Will Hearn is finishing up his senior year of high school in Georgia — AP exams, college decisions, and all — while simultaneously running two college football social media pages with thousands of followers. He’s been building audiences online since he was grinding on Twitch playing Fortnite, and he hasn’t really stopped since.
Isaac met Will a few years ago through the internet. In this first episode, they catch up on what Will’s been building, what it’s taken to get there, and what both of them have figured out — and are still figuring out — about turning online hustle into something real.
From Fortnite to College Football: How Will Got Here
Will didn’t set out to build a college football media brand. He started where a lot of people his age started: gaming.
He was streaming Fortnite on Twitch, growing a page, picking up followers — the whole grind. That page made it to around 10,000 followers before it got hacked. Gone.
Most people would have walked away. Will didn’t. He pivoted to college football, a world he’d been immersed in his whole life. Both parents went to Georgia. Both sisters went to Georgia. He’d been attending games since he could walk.
In January 2019 — while still in middle school — he started Elite Georgia, a football-focused Instagram page. It grew steadily, hit 6,600 followers heading into the 2023 season, and then got hacked too.
“It also got hacked. I was at like 10-point-something thousand on the Fortnite page. I’m telling you, I would have been at one of those 100K accounts.”
Two pages. Two hacks. Most people tap out. Will’s response was to regroup, reassess, and build something bigger.
Why He Went All-College-Football Instead of Just Georgia
After losing the Georgia page, Will and his collaborator Reese made a strategic call: instead of rebuilding a single-team account, they bought an existing all-college-football page at around 4,500 followers and rebranded it as Elite CFB Now.
The reasoning was simple: a Georgia-only page can only ever talk to Georgia fans. An all-college-football page can talk to everyone.
The new model splits into two lanes. The main page runs like ESPN or CBS — stats, analysis, college football news. The podcast side of the brand leans more conversational, like a Barstool Friday Beers vibe. Two different audiences, two different content modes, unified under the same brand.
Will had also been experimenting with a network approach — building a group chat of moderators from different schools who could post collaborative content using the Elite name. The idea was solid, but he acknowledged the execution challenge: getting people from 50+ schools to consistently care about someone else’s brand is hard without having something concrete to offer them in return.
The Connections That Actually Mattered
Four and a half years of posting about college football doesn’t just grow a follower count. It builds a relationship network — and Will’s is genuinely impressive for someone who hasn’t graduated high school yet.
He received media credentials for bowl games. He’s built connections with Georgia players from the recruit level all the way to the NFL. And when the Falcons drafted a player who had been following his page, he reached out to congratulate him.
“You start at the recruit level, then they go to college, then they go to the NFL — and you have that connection with them.”
That kind of relationship can’t be manufactured. It’s built slowly, post by post, over years. The follower count is a byproduct. The relationships are the asset.
Will also pointed to the geography of it: through four years of posting, he’s connected with people from almost every state. Internet friendships that started over Fortnite streams turned into a network that spans the country.
“I probably know someone I’d be willing to stay with from every single state in the US — and it’s something we take for granted."
"We’re Getting Numb to Our Knowledge”
One of the sharpest moments in this episode came when Isaac and Will talked about something most young creators don’t notice happening to them: you stop seeing how much you actually know.
Isaac framed it this way — he’s spent years building social media content for businesses, and after doing it long enough, the skills that took real time to develop start to feel obvious. You walk past a business posting stock photos with their watermark still on them and you know exactly how to fix it, but you don’t give yourself credit for that.
“We’re getting numb to our knowledge. I don’t give myself credit for what I know, and I bet you don’t either.”
The advice: zoom out. Look at the average business’s social presence compared to what you know how to do. The gap is your value. The fact that it feels easy to you is the whole point — that’s a skill, not a given.
For anyone in a market like Ames, Iowa or a mid-sized city anywhere in the country, this gap is especially wide. Most local businesses are still posting like it’s 2016. The opportunity is sitting right there.
The Transition Period: Hyper-Focused But Not Sure On What
Both Isaac and Will circled around a feeling that a lot of ambitious people in their late teens and early twenties know well: you’re working hard, you care deeply, you have ideas everywhere — but you don’t have a single clear direction yet.
Isaac called it a transitional period. You know you have the drive. You know you have skills that most people don’t. But the question of where exactly to put all of it is still being figured out in real time.
“We’re in this transitional period where you’re hyper-focused but you don’t know what to hyper-focus on.”
For Isaac, leaving Iowa State after two years and going all-in on content creation was the move that started clarifying things. For Will, it’s freshman year at Georgia — figuring out whether to major in business, media, or both; whether to restart his social media work immediately or let the first year breathe.
There’s no clean answer to the transitional period. But naming it helps. Knowing that the restlessness isn’t aimlessness — it’s just direction being figured out — makes it easier to keep moving.
On Fraternities, Chamber of Commerce, and Dropping Negative Connotations
Will mentioned he’s considering joining a fraternity at Georgia. He went in with the same skepticism most people do — the stereotypes, the “paying for friends” criticism. But after going to rush events and meeting the people, the picture got more complicated.
Isaac had a funny parallel: he’d left Iowa State partly resistant to the whole institutional networking structure that college pushes, and now he’s paying to join the Ames Chamber of Commerce — essentially a city-wide business fraternity full of people who are decades older than him and don’t fully understand social media yet.
“I’m literally joining a city-wide business fraternity with people that won’t even make sense to me. I’ll be the weird guy in the room coming in at 20 years old, self-employed.”
The lesson both of them landed on: negative connotations about organized groups — fraternities, chambers, alumni networks, whatever — usually come from the stereotype, not the reality. The reality is that every one of those structures exists to do the same thing: connect people who have things to offer each other.
Sometimes the most valuable thing you can do is walk into a room where you’re the youngest person there.
Key Takeaways
- Getting hacked isn’t the end. Will lost two accounts with combined tens of thousands of followers and rebuilt both times. The audience you’ve built once, you can build again — usually faster.
- Niche down to scale up, then consider going broader. Starting with Georgia football gave Will depth and authenticity. Expanding to all of college football gave him reach.
- The connections outlast the content. Follower counts go up and down. The relationships you build with recruits, players, and collaborators along the way are what actually compounds over time.
- You’re probably numb to how much you know. If social media, content creation, or digital marketing feels obvious to you, that’s a skill — not a baseline. Most businesses haven’t caught up.
- Get in rooms where you’re the youngest person. Whether that’s a fraternity, a Chamber of Commerce, or a local business network — structured environments for connection work, even when they feel weird at first.
Connect with Will on LinkedIn. Connect with Isaac at isaacjarnagin.com.
