Kay and Tay's Million-Follower Secret? Just Being Real

The biggest thing that I try to convey with my with our content is to live life to the fullest. And even those like mundane, just like very standard days, like all those moments, like romanticize your life. I think if you stripped our content down to like the simplest form, it really would be us enjoying every day to the fullest. Today on Bay Area Innovators, we are joined by Kay and Tate Dudley, content creators who turn everyday moments into a global community. What began as a casual video quickly grew into millions of followers, built on authenticity, family, and documenting real moments as they happen. In this conversation, they share how they got started, why routine content resonates so deeply, and what it takes to build a meaningful life and career through genuine storytelling. This is Bay Area Innovators, and I'm your host, Steve Esposito. Kay and Tate, welcome to Bay Area Innovators. Thank you so much. Great to have you here. So I want to start with congratulations. You've had an amazing ride in content creation. You've been doing this for, I think, about four years, right, at most. And you've really grown a lot. And I think what's specifically, I think it's important, is the fact that you've done genuine content. You know, there's all this AI-generated content right now that's taken over the internet. We had reports that last year there's more AI content over the internet than actual content. So we'll talk more about it later. But please tell us a bit how you got started. You know, it's just recent that you got started and you're doing so well. How did the... What was the triggering point for you to start creating content? Well, we started because I feel like you really had a passion for video editing. And we used to make movies. I guess I should say you and my brother used to make movies together. Like once a year, they'd make one around the holidays. And we had just got done making one. And we decided to just make a little fun, trendy video. And we just realized how much fun we had doing it. And we made this New Year's resolution in 2022. Because January 1st was the day that we posted it. And we were like, we should just do this every single day for a year and see what happens. And it kind of just turned into something we never could have even imagined. Obviously, it wasn't ever... That was never the intention. It was really just to do it for fun, to do it together. Because we just enjoyed hanging out together and doing that. But it really just blossomed. And it's crazy. So you just started with one video and then you started creating one by one. And then it just grew from there, right? I think being consistent really helped. Because we didn't allow ourselves to not post something. Even if we didn't know what to post, we made sure we posted something. And the consistency of doing that. One, we got better at doing it and making better content. And then really, it was just kind of like a snowball. It just got bigger and bigger and bigger every single day. Well, it really seems that you are enjoying what you're doing. And I think this is very important. And I happened to watch one of your episodes, the one where you're presenting your house in Texas. It was very genuine, very simple, very genuine. This is what it is. And I'm showing you these things. So tell us more about this. It seems like you're pretty much doing very day-to-day activities that you are actually doing. You're not like anything mind-blowing, right? Yeah. No, our content has really morphed over the years into just that, like what's going on each day. So we kind of just film our life throughout the day. There's no expectation set with our audience that we're flashy or different or weird. We're just ourselves. And at the end of the day, we lump that together into kind of like a daily episode. And then that's our day. We post it each day. And some people like it. And those people stick around and they watch. And it's great. Yeah. It definitely didn't start out that way, though. It was not really... I can remember for the first six months, we didn't even have our voice on camera. Yeah, we were scared to talk on camera for a long time. I hated hearing my voice. So that took a few months to get over that. But now it doesn't bother me. But it used to bother me. So I can remember doing like, what is it? Where you lick lip. Oh, the lip syncing. Yeah, the lip syncing ones. We did those. And those surprisingly took a long time. So I much prefer the kind of content style that we do now because it's just very organic and natural. And it's just literally our life. And it makes it a lot more smooth. What do you think it is based on feedback or your thoughts that makes it so engaging with the audience? And there's so many people that love your content. What would be some of the elements that make that happen, you think? I think a lot of it probably is just the fact that we are just being real and raw and kind of giving our day-to-day life. I think a lot of people try to make up a life online. And I think the audience can see through that. And we just show our life. And it's funny because we'll post something that you might think, like the idea itself might sound really boring. And then it'll be super viral. I think two days ago, we posted a video of cooking soup. Or no, yeah, cooking's up in Tuscana. And I think on TikTok right now, it's like five, six million views. So I don't know. We're not flashy. We're not crazy. We just kind of live our life. And we post about it and people watch it. Yeah. We try to be relatable. The good, the bad, the happy, the sad, all the moments of life. Yeah, we're not scared to show emotions. It's no big deal because it's real. We don't want someone to feel ashamed in real life because they don't see those emotions online. A big thing was during the pregnancy journey, Kay wasn't scared to open up and explain her emotions about things that might've been hard topics. And I think it helped a lot of people to say, you know what, I had that problem too and never said anything and kind of things like that. Yeah, I think that's probably what makes it unique in that sense, the genuine and the fact that you are who you are and you're not using fake elements to create it. Do you worry in any way about people, your