The YouTube Blueprint: Matt Loui on Building a 7-Figure Brand

How do you turn YouTube into a multi-7-figure business?

In this episode of Behind The Stack, host Jade Barter sits down with Matt Loui to uncover the strategies behind building one of South Africa's fastest-growing creator brands.

Matt shares the lessons that helped him grow a YouTube audience of nearly 200,000 subscribers, build a thriving business through content, and create a personal brand that continues to open new opportunities.

We discuss:
• Growing a YouTube channel from the ground up
• Building a profitable personal brand
• The biggest mistakes creators make
• Turning content into a sustainable business
• The mindset behind long-term success
• Practical advice for entrepreneurs and aspiring creators

Whether you're a business owner, marketer, content creator or entrepreneur, this episode is packed with practical insights to help you grow your brand and create content that delivers real results.

Subscribe to Behind The Stack for conversations with the people driving innovation, business and technology.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

The Matt Louie. You were able to buy a house with YouTube money. Your life has drastically changed financially. You've built an audience on close on 200,000 subscribers, multiple businesses generated from that audience, and it's only two years into that journey. I know I'm super excited for this one. I know people are gonna get insane value. I know we'll jump into some of the actual numbers later in the video. Um, but from a starting point, someone who's who's listening or watching and and doesn't know Matt Louie, uh what is the channel about? Uh why did you start it? And yeah, what is the the style or type of content that you produce?

SPEAKER_00 0:54

Yeah, excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to begin this journey of teaching and hopefully helping people in what I've been able to build. I think there's been many, many lessons over the last few years where yeah, it took those years to learn them. And I'm excited to share a lot of those insights. I think if someone can hold on to what I'm about to share, yeah, hopefully it it provides the insight that can change lives. Because, like you said, YouTube has YouTube's been huge for me. So for those who don't know, I have a YouTube channel. It's called Matt Louie. Like you mentioned, almost 200,000 subscribers. Come on. And just such a big blessing, such a big business, part of my business now. Just such a yeah, I feel so lucky to have it. Essentially how it started was I was uh I'd moved on to Durban and I was in a one-bed, tiny little place, had a small, small room with a single couch that had holes and all sorts of it was dirty secondhand. Yeah, I think this thing was living outside. I don't know where I even got the couch. And and I um I've always been interested in editing, I've always loved the art of storytelling and kind of piecing together this puzzle through editing, video editing. And I started seeing on YouTube that videos about Cap Cut, a mobile app, a free mobile editing app, were doing really well. And there were some creators that would post a video and get half a million views, and I would watch these videos, and as much as they were providing a lot of insight, I didn't feel they were revolutionary or super difficult. So through that, I found inspiration to think and and finally decide hey, I could maybe do this. Take me back, you know, 10 years. I have always had YouTube channels. I have loved YouTube. I had a vlogging channel, 200 videos, that thing flopped hard. Taught me a lot, but you know, less than 200 subscribers. I've had gaming channels, I've had fun channels with you, the where we where we messed around and made fun videos. And all of those things were instrumental and and taught me a lot. Uh, but I think the the key point there is that I've always been interested in YouTube. So I saw this new potential niche as a way to do what I love and hopefully build an audience from it. So yeah, I started making some how to do this trick or how to do this effect video on CapCut. Terrible production quality, minimal effort, you know, shot on the phone, pieced together very basically in the edit, and uh yeah, started releasing videos. And I think it was within the first 10 videos that I released where I had a video that started to get traction. And it was so exciting when yeah, that video started to take off. And I could see the numbers, you know, the the previous videos were reaching hundreds of people, and this one started, you know, a thousand people, two thousand people, three thousand people. And the rest is history. Uh, I think the channel has a hundred videos on it now, and uh, yeah, like you mentioned, almost 200,000 subscribers, and that's where things started.

SPEAKER_02 3:52

You mentioned previous channels, and I I won't name our channel because there's some embarrassing stuff of us online, but what made this this different? I mean, I I know you well, for those that don't know, we've been best mates for as long as I can remember, making videos, running around doing silly challenges. What made this channel different? Um, and and did you see that it would become a lucrative business from day one? Was that the ambition or was it let's let's start another channel?

