Around 2012 or 2013, Courtney Adanna was getting made fun of for having a YouTube channel. She was in middle school, years away from the term “Creator Economy” meaning anything to anyone, and the internet was not yet something most people took seriously as a livelihood. She kept posting anyway.

Today, nearly five million YouTube subscribers, over 1.5 million TikTok followers, and more than 400,000 Instagram followers later, Courtney is known as “Courtreezy”: a Nigerian-American creator whose reaction videos, cultural commentary, and unfiltered personality have built one of the more devoted fan communities on the platform. That community has a name, the Reezys, and this summer, it has a clothing brand, Reeze. 

“I am so blessed and grateful to have that,” she says of walking into a product launch with a built-in customer base. “To know that there are millions of people that are tuning in every single time I post something, it does warm my heart to know, like, wow, 2012 Courtney would have never imagined this type of reality.”

Starting Before Anyone Cared

Courtney started making videos with her best friend because they were consumed by watching them, two kids who spent enough time online that producing content felt like the natural next step. The platform carried no cultural weight or commercial promise at the time. “People were not really caring about social media as much as they do today,” she says.

The early years attracted ridicule. People around her made fun of her for having a channel. She kept going regardless. “I really wanted to be a YouTuber,” she says. “It was just so ingrained in me.” 

What delayed the full-time transition for years was school. Courtney kept content as a secondary pursuit through high school and college, even advancing through nursing school applications by 2019. Then the pandemic cleared her schedule entirely, and she gave the channel everything she had.

The Video That Changed the Count

The video that catapulted Courtney into a different category of growth covered a specific cultural moment: the wave of TikTokers being canceled for using the N-word, and the apology videos that followed.

“I was like, ‘Oh, I’ll rate the videos, the apology videos, because I’m black, whatever,’” she says. She posted it and watched her subscriber count move in numbers she had not seen before. “I gained, I believe, almost 300,000 subscribers in a month.”

RATING TIK TOKERS N WORD APOLOGY VIDEOS because im black. 

The growth did not produce uncomplicated excitement. Courtney describes the weeks after as disorienting. “I started to get very scared and very self-conscious and kind of doubting myself,” she says. “If I’m gaining this many subscribers, tomorrow they might forget about me, tomorrow they might decide maybe that was just a moment.”

She posted through the fear. Momentum held, around 100,000 new subscribers per month after the initial spike. By the time she told her Nigerian parents she was leaving nursing school applications behind, she had months of evidence. They gave her a year to prove it. That was six years ago.

Reaction by Instinct

Reaction content is a crowded format on YouTube. Courtney’s version works, she argues, because of something she cannot manufacture.

“I am genuinely a dramatic person. I get it from my mom. My entire family actually is extremely dramatic. We’re Nigerian, so we’re also very expressive,” she says. That expressiveness creates a specific viewing dynamic. “When watching my reaction videos, it feels like you’re watching it with a friend because I’m saying everything that you’re probably thinking.”

The same quality governs her selection process. She does not reverse-engineer trends or optimize for the algorithm. She scrolls her own phone, finds what catches her attention, and films what comes naturally. Content that moves across internet subcultures this way reads as curious rather than calculated. The audience, she believes, can feel the difference.

Photo credit: Amy Maldonado

What the Reezies Actually Need

The Reezys did not name themselves. Courtney decided the community needed an identity, chose one, and it took. “I think maybe I did shape it in a certain way, but I don’t think it was intentional,” she says. “It just ended up being the way it is.”

What the Reezys share, more than any demographic detail, is a particular use case for her content: relief. “I think the Reezys look at social media and even my YouTube videos as a place to unwind and relax and, you know, chill with a friend,” she says. That mirrors Courtney’s own original reasons for starting. In school, she describes herself as quieter, more reserved. On camera, she was exactly herself. The overlap between what she needed and what her audience needed is where the community lives.

The clothing line extends that emotional logic. Reeze is colorful, direct, and built around a specific message. One of the pieces carries the phrase “hot in real life,” a label that captures the brand’s central purpose. “I want everyone who puts it on to feel their most confident and to feel like they’re the hottest in the room,” she says.

As Courtney has grown, the Reezys have grown alongside her. “There are people that’ve been watching me since 2020, and 2020 me versus 2026 me today is two different people, but it’s still the same person watching my video,” she says. Sustaining that over time requires the one thing she has found hardest: consistency. “That’s something that I actually have struggled with for many years,” she says. 

What Brands Miss, and What She Now Knows

Courtney’s critique of how brands approach creators has always been pointed. Operating her own product line has made it more precise.

Photo credit: Amy Maldonado

“Brands sometimes don’t trust the creator’s vision enough,” she says. The typical failure involves a brand commissioning the creator’s concept, then reworking it until the audience relationship is compromised. “A brand will come and ask me to think of the concept or think of an idea, and then they’ll rework it to be the way that is brand-friendly,” she says. “But they don’t realize that it’s my audience that’s going to watch it, and I know my audience best,” she adds. 

And creators, she argues, have an advantage brands consistently underestimate. “We understand our audience the most.”

Her threshold for partnerships is categorical. “My audience’s trust is everything,” she says. “If I lose that, I don’t have anything after that.” Running Reeze has produced the other side of that equation in practice. Managing customer feedback, logistics, and the expectations of people who already believe in her has introduced demands she did not anticipate. “I didn’t realize how much work it’ll be,” she says. 

That experience now informs how she reads brand conversations from the opposite direction.

When the Dream Catches Up to the Vision

Courtney is not a person who waits for a decisive signal to scale. There is always a next idea, and a next one after that.

“I am just a dreamer. If I hit one goal, I’m thinking about the next goal and the next goal,” she says. For years, that ambition ran ahead of her infrastructure. She edited her own videos, managed every element of her channel alone, and absorbed the ceiling that comes from doing everything yourself. 

The team she has built this year, with an editor, video support, and filmmakers available for larger productions, has finally closed that gap. “I’ve hired a lot more people. I have a lot more people on my team,” she says.

The Reeze clothing brand is the most visible expression of that shift. Production ambitions are expanding alongside it. And when the Reezys eventually look back at this chapter, Courtney knows what she wants them to take from it.

“I want them to say that I stood up for people who have big dreams and want to achieve really massive things in life, even when they have people around them who are telling them no, and that their dream won’t be a reality. You need to keep on going. You never know what could happen to you next.”

Cover photo credit: Ernest Pierre

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