Hello! I’m in my early 20s, and in the last 12 months made ~500k from my YouTube business. I thought this would be an interesting story and I have big plans for the business over the next 5 years so figured I should write updates on how it’s going, problems I run into, maybe you guys can help me get rid of constraints and false beliefs I have faster. I’m also going to be intentionally vague about some details to avoid people figuring out who I am, but all the information will still be accurate.
I was living with my parents after COVID hit and college went online, and I made a TikTok gaming account hoping maybe I would be able to make enough money to not go back to college. The TikTok account gained some traction and I knew early on I needed to get the viewers to YouTube if I wanted a chance to make any money, so I came up with a clever way of converting those TikTok viewers to my YouTube channel (which only had my reuploaded TikToks at the time). When I went viral again on TikTok, I got my first 10k or so YouTube subscribers, great. At the time I had an outdated understanding of how YouTube worked, I figured I needed to already have an audience if I wanted to grow because I thought YouTube only promoted videos with a lot of views, that’s obviously not true as I prove a couple times later on, but starting out I had no idea what I was doing and my videos were terrible, so any time I made a YouTube video I had to promote it with TikTok in order for it to do well. The YouTube videos are the product and the TikToks are the ads, and at this point I had a good understanding of how to make an ad, but I didn’t understand how to make a good product. The views were averaging around $50 a day, but with every new YouTube video I uploaded the views would be lower than the previous video unless I supplemented it with a TikTok. This is the equivalent of running ads on a shit product, it works alright for a bit but the ads quickly reach as many people as they can profitably reach, so the two options are to either make different ads to reach more people or to improve the product. For a couple months I kept just making more ads and didn’t bother improving the product, and that made me some more money, at this point I was averaging $3k a month, but of course it’s not scalable when the product is shit. I was learning what was needed to go viral on TikTok though, and at this point I had one TikTok really blow up. It got me over 100k YouTube subscribers on its own, and after seeing the YouTube views decline video after video despite getting lots of traffic from promoting them on TikTok, I finally understood that I just needed to make better YouTube videos. This was the most important decision I’ve made so far in my entrepreneurial career.
The next season of my life was all about improving the product (YouTube videos). I had heard MrBeast say many times that to do well on YouTube you need to just make better videos, but for some reason it never really clicked until this point. I went back to all the videos I had made up to this point and studied them. I would try to figure out why viewers clicked off, then try to not make the same mistake again. After learning a lot, I got back to making videos, and this time I tried as hard as I could to make it as good as possible. Looking back it was still shit, but it was so much better than the previous videos. This video did really well, and not just because I had an extra 100k subscribers, it went way beyond that. I made $8k that month, and saw proof that to do well on YouTube you truly just need to make better videos, so I doubled down on doing exactly that. Finally I felt like I was able to drop out of college and focus on YouTube, so that’s what I did. Instead of videos doing worse the more I uploaded, now the views were increasing exponentially, and I wasn’t even making TikToks to promote them anymore, it was entirely from YouTube. I kept doing this for a few months. Every time I made a video, I’d study it, figure out how to improve it, then apply the lessons to the next video. My monthly income went from $8k to $10k to $15k, then I had a video go viral. That month I made $60k. I was also making the videos entirely by myself and living with my parents so my profit margins were 100%. I had started this off with the goal of making money to drop out of college, but at this point the money was just sitting in my bank account doing nothing, I was spending about $1k a month for rent and I literally spent nothing else, so I completely stopped caring about making money, there was no need anymore, I was dead set on just making better videos. I kept doing the exact same thing, I improved video after video and I started paying someone to help me with the tedious tasks so I could spend more time on what actually mattered, and when I did that I had another video go viral, this time it outperformed the other one by a mile, I made $150k that month, all profit. This was all great, but this is where I started to burn out.
I was getting really tired of doing the same thing over and over. I knew exactly what I needed to do to go viral in the niche I was in, so I was no longer learning anything. On top of that, I no longer needed any money, especially considering even if I quit, I would still make a lot of money over time from people rewatching the videos and YouTube finding new audiences for them. I was still only spending $1k a month, and I was getting so much more attention than I’ve ever had. I’ve had a tendency throughout my life to be socially anxious, it was really bad in college, I wouldn’t leave my room to eat because of how many people would see me, instead I would stay up all night and buy some food in the morning before anyone else was awake, then I’d play games all day by myself. College was a horrible time in my life, it got to a point where I was planning on ending my life, which is why I was able to grind so hard on YouTube, it felt like it was either I made YouTube work or my life would be over. Anyway, for me at this point on YouTube, it was terrifying. I had grown way beyond what I was comfortable with, I had millions of people waiting for me to upload (and expecting it to be a fantastic video), tens of thousands leaving comments and thousands of strangers trying to figure out who I was and dox me, it was way more than I could handle, so I started procrastinating. My next videos took a lot longer than usual to make, and they just weren’t as good. I still made a lot of money, when I uploaded I would make around $80k and when I didn’t I would make around $30k, and over time I just stopped uploading entirely.