audience, your fans to know so much information about your personal information, what you do every day, what you eat? Do you ever think or worry about that? No, not really. I think like nowadays, it's super common to have your public footprint or your internet footprint. It's super common for that to be pretty big. People don't really realize it, but ever since Facebook, you put your age and this high school you went to and the places that you eat and your family's names, all that's living on the internet and it's been on the internet for 20 years. So to us, it's like, yeah, it's on the internet, but so is whoever's watching this, all their information's already on the internet too. I think it's also important to know that we don't share like- Every moment. Every moment of our life. I mean, we might share what we're making for dinner. We might share like, you know, little tidbits of information throughout our day, but I would never like share where my child goes to school or like information like that. I would never share online, but just like our preferences of what we like or don't like, hobbies we like. I don't think that that, it doesn't bother me. It doesn't worry me, but also we only share like just small little pieces of our day. You know, there's so much that we don't share and that we keep to ourselves. Yeah, but if you added it up each day, you know, the viewer probably gets 10 minutes of that 24 hour period. Yeah, but I think you should be very careful regardless of if you have a big presence online or not. Just, you know, I don't think you should share the school that your child goes to, what dance team they're on, you know, things like that. I think they need to stay private. So we try not to share stuff like that. Can you talk to us a bit about the importance of family? How important you see a family and kids and, you know, because this is pretty much what you're showing every day and people seem to love it, which is great. But just tell us more about the values. Yeah, I think, I mean, for us, for me, I'm sure Kay agrees, like family is the best part of this job. We get to be parents as a job, you know, we get to spend all our day, all our time with our kids and hang out and play and go do fun experiences in life. And, you know, that's honestly, it's like, to me, it's like the point of life. You know what I mean? It's like the most enjoyable thing in my life is being a husband and a father. And yeah, I mean, we love it. We try to support positive relationships and positive family dynamic. And, you know, we're always, like I was saying, like being vulnerable in times to support that message for sure. Yeah, we definitely don't want to ever come across as like the perfect family or the perfect couple or anything like that by any means. But we do try to like show that, you know, the realistic sides of life with marriage and children and how it can be hard, but it can also be beautiful. And like he said, it's just beautiful that we get to do this for a living and be with our children every single day. Like so blessed. It's funny, a comment that I see a lot is always like, you know, I swore that I was never going to have kids, but I have the worst baby fever right now. You know, things like that. So yeah, we've probably got a lot of people having kids now. Now, another thing is how do you make, you know, content every day? So you mentioned that, you know, you just do your day and then you take clips of that. But, you know, there's just so many ways you can have breakfast or so many ways you're going to play with the kids. So how do you make it so it's not repetitive? Or if it is repetitive, how do you keep the variety so it doesn't get, you know, boring for people? So I think luckily a lot of people just they feel comfort in watching the same thing every single day. You know, there's some people's channels out there that are the same seven angles and they do the same seven things every single day and people eat it up and watch it every single day. So, you know, it's not like that with us. Every day is a little bit different. You know, if we're cooking, we're probably cooking a different meal. We're probably putting the camera in a different place. You know, it could be similar, but there's slight differences. But yeah, I don't think at least for me, I don't feel a need to have to force any kind of difference day to day because I genuinely feel that people kind of like the comfort in knowing what their comfort creator is going to do each day. Yeah, that's so true. Because I think a lot of people, they follow tons of people. I mean, I can think of like 20 people right now that all do different styles of content. So if one of those creators or if all of those creators are doing the exact same thing, as I'm scrolling, I'm seeing different content still. So you don't really get over or like used to it or annoyed by it. I think people like to see the same thing a lot. Yeah, and I feel like I can look, I can think of creators in my mind and I can think of the exact content that they make like repetitiously. And you can probably think the same way. Like you have a creator that you can think of that has always talking to the camera in the same way or using the same voice. Talking about values, now you're doing content creation. This is almost your full-time job. I think you are doing some other work, Tay. So of course you need to be getting the viewership and the views. But I wonder, are there other values that you try to inspire your audience? For example, to eat healthy or education-wise or how to play with kids. Is that on your mind when you're getting the videos or is it just simply whatever comes to mind that day? I mean, I think at the end of the day, it's not my job to make sure that people are doing it one way. I think there's a thousand ways to correctly raise a family. I would never want to show an incorrect way. I would never want to do the reverse of that and give bad values. But I would never want to explain in my audience what values they should have. Yeah, because like I said, you can parent so many million ways. You can put your baby to bed at nine. You can put them to bed at seven. You know, it's what works with your family. And every family is different and their dynamic's different. But we do try to keep the message positive