Welcome to Millionaires, where we profile creators who have recently crossed the one million follower mark on platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch. There are creators crossing this threshold every week, and each of them has a story to tell about their success. Read previous installments here.

For years, Avalanche wanted to be a pro gamer.

“I was super interested in Call of Duty,” he tells Tubefilter. “That was my scene.”

He followed all the pros. He wanted to be like them. He teamed up with his friends and ground his way through the game’s competitive ranked mode, “trying to get the top ranks and be as close to professional scrim level as possible.”

But now, ten years later, he’s not a pro gamer. Instead, he’s focused on the exact opposite as one of the members of Full Squad Gaming, esports org NRG‘s casual gamer content group.

NRG launched Full Squad Gaming in late 2020 as a way to reach the everyperson who’s out there playing games after a long work day. Avalanche–a former 100 Thieves member–joined with longtime friend Classify (also a former 100 Thieves member; they were both part of the org’s four-man group The Mob) last September. At the same time, industry vet Hung Tran, who did six years of marketing for the NHL’s Philadelphia Flyers before moving into esports with Philadelphia Fusion, Ultimate Media Ventures, Playfly Esports, and Zoned Gaming, joined as Full Squad’s president.

Together with Full Squad’s previous members Nick Dallas and Mikeoofs, Avalanche, Classify, and Tran set out to supercharge the group’s social media presence.

And they succeeded: over the past eight months, they’ve grown Full Squad’s YouTube channel to 1.2 million subscribers and its TikTok account to 4.2 million followers, and have gone from 20 million views per month on YouTube to more than 80 million. Much of that growth came from the group’s “imposter” series, which takes its inspiration from Among Us and in each installment has the guys guessing which of them might be an insidious traitor. That series alone generated 240 million views with 70 short-form videos across YouTube and TikTok.

Lately, they’ve expanded the imposter formula to “celebrity imposter,” where they challenge guests like The Rookie actor Eric Winter (who successfully won a round, btw, despite that being his first time meeting the squad).

So, what’s next?

“We’re still flying high off of [the imposter] trend,” Avalanche says. “I’m very thankful for that. That’s easily my favorite memory with how quickly everything took off. I know the guys are too.”

“We’ve built the short form subscribers on YouTube via short-form content, and we’ve only posted what? Eight videos, long-form videos on YouTube,” Tran says. “Very, very excited about the future and very appreciative of just the subscribers and the audience who’ve supported us along the way.”

Check out our chat with them below.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tubefilter: Nice to meet you both! I’d love to start with some background about Full Squad. How did this whole thing come together?

Avalanche: I feel like Hung, you should start that one off. I’ll dive into the rest of the things, but that’s a Hung question.

Hung Tran: Yes, for sure. Full Squad’s been around for a few years now, and Full Squad is the brother-sister company to NRG, which is under Hard Carry Gaming. NRG is the competitive side. I think a couple of years ago, the team thought there needed to be a casual gaming side as well. The total addressable market for casual gamers is a lot bigger than competitive gaming. That is the foundation of where it started. Fast forward to today, it’s been what? Three-ish years since it started. I joined in August. We brought Avalanche and Classy in September to join Mike and Nick, who were some of the members who’ve been around for a little while.

The core of this group now has only been together really since September, and we got off to a really hot start. September, as soon as these guys joined, we filmed the announcement video and then we headed off to TwitchCon for a Ford activation that lasted about three weeks. It was pretty hot and heavy once we started, but it’s been a wild ride over what? The six or so months since Classy and Ava have joined Mike and Nick.

Tubefilter: Perfect. Yes, I’d love to hear about you joining, Avalanche.

Avalanche: Okay. Hung, the other guy on this call, I’ve known that man for five or six years. I randomly met him at TwitchCon. I’ve been in this space for about over a decade, I’d say 11, 12 years. I’m only 26. I’d like to think I’m still young. I might be getting old, who knows? I’ve been on Twitter online since I was 13, 14 years old. Very interested in gaming, passionate about it. It was the first thing I loved and I’m very passionate about a lot of things, but it was my first true love. I met Hung at TwitchCon, and Classy was with me too. He’s not on this call, but he’s in our group. We immediately, sparks were flying. Conversation was natural. Hung was a great guy. We were just hyped to be there. We were at his booth and we traded information. He gave us some merch for whoever he was working with at the time.

