Everything You Need To Know About Starting & Growing a YouTube Channel in 2026

The biggest mistake new YouTubers make is trying to be good before they're willing to be bad. The only way to improve is just to keep doing it. The more videos you upload, the smarter the people you surround yourself with, the better you'll be.

If you want to be the best YouTuber, then you can be the best YouTuber. You just have to be obsessed, obsessed with YouTube, man. Watch so many videos, find out what your niche is, find out what you enjoy doing, and then just upload videos. You won't even care if it's getting no views. If you want to get started on YouTube, Screw the gear. Don't think, "Oh, I need to wait to upgrade to a fancy-ass camera before I'm allowed to get started on YouTube." Start with whatever you have.

Start with your phone, and you can always upgrade later. Every successful creator you admire spent months or years making videos nobody watched while they learned the skill. Once you've started on YouTube, this is a mistake everyone makes, is that you're way too focused on the analytics.

But at the start, like, it doesn't really matter.

The only thing you have to do is just keep on producing more and more and more videos and not really worry about the fact that no one is watching them and that you're not getting very many subscribers.

If you look at the stats, according to TubeBuddy, the average channel with 1,000 to 10,000 subscribers has made 152 videos. When I was making those first 100 videos, or even the first 300 videos, I wasn't thinking about, uh, subscribers or like building up an audience. It was mainly just me having fun sharing what I found interesting about those computers and that software to whoever would watch.

There was no one big at gaming, and I didn't know you could make money out of it. So it was never like a career that I just quit college to pursue. It's just something I just love to do. If you keep waiting until you're ready, confident, or perfect, you'll keep building excuses instead of building momentum.

At the end of the day, I will never say my videos are perfect. You know what I mean?

There's—

none of us are perfect. Even your podcast probably has ways that could be better.

So 13 years ago, when we first started on our YouTube journey, we filmed everything with a MacBook, like literally the webcam from our MacBook, and we edited the videos and uploaded them all using one device. Whatever time frame you think it's going to take to achieve something, it's probably going to take 3 times longer, you know. And so if you think it's going to take 2 years to hit 1 million subscribers, it's probably going to take like 6, 7, 8, 9. Unless you're MrBeast. No, even for me, I started at 11. It didn't happen until I was in my 20s or whatever, 19. So in the next 3 hours, you'll learn the lessons that will save you years of frustration, help you avoid the mistakes most creators make, and give your channel its best chance to succeed. If you've been here before, drop a hashtag #believe in the comments below so I can feature you here in a future video. And if you're new, welcome to Believe Nation, the only channel that helps you believe in yourself daily, one video at a time. Your first 100 videos on YouTube are going to be terrible, and that's exactly how it's supposed to be. All you need to do—

this applies to people who have not uploaded videos but have dreams of being a YouTuber— is make 100 videos and improve something every time. Do that, and then on your 101st video, we'll start talking like maybe you can get some views. But, you know, your first 100 are gonna suck.

This is what I love about YouTube is you get to see this growth. Yeah, you get to see the Super Mario effect in action. You can go back and see the first video. There's a few before that that are even more awkward where it's like, you know, I haven't found my voice. I haven't learned how to like talk to the camera and I freaking love it. I think for any new creator, that's so important. You have to be able to get past the first 10, 100, 200 videos based on your love for it. Success on this platform isn't about your natural talent. It's having the courage to suck until you finally get good. Your first video is not going to get views. Period.

It's not. Your first 10 are not going to give views. I can very confidently say that. So stop sitting there and thinking for months and months on end and just get to work and start uploading.

Failure is the process. Like, if you're not failing, you're not reaching far enough. If you demand perfection from your very first upload, you will paralyze your progress and deny the world the exact message it desperately needs to hear— yours.

There's literally no such thing as a perfect video.

