Exactly four years ago today, on October 14, 2022, a burned-out Fortnite YouTuber in Montreal picked up the phone and called his old video editor in Cyprus.
The YouTuber was 18. The editor was 15 and still in high school.
Within three months, the faceless Snapchat shows they launched together did $600,000 in ad revenue in a single month. By spring they ran five of the top 10 shows on the entire platform, with 20 employees and a $50K monthly payroll.
Luc (@NotLucFN) and Daniel Bitton (@DanvslBiz) told the whole story on The Brett Way podcast, and it's one of the wildest founder episodes I've heard. The absurd numbers are the smaller half of it. The February collapse, and what they rebuilt from it, is the half worth your time.
Here's the full episode, and below it, every number I could pull out of the two hours.
Two Kids, One Machine
Luc built an 800,000-subscriber Fortnite channel as a teenager. In August 2020 he pulled 50 million views in a single month. His skill: scripts, hooks, and reading analytics ("if there's one skill I've learned in five years, it's why videos go viral").
Daniel started editing at 12. Call of Duty trickshots, then Fortnite edits, including Luc's videos. At 13 he was getting paid about $300 a video and sitting at his desk from 8am to 10pm. Before Snapchat, the most he had ever made in a month was $1,000.
The split has stayed the same ever since: Luc handles scripts and analytics, Daniel handles editing and thumbnails, and neither of them shows his face.
They met through an agency on Twitter, lost touch for almost two years, then reconnected with that October phone call: "Short-form content is the wave."
Step One Was a YouTube Shorts Channel, Not Snapchat
They didn't start on Snapchat. They started a faceless basketball Shorts channel called Slam Dunk, from zero subscribers.
Luc predicted 100,000 subscribers in two months. They hit it in 42 days, posting one video a day. Six months later: one million subscribers. Their most viral video, a short debunking fake "primitive survival" channels, sits at 80 million views.
Shorts barely paid them, but money was never the point. The channel was a training ground. Every video, they read the retention graph, found the exact second people clicked off, and fixed it in the next one. They even transcribed competitors' scripts line by line into Google Docs and asked why each sentence kept people watching.
Luc's line on this stuck with me: "People love to blame the algorithm. You're just making bad videos. It's literally that."
The OBS Heist That Got Them Onto Snapchat
Snapchat shows were (and still are) gated. You can't just post. You need a publishing portal, or a rep at a media company who has one and takes a cut.
Luc reached out to about 40 people. Every single one ghosted him. A friend who had access was gatekeeping his contact.
Then, on a Discord call, that friend screen-shared his WhatsApp for a moment. Luc hit record on OBS.
Scrubbing the recording frame by frame, he found two frames showing the rep's email address. He sent a cold pitch: I'm a YouTuber, I'll make a show, I'll make it blow up, we all make money.
The rep said yes. The show got approved. (That rep still takes a percentage of everything, by the way. Access has a price.)
You can't copy that exact move, and they say so themselves. What you can copy is the posture. Forty closed doors in, most people quit. These two recorded the keyhole.
$600,000 in the First 30 Days
Snapchat hides your revenue for your first 30 days. You post daily into a black box.
On January 12, 2023, at 2am, the dashboard unlocked. It showed $186,000.
Daniel, 15 years old at the time, FaceTimed Luc screaming, then called his mom: "Mom, I made it, I'm out the trenches." She thought he'd faked the screenshot with inspect element.
The first full month on that one show closed at $600,000. Straight ad revenue, zero costs, no team. Just two teenagers doing everything themselves on the fastest-growing show on the platform.
It worked because supply was capped. There were only about 6,000 shows on all of Snapchat, every approved show was monetized from its first video with no subscriber thresholds, and a three-minute episode paid like an eight-minute YouTube video.
Their competitors posted three times a week, believing daily posting hurt reach. Luc and Daniel posted every single day and broke the myth.
Then February Took Almost All of It Back
Three days after Luc dropped his classes to go all in, views fell off a cliff.
February closed around $70,000 to $100,000, down from $600K the month before. They had one show and no backup plan when the algorithm moved.
Daniel described the whole arc in one sentence: "We went from nothing, to everything, to nothing, to back to everything."
The rebuild is the part worth studying. Instead of praying the one show recovered, they spent March turning a lucky hit into a system:
→ Spun up 8 to 10 shows across news, sports, entertainment, crime, and satisfying content.
→ Hired about 20 people (friends, cousins, kids from the Fortnite community), trained from scratch on long calls. Flat rates: roughly $75 per script, about $100 per edit, $3K to $5K a month for full-timers. Payroll hit $50K a month.
→ Ran 80% of the business through Discord. One task, one person. They QC everything but produce almost nothing themselves.
By the end of March they were back at $500K to $600K a month, this time spread across a portfolio. At peak they ran 15 shows, five of them in Snapchat's top 10, doing 3 million views a day.
Luc called it a monopoly. He wasn't exaggerating by much: their five-person Discord group chat collectively owned 18 of the top 20 shows.