Fast forward to today, Classy and I have been through a lot of stuff in the gaming community. We’ve been through multiple organizations. We worked with MrBeast for a little bit, and then Hung needed two more pieces of talent. As he mentioned, Mike and Nick have been a part of the organization for a little bit, and he needed the second half of this new version of Full Squad to come about and move to California. He knew us already from years prior, and we started having some meetings. We started talking face to face on Zoom calls and Google Meets with Nick and Mike, but the chemistry was there. We all felt like this was right.

We joined, had the big move back to California. I had already lived in LA for like two and a half, three years. I lived here through COVID. I may not be born and raised here, but I lived through the worst times in the city. I can claim it. I’ve been here for four or five years now. Then, yes, we moved over, started doing trend type of content that we knew would have a shot at working, while also trying to find our own lane on the side and trying to find our own pace.

I’m speaking ahead here. I know you have more questions, but that rolled into January, the new year, which is where I think we truly found our own pace, our own brand, what works for us, what people resonate with about us. Not just doing the trendy TikTok dance. I don’t think badly of anyone doing trendy TikTok dances. Whatever works for you, go ahead and do it, chase whatever. We wanted to find something that was our own. I feel like that started in the new year.

We’ve been here for six, seven months, but found our pace I think in the last four.

Tubefilter: I’m a very big gamer. I was verging on pro level for one game, but am casual for things like Apex Legends, and I feel like casual gamers sometimes think they’re taken less seriously by developers and by organizations. I’m really curious what you think about the importance of having a casual organization.

Avalanche: I can relate directly to you, because the way I came into the space when I was 13, 14, I was super interested in competitive Call of Duty. That was my scene. I know guys always play CoD, but that’s what I was in. I was following all the pros. I wanted to be like the pros. I was grinding ranked matches with my friends, trying to get the top ranks and be as close to professional scrim level as possible. In terms of casual gaming, I feel like casual gaming, it caters to just way more people. The people who have work, they get off work, they come home, they just want to have fun, play for a couple hours, go to bed. The college kids who aren’t that good.

Also it comes down to having– You can relate to this, I feel like. You might’ve been very talented, just naturally, but a lot of it comes down to setup too. I have cousins who don’t have the most money, don’t have the nicest setups. I’m trying to give my cousin my old PS5 and stuff just to step up his gaming setup. Some people don’t even have the opportunity to be as good as they can be in FPS games, because their internet isn’t great. They’re playing on a TV and not a super responsive monitor. They just have scuffed equipment.

Tubefilter: Yes. I was playing on a basic Xbox One.

Avalanche: You’re playing on a TV when you started?

Tubefilter: I was on a TV, yes. And I didn’t have a headset when I started. [laughs]

Avalanche: Salute. Salute to that.

Tubefilter: Now, I feel like I can’t transition over to PC, but I feel like if I picked it up on PC, I would’ve had a leg up.

Avalanche: I salute that so much, because when I play…I’ve been in gaming, I’ve told you, for a while. I’m so used to monitors now when I’m playing something like FIFA, for example, I need that response time. Then I’ll go to my friend’s house and we’ll play on some big, older TV, and I’m just getting mad and I’m complaining about those little things, and I feel like I’m bothering them. They’re like, “Brandon, shut up! Just play the game!”

I’m like, “You guys don’t understand!” I’m clicking a button and it’s happening, it feels like, a decade later in the game.

Tubefilter: Yes. It’s definitely a curve.

Avalanche: Yes. But the audience is massive and I feel like we’re very lucky to cater toward, we always say we’re what you want to hear in an Xbox party chat, in a PlayStation party chat. That’s what our company caters toward. Just a bunch of friends, sitting in game chat, talking about whatever, and who aren’t maybe the best at games. Someone has to be bottom frag. Someone has to be the worst one. It might be everyone at the same time.

Tubefilter: That’s the best. Bonding in suffering. So I know you guys have been doing an imposter series that has been insane. There’s also an insane level of content, the amount of content you’re putting out for that has been a lot of videos, and in what? Ten weeks?

Avalanche: Yes.

Tubefilter: I’m curious about the development of that.

Avalanche: I would like to shout out Mikeoofs. One of us four. We’re a group of four, it’s Nick, Classified, me, and Mike. Mike had this idea one day, we were all sitting on our couch where we normally do our podcast. He pitched the imposter idea, basically. This was December, mid to late December, where we were trying to find our own rhythm. We said for the new year, we want to chase our own goals, what we want to do, not just doing trends.

