This piece is the cover story for our second edition of Creator Mag. To read the rest of the magazine, click here.

It’s a beautiful, sunny day in February as I wait near the corner of Bleecker Street and Lafayette, smack-dab in the center of a trendy New York City neighborhood just southeast of Washington Square Park.

This is my first time in NoHo, short for “North of Houston Street.” My mom, who grew up near the city and would take the train in with her friends, gave me a puzzled look when I asked for her thoughts on the area ahead of time. You sure you don’t mean SoHo? she said, referring to the well-known artistic hotbed.

Nevertheless, as I found my way to Bleecker, I passed by some familiar sights. Ronnie Fieg’s Kith, a staple in the New York streetwear community, is mere steps away from my destination. So too is the iconic Japanese label A Bathing Ape, one of the brand’s three stores all within 10 minutes walking of each other.

Between the upscale restaurants and fashion scene, at first glance, NoHo doesn’t seem like the most obvious choice to open a new ice cream shop. Yet none of this is supposed to be obvious. “There’s no textbook on the creator economy,” one of the shop’s co-founders, Tejas Hullur, says. “There’s no, ‘Oh, this is when you should pivot,’ like, ‘this is when you know,’ or anything like that.”

Then again, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who saw this coming in the first place, this being a store concept fueled by millions of diehard fans on TikTok and brought to life by one of the most forward-thinking investors in the game.

In fact, Dylan Lemay, the creator behind it all, struggles to predict where he’ll even be five-to-ten years from now. “Everything changes a lot faster these days,” he says, “especially with the way content creation has changed my life.”

I think I’m at the right address, confirmed when Dylan — rocking transition glasses and bleached blonde hair — approaches the door of an unassuming empty retail space and begins to unlock it.

Though we’ve met over Zoom, I reintroduce myself, and Dylan remarks how I’m the first person to step foot in the store besides him and the other team members. “I actually just picked up my own set of keys so that me and you could go in,” he says enthusiastically.

At the time we’re meeting up, the creator is just getting settled into his new life in New York, moving a week prior from his hometown of Taylor, Michigan — a mid-sized suburb of Detroit — to an apartment he shares with Tejas several blocks away. Save for some lines of blue tape on the floor, the store is pretty empty, as it still has some unpacking of its own to do, too.

For someone with over 11 million followers on TikTok, 3 million subscribers on YouTube, and several hundred thousand followers on Instagram, the 25-year-old creator is pretty low-key. “When I met him, he was at, like, maybe 9 million…some sort of follower count close to there,” Tejas, a creator with nearly 500,000 followers himself, told me in December. “But he just didn’t seem like that type of guy…he was so down to earth, quite the opposite from cocky as you can be.”

Even after hearing this perspective, upon seeing Dylan walk up to the store, I still had to do a double take. Celebrity is a fluid thing, yes, but given the way social media has rapidly changed the lens in which we perceive high profile people, some of those unwritten rules feel like they’ve more or less been etched into American culture with a permanent marker. Isn’t someone like Dylan supposed to be trailed by security guards and black Escalades, ducking paparazzi trying to capture his every single move?

Part of that is timing. When I ask Dylan if anyone’s been stopping him to ask for a picture, he says not really. “To be fair, none of my fans really know I’m in New York yet,” he chimes in.

But part of it is also by design. If you watch his videos, you’ll notice that even as he tosses ice cream to customers and talks about his job, viewers don’t actually get a glimpse of what he looks like. Which “is kind of nice,” according to Dylan.

He tells me a story of how he went to a boxing event in Miami last year, which featured two creators duking it out in the main bout. Influencers flooded South Beach en masse, leading to all sorts of hijinks and wild interactions, yet there was one moment that stood out most to Dylan.

“There was a kid with, like, six-to-eight million [followers] — something a couple less than me — and I remember seeing the girls swarming him and chasing after him,” he says. “I get that I’m not, like, a thirst-trapper, so it probably wouldn’t happen to me anyway. But I just remember thinking I am so thankful that I do not show my face in the videos, because I would never want to feel like that.”

The main counter at the store (renderings courtesy of CATCH’N)

Instead, Dylan focuses his energy on something else entirely: Taking the space in which we were standing and translating it into the best possible experience for both fans and casual customers alike. As he shows me around the store, the vision becomes a little clearer, and his passion for everything he’s building toward starts to shine through.