and we try to keep it happy. If it's supposed to be happy, if it's a sad moment, it's going to be sad. The biggest thing that I try to convey with our content is to live life to the fullest and even those like mundane, just like very standard days, like all those moments, like romanticize your life, like just really enjoy every moment because we all only get one. We get one life and it may be as like silly as like, I don't know, like going shopping for something that you need at the house. But just making that fun and really just, it's all about just enjoying your life. I feel like that's what I try to convey with our content. I think if you stripped our content down to the simplest form, it really would be us enjoying every day to the fullest. That's great. Can you give us some of your favorite episodes? What were either the most amazing, the biggest impact or just your favorites? It's funny because when you say that, I immediately just start thinking to points in my life. I don't even think about the content itself. It's like our first baby moon when we went to Maui, Hawaii before the fires. That was an amazing time. The content was great and really enjoyable too. Switzerland. Dubai. Yeah, Dubai. So I guess a lot of the highlight moments, obviously other than the births of the babies and stuff, were travel related because it's those fun experiences that are outside of the norm that are always really exciting. Yeah, for sure. And it's funny because I'm trying to think about the actual content pieces tied to each of those things. But I just remember, just like we lived in the moment, but we also filmed it. Yeah, that makes sense. So I'm remembering the actual memories of it versus the actual videos. But the content was great after. Yeah, the content always does really well when we travel and we get to show Ellie new experiences or we experience things for the first time. Yeah. Are you familiar with the Outdoor Boys channel? You know, he does a lot of traveling. Yeah, he recently retired, I think. He said that he was too popular. He would go to a store and people start asking questions and he didn't like that. It does get like that, yeah. How about some of the downsides? Were there moments where you felt like we can't pull this through, we can't go anymore? And how did you come out of it? I think my brain immediately goes to like, we were kind of new to content, but Kay's grandmother got sick. And at that point, we still both worked full-time jobs on top of content in the nighttimes. During that first year. Yeah, during the first year of content. And we had to also, Kay was the kind of a nurse for her grandmother. Well, I can let you tell the story. Yeah, we were both working full-time jobs at the time. You know, I think we had been doing content for like 10 months. We were 10 months into our year of our goal to do it every single day. And we had at that point, I think, gained like almost 900,000 followers on TikTok. And I don't know what it was on Instagram and other platforms, but that was our biggest. So at that point, we were like, this could be something, you know, we have to stay consistent. So we were juggling full-time jobs, doing our daily content. And then also my grandmother went into hospice with cancer. And my family and I, we all took turns. And so we would travel up there about three hours every weekend. And I would do the night shift with her. So we were doing that on top of all the other things with content and work. And so it was a lot. And there were definitely a lot of moments where we were like, we just gotta drop the content. This is too much. But I think we're both very stubborn when we set our minds to something. We stick to it and we just kept going. And I'm so glad we did. And I know she would be proud of us for continuing. Wow. I gotta ask you about social media. Obviously, your content is on social media and it's great content. Now, at the same time, social media, it's not been a good influence for kids in many ways. How do you see that? And do you see that, you know, how are you balancing that? Because you have kids that, you know, there's an older one and the younger ones may soon be looking into social media. Yeah, I mean, I think limiting screen time is always good, even on or off of social media, you know, like even Netflix or anything like that. Any kind of media, you know, kids can get addicted to. And, you know, kids were kind of addicted to it even when we were kids, but there weren't tablets. So you couldn't bring your TV shows with you, right? So, but yeah, I mean, luckily our 14-year-old isn't, I mean, really into social media. She doesn't have any of the accounts on anything and she doesn't absorb a whole lot of it. And the babies, of course, are too young. But I think that's more of a lifestyle thing. You know, we live a lifestyle where we want the babies to play outside and to play with toys. And so we, you know, we do that for them. And that's how I want them to grow. Yeah, and despite like our big presence online, you'd probably be surprised to know we don't spend a lot of time online. And our children, obviously they're too young. And then my 14-year-old, she, you know, has no interest in it. So, but if she did, I think the way I would handle it is having, I would definitely want like parental, what is that? Where you make sure you monitor it. It's, I haven't had to navigate that yet. But I think in my mind, I would definitely want to have parental limits on there. And then, you know, screen time, obviously. I just think there's a lot of things online for young teens that can really affect their mental health. And I think if I had been a teen in today's world, I, you know, I don't know what kind of mental health struggles I would have went through, because there's just so much negativity online. So, yeah, I mean, we're online and we try to spread positivity. I think our content style is safe for all audiences. So that's something I really like about our content. But, yeah, we try to keep it very clean because we do have such a huge audience. Like we have five-year-olds, six-year-olds that come up to us and they're like, I follow you on YouTube, you know? So I think we always have to remember that our audience is so vast and there's so many young children that watch our stuff. So, yeah, I feel proud that