Welcome to YouTube Millionaires, where we–in partnership with global creator company AIR Media-Tech–profile channels that have recently crossed the one million subscriber mark. There are channels crossing this threshold every week, and each creator has a story to tell about YouTube success. Read previous installments here.
Hannah and Regal were on their honeymoon when Hannah’s phone started going off.
It was TikTok.
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It was a lot of TikTok. Hundreds of notifications were pouring in–all for one video. Earlier in their honeymoon, Regal had made a Hannah a massive bubble bath, and when she filmed her reaction, he told her to post it on TikTok. They’d launched a shared account a few months before, hoping to build a following and promote Regal’s music (made under his moniker Regal Noise), but things hadn’t really caught on.
They didn’t expect the bubble bath video to catch on, either. But, of course, it did. Then, on their way home, they made another video where they ordered over a hundred Chick-fil-A nuggets to fly home with them to Chick-fil-A-less northern Minnesota. That one took off, too.
“I was like, ‘Okay, so maybe this couple kind of stuff is what we should continue posting,'” Hannah says.
That strategy worked out. By the end of 2021, they’d established a solid foothold on TikTok–and that was when Regal’s dad urged them to start cross-posting their content to YouTube Shorts.
This strategy also worked out, because Hannah and Regal (who recently welcomed their first son Jace) now have over a million followers on YouTube to add to their 4 million on TikTok.
Check out our chat with them below.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tubefilter: For any readers who don’t know you, give me a little intro about both of you, where you’re from, and how you met.
Hannah: I’m Hannah.
Regal: I’m Regal.
Hannah: Yes, aka Justin.
Regal: Yes.
Hannah: If I reference to him in Justin all of this interview–his real name is Justin, but he goes in Regal for entertainment purposes because he does music. His music name is Regal Noise. Just in case if I call him Justin. [laughs] We’re from northern Minnesota and that is where we met as well. Then how we met…Well, it starts with him. You can start us off, how we met.
Regal: I found her on Facebook. She was tagged in a photo of somebody else and I was like, “Who is that?” I saw that she was in the area and I added her as a friend and she accepted, but just there was like a month or so before we actually met in person where I was just loving all of her posts that she did. I had a notification set up whenever her status would update or whatever.
Hannah: Slightly stalking, but strongly pursuing.
Regal: Well, I wanted to be in the picture! I wanted to let her know that I was paying attention. Fast forward, she checked into a concert that was going to be happening in the area and I was like, “I’m going to be there.” I just didn’t want to message her when we’ve never met. I just don’t want to be like, “Hey, you want to meet a complete stranger?” I was wandering around town hoping I’d run into her so I could just introduce myself, but there was an opportunity, and we met. I ended up showing up at the concert. It wasn’t a huge concert, it was a few hundred people. I met her and introduced myself. After that night, I think we both had a good feeling of one another.
Hannah: At least when I saw him, because I recognized him from Facebook. I was with my cousin and my friend. I walked into the venue of the concert and I saw him and I was like, “Oh, my gosh. That’s the guy that’s stalking me on Facebook.”
Regal: She totally threw me under the bus.
Hannah: In the middle of the concert when he came and introduced himself to me, my cousin and my friend were like, when they saw him walking towards me like, “Oh, my gosh. He’s going towards her.” As soon as he started talking, we talked a little bit, I realized that he was super nice and I didn’t have that, “Oh, my gosh. I didn’t want to see him anymore.” I right away was like, “Wow, this guy is just super nice.” Shortly after that, a few days later, he messaged me on Facebook.
Regal: To add to that too, I just also want to say that we did, this is like, no lie, we finished each other’s sentences the first time we talked.
Hannah: Yes, the first time we talked.
Regal: Went up to her, I was like, “Hi, I’m Justin. We haven’t met in person, but we’re friends on–” and she’s like, “Facebook.” We said it at the same time. We smiled and it was just like, “Oh, right.” It was just one of those cheesy chick flick moments.
Tubefilter: Yes, and it worked out!
Regal: It was really good.
Hannah: Then he messaged me a couple of days later. We went on our first date, and the rest is history.
Regal: We went to a cafe and we got there around one o’clock and it closed at seven and we left little after seven.
Hannah: We shut the place down. We were talking and playing Farkle.
Regal: Playing Farkle. We had a really good time.
Hannah: Yes, and then we got engaged six months after that. Married two and a half months after that. It all happened pretty fast.