“I’ll walk through with you as if I’m a customer,” Dylan says, pulling out his phone to show me renderings that their team mocked up. The blue tape, marking where equipment and furniture will be housed, outlines a horseshoe pattern. When patrons first walk in the door, they pass by shelves of various products (such as apparel and other merchandise) before taking a right turn towards the counter.

As they wait to be served, customers will notice a see-through prep kitchen inspired by Krispy Kreme, the chain famous for letting customers watch as they make their doughnuts from scratch. Then, upon walking up and placing an order, the magic starts. Employees will mirror Dylan’s trademark style, smashing different flavors and toppings together on the cold slab while simultaneously flipping the neatly-packed ice cream ball up in the air.

Given social media’s role in turning the store into a reality, once we reach the check-out counter, I ask Dylan if there will be an “Instagrammable spot” anywhere in the store. He smiles before responding. “If you think about that, it’s like a cool backdrop you take your picture in front of. Instead, we’re trying to be forward-thinking…the Instagram age is kinda dying, you know? So what’s the next step? Like, what’s taking place over Instagram?”

The answer is purposefully an obvious one: TikTok. “The whole point of everything we’re doing is making it a ‘TikTokable moment,’” Dylan says. “So, yes, you can take pictures of anything, but we’re gonna make endless videos,” motioning to the cold slab and prep kitchen.

The store’s see-through prep kitchen (Renderings courtesy of CATCH’N)

And, of course, people will want to film the end result, as employees toss finished desserts into the waiting cups of excited customers. The shop, aptly named “CATCH’N Ice Cream,” is centered around this unique experience— along with the handmade, high-quality product they’re selling, of course.

When you hear Dylan lay out his vision, he plays the part of an experienced restaurateur well, confidence oozing out of his soft tone. To get to this moment, though, standing in this physical embodiment of a long-held dream deferred, he first had to accept himself for the job he loved.

Even if his content essentially blew up overnight, his penchant for creating— and, more specifically, ice cream — developed over a long period of time.

“As a kid, you know, you grow up doing these things with your family and you don’t think anything of them,” Dylan told me when we first talked in November. “Like, this is normal. Everyone does this. But then as an adult, you look back and you realize, ‘That’s kind of weird. Why did we eat ice cream every night before bed? Like, it’s kind of unhealthy?’”

He described the dessert as a “focal point” in their lives, hanging out at the living room table together as a family. On top of that, every summer, Dylan’s grandma would make homemade ice cream from an “extremely old recipe.” It’s the same one his great-great-great-grandmother used to use, as the elder matriarch would sell the final product out of her house.

Dylan said he cherished those moments making ice cream and learning how to crochet with his grandma because he always wanted to figure out how things worked. He realized that about himself pretty early on through the various hobbies and creative endeavors he would pursue.

He’d joke around with his friends, who — more often than not — would label him as an artist. “And I would be like, ‘No, I’m just good enough to make you think I’m good at it,’” he told me. “But if you see someone that’s really an artist, they would know I’m bad.”

“And so that’s, like, a good way to see [my career] throughout,” he continued. “I learned how to paint. I did cakes, I did all kinds of random artistic things. But at the end of the day, I never became, like, a master of them. I just dabbled in each one.”

When he was 15, his friend became a manger at their local Cold Stone Creamery. Even though he didn’t work there, Dylan would hang around the store, learning the basics of the job. So when they needed someone to help decorate cakes the following winter, his friend knew who to call.

“…the ice cream part of it was a huge plus — it was something creative,” Dylan said. “That was really important to me because it wasn’t like I was going to work every day. It was like I was practicing a craft, rather than just grinding away at something that I hated.”

By the end of high school, Dylan wasn’t exactly sure what he wanted to do next. His older brother had attended Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Missouri, a 12-hour drive from Taylor. While the school only had an undergraduate population of 200, it was a relatively cheaper option, and it was easy to get in (“I didn’t have good test scores,” Dylan said.)

Plus, there was an additional perk: Springfield had a Cold Stone. “I called them and I was like, ‘Hey, I have two years of experience. I’m looking for a job,’” Dylan recalled. “And the manager at the time, she was like, ‘You just saved my life. My cake decorator just quit two days ago. When can you start?’”

“It’s weird that that kind of made me comfortable deciding on the school because I knew I’d have a job that I enjoyed, which was with ice cream,” Dylan continued. So, with the same position in a different state, Dylan packed his bags and moved to Missouri.

Fast forward four years, and Dylan was facing another big fork in the road.