I said this yesterday to Hung, and we are really lucky, because this space…I’ve been around. This does not work like that. Having an original idea, doing it, and it just blowing up to the whole world and people loving it. Now we’ve been doing it for weeks and weeks. People are always interested. We’re trying to spice it up, inviting celebrities, inviting athletes. Hopefully in the future–not to leak anything–inviting different types of people just to make it interesting, but we got super lucky.

We started posting a few of them and then they just took off, because I feel like the casual audience could relate to us four sitting on the couch, arguing with each other about, oh, you’re wrong. I’m right. You’re lying. I’m not. They could see themselves doing it with their friends. People get so involved. The comment section is my favorite part.

People notice our mannerisms. Classify, when he’s usually imposter, he’ll start looking around like this and fidgeting with his mic, and the comments call him out. He does it multiple times. The comments call him out. When I’m imposter, I’ll say “world renowned” a lot. It’s like a freebie, because the topic will usually be celebrity, athlete, animals, something that all four of us have to know. It can’t be something super niche, like a niche anime character, because what if three of us don’t know. It has to be something like a shark that all four of us have heard of and we can go roundabout.

Yes, but people relate to it. People have become attached to us through it, which is cool. It’s starting to show even in like– Okay. I’m not some A-list celebrity, but we’ve been going out the last few weeks and we’ll go to the mall, and people notice. A group of kids walked up to us like, “Oh, you guys are the ones from the imposter videos. We love the series.” People have come from our long-form, which we’ll speak on later, but it’s cool to see the faces of some of these people, because we’re so used to just looking at numbers on the screen. Oh, we did this many views. We’ve had this many comments. It’s like, it’s cool to see the actual people and meet them.

Tubefilter: You’ve put out, I think, 70 different Shorts for this series in 10 weeks. How does the filming process go? Do you batch film?

Avalanche: Hung, do you want to go or do you want me to go?

Hung Tran: Yes. I can answer that. The squad comes into our office, which we have a 15,000 square foot studio in downtown Los Angeles. They come into the office probably three, four days a week, and they shoot a bunch of content in those days. The cool part about the imposter filming process is each short forum video that probably takes 10, 15 minutes to shoot. We can shoot a bunch in a day. Honestly, the longest part is probably the editing process. But yes, the guys are some of the hardest workers ever. They plan out the content and they go into the office and they just grind the shoots. We’ve got a team of a couple editors as well who support us.

Avalanche: Shout out Nom. Shout out George.

Hung Tran: Yes. Some of the funniest guys out there. They are able to batch shoot everything within a few days and then it goes to edit and then it goes to our social team.

Tubefilter: Perfect. Then Avalanche, you mentioned long-form. When did you get into long-form? Talk to me about the long-form plan.

Avalanche: Yes. We found a lot of success through, obviously, TikTok. That’s where the series originally blew up, and we took it to YouTube Shorts. If anything right now, I feel like it’s doing even better on YouTube Shorts than it is on TikTok. It’s doing great on both, but YouTube Shorts took off, and I never knew people even watch YouTube Shorts until we were out and about. Whenever we meet someone, I always ask, “Where did you come from?” Because I’m curious, do you watch TikTok? YouTube Shorts? I feel like the most replies I’ve gotten are from YouTube Shorts, and I never knew people really watched that, but it blew up.

Now we’re like dipping our toes into long-form, because with YouTube Shorts and that many people there, if you just sprinkle in three seconds at the end of the video, “Oh, this is just a clip from our long-form video, go check it out.” You’re already on the app, you click the link and you take yourself to the video. 

Yes, so long-form. Okay. Yes, let me backtrack. YouTube Shorts and TikTok, it’s only a minute probably of us debating. Little debate, conversation, and getting to know us for a minute at a time, minute at a time. Whereas long-form, we can make it as long as we want. Probably not over 30 minutes. I don’t think we’d ever do that, but somewhere between 15 and 30 minutes of people getting to know us, seeing us really talk stuff out, maybe do some challenges, some punishments for getting rounds wrong or right.

Then yes, I feel like in a way, YouTube long-form is just the most personal thing you can do, other than a livestream, I’d say. I come from livestreaming. You can stream for 12 hours straight. That’ll get real personal. You’ll get delirious, delusional after 12 hours. Yes. Long-form YouTube is what we’re trying to do. Our latest thing, which is brand new, is celebrity imposter, because we’re trying to spice it up. We’ve been doing just us four for some weeks now. Maybe switching some people out, bringing our editor in, bringing this random influencer in. Now we’re trying to get celebrities in our long-form YouTube videos, which maybe combines their audience and what we got going on over here, all these views. It just benefits both people.

