Meet Enaldinho, the YouTuber who started his career in a tub of slime and is now a millionaire

Since he got into a bathtub full of sticky slime in 2016, YouTuber and businessman Enaldo Lopes de Oliveira Filho, 26, from Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, saw his life change radically. He filmed the whole thing and posted it on YouTube. He suffered severe bullying, but he also got what every influencer wants: followers and engagement. Welcome to Generation Z.

“I saw the channel go from 10,000 to 100,000 subscribers, and from the following year onwards, it really exploded. I started making money online and changed my life,” he says. “It was a turning point, but I heard a lot of insults; people said I was embarrassing myself.”

Since then, Enaldinho, as he is known, has asked his family for a chance to make a living from content production. His father wanted him to study business administration and did not understand his son’s obsession with the computer — sometimes playing games, sometimes promoting unusual videos.

Enaldinho took a year off from studying and continued recording videos with content that, to many people, may seem ridiculous, but has a very loyal audience. The hit of that moment was the Oreo challenge: he placed 100 fillings of the famous cookie, one on top of the other, until he reached a hundred of them. In one week, he gained more than a million followers and earned his first R$4,000.

“My channel was thriving, and that money was enough to confirm that I would earn more than if I worked with my father in his cachaça factory. That’s when some businessmen started calling me for partnerships. I gave up college to dedicate myself to the internet and multiplied my source of income,” he says.

Since then, Enaldinho has only grown. Today he has more than 35 million subscribers on YouTube, almost 7 million followers on Instagram and a network of more than 150 licensed products that guarantee him R$20 million in revenue per year.

Now, he has invested in dubbing his more than 4,000 videos into Spanish to internationalize his channel and achieve worldwide success. He also wants to launch a chain of burger restaurants.

He also became friends with the world’s biggest YouTuber, MrBeast, who invited him to dub his content. What’s more, Beast called the 50 biggest YouTubers on the planet (Enaldinho is one of them) to record a special video that will be broadcast on the 13th. It is the promotion of a competition in which the winner will take home US$ 1 million.

He says he has never been driven by money. He loves what he does and everything has worked out so well precisely because of that. “Soon, I want to stop aiming for profit, because for what I need, it’s already good enough. If today I have the cars of my dreams and record in a mansion, I owe it all to my choices. The internet has changed my life.” And to think that it all started in a tub of slime.