SPEAKER_00 4:24

It wasn't the goal for it to be lucrative. I think there was always a hope that it would be. You know, I was putting time and effort into something that I didn't know what could happen. And I think that's the risk that a lot of creators or people who are wanting to start content creation, they have. Will this ever turn into something? And I think through what we're going to discuss, you'll see that it can. Um, but that was always the hope. The hope was can I I I I eagerly and and really want to build something that is sustainable, that I can make videos in my house and turn this into a business. I didn't know if it would work, as I mentioned. I had four or five failed channels, right? So the the hope was there. The realism or the realistic side was this could honestly turn into the sixth failed channel. Uh yeah.

SPEAKER_02 5:08

So and that's that posting journey, starting posting. Um, how do you conceptualize, come up with the videos? How do you for someone who's from base ever like man, I want to make it on on YouTube? Is it just create, try? I mean, we've like you said, we've had lots of content, failed content that didn't materialize into something more than just memories, which is a blessing, but it it's not lucrative. So so you mentioned seeing an opportunity with CapCut specifically. How did you go about, man, I'm gonna post these types of videos and structure it this way?

SPEAKER_00 5:44

The best way to fast track your way to a viral video or a video that gains more traction than the rest, and honestly, a single video that could transform your entire entire channel and life is you have to see what's already working. And I use this kind of analogy in in the film industry, because we all watch films, you have comedy, you have rom-coms, you have horror. We aren't reinventing or changing the wheel of what works. We have these formats that work in the film industry where people have just been regurgitating the same story pretty much, different characters, different set design, but the same beats and the same story for as long as film has been around. I think oftentimes we think with YouTube or with content creation in general, this has to drastically change. That is so not true. YouTube is a storytelling medium, content creation is a storytelling medium. And with that, you have to see what's already working in the niche that you're creating content for. So for my channel, it was CapCut. What type of content was working for CapCut? And I'll use the example that's close to home. It was people were watching a lot of speed ramp Cap Cut videos. CapCut was one of the first platforms and video editing tools where you could speed ramp in a very easy way. Now, you may not know what speed ramping is, but people were watching these videos. So what I did was I realized that, okay, we have this winning this winning niche, which is CapCut, and then the format that is winning in the niche is speed ramp videos. So that 10th video that I was talking about about speed ramping, that was the one that actually started to do well. And it's no surprise that it started to do well because I was able to strategically analyze the niche and see which formats in that niche were doing well. And that is the fastest way to file to get to a viral video. It's not to think you need to reinvent the wheel, it's not to think that you need to create some content that is revolutionary different. Leave that to the big boys, the Mr. Beasts who have millions of dollars of budget, who can reinvent huge teams and recreate what is working. But you'll even see what's interesting is when you analyze the structure or the format of a Mr. Beast, there are so many trends within how he structures his videos. There's a reason he does that. It's because he's found what works and he's just replicating that until it slowly starts to not really work anymore, and then you change a key thing about that.

SPEAKER_02 8:03

You obviously we've spoken a lot about formats and and how to structure a video and and what works. Let's say someone out there follows that to a T, posts 10 videos, doesn't get views. What do they do? Why does that happen? Um I I know these aren't easy questions to answer, but algorithm, all these different factors, should people be concerned about that? Re-look at that, or or what is your take on what people strategically should do reviewing their own videos?

