Alumni profile: John Fish, A.B. '21

John Fish, A.B. '21, loved the crawl space under the stairs to his basement at his family home in Ontario, Canada. He’d bring in pillows and blankets, curl up and tuck into a new book, exploring C.S. Lewis’s world of Narnia on one day – his middle name, Aslan, refers to the magical lion at the center of the Narnia series – and the high-tech spy life of Eoin Colfer’s “Artemis Fowl” series on another day. Tucked away under the basement stairs, Fish fell in love with books, reading and long-form storytelling.

“This feeling that the world was full of magic, and there’s so much that can be done, I keep chasing that feeling, which is what a good book does,” Fish said.

That love for storytelling and books propelled Fish through Harvard, where he concentrated in computer science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). He’s now a successful YouTube content creator, with over 900,000 subscribers and videos whose view counts frequently hit six digits. He’s also the founder of Bookshelved, a social media platform centered around books. The app currently has tens of thousands of users.

“I wanted a place where I could talk to people about books,” he said. “I wanted to actually have connections and conversations about the medium.”

Fish had already begun creating YouTube content before he got into Harvard, but a 2017 video entitled “How I Got into Harvard” blew up and has since garnered over 750,000 views. Seeing vlogging as another form of long-form storytelling like books, Fish decided to document his time at Harvard.

“Harvard benefitted me more than any other decision I’ve ever made in my life,” he said. “My life completely changed. I got this career out of it, learned all of these amazing technical skills and got to run on the track team. It was just a very vibrant period of life for me that I loved.”

Interested in coding and computers from a young age, Fish quickly decided on computer science as a concentration, with a secondary in Mind Brain Behavior. During his first year, he helped produce videos for the Dean of Students Office.

“I got a lot better at math through computer science,” he said. “Computer science courses help you think really clearly, and that helps you learn how to build products much better. I got a lot better at the actual process of building following graduation through real-world experience at start-ups. But what enabled me to be able to do that type of learning and thinking were the courses I took at SEAS.”

As a national-medal-winning high school runner, it was athletics that brought Fish to Harvard from Toronto. 

“The girl I was dating at the time was also a really good runner,” he said. “She needed to take her SATs, because she was 100 percent going to run at a Division 1 school in America. It was winter in Canada, and I decided since she was studying for the SATS, I’d study with her and take the test as well. It just aligned that I suddenly had a test score and race time that fit the profile of an Ivy League.”

Many of Fish’s YouTube vlogs centered around books, and by his sophomore year at Harvard he was already imagining something like Bookshelved. He wasn’t satisfied with the book-based social media platforms that were already available, because too many of them relied on lists and ratings, which he described as a “single-player experience masquerading as a social network.”

“For a lot of people, their motive to use these apps is to track how many books they’ve read and give them ratings,” he said. “That’s super-valuable, but what I didn’t love about it was people were asking about it as a place to connect, and it didn’t feel like a place to connect for me.”

About a year after graduating, Fish began to build Bookshelved in earnest. While the platform offers the ability to track one’s book, similar to other book-based social media, it also organizes monthly book clubs, in which users all purchase the same book, read it and engage in online discussions and conversations.

“That for me has been super rewarding, in that I’ve gotten to talk to very smart people about books I wouldn’t have otherwise,” he said.

Fish is able to support himself purely off revenue from his YouTube videos and Bookshelved. It’s a level of success many content creators wish for, but very few achieve.

“You have to chase what gives you energy, and I think that’s a really critical thing that people miss,” he said. “When they’re starting out, a lot of people like the idea of being a YouTuber, but the actual day-to-day work of filming, editing and posting content is not exciting to them. So maybe they’ll have this excitement for the first few videos that they post, but then that goes away, and suddenly they’re stuck with the day-to-day slog, and they stop posting. If it’s an exciting idea for you like this was for me, try and make a video. You don’t have to think about it like a full-time gig. Have fun with it, post a video, and if you enjoyed the process, make another.”