Connnor Flannery (‘25), more commonly known as @connorpugs for his viral short-form videos on Instagram, started building an online persona when he was only 12 years old. His earliest YouTube videos, posted over 10 years ago, spanned video game livestreams, “storytime”-style videos and personal commentaries. Most of it was just for fun. However, during his time as a Wake Forest student, his love for content creation evolved into a sustainable path to success.
Today, Flannery’s follower count is in the millions across channels, and his videos generate more than 200 million views per month. Flannery notes that some of his successes were purely random. He also acknowledges that having a mathematics background was pivotal to his growth, helping him to understand metrics like audience demographics, engagement rates and how different styles of posts perform in different contexts.
“It is a data-driven game,” Flannery said about social media. “There is a lot of noise, so you need a bit of intuition, but mostly it comes down to understanding a data set and applying the results to your next round of scripting, editing and posting.”
Most successful content creators earn income by becoming “influencers,” a career that over half of Generation Z aspires to pursue, according to a 2023 survey. Through brand partnerships, influencers advertise a company’s products or services to their online audiences in exchange for payment. While still operating in the world of social media monetization, Flannery’s path looks a little different than the traditional route. Instead of promoting someone else’s goods or services, he helps companies grow their own personalized social media brand by coaching them.
Pugs Media, named in homage to Flannery’s childhood obsession with pugs, is a social media marketing agency that consults with clients looking to create a personal brand online. The company is primarily B2B, meaning it services other businesses like financial advisory groups, real estate companies and even other startups. Flannery and his co-founder, Charlie Phinney (‘25) first hatched the idea in Wake Forest’s Startup Lab and have worked towards their goals ever since. For Flannery, the company is his way of pursuing a sustainable career in social media while still building connections offline.
“There’s some randomness required to maintain virality consistently. It’s not something you can project out for the next 10 years, let alone five years,” Flannery said. “I wanted a job that was more of a traditional business model where I could also build real relationships.”
Pugs Media helps clients with something most businesses struggle with: transforming a founder or executive into the face of the brand. Experts note that storytelling and company messaging are becoming some of the most important yet untapped assets in business. In line with that idea, Pugs Media focuses its efforts on helping companies develop individual authority, credibility and trust online through “organic” social media or content that isn’t paid for by advertisements, for instance.
“We find that people connect with people,” Flannery said. “Nobody really connects with a brand unless it’s a highly reputable one with lots of name recognition. So what we are doing is building personal brands for founders, leaders and executives using organic social media growth.”
The process starts with an initial consultation with the Pugs Media team, including an audit of the client’s current social media usage and industry research to determine a posting strategy. The client commits to one video or content creation session per month; however, the Pugs Media team handles the rest from scriptwriting and research to editing, posting and tracking performance. Pugs Media is not necessarily trying to make their clients attract millions of views, but rather to help them attract the appropriate audience for their industry.
“The goal is not to go viral but reach as many decision makers as possible,” Flannery said. “We’re not going to have them do a TikTok dance or something crazy. At the end of the day, these are professionals, and the whole point is to reach more of their ideal customers online.”
Flannery and Phinney graduated from Wake Forest last year, and the company still has ties to the university. Pugs Media’s earliest clients came directly from the Wake Forest alumni network after hundreds of introduction calls. They have also involved students and alumni in the company through internships and one full-time hire. Director of Startup Lab, Gregory Pool, described Pugs Media as part of a “virtuous cycle” of reinvestment in Wake Forest’s entrepreneurial community.
“One of the things I appreciate about Pugs Media is that they are definitely a Wake Forest-centric organization,” Pool said. “Serving alumni as clients, hiring graduates and investing in other Wake Forest-founded companies are all examples of how they have both given back and paid it forward.”
Pugs Media currently has three full-time employees and 15 clients, but is looking to expand its team to meet surging demand for the service. The future could include a lower-priced “do-it-yourself” version of their service analogous to an online course, Flannery said, although he wants to maintain a hands-on, personalized model for as long as possible.
Unlike most startups that take venture capital in exchange for equity in the company, Pugs Media has remained intentionally bootstrapped. Flannery believes Pugs Media’s agency model allows the company to scale through recurring revenue, instead of investor money. It also gives the founders more certainty that the model works before expanding and hiring full-time employees.
“We’ve taken no money, and we don’t really plan to take any money,” Flannery said. “With a service business, we can prove demand and scale, purely from cash flow, instead of betting on an idea before it’s tested.”
The greatest test will be whether Flannery can train others to replicate his success. Social media consulting is a competitive space with a low barrier to entry, but Pugs Media has carved out defensibility by pairing Flannery’s experience with Phinney’s analytical and operational strengths. Still, scaling a service business presents challenges when the model depends on performance, personality and trust to cut through the noise.
“It’s going to come down to execution,” Pool said. “They know the space is crowded, but they’ve built something that works, and now the question becomes whether they can take their secret sauce, train other people and grow it from there.”
