My startup hit $200 million ARR. But first I walked away from 2.5 million YouTube subscribers and nearly went bankrupt

Most people see the $200 million ARR. They don’t see the summer in Spain with no air conditioning, a dwindling bank account, and investor rejection emails piling up. They don’t see the moment you realize you might have to tell your co-founders it’s over. That’s the part worth talking about. It was the summer of 2023 and our startup Fanvue was in trouble. Months earlier, we’d suddenly found out that we had way less money in the bank than we thought. To fix it, we’d been reaching out to investors and getting nothing. The email responses still haunt me today: “Thanks Joel, but I’ll pass,” read one. “Out of our scope,” said another. This went on for months. Growth slowed, and then stopped completely. What had been working before just stopped. Every founder has heard this story. Nothing prepares you for when it’s yours. Even when you know, there is this voice in your head saying that all that effort you put in could amount to nothing. I remember we were staying in a villa in Spain. It was the middle of summer — no air conditioning — and we were all sweating as we plotted our outreach. I had a leaderboard up showing how many investors each of us had contacted. The writing was on the wall. And yet, not long before, everything had been working. We’d 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 direct to fans, rather than by advertisers — was sound. All the late nights, the hard work, the endless debate about whether this was a good idea had started to pay off. I Knew What Creators Needed Because I Had Been One The reason I understood creators was that, once upon a time, I was one. At 16, I was making $100,000 playing FIFA on YouTube. At 17, I dropped out of school to make videos full time. My parents thought I was crazy — in my room playing video games all day — until they saw