SPEAKER_00 8:38

Well, and I think that's such it's a great question because that is the unfortunate reality for a lot of content creators. It was the reality for myself on the failed channels, is I wasn't I didn't wake up one day and start to be strategic on YouTube. This was always something that I had in me. It's just that strategy for those other channels never turned into any actual success. And I think you know, there's a lot of people, like I said, that that are doing something similar. They're analyzing videos, they're seeing, okay, what are the trends on TikTok or Instagram? How do I follow these? Yeah, it's a real, it's a real problem. And that can be super disheartening. It can be so disheartening and discouraging. And I just want to say if someone is feeling discouraged, if someone is feeling disheartened, like realize that yes, the the the fact that the video is not doing well on a viewership level is indicative that something could be wrong, or that I'd rather reframe that to say that there's an opportunity for you to do better. It's nothing per se that's wrong with the video. You just have an opportunity to tweak some things to do better. And I mean there, there's, as we know, lots of different factors that could be leading to a video that's not necessarily doing well. I posted recently a format of some AI tools. I posted video one, 400,000 YouTube views organically within two weeks. I posted pretty much the same video two weeks later because I realized, wow, this format is winning. And sure, it's still a bit of an outlier, but I think it's at 20,000 or 30,000 views. And what I mean by that is you can copy everything someone else is doing or find inspiration in what someone else is doing, or even have a successful video yourself and try and copy that and still not have that success. And and we all need to remember as content creators that there's something called the X factor, that's what I call it, the X factor where you can be doing all the things right. But if that X factor could be the algorithm, could be a comment that magically appears, could be engagement rates, if that doesn't, if that isn't in the video, your video is not going to do well. What I can just say is focus, focus on what is in our control as content creators. And that's things like the production quality, that's your script, that's the time that you spend ideating and researching what is working in your niche, what specific formats are working. Those are things like the way you speak on camera and present on camera. Are you authentic? Does it look staged? Are you super nervous? Are you speaking too slow? Are you speaking too fast where someone can't even comprehend? All of those things are things that are in our control. Yeah. And I think even closer to home is the editing. Is your video edited in a way that someone actually wants to watch it or not? And I write an editing channel, so go find inspiration on that. You know? So so again, just to sum it up, focus on what is in our control. Don't see the success, especially for your early videos. Don't see the views as a metric for how good the video is, just seeing it, see it as an opportunity for what more you can do in those videos.

SPEAKER_02 11:33

And and keep going. I know we speak about it a lot, and it's we haven't stopped creating. We like you say, you you have videos that do well, ones that do bad, but you don't stop yeah, re-innate like reinnovating, seeing what you can improve, seeing what you can change. And I know we we speak a ton about momentum and the trade-off for when that reward or when things start to change, it's it's sometimes months, sometimes years, but your channel, 10 videos in, starts to the wheel starts to turn a bit more. What do you a creator that's gets to that level or or starts to see that? How do they then capitalize on the next phase to really scale it? Because that's the hard thing about content. You clap a million views today, tomorrow everyone's forgotten about it, and your brand is tarnished. So how do you now we you've got some momentum, there's good views, there's engagement. Where to what was the next strategy?

SPEAKER_00 12:31

When you have a video that is an outlier or starts to do well, it is an incredible opportunity as a creator for a number of reasons. Number one, you feel encouraged. You've put all this time and effort into your videos. You may have posted 10 or 100 or 1,000, and you finally have one that starts to do well. It's encouraging, but you cannot base your whole identity or your metric now on that successful video. I'm saying see it with a level head. And what that level head means is let's be strategic in analyzing exactly why that video did well. Could be that X factor, it could be your worst video, and that X factor just happened to play in your favor, and now you have a video with a million views. But more oftentimes than not, it's something that you did in that video that is resonating with a million people. So see see the success as a new benchmark, not for viewership, but for the strategy that you've employed in that video. That is how you win. You have found a winning format. Now it's time to find inspiration from yourself rather than other people. And an example of that is, you know, I had a I saw a format, uh, 10 Cap Cut Tricks to Turn You From a Noob to Pro, or 10 Cap Cut Tricks to Turn You Into a Pro. The titles can change. That type, that format, that storytelling mechanism with a number of effects or tricks at the beginning to turn someone into a pro, that was doing well. So me employing what I am teaching, I employed that and I made a video about that. And that is my most viewed video to date. 1.5 or 6 or 7 million views on a long form piece of content. I mean, that's generated a lot of money and a lot of new awareness and subscribership. I have subsequently used that video as a format and made three or four other videos that are all outliers on my channel. 500,000 views, 200,000 views, you know, 700,000 views because I just followed my format. So that's the first thing is be strategic. See that as and and analyze that for why it worked. The second thing is don't be discouraged when your next video doesn't do as well because it won't. And not don't be discouraged because you will be discouraged, but realize that that's okay. It happens. That is the norm. Roll with it. Roll with it. Take the punch and keep rolling. And I think the third thing, and this is where things really start to shift, is one video can change your life. What it's doing is it's bringing in a lot of new audience that could potentially be customers. It's growing your subscribership, your followership. People are seeing you. Naturally, the videos to the left and right or the video posted before and after that video are going to do better than usual because people are watching those videos. And that is when, as a creator, you need to stop calling yourself a creator and you need to see yourself as a business person. You need to see yourself as someone who is now running a business. What that means is oftentimes the revenue, I mean, I think TikTok and Instagram, you don't even make money off your revenue. YouTube, fortunately in South Africa, we make money off the viewership that we make, which honestly can be a full-time job and fully sustain someone if they just leave it there and they're pulling views. YouTube or Instagram or TikTok, the viewership, the free value that we provide, that is only the top, top, top end of the funnel. And for those who know marketing, your top of funnel is your awareness. It's what is going to generate eyeballs. But everything that happens afterwards, which a lot of content creators in our country don't do, is the actual business side. And I'm sure we'll jump into how to turn content into a business. But in short, see your viewership, see that video that's gone and been successful as the the means to start generating an income. Whether that's a course or a product that you're trying to sell or a business that you're trying to close or coaching, or yeah, there could be a lot of different or the beginning of sponsorships for you. There's so many good things that you can now start to think more as a business than just a content creator.