At this point I talked to a big influencer in my niche, and I realized that I liked the game of YouTube and business far more than I liked the game of being an influencer. This is when I decided to pivot from being a YouTuber to owning a company that creates YouTube videos.
I know exactly how to do well on YouTube, I just don’t want to be the face of the channel, so my plan is to create channels in different niches and hire teams to create the videos for me. So, I created a new channel in a different niche and used the same TikTok strategy I used for my main channel to give it a boost (I didn’t use my main channel whatsoever to boost this channel, it was entirely organic), and sure enough after a month the new channel had 10k subscribers and it was proven to be a viable niche. I made some of these videos, but I quickly stopped enjoying making them, so after making only a few of them, I stopped uploading. This channel was making $3k a month at the time and the videos are really simple so I decided to hire a friend of mine full-time to make the videos for me, hoping to teach them everything I know about YouTube and have them continue the channel for me. I made a big mistake here, I let them have too much control of the creative process when they weren’t ready for it. I should have made some videos while they watched and made sure they understood exactly why I was doing what I was doing. The videos quickly stopped performing as well and the channel now (a few months later) is only making $1k a month, but they’re starting to hit their stride, they know a lot more about YouTube now and we’ve figured out a format that works, the only hurdle is having them produce the videos faster and spending more time working, but I suspect within a few months that channel will be making $10k a month and I’ll have an employee that knows enough about the YouTube game to eventually be able to make the less important decisions I’m making now.
While I was training them to take over that channel, I started another channel, this time in a niche much more interesting to me and one that will continue to grow over time (as opposed to the others, which were specific to gaming). I’ve learned from my mistake with the other channel, this time I’m planning on keeping creative control for as long as I can, and hiring people to help me do things faster, rather than trying to hire someone to take over entirely. This channel I’m really excited about, after just 2 videos and 2 months (and again no promotion from my other channels, that would harm the channel since the videos would be seen by the wrong audience) it’s made over $10k with no sign of slowing down, and this is what I’ve been spending most of my time working on recently. The next step for this channel is to start hiring (while keeping creative control), and my goal for it is to be generating over $100k a month by the end of the year. I think as long as I keep focused and don’t make any massive mistakes that’s a very achievable goal, in fact I think if I’m careful and do everything right I should be able to hit that number half-way through the year.
I’m making a lot less money now than I would be making if I were to spend all my time on my main channel, but I’m learning so much more about business and YouTube, and I’ve been enjoying the work a lot more. I’m able to work more than I used to, I’m waking up at 5:30AM and am averaging around 10 hours of work a day with one day off (I’m taking today off, that’s how I have the time to write this), and I’m really excited to see what the future holds.
The most important lesson I’ve learned through all of this so far is that it’s fine to be motivated by money at first, but if you’re only motivated by money you’ll burn out as soon as you have so much that you no longer need it. If you want to achieve massive success, you need to be motivated by something greater than money, like making your product perfect or building a business big enough to operate on its own.
I hope you enjoyed the read, I’m not sure yet if I’ll be posting another update to this, but let me know if you want to hear more:)
Comments:
the conversion from TikTok to YouTube really just comes down to making the TikTok fascinating, then telling them the full thing is on YouTube. if you did something crazy and made a YouTube video on it, then made a TikTok summarizing the crazy thing you did, the people who see the TikTok will naturally want to see other things youve done, so as long as they enjoyed watching the TikTok, many people will check you out on YouTube.
