OG: Approved - Ryan Izquierdo
Featuring the Next Generation of Storytellers Rising from the Creator Economy
Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.
Name: Ryan Izquierdo
Instagram: 220K Followers
Tik Tok: 2.9 Million Followers
Youtube: 1.07 Million Followers
Who Is Ryan Izquierdo?
He’s a Florida man.
Ryan Izquierdo has built a career by turning a personal obsession into a repeatable body of work, and then letting the internet do what it does best: find the people who care.
At the center of everything is fishing, but not as a gimmick or a lifestyle flex. His videos document real days on the water, in Florida and surrounding areas, and they carry the full rhythm of those days. Travel, setup, long stretches where nothing happens, and the sudden moment when everything changes. The camera stays close enough that you feel the waiting, not just the payoff.
What’s easy to miss if you only see a clip or two is that Ryan is running a multi-lane operation. Long-form videos give shape to full outings and adventures. Short clips pull out moments of intensity, surprise, or failure and work as entry points for new viewers. Neither exists on its own. The short work points back to the longer pieces, and the longer pieces give the short clips their weight.
Ryan’s social channels are not built around narration or performance. He doesn’t talk you through every move or frame the day as a show. Much of the storytelling comes from sound, movement, and proximity. Wind hitting the mic. Water slapping the hull. A line tightening unexpectedly. When he speaks, it feels situational rather than presentational, which keeps the work accessible even if you don’t know much about fishing.
That approach has made the content work beyond a niche audience. People who don’t fish still watch because the structure is familiar. You understand pursuit, patience, and payoff even if you’ve never held a rod. Over time, that has helped his audience grow steadily rather than spiking and disappearing.
What ties all of this together is repetition. Ryan does the same thing again and again, in different conditions, and refines the execution over time. He doesn’t chase formats or trends. He shows up, films the day honestly, edits with restraint, and publishes consistently. The growth feels like a byproduct of commitment rather than a strategy.
Seen as a whole, his work isn’t just a collection of fishing clips. It’s a living archive of time spent doing one thing seriously, using social platforms as distribution rather than identity. The audience doesn’t feel like fans of a persona. They feel like people along for the experience.
Three Things We Love About Ryan Izquierdo
He built a whole operation around one obsession: This isn’t a guy dabbling in fishing content. Everything ladders back to being on the water. Long videos, short clips, brand work, travel. It all comes from the same place. That focus is why it holds together and why people stick around.
The short clips don’t cheapen the longer work: A lot of creators flatten their world into highlights. Ryan does the opposite. The quick moments feel like pieces pulled out of real days, not moments engineered just to pop. They make you curious about what came before and what happened after.
Florida isn’t a backdrop, it’s the point: The canals, the heat, the wildlife, the unpredictability. The work feels rooted in a specific place and way of living. You’re not just watching fishing videos, you’re watching someone move through Florida like it’s home.
For the months that I've been reading these dispatches, something has felt like a miss... so far, none of the work featured by these creators has inspired me to dig deeper, follow longer, spend more time. The only explanation I came up with was that maybe it's a generational thing, that this GenXer just doesn't get what the cool kids are up to and, oh well.
But today I read this (yes, long) piece about narrative collapse and the dots are starting to connect... Where, in the creator economy, is "narrative" being made? Are "narrative" and "storytelling" the same thing (if these are, indeed, the "next generation of storytellers")? So much of what I've seen by creators feels more personality-driven than narratively constructed, and maybe that's what audiences are into these days, or at least what's rewarded by algorithms.
Still processing, but would love to read your take if you can spare the time for a long read:
https://www.metropolitanreview.org/p/stop-the-stream
The repetition angle is underrated. Most people think you need constant novelty, but Ryan shows how depth beats breadth. I tried similar with some tech content last year and keeping the same format actually helped retention. What really works here is the waiting, those long stretches where nothing happensare what build trust with the audience, not just the big catch moments.