Our first guest was Eric Winter. It went as great as we could have possibly imagined our first guest going, because it’s not always like that. You can get someone who’s not too talkative and more introverted, which is, no offense to anyone out there like that, but maybe the flow isn’t right. There’s no synergy. Eric came in and it felt like he was just one of the guys. He meshed with us. He won a round as imposter, which is hard to do with us four who’ve been playing this game for 10 weeks and we know each other’s mannerisms and stuff. He won a round. He was having fun. He was laughing.

Then all of the comments were my favorite part. He’s really popular on a show called The Rookie right now. Shout out The Rookie. They’re doing great. He’s one of the main guys. All of the comments were like, “Most unexpected collab, but glad it happened.” His name on the show is Tim Bradford. People are like, “What’s Officer Tim Bradford doing with these guys? Why is he here? What’s going on?” People are like, “This is so random, but we love it. The collab we didn’t know we needed.” What was the wording, Hung?

Hung Tran: The collab we didn’t know we wanted, but now we know we need it.

Avalanche: We know we need it. Yes. We saw that comment a billion times. That’s cool to see, because it’s people from this corner of the internet coming over to our world, and now they know our faces. The people who have been rocking with us know Eric, and maybe they want to go check out The Rookie now. It’s cool. Just two worlds colliding. I love seeing stuff like that.

Hung Tran: I can add to that too. Prior to Avalanche and Classy joining, I think Full Squad is really good at entertaining audiences. We were driving billions of views across TikTok. The new goal that we were trying to achieve was, how do we really build fandom? How do we really let people get to know these guys? That’s why when the impostor series started popping off, those videos are about a minute long, and people started really wanting more and more to get to know Classy, Avalanche, Mike, Nick. They understood their mannerisms. They understood their personality in a minute. We wanted to feed into that fandom a little bit more. Let our audience really get to know these squad members. They’re all phenomenal human beings. They also remind me– I’m older.

Avalanche: You’re not that much older, Hung. He always says this.

Tubefilter: How old are you?

Hung Tran: I’m 39. I’m an old man these days in social media culture. When I look at these four, they remind me of my friend group when I was their age. These guys are amazing. Again, they’re amazing human beings. They’re all super nice. They’re kind. They’re smart. They work hard. They also get to live the dream in Los Angeles. They’re all making content, living in LA, going to Coachella with Samsung, going to street races with Rockstar. Really cool experiences.

The reason we got into the long-form side is we really want to create that relationship with our audience and really let people get to know these guys even more. I’m biased, because I work with them every day. As people spend more and more time with them, they’re just going to fall in love with these guys. They’re the aspirational friend group, I think, that the audience watches. They’re like, “Oh, I have a friend like that. I have a friend like Mike. Oh, I’m the Classy of the group.”

Avalanche: Right. I feel like, another thing, too. I hate to jump forward. I don’t know if you’ll ask–

Tubefilter: No, that’s okay.

Avalanche: –but another thing that people can relate to, I know we’re just like a group of four guys, which is like, yes, all right, dude’s cool. We’re all very diverse. Classify, Russian. My background. A lot of our content is, our parents are immigrants. Classify’s parents are immigrants. My parents both immigrated from Kenya. I’m African American. Mike is Chinese and Japanese. Then we always say Nick’s our resident Valley white guy. But even then, people watching our videos, you look at the video and you see someone who maybe looks like you, who talks like you, maybe acts like one of your friends, I feel like that boosts us even more. 

Say we were four Black dudes. Not saying that’s a bad thing, but you might not relate to a whole subgroup of people out there. Having four just very diverse and different people in a group who are good friends, it’s special, I think. I think it’s very special. You can’t just throw any four people like that who will mesh like that, who are from four different backgrounds, and make this type of concept.

Tubefilter: Yes. It’s huge. Any other cool plans you guys have for this year in terms of developing content, building out more audience engagement, that kind of stuff?

Avalanche: Hung, I’ll let you go.

Hung Tran: Like Ava alluded to, celebrity imposter is our newest property.

Avalanche: Go check it out!

Hung Tran: That’s our podcast style, right? There are so many podcasts popping up these days. For us, we love doing podcasts. As you can see, Ava loves the app.

