It’s early morning when Tom Oswald pulls up to Homeboy, his Scandi-cool cafe on the ground floor of Yugo Adelaide, a massive student accommodation building on North Terrace. He starts sweeping the courtyard and setting up chairs outside. He receives a delivery of produce, preps pillowy focaccia and glazes cinnamon scrolls before the daily influx of customers starts rolling in.

It’s just another day in the life of the 19-year-old Tiktok star whose snappy, diaristic videos about the minutiae of running a cafe have clocked hundreds of thousands of views since he started posting in 2023. Some – including his first – have gone north of a million.

“Having little to no customers on my first day, I posted my first Tiktok, ‘Opened a cafe and nobody came’,” Oswald tells Broadsheet. “It was the harsh truth [about opening a cafe]. I was half making fun of myself and half having a laugh.”

Since that first viral video (shot at the original Homeboy cafe in Hahndorf in July 2023), Oswald has continued to post Tiktoks roughly once a week; sometimes more frequently than that. The moments he shows – soundtracked by anything from retro muzak to Fontaines DC – aren’t extraordinary by any stretch. And yet they keep more than 700k followers across Tiktok and Instagram coming back for more.

Hospitality groups pump thousands of dollars into social media campaigns. Oswald made a 19-second video Tiktok’s algorithm plucked from the 34 million uploaded to the platform every day. But that whopper debut and every video since has helped Oswald keep the lights on at Homeboy for nearly two years.

“Homeboy would not be where it is without social media,” he says. “It might’ve not even existed.”

Oswald’s BTS approach to social media marketing is a huge departure from the hyper-stylised still photography pioneered by influential venues like Chin Chin in Melbourne, whose launch in 2011 was one of the earliest examples of an Aussie hospitality business embracing social media as a marketing tool. You don’t need to scroll far to see how little the strategy has changed. Seen a photogenic tablescape lately? Look, here’s one. And another. And another.

“Back in those days, it was a lot easier to break through… because there was a lot of trial and error, and people not really understanding the power of social media,” said Chin Chin’s former marketing guru Jess Ho in an interview with The Bureau of Eating & Drinking last year. “These days, social media has become a business, and a lot of that business just creates noise.”

For Kelsey Gaffey, cutting through the digital noise was nothing compared to the real-world problem of standing out on Toorak Road in South Yarra, one of Melbourne’s buzziest hospitality strips. But her vinyl-spinning wine bar, Gracie’s Wine Room, had a keen clientele weeks before the bar poured its first glass.

In October last year, Gaffey quit her corporate gig to chase a dream of opening a venue. Over the next 99 days, she posted more than 50 Tiktoks exposing the realities of that process, from the building phase to menu development. In one of her most watched videos, Gaffey addresses a “very valid question” she’d seen in comments: how can a 25-year-old afford to open a wine bar in one of Melbourne’s most affluent suburbs?

She candidly explains how she’d drained her savings and sold shares to buy a majority stake in the business, which she now co-owns with a group of investors, including family and close friends. She also alludes to the fact that she doesn’t come from money – let alone well-heeled South Yarra. “I’m from Adelaide. I’m from a single parent household; my mum, sister and I really struggled,” she says in one video.

“Once I bit the bullet and put that first bit of vulnerability out online, the response just made it so much easier,” Gaffey tells Broadsheet. “People want to know the lows. That’s what really hooks them and makes them feel part of the journey.”

Gaffey’s vulnerability paid off. On opening night, Gracie’s Wine Room had a line down Toorak Road. “We would have served a couple of 100 people across the night, probably more,” she says. “It was incredible and definitely unexpected. But it just shows the power that the social media journey had, with so many people showing up to support us.”

Cut to now, and that first night’s trade – which felt busy at the time – wasn’t nearly as busy as Gracie’s is today. “We genuinely thought it couldn’t get better or busier, but we’ve continued to grow week on week, so the momentum hasn’t stopped yet.”

To protect her privacy, Gaffey is careful about what she shares online. But while it “can be daunting” to engage with the platform in such a candid way, she says there’s no doubt it’s had a positive impact on her business.

“The trade-off is being able to build a really engaged and loyal community,” she says. “Any additional stress or time is absolutely worth it. It makes me so happy when people come into the venue and tell me they’ve seen our content online.”

In the same way that Instagram went from a dinky photo-sharing app to digital town square in just a few years, Tiktok has evolved into something far more influential than its early days of lip-syncing and dance challenges would suggest. And if Gen Z’s trust is shifting from experts to influencers, then Gracie’s Wine Room is the proof.

Gaffey, a first-time business owner, says she was using Tiktok like a search engine to find answers to her questions about building a bricks-and-mortar venue from scratch. When she couldn’t find the content she needed, she’d tap her audience of “like-minded young professionals” for a solution.

“If we’re experiencing an issue, whether it’s a leak or something to do with the council, as soon as I open up about it online, the first thing I see in the comments is people offering advice or support.”

Because she’s posted consistently about Gracie’s since she quit her old job, Gaffey can’t say for sure what would happen to business if she stopped. Cherilynn Yap – whose Bondi cafe Up South pulls queues for its warm chunky cookies – says sales tripled over a six-month period once her day-in-the-life videos started gaining traction online. Yap was inspired to create her own content after following Brisbane cookie queen Brooke Saward Brooki Bakehouse, whose viral videos led to a cookbook that sold out before it launched, and an international pop-up in Abu Dhabi last year.

Yap believes Tiktok’s timestamping feature – the marker “of when and what you’re doing at that moment” – could be a factor in her (and other creators’) success with the platform. What her audience doesn’t see? The hours she spends editing her videos at night.

“I’m really lucky that it’s also my hobby. After a long day at work, curling up under my blanket and editing a video is my ultimate guilty pleasure. It’s incredibly rewarding to see people connect with my content, and even more so when they support my small business as a result.”

Compared to Yap, Gaffey spends far less time on cutting her videos. “I’m not filming a highlight reel,” she says, “It’s not super aesthetic and it’s not really edited, so the content I make honestly doesn’t take a lot of time out of my day.” Meanwhile, Oswald says he’s “very particular about the filmmaking side of things” and spends around five hours on top of a 45-hour work week to film and edit videos.

Despite the amount of time and effort she puts into them, Yap says it’s not the popularity of her Cherrysgoods Tiktoks that will give her business longevity. It’s the quality of her product.

“We were struggling a little bit because when we went viral, it was a big change,” she says. “Our team was understaffed for a couple of weeks, which meant we had to close one day a week. You still have to focus on your craft at the end of the day.”