I would be blown away if that me could see me today doing this interview, I'd be like, you're crazy. But that's just incrementally keeping that treadmill on jog. I've just stuck with it. I think it takes practice to make videos. And I think it doesn't hurt to get started with what you have. When I started my channel in 2009, nobody was making educational videos for entrepreneurs. I didn't have any idea what I was doing. My first video got exactly 3 comments in an entire year. One was from my mom. One was from my sister and one from some random guy who saw my video, and I was so excited that a stranger watched my video, but my videos were terrible. It took me 350 public videos before I could watch my own content without being completely embarrassed by my own work, and 700 videos until I finally made something that inspired me. If I quit because my first few videos were bad, I wouldn't have reached the 4-point-whatever million subscribers we have today. Now I know what you're telling yourself right now. You're saying YouTube has changed, and today you need a $10,000 camera and a massive editing team just to get 10 views. But the truth is the algorithm doesn't care about your expensive gear. It only cares about people clicking and people watching. You can actually beat channels with massive budgets just by using your phone and the right strategy. Let me break down the exact system you need to steal their traffic and build your audience this week. Stop chasing viral views and focus on impact. You're probably focusing on the completely wrong metrics. Over 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every single day. The competition is YouTube is massive. You look at those numbers and you feel totally overwhelmed. You see that 95% of YouTube videos get fewer than 1,000 views and you just want to give up. You think that if you don't get millions of views, you're failing, but you don't need a million subscribers to make a million dollars. Remember, you're built to serve. You have a specific message that can change the life of the person watching your video. Focus on who you're serving, not who you aren't serving. If your video gets 50 views, that is 50 real human beings who sat down to listen to you. Imagine 50 people in a room listening to your speech. You'd probably be thrilled. Treat your YouTube channel the exact same way. Your goal isn't to please just a robot algorithm. Your goal is to build deep trust with a highly targeted audience. When you change your focus from going viral to making a real impact, the game changes for you. You stop stressing over the vanity numbers and you start caring about the actual humans on the other side of the screen. Master the click and the hook. Now you can have the greatest video in the world, but if nobody clicks, your message dies a slow death in the the dark. Your thumbnail and your title equal 80% of your success on this platform. The algorithm looks for high click-through rates. If your thumbnail is confusing or boring, people will scroll right past you. You need to test your thumbnails constantly. If you're interested, we have Brandlytics. It's the most advanced thumbnail and title split testing software in the world that I highly recommend checking out. Keep your design simple, use high contrast, don't put too many words in your thumbnail. Your title needs to promise a specific outcome. Don't use vague words. And once they click, your first 60 seconds dictate your retention. The data shows that if you can keep people watching past the first minute, your average view duration will skyrocket. So cut your long intros, stop talking about yourself, deliver value immediately. Tell the viewer exactly why they need to keep watching. Give them the most important information right away to hook their attention. If your 1-minute retention stays above 70%, YouTube will push your video out to tons of new people. Steal traffic with growth videos. You're probably wondering, how do you get discovered when nobody knows who you are? The answer is what I call growth videos. You don't want to show up at number one for a search term that nobody's looking for. The real secret to rapid channel growth is ranking after other popular videos. You need to model success. So find the biggest creators in your specific industry. Look at the videos that are getting lots of views for them right now. You don't copy their video, but you can model their topic. You make your own version of that successful concept. Add your unique perspective and your specific philosophies, your stories. When someone finishes watching that bigger creator, YouTube will look for the next logical video to play because your topic, title are highly related. Your growth video has a chance of showing up in the suggested feed. You are legally stealing their traffic. This is how you build an audience fast without waiting for the search algorithm to slowly rank your content. It puts your face right in front of the exact buyers that you are trying to reach. The 100 video rule and unstoppable momentum. Okay, your first videos are going to be terrible. You need to accept this right now. Success on YouTube isn't about your natural talent. It's about having the courage to suck until you finally get good. As I mentioned earlier, it took me 350 videos, public videos, before I could watch my own content without cringing, and another 700 videos to actually inspire myself, right? You're setting your expectations way too high. So commit to the 100 video rule. Your only goal is to upload 100 videos and make each one just 1% better than the last one. The biggest thing you're missing right now is just momentum. You sit around overthinking every single detail. You rewrite your scripts 20 times. You delay your upload because the lighting isn't perfect. Perfectionism is just you being afraid, and that's okay, but stop letting your fear hold you back. Hit publish, do it again, build undeniable momentum, and stop judging your first video against somebody else's 100th. Just get reps in and the quality will follow naturally over time. Build a business development machine. If you want to monetize your channel without relying on ad revenue, you need to build what I call a business development show. Ad revenue pays pennies when you're small, but you can use your channel as the ultimate networking tool. Creating interview series, reach out to the top 50 people in your industry who could refer massive amounts of business to you. Invite them on your show to share their story. Nobody's asking them for interviews. They say yes, you get to sit down with them for an hour. You build a genuine relationship. You do a great interview, hopefully, and give them amazing content that they can share too. By simply being a good host and building that trust, they naturally are curious about you and what you do. You could have 200 subscribers and build a 7-figure business just from the relationships you created on your tiny YouTube channel. Inside my Movement Makers program, entrepreneurs use this exact strategy to completely transform their income. Quality of thought over quality of production. People use expensive gear as an excuse to procrastinate. You think you need a massive editing team in a fancy studio, you don't. Quality of thought will always beat quality of production. If you have a message that can genuinely change someone's life, they don't care if you filmed it on your iPhone or in your car. They only care about the value that you provide. Your background visuals and your transition effects won't save a terrible idea. So stop worrying about looking professional. Start worrying about being impactful. Share your raw, unfiltered truth. As you get going, there's lots more that you can continue to add— more gear, more analytics, etc. But right now you just need to focus on delivering profound value. You have a unique perspective that the world desperately needs. Your specific experiences have shaped a viewpoint that nobody else has. Lean into that. Let your raw authenticity be the thing that attracts your loyal viewers. Also, if you want to take real action after this video, I made a free worksheet just for you. It covers the top lessons from today, gives you space to write your biggest takeaways, and helps you build a simple action plan. It's 100% free. Just check the link in the description below to go grab it. I'll see you there. Find your purpose in your pain. Now you might be struggling to figure out what your channel should even be about. The answer is already inside you. Your purpose comes from your pain. Whatever you struggled the most with in your life is exactly what you need to help other people through right now. I struggled with being a shy, introverted entrepreneur. I quit on my first business partner for a day, and then I came back, right? I felt completely isolated. Now I make videos for the 19-year-old version of me who desperately needed someone to believe in him. So look back at your darkest moments. Look at the problems that you conquered. There are millions of people out there right now who are currently trapped in the exact same pain that you escaped. They need your guidance. They need your voice. When you build your content around helping the person you used to be, you'll never run out of motivation. Your channel becomes a mission instead of just a marketing tactic for you. It gives you the endless motivation you need to keep keep recording videos even when you're exhausted and nobody is watching. It's the reason I've made 10,000+ videos and still wake up and want to make more videos, because I feel like the work that I do actually matters. When you're just chasing a strategy, you're way more likely to burn out. Model success and copy the rise. When you want to achieve something great, look for people who've already done it, but you must copy their rise, not their result. So you look at massive creators and you try to do what they're doing today. You see them doing huge huge productions or big giveaways or celebrity guests, and you try to replicate that and then you fail. You need to look at what they did when they had zero subscribers. What were their daily habits before they became famous? How did they title their videos when nobody cared who they were? Study their beginnings. Find out how they got their initial traction. Success leaves clues. You don't need to reinvent the wheel from scratch. Find your heroes, analyze their early strategies, and apply those exact same frameworks to your own channel today. You need to go back to their oldest videos. You can sort their channel by the oldest. Watch Look at the terrible lighting. Look at the bad audio. Look at how they struggle to look at the camera lens. This gives you the confidence to start. You'll realize that every expert that you see was once a complete rookie online. They just started earlier and they refused to quit. And you can do the exact same thing right now, starting today. Stop overthinking and just hit record. So we need to agree to stop letting perfectionism destroy your ability to get your message out. You think you're protecting your brand by waiting until your video is perfect, but you're actually just hiding. You're hiding behind research. You're hiding behind planning. Planning is just procrastination. Hiding. You don't need another course. You don't need another strategy book. You need to hit record. The market will tell you what works and what doesn't work. You can't learn how to ride a bicycle by reading a book about it, right? You have to get on the bike. You have to fall off a little bit. You have to scrape your knee once or twice. YouTube is the exact same way. You have to post bad videos to learn how to make good videos. The The algorithm rewards consistency. It rewards creators who show up every single week without fail. So make a schedule and stick to it. Treat your upload day, uh, like a sacred commitment to yourself and to the people that you want to help. If you say you're going to upload every Tuesday, then upload every Tuesday. Don't make excuses. Just get the content out there and let the data tell you how to improve. Your environment dictates your success. You'll never achieve massive growth if you're surrounded by negative people. Your environment has been perfectly designed to keep you exactly where you are. Right now. So if your friends tell you that YouTube is a waste of time, you'll eventually believe them. If your family laughs at your videos, you'll lose your motivation. You have to protect your mindset. You have to change your environment. If you cannot find supportive people in your physical life, you have to build a digital environment. This is why I watch videos of successful entrepreneurs every single morning on my believe walk. I want Warren Buffett in my ear. I want Steve Jobs in my ear. I want people who have achieved impossible things telling me that I can do it too. You need to flood your brain with positivity and ambition. So subscribe to channels that lift you up and stop watching the news. Stop consuming drama, negativity. Think about your mind like a garden, right? Whatever you plant in that garden will grow. So plant belief, plant courage. And when you change your inputs, you drastically change your outputs. How to handle the haters and trolls. So when you finally start getting views, the haters will arrive. This is a guarantee. Someone will leave a mean comment about your voice. Someone will insult your background. Someone would tell you look like Nicolas Cage. Someone will tell you that your business is a scam. Most creators let one negative comment ruin their entire week. You cannot let strangers dictate your emotional state, right? Haters are often just confused fans. They are projecting their own insecurities onto you. Happy, successful people don't spend their time leaving mean comments on YouTube videos all day. Only hurting people hurt people. So when you see negative comment, Feel bad for them. Realize that their life must be in a really terrible place right now. Don't argue with them. Don't try to defend yourself. Just block, delete, move on. Protect your peace. Focus entirely on the people who are thanking you. Focus on the viewers who need your help. The more haters you get, the more it means you're actually making a real impact and reaching a wider audience. Turn your channel into a daily habit. You have to build your channel into your daily routine. Motivation, it has a half-life, right? It wears out. You feel fired up today, but tomorrow you'll wake up tired. You won't want to film. You you won't want to edit. If you rely on motivation, your channel will die. So you need discipline. You need to schedule your YouTube time in your calendar, just like the most important doctor's appointment. Block off 2 hours every Thursday morning to film. Block off 3 hours every Friday to edit. Don't let anything interrupt that time. Treat your content like a million-dollar business and it will eventually become one. Treat it like a hobby and it'll only ever cost you money. The most successful creators I know are disciplined. They do the work even when they're exhausted. They do the work when nobody is watching. They do the work when they have zero subscribers because they know that consistency compounds. The effort you put in today will pay you back 10 times over in the following years. Identify your core value. Every successful channel stands for something specific. You need to figure out your most important core value. For me, that word is believe. Everything I do filters through that one word. When you have total clarity on your core value, creating content becomes incredibly easy. You stop guessing about what to talk about. You just share your truth. If your core value is freedom, then every video you make should help your audience achieve or believe in more freedom. If your core value is resilience, then every video should teach them how to bounce back after failure. Don't try to copy someone else's brand. You will always sound fake. Figure out what matters to you the absolute most. What is the one message you'd share with the world if you only had one day left to live and build your channel around that single idea? People, they don't subscribe to the topics. They subscribe to people. They subscribe to leaders who have a deep conviction in what they're doing. So stand for something powerful and the right audience will find you automatically. The power of deep analytics. Now, you can't grow what you don't measure. You have to look at your data objectively, right? All progress begins with telling the truth. YouTube gives you the most incredible dashboard full of analytics. Most creators only look at their subscriber count and their total views, and that's a massive mistake. You need to look at your click-through rate. It's incredibly important. You need to look at your audience retention curve. Those two things will make or break your channel. You need to see exactly where viewers are rewinding your videos. If you notice that everything drops off at the 3-minute mark, you need to figure out why. Did you start rambling? Did your audio go bad? Did you go off topic? Use that data to fix your mistakes. Even with the most basic of YouTube Studio information, you have everything you need to start to win. So stop guessing. Let the numbers tell you the truth. If a video fails, don't get all emotional about it. Just look at the data, learn the lesson, and get better with your next video. It's a scientific process of making small adjustments until you find the exact formula that you and your audience loves. Monetize before you're ready. You do not need to wait for the YouTube Partner Program to make money. Waiting for ad revenue is the slowest path to making money on YouTube. You can start monetizing your channel today with zero subscribers. If you're an entrepreneur, your channel is a top-of-funnel marketing engine for you. You should be driving views to your own products and services. Put a link to your consulting calendar in the description Offer a free guide, right? We call it a lead magnet, in exchange for their email address. Sell a digital product. If your video solves a specific problem, people will gladly pay you to help them solve it faster. Don't feel guilty about selling. If your product genuinely helps people, then selling is just another form of serving. You are doing your audience a disservice by hiding your solutions. So tell them exactly how they can work with you. Be bold about your business. You are an entrepreneur first. First and a content creator second. Use the platform to fund your mission and scale your impact to reach even more people. Your true story is your biggest asset. People crave authenticity more than anything right now. They are tired of the fake gurus and perfectly polished lives. Your biggest competitive advantage is simply telling your story. Share the embarrassing failures, talk about the times you almost went bankrupt, reveal the mistakes you made when you were first starting out. When you show your vulnerability, you become more relatable. You build a deep emotional connection with your viewers that a perfectly scripted corporate video could never achieve. Your audience wants to know that you are a real human being who struggles just like they do. When you stop trying to look perfect all the time and start focusing on actually being real, your channel will experience a massive gift in engagement. People will start leaving long emotional comments because they finally feel seen and understood. So don't hide your scars. Your scars are the exact proof that you survived the battle that they're going through right now, and they are the reason people will trust you to lead them. You have the exact blueprint to grow your YouTube and turn your channel into a massive engine for your business, but none of this matters if you don't actually put it out into the world. You have to take the very first step today. Your message matters. Your message matters, and you have an obligation to share your voice. Playing small does not serve the world or the people who desperately need your help, or your family, or your bank account. Don't let another day pass by keeping your story hidden behind fear and overthinking. You have greatness inside of you, so give yourself permission to be great right now. Over 75,000 channels have over 1 million subscribers, and expecting your first videos to trying to be perfect is the exact reason your channel isn't growing. And often you'll find for most YouTubers who are actually big and successful on the platform that they spent ages just making crappy videos to learn the art and the science and the skill of actually making videos. And I see so many people these days who have this expectation that like, I want video number 1 to take off.

And it's like, video number 1's not gonna take off. Yeah, it was new and it was fun. When I was making those first 100 videos or even the first 300 videos, I wasn't thinking about subscribers or like building up an audience. It was mainly just me having fun sharing what I found interesting about those computers and that software to whoever would watch.

When I first started, I had this really crappy hand-me-down laptop. I think my brother got it for Christmas, and I ended up kind of just like stealing it and using it.

I didn't know how to edit.

I didn't know how to paste the video. I didn't know how to do anything. I basically had nothing, knew nothing, had no money, and just was just like grabbing things like, we're just gonna try to make this work. The regular people hitting 1 million subscribers right now expected to suck at the beginning, but they pressed record anyway. All you need to do—

this applies to people who have not uploaded videos but have dreams of being a YouTuber—

is make 100 videos and improve something every time. Do that.

And then on your 101st video, we'll start talking like maybe you can get some views. But you know, your first 100 are gonna suck. I implore you to stop watching videos like this, stop overthinking, and just make your first 7 videos.

7 is the magic number.

No one starts off being perfect from day one.

My first 2 years was basically basically me just kind of like roaming around my house trying to find things I already had, using equipment I already had, and just filming it. When you finally let go of being perfect, you'll unlock the courage to just start and begin creating the channel that makes a real difference for—

It took me like 7 years to make my first YouTube video because I spent so much time overthinking and thinking I needed the right camera and the right microphone. There's literally no such thing as a perfect video.

13 years ago, when we first started on our YouTube journey, we filmed everything everything with a MacBook, like literally the webcam from our MacBook, and we edited the videos and uploaded them all using one device. I started my YouTube channel back in 2009. I was incredibly shy, terrified of the camera. My first videos were completely embarrassing. My name is Evan Carmichael. My name is Evan Carmichael. Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. My name is Evan Carmichael. Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael, and welcome to another edition of Modeling the Masters. I had bad lighting, terrible audio, and I looked like a robot reading this script, but I told myself that I'd rather know and fail than never try at all. So I just kept pressing record. Took me 350 videos, public videos, before I wasn't completely embarrassed to watch myself back. Took me 700 videos until I finally made something that inspired me. I sucked at the beginning, but I accepted it. If I waited to be perfect, I wouldn't have 4 million subscribers today. Look at Jimmy Donaldson, the guy you probably know as MrBeast. Today he's got the biggest YouTube channel in the world. But his first videos were shot in his bedroom on a cheap laptop camera. He was just a regular 13-year-old kid mumbling about video games. His lighting was terrible, his audio was worse, and nobody watched his stuff for years. He didn't wait for a million-dollar budget or fancy studio. He just started making videos and allowed himself to be terrible. He made over 100 awful videos before he even started figuring out how to be good. He accepted that he had to suck work before he could succeed. Marques Brownlee runs the biggest tech channel on the internet today, but he started out as a regular high school kid in 2009. He didn't have expensive cameras or a massive studio. His very first videos were shot on a cheap webcam he bought with his allowance. He just pointed the camera at his computer screen and talked about free software. His videos were blurry, boring, and totally imperfect. He made 100 videos before he even reached 100 subscribers, but he kept pressing record anyway.

Point.