SPEAKER_02 16:18

What sparked that for you? I mean, I know you you had the momentum going and you thought, okay, now what made you think, let me capitalize on this differently? Let me provide something or sell something to this audience that's different to my offer. Because the opposite is you could have thought, well, let me just keep making more views and get more ad sense. Why didn't you do that? Why why would you advise that people focus more on funding to a potential product or, like you say, a course or something?

SPEAKER_00 16:49

All right. The the simple answer to the why. Why should someone not let their content be the only revenue stream? For my case, why should YouTube not be the only revenue stream? Is because if we were to analyze my YouTube business, YouTube AdSense, the money that YouTube pays me for viewership, only makes up about 15% of the overall business revenue. 15%. And we're not talking about no numbers. We're not talking about 10 Rand a month. Right? So when YouTube makes up 100% of your audience or your revenue, that is when you have to start thinking, I need to expand what I'm selling. Right now, you're just selling viewership. Yeah. And it's free viewership and it earns you peanuts. You need to sell something else. So that's that's the why. Is because YouTube, in my opinion, should only be between 15 to 20% of your overall revenue that you're bringing in through your content. How I got to this realization and point is through the years. It is through the years I started to see some of the creators in my niche uh start school, school.com profiles or uh communities. I started to see some of them launch their own websites that had courses built into them. I didn't know what this meant. I had no mental framework or knowledge or wisdom about what does a course look like? What is the value of a course? Why would someone even buy a course when there's all this free content online? Why join a school community so you can talk to a creator once a week or once a month? You know what? I had no mental framework for the value that actually could be provided. And it's through it's it's kind of so it is funny. I had copywriters and course creators and school community managers start to email me. Every day I would get a new email. Matt, you're missing out on revenue, delete email. Matt, you're missing out on revenue, delete email. And eventually, over time, and many months of wasted revenue opportunity, I started to read those emails. Matt, you need to make a course. What? A course? Someone can just watch my YouTube videos and find inspiration for free. Who's gonna want to buy a course? And then I started having calls with some of these guys, and they started to build my mental framework of how this could work, why it was potentially valuable. Once I had that bug that bit me of okay, wait, something something is something is wrong here. There's an opportunity here that I'm not capitalizing on. Then I started to research by myself. Okay, what is a course? Who's running a course? Why do they do courses? The value of a course. And I knew that people were making money from courses. We all know there's these people who claim to be making money. I thought maybe it was a scam or whatever. But over time, over the months, I realized okay, there's a need for people to learn in a very structured way, for people to learn from someone who they enjoy learning from already on a free basis. They want to support the channel as well. And yeah, I spent about a month and a half just producing, editing a course, Capcut Lab. And Capcut Lab is the business side, the expansion, the first expansion of the business that has transformed my life. Because all of a sudden I'm asleep and I'm making sales on a course. I'm talking to you on a podcast and I'm making sales on a course. I'm doing my day job or I'm making free content, but I'm making sales on a course. So now the viewership is not the only thing that's bringing in revenue. It's rather the product or the business that I'm building from that free viewership. And if that doesn't incentivize or encourage someone to use those free views to sell something else, I don't know, go watch another podcast. But please, please be encouraged to do that.