Tubefilter: When did content creation come into this?
Hannah: Like I had mentioned, he does music, Regal Noise. He’s an artist. When I first started dating him, he was going to be releasing a new song, and I was trying to help figure out how to market it. We were trying different avenues. My brother, who had–this was around when COVID started–he said that he was on TikTok and I didn’t know what it was. Then I shortly found out what it was and was always on there and stuff because I really liked it. Then people were telling Regal to jump on there and try to do music that way and promote his music. I started trying to figure out, “Okay, how can we do this?”
When we got engaged, I started posting just, I don’t know, silly videos of him and stuff, and nothing really took off right away, so I was like, “Okay. Whatever.” I stopped posting it for a little bit.
Regal: She had actually said that, her original saying was like, “If we can get an account really big or whatever, maybe we can get it big enough to where we can advertise your music.” I was like, “Okay, whatever.” I didn’t think anything of it, so I just let her post. At this time, it was just random videos. It was just stupid things I would be doing, pretty much. It’s evolved, but that’s what it started at.
Hannah: Then on our honeymoon, I think we were a week into our honeymoon and he was taking a bath. He was in there for quite a while and I was like, “What is he doing there?” He was like, “Hannah, come in here.” I was filming and I walked in and he’d made this humongous bubble bath. There was the whole bathroom full of bubbles. I’ve never seen a bath this big, and so I recorded my reaction to it because there were just stuff everywhere. He told me to post it on TikTok and I was like, “Okay, fine.” I made a little edit of it, posted on TikTok and nothing happened right away. It just had 100 views or something. I was like, “See, TikTok, nothing is happening.”
Then a few days later, we were still on our honeymoon, and all of a sudden I started getting a bunch of notifications on my phone and I was like, “What is going on?” I opened TikTok and I realized the video was starting to go viral. It was at 20,000 or something. We were just like, “Oh, my gosh. This video is going up.” Then it just kept going and going and going and then it eventually hit a million views and we were just so excited. We were like, “Oh my gosh, we went viral.” Then after that, I realized, “Okay, well, maybe let’s just try.” We tried a few other videos and then we did another couple…Or what did we do? I’m trying to remember exactly.
Regal: Chick-Fil-A was the other one we did.
Hannah: Oh, yes. Then we posted a Chick-fil-A video with a bunch of Chick-fil-A nuggets because we’re from northern Minnesota and there’s not a Chick-fil-A in two hours of here.
Regal: We discovered she loves Chick-fil-A on our honeymoon. She had never had Chick-fil-A sauce.
Hannah: I was just in love with it.
Regal: We were just on our way down in Chicago, and she had Chick-fil-A probably seven times on that honeymoon.
Hannah: I was addicted to it. On our way home, we were in Texas at the time. We were about to head home and I was like, “We need to get some Chick-fil-A chicken nuggets because we don’t have that. We ordered I think 120 nuggets or something like that.
Regal: We ordered a lot.
Hannah: We recorded it and we post that and then that was, I think two, maybe a couple of weeks after that first video went viral. I posted that and that went viral too and I was like, “Okay, so maybe this couple kind of stuff is what we should continue posting.” It happened. That was about August, September, and we had a few videos go viral over the few months, but then April and May is when we started really figuring it out. That’s fall and spring of 2021.
Regal: It started what we do now. It evolved from, our honeymoon is really where it all started.
Hannah: Yes, honeymoon is where it really started.
Tubefilter: Did you decide right away to continue uploading videos? When did it become like a, “This is a fun thing, but now we’re going to do this and be serious about it”?
Regal: Can I answer this? Let me tell you exactly how it happened. She just never stopped. This is the thing. I don’t even think we agreed. It wasn’t actually even an agreement thing. Well, we did agree originally. I said like, “Yes, I’m open to doing that.” Then she just was, she kept, I don’t know, I would just say that she was determined to figure it out, which, I love that about her. Hannah’s got such a determined integrity about her. She’s a very hard worker and she likes to succeed at what she does. I think that’s really what it stemmed from. I just caught up eventually.
Hannah: Now we’re both good, but at first, the couple aspect of it was just new and I was like okay, I would always just be doing pranks on him, and just all these videos and he would be coming home from work and get pranked and he’s like, “Oh my gosh.”
Regal: We did establish some boundaries.
Hannah: We established some boundaries and stuff, but now we’re good. It took a minute to catch up for him to be on board for it, but.
