Matt Nelson of WeRateDogs and Thoughts of Dog talks about his start

WeRateDogs and Thoughts of Dog founder brightens millions of followers’ days.

In an interview with Entrepreneur magazine, Matt Nelson, the creator of the Twitter superaccounts WeRateDogs (@Dog_Rates) and Thoughts of Dog (@Dog_Feelings), talked about the process of creating content and keeping things original.

In 2015, Nelson was a college freshman eating at Applebee’s one night with his friends when he snapped a picture of his friend’s dog sitting inside the restaurant, and an online empire of happiness was born from that moment.

Nelson started WeRateDogs from that post, and within the week had to recruit friends to help him sort through all the submissions people were sending him.

“It was a medium I could use for my writing to reach more people,” Nelson told Entrepreneur. “Obviously I couldn’t spend all this time doing what I do if I didn’t love dogs.”

At some later point he also founded the Thoughts of Dog account, which is narrated by a Lab and depicts typical doggy adventures like snuggling with your stuffed elephant and monitoring the Skittle hiding under the fridge.

WeRateDogs has 7.43 million followers on Twitter, and Thoughts of Dog has 1.86 million.

We often retweet the best posts from both accounts on the Dog O’Day Twitter.

Nelson dropped out of school once he realized he was spending full-time hours monitoring the accounts, and monetizes them through merchandise sold through the online brand’s website, originally just stickers, but now everything from shirts, pillows, baseball caps, calendars and coffee mugs.

As Nelson lives with his parents, their dog provides most of the inspiration for the Thoughts of Dog posts.

The brand has grown enough that he employs two assistants, one who focuses on the e-commerce side of things, the other sifts through submissions, narrowing the thousands coming in daily to about 30, which Nelson then selects from to write new captions for.

Both accounts use an Internet dialect called “DoggoLingo,” which misspells common words phonetically, transposes “D” to “B” and types out non-swear words like “heck” with asterisks.

“I saw that people liked the dog’s name coming first, then the caption and the rating at the end — that was the ticket,” Nelson told Entrepreneur. “The formula allows me to keep the captions fresh without being super repetitive.”

The brand has grown enough that it pulls in around five figures per month in revenue, though they have done sponsored partnerships with Disney and Cottonelle toilet paper in the past.

WeRateDogs is also on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat.

For other creators looking to build an audience, Nelson recommends adding a little bit of humor and a little bit of wholesomeness as capable of going a long way with audiences, and caring passionately about your topic enough to insert some of yourself into each post.