Avalanche: I love to speak. I’m sorry. I speak over people. I talk too much. Everyone knows that about me. If you’ve met me at any point in my life, that’s how I am. I love it. I love talking.

Hung Tran: We wanted to make something different. We wanted to make something ours. Our thought is, let’s play the game that people are getting to know us for and let’s have real conversations with some of these celebrities and influencers that we have access to. Let’s take it to a different level and get to know them.

We’ve got other properties coming as well. Again, the cool part about these guys in the squad is, it’s your friend group. What do you do with your friends? You’re uber competitive with your friends, right? We’re going to create other series where the four guys are just competing at everything together. I don’t want to leak too much about the series coming, but it’s really developing properties and really letting the audience get to know the amazing people in Full Squad.

Tubefilter: Perfect. Ava, you want to add anything?

Avalanche: He said that better than I could ever say it. Hung is way more well-spoken than me, but that’s pretty much it. We don’t want to leak. We have good stuff coming, but…

Tubefilter: No spoilers.

Avalanche: Yes, no spoilers. We’ve been having meetings about what we want to do next. Obviously, we’re very aware internet trends come and go. I’m honestly still stunned that people are as engaged with imposter as they are. If anything, it’s been hitting more people and improving, especially in the long form aspect of things, but we’ll only be able to do imposter for so long. We have to start thinking about, all right, what’s next? What else? What here? What there? We don’t want to say anything, because this is going out to the world, I’m assuming. We don’t want anyone taking our ideas. They’re our ideas.

Hung Tran: Yes. It’s all about evolving and keeping up with trends and figuring out what’s next for us. The goal always is to test new things, see what works, and be on the forefront of what’s happening in culture.

Tubefilter: Ava, what’s been your favorite part of joining Full Squad?

Avalanche: I’ll say a small thing and a big thing. Small thing is I’ve known Classy for six years, seven years. A long time, longer time than anyone. Hung as well. Hung isn’t in the group of four making the content. Hung makes sure we’re all doing what we’re supposed to do. He’s the head honcho. I knew I’d be fine with Classy in terms of making content, we know how each other are. 

But in terms of Nick and Mike, the meetings are cool, but it’s like, say we moved all the way out here. It could’ve went the other way. We could’ve just not meshed on camera. Things could’ve felt a little awkward and- I don’t know. It could’ve been some friction, but I’m glad that we just naturally fell into like immediately. We’re all around the same age, which I give credit to. We can relate to a lot of things. We had similar upbringings and stuff, even with our immigrant backgrounds and whole different families. I consider it was very lucky to start on the foot we did. September, October, November, we just started rolling like naturally. Sometimes that doesn’t happen. Two people you’ve never met in your life. I’ve only known them for what? Six, seven months now, that can come together and start rolling like that. I think it’s a very special thing. The main thing that I’m– What did you say? My favorite memory so far.

Tubefilter: Yes.

Avalanche: That’s not really a memory, but it’s just something I’m thankful for. Memory is just back to the imposter stuff is how lucky we were. Obviously it was a great idea, Mike, your idea was fantastic. Mike, if you’re watching this, I love you, Mike. Great idea, but like I said, I’ve been on the internet. I always say, it doesn’t work like that. People think you just hop online, start making TikToks for a month, and one of them will blow up, and you’ll just start getting a following. It does not work like that.

I know how lucky we were. Yes, it was a good idea. Yes, I think we executed it great, but there was also, I don’t know if you want to call it luck. We were consistent, but I think there was a little bit of luck that comes to it for the first few videos to take flight like that. Then all of these numbers just start rolling in, because we always said, January we want to start doing our own stuff, not trends, not stuff that we’ve seen in the past that we can just replicate and put, regurgitate. Do our own original content in January. We started putting these out in January and they took off in January and that’s a very special thing.

I consider it as very lucky. It’s still pumping numbers. It’s what? It’s almost summer and we’re still flying high off of this trend. I’m very thankful for that. That’s easily my favorite memory with how quickly everything took off. I know the guys are too. We’re all very appreciative of how this has gone, because it is not like that on the internet.

Hung Tran: Yes, it’s very cool. We’ve built the short form subscribers on YouTube via short-form content, and we’ve only posted what? Eight videos, long-form videos on YouTube. Very, very excited about the future and very appreciative of just the subscribers and the audience who’ve supported us along the way.

Avalanche: Just saying that to all the creators out there, you’ve got to put your head down. It’s not going to just happen overnight. We got very lucky.