Regal: It was a mindset shift for me, seeing myself doing this type of thing, because I was really focused on my music–and I still am, but now it’s just a part of it. It meshes really well together, because I think it’s added a lot of light onto my music. In the future I think it’s going to really benefit my career long-run.
Tubefilter: Totally. I talk to a lot of artists, a lot of business owners, actually, who have TikTok accounts or YouTube Shorts accounts, and it’s doing wonders for them.
Regal: Absolutely.
Tubefilter: Speaking of YouTube, when did you expand from TikTok to YouTube?
Hannah: His dad actually is the one who told us to start posting. I opened an account because I posted our wedding video and our engagement video on there. I was trying to funnel people over, but that was for long-form content. Then his dad told us, “Hey, you should get on YouTube Shorts because I’ve been seeing a lot of Shorts similar to stuff that you guys do. They had a lot of views.” December of 2020, I think, because it was year after we started doing content, we posted, isn’t that right?
Regal: I thought it was within that first year. It didn’t start taking off until, honestly, this last year.
Hannah: We started some and within a year of us making content creation, we started posting on YouTube. I don’t remember the exact date of when we started actually putting our short-form content on there. I would have to look at a timestamp, but this last June, we were just reposting a bunch of our stuff. Then the summer of 2022, June, is when all of a sudden our Shorts started taking off our channel really soon and growing a lot.
All the views were below 10,000. And then one day I started getting a bunch of notifications and I looked and our videos were just getting tons of views, a ton of them are going up. I was like, oh my gosh, we’re growing lot on YouTube. Then it just continued, it’s ebbed and flowed, just like how fast it’s grown. It slows down sometimes, but for the most part, it’s been growing really good ever since.
Tubefilter: How much time are you dedicating to this now? Has this become your full-time gig, a potential career? What do you guys think?
Regal: We have transitioned fully into content creation. I don’t know. After our son was born, so about seven months ago, we’ve been full-time content creation. After she had Jace, she was on maternity leave, and then she did not need to go back. Then also I did not go. Leading up to my son being born, I was taking less and less time, because I worked for my mom’s business doing interior design, painting, and stuff. She was my boss, she knew what was going on with us and the attraction we were gaining, and so she was a little more lenient on certain jobs that I didn’t have to take and everything, After our son was born, we definitely made the choice and stepped out and saved and we actually got a great management team, and that was a big part of us.
Hannah: That was a huge part too.
Regal: It was a lot to be able to just handle on our own and bringing on our team really had helped us to confidently say, “Okay, we can do this.”
Tubefilter: Can you tell me a little bit about your team? How many people are you working with behind the scenes? Do you guys work with an editor? Do you have a manager? What’s your setup?
Hannah: We have our two managers.
Tubefilter: Oh, two?
Regal: Yes. Currents Management.
Hannah: Currents Management.
Regal: They’re awesome.
Hannah: They are amazing. Besides that, so far we haven’t got on board any editors or anything like that. We’re not sure if that will be in the future or not. With our son, definitely, we have a lot less time to edit videos and stuff, so it might not be a bad idea maybe someday to do that, but we haven’t looked too much into it. So far as team-wise though, that’s about what we have is just our current management team.
Regal: Then as far as all the other stuff, editing, production, posting, that’s all done currently with Hannah and I.
Tubefilter: Gotcha. What do you guys feel has been the most significant factor in your growth of audience? I feel like your viewership really ramped up while you were posting videos about you being pregnant. Is that correct?
Hannah: I feel like we had quite a bit of a platform established, but I definitely think that also was a time period where we did see a lot of growth while I was pregnant.
Regal: There was a lot of growth there. I think there was a lot of growth. We had moved and I think after our move into our new house, that summer–
Hannah: The summer in 2021, we grew a lot because we had…I think at the beginning of summer, we were somewhere around maybe 300,000. Then by that September, we had hit a million on TikTok and then we took a break, when I first got pregnant, from posting on just all platforms because I got really sick. I was really nauseous. I was just not feeling well, so we just took a break for a while. We didn’t post on anything for two months or something.
Regal: I would say there was a steady growth up until she got pregnant and then there was a break because we needed the time. We had been working really hard.
