NELK

The NELK Boys are prank culture’s last kings: the crew whose “Full Send” chaos built a merch empire, a seltzer brand, and one of YouTube’s most loyal armies. What started as two Canadian kids filming pranks became the defining party brand of a generation — and then something much bigger: a case study in turning internet fame into a genuine conglomerate.

The origin story is pure grind. Kyle Forgeard — born July 12, 1994 in Mississauga, Ontario — launched the channel in 2010 alongside Jesse Sebastiani, then called NelkFilmz, while studying film at Toronto’s Ryerson University. Forgeard dropped out to chase the channel full-time. For years it was exactly what it looked like: escalating public pranks filmed on a student budget, the kind of content that racks up strikes as fast as views.

The breakout arrived in 2015 with the “Coke Prank on Cops,” a video that sailed past 40 million views and announced NELK as prank YouTube’s new heavyweight. The formula locked in from there: outrageous college-town pranks, party vlogs, and a rotating cast of Senders living the “Full Send” mantra — a philosophy that treats caution as a character flaw. The videos got them banned, demonetized, and bigger every single time.

The business pivot is where the real story starts. Demonetization — YouTube’s advertisers wanted nothing to do with the chaos — forced NELK to find another way to eat. The answer was already wearing the logo: Full Send merchandise. Limited drops sold out in minutes and, by the crew’s own telling, moved tens of millions of dollars in product. Forgeard has said his parents took out a six-figure mortgage on their house to fund an early merch run — the kind of bet that only makes sense if you know your audience will show up. They did.

Then came the seltzer. In June 2021, Forgeard launched Happy Dad hard seltzer with brothers John and Sam Shahidi, aiming NELK’s built-in distribution machine — some 7 million-plus subscribers and the most purchase-happy fanbase on YouTube — at the beverage aisle. The launch sold out its initial four-state run in under 48 hours with no traditional advertising at all. Happy Dad grew into a genuinely national brand, stocked in tens of thousands of stores, and turned a prank channel into a beverage company that traditional CPG executives study like game film.

The Full Send Podcast proved the range. Launched in 2021 and co-hosted with internet comedian Bob Menery, the show cracked the No. 2 spot on Spotify’s US podcast charts and landed guests traditional media couldn’t book: Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Mike Tyson, O.J. Simpson. The Trump interview in particular became a media event — a sitting former president choosing a prank crew’s podcast over every legacy outlet. Long-form, the Senders turned out to be genuinely good interviewers: curious, disarming, and unafraid to ask the dumb question.

The controversies never stopped the momentum — if anything, they fed it. Platform strikes, advertiser fights, and the endless debate over where pranks cross the line: NELK absorbed it all. The 2022 feud with Jimmy Kimmel, after the late-night host mocked the crew’s Mar-a-Lago visit in a monologue, ended with Forgeard calling Kimmel irrelevant and the Senders swarming his comments. Every clash reinforced the same lesson: the audience’s loyalty is the moat. Senders don’t just watch — they enlist.

The cast became characters in their own right. SteveWillDoIt (Stephen Deleonardis) turned his NELK run into his own massive following; Aaron “Steiny” Steinberg, Salim Sirur, and the rest of the rotating crew gave the channel a reality-show ensemble feel. The brand’s gravity kept pulling bigger names into orbit — athletes, rappers, and eventually presidential candidates all wanted a taste of the Full Send audience.

The next chapter is live. NELK brought the Full Send energy to Kick, joining the wave of top creators building on the streaming platform, while the podcast and the beverage business keep compounding. Fifteen years in, the operation that started with a camera and a dare is a diversified entertainment company — and it still runs on the same fuel: a group of friends willing to do what nobody else will, in front of everybody.

Why people watch: it’s the wildest party on YouTube with a business degree. Prank fans get the undisputed champs; business nerds get the best creator-economy case study of the decade — send it.

Previously covers the NELK Boys because the creator-to-conglomerate pipeline runs through them. Full send, always.

The Full Send ethos deserves its own chapter, because it’s the product. “Full Send” started as party-hard slang and hardened into a worldview: commit completely, apologize never, film everything. The merch turned the phrase into a uniform — hoodies, tees, and hats that function less like clothing and more like membership cards. Drop culture did the rest: limited runs, countdown timers, sold-out-in-minutes sellouts that trained the audience to buy first and think later. Supreme built the playbook for streetwear; NELK ran it for an audience that had never set foot in a boutique.

Happy Dad’s co-founders matter to the story. John and Sam Shahidi came from the digital-media world — Shots Studios, Lele Pons’ operation — and brought beverage-industry discipline to a fanbase most CPG brands would kill for. The bet was that loyalty converts better than advertising, and the numbers backed it: launch inventory gone in 48 hours, then a national rollout into tens of thousands of stores, then a permanent seat in the hard-seltzer wars against White Claw and Truly. UFC’s Nate Diaz came aboard as an endorser — the rare celebrity partnership that actually fits, because Diaz and NELK sell the same thing: beautiful violence, zero pretense.

The Full Send Podcast’s guest list reads like a fever dream of modern fame. The Donald Trump sit-down — a former president choosing a prank crew’s studio over every legacy outlet — pulled millions of views and a news cycle of its own. Elon Musk, Mike Tyson, O.J. Simpson, Andrew Tate, Dana White: the through-line isn’t ideology, it’s gravitational pull. The world’s most interviewed people keep saying yes because the room is fun, the questions are blunt, and the audience is enormous. In March 2022 the show hit No. 2 on Spotify’s US podcast charts — ahead of nearly every professional media operation on earth.

The politics are part of the text now. Outlets from the New York Times to Wikipedia have noted NELK’s drift into right-wing political promotion — the Trump interview, the Mar-a-Lago visits, the coded merch. Whether you read it as authentic belief or audience capture, it completed the brand’s transformation from apolitical party crew to cultural faction. The Senders skew young, male, and anti-institutional; NELK didn’t just reflect that audience, it helped consolidate it into a movement with a dress code.

The philanthropy complicates the caricature. In June 2021 the crew donated $100,000 to the reward fund for a fatal California freeway shooting — real money, real case, zero content angle. SteveWillDoIt’s viral generosity — $25,000, a job lead, and an apartment for a homeless man — became one of the channel’s most-watched arcs. COVID-era relief efforts and breast-cancer awareness campaigns round out a giving record that doesn’t fit the “chaos merchants” headline. The Senders take care of their own, and occasionally everybody else too.

The Kick era is the latest platform arbitrage. After years of fighting YouTube’s demonetization regime — the pranks that built the channel are exactly what advertisers flee — NELK took the Full Send energy to Kick, where looser rules and better splits favor creators of their scale. It’s the same move they’ve made for fifteen years: find the platform that wants them most, bring the audience, and let the old gatekeepers watch the numbers. The channel that started as NelkFilmz in a Mississauga bedroom now operates as Full Send Entertainment, a diversified company with beverage, media, and merchandise divisions — still fueled by the same dare.

The formula, stripped down, is deceptively smart. Beneath the chaos is a masterclass in audience building: authenticity as strategy, controversy as marketing, and a brand that means something to the people wearing it. Kyle Forgeard — Forbes 30 Under 30, class of 2022 — didn’t just build a channel; he built a distribution engine disguised as a prank crew, then pointed it at every industry that would have him. The pranks were the foundation. The empire was the point.