Nigel Braun (NileRed)

Nigel Braun is a chemist, and a popular YouTuber.

He has more than 5.8M subscribers on his YouTube channel, ‘NileRed.’

Introduction-

Nigel Braun was born on 7 September in Montreal, Canada and grew up here.

His younger brother, Corey Braun, works for one of Nigel’s YouTube channels.

Love for chemistry-

When Nigel first started learning chemistry, he neither hated it nor loved it but was indifferent towards it as he didn’t know any applications of chemistry.

But later as he learned the applications of chemistry and started doing his own personal projects, he fell in love with chemistry.

Experimenting since a young age-

Since 8, Nigel has been doing experiments on his own.

He did his first experiment by extracting capsaicin and capsaicinoids from hot chili peppers and ghost peppers.

Later, Nigel did zinc plating and tried to make thermite.

All these experiments intensified his love for chemistry.

Even before starting filming himself doing experiments and even before starting his YouTube channel, Nigel did a lot of experiments and also repetitively did many experiments.

Education-

In 2010, Nigel joined McGill University in Montreal, Canada to study for a B.Sc. in Biochemistry.

He graduated in 2014 with a grade of 3.51.

Nigel did a minor in pharmacology but was very interested in applied chemistry.

While studying here, he worked as a Chemistry Laboratory Assistant, Undergraduate TA and Organic Laboratory Technician.

Later, Nigel also worked as a Teaching Assistant for organic chemistry.

In 2015, he started studying for his master’s degree but as he wasn’t interested in his research and had no intentions of choosing academic research as a career, he dropped out from his master’s in the mid-2015.

‘NileRed’-

In early 2014, while working as an organic laboratory technician, Nigel was allowed to work on a few small projects and he decided to document them.

At that time, he wanted to document his projects only for his personal purposes and had no intention to share it publicly.

But in March 2014, Nigel decided to share them with the world through YouTube.

So, on 11 March 2014, he started his first YouTube channel, ‘NileRed‘ and started publishing science experiment videos onto it and soon, he started receiving positive feedback from people.

Working from a garage-

In 2015, as Nigel wasn’t able to film his projects in the research labs of his university, he decided to set up a lab at his home and start filming there.

He chose to work from his parents’ garage and here, he initially struggled to procure even the basic chemicals and glassware.

The garage was very confined and Nigel used to film all his projects on a single cluttered table.

Becoming a full-time YouTuber-

After dropping out from his master’s in 2015, Nigel was clueless about his future course.

During that time, even though he loved creating YouTube videos and teaching science through them, his channel wasn’t financially viable, as he was earning around $6 per day.

So, Nigel started studying a business course but later, he dropped out.

He decided to dedicate a full year to his YouTube channel as he hoped that this would grow his channel to the point that it could be financially viable.

Working hard-

In early 2016, Nigel opened a Patreon page and started accepting donations.

Thanks to Patreon, for the first time, he started earning profits on his YouTube videos and prior to this, he was losing money by creating videos.

At this point of time, Nigel became a full-time YouTuber.

Soon, he became popular and his videos started getting shared on social media platforms like Reddit, etc. and by the end of 2016, he crossed 100k subscribers on his NileRed YouTube channel.

In early 2017, Nigel became sufficiently financially stable through creating YouTube videos and this asserted his confidence in choosing YouTube as a career.

Thanks to this realisation, he started working harder on his videos and greatly improved the quality of his videos and also invested more money and time into them.

Nigel improved the script of his videos and also his video editing skills and started purchasing more equipment and chemicals.

He even shifted to a roomy rented space to conduct his lab experiments and to film his videos.

Here, Nigel along with his father built their new lab.

A successful YouTuber-

As of January 2024, he has 5.87M subscribers on ‘NileRed’ YouTube channel.

He has four other YouTube channels namely, ‘NileBlue,’ ‘NileRed Shorts,’ ‘NileRed Extra,’ and ‘NileRed en Español.’

As of January 2024, Nigel has 1.93M subscribers on NileBlue, 4.71M subscribers on NileRed Shorts, 861K followers on Instagram (nile.red), 1.8M followers on NileRed Facebook page, and 114K followers on Twitter.

He earns through a variety of sources like advertisements on his YouTube videos, receiving donations on Patreon, selling merchandise, receiving sponsorships.

Nigel uses a couple of Panasonic Lumix GH5 cameras to shoot his videos.

He has a team consisting of his younger brother and a childhood friend to help him out with his YouTube channels.

Nigel has a website.

His other interests-

Apart from chemistry, Nigel is interested in pharmacology and biochemistry.

In college, he mainly studied pharmacology and biochemistry and only studied chemistry as a prerequisite.

Only after graduating, Nigel studied chemistry extensively.

His other interests are photography and traveling.

Nigel lives in Quebec, Montréal, Canada.

So, how are you inspired by the success story of Nigel Braun?

Share with me in the comment section below.