SPEAKER_02 20:20

Please, you know what I mean? To do all that you're doing, I think even a course, right? You've you've got to have value to give. You've got to be an expert, you've got to be sharp. Like someone that's buying, it's got to feel like I'm gonna gain or develop or get something.

SPEAKER_00 20:35

I think oftentimes that's natural apprehension to starting something is we have to be the expert. You don't. When I started Cap Cut and teaching people how to edit on CapCut, I'd never used CapCut in my entire life. Right. Obviously, you learn it, you become the expert because I realize that this could be a business, this could be a channel. I'm spending hours and hours. Honestly, because the nature of CapCut changes and they release updates, I'm still learning two or three years down the line. So, all to say, you don't need to be an expert at something to start a channel and to provide value to people. You don't. You don't need to be an expert to sell a product from it. You just need to know what someone wants to know. Yeah, that doesn't mean being an expert. There's people who are way better at CapCut editing than me, but they don't have the same business that I've built from it.

SPEAKER_02 21:18

And and willingness to learn. I know you've you've been flipping good at that always. The ability to take time and and spend, like you're saying, long evenings understanding a skill or an editing style or whatever, so that you can perfect a way to teach or make a video on it. And obviously, this is a a tech mainly channel, and a lot of what you've built on is incredible pieces of software. And nowadays, obviously, as the the channels developing even more with with different AI and and stuff like that, how do you keep learning, keep creating content that's that? Because I truly believe it's it's only the start for Mad Louie and the channel 100%. So what is the next stage for creators like you and maybe someone's listening that's building businesses through through their brands and and different channels? Yeah. How do they scale it to the next point? Um, yeah, any insights there.

SPEAKER_00 22:23

We we can never stop adapting to the way the world is going. Some of the great businesses, you think of Blockbuster, they're nowhere because they they failed to adapt. Yeah. And it's the same with YouTube channels. Eventually, your channel will become stagnant and that momentum will slow down. It's just the nature of it, unless you are able to adapt with it with the times. So, what that means for me is paying careful attention to what is still working. The same strategies that I applied when I was starting the channel, where I found inspiration from other creatives or creators that were releasing content about CapCut. Now I'm finding inspiration from creators that are releasing AI content. And that's the same, it's the same way that I ideate. Nothing changes about the way that we or I source ideas. The fundamental is format is still working, whether it's about CapCut or AI or whatever topic that you're talking about. The format is still what's important. So with that knowledge, it's not saying great, I run a CapCut channel, I'm gonna be doing CapCut for the next 10 years. It's yes, I run a Capcut channel and I need to still be providing value to those viewers. But what what else is what other format is working in this field of content creation? Because I actually don't run a CapCut channel. I talk about CapCut as my primary topic, but I don't run a Capcut channel. I run a channel for content creators. I run a channel that teaches people how to edit videos. Whether you're a YouTuber, a business owner, an editor who's looking to get client work, that is who I'm talking to. What do those people want? They want to learn about AI. They want to learn how to speed up their editing using AI, how to make motion graphics using AI. And I think that's what's important is not to generalize or become so specific in your niche that you fail to see the value that you provide on a greater scale. I'm not a CapCut channel. I'm a channel that helps content creators. That comes with so many different offerings as opposed to just CapCut.

SPEAKER_02 24:19

Slightly different topic, but another like revenue stream and another big part of I think most channels or people is brand deals or sponsorships or or what have you. I I think in your case, shed some light into how you attract brands to want to or or technology or companies to want to invest. Um, use your platform as an opportunity to market. And because I know you are how do you go about aligning those to your channel? How do you go about choosing guys that hey, I'm not just gonna do this because someone's offering a couple hundred dollars? I I want to choose ones that align with me and my audience. Yeah, I think just speak speak to sponsorships and and brands and how that all works.

