It started with a conference his boss sent him to
In 2019 Ansari was working in business advisory in Sydney, dealing with small boutique clients and enjoying the view it gave him into how different businesses worked. His boss sent him to a business networking conference with instructions to come back with notes.
The keynote speaker was Gary Vaynerchuk, who spent forty minutes of his forty five minute slot talking about TikTok. Ansari found this both amusing and shocking. He went back to the office with nothing but TikTok for his boss.
That night, curiosity got the better of him. He downloaded the app.
He approached it like an accountant
What Ansari did next is the part worth paying attention to. TikTok in 2019 had a poor reputation, known as the app for lip syncing and dancing. Rather than accept that, he asked why a serious businessman would pitch it to a room of businesspeople, and went looking at how the algorithm actually worked.
He found it was driven heavily by interest and location. You would not see lip syncing content unless you had signalled you wanted it. With no data on him, the app served him Australian content, much of it comedic, and he found he was enjoying it.
As Sinead Donovan puts it, his accountant’s brain took him straight to the data and the analytics. He then looked for a niche.
Finding the tribe
Ansari’s audience is the South Asian diaspora born and raised overseas. Having grown up in Sydney with strong ties to Pakistan, he recognised a large group of people who felt there was little out there they could relate to.
He created for people who looked like him and shared those cultural ties, living in Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. Those four countries remain his top markets today, precisely because of where that diaspora sits.
Going full time, and the director who gave him two answers
For three and a half to four years this ran alongside a full time job. The nine to five at the office, then editing and recording afterwards. There are, he admits, a few videos filmed in the office that he would rather not resurface.
In 2024 a sponsor asked him to cover the Cricket World Cup in the United States. Three weeks, in July, which is a difficult time for any accountant to leave the office.
He sat down with his director and explained. The answer came in two parts, and it is the most quietly generous moment in the episode. As a director, I cannot give you the annual leave you need. As a friend, I would urge you to pursue this.
Ansari gave notice, went, and has not looked back in two years. Losing the stability of an accountant’s salary, he says, created a hunger in his belly. It was now or never.
Selling solutions, not follower counts
Most creators sign with an agency, which takes a cut and brings them work. Ansari deliberately went the other way. He did not want to be marketed to whichever brands an agency happened to have. He wanted to approach the brands he actually wanted to work with.
So he emails them directly with media kits, an assessment of the problems he sees in their social media, and how he can solve them. His own description of this is the sharpest line in the conversation: it is anything an accountant would do if they looked at someone’s financial reports and came back with solutions.
Sinead Donovan reflects it back to him, noting he was effectively arriving as a consultant as well as an ambassador. His response, that he should probably have charged more, gets the laugh it deserves.
The approach works because it changes the pitch. For a cricket campaign, instead of filming standard post match interviews, he proposed quizzing athletes on cultural and human topics to let their personalities and humour come through. Viewers connected with it, and the Cricket World Cup came back asking for more storytelling. He now employs someone whose sole job is reaching out to brands with ideas and proposals.
Authenticity as a commercial position
Ansari has never accepted a brand deal that arrived with a script already written, and will not be seen working with a brand he would not use off camera. He pitches brands on the condition that he keeps creative freedom.
His reasoning is commercial rather than sentimental. Audiences have become very good at spotting what is real and what is an advertisement. Authenticity is not a nice quality here, it is what makes the content work.
A family business built on a gap he could see
The fashion label came from noticing the same question repeatedly in his comments: where do you get your traditional clothing? He had family in Pakistan who could send him items whenever he wanted. Most people living in Australia did not have that.
So Alag by Ansari sells traditional South Asian clothing marketed specifically to the young diaspora living abroad. His uncle manages the operation, one cousin runs the marketing, and another has just been hired to manage the admin.
He is direct about why he needed it. Content alone is a volatile living, and a platform could disappear tomorrow. He wanted a business that provided real value rather than a money grab, and he credits the CA knowledge for making it possible.
On creative block and AI
Anyone who says they do not worry about content, Ansari reckons, is lying. Creative block is part of the job. His answer is to focus on what you enjoy making, because worrying about numbers and the algorithm is where people get stuck.
He also offers a liberating rule from the Louis Vuitton designer Virgil Abloh: you only need to change three per cent of something that already works to make it your own. You do not have to be a hundred per cent original.
On AI, Ansari thinks the viewers will draw the line rather than the platforms. If audiences are not comfortable with celebrities endorsing products through AI, it will fizzle out quickly. Harmless creative uses will survive. He uses AI himself for storyboarding and editing, generating rough drafts to test whether an idea works before filming, while cautioning against relying on it entirely.
How he would sell the profession
Asked to put on a consultant’s hat and advise Chartered Accountants Worldwide on social media, his answer is two words and then a full strategy: people first.
Show who you are. Talk to viewers about what Chartered Accountants actually do, how they work, how they help others. Show people who they can look like. That will attract the right viewers, the ones genuinely curious about the profession, rather than the millions of views a trending dance would bring and waste.
His second point is informative content. People shy away from explaining too much, worried that giving information away for free will hurt them. He thinks that is exactly wrong. The more you inform people for free, the more you earn the trust that leads them to spend money with you.
Informative content, and people first. It is decent advice for any professional body, and it comes from someone who has tested it at scale.