we keep our content clean, but there's not a lot, I mean, there's a lot of unclean stuff. So I just think parents have to just be very careful with what they allow their children to do when they're not around, because there's just so much out there now. Yeah. Yes, and again, with AI and the content, AI-created content, it goes into a direction where it becomes very difficult. Yeah, for sure. Tell us about your goals. What are your goals with your content creation and anything else? What do you want to accomplish in the next few years? I mean, for us, the content world for us, we're in a good flow state. We have a good repetition where we do our daily episode and we share kind of our story and I definitely want to continue to do that. We also want to take a jump You got it. So we are starting up a brand. Actually, next month, we're kind of kicking it all off. So that'll be a really fun thing for this year to kind of mix it up a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's going to be a fun next step. What is it going to be? What's the product? So the product is called Hey Nutrition, H-E-Y. So like the greeting, you know, Hey. It stands for Health Energy U and it's a nutrition company, but we're starting with protein bars. Kay actually has a really good story about it and kind of how we got to the point where we wanted to do it. Yeah, so I have lupus and I'm also breastfeeding and when I was breastfeeding Ellie, I started making these like lactation protein balls because it was good for me with my lupus, but also good for me with nursing. So I started making those like weekly. We did post about them a lot. So we obviously like shared the recipe and everything. And then it was just one night of about a year and a half ago, we were sitting there talking about how cool it would be to make these into like protein bars. And that's really just where the idea came from. And then we just decided to actually do it. And it's been a labor of love for about a year and a half now. Yeah. And so we made sure through the whole process that it was like, you know, safe for Kay with lupus, but also safe for breastfeeding mothers. And we also want to be able to give it to Ellie. And so it's, yeah, we're like, we're really excited about it. We're passionate about it. Well, that's great. Best of luck to you with that. And were you surprised? Like, again, in the first year, you probably were close to a million followers and, you know, that kept increasing. And how did this surprise you, that growth? Was it like, you know, yeah, we're doing the right thing, the right content, or was it even beyond that? I mean, it was definitely surprising. Our expectation in the very beginning was, well, at first there was no expectation, but even a month or so later, you know, our expectation was like, let's get 10,000 followers by the end of the year. And, you know, like Kay said, we were, we hit them. I mean, we were at 900,000 as we were going up to take care of her grandmother. But at a year, we were at a million followers. So we like reached a goal of a million in one year. So never expected it for sure. I mean, way above our expectations. Yeah. I don't think we ever really have gotten used to it either. Yeah. I think we pinch ourselves every day. And again, you have those really short videos on TikTok, on Instagram, and then the longer ones on YouTube. Can you talk to us about some of your, you know, videos that you actually went viral and then you were surprised and, you know, what made the difference in those videos? Yeah, I can remember the first one that ever went viral. And it was, it's so silly. Kay was sitting on a couch and there's like a doorway and I come around the corner and I'm wearing an oven mitt on my foot. And so the thumb of the oven mitt looks like a heel and then the rest of my foot's in the other part. And I'm just like, kind of like moving my foot around and like eating grapes. So it's just a really candid, silly moment. We put music over it. And we put some music over it and Kay was just cracking up. And we posted it and it just like started going off and it got like a million views and then two million views. And I can remember Kay just like in awe at the amount of people. At the point it had 700 views. We have a video where you're filming me and I'm like, oh my gosh, this is so cool. 700 people have looked at our video and I just thought it was so insane because at that point, I mean, we were getting like 10, 15 views a video and they were probably all our family. But yeah, I just thought that was so cool. And at that point I was telling myself like, maybe I can do this for a living with 700 views. No, but it ended up going to a million. That was our first like viral video. And then after that, I think that's when we really were like, hey, we made a million views. We can do this. We can do this again. Let's get another million views. And then at some point we made the goal that every video had to have a million views. And we've stayed consistent with that goal. Now we have a million on each video. So yeah, it's pretty cool. So again, you think the reason for that, what would you say is the reason? What makes that so appealing, you think? I think we've just cultivated and built an audience of people that are here to see the raw moments and to see our life as it happens. And like I said, there's no expectation. So it can be a silly video of me eating grapes with a oven mitt on my foot. There's no expectation. And I think that's where we win because if you're someone that's gonna do a big stunt and then you make a video and you didn't do a big stunt, people are gonna be upset. They're gonna be like, hey, I don't follow you for this talking thing. I follow you to see the big stunts. No expectations. That's how we've managed to, I think. Yeah, for sure. Just keep going. Kay and Tate, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate it. Any final thoughts for our audience? I don't think so, no. No, I'm just thankful to be here. Thank you for having us. Thank you so much. I appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you for watching another episode of Bay Area Innovators. If you enjoyed this episode and you know someone who should be on our show, please send us an email We would love to hear from you. Thank you and see you next week.