YouTube works by trying to predict who will like watching a video, then recommending it to those people, and in order for someone to go from TikTok to your YouTube channel, they must REALLY like the content. so, if a TikTok goes viral and it brings 1k people to your channel to watch the full video, YouTube will try recommending the video to other people who are similar to those first 1k, and since those first 1k people really enjoyed the content, the people that are similar to those people also will probably really enjoy it, so YouTube knows exactly who your target demographic is, and will blow the video up, assuming it’s actually a great video. if it’s not a great video it’ll stop performing well outside of the very specific target audience and will just die (what happened to all my early videos) also it should be noted that if the video is actually just really good, you don’t need TikTok at all to give it that boost, YouTube will be able to figure it out over time, I just like using TikTok because it’s a faster way of doing it, but I know a few people with 10+ large channels who don’t do any promotion, when they start a new channel they just upload to YouTube and wait a couple weeks, at which point normally the videos start doing well, YouTube is honestly just really good at finding the viewers who will like a video, it’s the only reason why the platform is as big as it is today.
the new channel videos are an average of 10 minutes long and they don’t have any voice or face. it sounds low effort but it’s actually the furthest thing from it, each video takes me around 150 hours to make (at least right now). in general you’ll find that the more effort you put into the videos, the more people will enjoy watching them thus the better they will perform. some people put too much effort on things the viewers don’t care about though, that’s an important distinction, you need to study the videos to figure out what people actually like about them, then double down on those things.
everything you see in your YouTube analytics is relative. your CTR will tank if the video goes viral, same with your AVD and APV, like ratio and all other types of engagement. Conversely, if the video performs really poorly then everything will be higher, since most of the impressions will just be from your core audience. because of that, I don’t pay attention to any metric other than the retention graph. in the retention graph you can see where people click off the video, all I do is find where people clicked off, then try to figure out what made them click off, and try not to make that mistake again. it’s not in an attempt to ‘game’ the algorithm or anything like that, it’s purely an exercise in improving the quality of the videos, if you find people clicked off at a certain point then that almost definitely means the video can be improved, so every time you find a spot people click off of and figure out what made them click off you improve your ability to make videos, which is what will drive the real growth.
I would do the one you think you can see yourself doing for a long time. if you really like making the creative education channel then I’d go all in on that, otherwise stick to the let’s play. you can do both, but it would be really hard and you probably wouldn’t be able to grow either of them as quickly as you would only focusing on one
you mention having thoughts of “this could be you, you never know which video will blow up”, that is a fundamentally incorrect understanding of YouTube and honestly I believe is the biggest thing holding you back (given the limited information I have). there absolutely is a reason why every video blows up, maybe it the title, maybe it’s the thumbnail, the game was in high demand and for some reason no videos were on it, maybe the storytelling was extremely captivating, there are always some reason(s) why a video blows up, and if you don’t actively try to figure out why it happens then you’ll never get better at YouTube, regardless of the channel you’re working on
it makes sense to make the videos as good as possible until it starts taking an unsustainable amount of time to make them, then instead of making them worse, you should hire people to help make them better. if you’re trying to make the most money and have the greatest impact on YouTube you always want to make the best videos you can make, not only will it immediately get more views, but a great video can continue to get significant views for years, I know many people who, every month, get 1m+ views on a video they made years ago. the better a video is, the longer it will take to die, and the more likely viewers are to watch your other content after.
Studying another channel
the best way to audit a channel is to just look at the best performing videos, figure out why they performed the best (was it the topic, packaging or actual video?), look at the worst performing videos, figure out why they performed the worst (again, topic, packaging or actual video), and do more of what you think made the top videos do well, and less of what you think made the bottom videos not do well. people tend to get way too involved in things like overall watch time and SEO that honestly just don’t matter at all, I have friends with 5m+ subs that don’t even know how to see a videos retention graph, nevermind understand the ins and outs of SEO, the way they saw their success was just by making good videos on interesting topics packaged in an appealing way, that’s all you need to do on YouTube, it’s simple but not easy
Outsourcing
I’m currently in the process of outsourcing my faceless channel but I have a lot more experience outsourcing my main channel (and talking to others who have outsourced most of their channel), and it’s the same process for both
some things I’ve learned about outsourcing: – start by outsourcing the lowest roi activities and the things you don’t like doing (doing rough edits, creating subtitles, creating assets, etc.) – don’t outsource what you’re best at (yet). – don’t outsource the creative (yet). often it’s your own creativity that draws the viewers in, if you try to outsource that the viewers will notice and probably won’t enjoy the videos as much. – people assume since you’re one person doing everything that all you need to do is hire one person but it never works out like that. if you wanted to fully outsource (which isn’t a good idea unless you already have the expertise needed to manage and motivate a team of people) you’ll probably need at least 5 people to take over your role (this number depends heavily on the content you make). you might be thinking thats ridiculous that you’d need that many people to do what you do by yourself right now, that if you had just a couple really good people then everything would be so easy–welcome to entrepreneurship, people are everything.
