Every OnlyFans creator has an origin story worth hearing, and thank goodness Kit Barrus made time to tell me hers! Her tale sounds a bit like someone dared an overachieving teenager to sprint into adulthood. She’s been a hard worker from the get-go with a full-time job at the tender age of 16 while squeezing in college classes in whatever cracks of time she could find. She didn’t have a job just for extra money to spend with friends, however. According to Kit, her parents expected her to earn her own way pretty early on. Says Kit, “Even though my family had resources, it was very ‘you’re on your own,’ which was a weird situation to be in.”
When Kit was almost 16, her parents essentially told her “happy birthday,” then informed her that she would need to start supporting herself financially. “My dad is very independence oriented,” says Kit. “So from a very young age, it was, ‘hi, you will have no help from us basically ever.’ At 15 and a half, I had to get my first work permit so that I could go get a little job so I could buy clothes and stuff.” She started pounding the pavement looking for work, and stumbled sideways into an amazing job while still in her teens. Says Kit, “I actually went in to interview for a law firm basically to get interview experience. I thought, there’s no way they’re going to hand a 17 year old a job at a law firm. They called me back an hour after I left the interview. And they said ‘we want you.’”
That job paid well, but it took up most of her time at an age where most teens are spending every spare moment with their friends or prepping for college. “I always knew that I wanted to go to college,” says Kit. “My dad’s side of the family has a lot of master’s degrees hanging out. My mom’s side of the family, well. My grandfather was actually a professor at Pepperdine.” When it came to paying for school, Kit knew she was going to be on her own. “I graduated high school and my grades were okay, but they weren’t great. I had a rough time in high school with my parents, and balancing a work schedule.” Not taking on debt was also a family value that Kit was taught from a young age, so she had to get creative. She managed to squeeze college courses around her full-time job, but it meant that she kept a pretty grueling schedule for the 5 years she had that job. “I went to community college early in the morning and at night. So I had a 7am class before work and a 7pm class after work. And I did that for five years. And then I sprinkled in like an online class or two. I did a lot of crying back then,” says Kit. Given how little time she had left after work and class for silly things like sleeping, I’d have cried a lot too.
Eventually, Kit realized that she wanted the college experience she was missing out on. Says Kit, “When COVID ended, I was really feeling in my heart that I was missing a college experience, and that I was having a really tough time. I didn’t really get to be a kid at all. I didn’t get to do anything. And I really want to do this.” Kit was studying psychology, and had to keep working to avoid totally depleting her savings while in school. She got certified as a personal trainer, but learned pretty quickly that the income was nowhere near what she earned while full-time with the law firm. She knew she was going to have to figure something out soon, but didn’t know what.
Her TikTok followers, however, had an idea. “I was hemorrhaging savings and I had a really small TikTok following. And they were like, ‘you should start an OnlyFans.’” Kit took the chance of a lifetime, banking on the support of her TikTok followers, and boy howdy did it pay off. Kit told her followers “all right, if I do this, you guys cannot embarrass me. You have to show up for me. You got to show up for me.” And show up, they did. To say that she did well is an understatement. Says Kit, “I made like 10 grand my first month. It was crazy.”
She was able to not only start paying school expenses with her OnlyFans income, she was doing well enough to be able to defer graduation and add a math major. “I’d already (8:29) applied to graduate,” said Kit. “I was set to graduate at the end of that semester. So I like revoked my application to graduate, and I signed up for the math major.” Some women drop out of school to be influencers, and here Kit decided to take the time to double down on calculus because she just wanted to. “I knew I was good at math because I took intro to stats, and I took a six unit course where it was like combined trigonometry and pre-calculus,” said Kit. “I took that class and I got an A plus, and I took intro to stats and I did the whole thing without a graphing calculator.” Yes. She’s just that good. Kit took those courses prior to OnlyFans being a part of her life, and got sky-high grades without a graphing calculator because she couldn’t afford one.