Upon graduating from college in 2018, the owners of the Springfield Cold Stone asked if he wanted to become a manager. Out of all of the options he had on the table, the decision ended up being pretty simple. “Making ice cream is just fun, and I’m gonna get paid more, so why not?” Dylan said.

He stayed in Missouri, growing into his new role and becoming closer with the franchisees. One summer, a new co-worker came from a different store where they did all sorts of different tricks, including packing the ice cream into a ball and throwing it to their customers. “I had heard of people doing it, but for me, I couldn’t even throw stuff in the trash,” Dylan quipped. “I just wrote it off as something I would never do.”

That was until his friends started getting really good at it. All of a sudden, customers didn’t want him to scoop their dessert unless he threw it to them.

Of course, by now, he’s mastered the skill — his company’s name is CATCH’N Ice Cream, after all. “Once you do it enough, you build muscle memory…it’s the same thing every time,” Dylan said. “So then I really started to practice that on another level, beyond just throwing it in the air. And that’s when I became pretty good at it.”

2020, though, was when Dylan started to realize that the tricks he’d been practicing could entertain an even larger audience. In the early days of the pandemic, outside of work, he had nothing to do. So, like millions of other people around the world, he downloaded TikTok. And just like with crocheting, painting, and cake decorating, he wanted to understand how it worked — in this case, what made videos go viral.

“One day, my screen time for TikTok was 14 hours,” Dylan laughed. “Like, that’s so bad…but I was so enthralled, devouring content over and over, just watching it all day.”

He posted several videos here and there, but once he felt confident that he could “follow the patterns” — making something people “would actually want to watch”— he uploaded his first “real” TikTok on May 4th.

The video wound up clearing 300,000 views in the first day.

Not long after, one post had 1 million views. He made a cake for his younger sister’s graduation and filmed it — that one hit 2 million. Another video reached 8 million views in the first day.

“I was just blown away, like, ‘This is insane,’” Dylan said. “I would respond to every single comment…I started seeing that for a couple hours, everyone watching this one video was from Australia, because they kept telling me how it’s called ‘Cold Rock’ in Australia.”

Dylan had bought a small, bendy tripod after joking around with his sister, claiming he was going to become TikTok famous one day. So when a friend asked for help in learning to cook, he attached his phone to the tripod and tucked it into his shirt, filming instructional videos while keeping both hands available.

It was a lightbulb moment. He improved the technique by wrapping two of the tripod legs around his neck; that way, he could get a perfect POV shot without worrying if his phone would fall.

“Because it was so fresh and organic, no one had seen anyone doing things like I was doing,” Dylan said. “So then all my videos became in that style, and I would rarely film another way. It was like…a secret that I had to guard.”

“And so for a while I wouldn’t explain to anyone how I really did it in my videos, because I was so afraid that someone would steal it from me,” he continued. “Which is weird, because now, I don’t care. I tell everyone.”

Once Dylan got his process down, he could make a TikTok from start to finish — including filming, editing, and voiceover — in 15 minutes. This efficiency allowed him to upload several videos in mere hours (“I think there was one day, I posted either seven, eight, or nine,” he said.) He became known for creating “loops,” a technique where his videos end the same way they began. This leads to repeat viewership, as his fans watch his shorts more than once, trying to spot where the loop takes place.

All of a sudden, Dylan was one of the biggest names on the world’s hottest platform.

Even as brands started to reach out for sponsorship deals, Dylan would politely decline. “Thankfully, my videos have done well enough that I don’t need to,” he said. “It’s also a lot of effort pushing things onto people that may not want them when I’d rather just have them enjoy my content.”

In August 2020, TikTok announced a $200 million “creator fund,” a pool of money which is distributed to users based on stats such as viewership and follower counts. Two-and-a-half-months after signing up for the program, Dylan had made the equivalent of his annual Cold Stone salary, a stretch of time he described as “mind-blowing.”

Not long before he started posting on the platform, the franchise owners in Springfield informed Dylan that they were moving on from the business. They appreciated all of his hard work over the years, inviting him over for dinner and treating him like family. So before listing the store, they offered it to him first.

“For me, I was just very confused,” Dylan said. “At that time, I put a lot of pressure on myself to have an ‘adult job’…but there was a point where I kind of started to feel comfortable, like, ‘Hey, I actually can do this. It’s okay if other people judge me, I enjoy my job. It’s ice cream, it’s okay.’”