Hiring People
we know people are everything, they will literally make or break your business, so the question becomes how do you actually hire the best people? here are some things I’ve learned: – hire from your audience if possible (if you make kids content this obviously doesn’t work). if the person you hire enjoys your videos then you’ll be able to avoid a lot of issues. they immediately understand what makes your videos enjoyable, they’ll be very motivated to do things right and they’ll really respect you and value your opinion, meaning you won’t need to spend as much time training them, they’ll put everything into their job and they’ll listen to your criticism to improve their work over time, it’s perfect. you can get that response from any employee if you’re a great leader, but becoming a great leader is extraordinarily difficult and takes years to do, so hiring from your audience is a fantastic way to shortcut that (but make sure you do learn to be a great leader in the meantime, if you don’t you’ll limit the scalability of the business). – only hire someone if they have a great attitude. I’ve friends with 20+ full time employees for their channels who’ve told me explicitly the biggest thing they look for when hiring is attitude. youtube is a tough game, you need people who are able to fail over and over again and just keep getting back up and trying again. – only hire people that are better than you at the thing you’re hiring for. don’t hire friends or friends of friends because they need a job, that’s a huge mistake people make, same with hiring for potential instead of hiring for current skill. you need to always hire people who are great at what they do, especially when they’re so good it hurts your ego. you need to hire the people who will best serve your business, not best serve your ego.
I’m still adding to these lists because I am by no means an expert, I’m still actively trying to get better at hiring and managing a team, so if you have any tips feel free to comment under this, I’d love to learn more!
More about CTR and AVD
maybe its something about the thumbnail that made it especially appealing to a broad audience, it’s hard to know without knowing your channel, but there 100% is a reason why it performed better than the rest. if people wanted to watch your other videos as much as your most popular video then your other videos would have more views, so it’s your job as a YouTuber to figure out why they didn’t find your other videos as interesting
by the way, you should be weary looking at CTR and AVD by themselves, if a video performs poorly it can have a high CTR and AVD just because it’s only really shown to your core audience who are more likely to click and watch. my worst performing video has a very high CTR and AVD and my best performing video has a really low CTR and AVD (because it was served to such a broad audience)
Making better videos
it’s not about the YouTube algorithm, it’s the opposite actually. YouTubers are realizing that people don’t like watching over optimized videos (like videos that don’t have any pauses, where it’s just go go go from start to finish, made to try to maximize retention), they’re realizing when they include some pauses in the video it gives the viewer a more enjoyable experience so actually tends to perform better.
it’s not 2016, big YouTubers aren’t trying to exploit the algorithm anymore. I promise you every big YouTuber I know is just focused on trying to make their videos better in whatever way possible, whether that’s by speeding up the pace, slowing it down, adding more storytelling elements to it, it’s all just about trying to make their videos better.
Finding What Works
that’s the million dollar question! I’ve done enough deep dives in not only my own data but others YouTube data and tried and testing enough things to be able to just sense while watching a video when people would start getting bored. most of the time it’s because the story isn’t progressing fast enough or it doesn’t feel real enough or intense enough, but really there are so many things, it’s like asking how to make a great painting. The way I got to this point though was from studying mine and other YouTubers retention graphs. any time there’s a dip in the graph, that means people clicked off, and there’s always a reason why people click off. I just would find these dips, try to figure out what caused people to click off at that point, and not make that mistake in the next videos, then repeat the process over and over until the videos you’re making are great
Not BS?
I agree sticking with it for a long time and posting a lot makes it so much easier to grow for most people, but the only reason it’s easier is because it almost forces you to learn what works and what doesn’t. if you already know what works and what doesn’t, you can just skip all that.
I’ll clarify that I didnt throw out all structure, not at all, in fact the structure of the video is the same structure I learned worked well on my main channel (and also in traditional storytelling), with the originality of it I was referring to the actual idea. I have had a couple channels fail, I uploaded a video and it never took, now I look back at those videos and realize what I could have done to make them better, it wasn’t the algorithms fault, it was my fault, and I just didn’t care enough about the niche to try again.
you can’t get a sponsor on your first post, I made the 10k in adsense. my rpm on the new channel is quite low because it’s new so there wasn’t a core audience to watch ads without clicking off so YouTube is less likely to show ads, my first month it actually got about 2m views. it’s understandable to not believe that’s possible if you think YouTube still works the way it used to work, where you needed an audience already to grow, but nowadays if you upload a great video that people want to watch to a new channel it will do very well. if you want some examples I know of a few in the Minecraft space, craftee is a channel created and managed by an older YouTuber logdotzip, they created the channel and in their first month, August 2021, got 29m views. their next month they got 117m. mysteryores is another example, he has 5 videos uploaded and the 3rd video he made is currently at 65m views