Hello

My Story

A majority of my childhood was spent in nature building forts, fishing, hiking, skiing, biking and experimenting with the natural world. I remember bursting through the screen door on the porch of the little red house and trying to make it down the long stone stairway before it slapped closed. I'd leap off the final step towards the river, kicking up a cloud of dust on the old dirt road with my heart thumping madly in anticipation. Down the treacherous path I'd fly with memorized calculation then jump from rock to rock up and down the center of the river as fast as I could without falling in. The river is my home and remains a huge influence on how I create my art.

I learned to play guitar after winning a free music lesson in 3rd grade and have been writing my own songs ever since. When I was in high school, I started writing my own raps and making music videos for my songs. I made my first couple youtube channels around 2009 as a place to funnel my creative energy. After graduating, I bounced around at a few different colleges studying advertising, marketing and graphic design until landing at Johnson and Wales where I joined the advertising team. I was deeply drawn to branding and the visual aspects of advertising and ended up becoming the videographer and photographer for the ad team. After graduating with a degree in creative advertising, I interned at a small production house in Minneapolis for a while, before landing a job as a camera man at a local news station working overnights. I spent much of my time at the news daydreaming, but also learned a good deal about scene setting through video. It was in a small editing bay before a live broadcast one afternoon that I wrote a bunch of names in a leather notebook. I was trying to come up with my own personal brand name; one that was timeless and true to me. That was when I wrote out the words "Trout and Coffee" for the first time.

I was soon fed up with my $11.50 an hour new job and quit to set off on a road trip across the country where I would produce my own series to air on one of my Youtube channels. I wrote, filmed, acted and posted one video a week while traveling around the United states for 10 weeks in the fall of 2015. This was right around the time I started posting very consistently on Instagram with the hopes of building an audience. The series barely got any views but the trip changed my life and I scratched that never ending itch to create something from my heart and share it with the world.

After returning home, I got a job at a local marinara sauce company where I had worked on and off since high school, and I started putting a lot of energy into photography and instagram in the background. By the spring of 2016, I quit my job at the marinara sauce company and dedicated my life to photography and building an audience on Instagram. I had around 25k followers that spring when I landed my first paid shoot with a backpack company from San Diego. That summer, my instagram account exploded and I was officially able to support myself through my art.

In the fall of 2016, I hired my good friend Mitch and we turned the attic in my parents garage into a creative studio. I stayed dedicated for the next few years, growing my following and producing ads for some of the biggest companies in the world. In 2017, I started the Trout and Coffee youtube channel as a place to document my life story so I would always be able to look back on it. At the time, it was purely a creative outlet from my paid Instagram work which was getting bigger and more stressful by the day. I wanted to make a living from Youtube but it always seemed too far out of reach, and I was already too far along on Instagram that it didn't make sense to switch platforms. In 2018 I was hired to create content for a real estate company and that's when I started making more money than I ever had, and the same time I started buying all my vintage vehicles and my cabin. This was my initial decent from social media, where everything started to slow down so I could focus on real world client work. I still kept my social medias alive, but I had begun to let go of the die hard pursuit of 1 million followers. It was this boom in client work that prompted me hiring two of my good friends to work for me full time, and why I ended up building my first office in the beginning of 2019. That didn't last long though, as shortly after we finished renovating that office, we all went our separate ways, and without the extra help, I had to slow down on client work. The office build, along with the cabin renovations and vintage vehicle maintenance and upgrades drained most of the money I had made from the boom. I had great assets as a result, but I also learned how expensive it was to maintain the life I had built.

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Though I had been posting some stories on the Trout and Coffee Youtube through the years, it was the spring of 2020 that I decided to go all in. I nearly halted all client work, and started putting every drop of my energy into Youtube. I learned first hand how much harder it is to "make it" on Youtube than any other social media, but through relentless dedication and long nights, I was able to pull together enough infant revenue streams to stay afloat. I began sharing the true story of my life and my journey, all the little ins and outs, the ups and downs and made my main focus this: to document my life in the way I want to look back on it when I am old. This meant not giving in to Youtube algorithms or feedback from viewers, but staying true to my original vision and goal through all the noise. It's very challenging, as most people don't realize my stories are real life and are not contrived. My friends are not a "cast," there's no "script" and there's no telling what may happen any given week. Though now that I'm trying a bit more to "play the game" with Youtube, I will never deviate from my original mission. I have yet to watch back much of what I have created over the years, and prefer to stay in the present moment and focus on what's next. One day I will watch it all back, but for now, the story continues.