My startup hit $200 million ARR. But first I walked away from 2.5 million YouTube subscribers and nearly went bankrupt
Most people see $200 million ARR. They don’t see the summer in Spain with no air conditioning, dwindling bank accounts and a backlog of emails rejecting investors. They can’t see the moment when you realize you may have to tell your co-founders that it’s over. This is the part worth mentioning.
It was the summer of 2023, and our startup, Fanvue, was in trouble. Months ago we suddenly learned that we had much less money in the bank than we thought. We’re reaching out to investors to fix this and getting nothing. His email responses still haunt me today: “Thanks Joel, but I’ll pass,” I read one. “Out of our scope,” said another.
This continued for months. Growth slowed and then stopped completely. What worked before has stopped.
Every founder has heard this story. Nothing can prepare you for when it’s yours. Even when you know, there’s a voice in your head that tells you all the effort you’re putting in won’t do any good.
I remember we stayed in a villa in Spain. It was the middle of summer, there was no air conditioning, and we were all sweating as we planned our outreach. I had a leaderboard showing how many investors we each contacted. The writing was on the wall.
But not long ago everything was going well.
We raised $792,000 in October 2020 and $1 million in March 2022, launched the platform in 2022, and Fanvue was growing. Our idea that creators could get paid by selling directly to fans rather than advertisers made sense. The late nights of hard work and endless debates about whether or not this was a good idea were starting to pay off.
I Knew What Creators Needed Because I Was a Creator, Too
The reason I understand the creators is because I was once one of them. When I was 16, I was making $100,000 playing FIFA. YouTube. I left school at 17 to pursue video production full time. My family thought I was crazy sitting in my room playing video games all day until they saw my bank balance.
People sometimes think it’s easy money. It wasn’t. I started when I was 13 and it wasn’t cool at the time. I hated being in front of the camera and had to make thousands of videos before I started making money. I made a thousand videos in a thousand days and then things really took off. At its peak I had 2.5 million subscribers.
Then came the other challenge: having the money, the fame, and having that level of pressure at such an early age. I was so paranoid that one day I would stop so I had to constantly raise the bar, thinking of new shows and challenges to keep people busy.
