Growing up as the son of Boost Juice founders Janine and Jeff Allis came with advantages. But Riley Allis has taken a different route, turning YouTube fame into a multimillion-dollar business portfolio.
At 21, Riley Allis had a choice. He could help his family build a frozen-yoghurt business that would eventually become a chain of more than 50 stores reportedly valued at close to $2 billion. Or he could stay in his bedroom making YouTube videos about Warhammer.
He chose Warhammer.
And sure, there are moments when he wonders if he made the right call, but not many.
Five years later, that decision has left the son of Boost Juice founders Janine and Jeff Allis with 700,000 YouTube subscribers, a 3D-printing business doing about $2 million in annual revenue and a new supplements company that he says generated $3 million in its first year.
Now 27, Allis is trying to turn the audience he built as a creator into something that doesn’t depend on his face being on a screen.
For someone who grew up in one of Australia’s most successful entrepreneurial families, it’s an unusual path. But if he had to forge it by talking about little plastic soldiers on the internet, then so be it.
1,000 burning suns
Riley Allis begins with the misconceptions: “If you come from a rich family, people think you must be an entitled wanker that gets everything handed to them,” he says, before Forbes Australia has had a chance to ask a single question.
“Mum and Dad obviously came from nothing, both were broke for the majority of their life … So they were really big on making sure me and my siblings didn’t go down that trust-fund path. I’d have to really kick up a fuss to get 20 bucks to buy pizza.”
What else did they do to keep him grounded?
“They didn’t take shit. If you talked back, you were f…ed. They would just bring the power of a vengeful God upon you, the power of a thousand burning suns … and we saw how hard they worked. They were getting home at 8 p.m. every night. So we were half raised by my grandparents. No one ever really took anything for granted.”
Having said that, he gets why people have those misconceptions. He has often been in the room with other children of the well-off. “It’s very jarring … chatting to these guys that were playing with daddy’s Amex at 16 years old, and they are just the most insufferable people.”
Allis finished Year 12 and went straight into the family company, Retail Zoo (30% owned by the Allises at that time, incorporating Boost Juice, Betty’s Burgers, Salsa’s Fresh Mex Grill, and Cibo Espresso). “I didn’t want to go to uni because I was sick of the idea of doing work that just gets put into a shredder. I wanted to do something that had its own impact, whether small or large.”
Blowing up
As an intern on the digital side of the business, he was “getting paid basically slave labour,” but he thought he’d give YouTube a try. In his spare time, he started a channel focused on the game Warhammer (think knights riding dragons shooting machine guns), did about 60 videos and had about 70 subscribers when he figured it was going nowhere.
He’d been retired from that career for about three months when he got an email from YouTube congratulating him on hitting 1,000 subscribers.
“I was like, ‘What the hell?’” One of the last videos he’d done was up to 100,000 views. So he stayed up till 3 a.m. making the follow-up. That blew up too.
“Mum and Dad didn’t go to uni … But if you have the tenacity and grit and the willingness to eat a bit of shit, then you can do almost anything.”
Riley Allis
Over the next three years, he grew the channel to 50,000 subscribers. Aged 21, he decided to go all in on his channel. “My parents were like, ‘That’s a bit random, but you do you.’”
COVID-19 struck two months later and his subscribers jumped to 150,000. “My income quadrupled year on year. And then, I mean, we’ve just celebrated 700,000 subscribers on YouTube, and then I’ve been able to turn that into this marketing vehicle for other companies I’ve founded.”
To be or not to be… in yoghurt
In 2020, the Allis family bought the Yo-Chi chain out of voluntary administration following the collapse of chef George Calombaris’s MAdE Establishment group. It consisted of just four shops.
Reports at the time said it was Riley and his older brother Oliver who’d bought it, though it was the Allis family. Riley says he was only involved during the initial transition. He had to choose between Yo-Chi and his own ambitions.
He chose to stick with YouTube. “The jury’s still out on whether that was the right decision.” Part of his decision-making process was the idea of breaking away from his mum’s shadow. “It’s very me. I love it. And Mum has no idea about YouTube, e-commerce, manufacturing. Food retail, she’s a jet. But making a YouTube video? She’d be as handy as a Neanderthal. It was cool kind of striking out on my own.
