From Home Movies to Millions of Views: How Partially Evolved Gets Local Businesses Seen

About ten years ago, Michael Mejia started a YouTube channel that was nothing more than home movies of him and his kids, something to look back on. It turned out to be the first step toward Partially Evolved, the food and lifestyle content business he runs today.

He eventually fell out of love with YouTube and moved to Instagram to promote cars he was renting out through Turo. That venture, he says, tanked after about a year. While he looked for his niche, he started posting food. Three to five posts in, a restaurant messaged him: come try our cheeseburgers, we like the way you make videos. It was not a paid job. The video did well, and he fell in love with the work.

At the time of this conversation he had been in food-focused influencer marketing for about two years, working with clients that include a Mexican restaurant, a pizza spot and a well-known fast-food burger chain, mostly here in the Inland Empire.

The first paid gigs

Mejia credits an early mentor, a social media marketer in Riverside who saw something in him and brought him in as a creator to promote the businesses he worked with. Those were some of his first paid jobs. They were not much, he says, but they were “enough to let me know” that if he grew it, he could turn it into a career: trying food from places he had never been, getting paid for it, and helping businesses that were struggling or ready for the next level.

Visibility is the job

About 90% of his content is food, with lifestyle pieces such as amusement parks and indoor playgrounds mixed in. Everybody eats, he says, and the work does not feel like work.

The problem he solves for clients is visibility. For some of them, his video has been their very first Instagram post. Customers find businesses on their phones now, not in the paper. “Nobody’s really looking at the billboard anymore,” he says.

What makes him different in a crowded field, he says, is local engagement. He grew up in Fontana and keeps his work in the Inland Empire. Businesses in Anaheim, Los Angeles and San Diego reach out, but he usually passes when his face would be on it, because he values being recognized around town. People stop him at local spots to say they saw his video.

Cross-post everywhere

Instagram is his main platform, partly because posts can flow straight to a connected Facebook page. TikTok, he says, is “sort of the wild west.” The same video can pull 400 views on one platform and 80,000 on another, and there is no telling which. His advice: cross-post on as many platforms as you can, even text-only ones such as blogs. Across all of his clients, his videos have reached millions of views.

He has gone viral, and he calls it “a high that’s very hard to chase.” Repeating the formula rarely works the second time. He would rather be consistent and hit the mark over and over than be a one-hit wonder.

You might not need him

For a marketer, Mejia is unusually candid: anyone with a phone and a decent camera can do what he does, for any passion. He gave his brother-in-law, who loves fishing, a plan: film the catch, the reel, the bait, the spot, even how to get a fishing license, and let viewers and brands find you.

“If you’re on social media, you do not need me,” he says. Hire him if you do not have the time, do not know your way around the platforms, or like his style. Or send a message asking for tips. He will help with that, too.

What the chamber does for him

Membership, he says, “legitimizes any business.” Monthly meetings put him in rooms he otherwise would never be in, with goal-oriented owners looking for the missing pieces of their puzzles. Two or three members had already reached out to hire him, and he has watched business cards change hands at the end of meetings. At one mixer he learned about opening savings accounts for kids, something he says he never would have gone looking for on his own.

He is also active on the chamber’s online business hub, where a question such as “does anybody know a good mechanic?” gets answered quickly by members who want to help each other.

He sees his work as one small piece of a bigger web. When a local business gains customers, that money moves to other local businesses, and a thriving local economy is what keeps parks, roads and schools in good shape for everyone, his own family included.

His advice to anyone considering membership: “Pull the trigger. Don’t sleep on it.” He also signed on to lead a chamber workshop on how he runs his own page and his clients’ pages, so newer creators can skip the missteps he made along the way.