In 2019, Ramis Ansari’s boss sent him to a business conference in Sydney and asked him to bring back some notes for the firm. The keynote speaker spent forty minutes of his forty five minute slot talking about TikTok, an app that at the time had a reputation for lip syncing and not much else. Ramis went home that night, downloaded it, and started taking the algorithm apart to work out what the fuss was about.
Six years on he has close to a million followers across his platforms, a fashion label, an events and MC business, and a full time career as a content creator. In this episode he joins host Sinead Donovan to explain how he found his audience among the South Asian diaspora, why he left a secure job to cover the Cricket World Cup, and what his director told him as a friend rather than as a boss.
It is also a conversation about the commercial side of creating, which Ramis credits directly to his training. He pitches brands the way an accountant reads a set of financial statements, by finding the problem and proposing the solution. He turns down anything that arrives with a script already attached. And he is clear that most creators fizzle out not because they run out of ideas, but because they never learned to run a business.
What you will take away
- How to find a real niche and build an audience around it, rather than chasing whatever happens to be trending
- Why a Chartered Accountancy background is a genuine asset in the creator economy, from reviewing contracts to pitching brands directly instead of through an agency
- How to approach a brand with a solution rather than a follower count, and why authenticity is a commercial decision as much as an ethical one
- A working view on AI in content creation, where it genuinely helps and where the line gets murky
- What Ramis would do with a Chartered Accountancy brand on social media, and why informative content builds more trust than chasing views
- How to handle creative block, and the three per cent rule for making an existing idea your own
About Ramis Ansari
Ramis Ansari is a Chartered Accountant, content creator and founder based in Sydney, and a member of Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand. He has close to a million followers across his social platforms, built around content for the South Asian diaspora in Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada.
He studied at Macquarie University and worked in business advisory before moving into content creation full time in 2024. He is the founder of Alag by Ansari, a traditional South Asian clothing label aimed at young people living abroad, which is now largely run by his family in Pakistan, and he also runs an events and MC business.
