People ask why I left a good job at a top company to go all in on YouTube. And the answer goes back to being 15.
That's when I started watching a fitness YouTuber called Christian Guzman. He was a few years older than me, at college, filming his own training videos. Nothing fancy. Just a bloke in a gym with a camera.
Then he opened a gym. It started as somewhere to film, and turned into a business. Then coaching programmes. Then a bigger gym with memberships. Then clothing. Then supplements.
And all of it came off the back of the videos.
I was sat there in my bedroom watching it happen, year after year. And it was at exactly the age where you're trying to work out what you want your life to look like. I already knew I wanted to build something of my own. I just had no idea how anyone actually did it. And here was a bloke barely older than me, building an entire company out of a camera and a gym membership. And I got to watch every step of it.
And the other thing I noticed is that I felt like I knew him. I'd never met the man and probably never will (
@Guzmanfitness if you ever read this, thanks mate). But I'd watched hundreds of hours of him talking. So when he put something out, I trusted it completely. He never had to sell me anything. The trust was already there, built one video at a time, while he was just training and filming.
I was a teenager and I didn't have the words for what I was looking at.
Years later I was working at one of the most prestigious car brands in the world. Good job, good money, the kind of place people are pleased to tell you they work at. And the whole time I still wanted to build something of my own.
So I tried everything. A dropshipping store. Selling stickers. I was a budding electronic DJ for a while, and I ended up DJing in seven countries. Then putting on my own nightclub events. And every time I'd give it a few weeks or a few months, and the moment it got hard I'd move on to the next one.
Then I came back round to YouTube, and it clicked. What I'd watched Christian do all those years earlier was build a business in public, with the videos doing the selling for him. And that's the thing I'd been circling the whole time without seeing it.
And YouTube changed my life. It got me out of that job, it's given me freedom over my time and my money, and it's let me build something I'm actually proud of.
Since then we've done 100 million plus views across the channels we've worked on. We've taken clients to $100K months. And my own channel, which is a side gig for us because we're so busy with client work, has done months of over $10,000 on its own.
So someone spends 20 minutes a week with you for a year. And by the end they trust you in a way no advert will ever manage. Then when you've got something to sell, they're already listening.
And that's what a YouTube channel actually builds. Everything else comes after.
I've put all of my YouTube knowledge into an 8-week course, which I'll keep adding to.
If you're interested:
* Follow me (important so that we can DM you)
* Comment "YouTube" below.