Jacob Nothnagel was born in the wrong body.

A 23-year old Kansas City man, Jacob recently transitioned from female to male. This journey can be difficult and isolating, but Jacob found support through the group of transgender men who met at a local gym. A gym he discovered using Google. Having recently undergone top surgery, Jacob was preparing to head back to the gym in hopes of continuing his transition.

This documentary was created as part of Google’s My Business' "Find Your People" campaign, celebrating small businesses and the communities they bring together.

The film was released online via YouTube during LGBT Pride Month, along with an accompanying blog post, to make Google’s support clear and to launch their Pride activities across the world. We hit a nerve with more than a million views within days of releasing the blog post, and huge press interest.

When it was later announced that Caitlyn Jenner would be receiving the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at the ESPYs, we saw an opportunity to take the lead in supporting the transgender community in this key moment of recognition. We took over the YouTube masthead for the day of the awards ceremony and aired the full 2:30 film during the broadcast in the moment before Jenner took the stage to accept her award. The true heroes of the story, Hailee and Jacob, represented Google in person at the awards ceremony, and tweeted out their support to transgender individuals everywhere.

Over 6.6 million viewers watched Jacob’s story during the ESPYs (rated TV HH 4.6) as Jenner prepared to take the stage. The film garnered national press attention in The Wall Street Journal, TIME, the Daily Mail, and others, with articles in Adweek and USA Today being shared 40,000+ times on social media. Since launch, the video has amassed nearly 1.5 million views on YouTube, and over 200K more across the web.

The true success of the film was to promote conversation across the web. Using the film’s hashtag #HeresToCourage, social media users pushed the spot to over 150 million total impressions across social media. The film inspired spirited debate, ands also hope and excitement for the future. One viewer wrote, “Something tells me that in 2016, we won’t see trans suicide rates be at the 40% we once saw them at. Google in a way is inadvertently saving lives.”