He knew that the only way to get better was to start making bad videos and improve just 1% every single time. So right now you're probably thinking, those stories are great for people who started years ago, right? But now it's too saturated. You might think the algorithm is too smart and there's too much competition for a beginner to even get noticed. That's completely wrong. The algorithm only cares about one thing, and that's how much you connect with your viewer. People are starving for real humans with real problems. And today I'm going to show you exactly how to use your unique story to reach 1 million subscribers. Serve the one person in front of you. It's incredibly easy to look at massive channels and think you need to reach the entire world right away. But trying to please everyone means you end up pleasing nobody at all, right? When you start out, you might only get 50 views on a video. Don't see that as a failure. Imagine 50 people standing in front of your living room right now. That's a packed You've got the power to completely change those 50 lives. YouTube hosts over 114 million active channels right now, and they're all competing for 2.7 billion monthly users. You don't stand out by shouting louder than everyone else. You stand out by caring more. If you focus entirely on solving a specific problem for one single viewer, the algorithm will naturally find more people exactly like them. It's called the paradox of specificity. Psychologically, when a person feels truly understood, their brain releases oxytocin. This chemical builds instant trust and deep connection. So stop looking at your analytics dashboard like it's just some scorecard. Look at it like it's a mirror of human behavior. Every single digit is a human. It's a breathing human who gave you their valuable time. When you wake up and you grab your coffee and you sit down to plan your content, ask yourself one simple question: How can I make one person, in my case, believe in themselves a little bit more today? If you make your video specifically for the past version of yourself who was struggling you'll never run out of amazing ideas. You know exactly what that person desperately needs to hear. So shift your attention completely away from just the vanity numbers. Put all of your energy into the actual impact that you're making. Focus on the depth of the connection and the width of your audience will naturally follow. But how do you actually start making these videos when you're absolutely terrified of the camera? Give yourself permission to be terrible. So you've got incredible ideas inside your head right now. Now, right? You probably think about them constantly, but you keep waiting for the perfect moment to start. You want the perfect camera, the perfect lighting, the perfect script, the perfect microphone. Perfection is just fear. The absolute truth is that your first video is going to be terrible. You have to expect to suck at the very beginning. It took me, as I said, 350 videos before I wasn't completely embarrassed by my own content, and then 700 videos until I finally inspired myself. I made something that actually was good. I didn't wait for a massive budget or a fancy studio. I just pressed record. If you wait to be perfect, you will wait forever. So taking messy action is the only way to build actual momentum. The science of neuroplasticity shows that your brain literally rewires itself through physical repetition, not through endless planning. So every single time you press record and you talk to the camera, you're building brand new neural pathways. You're turning a terrifying task into a completely normal daily habit. You can't edit a blank page, as they say, right? You can't improve a video that doesn't exist. You need to put out bad content so you can analyze it and figure out how to get 1% better the next time. The most successful creators in the world didn't start out with perfect skills. They just had the courage to be bad in public. So grab your phone right now. Don't buy the expensive gear. Don't build a professional studio. Just sit by a window with good natural light and tell your honest story. Tell people why you started your business. Tell them what you truly believe. Do it today. Hey, stop letting your fear of judgment rob the world of your amazing gifts. And once you finally get past the fear of pressing record, you have to figure out how to stay motivated on the really hard days. Build an environment that forces you to win. So your current environment is perfectly designed to keep you exactly where you are today. If you want to achieve massive things, you have to completely change what you feed into your mind. You wake up every day and the world actively tries to drag you You look at your news, you check your emails, and you immediately start feeling anxious. You have to be incredibly intentional about what you consume. I don't watch news. I start my day by watching videos of people who deeply inspire me. I go for a walk. I call it my believe walk. I want Elon Musk and Maya Angelou and Les Brown in my ear every morning. When you surround yourself with greatness, your own problems start to look very small. Studies on emotional contagion prove that you automatically adopt the emotions and mindsets of the people you spend the most time with. Now, if you can't hang out with successful creators in person, you can hang out with them on YouTube. So you need to ruthlessly curate your feed, unsubscribe from the channels that make you feel down and bad about yourself, and follow the creators who force you to level up and think bigger. If you're tracking your habits every day, then add 10 minutes of inspirational video to your morning routine. Just like you track your sleep quality or your daily protein intake, you track your mental diet. Motivation has a half-life. Fades quickly. So you need to inject that belief every day to keep you pushing forward. Set up a physical space and digital space so that success becomes your automatic default setting. Put a quote on the wall if you need to. Change your phone background. Make it absolutely impossible to forget what your mission is. When you design an environment that constantly reminds you of your true potential, taking big action becomes less effortful. But taking action once isn't enough. Fall in love with the daily grind. So you're probably looking for a secret algorithm hack to explode your channel overnight. The real secret is just showing up every day. Consistency is your ultimate competitive advantage this year. Most people get super excited, post 3 videos, see zero results, and quit. They let their temporary lack of results destroy their long-term vision. So hitting 1 million subscribers isn't about going viral one time. It's about building a massive library of value over many years. Also, if you want to take real action after this video, I made a free worksheet just for you. Covers the top lessons from today, gives you space to write your biggest takeaways and helps you build a simple action plan. It's 100% free. Just check the link in the description below to go grab it. I'll see you there. You have to intensely fall in love with the work itself, not just the final reward. If you only care about the money or the subscribers or the fame, you'll completely burn out when it gets hard. So you find a deep purpose in the actual videos that you make. I make my videos, 10,000 videos deep. Keep genuinely because I need them for myself. Even if nobody watches, I'd still make the videos every day. Research on intrinsic motivation shows that people who truly enjoy the work are 3 times more likely to stick with it through difficult times. When you love the daily grind, you become completely unstoppable. So create a strict schedule and stick to it. Decide that you'll post one video a week no matter what happens. Don't negotiate with yourself. Treat your content schedule like it's an important business meeting that you cannot miss ever. The algorithm highly rewards channels that keep viewers on the platform consistently. But more importantly, consistency builds deep trust with your audience and your skill set. If you're making one video a month, you're just never going to get good at the skill, and your audience learns that they can rely on you. Now, once you commit fully to the grind, you have to make sure that you're paying attention to the data that matters. Stop guessing and let the data guide your channel. So right now you're probably spending hours making a video, upload it to YouTube, and just cross your fingers and hope that it gets views. Hope is not a great strategy. The creators hitting a million subscribers right now, they're not just getting lucky. They're making decisions based on real numbers. The biggest mistake you can make is just assuming that you know exactly what your audience wants to click on. Your video could be the absolute best content that you've ever made, but if nobody clicks the thumbnail, your message dies in the dark. This is where you've got to treat your channel like a real business. You need to test your ideas. A 2026 survey found that channels with 10,000 to 100,000 subscribers see an average 22% increase in click-through rates just by running A/B tests on their thumbnails. That means they're uploading multiple thumbnail options for the exact same video and letting the audience decide the winner. Top creators are consistently hitting high click-through rates because they test everything. When you test your titles and thumbnails, you take the emotion out of the process. You stop being attached to the design just because it looks pretty to you. And you start looking at what actually stops a person from scrolling and clicking on your video. If your click-through rate is low, YouTube stops showing your video to new people. It's that simple. You've got to capture their attention in a fraction of a second. So use high contrast colors, show clear emotion, remove confusing text that's too hard to read. And once you've got the video up, you look at the audience retention graph. Are people leaving in the first 30 seconds? If they're leaving, your hook didn't match the promise of your thumbnail, or it wasn't emotional enough. You need to analyze this data every single week and use it to get 1% better on your very next upload. But I know looking at analytics can feel completely overwhelming. YouTube has a ton of data. I love it, but it can feel like you need a math degree just to understand what all the numbers actually mean. That's exactly why I built Brandlytics, specifically for you to stop guessing and start dominating on YouTube. You can't rely on luck to grow your channel. And so instead of hoping a thumbnail works, the software gives you the exact data points across 5 metrics clicks so you know exactly what your viewers want. I've designed it because I saw too many creators wasting time and losing momentum. You can plug in your ideas, do a split test, and let the science tell you exactly which one gets more clicks. To learn more, you can check the link in description below. And once you've got the data working for you, you unlock the absolute freedom to focus on what actually matters. Stop hiding your true self from the camera. So you might think you need to act like a loud, high-energy TV host to get views. If you're an introvert like me, you probably don't feel like you belong on YouTube at all. And that's not true. Viewers can instantly spot a fake persona from a mile away. They don't want your polished, fake, perfect anymore. They want real humans with real struggles. Leaning fully into the insecurities you've got is the absolute fastest way to build a massive audience. If you're awkward, be awkward. If you're shy, own it and say you're shy. When you show your flaws, you give other people permission to be themselves too. And it creates an incredibly powerful bond. A famous study on the pratfall effect demonstrates that highly competent people actually become far more likable when they make visible mistakes. So your audience doesn't connect with your victory, victory, victory. They connect with the struggles that you go through. So share the exact times you almost lost your business. Share the moments that you cried on the floor wondering how you'd ever pay for your bills. When you openly share your pain, your purpose becomes more clear. Your viewers, they realize that you actually understand them, that you're like them. They'll stop seeing you as just another talking head and Mr. and Mrs. Perfect and start seeing you as a mentor for them. So you don't have to worry about having everything perfect and scripted. Speak from your head, speak from your heart. Imagine you're sitting across from your best friend, you're at a coffee shop. Talk to them, talk to them naturally. Vulnerability is your absolute greatest superpower. You don't need to hide the messy parts of your training, you can showcase them. But to truly stand out in a crowded market, you need to be willing to take serious risks. Make bold moves and ignore the haters. Your brain is constantly trying to keep you safe. It's trying to keep you comfortable, always. It'll give you 100 completely logical reasons why you shouldn't start a YouTube channel, right? It'll tell you the market is way too saturated this year. It'll tell you you don't have enough free time, you've got millions of other things to do, and you'll have to learn exactly how to ignore that voice. You need to make big decisions with your heart and small ones with your head. If your heart is screaming at you to share your message, you have to deeply trust it. The boldest ideas that come to you, I think, are the ones that you actually— those are the ones you need to act on. Those are the ones you need to execute towards. So don't ask for permission from anybody. Just go and do the actual work. When you start taking the risks, people, they're going to judge you. Your friends might laugh at your videos. Your coworkers might make some weird comments. Ignore them completely. You're not making your content for them. The people who judge you, they're not the ones paying your bills. They aren't the ones that are off chasing their own greatness. This one is wild. Research on social conformity shows that humans naturally suppress their unique ideas just to avoid social rejection. So you have to aggressively fight the biology that is in you. If you let the opinions of the average people around you dictate your actions, you're going to end up with a completely average life. You will end up like the people that you're talking to. So you need to care more about serving people than the people who are around criticizing you. That's a risk. That's scary. Post a controversial opinion. Share the bold idea. The way to hit 1 million subscribers is to stand out, and you can't stand out by trying to blend in, right? So taking those risks, that creates momentum, and momentum changes everything. Take the first step today. The biggest thing missing right now is just simple momentum. You've got great ideas, but you sit on them for years. You plan your research, you overthink massively. Overthinking is the absolute enemy of everybody's success. You need to drastically shrink the gap between having the idea and taking any kind of physical action. If you want to start a channel, don't spend 3 months studying the algorithm. Just pick up your phone and record a 1-minute video today. That's what I call the 2% difference. It changes everything. Taking one small step immediately creates a powerful psychological shift. It moves you from a state of dreaming into a state of doing. The Zeigarnik effect is a psychological principle stating that that people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks far better than completed tasks. By just starting the project, your brain will naturally obsess over finishing it. You'll wake up the next day desperately wanting to do more. This is exactly how you build an empire. One video at a time, one single day at a time. Don't look at this massive mountain of a million subscribers in front of you and feel completely overwhelmed. Just look directly at the very next step in front of you. When things get hard, hard, constantly remember why you started. Focus on your most important core value. Think about the people that you're here to serve and why you want to do this channel in the first place. Let that belief drive you forward even when the results are not going to be there yet. You've got absolutely everything you need to make a massive impact on the world right now. You just have to finally decide to start. Which brings us to the most important realization to make right now: your time is now. You've got a unique gift that the world desperately needs right right now. So stop waiting for the perfect moment and start trusting your own potential and ideas. The only thing standing between you and the life you truly want is the willingness to begin. So step up, share your voice, claim your greatness, make the impact you're looking for. If you think YouTube is too crowded, that is a lie that you are telling yourself to avoid doing the hard work.