What the Big Numbers Hide
I pulled apart this episode because the headline numbers are gross revenue, and the guests are refreshingly honest about it.
The rep takes his percentage off the top. Then the 50/50 partner split. Then $50K of payroll. "Mid six figures a month" is the machine's revenue, not two teenagers' take-home.
They also torched their own industry's marketing. Luc, verbatim: "Technically we're in the automation business, but dude, it is not automated. We are full hands-on." The Dubai-skyline "passive YouTube automation" course pitch? They refuse to sell courses at all, because results can't be promised.
And the platform risk is real. Snapchat curates everything, allows no brand deals on shows, and won't let you promote your own products. Ad revenue is the entire business. When Brett asked what they'd do starting over with one platform, they both said YouTube, for exactly that reason.
They watched this risk play out on their own dashboard, where ten videos in a row can flop after months of wins. A seasonal business, in their own words.
Where They Are Now (the 2026 Update)
The episode is from mid-2023, so I checked what happened since. This part makes the story better, not worse.
Snapchat eventually did what platforms do. On February 1, 2025 it killed the old gold rush and rolled out a unified, invite-only monetization program: 50,000 followers minimum, 25 posts a month, and 10 million views in 28 days just to qualify. The exact door Luc and Daniel squeezed through no longer exists.
Daniel had already moved. When Snapchat payouts first dipped in 2023, he rebuilt the same faceless playbook on YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and Reels. In 2024, at 17, he co-founded Crayo, an AI short-form video tool that hit $600K a month in revenue within its first year.
Then it went full circle. Brett Malinowski, the host of this very episode, later built Content Rewards, the app I covered when it hit $100K a month in 60 days. Today Daniel Bitton is its CEO. The platform pays 300,000+ creators to post for 200+ brands, including the NFL, ElevenLabs, and Polymarket, moving around $40K in payouts a day.
The kid who couldn't get one Snapchat rep to answer his emails now runs the marketplace where brands buy reach.
What Bootstrapped Founders Should Steal
You're probably not going to start a Snapchat show (and after the 2025 rule change, you mostly can't). Steal the operating system instead.
→ Train in public on a cheap platform first. Slam Dunk taught them retention mechanics for $10 a video before Snapchat paid them $600K for the same skill. Your "Shorts channel" might be a free tool, a newsletter, or 30 days of build-in-public posts.
→ Read the retention graph, not your feelings. Find where users click off, fix that one thing, ship again tomorrow. Works for onboarding flows exactly like it works for videos.
→ One channel printing money is a countdown, not a business. Their February crash is the same lesson every founder with one big client or one SEO keyword learns eventually. The fix was a portfolio plus a team, built in six weeks.
→ Copy, then add. "It's not copying, it's severe inspiration." Transcribe what's winning in your market, figure out why line by line, then out-execute on cadence.
→ Sell a feeling when you productize. Their analysis of Oliver Brocato's $11M Tabs chocolate playbook: nobody is buying chocolate for $30, they're buying what it signals. Ad revenue was their floor; they're climbing toward equity.
→ Hire for trust, train for skill. Friends and cousins at flat rates, trained from zero, beat expensive strangers. And Daniel's hiring rule is a keeper: "I will never ask an employee to do something that I haven't done."
FAQ
What are Snapchat shows?
Snapchat shows are curated, episodic video channels inside Snapchat's Stories ecosystem. Unlike a normal profile, a show needs approval through a publishing portal or an authorized media partner. Once approved, episodes (30 seconds to about 10 minutes) are monetized with ads from the very first video, which is why the format minted so many six-figure teenagers between 2022 and 2024.
How much did Snapchat shows pay?
During the gold rush, Luc and Daniel's average show made $60K to $120K a month, and their best show did $600K in its first 30 days. Payouts came as straight ad revenue via wire transfer. Those were gross numbers: rep commissions, partner splits, and payroll came out before anyone got paid.
Can you still make money with Snapchat shows in 2026?
Not the way this story happened. Since February 1, 2025, Snapchat runs an invite-only monetization program requiring 50,000 followers, 25 posts a month, and about 10 million views in a 28-day window. It still pays real money to established creators, but the "approved today, monetized tonight" window that let two unknown teenagers print $600K is closed.
Do you need to show your face to run a content business like this?
No. Every property in this story is faceless: voiceover shows run by a scriptwriter, a voice artist, an editor, and a thumbnail maker, or clip shows run by one person compiling licensed and repurposed footage. The edge is in scripts, retention analysis, and volume, not personality.
The Playbook Compounds, the Platform Doesn't
Snapchat changed the rules and the gold rush ended. The skill of reading a retention graph didn't, and it's what carried Daniel from a teenager's bedroom in Cyprus to running Crayo and Content Rewards before turning 20.
I interview bootstrapped founders every week about exactly this: building distribution you own instead of renting someone else's algorithm. If that's the game you're playing, the podcast is where I put the full conversations.
