Ryan Trahan

Ryan Trahan (born October 7, 1998) is an American YouTuber, vlogger, and entrepreneur. He is best known for his "penny series”, which he has done several times since 2017. Trahan has founded multiple businesses, including Neptune Bottle, clothing line Howdy Howdy and candy company Joyride.

Personal life
Trahan was born on October 7, 1998 in Sugar Land, Texas, later attending Rice High School in the town of Altair. While in high school and later attending Texas A&M University, Trahan was a cross country runner, placing third in the Aggieland Open competition in 2017.

Trahan started a water bottle brand in 2016 with his friend Caden Wiese, named Neptune Bottle. Trahan eventually left A&M after the National Collegiate Athletic Association ruled him ineligible due to using his channel to share running videos while advertising his company as a student athlete. Although Trahan sought a waiver with the association allowing him to continue running his business while remaining an athlete, he dropped out of university to continue working on the business and his YouTube channel. According to Trahan, in the first year of its existence, Neptune Bottle had earned over $50,000 in revenue.

Trahan married YouTuber Haley Pham in 2020. In 2023, he started a clothing line, Howdy Howdy. In 2024, he joined a candy company, Joyride Sweets as Co-Owner and Chief Creative Officer.

YouTube career
Trahan started his YouTube channel on January 21, 2012. Originally producing content on running, Trahan now creates eclectic content, ranging from Tesla races to outdoor camping. Trahan reached 1,000,000 subscribers on January 29, 2019, 10,000,000 on July 4, 2022, and as of April 2024, Trahan's YouTube channel reached 15.5 million subscribers and gained a total of over 3.1 billion video views. Trahan has compiled over 16.8 million subscribers throughout all Youtube channels he manages.

Trahan was the winner of the "First Person" category at the 2023 13th Streamy Awards; he also participated in a "creator roundtable" before the ceremony, and presented a portion of the event.

Penny challenges
Originally inspired by Gary Vaynerchuk, Trahan started a month long series, dubbed the "Penny Challenge", in June 2022. The premise of the challenge was, starting in California with a single penny, to travel to MrBeast in North Carolina and deliver the original penny, using only funds derived from said penny. Trahan originally set a target to fundraise $100,000 for the nonprofit Feeding America, which he was able to fulfill, raising $1.38 million by the end of the month.

Trahan financed the challenge through completing online surveys, mowing lawns, dog walking and selling items such as soft drinks, bottled water, and golf balls, among other methods. To help garner funds for Feeding America, Trahan created incentives for donations, in particular "THE GREAT RESET", where a $50,000 donation to the fundraiser would reset his earned funds to a penny. In addition to this, for $100,000 donations (of which he received three), Trahan had donator-chosen designs tattooed on himself. The series was largely sponsored by PayPal Honey.

Premiering on July 1, 2023, the Penny Challenge returned with a new route from Paris to New York City. The challenge retained its original rules, aiming to raise $250,000 for the nonprofit organization Water.org. With the support of the public, Trahan raised over $400,000 for Water.org.