Dan Exclaims! is manga YouTuber with 15k+ subscribers, at the time of writing this, on YouTube and his channel had been growing for about a year now, only recently making a move to live streaming on Twitch (a live-streaming platform where people can live-stream playing a variety of activities for their fans, like gaming, chatting, eating, etc.)
One might wonder how Dan got to where he is today, and why? When asked about his goals when he was younger compared to where he is now, Dan had this to say,
“The one thing that was a confident in my life was anime, it was the thing that i woke up at 11 o’clock at night, when I was 9 years old watching YuYu Hakusho, til 2 o’clock in the morning watching cartoon network and trying to figure out what was gonna happen next.”
When he was graduating high-school and scheduling his classes for college, he did his best to choose classes that could lead to the path of being a voice actor. He could work in voicing cartoons or anime as a career.
“Suddenly they asked to pick my major and what’s gonna be the quickest two year degree for me to get? For some reason I lost track of my goal and I was gonna be a teacher, I love English, I love the written word and I love movies. Two year’s into that I decided to go to school for film and see what’s going on there.”
Dan went to Jersey City University where he went to his first class and met a known YouTuber Vocal Pineapple Academia, they talked and Vocal Pineapple mentioned YouTubing to him, initially Dan brushed this off, graduating college. After college he didn’t end up going into a film job right away.
“I’m scraping by, trying to figure out what I’m gonna do and then I get an opportunity to be a game-show host in bars. In 2015 I would go bar to bar doing bar trivia, then in 2017 someone approached me and told me I had a voice for radio and should really go into that.”
So he went to his local radio station and got a job with the street team, this team covers events like concerts and as time went on his boss offered him a job working creative around 2018 because of his degree in audio editing. Creative is running the radio show advertisements and commercials. At the same time his friend Vocal Pineapple Academia kept encouraging him to get into YouTube.
“I started doing YouTube, kind of, I was doing Dragon Ball Legend videos and occasionally My Hero Academia Videos but i got to the point around August 2018 where I blew off doing YouTube and put that to the side a little.”
For Dan 2018 was a huge year for him, he kept working his job at the radio station and was in the heat of doing trivia events across New Jersey, becoming a B list celebrity in a small part of town. Always wanting to be a comedian, he was a class clown his whole life.
“My heart just always had me in a way, shape, or form, trying to figure out how to perform and have my art get across to somebody.”
He got more recognition at his local radio job and got a job as the assistant creative director, accepting phone calls, editing them, playing them live, running the show. Come September 2019, his YouTuber friend was not ready to give up on him, Dan had this to say,
“So here comes Vocal Pineapple again and he tells me, ‘Dan, My Hero Academia Season 4 is starting, make a YouTube channel, ‘ so I decided to finally do it.”
This is when Dan had a lucky streak. The My Hero Academia spin-off series, My Hero Academia Vigilantes, was doing a backstory arc on a major character of the Main series. Dan made a video on this Backstory arc and immediately became the guy that broke the news on a major reveal during this arc, instantly becoming the guy that was known for My Hero Academia Vigilantes. No one else filled that slot in the manga community on YouTube.
Over the past year his channel has grown to where it is now and he also started streaming in 2020 and built a strong community there too, He always makes sure to greet his fans, he reads comments on his videos, remembers his regulars.
“I feel like I’m at a decent amount of followers where i build an intimate crowd of people that i talk to frequently and i almost feel like if i don’t put out a video for them its something that they look forward to every week.”
At the end of the day, it’s important to remember that anyone around you has an amazing life story, While to some Dan Exclaims! may seem like any other YouTuber, but its worth noting his life story and how he got to where he is today.
