Ryan Trahan and the Charity Stunt as Business Engine

The last stop was Hawaii. By the time Ryan Trahan and his wife, Haley Pham, got there, their 50 States in 50 Days series had raised $11.5 million for St. Jude, against an opening goal of $1 million that was cleared within two weeks. “I wish I could bake a cake big enough to give each of you watching a slice,” Trahan said, as Tubefilter quoted him. It is a gracious line, and it also describes the business model with some accuracy: one stunt, fifty daily episodes, a very large audience, and a long line of people willing to pay to appear in it.

The mechanics were plain. A donation of $5,000 or more bought an on-air shoutout; $50,000 or more let the donor trigger a “Wheel of Doom” penalty, such as a temporary separation or a phone-free stretch. Tubefilter described the arrangement as DIY influencer marketing open to brands of all sizes. The money went to St. Jude. The attention went wherever the donor’s name was read aloud.

The arc

Trahan left Texas A&M in 2017, where he had been a runner, to do YouTube full time. Shopify’s account says he tested entrepreneurial ideas, including a water-bottle company called Neptune, when his channel had about 30,000 subscribers. The format that made him came later. In 2022 he started a penny in Los Angeles and tried to trade it across the country to MrBeast, raising $1.38 million for Feeding America on a $100,000 goal. Tubefilter counted more than 190 million views, and said he gained two million subscribers in 30 days. MrBeast was both the destination and, with $100,200 in donations, one of the two largest spenders. That is the part of the story that is luck: the biggest creator on the platform was the finish line.

By Shopify’s October 2025 count Trahan had 21.5 million subscribers. The 2025 series was built like a traditional TV show, in Trahan’s words, with a predictable structure each day and episodes of roughly 20 to 40 minutes.

The company

Trahan does have a real one, though it is not his. Joyride Sweets is a plant-based, low-sugar candy brand, and the company says that in 2023 its Tyler partnered with Trahan, who is “a co-owner and Chief Creative Officer.” Guinness names Tyler Merrick as his business partner. Shopify reported that Joyride was one of the top two candy brands sold at Target; that is a secondhand claim, and no sales figures are public. In June 2025 Trahan asked fans to photograph the product and post it with a hashtag, and they supplied 1,733 photos in an hour, a Guinness record. In March 2025 he also opened Candy World, a three-day pop-up on a New York street, powered by Shopify. “I got to open a real-life candy store in one of the most iconic streets in America,” he said. Candy World was a stunt, not an operating retailer.

How much any of this earns him is not on the record. None of the coverage reviewed reports his revenue, Joyride’s sales, or his channel’s ad income. Joyride’s own FAQ mentions “merch drops,” and that is as far as the public detail goes. Note also who wrote the Shopify piece: a company that contributed $100,000 to the St. Jude total, and chose a Wheel of Doom penalty on day 43 according to one tally. It is not a neutral witness.

What it is evidence of

The trend is the charity stunt as an engine for a creator’s whole portfolio: the audience is built by the giving, the sponsors are recruited by the audience, and the equity sits in a product the audience will buy. Nothing in the sources says the St. Jude series sold candy. But the structure, a trusted face with 21 million subscribers co-owning a consumer brand, makes every wholesome upload a distribution asset.

The sponsor side was not uniformly a bargain. Marketing writer Greg Zakowicz reported that Staple Games was the top donor at $815,642 and Lectric eBikes gave $610,000. He cited an unnamed LinkedIn user’s estimate that Staple received about $1.9 million in value, while noting that Staple did not respond to his request for comment. Others fared worse: PieCalendar saw a traffic spike but few extra sales, and said “the ROI is secondary to the actual impact the donation had on the cause.” That is the closest thing to criticism in the coverage reviewed. It questions whether sponsors got their money’s worth, not whether the charity framing was cynical, and we found no reporting that alleges the latter.

The failure case came earlier. During the 2022 penny run, a donor named Paul Dodds became the top giver at $50,000, then, on day 11, pledged another $100,000 on a call with Trahan. MeinMMO reported that days later his name was blurred in donor lists and his social accounts were deleted. The outlet stressed that there was no confirmation of what had happened, and that Trahan had not commented. We cannot say whether the money was real. We can say that a public auction for attention invites exactly this kind of ambiguity.

Trahan is not proof that the path to a company runs through charity. He had a rare subscriber surge and a famous finish line, and the commercial return is mostly undisclosed. He is evidence of something narrower: that a creator can now build the sponsor deck, the stunt and the product into one loop, and that the loop is, so far, documented only by the people inside it.