Though he often talked with the owners about building a career in the industry, Dylan wasn’t exactly at a place where he could drop over half a million dollars to purchase the store. “I didn’t ever think I was going to have money like that in my lifetime,” he laughed.

They continued to revisit the conversation, but as Dylan’s TikTok grew, he knew he couldn’t continue to work his day job while creating content. So, with the owners’ support, he quit and moved back home to Michigan. “I didn’t have a full plan yet,” Dylan said. “I just knew that if I stayed in Missouri and made videos there, I wouldn’t be quitting my job. They depended on me too much…my friends at work, they still call me [asking for help]!”

The thought of owning his own ice cream store, however, stuck with him. He started working at a nearby Cold Stone, but realized pretty quickly that he didn’t care for the way the owners ran things. Luckily, a franchisee in Florida invited him to film at their store, and Dylan used this as an excuse to fly down and bring some friends along for the ride. He had such a good time there that when he got back to Michigan, he started collaborating with small shops all over the state.

During this period, Cold Stone actually offered him a deal to come on as an official brand ambassador. “It was a really bad deal,” Dylan said. “…they have millions of dollars in marketing money, and they didn’t want to spend it on a great opportunity. So I was like, why don’t I go to the little guy that doesn’t have any money and has no marketing budget at all?”

Pretty soon, he was getting offers to travel to stores all over the country, forming relationships with their owners and learning what made each business tick. At one point, he almost bought a small shop in Michigan before deciding against it. “The owner in Missouri had told me, ‘If I were to restart, I would make my own company,’” Dylan recalled. Therefore, he wanted to wait for the perfect opportunity, one that matched his vision and the potential he was building through his content.

But first, he would need some help. While traveling around the country was a ton of fun, the majority of time outside of when he scooped ice cream was spent alone in his room, editing videos. Most of his daily interaction with other humans was through the comment section on his posts.

That’s when Tejas entered the picture.

“This is, uh, this is a funny story,” Tejas smiles while talking to me over Zoom in December. “Dylan and I had friended each other on TikTok…we DM’d a little bit, but I actually said something that kind of turned him the wrong way. It was something like, ‘Hey, man, I’m really trying to understand the businesses that creators are building,’ and I think he took that as, like, ‘Oh, so you can make a TikTok about me?’”

Time passed, and when June rolled around, Tejas was looking for someone to go with him to the aforementioned boxing event in Miami, reaching out over DMs. Dylan responded and asked if he could bring Milad Mirg along, a fellow creator known for uploading videos of his work at Subway to over 8 million followers.

Dylan and Tejas, pictured in their apartment together in February (Photo by Nathan Graber-Lipperman)

Soon enough, the three of them were hanging out in South Beach, “After that, it was like fireworks,” Tejas said, mentioning that they quickly became friends. “During that trip, Dylan actually told me about his dream to open an ice cream shop.”

Earlier in the year, an early-stage investor named Chris Camillo had reached out to Tejas, expressing how much he liked the creator’s content on TikTok. Chris was beginning to upload more videos himself, commenting on the stock market with his two best friends under the channel name “Dumb Money Live.”

Tejas soon realized that his new fan was more than just another random guy talking up NFTs on YouTube. As the story goes, Chris had famously invested $20,000 in 2007, then — as markets collapsed during the Great Recession — proceeded to produce $2 million in returns over the ensuing three-year period. With the other two-thirds of Dumb Money, Chris wound up turning that $2 million into $21 million.

When looking for trends over the course of the last decade, the investor began to appreciate just how much information could be pulled from the conversations and cultural shifts happening on social media. Working directly with content creators to launch their own ventures became an increasingly attractive proposition, and he told Tejas as much in April.

“If you think about it, who understands a customer or a market better than someone who is creating content around that particular topic every single day, engaging with thousands — if not millions — of theoretical customers around that content, right?” Chris told me over Zoom in March. “I feel like content creators are better suited to understand product-market fit than any venture investor or any kind of traditional founder.”

So, after Tejas hit it off with Dylan just two months later, he texted Chris: I think I found someone you might want to work with. They set up a call, and Chris walked away from the meeting impressed.

From left to right: Tejas, their realtor, Dylan, and Chris meet in New York (Photo via Dylan Lemay on YouTube)

“Just the realest kid I’ve ever met,” Chris answered when asked to describe Dylan. “Everything that he does on TikTok is exactly who he is when you meet him in person. Like, he just wants to bring joy to people. And the thing he knows best is ice cream. So it kind of makes sense for him to continue to use that format, to connect with people and help them and just put a smile on their face.”