Did OnlyFans help Kit pay for college? Yes. But did what she learned in college help Kit dominate on OnlyFans? Also yes. “I find the psychology very pertinent, actually, particularly in the marketing aspect,” says Kit. “When I’m making Instagram reels, I’m trying to get people interested in what I’m saying.” And she does, but she does it by playing on the human brain’s need to be right. “I call it comment farming. When I’m talking to my friends, they’re like, ‘oh! This mistake was left in the video,’ and that’s comment farming. Everyone’s going to tell me that mistake was left in the video,” says Kit. “‘You misspelled a word.’ ‘You said this wrong.’ Yes. Exactly. You get a little entertainment for free, but I want it to sit in the back of your head.”
Beyond knowing what gets scrollers to turn into committed subscribers, Kit also made it known that the math degree isn’t just fancy wall decor. “I find the math comes into play when I’m looking at the statistics of different things,” said Kit. “So I’m trying to find out when a piece of content does really, really well, what does that mean for my page? Because I’ve had content do very well, but it means nothing for my page. I like being able to cross analyze these statistics, figure out the sources that people are actually coming from.”
Want an example of her math prowess in action? Once upon a time, purely for funsies, Kit took the data from her OnlyFans and social pages and built out a spreadsheet that tells her how to best run her business. “I don’t do that anymore, but I did it for fun at one point. It was interesting because I was trying to figure out the optimal time if I could only post one time a day on Instagram, when would be— for me— to get the most bang for my buck. If I can only post one time a day. What time am I posting?” said Kit. And she was onto something, because it worked. “It was when I was [studying abroad] in Australia, and it wanted me to post at like 10 or 11 in the morning Australia time. I did that for a few months, just did one post a day. I think I grew by like 100K followers in the next six months to eight months.”
Kit is nothing if not intentional. Every decision that she makes for her business is strategic, including the way she cares about her subscribers beyond their renewal charge every month. Kit pays attention to what her subscribers tell her, and uses the information to inform her business decisions, which has helped her avoid financial pitfalls that snare a lot of other OnlyFans creators. Says Kit, “A lot of people have been seeing their page traffic suffer because of the government shutdown. A lot of people who subscribe are blue collar workers, and when the government shut down, a lot of these people aren’t getting paid. So they’re obviously not on OnlyFans pages.” OnlyFans is Kit’s primary source of income, so she had to figure something out. “I made a big adjustment to how I run the page. I keep track of it if someone tells me what their job is. So anyone who’s blue collar, anyone who’s working for the government and we know about it… when I sent out pay-per-view content to them, it’s going out cheaper.” Yes. You read that correctly, Kit lowered her rates during the shut down to cater to her subscribers who were affected by the extended time without a paycheck.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that the US government just experienced the longest shut-down in our history. Federal workers and people who work for programs that are paid for with federal grants went without pay for… way too long. Because of Kit’s awareness of her customer base, she pivoted and adjusted her prices accordingly during the shutdown while much of her fan base was furloughed. Said Kit, “I’m not asking these people for the amount that I normally would, because I saw what was coming and I thought, okay. I can either hemorrhage all these subscribers, or I can adjust and use all the data that I’ve collected on these people.” You might think that most of her subscribers would have bounced during a time of so much financial stress, but Kit’s page saw the opposite result. “I think we’re about to have the best month I’ve had on the page. Despite the government shutdown, despite the market, despite everything,” said Kit. Making her OnlyFans financially accessible to the large percentage of her audience that was affected during the shutdown caused her subscriber loyalty to skyrocket, putting her on track to have her best financial month yet.
Kit makes a point of connecting personally with her customer base so that she knows what they need and want from the content they pay for, and what their budget is for said content. Why is that such a big deal? “When somebody just wants porn, they go to Pornhub. But when they’re wanting connection, wanting a sense of intimacy, wanting to feel seen and cared for… they go to OnlyFans. They’re not going to find that [connection] on Pornhub, or anywhere else but OnlyFans,” said Kit.
Watching Kit’s star rise has already been an amazing ride, and it’s still moving up in the sky. From hardworking teen to being an overbooked psych major, to being a math whiz in Australia, to using those numbers to turn her into one of the most brilliant strategists on OnlyFans. She may have stumbled into her first full-time job, but she graphed her way to success on OnlyFans with intention. And to close with her own words, “Loyalty is really important to me. I try to treat it like the business that it is. So if I take care of the customer, of the consumer… if we honor the customer, the consumer, then they’ll keep coming back.”