Yeah, YouTube is saturated with content nobody —wants to watch.

The platform is crowded with boring copycats, but there is always unlimited space for someone who shares their true struggles. And if you let the fear of competition stop you from hitting publish, you will spend the rest of your life working a job that you hate. So press record right now and get started, because there's a massive wave of opportunity as it pertains to YouTube, and you don't want to miss it. When I first started my YouTube channel, I was so shy and bad on camera, I literally I literally had to make 350 videos before I could watch myself back without feeling completely embarrassed. My name is Evan Carmichael. My name is Evan Carmichael. Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. My name is Evan Carmichael. Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael, and welcome to another edition of Modeling the Masters. It took me 5 full years just to cross a couple thousand subscribers, but I did not quit. I kept hitting publish because I wanted to help entrepreneurs feel less alone in the struggles. Now, you might be thinking that this year is completely different and that the algorithm only rewards big channels with huge budgets. But the truth is the platform is actually starving for real human connection right now. People are bored of the over-edited robotic content. They want your real personality. And if you follow the exact strategies I'm going to share today, you can bypass the noise and build a million subscriber channel faster than you ever thought possible. Stop chasing viral trends and serve your audience of one. You probably look at your YouTube dashboard and feel depressed when you see 10 views. You think 10 views, it's a massive failure. You want to quit. And you feel this way because you're focused on the wrong metric. You're focusing on vanity instead of impact. And I want to completely shift your focus to service. You're built to serve. Think about the hardest moment in your entire life. Think about the deep pain that you went through. Now think about the fact that you survived it. You figured out solutions, and millions of people are currently stuck in that exact same pain right now. They are crying themselves to sleep because they do not have the answer. You have the answer, and I think you have a moral obligation to share your solution with them. So when you make a video, don't make it for a computer algorithm. Make it for the version of you from 5 or 10 years ago. Talk directly to that person. Tell them exactly what they need to hear to get unstuck. And when you do this, your content, it stops feeling generic and it starts becoming highly specific and deeply emotional. The people watching will feel like you are reading their mind. They will trust you. A study by the Harvard Business Review found that increasing customer retention rates by just 5% increases overall profits by 25 to 95%. The exact same rule applies to your audience on YouTube. Deep loyalty is vastly more powerful than a million random clicks. Focus on changing one life at a time. If you get 10 views, imagine 10 real human beings standing in your living room asking for your advice. You'd be pretty thrilled to help them. Treat your small audience with that level of extreme respect. They will become your greatest advocates and share your message with the world. You have to realize that every massive creator started exactly where you are today. They stared at the screen with zero views. They felt the exact same doubt. The difference is they did not let the lack of immediate validation stop them. They focus on the work. You can adopt this mindset. So think about the specific questions that your ideal viewer is typing into the search bar. Answer those questions correctly. Give them practical, actionable advice that they can use the second the video ends. Expect to suck and force yourself to build momentum. The biggest reason your subscriber count is stuck at zero is that you're trying to be perfect. You have a great idea for a channel, you spend months planning, you buy a fancy camera, you buy expensive lights, you plan the perfect script, and then you sit down to record and You freeze, right? You feel awkward. You hate how you sound. You hate how you look. So you delete the footage and you tell yourself you'll just try it again next week. Next week never comes. You're using perfectionism as a shield to hide from the world, and you have to stop that immediately. The American Psychological Association, they published a massive study showing that perfectionism is a leading cause of severe burnout and depression. You will burn out before you even launch it if you demand perfection.. And I need you to completely lower your standards for your first video. Just expect to suck. It's a brand new skill. You do not expect to play piano perfectly on your first day. You should not expect to be a natural on camera either. When I started my channel, I was terrified. I couldn't even look at the lens, right? I talked about recording 350 public videos before I could watch myself without feeling completely embarrassed. And then it took me 700 videos before I actually started to inspire myself. Like, oh, I'm starting to get good at this. You don't need to wait that long, but you do need momentum. Momentum is the single most important thing that you are missing right now. So make a promise to yourself. Promise that you will upload one new video every single week, no matter how bad you think it is. Use your phone, sit in the car, just hit record and talk. Focus on taking action, not getting it right. Perfectionism is a disease. It is a brilliant disguise for procrastination. You tell yourself that you are researching, right? You tell yourself that that you're just waiting for the right moment, the perfect moment. It doesn't exist. It will never exist. If you wait until you feel completely ready, you will wait for the rest of your life. So embrace the concept of the 2% difference. Just make your next video 2% better than your last one. Maybe today you just focus on speaking a little bit louder. Maybe next week you focus on removing some filler words. You build your skills incrementally. You do not try to master everything on day one. And once you build momentum, the fear disappears. Master the satisfaction engine. The YouTube algorithm has completely changed. If you use the strategies from years ago, your channel will die. Back then, creators use sneaky thumbnails, misleading titles. They just wanted to trick you into clicking. They focus entirely on just the click-through rates, and that era is completely over. The YouTube system now is driven by highly advanced artificial intelligence. It is no longer just a search engine, it is a satisfaction engine. The algorithm tracks tracks complex data to figure out if a viewer actually felt fulfilled by watching your video. It measures the watch time. It measures emotional resonance. A recent report on digital trends by Cisco showed that video will account for 82% of all internet traffic. Because there is so much noise, the platform only rewards content that truly changes how people feel. So you have to master the satisfaction engine. And to do this, you must deliver on the the promise of your title immediately. So do not waste the first 2 minutes talking about your weekend, right? Do not welcome people back to the channel. The viewer clicked because they have a specific problem. Give them the solution in the very first sentence. Respect their time. Structure your videos clearly. Give a powerful hook. Tell a relevant story. Provide a concrete step-by-step action plan that they can use to fix that problem today. When viewers finish your video, they should feel more energized. They should smarter. When someone clicks on your video, they are giving you a massive amount of trust, right? They're giving you their most valuable asset, which is their time right now. If you abuse that trust by rambling or hiding the answer, they will leave immediately. And YouTube, they track this. They track how long someone watches. They track what they do after they watch. Do they watch another video from you? Do they close the app completely? If your video genuinely satisfies them, then they want to watch more. And YouTube loves this. They will reward you by promoting your content for free. Keep your pace energetic. Like cut out the dead space, remove long pauses. Every single sentence must serve a specific purpose. If a sentence does not educate or entertain, then remove it. Turn your channel into a business development machine. Now, you probably think you need a massive audience to make money. You think you need to rely on ad revenue, and that's a terrible strategy for a beginner. You will starve waiting for YouTube to pay you a full-time income. You need to flip that model in your head completely. You can build a 7-figure business with only a few hundred subscribers. You do this by turning your channel into a business development machine. So stop trying to go viral. Start using your content to build high-level relationships. Figure out who your perfect client is. Figure out who could refer massive amounts of business to you. Then invite them onto your channel for an interview. Most successful people are never asked to share their personal story. They will be flattered. They will say yes. You sit down with them for an hour. You ask them brilliant questions, right? You make them feel important. You build a deep and genuine connection with them. And after the interview, you give them the video clips to share with their own audience. You're giving them free marketing. You are providing massive value upfront instead of taking. A major psychological study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology proves that giving upfront value creates a powerful feeling of reciprocity. We do this with our Movement Maker students. People have closed 8-figure deals by doing this exact strategy. You can use it too. When you help someone win, they naturally want to help you win. When they need the service you provide, they will hire you. They will not search Google for a stranger. They will hire the person who just spent an hour making them look like a hero. You just landed a massive client, and it doesn't matter if the video only got 10 views. Imagine the power of having 50 deeply connected referral partners in your city. Imagine if those partners sent you just one new client per year, your business would absolutely explode. This is the magic of the Business Development Show. You completely bypass the traditional algorithm. You're not waiting to get discovered by millions of strangers. You're taking direct control of your own growth. You're identifying the exact people who hold the keys to your success, and you are building a bridge directly to them. The strategy completely removed the anxiety of looking at your view count. Stop guessing and start testing like a scientist. So in the beginning, you just need to build momentum and hit publish. But once you build a solid audience, the creators who grow the fastest are the ones who treat their data as seriously as their art. You cannot rely on guessing anymore. You cannot just pick a video thumbnail because you think it looks good. You must test everything. I've run tens of thousands of split tests on my own channel. I once took a 4-year-old video that was only getting 100 views a day I brought it up to almost 15,000 views a day just by changing the thumbnail. YouTube actually saw what I was doing and they wrote a private case study on my split testing methods to share with their top creators. If you want to reach a million subscribers, your biggest growth will not come from your new uploads. It will come from fixing the old videos that are sitting dead in your back catalog. Those old videos are low-hanging fruit. If YouTube is trying to promote them, but people are not not clicking, you have a massive problem. And this is exactly why I built my software called Brandlytics. You can check it out at brandlytics.ai. It's a tool designed specifically to track your testing history, tell you exactly what to test next, and fix the videos that should be winning right now on your channel. Mistakes cost you momentum. Every wrong step pushes you further behind. If you want to scale to 1 million subscribers and build a massive business, you have to replace the guesswork with certainty. Use modern technology without losing your soul. So you live in an era when technology gives you literal superpowers, right? The AI tools available to creators right now are unbelievable, but you have to use them correctly. Most new creators are incredibly lazy, right? You use AI to write all your scripts, they use AI to generate fake voices, they remove their entire personality from their videos. I think this is a massive mistake. People desperately are craving human connection. If you just sound sound like a robot reading a Wikipedia page, your channel will stay at 0 subscribers forever. You need to keep your authentic voice. So you can use their technology to scale your reach, but not to replace your soul. Record your videos yourself, pour your actual emotion into the camera, then use the software to do the heavy lifting. For example, AI localization is a massive growth lever right now. You can take your English videos and instantly translate it into Hindi or Spanish or Japanese. Research by Nimdzi Insights show that 90% of global consumers will completely ignore a product or video if it is not in their native language. So by localizing your content, you open up entirely new markets without filming the video again. Think about the massive advantage this gives you. 5 years ago, creators— I did this too. I had a team in Russia, I had a team in Argentina. You had to hire entire teams of translators to reach a global audience. It cost thousands of dollars and took weeks of work. And today you can do it from your laptop in 10 minutes. You can also use tools to automatically automatically find your best moments and cut them into short vertical videos. You can distribute these clips across every platform to protect yourself from algorithm changes, right, and platform changes. Let the machine handle the editing and the translation and the distribution. But you must focus all of your energy on your ideas and your passion, your unique experiences, your failures, your specific worldview. They're the only things that can't be captured by software. A machine can never tell a personal story about how you struggled and overcame adversity.. It can never show genuine emotion. So lean heavily into your raw, unfiltered humanity. Let your flaws show. Let your genuine excitement shine through. Use the AI to distribute that pure humanity to every corner of the globe. Design your environment to protect your belief. Your biggest enemy is not the YouTube algorithm. Your biggest enemy is the voice inside your head telling you that you are not good enough. Creating content is an intense emotional rollercoaster, right? You will put your heart into a video and nobody will watch it. You will face painful rejection. You will feel completely alone. You will have to build an iron shield around your mindset, right? Your current environment is perfectly designed to keep you exactly where you are today. So if you want to achieve something massive, you have to ruthlessly protect your belief. You need to audit everything that you consume. Consume into your head. Pull out your phone right now. Look at who you follow. Do those accounts make you feel inspired? Do they make you want to take action? Or do they make you feel jealous or angry or depressed? Unfollow every single person who drains your energy. Fill your feed with people who show you what is possible. You have to manufacture your own daily motivation. Every single morning before I do anything else, I get outside, I go for a walk. It's our Believe Walk Challenge. 