SPEAKER_00 25:04

All right, so sponsors are a slight point of contention. I get about 20 emails a day from sponsors wanting to do something on Matt Louie, and it is so annoying because if we're on if we're on a shoot, if we're on a podcast episode like this, I will check my phone afterwards and there'll be these huge briefs of sponsorships, and it it's honestly it can be all consuming. So that's step one is when these people start reaching out to you, find a way to distinguish the ones that you actually want to work with versus not. And I'd say about 90, 99 or 98% of the sponsorships that come into my inbox, I just I read. Either I write an email reply saying, hey, I'm not interested, or I can see that it's a generic template and they've reached out to a hundred different creators, and then I just ignore it. And then there's those few that genuinely align with my audience. Not my content, but my audience. Because remember what I was talking about in terms of see your channel as who you're providing value for, content creators. Okay, there's a tool that helps people to generate AI videos, and it's phenomenal. Those are the types of guys that I want to feature on my channel. Why? Not because they're paying a lot of money, but because it's actual tangible value for my audience. That is what I want to promote, right? Not just the guy who's willing to pay uh thousands of dollars for a video about coding. I don't I don't do coding content, you know. I could take the money, but then what that does is it almost dilutes who you are as a brand. Yeah, your audience all of a sudden, oh no, you know what, Matt Louis is now releasing videos about coding, and you know, it kind of is not great for the brand image. So I think that's the first thing is find find sponsors that you can still weave in value for your audience. Sometimes it's hard to find, I won't lie. It's not always apparent, oh, this is 100% valuable. It's you gotta almost work it into the story, and that's our job as creators and business owners is being able to strategically, innovatively, shrewdly weave in those sponsorships into the video. Sponsorships can be, yes, both annoying, but they can also be a massive, massive advantage to the channel. And if I was to solely look at let's make four sponsored videos a month, sponsorships would genuinely make up around 70% of the channel's revenue. Wow. There are currently, and this is the opportunity for anyone listening as a content creator, there is such an opportunity for sponsorships right now. Companies are throwing money into the content creator economy, which is then distributed to people like you and I, because they want their brand featured in an authentic creator-led way. And that's why I'm getting so many sponsorship requests, is because there's just hundreds of thousands of these brands who are looking to reach out and provide sponsorship. I think the initial part of your question was how you start to get sponsorships honestly is through your viewership. It's very it's gonna be very hard for a sponsor to see the value in sponsoring with anyone as a content creator if you're getting 10 views a video. Because what they're seeing is, okay, I'm gonna pay money to this creator. That video is only gonna be seen by 10 people or 20 people. The ROI, if I pay them $500 and I make one sale at $20, I'm not gonna make any money. What they like to see is average viewership. So they know it kind of mitigates risk. They know, okay, if we if we post a video on Matt Louie and his average viewership is 50,000 views, there's a there's a good chance that 50,000 people see our advert or our sponsorship and those people turn into buyers. That's pretty much the way to reach sponsors is to release content that pulls views and that they want to align with. The rest, oftentimes, I know some creators reach out to sponsors. I've been very fortunate not to have to do that, where I just get a lot of sponsors reaching out to me. My um my business email is in the YouTube channel. So at the at the bottom of every video for business inquiries, contact my emails there in my actual channel. The email is on there as well in the contents uh in the contact section. And yeah, that's how I source sponsorships. I really do nothing, I just have to read emails and decide what I want to partner with and who I don't.

SPEAKER_02 29:03

Yeah, and I I think you raise so many powerful points there. It's more important than I even I realize at times what your brand is, and like we're speaking about YouTube, seeing it as a business. Uh, power Power A doesn't decide tomorrow we make milk and and completely pivot their strategy. They stick with who they are, but they refine, they better their product, they do updates to the packaging. And I think if we if we look at our channels more like that, we see every subscriber as a client, whether they buy something else or they're just a subscriber, that they're there for some sort of value or something that you're creating, and it's so crucial to hold that and just refine and improve and better your craft.

SPEAKER_00 29:49

And I and I want to just go ahead and touch on that. They are not a subscriber, they're a potential customer. Yeah, when when your subscribership goes up, sure, it's great for the channel, but that doesn't mean anything. Yeah, there's channels with half a million subscribers reaching 2,000 people a month, right? Right. So the subscribership doesn't mean anything, but what does mean something is if you can convert them into a customer, and that conversion comes from the way that we treat our channels as businesses, not just as channels.