“Even when my family left Melbourne to go to Sydney, I was the only family member that stayed in Melbourne just because it was more my speed.”
Oliver Allis has grown Yo-Chi into a cult that now has more than 50 stores, with sales on track, it says, to hit $316 million this financial year. The Allis family still owns 74% of the company, whose valuation is reportedly closing on $2 billion.
Riley says his YouTube channel, Majorkill, makes more than $1 million a year. Only a part of that is from ads. One of his more profitable sponsors is a skincare company. Which makes sense when you think about his teen audience and acne.
His 3D-printing business, Major Minis, employs eight people and turns over about $2 million. He also produces an annual calendar with adult entertainers in Warhammer costumes. “Sold like hot cakes,” he told the Get Harder podcast. “Think about the demographic. 99% dudes.”
And think about the enterprise required. He had to find cosplay artists in the Philippines to make the outfits, ship the costumes to Australia, then explain to a bunch of Melbourne adult entertainers what he needed them to do. The most expensive part was then getting graphic artists to place the scantily clad models into the Warhammer world.
It sells about $300,000 worth a year. “They’re actually pretty tasteful,” he told Get Harder.
But he’d been doing it since he was 18 and knew he was just an algorithm update away from potential ruination. And the YouTube business was dependent on him. He had to be on camera all the time, pumping out content. Every time he went on holidays, the channel suffered.
“I want to move on to my next thing, but I can’t just like drop this cash cow and then zero myself out. So I was like, okay, what’s something else I’m really passionate about that doesn’t need my name and face plastered over it to be successful?”
He contemplated a peptide clinic, but the rules made that prohibitive.
All the while, his own testosterone numbers weren’t great. He was into his fitness and jiu-jitsu. He paid attention to such things. He didn’t want to be at the bottom of the reference range. “My doctor’s like, ‘You’re in range, you’re fine.’ I’m like, ‘Mate, I’m exhausted all the time, have to nap every day. I’m addicted to caffeine. That’s bullshit.’”
Allis was aware that young men going onto testosterone supplements slowed the body’s natural production of the hormone. “Your balls will shrivel up because they don’t need natural production anymore.”
So he dabbled in multiple herbal supplements with the idea that it was better to support the body’s own production of testosterone than flood it with the artificial stuff. His numbers rose from 300 nmol/L to 450.
Supplements seemed a more comfortable path. He loved the biohacking scene, but thought the supplement industry was a mess.
“There’s a lot of science behind it, but there’s a lot of scams behind it, too,” he says. “People using ingredients that don’t work or overpromising, or even the right ingredients but the wrong standardisation.”
Allis and his best mate, Joe Sinclair, launched NattyPLUS in 2025. The idea was to identify ingredients with clinical evidence behind them, use the correct standardisations and combine complementary ingredients into “hero stacks”.
“Most supplements are bull crap,” he says. “And if you do create a really good supplement regime, you end up taking about 30 capsules.”
Testosterone was an obvious place to start because he had been the customer himself. But they also brought in products targeting liver health, blood sugar, general nutrition and sleep.
YouTube gave him an audience to launch it without spending heavily on advertising or giving away equity to a celebrity influencer. “I could just be my own ambassador,” he says.
The first month brought in about $100,000 in sales, he says, before dropping to $30,000 the following month, once the launch promotion ended. Since then, he says, the business has grown rapidly.
NattyPLUS generated about $3 million in revenue in its first year, according to Allis, and he expects to have a $1-million month before Black Friday this year.
He’s trying to automate his manufacturing business so that it can run in the background, and he’ll keep ticking the YouTube along. “But NattyPLUS is my thing that can go to the moon.”
And so when people see the car he drives, the house he lives in, they presume it’s all been handed to him, but he got none of it from his parents, he says.
What he did get from them was role models. “Their success and their grit showed me that the horizon was actually quite far and there was a lot you could achieve if you put your mind to it.
“Mum and Dad didn’t go to uni. They’re not the most book-smart people. Mum forgets the name of every character in every TV show ever. But if you have the tenacity and grit and the willingness to eat a bit of shit, then you can do almost anything.”
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