How One Investor Turned $20K into $80M Just by Reading TikTok Comments (And How You Can Too)

Most people scroll through TikTok comments for entertainment. Chris Camillo, on the other hand, turned it into an $80 million investing strategy.

Without a background in Wall Street finance, Chris pioneered a method he calls “social arbitrage”, essentially spotting cultural shifts in real time before traditional analysts even notice them. His secret weapon? TikTok comments.

Why TikTok Comments Matter for Investing

Wall Street firms spend millions on data feeds, research reports, and predictive models. But Chris realized something most people overlooked:

“We can watch the world unfold in real time simply by reading comments.”

TikTok comments are where consumers express raw, unfiltered emotions about products, trends, and cultural moments.

• When UGG Minis exploded, he saw it first in TikTok comments.
• When Crocs made a comeback, the hype was obvious from thousands of passionate replies.
• When misinformation slowed down Celsius drinks, he knew it before earnings reports confirmed it.

Comments aren’t just noise, they’re early signals of demand shifts that can move billions in market value.

The Problem: Manual Research Takes Thousands of Hours

Chris admitted he spends 4 hours a night, seven days a week, reading TikTok comments. Over nearly a decade, he’s read close to a million of them.

That’s not realistic for the average investor or entrepreneur. Most people don’t have the time (or obsession) to manually sift through endless comment sections to find the next big trend.

The Solution: Automating TikTok Comment Scraping

This is where tools like the Scrape Creators API come in.

Instead of manually clicking through videos, you can programmatically scrape TikTok comments at scale. With our TikTok Comments API, you can:

• Collect comments from any TikTok video automatically.
• Analyze sentiment (positive, negative, neutral) across thousands of comments.
• Spot breakout trends early, before Wall Street catches on.
• Build your own “social arbitrage dashboard” to track hype around products, brands, or niches.

Here’s a simple example request using our API:

https://api.scrapecreators.com/v1/tiktok/video/comments?url=https://www.tiktok.com/@stoolpresidente/video/7540421471189945631

Here's a sample response:

 {
  "alias_comment_deleted": false,
  "comments": [
    {
      "aweme_id": "7540421471189945631",
      "collect_stat": 0,
      "comment_language": "en",
      "create_time": 1755650615,
      "digg_count": 73,
      "reply_comment_total": 2,
      "text": "Finally, a Missouri review",
      "user": {
        "avatar_thumb": {
          "url_list": [
            "https://p19-sign.tiktokcdn-us.com/tos-useast5-avt-0068-tx/daa579307505fa533658a125938484c4~tplv-tiktokx-cropcenter:100:100.jpg?dr=9640&refresh_token=f500cc85&x-expires=1755802800&x-signature=UzIbznAofxqu67Wlq9NGbW%2F%2BeFQ%3D&t=4d5b0474&ps=13740610&shp=30310797&shcp=ff37627b&idc=useast8"
          ]
        },
        "nickname": "Raymond",
        "uid": "7418749107548587054",
        "unique_id": "rbowen88"
      }
    },
    {
      "aweme_id": "7540421471189945631",
      "comment_language": "en",
      "create_time": 1755642778,
      "digg_count": 621,
      "reply_comment_total": 7,
      "text": "Dave Casey’s breakfast pizza is amazing that’s crazy",
      "user": {
        "avatar_thumb": {
          "url_list": [
            "https://p16-common-sign-va.tiktokcdn-us.com/tos-maliva-avt-0068/7325600029631053829~tplv-tiktokx-cropcenter:100:100.jpg?dr=9640&refresh_token=0ad41199&x-expires=1755802800&x-signature=DTvy8pHaZVoqtFVbrTmffxIww7s%3D&t=4d5b0474&ps=13740610&shp=30310797&shcp=ff37627b&idc=useast8"
          ]
        },
        "nickname": "Carson Hinn",
        "uid": "6789670671452734469",
        "unique_id": "carsonhinn"
      }
    }
  ],
  "cursor": 20,
  "has_more": 1,
  "status_code": 0,
  "total": 396
}

Real-World Use Cases

1. Retail Investing – Track products trending in comments (like energy drinks, shoes, or tech gadgets) before earnings season.
2. E-commerce – See what customers are raving about, then stock or resell those items.
3. Market Research – Identify pain points in real time by monitoring sentiment around competitors.
4. Social Listening SaaS – Build a tool that analyzes TikTok conversations at scale and sells insights to brands.

Why This Matters Now

Culture shifts faster than ever. Trends that start as a TikTok meme can translate into billions of dollars in sales (and investment opportunities) within weeks.

Chris spent nearly a decade manually decoding this process. With APIs like Scrape Creators, you don’t need to. You can automate the collection of TikTok comments and focus on building insights, or even an entire SaaS platform around them.

Ready to Spot Trends Before Wall Street?

Stop scrolling and start scraping. With the Scrape Creators TikTok Comments API, you can automatically collect and analyze comments at scale, the same raw data Chris used to turn $20K into $80M.

Try it out for free today, no credit card required, first 100 requests are on us.