15 minutes outside at least. And I listen to a famous entrepreneur. I listen to Steve Jobs, I listen to Howard Schultz, I listen to Michael Jordan. I need these powerful voices in my head. I need to borrow their belief until I have enough of my own. A massive study by the University of Oxford shows that the people you surround yourself with, even virtually, directly dictate your long-term success. You cannot afford to leave your mindset to chance. Your brain is a sponge. It absorbs the energy of whatever you put around it. If you surround yourself with people who complain, guess what? You will become a complainer. If you surround yourself with people who doubt themselves, then guess what? You will doubt yourself too. This is why you must aggressively prune your environment. Build a digital fortress around your mind. Seek out the content that challenges you to play a bigger game. Study the creators who are doing exactly what you want to do. Watch their interviews, read their books, immerse yourself in their worldview. When you do this consistently, instantly, their courage will rub off on you. You will start to think like them. You will start to act like them. You will begin to ask yourself what the boldest version of you would do right now. And if you implement every single strategy that I just gave you, your channel will start to explode. You will build a much bigger audience and a deeply profitable business. But none of these tactics matter if you fail to grasp one final essential truth. Your next step to greatness. You already have everything you need inside of you right now. Stop waiting for permission to share your powerful voice with the world. The people who need your help are out there searching for you today. So keep taking action, keep serving, and never let fear win. Most beginners on social media won't win. You post a few times, you play it safe, you blend into the crowd. If you look like everyone else, no one will remember you, and if you are easy to ignore, you will be ignored. Think about James Dyson. For years he was broke and frustrated, working out of a tiny workshop while everyone told him that his idea would never work. He believed vacuum cleaners were flawed, so he set out to build a better one. What most people do not know is that Dyson failed 5,126 times. Prototype after prototype did not work. Investors said no. Manufacturers laughed at him. Him. Anyone else would have quit long before that, but he kept going. On attempt number 5127, the vacuum finally worked. That one breakthrough turned into Dyson, a global brand worth billions of dollars now. Dyson did not win because he was lucky. He won because he was willing to look foolish and persist when everyone else would have stopped. If a man can fail over 5,000 times and still win, what is your excuse as a beginner? My own journey was no different. When I I started on YouTube. I sucked. I'm not afraid to admit it. It took me 350 videos before I could make one without being completely embarrassed by my content. I couldn't even watch my first videos back. I'd hit play and cringe at myself. And the growth was painfully slow. In the first 6 years of YouTube, I gained 9,000 subscribers. 6 years, 9,000 subscribers— that's basically nothing by today's standards. I felt like a failure many times. I struggled with self-doubt every day, but I kept going. I kept making videos. I kept improving one tiny step at And then things started to happen. In the next 6 years, those 9,000 subscribers grew to over 2 million. And those breakthroughs only came after years of struggle and persistence. If I had quit in year 5 or 6 because it felt hopeless, nobody would even know my name today. Now you might be thinking, okay, but Evan, I'm a nobody online. Who's going to listen to me? I'm not a leader. Listen, every influencer that you admire, every leader that you respect, they all started with zero followers. Nobody gave them permission to lead. They decided to lead. They stepped up, they shared their voice, and they did the work long before they had an audience. Leadership isn't a title that you are given. It's a skill that you develop. And so by showing up consistently, by serving others, if you wait until you feel like a leader, guess what? You'll never post a thing. You become a leader by acting like one before anyone believes in you. So yes, even a beginner with zero followers, you can be a leader. In fact, In fact, that's the only way that you become one. So before we get into the how, I want to give a quick shout out to Jackie Wood from my school community. Jackie asked, as a beginner on social media, what would be your top 3 suggestions to stand out as a leader in your niche? So Jackie, I love this question. This video is for you, and I promise by the end of it you'll have a clear game plan to rise up as a leader. All right, let's do it. Here are my top 3 suggestions for any beginner who wants to stand out as a leader on social media. Tip number 1: Share your story and be real. The fastest way to blend in online is to fake it. The world is full of all these cookie-cutter creators trying to be perfect, never showing any real part of themselves. That's exactly why you must be authentic and share your story. Nobody has your journey, your quirks, your voice. So lean into that. Be the real you, not the polished fake imitation version of somebody else. So when I say share your story, I mean the real stuff, the struggles, the awkward moments, the things that you might be afraid to put out there, because ironically, those are the things that actually make people remember you. And so here's some proof. I once went to a fancy event in Los Angeles, VIP dinner, the works, and I hated it. I'm an introvert. Small talks in big groups, it drains me. So instead of schmoozing, I snuck off to a Subway across the street, got a sandwich, and ate alone in the hotel lobby. And I pulled out my phone and I filmed a quick video confessing how out of place and introverted I felt, and that it's okay to recharge alone. I posted it to my Instagram, I think on YouTube. You know what happened? The response was overwhelming. So many people commented things like, "Thank you for saying that. I thought I was the only one who felt like an imposter at those events." And by sharing my vulnerability instead of hiding it, I made a deeper connection with people. People trust you when you're real. They see a leader who's human, not some untouchable fake plastic guru. Even science backs this up. So psychologists talk about the Pratfall effect. So basically people actually find you more likable when you show your imperfections. One study found that authenticity and vulnerability build stronger emotional connections with an audience than trying to appear perfect, especially at the beginning. So your followers aren't looking for flawless, they're looking for relatable. So share that story about how you spilled coffee on your notes right before a big client call, or share the mistake that taught you a really hard lesson. Those moments make you stand out because everyone else is too busy hiding their cracks behind a pretty facade. When you share your story, two amazing things happen. First, you become impossible to copy, right? Competitors can steal your style or your topics, but they They can't steal you, your unique life experiences. And second, you build trust. You signal, hey, I'm not here to impress you. I'm here to help you, warts and all. And trust becomes everything. People follow leaders that they trust. Remember, people don't buy from brands. They buy from humans that they trust. So show them the human side of you. Now, maybe you're still worried, won't sharing my flaws make me look weak? No, it makes you look real. It makes you look courageous. Brené Brown calls vulnerability the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change. So being real is a form of leadership. Plus, sharing your challenges lets you flip them into lessons for your audience. So as a leader, everything you've overcome is a roadmap for someone who's coming up behind you. So your story might be exactly what someone in your niche needs to hear right now. And one more thing, don't hide yourself. In my early years, I was terrified to put me front and center. I figured I'll just share famous entrepreneurs' lessons and stay behind the camera. I told my agent, "I have no desire to be famous. I don't like the spotlight on me. I'm introverted." But he pushed me and finally said something that really changed my perspective. So he said, "The more people know you, the more people you can serve." And that really hit me. By staying invisible, I was actually limiting the impact that I could have. I realized that if I believe in my message, I have to be willing to be seen. Seen. So I'm telling you what I had to tell myself. Don't be afraid to share you. Show your face, speak in your voice, tell your story. It's not about ego or look at me, it's about service. If you can help someone with your story, then you must. The world needs what you have. Hiding helps no one. Sharing will make you stand out because so few have the courage to do it. Number 2: Stay consistent. Wanna know a secret weapon that 90% of beginners never develop? Consistency. The internet is littered with abandoned accounts and dead channels. The truth is most creators quit before they even break through. Over 90% of YouTube channels never reach 10,000 subscribers, not because they aren't talented, but because they give up too soon. They post a few videos, they don't get the results that they hope for, they get discouraged, and then they just vanish. They disappear. Consistency is rare, which is exactly why it'll make you stand out. So if you simply keep showing up while others are fading away, you'll already be in the top echelon. So show up for one year and you'll be shocked at where you end up. If you show up every day for the next year, you won't recognize your life a year from now. But you have to last that long first. The first year is brutal for almost everyone. Slow growth, little to no money. The algorithm plays games with your sanity. It's basically a hazing process to get started. It's supposed to be hard. It's like a test to see who actually wants it and who's going to quit. Most people fail that test. Test, but not you, not now, right? You're here, you're listening to this, so I know you're serious. So I'm telling you now, decide that you will not quit no matter how slow it feels. Commit to consistency. Post that podcast every week, drop a video every Tuesday, whatever your schedule is, stick to it religiously. When your competition falls off in month 3 or 6, your consistency will make you shine. Remember my story— 350 terrible videos, 5 to 6 years of almost no audience. I could have said, this isn't working, I should stop. That's probably the logical, sane thing to do. I felt that way many times. But the difference between the people in the social media graveyard and the leaders you look up to that are still standing is that the leaders kept going when everyone else gave up. It's not about never getting tired or never doubting yourself. It's about continuing despite that. It's about being stubborn on your mission, but flexible on your methods. If one video flops, make the next one better. If you go 3 months and there's no growth, both learn and adapt, but don't disappear. Most creators burn out because they try to sprint what is a marathon. They post like crazy for a short time and then exhaust themselves. Pace yourself, but stay in the game. So here's a pro tip: expect to suck at the start. It's okay. Give permission to yourself to be bad while you're getting better. I didn't want to accept that at first. I wanted my first videos to be great from day one, and when they weren't, I beat myself up. I've since learned to embrace the process. You heard the stats, right, from me. 350 videos until I made one that I could watch without cringing, and 700 until I actually made myself proud of my content. That's the reality behind anyone you see killing it online. There's a mountain of unseen, unimpressive work that came before. So don't compare your first steps to somebody else's middle. Your job is to just keep taking those steps. You are on the cusp of something great. Just a little more patience, a little more effort, and you'll get there. And it's true, the ones who win are the ones who outlast. Be the tortoise, not the hare. Slow and steady steady, consistently improving will beat the flashy sprinter who quits halfway. And one more thing on consistency. Make sure you actually enjoy something about what you're doing. Leaders have passion. You rarely see someone win long-term at something that they hate. If you despise making videos, maybe writing blogs or doing podcasts is more your style. So do that. Find a format and a topic that you love enough to stick with it when it's not giving you rewards yet. Yet. Passion is what fuels persistence. If you love the process, you can endure the pain. If you don't, you'll find excuses to stop. So create content around something that actually energizes you, that you care deeply about. That energy is infectious and it will keep you going. So for me, I'm a visual learner and I love modeling success. That's why I chose YouTube and profiling famous entrepreneurs, because I genuinely find it fun and inspiring 16 years later. It gave me energy even when the numbers were small. So figure out what aspect of creating that you enjoy and lean into that. It will make consistency so much easier for you. Number 3, serve your audience no matter how small. Leadership isn't about you, it's about them, right? The people you serve. If you want to stand out as a leader on social media, focus obsessively on providing value and helping your audience win. Too many beginners chase clout or vanity metrics. They ask ask, how can I get more views? How can I look like an expert? So just switch that mindset a bit. How can I make a real difference for every person who watches my content? When you approach content like that, you immediately separate yourself from 99% of the newbies. You're not just another person shouting for attention. You're someone who actually genuinely cares, and that becomes magnetic. It doesn't matter if you have 10 followers or 10,000. Serve those 10 like they're the most important people in the world, because to you as a leader, they should be. Don't get obsessed with who's not following you. Focus on who is in the room, no matter how few. I remember getting 50 views on a video and feeling discouraged. 