On a Scroll continued from page 9 @denverfoodscene Search anything related to Denver on TikTok and you’ll stumble across denver- foodscene, a popular account that shows off the area’s best restaurants and other eating opportunities. Its creators have tasted shiny caramel apples and sugar-coated apple- cider doughnuts at Ya Ya Farm and Orchard. They’ve eaten gooey, ice cream-covered cinnamon rolls and smothered burritos at Hashtag, and visited favorite Manila Bay Filipino Restaurant time and again. The account has 509,400 followers and posts high-quality videos almost every day, so you could be forgiven for assuming there’s a big team churning out content — but the crew is just 31-year-old Yesenia Chinchilla and her husband, Daniel Perez. They moved to Denver in 2016, and Chinchilla started denverfoodscene on Instagram about a year later as a way to explore the city. When TikTok started to be- come popular in 2020, she ex- panded the brand to the video platform, where it is now well ahead of its Instagram sibling, which has 198,000 followers. The TikTok site got a big boost in July 2020, when Chinchilla posted a video of different types of tacos with a trending sound that said “These are real tacos, not from Taco Bell.” From there, denverfood- scene has grown into a full- time job for Chinchilla. The site makes money off of res- taurants that ask for paid part- nerships as well as from its sponsor, Metropolitan State University of Denver, which reached out to Chinchilla in September of 2020. Two years later, that connection has proved to be a productive one, bringing exposure to the cam- pus, fi nancing to Chinchilla and deals to followers; using the code “Denverfoodscene” even waives the MSU online application fee. “I really like that it’s now to a point where @theamandabittner Like many users, Amanda Bittner con- nected with TikTok during the early days of the pandemic. She’d follow trends, do dances and post cat videos that now make her cringe. Originally from Pittsburgh, the 31-year-old moved to Denver last November after living in Raleigh, North Carolina, for nine years. There she’d worked for a com- pany called Offl ine that would post stories about events and restaurants around town, so she’d often go out and try new places and post about them on social media. Those habits proved handy in a new city, where she now produces things-to-do videos about restaurants, coffee shops and day trips in Colorado, all tightly curated to a Denver lifestyle. On theamandabittner, she shares videos titled “The most instagrammable alley her to post a video. Along with the growth in followers, Bittner has also seen an increase in haters and trolls, including some who tell her that Colorado’s full and to stop posting videos of the state. “There have been very nice natives that have told me I’ve found hidden gems and spots that they didn’t know about, which means a lot, but sometimes a big struggle of mine is that I focus more on the negative the algorithm if I don’t post.” She gets many of her ideas from followers, who often make suggestions. She’s also in a text chain with about fi fteen to twenty other female social media content creators around the state who bounce ideas off of each other. “In Denver, there are a lot more creators than where I came from,” Bittner says. “I feel like I was a big fi sh in a small pond in Raleigh. Here in Denver, there are all kinds of people making creative videos.” Fortunately, she has no desire to become an “infl uencer,” she says. “I feel like people think in- fl uencers are cringey or showy or shallow, and I don’t want to be any of those things. I’m just a nor- mal girl posting my experiences.” Yesenia Chinchilla (above), Andrew Vascassenno and Amanda Bittner all share their Denver discoveries on TikTok. 10 it’s organically growing,” Chinchilla says of the site and her community of followers, who share their feelings about the food they like and different restaurants. One of the biggest challenges? The negative comments that hate on the restaurants she features. “I feel like with anybody, if you’re on social media a lot, it just mentally is not good for you,” she says. “I constantly have to catch myself [on] how long I’m on these platforms.” While Chinchilla plans to expand and add to her team — denverfoodscene is al- ready active on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and even Pinterest — she knows this won’t last forever. “Eventually people aren’t going to want to see me,” she says. “Right now we’re just taking it day by day and exploring more ideas for what we can do with it.” in Denver,” in which she shows off the Dairy Block, and “Four dreamy remote work spots in Denver”: Hudson Hill, the Ramble Hotel lobby, Table Public House and Dandy Lion Coffee Company. Bittner works full-time in social media marketing and content creation for a com- pany called Mic Drop Workshop that helps women become strong public speakers. Her TikTok is a hobby: “This is all just for fun that I do on nights and weekends,” she says. But since she has over 10,000 followers — techni- cally, 26,700 and counting — she’s eligible for the creator fund, a TikTok program that pays people a certain amount to continue making content. “I joined and started making money from TikTok itself, but it’s very minimal,” Bittner says. “I think over the last two years I’ve made maybe $150.” The site does make more money through Bittner’s own partner- ships when brands or local businesses pay @andrew_denver_realtor Best known to locals as “the guy who does the most and least expensive houses in Denver,” Andrew Vascassenno has been creating TikToks related to the housing market for a little over a year. Vascassenno moved from Arizona to Denver in 2017 and went into real estate full-time in January 2020. He joined Tik- Tok in February 2021 and, with a background in accounting, started to make personal fi nance- and tax-related TikToks. “I did that for two months straight, got burned out and kind of ran out of content,” Vascassenno says. “Per- sonal fi nance is a very saturated market.” (As proof, the hashtag has 6.8 billion views.) So Vascassenno decided to take his real estate knowledge comments than the positive ones; the nega- tive ones just feel a little louder sometimes,” she says. “I’ve posted all kinds of travel videos from all different cities, and I’ve never gotten the haters that I’ve gotten here in Colorado. People are very territorial.” Still, she feels pressure to constantly post. “If a day goes by that I don’t post, I feel like I’m behind,” Bittner admits. “No one’s tell- ing me that; it’s just a weird pressure about being a creator. I feel like I’ll be punished by and put it to use. In addition to the most/least expensive homes videos he posts every Mon- day, he creates short clips offering the pros and cons of neighborhoods around Colorado so that someone looking for information can do so by watching a thirty-second clip rather than watching a long YouTube video. “I’ve got a playlist where I’ve got all the pros and cons videos lined up and all the neighborhood tours videos lined up,” Vas- cassenno says. “If continued on page 12 OCTOBER 6-12, 2022 WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | westword.com @DENVERFOODSCENE @ANDREW_DENVER_REALTOR @THEAMANDABITTNER
