Ryan Trahan has masterminded plenty of epic stunts online: traveling the US on the profits made from a single penny, racing across every state in America, all while rallying millions for charity.
But in March 2025, Ryan undertook his biggest challenge to date—one that took place offline. This time, Ryan transformed a busy New York street into a full-scale candy wonderland, called Candy World. The three-day pop-up, powered by Shopify to celebrate his better-for-you candy brand JOYRIDE, was a spectacle. It was also a confirmation that Ryan’s mix of ambition and sincerity could electrify a real-world crowd just as powerfully as his millions of YouTube viewers.
Ryan describes it as “one of the most surreal moments” of his career. For a creator whose reputation was built online, stepping into an IRL space where people could walk through a candy world of his own design was unforgettable. “I got to open a real-life candy store in one of the most iconic streets in America,” he says. “The Shopify team did an incredible job executing the vision I had for it and made Candy World come to life.”
The collision of content and commerce gave Ryan the tools he needed to take what normally lives on YouTube and turn it into an immersive brand experience his fans could share in person, giving him the chance to look them in the eye and experience firsthand the magic of what makes it all click.
Ryan has a knack for pulling off supersized endeavors. His projects are massive, sometimes ridiculous, and always ambitious. But what makes them legendary is something bigger than scale. It’s the way Ryan wraps every challenge in humour, kindness, and an almost disarming sincerity that makes you feel like you’re on the adventure with him.
That’s not an act, according to Michael Ruffolo, manager of creator and influencer partnerships at Shopify. “Ryan is genuinely the nicest guy,” Michael says. “A lot of what’s important to him is finding the heroes in people: seeing what’s special about them and giving them a chance to show it. When viewers watch that happen, they feel like they’re part of the story too. They’re encouraged to put more good into the world.”
That quality—putting people first—has defined Ryan’s path. In 2017, he walked away from life as a Texas A&M student athlete runner to pursue YouTube full time. Initially, his channel had just 30,000 subscribers, and he was already testing his entrepreneurial instincts with Neptune, a water bottle company. Over time, his channel grew from niche running content to viral social experiments, and his strategy shifted from frequent uploads to fewer, bigger challenges.
The payoff has been massive: 21.5 million YouTube subscribers, plus millions more across Instagram and TikTok. Through it all, his principle never wavered: create work that makes people feel good about themselves. “When I upload something, there’s hopefully going to be a lot of people that know it’s going to be good. And it’s going to make their day better,” Ryan tells Shopify.
In 2023, Ryan’s mission to do good couldn’t have been sweeter—or healthier. Setting his sights on adding “full-fledged entrepreneur” to his résumé, he joined forces with JOYRIDE, a plant-based, low-sugar, non-GMO candy, not only to satisfy his sweet tooth but to look (and feel) good while doing it. Spurred on by his desire to indulge while keeping his blood sugar balanced, Ryan often was disappointed with his visits to the candy aisle. He wanted to change that. “JOYRIDE brings childhood wonder back to candy, regardless of your age,” he says.
Now, with JOYRIDE on shelves across America, Ryan is doing what he does best: turning it into a community mission. In 2024, he declared June 15 JOYRIDE Day, calling on fans to clear the candy aisle shelves. And they delivered: by 2025, JOYRIDE was one of the top two candy brands sold at Target. And because no Ryan milestone is complete without an adventure, he celebrated JOYRIDE Day that year by setting a Guinness World Record for the most photos of people holding candy posted to Instagram in one hour.
Ryan is transparent about his intentions. He wants his followers to know their choices matter; that together, they can change candy aisles forever. “I dream of a candy aisle where every brand is competing to make truly great candy without taking shortcuts on cheap junk ingredients,” he says. “As of today, there are thousands of kids around the world who will grow up enjoying JOYRIDE, and will never have to compromise as an adult, or give up the joy of candy.”
But even while scaling a consumer brand, Ryan hasn’t slowed down creatively. His 50 States in 50 Days project, which kicked off in June 2025, stretched his ambition across America. The journey demanded everything of him and his team, creatively, physically, and emotionally. But it also let him realize a lifelong bucket-list dream of traveling across the country while raising funds for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Each day brought a new location, a new story, and another one of the coolest Airbnbs he could find in each state (a non-negotiable rule of the project), with his wife, Haley, by his side.
The pursuit was wholesome, but it wasn’t without its fair share of drama to keep viewers coming back for more. Ryan devised an inclusive donation system where one follow on YouTube or Instagram equaled a 1¢ donation, making sure that anyone who wanted to take part in raising funds had the chance to do so. Bigger gifts, though, meant spins of the Wheel of Doom, a contraption designed to derail his travel plans. On the first night in Texas, a $50,000 donation from MrBeast set the tone: an act of generosity that came with the consequence of having to start late the next morning.
What surprised Ryan most wasn’t the exhaustion or the logistics, but how deeply the series resonated. “I was surprised by the overwhelming amount of families enjoying the series together,” he says. That connection powered the project to its ultimate achievement: surpassing his goal of reaching $1 million in donations for St. Jude. “I was blown away by my small-but-mighty team’s dedication to crafting 50 amazing videos that gave the St. Jude fundraiser an opportunity to reach a staggering $11.5 million,” he says. Shopify proudly stepped up, contributing $100,000 to the incredible final total.
The amount raised is just one mind-boggling example of what Ryan has been able to achieve. Through the sheer amount of views, subscribers, and larger-than-life adventures themselves, Ryan stays focused on the ripple effect: how one person’s mix of ambition, humour, and genuine kindness can inspire millions to laugh, to give, to show up, and to believe in something bigger than themselves. And not just online: Collaborating with Shopify to create his pop-up showed that Ryan could bring that same sincerity offline too, gathering his community to experience the connection that usually lives on screen. Whether he’s reimagining candy aisles or rallying strangers to raise millions for kids who need it most, Ryan proves that the internet doesn’t have to run on spectacle alone. It can also run on sincerity.