50 views, that's nothing, right? But then I just mentally reframed it. If I was giving a talk at a library and 50 people showed up to hear, I'd be thrilled, right? That's a packed room for a newbie speaker. Those are 50 human beings who gave me their time. And that shift in perspective changed everything. I stopped seeing only 50 and started feeling grateful for every single viewer. So then I doubled down on serving those people, responding to comments and answering questions like this one. This is a, this is a question and answer video, making content that addresses their struggles. And guess what? More people came slowly at first, but they came because people feel it when you care. They tell their friends, they stick around. Loyalty is built one person at a time. So Evan from 20 years ago didn't understand this. I thought success was all about the numbers. And I was so ashamed when the numbers weren't there. I even hid my struggles. I was too embarrassed and too ashamed to tell my friends that I was failing and that I was broke. I put on a fake smile and I'm living the entrepreneur dream while quietly stressing out about how I would survive. I thought I had to appear successful, but I was wrong. What I needed was to ask for help, to be honest, and to focus on the impact, not my fragile ego at the time. And eventually I learned impact over ego. Go. Forget looking cool. Just create value. Solve real problems. Encourage people. Share knowledge generously. Do it even when few people are listening, and you'll earn a reputation as someone who cares and who delivers. That is leadership. Also, don't be afraid to engage and build community, right? Leadership on social isn't just a one-way broadcast. It can be a conversation. Reply to that one comment that you got. Thank people for watching the video. Shout out a community member like we're doing for Jackie right here, make your followers feel seen. People, they crave connection. If you give them that, they will remember you. They'll see you as a leader with them, not just above them. So one of my favorite things to do is to feature members of Believe Nation, you guys, in the videos, at the start of all the videos, right? There's a, leave a hashtag #believe and we'll feature you here in a future video. We rise together. So even if your community is 5 people right now, engage those 5 like they're friends and allies. Service also means constantly asking, how can I help my audience more? So maybe that's through your content. Uh, maybe it's through a free resource, like the worksheet that I mentioned here in the description below. Maybe it's just by listening to their struggles. When you focus on serving, two really important things happen. First, you never run out of content ideas because their needs and questions give you an endless supply of what to work on. And second, you position yourself as the go-to leader in your niche because because people can tell you're in it for them, not just for yourself. The leaders who last are mission-driven. And so what I try to remind myself of is your purpose comes from your pain. The struggles that you've overcome equip you to help other people. I started my channel to serve the 19-year-old version of me who felt lost and had no guidance. I knew exactly what that kid was going through, and I was obsessed with trying to help him and others struggling like him, right? Not struggle as much as I did, I did. And I wasn't thinking about the fame or the money. I was thinking, how can I make the journey easier for someone else? When that's your driving force, you stand out. People can feel the difference between a leader who genuinely cares and a selfish content creator just looking for clout. And hey, if you have the ability, then you have the responsibility, as my mom always said, to use it. If you can help, then you must. And that mindset will set you apart. Most people hold back their best advice or dilute their message because they're just trying to sell something or they're afraid of giving too much. But not you, right? Not now. You're going to give massive value upfront. You're going to share your best ideas freely. Why? Because you actually want to see people win. And what it does is build trust and positions you as a leader that people want to follow. The world needs what you have. Don't ever forget that. There are people out there right now who are praying for the solution the solutions and encouragement and empowerment that you have locked in your head or your heart. So go give it to them. That's how you lead. That's how you stand out. So let me recap the 3 suggestions real quick. Be authentic, share your story, your flaws and all. Be consistent, show up relentlessly when others won't. And be service-driven, focus on helping your audience, not boosting your ego. You do those 3 and you will absolutely stand out as a leader in your niche, no matter if you're starting at zero. Today. I know it's not easy. None of this is easy, but it's worth it. You have something special to offer, and the beginning is always the hardest. Remember, the leader you admire is just a beginner who refused to quit. Keep going. I believe in you, but more importantly, I want you to believe in yourself. If you have under 100,000 subscribers on YouTube, using YouTube Studio's A/B testing tool is a great choice. It's free, it's accurate, and it's a good starter tool tool you should be leveraging. If you're over 100,000 subscribers, then it's time to take your split testing more seriously, and you need a professional tool like Brandlytics. Now, I'm a split testing nerd. I've personally completed tens of thousands of split tests on my own YouTube channel, and when I showed YouTube what I was doing, they decided to write a case study on me. At the time, they were shocked that I took a video that was 4 years old and getting 100 views per day and took it almost 15,000 views per day just by changing the thumbnail. Over the years, I've helped thousands of small and big creators grow their YouTube channels. And once you cross 100,000 subscribers, the channels that grow exponentially do so because they focus on their data as much as their art. They match the art of creating videos with the science of the algorithm. That's where Brandlytics comes in. I developed it myself just for my own channel because I needed a way to A/B test at scale. Then some of my big name friends wanted to use it, and it was their secret weapon too. And I didn't know if I was ever gonna make it publicly available to everyone or just keep it for us, but I decided to open it up, at least for now. When we help smaller creators, the most important things are usually figuring out their content strategy, scripts, brand design, and hooks. When we help larger creators, the fastest way to generate growth usually isn't in new videos. It's by fixing the library of content. If you have over 100,000 subscribers and hundreds of videos, adding one more video won't move the needle as much as fixing your old videos that should be performing better. You have gold in your library of videos that YouTube is trying to recommend right now, but people aren't clicking because you have a bad title and thumbnail combination. So how do you find those low-hanging fruit videos? How do you set up tests, track your data, manage your team, see your results, and continue to dominate That's where Brandlytics comes in. For people who use YouTube Studio A/B testing, they usually do it at video launch. It's actually great for that. Set up your 3 variations and see what performs the best. With Brandlytics, we don't even let you run a split test on a video that is less than 7 days old because the data is too variable. But what do most people do next? They just leave the thumbnail that won in Studio up and focus on the next video launch. That's crazy. Like, very, very crazy. First of all, the audience that watches the video in the first 7 days is nothing like the audience that watches afterwards. How your core audience reacts to a video is often very different to how a colder audience reacts. Your videos live forever on YouTube and can bring in views forever. So if you want to take your channel seriously, you need to test forever. Just testing at launch isn't good enough anymore. How do you know what videos to test? How can you tell which videos are underperforming because of a bad thumbnail-title combination? YouTube Studio YouTube Studio won't tell you, but Brandlytics will. Here's what we do. We sort your entire channel by the videos that are getting high impressions but have an underperforming click-through rate. This means YouTube is trying to promote your video because they think it's a good video, but people aren't clicking on it because your thumbnail and title suck. That's great news. It's much easier to fix a thumbnail and title than record a killer video that has great retention. Now, what makes for a a good click-through rate? That's probably one of the most frequent questions I get asked. And the answer is it depends on how many impressions a video is getting. If the video only has 4 impressions and 3 of them are from your mom who clicked each time, that gives you a 75% click-through rate. By contrast, if you have a video with a million impressions and a 5% click-through rate, it doesn't mean that the CTR sucks because 5% is less than 75%. What it means is that as your video reaches more people, it goes to a broader and broader audience. Audience, which means the click-through rate will drop. The number one video on a channel usually has a below average CTR for that channel. That is normal. It's reaching new people and those people won't click as much as your hardcore subscribers. So what makes a good CTR? How can you tell if a video has an underperforming click-through rate? You compare similar videos with similar impressions and see which ones consistently get lower CTRs. That's what Brandlytics does automatically. For you. It runs through your entire channel, looks at the past 28 days of data, and gives you the videos that right now should be getting more views but aren't because the click-through rate is too low. Those are the videos you fix right now with a better thumbnail or title. YouTube Studio's A/B testing is a great tool for beginners, but once you start taking your data seriously, there's no comparison. How do you know what to test? The next question I then get asked is, okay, so I know I need to run a split test, but what do I test? A thumbnail or the title or both? Both. First of all, we don't allow users to test both the title and thumbnail at the same time. You need to be able to isolate why a test wins or loses. If you're trying a new thumbnail and title at the same time, you don't know which is the reason why it wins or loses. Next, Brandlytics will also recommend what to test next. After you load in your channel, we will give you guidance not just on what videos to fix, but whether you should update the thumbnail or title. You can ignore the guidance if you want, but I wouldn't recommend it. Let's talk about your testing history. This might sound super boring, but it's actually super important. If you want to run a follow-up test on a video in YouTube Studio, you have to delete all the data from the first test. What? How are you supposed to know what you've tested before? There are videos on my channel that we've run over 20 tests on. If a video is underperforming, we run an A/B test. If it loses and the video is still underperforming, what do we do? Run another test and then another. And then another and then another and then another until it's not underperforming anymore. For anyone who runs ads, this is normal practice. You keep running tests and always try to beat your best. When do you stop testing? Never. But if you have to delete a test on YouTube Studio to run a new test, how do you know what you've already tested? What thumbnails have you already tried? What title combinations have you already tried? You have no idea, or you have to create a complicated system on your own.