The respect was mutual. “Chris has a well-established track record of doing right by people, and that was really important to me,” Dylan said.

With its lead investor in tow, the store now had legs. Things were moving so fast that Dylan and Tejas hadn’t really even defined their roles yet. “I just thought, ‘Man, let’s co-found this,’” Tejas said. “He [Dylan] said, ‘Let’s do it.’”

They spontaneously booked flights and — over the course of two weeks — traveled to locations in New York, Los Angeles, Tampa, and Miami, before winding up back in the Big Apple. Tejas labeled the trip as a “pinnacle moment” of his year, as the now-roommates became even better friends. It also gave him more confidence in his career as a creator, as he ultimately dropped out of college ahead of his senior year at Indiana.

After trekking across the country, Dylan’s audience made the decision easy, with fans overwhelmingly asking him to open the shop in New York. That’s where Chris’ network kicked into high gear.

“Chris grew up in New York, and he knew the best investors in New York,” Tejas said. “He’s very respected. He knows how to negotiate, he knows how to lead. And that is kind of the foundational piece to why we have this super team. Restaurant consultants, designers…we have the number one, like, ice cream manufacturer on our team. It’s crazy, right?”

Nonetheless, that didn’t make finding a location easy. Chris summed up the process in one word: Torturous. “…how hard could it be to find an ice cream shop in New York? Well, as it turns out, incredibly hard, harder than you ever imagined it could possibly be,” the investor laughed.

Dylan’s new team scouting locations in New York (Photo via Dylan Lemay on YouTube)

They looked at “dozens and dozens” of locations. Some didn’t have enough electricity to power all of the refrigerators required for the store. Others needed a bigger basement for storage. After multiple days of searching, they were just about to give up, amplified when they were standing at their dream spot and slowly coming to grips with the fact that it wasn’t going to work out. That’s when a space across the street caught the group’s attention.

“I asked the realtor, ‘How about that place?’” Chris recalled. The landlord didn’t allow startups in the building, but that didn’t stop Chris and the team from falling in love with it. “We begged the landlord, and as it turned out, the landlord’s children were fans of Dylan’s and convinced him — this huge New York real estate family — to make an exception for Dylan.”

NoHo wound up being the perfect spot. Dylan’s goal wasn’t to make the store a tourist trap — he wanted to feel like he was ingrained in a neighborhood itself. One night, Chris went to scout the location, standing out front for an hour as he watched people walk back and forth. He noticed a lot of local foot traffic given Bleecker Street’s proximity to New York University, especially after dinner time. That — along with the nearby streetwear stores — meant young people were always out and about in the area.

“It was like a fairy tale,” the investor concluded. “I’m so happy with how it came together.”

As we leave the store, Dylan locks the door, saying good-bye to the place for the time being. I propose that we turn left on Broadway and take a half-hour-long stroll down to the southern tip of Manhattan for some more photos. Dylan obliges; anyone from the Midwest knows that you don’t get many 50-degree days in February, so you naturally have to take advantage of them when they come around.

We talk about Dylan’s aspirations for the venture. One thing he’s clearly excited about is the endless amount of possibilities for collaboration with athletes, musicians, and other creators. How soon until we see the Logan Paul flavor — one month? I ask jokingly. “I don’t know, maybe we take Prime [Energy Drink] with Logan Paul and make it into a sorbet!” he responds.

In a somewhat more serious tone, he states that his true goal has remained consistent: To “accessorize every part” of his favorite dessert and “create that experience I had when I was a kid.”

“I want to unite people around ice cream,” Dylan says. “Whether it be a birthday party or a sleepover or just friends hanging out, just give them moments that are special. And that thing that brings them together is ice cream.”

Dylan serving imaginary ice cream to the famous Charging Bull statue on Wall Street (Photo by Vicky Woodburn)

The shop is still several months away from opening. As we walk through the city, I tell him I’m curious to know what it’s like to finally be here, in New York, his dream so close that it’s within his grasp.

“It’s just a really mean tease,” he says. “It’s like this dangly thing right in front of my face, and I’m almost there, but I can’t have it yet. I know it’s gonna be a lot of work when the shop is open, but right now it’s, like, I’m working so hard, but I’m not seeing that yet because it’s not tangible. But this is the closest I’ve been so far.”