SPEAKER_02 30:16

Yeah, and it's an important point. I mean, sharing here for my channel field life, you know, it's been a tough journey and and two years of of hard grind on the other side. I've probably made like 5,000 Rand in two years. My biggest videos are sitting at maybe 30, 40k. Um, TikTok alone, I think I pulled a million views last year, but didn't capitalize on that as a business. YouTube, I I saw actually this week, I pulled a million views over its lifetime. Those views for now it's meant nothing because I didn't capitalize yet. We know I'm working on on how to look at that, and it's so crucial for all of us at any level, but there is a way to convert or sell something or create something that makes that meaningful because the views, the channels in and of themselves can quickly die out, um, unless you capitalize and and convert and what have you. I I'm speaking a bit about numbers, and we spoke a bit about uh numbers from you and and what YouTube has enabled you to do. Um, shed some light into like I mentioned, nearly 200,000 subscribers. How many views have you you pulled, any other numbers that you think will be valuable to people to start to think about YouTube seriously or as a business or or just understanding where they can be with the tools and insight that you've provided.

SPEAKER_00 31:45

So, this is what I want someone to remember before I tell anything about numbers. You do not need to have 50,000, 100,000, 200,000, a million subscribers to start generating income that can change your life. You don't. Whoever's watching, you don't need to have the big subscribership numbers, the big viewership numbers to start making good money. What the position I'm in affords, having 180 or 190,000 subscribers at this point, like we said, it's provided me with the financial stability that I could have only ever dreamed about, which is buying a house. It's paid off car, it's the ability to travel whenever I want, make videos wherever I want in the world. Yeah. It's been incredible for me. And the fundamental is that YouTube as a business has turned into a multi-seven-figure business a year where those free viewerships, the the channel that was started in my bedroom on a phone, talking about Capcut Mobile, which is also a free app, that channel has turned into something again that that is is pulling in a lot of money. For someone as a solo creator to be making more than business executives in a lot of companies, for someone in their 20s who's again, I'm I'm just so blessed to be in this position, so humbled by it, because there's lots of people that are working way harder and don't have that opportunity. But the the fundamental and what I'm trying to get across is that man, this thing can turn into something special. This thing called content can turn into something very, very special.

SPEAKER_02 33:18

I think as someone that knows you pretty well, um I think for me, I'm I'm just insanely proud to call you a brother, but also to have watched this journey. I think for us to speak about it and just your willingness to share some of the stuff and provide insights to people, uh, it just shows your your care for the industry and also just not being selfish or um holding what you've learned to yourself. But I think you have every reason to be insanely proud of what you've built. And it it no doubt um is not easy, it's a ton of hard work, lots of late nights that I've witnessed and and building out the course. But I think for me as as your brother, none of this just happens by chance as well. And you you are two million percent fully deserving. And and like I always say, it's just the start. I hope people watch this and really switch on to following your journey and subscribing because it only benefits them, it only helps them more in their journey and their business. And yeah, just what an honor to to hear this journey. And I hope it paints uh at least half as good picture to to what you've built and and the man you are and and the value you provide in the businesses you've you've built. And yeah, I just thank you. I I I thank you for your time and and sharing such incredible insights.

SPEAKER_00 34:49

Yeah, honored to be here. I hope it's only the start for both of us. 100%. And yeah, I hope that this can be a valuable piece to anyone listening, but also a valuable piece to behind the stack. Um, that people realize what you are building, that you want to provide this value on a consistent level to people. And yeah, I'm excited to see as well where all of this goes for you and what you've already built. Yeah, thanks for the opportunity to share. And if you're a content creator, just keep going. Yeah, apply what we've talked about. I promise you it can be the biggest, most incredible thing. If someone had told me two, three years ago that I could be making videos in my house in the comfort of my home when I want, when I want, sure, you have to be disciplined and I have to stay on top of things, but I'm not traveling to a job and I'm I'm I'm making money that allows me to live and live well. If someone had told me that, I probably would have laughed. So you may be laughing now. And I I do think in our country that content as a career, content then turned into a business, and that business as a career is people are getting it, but it's still underutilized. And there's so much opportunity for the talented people in our country to take it seriously. Yeah. Um yeah, if you hear this and you want to reach out, follow on Instagram, send me a DM, and I'd be happy to uh yeah, answer questions and try and help you on your journey. Thank you again. Thanks, brother.