If you need to find a plumber or someone to fix a hole in the roof, consider a new source: social media.
It’s a distinct change of pace from the viral dances, “must-have” shopping deals, and other TikTok tropes: “Let’s cut open this twelve-year-old hot-water heater and find out what’s on the inside,” announces a smooth but matter-of-fact voice while a faceless pair of gloved hands starts to peel away the exterior layers on a big white tank to show off the sludge that might build up if you don’t flush your hot-water heater annually. It’s a mind-bogglingly effective advertisement for regular servicing that’ll have you imagining crunchy little flakes in your water—a pimple-popping video, home-maintenance style. “It’s not the worst that I’ve seen, but there’s quite a bit of buildup in here, and it looks pretty nasty,” explains the narrator, who posts by the handle @theplumbersplunger.
Keep scrolling, and maybe you’ll stumble across @thethatchingguy, a tattooed British man who shares videos of his work redoing thatched roofs, with a special emphasis on the satisfying thwack thwack thwack of his leggett, a grooved tool used to pat the thatch into place. Or perhaps you’ll encounter Trey Hill of Gold Star Inspections (@gold.star.inspections), a no-nonsense man who’s turned the wacky and appalling stuff he sees while doing home inspections (like loose faucets and flipped hot-and-cold placement in new builds) into a whole series of videos and a catchphrase: “That ain’t right.”
When you’re standing in your bathroom panicking over a flooded toilet, it seems impossible to find a plumber. When you’re calling contractors all over town for a kitchen renovation, it feels like it’s going to require a magical quest involving three riddles and a wise old witch to book one you can trust. Where do you turn—Angi? Your group chat of local parents? God forbid you even try your town’s Facebook group. Get it wrong, and you’ve basically paid somebody to wreck your house.
Well, there’s another avenue for homeowners in need of assistance—or at least a way to learn a bit about what tradespeople do: TikTok and other social media platforms, where plumbers, home inspectors, welders, and electricians are sharing glimpses into their work and building pretty big followings doing it. They offer an educational, behind-the-scenes look for a generation of homeowners that missed out on shop class and home ec and never got into This Old House but now really want to understand when a leak constitutes an emergency and what red flags to catch on a home inspection.
Plus, it’s not just prospective clients or fellow tradespeople watching them, either: It turns out there’s just something really, really soothing about watching somebody thatch a roof.
@theplumbersplunger is the work of 27-year-old David Williams, who’s based in New Braunfels, Texas, and covers the San Antonio area. After working for other companies as a journeyman plumber, he recently launched his own plumbing business—thanks in no small part to the platform he’s built on TikTok and elsewhere over the last few years. (When I first reached out, he’d just polled his followers on his Instagram Stories about the best promotional wrap for his van.)
Williams got his start when a friend from high school asked him about the photos and videos he was sharing on Snapchat while working. His friend said he followed people online posting similar things publicly to TikTok and YouTube and suggested Williams start. “So I looked into it and saw how well some of the channels were doing,” he says. He started with TikTok because he’d heard that was the easiest place to build an audience, then gradually expanded to Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook.
“Honestly, without social media, I probably wouldn’t have been able to start my own company as quickly as I have,” Williams says. Partly, that’s because the content itself brings in some money, providing a financial cushion while he gets going—he makes money directly off YouTube views, for example. But he was also confident that he could make the business work from looking at his follower info and seeing how many were in his general area.
Cy Porter, a home inspector based in the Phoenix, Arizona, area who posts as @cyfyhomeinspections, was also able to create and then leverage his following into new customers. His wife recommended he try social media as he was getting his business off the ground, because he kept coming home and telling her stories about the stuff he’d seen that day. Now, a few short years later, “we don’t need business anymore. I turn down about a thousand jobs every couple weeks. We have more business than we can handle. I have a fourteen-month wait list,” he says.
It’s not zero-risk, though. Lots of attention means lots of attention on any mistakes you might make. Says Porter: “If you say something stupid on social media and you don’t realize it was stupid until everyone else sees a different perspective, you can ruin your entire business.” Williams says the scrutiny adds an extra layer of accountability for the quality of the work itself: “Obviously we choose what we’re going to post, but still, if you’re recording something, you’re going to make sure you’re doing it right.”
“Honestly, without social media, I probably wouldn’t have been able to start my own company as quickly as I have.”
—David Williams, @theplumbersplunger
Of course, one issue is that sometimes people disagree about what constitutes doing it right. And like everywhere else on the internet, the feedback can be intense, and it means developing a skill that’s new to the trades: ignoring the harsh drive-by judgments of random people online. “No matter what you do online, there’s a whole group of people [who will say] that you’re doing it wrong,” says Williams. @theblondewelder, a welder and ironworker in her 20s who lives in British Columbia (and doesn’t give out her full name), says that she recently got a DM that was so clueless it opened her eyes a bit. “I’m starting to think that these people on the internet actually have literally no idea what they’re talking about and they’re just trying to start shit,” she says. “I’m really trying to get better at ignoring that.”
There’s some skepticism within the trades as well. Williams has talked to older company owners who are against providing free repair tips, on the theory that it’s essentially giving the store away; his counterpoint is that there’s already plenty of info out there about how to do the simple things—and for the more complex tasks, there’s no video that’ll save a DIYer from the unpleasant surprises they might find.
TikTok has its limits, too. “I wish that I could just happen to meet a general contractor and, ‘Oh yeah, go look at my TikTok. You can see all my good welds on there,’ ” the Blonde Welder says. “He’d either just be like, ‘No, I want to see your résumé,’ or he would just be like, ‘Weld in front of me.’ ” Social media can help jump-start a business, sure, and raise awareness about the trades and offer a new way of making connections and learning about various fields—but welding is still welding, and plumbing is still plumbing, and either you’ve got the goods or you don’t.
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