Hannah: We were still both working our full-time jobs too. I was working as a nurse and he was doing the interior design and painting. It was just getting to be too much and with the house, with being sick, with being pregnant and all that, it just like, “Okay, we need to just pause on this for a second.” Then once I got into the second trimester, we announced that we were pregnant and then that’s when we started picking back up and growing. The goal is that we wanted to hopefully build the transition to full-time.
After we announced the pregnancy, we started getting back into the rhythm of posting and then I think it still took a little bit, but basically around I think it’s April, May of last year is when we really started posting again. It has slowed down again because, having a son, he’s getting busy, he’s starting to crawl around and stuff. He had us on our toes these days.
Regal: I guess to answer the question, I think our main growth came from the summer of 2021. We started growing summer 2021, and that’s when we really saw a great increase. Then going into a little after 2022, we also saw, I think it’s just been steady growing since summer of 2021.
Tubefilter: Do you have any plans or goals for things now?
Regal: Yes. I would like to release some more music here coming up soon, and we would like to use our platforms to shine some light on that because I’ve been working on music for over a decade now. I’ve had some successes here and there, but with the success we’ve seen in our couple’s content, that’s been a goal of mine to get a good song going and maybe eventually do an album or something when we get some time. That’s a goal of ours, mine. I guess we do have some goals as well as far as growth that we would like to see this coming year. At the beginning of the year, we talked about what we would like to see. We have some personal goals that we’ve set for growth that we want to see.
Hannah: We’re hoping to, in the near future, do some merch, too. That’s another thing.
Regal: I think eventually, she is going to write a book.
Hannah: Yes. I love to write. We’ll see.
Regal: I think she needs to see! She’s great at writing. I thought I was good at writing because I write songs and stuff.
Hannah: He is the writer.
Regal: I’m like, “Yes, awesome.” Then when I met her and I’m like, “Wow, she is so good at writing.” She’s just effortless. She just really, really conveys thoughts clearly. I think she should and I’m encouraging her on that. She said she is wanting to. That, I think, is another goal. I don’t know about this year. Maybe she could start because we might be getting some more free time with some help that we’re bringing in.
Tubefilter: Perfect. Fantastic. I think that’s essentially the end of my questions. Is there anything else that you wanted to talk about or anything you feel like readers should know about you?
Regal: I don’t know. Any ideas?
Tubefilter: I did want to ask, how do you plan on handling your son? Are you going to post videos of him?
Hannah: I think we want to keep our stuff couple content. We had talked about, we didn’t really want to turn our stuff into a family channel per se, just because it is important for us to protect him and for his safety and privacy. I guess our goal is to not make him the main focus of our channel and stuff. We never want to do anything that would…I don’t know.
Regal: Just for our personal choice, not saying–everybody has their own opinions on things and we don’t want to look at anyone else, whatever. It’s just for us, we do have him included in some things.
Hannah: Yes, we do.
Regal: But he’s just not the focal point and we don’t want to ever make it just like, we’re just shining the spotlight on him constantly. We tastefully want to include him just because he is our son and we can’t ignore that he’s in our life, but we do want to protect him. I think that covers it.
Hannah: You’ll see him in our stuff. We try to strategically, if we’re going to do a prank or reaction, we try to do it during his nap times or if we have one of his grandparents watching him and stuff. Like Justin said, everyone has their own boundaries and not saying any person’s decision is right or wrong, what they choose to do with their child on social media, but just for our own comfort and boundaries and for just what we’re comfortable with, it’s going to be probably more minimum.
Regal: We just want to minimally just include him. I think that covers it.
Hannah: I know that is a question that people ask, too. I did address it on our Instagram, and I made a little post on YouTube explaining that as well. That is probably a good question to answer. I’m trying to think if maybe I see any common questions a lot on our videos and stuff. A lot of people ask if we’re Christian. Yes, we are. Faith is the most important thing in our life to us.
Regal: Yes, faith is really important to us.
Hannah: I see people ask that question a lot. Is there anything else that I could see? If anyone does want to check out Justin’s music, like I said, he goes by Regal Noise. He’s super talented. What genre would you say that you are?
Regal: I think it varies. I would say, to explain, my goal is to get a top 40 record. I want to be heard. That means pop, I would say it’s pop-based with elements of hip hop and rock. EDM is even in there. I’ve done a lot of different genres. I think we’re waiting for a full album to really see maybe what people decide what that is. My goal is just to get something that translate where it’ll be up there with what’s current. I want my message to translate to many people–and that, I guess, means you have to be on there.
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