Aris Yeager, better known as “Louis,” his online persona parodying the lifestyle of a spoiled, ultra-wealthy European on his Instagram account, The European Kid, is giving back to the small-business community in New York City.
With his new NYC-based venture Storytime, the 23-year-old NYC-based entrepreneur aims to connect New York City restaurants, coffee shops and other local small businesses with influencers to create affordable, but lucrative social media campaigns.
“I love discovering hidden gems,” he said. “I want a platform where I can instantly go and it’s not about getting paid. It’s about just simply getting products tested, trying a place out. We created this app where, basically, you can instantly connect with that cool bakery next door that will offer you a couple of their iconic pastries in exchange for posting content.”
“It’s a simple concept, yet I realize there’s such an important need in the market for that kind of connectivity,” he added.
Aris has garnered one million followers on Instagram through his skits and pranks on Hollywood stars, influences and shop owners. His internet personality “Louis,” who dines in fancy restaurants, parties on yachts and travels around the world, is a dramatized version of people Aris knows in his own life, he told Fox News Digital.
Yeager grew up in Brussels, Belgium, but attended college in Boston. The idea to create a hyperbolized version of a rich international kid was born out of his personal experience with friends he made at Northeastern University around the time TikTok was really blowing up.
“In university, the international community always seemed superior because they’re more affluent and there’s so much comedy to that, so that’s really what sparked the idea to even do this character,” he said. “It completely started as a joke, making fun of friends that I had.”
Yeager said the whole idea behind his content is the controversial clash between Americans and the obscene behavior of rich people, specifically Europeans, which has really captured the attention of his followers on social media.
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“There’s a whole brand of this European character that people love, they love drama and they love seeing him shout on the phone asking for his dad to send him $10,000 to go to Miami,” for example, he said. “That was the first video I did, just seven million views in like one week.”
“I used to really think TikTok was a platform for kids to make dance videos, but I really just accidentally posted this video and next thing I know, it kind of just went wild on social media,” he said.
His content is so absurd, viewers are constantly left wondering if the conflict in his videos is real. He admits it is scripted comedy, where his counterparts are warned about his plans beforehand. But, he adds, the reactions around are all real.
“It’s usually the person that I’m arguing with, I will tell them: ‘Listen, I do this character, I want you to be part of it. I want you to treat me like any other person,” he said. “I don’t want to be an absolute a–hole in front of everyone. There needs to be some consent when I’m going to be unleashing this character, otherwise I would feel bad to be honest.”
“It’s so interesting because, I get hundreds of millions of views yet, people somehow still love him, even though he can be such an a–hole,” he added. “People just love the character and they want to always believe that it’s real.”
Yeager admits he himself comes from a fortunate background, which plays into his comedic inspiration.
“One thing I realized when I went to college in the U.S., everyone’s so fascinated that I’m European and they always ask me like the stereotypical questions because I grew up in Belgium,” he said. “People just kind of fantasize about European culture and… how Europeans act a certain way, especially the class element then to it.”
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Since he got into the social media space, Yeager said he’s been interested in influencer marketing and the ways it can transform businesses, especially in places like New York City, which inspired him to launch “Storytime.”
“The whole point of Storytime was that it’s an issue that I had,” he said. “Every day, I’m interacting with so many different small businesses, from the cup of coffee that I go get, to the sandwich, to my afternoon pastry and was thinking to myself: ‘Why isn’t there a platform where there’s more connectivity between influencers and businesses?'”
“And it’s simply that,” he said. “I’ve basically built a marketplace where you have a certain vetted community of influencers that can interact with all these unique small businesses, especially in New York. There’s this huge gap in the connectivity of influencers in the food and beverage space and that’s really what I built.”
Yeager also believes there is a huge misconception about what makes a good influencer. With Storytime, Yeager said his focus is on local influencers who have a wide reach in a certain city that can be very beneficial to a small business.
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“I have hundreds of millions of views, I have a million followers on Instagram, but the reality is I’m not the ideal person to be going and posting for a small business, even if it’s a story for Instagram, because my audience is so international,” he said. “It can be a lot more effective connecting them to small businesses as opposed to that one big influencer who’s going to charge tens of thousands for a video.’
“I built a marketplace for redefining who is an influencer,” he added. A microinfluencer “posting a story of a bakery spot that you love and you’ve seen on the app… that’s so much more effective than the influencer with 200,000 followers who are all in Brazil.”
He also said the power of social media is integral to the success of a business, so connecting local influencers with smaller mom-and-pop shops is vital.
“Every business that’s created is forced to have some kind of presence on social media because it will allow you to reach more of a market, and it’s almost like a make or break, I think, for some businesses,” he said. “It’s a new reality of how businesses get exposure and how businesses get new clients. It can be used in so many different powerful ways to put a business on a map.”
Yeager said he has plans to expand Storytime to Miami and Boston with the goal of promoting smaller businesses that local influencers in those cities love.
“It’s really effective for small businesses because, obviously, they don’t have huge marketing budgets to spend thousands per month trying to find influencers using expensive vetting tools,” he said. “It’s one thing waking up every morning and making a video about a shouting French kid, it’s another thing being able to create a platform to help empower small businesses.”
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