Best business TikTok accounts to follow in 2026, judged on what they built

The 10 business TikTok accounts at a glance

Last Tuesday I gave the For You page 20 minutes, which is 20 minutes more than I'd planned. In that time 6 different people shouted at me about offers, and 4 of them were standing in front of a car they had probably rented for the shoot. I kept asking the same question at every video, and it was the only question that mattered: has this person ever run payroll?

I post short videos about marketing on TikTok myself, so I know how little the format tells you about the person behind it. A 45-second clip rewards confidence, and confidence is free. So I built this list the way I'd want a friend to build it for me, which means every pick below built or ran something real first, and the receipt is in the write-up with a source you can open.

What makes business TikTok accounts worth following?

Business TikTok accounts are the creators who teach business in vertical video: how to price, how to hire, how to buy a laundromat, how to raise a round. The good ones are rarer than the feed suggests, because the format is short and the incentive is to sell you a course at the end. So I ask 1 question before anything else, which is whether the person built or ran the thing they are now explaining.

Then I look for 1 specific video, because that is where the claim can be checked, and I care about this because I've founded 4 companies and sold 2, and the second exit was a media company that grew to an 800K audience on organic alone, so I know how much of a feed is performance. I ran the same test on my business influencers page, which covers the bigger names like Alex Hormozi and Noah Kagan across every channel, so this page is the TikTok-only cut with different people on purpose. If you came for TikTok creators who explain marketing specifically, Gary Vaynerchuk, Daniel Priestley and Grace Beverley are the 3 here who built marketing businesses or consumer brands and talk about the channel from inside it.

10 business TikTok accounts that built something first

Here they are in a loose order, starting with the people who buy and build, then the operators, and ending with the one working VC.

Codie Sanchez (@realcodiesanchez)

Codie Sanchez started at Vanguard in 2008, climbed through Goldman Sachs, State Street and First Trust, and launched Contrarian Thinking in 2020, according to her own about page. Her publisher's bio says she owns Main Street Holding Company and Contrarian Thinking Capital, with car washes, laundromats and roofing companies in the portfolio, and her book Main Street Millionaire came out on December 3rd, 2024 and went straight onto the New York Times list. Get the handle right, because @realcodiesanchez is her and @codiesanchez is not. Start with Economics of a Laundromat, episode 1, from September 2025, because it walks through the numbers of a business most people drive past.

Her line to Success magazine in July 2026 was "Stop looking for what's sexy. Start looking for what makes money," and the videos are that sentence with receipts. Follow her if you'd rather buy a business than start one.

Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee)

Gary Vaynerchuk built a company before social media existed and then built a second one on top of it: his biography says he grew Wine Library, the family liquor store, from $4 million to $60 million in annual sales, then co-founded VaynerMedia with his brother AJ in 2009, and 9 years later it had more than 800 employees. Skip his motivational clips and pick the ones where he's early on something, like the live shopping video, where he asks you to spend 3 hours doing homework on TikTok Shop, Whatnot and eBay Live, because he thinks it's the next big selling channel for anyone with a product. Follow him if you sell something physical and want to hear about the channel 2 years before it's obvious.

Steven Bartlett (@steven)

Steven Bartlett co-founded Social Chain in Manchester in 2014, stepped down as co-CEO in 2020 at 27, and has hosted The Diary of a CEO since 2017, per Wikipedia and his own site. He joined Dragons' Den in 2021 as its youngest ever dragon, his company Flightstory includes Flight Fund, and in February 2023 Brave Bison agreed to buy Social Chain for at least £7.7 million, 3 years after he had left, as Tech Funding News reported. The @steven account is the podcast's clip feed, so you get his guests as much as him. Start with How to be GOOD at social media, and follow him if you want the European founder-investor view without a 2-hour commute.

Grace Beverley (@gracebeverley)

Grace Beverley launched TALA, an activewear brand, in 2019 while she was still studying music at Oxford, and later founded Shreddy and The Productivity Method, per Wikipedia. TALA raised £4.2 million in a round co-led by Active Partners and Venrex, reported in February 2022, with Rapha's Simon Mottram among the angels, according to TheIndustry.fashion. What makes her account useful is how much of the process she films herself, like the video where she shows a TALA overcoat and explains why coats look great online and then go limp when they arrive, or the things she'd have done from the start. Follow her if you're building a consumer brand in Europe and want to see what the founder's week looks like.

