MrBallen's Media Empire

A story about how John Allen (MrBallen) found viral success on social media after multiple failed attempts, eventually leading to a major media company.

"I was obsessed with social media and content creation. Despite many failures over probably 6 months or maybe a year of awful cringe videos that went nowhere, on a whim I decided to shoot a quick video about the Dyatlov Pass case in my hotel room at a water park in Pennsylvania.

I left my phone in the room for a couple hours while we went to the water park. When I came back, I couldn't even open my phone - there were so many notifications pouring in. It had over 5 million views in just a few hours on my TikTok account that had no following.

I went into this feverish state of constantly telling stories on TikTok - 3 a day for 30 days. We grew to about 7 million subscribers on TikTok, then shifted to YouTube. At that point, I was spending about 26 hours to make one video in the first 6 months on YouTube, doing 3-5 videos a week. I was completely negligent in all duties besides content. My wife is a saint and picked up everything else.

Even though the channel was in the millions, I was so close to giving up. That's when Nick came in through an email saying he was a fellow combat veteran wanting to help. He was working with Mr. Beast at the time. I handed the reins of virtually everything over to Nick and he scaled the company. Now we have over 50 employees, a slate of shows, and I just show up to the studio, tell stories, and leave. We've built to about 25 million fans across platforms, with the podcast doing 8-figure downloads monthly."