The first video Brandon Pleshek ever posted to TikTok was a rug being vacuumed. No narration, no hook, no strategy. It got 30,000 views in a day, and he thought the platform was broken.

“I was like, ‘This is fake. This is some sort of bug,’” Brandon recalls. “‘What happened? What’s broken on the platform?’”

Nothing was broken. The third-generation professional janitor had stumbled onto something real: a massive, underserved audience that had no idea how to clean their homes and desperately wanted someone to show them. 

Five years later, Brandon runs Clean That Up, a multi-platform creator business with more than four million followers across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube combined, a newsletter approaching 17,000 subscribers, and an annual tentpole campaign, the “Spring Cleaning Spree,” that generated 70 million views and $300,000 in monthly sales in 2025 alone.

“I always say I teach people how to clean on the internet,” Brandon says.

The Business Instinct That Came Before the Camera

Brandon did not come to content creation looking for a new identity. He came looking for a wave.

He had been posting satisfying cleaning clips to Reddit’s power washing communities for years before TikTok existed. When COVID-19 shut down both the residential and commercial sides of his cleaning business in early 2020, he was stuck at home with decades of professional knowledge and a phone full of footage nobody had seen. He posted. The rest accelerated quickly.

What drove his growth in the beginning was not the content itself but the frame he put around it. He branded the account as “Clean That Up” rather than his local business name. “If a brand wanted to partner with me, they’re not really going to partner with a local business,” he explains. “But they would partner with someone that’s more of a creator or influencer on the internet.” 

That distinction, made before he had 1,000 followers, shaped everything that followed.

Growing up in an entrepreneurial household reinforced the instinct. His father ran the cleaning business while building a parallel songwriting career, placing songs with recording artists on the side. “Watching that side hustle of his, and how he navigated that, gave me the path to say I could do that too,” Brandon says.

The Pillowcase Moment

Brandon’s first real proof-of-concept came at 4 p.m., in his childhood bedroom. He and his wife had sold their house during the pandemic and were temporarily living with his parents. He filmed six seconds of his grandmother’s old trick for cleaning ceiling fan blades with a pillowcase, recorded the voiceover from a closet with a blanket over his head, posted it, and went to eat dinner with his family.

“I came back like an hour later, and I had just hundreds and hundreds of notifications,” Brandon says. “The video blew up instantly.” By his account, the video had accumulated between 250,000 and 500,000 views within the hour.

Brandon has remade it several times since, noting that it still performs. The reason, he says, is as much about conflict as it is about utility. “Some people love it. Other people are like, ‘That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen.’ But engagement, either positive or negative, is usually a net positive.”

Positivity as Strategy

Cleaning content has a natural tone problem. The task is universal, and almost nobody enjoys it. Brandon made a choice to be the exception, betting that audiences needed someone who could make the work feel slightly less miserable rather than someone who confirmed how much it sucked.

“If you have a positive attitude with cleaning specifically, that’s really going to help attract people to you,” he says. 

The proof accumulates in his phone. He keeps a folder of screenshots from viewers who tell him he changed how they feel about keeping their homes clean. “We get comments every single day. Brandon, I don’t know how you did this, but you made cleaning somewhat enjoyable for me. That fills my cup 100%.”

Building the ‘Spring Cleaning Spree’

The Spree did not begin as a campaign. It began as a dare Brandon issued himself: 30 videos in 30 days, all spring cleaning. “The joke is that I had no idea what I was getting myself into,” he says. 

The first year was a production grind. Viewers loved it and immediately asked for a checklist. Year two had one, but Brandon only showed it on screen rather than making it downloadable. “Looking back on it, why wouldn’t I make that available for people?” Year three brought a free digital download. Year four added a physical book, ordered in a run of 500 copies, which he expected to sit in a warehouse. “Within the first two days, we sold out of that first batch instantly.”

By 2025, according to Brandon, the campaign had produced 70 million video views, $300,000 in monthly sales, a 100% sell-through rate, and the number-one Google SEO ranking for “Spring Cleaning Spree.” 

He credits the commercial results to what he calls a reciprocity loop. “When you give away a ton of free information, your audience is compelled to want to give back,” he says. The digital checklist stays free permanently. “I feel very strongly that cleaning should not be gate-kept behind a paywall. The more that I give away for free, the more they will come back.”

Long-Term Partnerships Over One-Off Deals

Early in his creator career, Brandon identified the core volatility problem and built a structural fix. Rather than chasing one-off brand deals, he pitched brands on six-, nine-, and twelve-month contracts. 

“The hardest thing as a creator is you can have one month where you’re making good money, and then for two months you make nothing,” he says. Locking in longer terms gave him a revenue runway to invest back into the business.

The philosophy mirrors the family cleaning company. His grandparents’ clients have stayed for over 40 years. “You take care of others, they’ll take care of you,” Brandon says. “In Influencer Marketing, if you take care of me, I’ll make a good video and do my best. That will take care of you.” 

One of the brands he signed in those early days, when he had fewer than 50,000 followers, is still a partner now at 6 million. He is equally deliberate about fit. “If I can teach you a skill and show you a product at the same time, that’s a 10 out of 10.”

What Comes Next

Brandon’s most consequential long-term move is the quietest: building infrastructure that does not depend on any single platform. His newsletter has already surpassed its annual subscriber target. 

His website runs SEO-optimized content. He monitors Google Trends to identify search demand before producing videos. “If you search for how to clean something, my goal is that you see my face,” he says.

The team is intentionally small: an editor who grew into the head role from the beginning, a head of production, an SEO-focused web developer, and his father, who co-writes the newsletter. “I’m not worried about growing the business to be this insane monolith of cleaning media,” Brandon says. “If we can continue helping as many people as possible, the rest will be taken care of.”

That philosophy, borrowed from the same family business that sent him to clean offices as a teenager, is what he returns to when the platform anxiety creeps in.

“Keep having fun. There are a lot of ups and downs, a lot of uncertainties, and you can get really muddied down in the worry. If you’re super worried, your videos are not going to be as good. The energy you’re putting into the videos is not going to be as good.”

For anyone starting out, the advice is simpler still.

“Throw as much spaghetti at the wall as possible and see what sticks. The first year is going to suck. Do not go back and watch my first year of videos. But man, did they help me learn so much to get to where I am today.”

Brandon Pleshek is managed by The Digital Dept. 

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