— to keep track. This is one of the main reasons why I built Brandlytics. When you click to run a test, it will show you all of the previous tests that you've already done on that video so you can avoid making the same test again and continue to learn from what works. Again, it's just about taking your data and the science of YouTube seriously. If you're only going to run a few split tests per month or only at video launch, then use YouTube Studio. When you're ready to turbocharge your back catalog and your channel growth, growth, Brandlytics is the obvious answer. What else does Brandlytics do? Now, there are a lot more features we've got and are developing, but I don't want to make this video incredibly long. A lot of them, you don't even realize how important they are until you start trying to A/B test at scale. Brandlytics was specifically designed for people who want to scale. Can it work for smaller channels? Yes. I'd say the data starts being really valuable for channels with 10,000+ subscribers, but it turbo unlocks when you have 100,000 to millions of subscribers. The more videos and data you have, the more impactful it is. If your channel is smaller or new, I suggest using YouTube Studio's A/B testing because it's free and your path to growth is usually again more on content strategy, scripts, brand designs, and hooks, not A/B testing. One more thing. I can't finish this video though without also talking about the training that we do. I've coached thousands of creators at this point with their channels from pure startup to 8 figures in subscribers. And as a special bonus for Brandlytics clients, I go live every 2 weeks for 85 minutes to guide you on your growth. Usually we start each session with a channel breakdown. When you sign up for Brandlytics, you can ask our team to get on the list for channel breakdowns. I'll break down one channel with the channel owner, go through their YouTube Studio backend as well as their Brandlytics results, and guide them on how to grow the channel to the next level. That's the first half of the call, and you get to sit in on the consultation. The second half of the call is dedicated to your questions. I'll bring people up on stage in our Zoom room room. You ask your question and I'll do my best to help. I've helped scale my channel to millions of subscribers as well as some of the biggest names in entrepreneurship to millions of subscribers, and it's one of my favorite things to do. The session alone is worth the price, so you can think of it as getting the software for free or getting the sessions for free. But I want to see Brandlytics clients win, so it's a fun way to give more value twice a month. So I think that's good for now. Brandlytics definitely isn't for everyone yet, but if you got some traction already and are now ready to take your YouTube growth seriously, then Brandlytics is for you. I can't wait to help you out. Believe. Trying to sell to everyone guarantees that no one will listen. Broad messaging only gets ignored. People only pay attention when they feel like you're talking directly to them. If you launch your new offer without a clearly defined avatar and message, your marketing will fall flat and you'll start wondering if you're really cut out to be an entrepreneur. Jeff Bezos had an odd rule at Amazon. He kept one empty chair in every meeting. That chair represented the customer, the most important person in the room. He did it because even at Amazon size, Bezos feared what happens when you forget who you're serving. The empty chair was a constant reminder. Every decision had to keep the customer's needs front and center. Think about that. If the guy who built Amazon felt that pressure, imagine the pressure on you with your new offer. You have to fight the same fight to keep your customer's voice in every conversation. When I was 19, I learned this the hard way. I had a software startup that was struggling. I was making about $300 a month and eating cheap bean salad for lunch every day. After 9 months of zero sales growth, I hit my breaking point. I called my business partner and quit. The second I hung up, I cried harder than I ever had in my life. I felt like I had betrayed myself. I was the never I'm a never-quit guy, and yet here I was quitting. The next morning, I felt something worse than failure— regret. I realized the pain of not knowing would haunt me more than the pain of feeling. So I swallowed my pride and went back to my partner's apartment the next day. I knew I couldn't quit. I had to keep going. I knocked on the door. He let me in, but I knew we had to change our approach. Instead of trying to do everything alone, I looked for someone who already had the audience we needed. I took a page from Bill Gates's playbook and pitched our product to a bigger company as a partnership. 3 weeks later, we closed a $13,500 partnership deal. That deal gave us momentum. We started getting traction. We grew the business, and a few years later, we sold the business. I went from sobbing on the floor to hearing customers tell me how our software changed their lives. It only happened because I finally humbled myself to focus on where my customers were and what they actually needed. Maybe you're still skeptical. You might be thinking, but I don't want to narrow down too much. My product can help everyone. Why limit myself? I hear you. It feels counterintuitive to exclude potential customers, but here's the truth. A broad message is a boring message. Marketing 101 says that if you speak to everyone, you speak to no one. In fact, almost half of buyers will choose a solution that speaks directly to their specific needs. So focusing your message isn't shrinking your opportunity. It's actually actually increasing your odds of connecting with the right people. All right, so how do we actually do it? How do you dial in your avatar and messaging so your new offer actually connects? One marketing study found that your messaging can determine 80% of your conversion rate. That's how important this is. So I'm going to share 5 steps to make it happen. Step number 1: Define your one person, your avatar. Don't start with a market of everyone who might buy someday. Pick one ideal customer, one avatar, and get specific. Give them a name and age, a story. The more concrete, the better. If you think this doesn't matter, think again. When Dollar Shave Club launched, they weren't targeting anyone who needs razors. They focused on young men fed up with expensive, over-engineered razors, and they spoke directly to that frustration. Their first viral video literally opened with, "Our blades are effing great," delivered with humor and attitude that perfectly matched their avatar. It resonated and brought than 12,000 customers in 2 days because those people felt, "This is for me." Paint a vivid picture of your target person. Are they a 35-year-old first-time working mom from home overwhelmed and looking for convenience? Are they a 22-year-old startup founder who values speed over polish? Know who you are speaking to. If you catch yourself saying, "Well, it could be for anybody," take a step back. As the saying goes, if you try to be for everyone, you end up being for Zero in on the one person you want most to serve right now. Step number 2: Research their pain points and desires. Now that you have a specific avatar in mind, go find out what really keeps them up at night. This isn't a guessing game. You need to ask and listen. Hop on calls, run surveys, read forums and Amazon reviews in your niche. Your goal is to understand the world through your customer's eyes. What are they frustrated with? Frustrated by? What words do they use to describe their problem? What solutions have they tried before that failed? This step here is non-negotiable. According to CB Insights, 42% of startups fail because they build something that nobody wants. In other words, nearly half of new businesses die from ignoring this step. I don't care how brilliant you think your idea is, if it's not solving a real pain for your avatar, it's not going to work. The good news is that when you do talk to your customers, you'll often discover small tweaks that make your offer dramatically more appealing. You might learn that your coaching program's audience doesn't actually care about your 10-step process. That's your obsession. What they really want is to free up 2 hours in their day to spend with their family. That insight lets you change your messaging to lead with that benefit, instantly making it more compelling. So immerse yourself in their perspective. Use their language, and we'll talk more about that soon. And don't be afraid to literally echo their complaints back to them in your messaging. When your viewer, your reader, your listener has this eerie feeling like, whoa, it's like you're inside my head, you've done your job. You're ready to craft a message that connects. Step number 3: focus on emotions and outcomes, not just features. People buy with their hearts, not just their heads. Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman says 95% of purchasing decisions happen in the subconscious mind. Translation: logic might justify, but emotion decides. This means your messaging has to go beyond listing features and technical details. You need to speak to how your offer feels and what it means to your customer. Think about Nike. Nike sells shoes, but their ads rarely talk about rubber soles or foam cushioning. They sell the emotion of victory, the a feeling of inspiration. Steve Jobs put it best when explaining Apple's marketing: Nike honors great athletes and great athletics. They never talk about the product's details. I want you to do the same with your messaging. Don't just tout what your product does. Paint a picture of the result it creates. Will it make your customer feel proud and confident? Will it remove a stress that's been weighing them down for years? One Inc. article put it this way: you You can measure features, but sell the lifestyle and the feeling. Highlight the emotional payoff your customers get. If you're offering a fitness program, the feature might be 3 workouts a week, 30 minutes each. Important, sure, but the message should be, feel stronger and more energetic than you have in years so you can run around with your kids and never get tired. See the difference? One speaks to the feature, the other speaks to the feeling and life outcome. Whenever possible, tell a mini story in your customer's life that your product makes possible, because that story creates an emotional response—hope, relief, excitement—and emotion is what really drives action. Step number 4: Speak your customer's language. Personalize your message. To really dial in your messaging, you have to use the exact words your customer uses. Uses. Too many entrepreneurs make the mistake of slipping into industry jargon or generic marketing speak. Don't do that. Use the words that light your customers up. How do you find those words? By listening. Listen to their rants, listen to their reviews, their everyday conversations. If your target customer calls herself a solo entrepreneur and never an SMB, use her term. If she jokes that she's allergic to spreadsheets, maybe that's a line you you can weave into your copy. This is more than a trick. It's about making your messaging feel like a one-on-one conversation. Studies show 63% of customers are more likely to engage with brands that personalize their messaging to reflect the customer's own needs and situation. People will instinctively pay attention to what sounds like it's meant for them. Think of your messaging as a mirror that you hold up to your avatar. When they see themselves in and in that moment, trust forms. They think, "Finally, someone understands me." And here's a practical tip: write as if you're writing to a single person. Imagine your ideal client is named Jamie. Start your draft with "Dear Jamie" and write like a personal letter offering to help with a specific problem. You can delete the "Dear Jamie" later, but you'll find that the tone stays personal and focused. Also, address your customer as you, just like I'm doing with you. You right now. It pulls the reader in. Avoid saying our customers or they. Make it direct. The best part is when you nail this, your audience will start to feel a connection with you beyond the product. What it does is create a sense of belonging with them. They don't just buy the product, they buy into the mission, the vibe, the identity of your brand because it matches their own. That's how you turn a casual buyer into a raving fan. And step number 5: test, refine, and iterate. Crafting your avatar and messaging isn't a one-and-done task. It's an ongoing process. The market changes, trends change, and sometimes you'll find that your first guess at messaging maybe isn't resonating as much as you hoped. That's okay. This is where testing and iteration come in. You want to be thinking like a scientist, running experiments. Test different headlines, different angles, different stories in your content. Use A/B tests for your emails and your videos and your ads and see whether version A or version B gets a better response. Pay attention to the feedback, both the data and the direct comments from your audience. If people aren't responding, it might be a sign that you need to tweak the avatar or refine your value proposition. For example, you might discover through testing that your audience responds way better when you talk about freedom than when you talk about about success, or maybe a phrase that you've been using just isn't clicking, but another phrase makes people perk up and click buy. These are golden clues. Incorporate them. Remember, even big brands constantly refine their messaging. Coca-Cola has been associating itself with happiness for decades— Open Happiness, Choose Happiness— and now it's Taste the Feeling. Yet they still evolve their slogans every few years to keep it fresh. You should be doing the same on a smaller scale. Every piece of content you put out an opportunity to learn more about your customer. Use those opportunities and don't get discouraged if your early messaging misses the mark. View it as data, not failure. It's telling you something. The entrepreneurs who win are the ones who listen and adapt. As you gather more real-world feedback, your picture of your avatar will sharpen and your messaging will get tighter and more powerful. The bottom line is stay curious and stay flexible. You're crafting a conversation with your audience. And conversations are dynamic. So keep tuning in to what they say back. When you notice an uptick in engagement, more clicks, more comments, more OMG, were you reading my mind reactions, double down on that. You're finding your groove. Keep refining and keep going. Showing up here and putting in the work already sets you apart from the pack. Plenty of others would have given up or skipped this, but not you. You're here. You're doing the work to try to get better. So keep refining your avatar. Are. Keep sharpening your message. Keep moving forward on your mission. Imagine this. You're a consultant or coach who hasn't signed a new client in months. Revenue swings wildly. One month, $10K. The next month, $35K, then nothing. In desperation, you consider launching cheap courses or ebooks, hoping a low-price offer will bring quick cash. Stop right there. This spray and pray approach is actually a trap driven by fear, and you're You're not alone. Studies show that fear makes people choose safe diversification that don't create real value. In this video, I'm gonna share a focused strategy to break outta that feast or famine cycle and consistently land high-ticket clients. You'll learn how to leverage two tactical content plays, a biz dev interview show, and buyer breakthrough videos to generate $30K+ deals backed by data and real examples. No chasing vanity metrics. No endless low-ticket hustle, just actionable steps to grow your business. Let's do this. Don't let fear derail your strategy. Keep the main thing the main thing. When business dries up, fear kicks in and whispers, lower your prices, create a cheap offer, cast a wider net. It feels safe, but it can sabotage your success. Research confirms that fear-based decisions often lead to conservative moves— that don't actually drive growth. In our case, it's like abandoning your premium service, the real solution you offer, to chase a low-ticket product you think more people will buy. Creating low-price offers is not easier for an expert like you. You'd need to sell hundreds or thousands of cheap units to match just a