Simon Squibb (@simonsquibb)

Simon Squibb left home at 15, was homeless for about 8 weeks, and started his first business by offering to clean up a garden for £200 a month, as he tells it in a Vestd interview updated in December 2024. He moved to Hong Kong at 23, built the creative agency Fluid over 15 years, and PwC bought it on February 1st, 2016. In 2023 he founded HelpBnk, a free community for founders that began with a disused London staircase where people pitch their dream into a doorbell camera, per CO/AI, and his book, What's Your Dream?, came out with Penguin on January 16th, 2025. Start with the video where he tells you to pitch at the doorbell of dreams, because the format is the pitch, the reaction and the decision in under a minute, and follow him if you have an idea and no idea how to say it out loud.

Daniel Priestley (@daniel_priestley)

Daniel Priestley co-founded Dent Global in 2010 with Glen Carlson and Mike Reid, and the company says more than 5,500 business owners have been through its accelerators, which run out of the UK, Australia and Canada. He also co-founded ScoreApp with Steven Oddy, which its own site says has generated more than 10 million leads across 187 countries. His videos are his book Key Person of Influence in 60-second pieces, so start with the 3 buckets people put you in the moment you introduce yourself (newbie, worker bee or Key Person of Influence). Follow him if you sell expertise and keep losing deals to people who know less than you.

Leila Hormozi (@leilahormozi)

Leila Hormozi co-founded Gym Launch, Prestige Labs and ALAN with Alex Hormozi, and in 2021 a private equity sponsor bought the first 2 for $46.2 million, per the Acquisition.com bio, which also says the portfolio grew to over $250 million in annual revenue in 4 years. Alex is the famous half, and I put him on the business influencers page, which is exactly why she's here instead. Her feed is about running the company rather than selling to it, so start with her video on which jobs AI will replace, then the one where she says your main job as an owner is putting out the biggest fire that week. Follow her if you've got 10 or more people on payroll and the hard problem is now them rather than the product.

Nick Huber (@sweatystartup)

Nick Huber founded Storage Squad, a student storage company, at Cornell with his partner Dan Hagberg, grew it to 25 college towns and sold it in January 2021 for seven figures, per his own about page, which also lists 42 self storage facilities and over 1 million square feet as of December 31st, 2021. He's the clearest voice on this list for the business nobody films a Lamborghini in front of. His pinned video says to start by making $5,000 a month in profit before you think about anything bigger, and that one sentence is most of his philosophy. Follow him if you'd rather own a cleaning company than pitch a deck.

Chris Donnelly (@donnellycss)

Chris Donnelly started Verb, a luxury digital agency, at 21 with £400, built it to clients like Bugatti and LVMH, and sold it to private equity for eight figures in 2021, per his profile. The same year he co-founded Lottie with his brother Will, a London care marketplace that raised a $21 million Series A led by Accel in October 2023, for $31 million raised in total, as Tech.eu reported. His biggest series is Most Toxic Companies, where he reads a message from a bad boss and reacts as someone who has managed a team himself, and the one to start with is about a boss who refuses to listen to an employee asking for help, posted on September 29th, 2024. Follow him if you manage people and want to see your mistakes from the employee's side before someone makes the video about you.

Erica Wenger (@ericawenger)

Erica Wenger is a 3-time founder who worked at Worklife Ventures before she started Park Rangers Capital in 2023, and Fortune's Term Sheet profiled her on November 14th, 2025: her first fund closed at $4.3 million from 130 LPs, it writes $100,000 to $200,000 checks, and the portfolio she's known for includes Clay and Beehiiv. The thesis is elephants over unicorns, which means companies built to last rather than priced to impress. She is the one working VC on this page who posts like a creator, so start with what most people don't realize about venture capital, then her cold-email video, where the 3 things she looks for are brevity, a proof point of credibility and a clean online profile. Follow her before your first raise, because she tells you what the person on the other side of the call is actually scoring.

Which business TikTok creators explain venture capital and fundraising?

