddy, parlayed her reported $125 million SiriusXM deal into sports drink brand Unwell Hydration. Steven Bartlett expanded beyond The Diary Of A CEO podcast to build a media company hosting other voices. Emma Chamberlain launched a coffee brand. Brent Rivera sells snack chips. Even Alix Earle has teased a forthcoming business.

Tu didn’t plan to become @YourRichBFF. In 2020, her first-ever TikTok–on how to reinvest Covid stimulus checks–went viral. She kept posting: Student loans, credit card debt, prenups, retirement. Raised in an immigrant household obsessed with budgeting, armed with Wall Street chops from a trading job at J.P. Morgan and brand savvy from roles at BuzzFeed, Tu became the money friend millions never had. She walked away from a $600,000 salary, banked $100,000 as a safety net and bet on herself. “I was terrified,” she recalls.

Since then, brands including SkinCeuticals, Lululemon, Amazon and Adobe have tapped Tu. And she’s strategic about partnerships, too. Take for example SoFi, the $26 billion (market cap) fintech company. After two and a half years as a creator partner, Tu stepped into the role of “chief of financial empowerment,” which she tells Forbes is a part-cash, part-equity deal.

“How do I essentially scale me?’”

Ask Dolly—“Dolly,” short for dollar—is now being bankrolled by those creator earnings. The chatbot operates via web and a mobile app where users can ask their money questions in the same manner they’d typically DM Tu. The startup is also employing in-house financial advisors that can connect directly with any users in more complex situations. It’s still in beta, but plans to operate on a freemium model priced similarly to, say, a Netflix subscription.

“My hope is everybody will be able to put a little Vivian Tu in their pocket,” she says. “Have access to me 24/7.”

While Tu won’t advise on how to go viral (“luck and timing,” she says), she’s a masterclass in how creators can diversify their portfolios.

Alongside her social media, speaking gigs, brand deals and equity partnerships, Tu leans into more traditional media, like hosting the podcast Networth and Chill or spending years carefully penning books. Well Endowed, in her words, provides a “roadmap of a person’s lifetime,” guiding readers from budgeting through retirement and every milestone in between—for the audience that wants more than a 60-second reel at a time.

A sweeping mandate for one person, and Tu acknowledges the pressure. But slowing down isn’t part of the plan.

“I do what I'm really good at, and then I try to hire people who are smarter than me. I pay people above market. I hire slow, fire fast,” Tu says. “Creators are the next businesses, and the best ones are going to be led by people like me.”