few high-ticket clients. High-ticket programs lets you focus. One industry expert explains that high-ticket offers bring significant income per customer So you don't need a huge audience or tons of leads to hit high revenue goals. Fewer clients, less complexity, but higher value delivered to each. That's a winning formula for a small team or solo business. You can pour your energy into what you do best instead of juggling funnels and ads and support issues for a low-priced product. As another coach puts it, high-ticket success isn't about luck. It comes from clarity and connection, whereas low-ticket ventures often devolve into endless tech tweaks and refund headaches. That's the not-so-glamorous side of selling at scale. High ticket beats low ticket. Here's the proof. Still on the fence about focusing on high ticket? Let's back it up with some evidence. High ticket services are not just anecdotal wins. They're economically smarter for many experts. Consider profitably selling a $30,000 consulting package once clients can net more profit than selling a $300 course 100 times. In fact, business strategist Evan Carmichael observed that just 5 high-paying clients can outperform 100 low-paying customers in revenue with far less stress on you and your team. High-ticket models often mean higher profit margins per sale, a small or no team, and simpler delivery. Meanwhile, low-ticket models rely on sheer volume and complex funnels. One sales expert bluntly calls low-ticket offers a hamster wheel hustle that drains your energy and steals your time. Ouch, but true. Think about it. With low-priced products, you'd need robust marketing to reach masses of buyers. If you're not already an online marketing whiz with a huge audience, that's an uphill battle. As entrepreneur and friend of the channel Jenna Kutcher noted, to make $50,000 from a $50 product, my marketing would have needed it to be a lot broader, meaning a big ad budget, affiliates, or viral content. That's essentially building an entire marketing machine— webinars, email sequences, customer support for all those buyers, maybe even handling refunds. Do you really want to manage all that? Probably not, and you likely don't have to. Now, on the flip side, high-ticket consulting or coaching lets you laser target a handful of ideal clients. Your marketing can be more personal and direct. In fact, many high-ticket service providers stay fully booked just from referral No flashy marketing at all. You can deliver great results to a few clients and generate case studies and word of mouth that bring the next clients in. It's the classic quality over quantity play. But here's the key: to sell high ticket consistently, you must build trust and relationships. High paying clients rarely buy impulsively or from a random click on an ad. They buy when they trust you. As a business coach on Medium put it, high-ticket clients don't buy on impulse. They buy from trust. So how do we quickly build that trust with the right people? Let's dive into the first big tactic. The Biz Dev Show. Turn content into relationships and clients. One of the fastest ways to build trust with high-value prospects is what I call the Biz Dev Show strategy. Here's how it works. Instead of chasing clients through cold calls or generic ads or hoping a video goes viral, You invite your ideal clients or key referral partners to be interviewed on a content-rich show. The magic is in the format. You're giving them a platform to share their expertise, not a sales pitch. It's disarming, it's flattering, and it starts with a genuine relationship. Why is it so powerful? Because referrals and relationships drive business. Approximately 65% of all new business comes from referrals and recommendations, and a staggering 84% of B2B decision makers say their buying process starts with a referral, not a Google search, not a cold email, but a referral. By hosting a biz dev show, you're essentially manufacturing referrals and warm introductions at scale. You spend 30 to 60 minutes talking one-on-one with someone who could either hire you or refer you, all under the friendly pretense of content creation. It's networking on steroids. Now, a few pointers to make this work effectively for you. Number 1, target the right guests. These should be people who either are your ideal client or have access to many of your ideal clients. For example, a VP in a company that could use your consulting or well-connected individual in your industry. We call them your Money 50. Make a list of 50 high-impact people you'd love to build a relationship with. Next, keep topics safe and valuable. If your guests are C-suite executives or experts with sensitive information, don't ask them to spill company secrets. Instead, discuss general but insightful topics around their leadership, their vision, industry trends. For example, if you're talking to VP Sales, ask, what's your philosophy on building visionary teams? These kinds of questions let them shine without any NDA worries. They'll appreciate that you're highlighting their expertise and you sidestep any confidentiality issues. Remember, the interview is about them, not you. You're showcasing them as an expert. Next, Next, build rapport and listen. During the interview, be genuinely curious. People can tell if you're just waiting to pounce with a sales pitch. Instead, actually enjoy the conversation. Compliment their insights. Dig deeper into their stories. This is where your trust is formed through authentic human connection. By the end of the 30-minute conversation, you'll be amazed how much goodwill you can earn by simply listening to people well. Next, sneak in one strategic question about your domain. This is a pro tip. Midway through the interview, ask a question that relates to the problem that you solve. For instance, for that VP of sales, you can say, I often help companies develop their next generation of leaders. In your experience, what's a common challenge in grooming new leaders? The guest answer will likely reveal a pain point, or at least get them thinking about that need, and it suddenly establishes your expertise. You mentioned that you help companies companies in that area after all. Next, the off-air ask. Once the recording is over and you've thanked them, don't just say goodbye. This is the crucial moment. Transition to a casual conversation about the topic they touched on that intersects with your services. So, uh, for example, you mentioned struggling to groom new leaders. That's exactly what I specialize in. I'd love to offer a few ideas or even hop on another call to discuss how we could tackle that if you're open to it. To it. It's a soft invitation framed as a helpful follow-up, not a hard sell. Since you've spent time providing them value and showcasing them, you've earned the right to ask. Often they'll be receptive either to explore your services or to introduce you to the right person at their company. Next, ignore the vanity of views. This strategy is about quality, not quantity. Maybe only 10 people watch the interview on YouTube. It doesn't matter. The one person who mattered was your guest. And now you have a warm lead. Plus, you can repurpose the interview clips for social proof or marketing later. But that's the cherry on top. As a general rule, don't obsess over likes and views at this stage. They are vanity metrics that can distract you from your real goals. As one marketing expert put it, every minute and dollar spent on chasing vanity metrics is a missed opportunity to focus on metrics that matter. In our case, the metric that matters is how many genuine conversations you're having with potential $30K+ clients, not how many random people like your YouTube video. And also, if you need help with any of this, we do have programs that typically range from $15K to $50K to work with myself and my team to execute these strategies. It's called Movement Makers, and there's a link in the description below on how you can apply to work with us. Now, if you're worried, won't a longer interview bore people? Shouldn't I make it super short? Short? Think again. When the content is valuable to the right person, they will absolutely engage, even if it's long. Podcasts are a great example. 93% of people who start listening to a podcast episode stick with most of it or all of it. These can be 30, 60, 90 minutes long. It's not about the length, it's about relevance. If your interview is insightful, your guest and any genuinely interested viewers will be hooked. So don't cut a great interview short just for the sake of making it snackable. The more time you spend building rapport, the stronger the relationship will be. By the way, doing this weekly, say one interview per week, means 52 warm connections a year with exactly the people who can grow your business. So ask yourself, what's the likelihood that yields at least a few high-ticket clients or deals? If you're still hesitant, remember that referrals and personal connections outrank any other lead source in closing big deals. You're engineering those connections systematically Many consultants running high-ticket businesses rely on exactly this method. We've taught many of them. It works because it's human and it's direct. And because trust is the currency of high-ticket sales, you're essentially printing money by investing time in relationships. Buy Breakthrough Videos. Content that converts, not just content for content's sake. Now, while you're executing the biz dev interview for proactive outreach, there's a second tactic tactic that covers the inbound side. I call these buyer breakthrough videos, BBVs. Think of BBVs as your on-demand sales assistant. These are focused videos that answer key questions and objections your high-ticket buyers have before they hop on a call with you or your team. They break through the mental barriers that might stop someone from contacting or hiring you. Here's why buyer breakthrough videos matter. Potential clients are likely checking out your website or YouTube quietly doing their homework on you. When they land on your site and see generic buzzwords like innovative solutions or a list of services with fancy names, they might think, huh, I'm not exactly sure what that means. If they're confused or unsure, they leave, right? Bye-bye lead. We don't want that. We want to capture and convert that interest while we have it. Here's a quick stat for you. Adding a video to your landing page can boost conversions by 86% on Why? Because video engages visitors and makes your message clear and memorable. Viewers retain about 95% of a message when they watch it in a video compared to just 10% when reading text. So if you need to explain a complex service or build trust, video is your best friend. To create buyer breakthrough videos, follow these simple steps. Number 1, identify your buyer's top questions or hesitations. Think about the past sales calls or client meetings that you had. What did people ask? What did they need clarified? Maybe it's, how exactly does your process work? What kind of results have you achieved? Or what does whatever jargon word really mean in practice? Also, look at your website services or programs page. Every bullet or term there is a candidate for a buyer breakthrough video if it's not self-explanatory. For example, if you list Knowledge Accelerator program as an offering, you must have a video that says what that is in plain language and why it's awesome. Don't assume a clever name just speaks for itself. Next, keep each video focused. You're not doing a full webinar or giving away the secret sauce. The goal is to educate and intrigue the viewer enough that they think, this person really knows their stuff and I understand how they can help me. Maybe I should talk to them. For instance, a consultant could record a video called How to Smooth Out Volatile Monthly Avenue, where you explain common causes of feast and famine income. If that's the pain your prospect has, you just hooked them. Next, place these videos where your warm prospects will see them. Your website is number one. Embed the relevant video next to the text about that service or the topic. If someone's reading about your leadership coaching program, have a video of you describing the program's approach and outcomes. Also consider setting buyer breakthrough videos directly leads. Let's say someone downloads your PDF or inquires by email. In your follow-up, include a link. By the way, I made a video answering this common question. I think you'll find it useful. It feels personal and adds a human touch. Next, leverage YouTube strategically. Upload these buyer breakthrough videos to YouTube as well. The reason is you can easily embed them on your website and share links, and you can start building a content library. Over time, some will get discovered by people searching for that that question, bringing you bonus organic leads. But again, view counts here are not the goal. Conversion is. If a video only gets 300 views, but 10 of those viewers schedule a call with you, that's a huge win. Let me give you a real example to illustrate the impact. I reviewed a consultant's website for our Movement Makers program. Link to check it out in the description below. And he listed services like Knowledge Accelerators as a bullet point. Impressive term, but to a new visitor, they'd be scratching their head. What does that mean? So we recommended he turn each of those concepts into a video explanation. Why? Because if a potential client spends even 5 minutes watching him clearly explain his unique approach, that client is far more likely to trust him and reach out. Right now with just text, people were likely bouncing off the page confused. We're losing money every time a qualified prospect leaves the site unsure about what we offer. A video fixes that. It's like having a mini consultation. With every site visitor 24/7, and it can dramatically increase your lead-to-client conversion. The data already told us videos make people convert more. And beyond just the stats, it just makes sense. People feel like they know you after seeing you speak on video, and that familiarity breeds trust. So brainstorm your buyer breakthrough video topics. A good rule of thumb is to have videos for the big outcome or the value prop you deliver, the key components of your methodology or services, and any major objections that you frequently hear. For objections, maybe it's, uh, I don't have time for this. Make a video, how to get ROI from leadership coaching even if you're busy. Or is it worth the investment? Uh, maybe a video, why high-level leadership coaching pays for itself with some data or examples. You get the idea. One more thing, quality. Do you need fancy production No. Use a decent webcam or smartphone, ensure good lighting and clear audio. