Hello everyone, today I’m going to share something with the world. It is a story of success with a little bit of luck. It includes my father who is the best guy I know. He is someone who can make your day with saying only one sentence, either if it’s emotional, funny or random. This story is also about making the people of Croatia laugh that started with only one text message.
When I was a bit younger my dad and me always had communication over text messages because I went out a lot. Parties, hangouts and stuff young people do. He always worries that something is going to happen to me when I go out like most fathers do. At the time of this happening I was 19 years old.
One day I went out with my friends to have fun and he sent me a text message that said “Please go catch some girls rather than hanging out with your alcoholic friends.” I only replied to the message and continued with partying. After a couple of days I came to an idea that it would be fun for other people to see what their parents are texting them at different situations in life. I made a Facebook page called “Dnevna doza poruka roditelja”, which translates into “Daily dose of Parents Texting”. I didn’t expect much, just added a profile picture, cover photo and invited a couple of my closest friends. After a few days nothing was happening, the page had approximately 50 likes and I only published a screenshot of the message he sent to me. I asked some of my closest friends to like the page but they judged my decision in a way that one particular close friend made fun of my decision. I proved him wrong. Want to know how?
After a couple of weeks, a random guy sent a photo of his conversation with his mother and sent it to the page and I didn’t know how he stumbled upon my page. I published his photo on the page and kept it that way. A couple of days later I went to party again with a couple of my friends. This is pretty normal for the youth in Croatia so don’t mind me going out to party in every paragraph of this story. I even forgot about the page because there was no activity on it, no one new was coming to visit and no one was sending more screenshots. After partying again I went home and fell asleep. When I woke up I had something really interesting to see.
It was my Facebook account blowing up with notifications. Over one night, 600 people from Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia liked the page and the content that has been published. Have in mind that the page had only 2 photos, the one from my father and one from the random guy. I was surprised and excited! At the time, the page was getting more than 1000 people in a single hour and many more people sending screenshots of conversations with their parents. This became a daily activity of mine and I published a lot more photos. Some photos went viral and they had over 20 thousand likes in just a couple of days.
It just kept going, Croatian mainstream media sites covered the story while I remained anonymous. Most popular Croatian newspaper called “24 sata” covered the story and named the article “Kids are sending text messages to their parents and Croatia is laughing because of them”. It all happened really fast and I didn’t expect so many people joining and liking the content I was publishing. I’m really thankful for everyone who sent their funny screenshot because a lot of good people built this story. In just one month, more than 100,000 people liked the page and I wasn’t even aware of what was happening with this whole situation. I have told this story to my father at the time it was happening and the only thing that he said is that he is proud of everything that I have made of only one text message. He was asking me daily: “Hey son, how much likes does your page have?”, and I kept answering “More than yesterday”.
After a year has passed of me being in charge of this page and everything published on it, the page has reached a number of 195,000 people and not a lot of new audience was coming and there was not much content that I was able to publish. It reached it’s peak and I gained so much experience from it. I wasn’t sad that in a way this good run ended I was happy that I gained so much good knowledge from this whole story. It developed my interest in marketing, writing, social media and how to give other people the experience of feeling different emotions through a computer screen. I’m so glad that a lot of people experienced positive emotions just because they were able to read some funny text messages and I’m motivated to share this story with the world.
To be fair this isn’t the most amazing story you will ever read but it is something that I just had to write out and I appreciate every single one who will also read this till the end. My current passion in life is to work on my skills that make me happy, and writing is definitely one of them. Also a big thanks to my father who has pointed me in the right direction. It is a good feeling!
This is my first time sharing something with other "Pandas" so if you can be nice, I would appreciate! :D
Kristian
