Before the client list, the team, and the billion+ views, Clipstar’s founder had an inbox and a very long list of strangers.
That founder is Atreyu Amis, an Ottawa teenager who now leads Clipstar, a company that brings clipping to major brands, organizations, and even politicians. He launched it a little over a year ago after spotting a gap: big companies, organizations, and governments weren’t using clipping to market themselves. He says the company has produced promotional content for Amazon Prime shows and movies and for MPs from different political parties, and has generated more than a billion views in 2026 alone. His entrepreneurial streak started well before any of that: at 12, he began a window-cleaning business, going door to door.
“We started at the beginning of 2025, and for probably the first six months it was just me. I was literally DMing every person I could,” he says. “In the beginning I was doing about 200 emails manually a day and a couple hundred Instagram DMs.” The payoff came at 30,000 feet. “I remember I was on a flight to Finland when we booked our first client. It was a $500 test, and I was so happy because it proved there was demand for what I was building.”
To understand what he built, you first need to understand clipping. Clipping means taking long-form content and redistributing it as short clips across a large number of independent social accounts, with the people posting them paid according to the views they generate. A brand or its agency supplies approved footage, and each clipper cuts and posts their own version on TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts.
Amis thought that this creator-world tactic belonged in much bigger rooms. “I was really connected with influencers and creators, so I saw how they were using short-form content to push their brand and, in most cases, sell products or clothing,” said Amis. “And I thought, we’ve got to bring this to bigger companies and bigger industries.”
It started small, with influencers, then Clipstar landed its first political client, the Parliament of Canada. The pattern repeated: “In every industry we’d land a small fish, use them as a case study, and build.” The Amis’ own first case study was a musician friend. Now the case studies are bigger. “Today, as of yesterday, we just signed with Sony Music, and we’re working with Amazon Prime and Apple TV.”
The operation behind it is lean, but mighty. “Now we’re a team of six or so. We’re sending 200,000 emails a month and about 100,000 Instagram DMs a month.”
Pitching executives is a different game when you are a teenager. “When you’re 15, 16, 17, no one really takes you seriously, but I always used that as an advantage,” he says. His pitch is simple: “You can hire a 60-year-old to do your marketing, who’s learning it from AI and some random book, or you can hire the guy who grew up in it for the last 10 years.”
These days, Amis adds, numbers do the arguing. “Age doesn’t become a bottleneck once we can show we’ve done about a billion views this year.”
Balance was never the plan. “I went to Ashbury for high school, and I was locked in on work and building things throughout. I had a cleaning company that scaled, and we ended up with, I think, 12 employees doing cleaning and windows and stuff.” The drive, he says, has no origin story. “I just could never imagine being normal or average, not in a disrespectful way.”
The sacrifices were real. “The biggest sacrifice was definitely the normal things you do growing up that I didn’t do,” said Amis. One trade was easy to justify: “Last Halloween a bunch of friends invited me out, and we were working on [Clipstar], so we ended up going to Toronto.” While his friends were partying, Amis was making deals and building Clipstar.
Success also cost him friendships. “When we started going crazy, there was a lot of jealousy, and I don’t talk with some people now. But it is what it is.”
As clipping grows, so does the temptation to fake it. Amis’ answer is technology. “So we built tech around that, and I think that’s the angle that lets us overcome the saturation. For us it’s about making sure we get people’s content in front of real people.”
That includes aiming views geographically. “Because we have so many pages and so many clippers, we can guarantee 75 per cent of views to a specific city if needed.” For one of Toronto’s mayoral candidates, the promise was concrete: “We’re going to make sure 75 per cent of the views you’re paying for are in Toronto.”
Where does he see it going? “Over the next 24 months, we’re going to see companies that have never done social media marketing enter it through clipping, and we already see it today,” Amis continues. “For example, Louis Vuitton wants to clip people wearing their brand. All they did before was paid ads, and now they want to do it organically.”
Many founders brag about leaving school. Amis rejects that. “Most founders, I feel, talk about dropping out of high school or university, like it’s cool. I was always the opposite. I think education is still quite important.” After deferring from his first university program, he has a different plan: “I think I’m going to do a business program.”
Strangely, the hustle looks the same as it did years ago. “When I was young, I’d sell cookies, like a lemonade stand but with cookies,” said Amis. “I don’t know why, but if there was a way to make money or turn something into a business, I always had that thought.”
The boy who sold cookies became the kid knocking on doors with a window-cleaning business, and then the founder landing Sony Music. The products changed, but the instinct didn’t. “Even at six, seven, eight years old, if I saw a sign for marketing, I knew what they were doing,” said Amis. “I was always kind of an opportunist from a very young age.” He noticed where the attention was going before most people did, and he built a company there
Header image: 18-year-old Atreyu Amis, founder of Clipstar. (Photo Courtesy of Atreyu Amis)