When people ask what he does for a living, Dylan tries not to put a label on his job, though he tends to gravitate towards “content creator” over “ice cream influencer (that latter takes “two dynamics that don’t make sense together and tries to mush them into one,” he explains). Sometimes, he just tells them that he shoots videos about the dessert online, which “usually gets the conversation going, because people wanna know how you move to New York City when you just make ice cream.”

Given how quickly social media is evolving, it’s understandable that for most people, the discourse around what constitutes work is still catching up to the modern landscape. “I saw a TikTok the other day that said, ‘I quit my nine-to-five, and now I work 24/7,’” Dylan chuckles. “Nowadays, it’s like, I’m always on call in a way, and there’s always something I could be doing.”

Nevertheless, as they begin to dip their toes in the business world, more and more creators are flourishing as multi-hyphenates. So why box themselves in, limiting the full potential of their brands?

Chris agrees. “In the past, we would have business-minded entrepreneurs that would hire creative people to help them with their vision,” he said. “And I think going forward, we will see a lot more creative-minded people hiring business-minded people like myself to help them launch their ventures. So it’s kind of flipped.”

However, creators need to play the long game if they truly want to get to a point where starting a company is realistic. Tejas and Dylan both cited their communities as vital cogs. Referring to his explosive audience growth, Dylan says, “It can be very overwhelming because you talk to your friends, you talk to your family, and they just don’t quite know what to say, right? But then once you start to meet other people that are in the same boat as you…there’s just a different level of, like, connectedness that you get through that.”

He continues. “I was in a group message with [other] creators, and one day, somebody said how the information we’re sharing is worth, like, millions. And I said, ‘If you think about how much we save each other from quitting, this group chat is worth hundreds of millions because we’re keeping each other in the game every day.’”

Soon enough, Dylan’s own business will be achieving that next step, as he brings on employees for the first time. He’ll be acting partly as an owner, but also as a marketer, continuing to upload content that promotes the store. He’ll also be providing his new hires with resources to help them grow into their roles — and maybe even become creators themselves.

There have been plenty of hurdles to get to this point, and Dylan knows that there will be plenty more in his future. But that’s not a reason to not take risks. “A lot of creators get hung up on everything performing amazing all the time…you have to remember that at the beginning, you were guaranteed no views, nothing!” he says. “And once you kind of humble yourself, then you’re able to actually start over.”

It doesn’t mean that the path forward is always clear, though. Dylan says that he wants to be more vulnerable in his content moving forward, even if he’s not there yet. He’s still navigating what it means to have so many people tuning in whenever he presses publish, telling me that one day, he’ll begin to open up on the lower points of his journey.

10 days after our conversation, though, I noticed that he uploaded a video to his YouTube channel titled “Having 11.1 Million Followers and 3.1M Subscribers.” Narrating over footage from his move to New York, he starts by saying, “I don’t know what all of this is gonna look like, and I could fail. And that makes me scared.”

Dylan pictured at Battery Park in New York (Photo by Vicky Woodburn)

Still, as we walk down Wall Street, Dylan says he’s bullish on the shop’s success. At first, delegating tasks and giving away pieces of the business was “really tough,” but he’s already seeing the results as their 20-person team helps turn his dream into a reality. Additionally, through traveling to different events and ice cream places, he’s been able to connect with his fans in person, realizing how excited they are to be along for the ride.

“Just read the comments,” Tejas says. “Go away from normal metrics like views and all that stuff and truly read what his fans are saying and how invested they are.”

For now, though, he’s still waiting, laying low as he sprints towards the finish line. When asked to describe his story, he says, “Kid takes a part-time job and turns it into a one-point-five-million-dollar business,” before stopping himself. “Well, I guess that’s not what we’re actually evaluated at…that’s how much we raised,” he laughed.

“I was just a kid that made ice cream at an ice cream shop,” Dylan continued. “Like, I had a normal everyday job that at my age looked like I was going nowhere with my life. But I used the internet to completely change it and now people can say the exact opposite of that sentence.”

“So I would just try to encourage little kids to just be creative,” he concluded. “Have fun and lean into things that you like, because the internet gives you ways to do them on a whole new level like you could never imagine.”

In Dylan’s case, it’s taken him this far, to his own little world chock-full of his favorite dessert, a world where — in his words — he’ll be spending every day livin’ the dream and scoopin’ the cream.

Coverage of Creator Mag.2 continues on! To purchase a physical copy of the magazine—as well as a limited-edition “Stormy Ice Cream” Hoodie—check out our shop here.

Livin' The Dream and Tossin' The Cream

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