The honest answer is that very few VCs post well on TikTok, which Wenger says in one of her own videos, so the list is short. Wenger is the one to start with, because she is writing checks right now and explains the pre-seed round from the investor's chair, Simon Squibb is the angel side (the CO/AI report from June 2025 puts his investment in start-ups at over £300,000), and Steven Bartlett covers the Dragons' Den version, where you watch the pitch and the decision in the same clip. Codie Sanchez is the other route, because her Contrarian Thinking Capital is a venture firm and most of her videos are about buying a business instead of raising for one. So the best TikTok accounts for entrepreneurs who are raising this year are Wenger first, then Squibb and Bartlett for the pitch itself, and Sanchez if you want to skip the raise and buy.

If you want the long version, my best YouTube channels for entrepreneurs page has the investor-hosted shows, and the growth marketing experts list covers the people who write instead of film.

How to tell which business TikTok accounts know what they're talking about

The hustle accounts are easy to spot once you watch the last 5 seconds, because if every video ends at a sales page, the content is an ad for the course. Several people on this list sell things too, since Sanchez, Priestley and Beverley all have paid programs, and I kept them because the business came first and the program came after. The order matters more than the price.

Second, look for the miss. Squibb opens with 8 weeks of homelessness, Bartlett left the company he founded 3 years before it sold for £7.7 million, and Wenger says out loud that very few VCs are on TikTok at all. People who have run something have a bad year in the story somewhere, and the ones worth following tell you about it.

Third, stop reading the follower count as proof, because the algorithm now decides reach video by video (here's why follower counts stopped deciding reach) and a good hook is a separate skill from running a company. The same test works on LinkedIn, where I wrote up what actually works in organic posts.

So the next time the For You page hands you 6 people shouting about offers, ask the payroll question at each one. Most of them fail it in the first 5 seconds, which is fine, because the 10 people above don't.

Hear how VCs got their companies to the next stage

If you want the investor view on how a company actually got from one stage to the next, that's what my show Sell That S*it! is built for. Every season-one guest is a VC, and season one is filming now, so there are no episodes out yet. Until it lands, Erica Wenger's feed is the closest thing in 60-second form, and the newsletter box at the bottom of this page tells you when the first episode drops.

FAQs about business TikTok accounts

What are the best business TikTok accounts to follow in 2026? Codie Sanchez (@realcodiesanchez) and Nick Huber (@sweatystartup) for buying and running boring businesses, Leila Hormozi (@leilahormozi) and Chris Donnelly (@donnellycss) for managing people, and Erica Wenger (@ericawenger) for fundraising. Add Steven Bartlett, Grace Beverley, Simon Squibb and Daniel Priestley for the UK view.

Which TikTok creators explain marketing for startups? Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee) built VaynerMedia and is early on channels like live shopping, Daniel Priestley (@daniel_priestley) built ScoreApp and explains how to stop being the cheapest expert in the room, and Grace Beverley (@gracebeverley) shows the launch process from inside TALA. All 3 built the thing they talk about.

Which creators explain venture capital and fundraising in short videos that a non-finance founder can follow? Erica Wenger (@ericawenger) is the one working VC on this list, and her videos cover cold emails, pre-seed checks and what investors score on a first call. Simon Squibb (@simonsquibb) shows the angel side by funding pitches on camera, and Steven Bartlett's @steven feed carries the Dragons' Den version.

Which business creators give advice without the hustle-culture fluff? Nick Huber tells you to make $5,000 a month in profit before anything else, Leila Hormozi talks about hiring and firing rather than mindset, and Erica Wenger explains what a $100,000 check actually buys. None of the 3 is filming in front of a car.

There are too many business influencers, so how do I tell which ones know what they're talking about? Ask whether they built or ran the thing before they explained it, then open 1 specific video and check the claim against a source. Then watch the last 5 seconds, because a video that ends at a sales page is an ad for the course.

Who are the best business content creators in Europe? Steven Bartlett (Social Chain, The Diary of a CEO), Grace Beverley (TALA), Simon Squibb (Fluid, HelpBnk) and Chris Donnelly (Verb, Lottie) all built their companies in the UK and post on TikTok, and Daniel Priestley's Dent runs its accelerators from the UK. Between them you get media, consumer brands, angel investing and care tech.

About the author

Part of the stage playbooks: what to do for growth at pre-seed, seed, Series A, Series B and Series C. The glossary →