UF entrepreneur turns profit selling TikTok knowledge to businesses

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At only 22, Sofia Grande has owned three businesses — not all successes, but each special. 

Born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Grande’s flight departed for the U.S. during her last year of high school. She navigated the college admissions process on her own, which taught her the importance of relying on herself, a lesson she now carries into entrepreneurship.

“I didn’t have anyone to help me … Like, what — my little sister would teach me?” she said.

She went on to earn a UF bachelor’s degree in finance and financial management services and a UF master’s degree in entrepreneurship. Yet Grande’s ambition began before she stepped on campus.

At 15, Grande created her first business: Ethereal Swimwear, a website that sold swimsuits for young women domestically and internationally. She built a website, found and contacted suppliers, and oversaw each part of the manufacturing and selling process. However, in an oversaturated market, with fast-fashion competitors like Shein, Ethereal Swimwear’s run was short-lived. 

Despite lasting only a couple of months, Grande said her first business venture taught her marketing tactics, like running advertisements and reaching out to influencers, and familiarized her with Shopify, an e-commerce platform for startup businesses.

For her second run, she enrolled in an immersive two-week entrepreneurship program. She launched niche nonfiction books through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, a platform where authors can self-publish books without going through a traditional publisher. 

She used pen names for her books and handled every step of the process herself — from composing outlines to writing and formatting to pricing the books according to demand. 

Since her books in KDP were often unstable in sales, Grande turned to creative marketing methods. She built a nearly 30,000-member online community through social media, specifically TikTok and Facebook. Still, the costs often outweighed the profits, and eventually the business declined.

Grande used the experience as fuel to keep learning.

“When someone like me comes along and says, ‘Boy, that business isn't really that great’ … you've got to be coachable,” said Christopher Pryor, a UF clinical associate professor of business and Grande’s mentor. “What Miss Grande has is a stellar level of coachability.” 

Her passion for startups solidified during her internship with Procter & Gamble, a global manufacturing company that produces everyday household and personal care brands. There, she observed how CEOs carved their own visions and developed their ideas into reality.

“You have the power to decide how you want your life to be,” she said.

Grande received a scholarship to attend the 2023 annual Dynamite Circle conference in Bangkok, Thailand, a four-day event for more than 400 established entrepreneurs across the world.

At the conference, she realized many business owners said social media could help grow their businesses, but few knew how to implement it — and even fewer had the time to learn. Grande recognized this gap as an opportunity to find clients for her new online agency, Blue Alpaca Media. 

The agency has become Grande’s most successful business yet, operating at an 80% profit margin without requiring a single outside investment. Its purpose is to provide social media marketing assistance to established businesses.

She describes her breakthrough as an unexpected “snowball effect.” What felt like the failure of her second business became the very experience that paved the way for her third business, she said.

“You never grow if you don’t fail and if you don’t try again,” she said.

Grande’s mission is to share her resources with those who lack them while still preserving her own work autonomy. By equally valuing her failures and successes, she envisions making this mission possible. 

Contact Ariana Badra at abadra@alligator.org. Follow her on X @arianavbm.

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