Treehouse: 30 Million Subscribers, Bankruptcy at 21
I started in my living room. Just me, a camera, and six seconds to make someone laugh. That's all it took—
six seconds.
I was eighteen, still figuring out homework between uploads, still trying to balance chemistry labs with content calendars, and suddenly the numbers started climbing. A thousand. Ten thousand. A hundred thousand. It became this thing I couldn't quite explain to my teachers or my parents. "What do you mean you're famous on the internet?" they'd ask, like I'd just told them I was moving to Mars.
But I kept going. Cleared out a corner of my bedroom, set up better lighting—those ring lights that make you look like you're glowing from within. Learned the angles that made my face look more symmetrical, figured out timing, that split-second before the punchline where you can feel the tension building in your chest. The followers kept coming—Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, all of it bleeding into one continuous stream of notifications that never stopped, not even at three in the morning. Over thirty million of you now. Thirty million. I still can't wrap my head around that number. It's more people than live in most countries. It's a stadium that would stretch beyond the horizon.
My biology—my profile, my public information—it says I live somewhere that I probably don't. And that's intentional. That's because of personal safety, which I've gotten pretty good about over the years. You learn quickly when strangers start showing up at addresses they think are yours, when packages arrive that you never ordered, when someone recognizes your house from a reflection in your sunglasses in a video you posted three years ago. So yeah, I'm careful. I've learned to be.
But here's what I want you to understand: I don't live in high society. I'm not attending galas or rubbing elbows with old money in penthouses overlooking the city. I'm also not poor—I'm incredibly fortunate, and I know that. But I'm not rich either, not in the way people assume when they see the subscriber count. I'm somewhere in that upper middle class zone, that strange territory where you're comfortable but not comfortable enough to stop thinking about money. Where you can afford nice things but you're still checking price tags. Where you've upgraded from your childhood bedroom but you're not buying property in the Hollywood Hills.
I live in a normal house. A nice house, sure—nicer than the one I grew up in—but normal. There's a mortgage. There are neighbors who mow their lawns on Saturday mornings. There's a grocery store ten minutes away where I still do my own shopping, hood up, headphones in, trying not to be recognized in the cereal aisle. This is the reality that doesn't make it into the videos, the reality that exists in the spaces between uploads.
The thing about building an audience when you're eighteen is that you're learning everything in real-time, in public, with millions of people watching. I learned how to edit videos by editing videos. I learned what made people laugh by watching what made them laugh. I learned how to read analytics, how to optimize thumbnails, how to ride trends before they peaked and jump off before they crashed. I became fluent in the language of virality—that strange alchemy of timing and relatability and luck that turns a random Tuesday upload into something that gets shared across continents.
But here's what I didn't learn: ask me about taxes. Seriously, ask me about quarterly estimated payments, about write-offs and deductions, about what counts as a business expense when your business is yourself. Ask me about contracts, about what I'm actually signing when labels slide papers across tables in meetings that feel more like auditions than negotiations. Ask me about the fine print, about exclusivity clauses and revenue splits and what happens when you sign away rights to content you haven't even created yet.
Ask me about investing. About where money should go when it comes in faster than you ever imagined but you have no idea if it'll still be coming in five years from now. About stocks and bonds and index funds and retirement accounts—retirement, at twenty-something, when retirement feels like a concept from another lifetime. Ask me about building something that lasts beyond a viral moment, beyond a trend, beyond whatever version of me you all fell in love with when I was just a kid making videos between algebra homework.
Ask me about health insurance. About what happens when you age out of your parents' plan and suddenly you're responsible for finding your own coverage, for understanding deductibles and copays and out-of-pocket maximums. About dental work and vision care and all the mundane, essential things that keep a human body functioning that nobody talks about when they're talking about influencer success stories.
Ask me about relationships—real ones, not parasocial ones. About how to maintain friendships when your job is to be perpetually online and their jobs require them to be offline. About dating when every person you meet has already formed an opinion about you based on a curated highlight reel of your personality. About family dynamics when you're suddenly making more money than your parents and nobody quite knows how to talk about it.
Ask me about mental health. About what it does to your brain to wake up every morning and check how many people loved you yesterday, quantified in likes and comments and shares. About the anxiety that comes with silence, with a post that doesn't perform, with the constant nagging fear that you've already peaked and it's all downhill from here. About the pressure to be "on" all the time, to be the person people subscribed for, even when you're tired or sad or just want to be boring for a day.
I got really good at one thing: making you watch. Making you laugh. Making you share. Making you feel something in the scroll, in that endless feed of content that blurs together until something—my something—makes you stop. I learned how to package myself into digestible moments, how to be authentic enough to be relatable but polished enough to be aspirational. I learned the rhythm of the internet, the pulse of what people want before they know they want it.
But there's this whole world of knowledge I skipped over while I was chasing the next million. Business. Strategy. Longevity. The stuff they don't teach you when you're learning everything from a smartphone screen, when your education is coming from YouTube tutorials and Reddit threads and trial and error with an audience of millions watching you figure it out.
I missed out on college—not because I couldn't go, but because the opportunities were coming too fast to pause. I missed out on internships, on mentors, on that structured environment where you're allowed to fail privately and learn from people who've already made the mistakes you're about to make. I missed out on building a network of peers who are growing alongside you, who understand the industry you're in because they're in it too.
Instead, I built something else. Something unprecedented, maybe. Something powerful, definitely. But also something fragile, something dependent on algorithms I don't control and platforms I don't own and an audience whose attention is the most valuable and most volatile currency in the world.
I'm not complaining—I want to be clear about that. I'm grateful every single day for this life, for the opportunities, for the fact that I get to create for a living, that I've built something from nothing in my living room. But gratitude and uncertainty can coexist. Success and confusion can sit side by side.
So I have to ask—could you teach me? Because I'm starting to realize that knowing how to go viral and knowing how to build a life might be two completely different things. I'm starting to understand that the skills that got me here might not be the skills that keep me here, that sustain me, that help me evolve into whatever comes next.
Could you teach me about the things they don't make viral videos about? About stability and planning and building something that doesn't depend on whether the algorithm favors me this week? About transitioning from being a personality to being a person with multiple dimensions, multiple revenue streams, multiple identities beyond the one you know?
I'm asking because I don't have the answers. I'm asking because thirty million followers doesn't mean thirty million mentors, doesn't mean wisdom, doesn't mean I've figured anything out beyond how to make you click. I'm asking because I'm still that eighteen-year-old in his living room in a lot of ways, still figuring it out, still learning.
And maybe that's the most honest thing I can say: I don't know what I don't know. But I'm ready to learn.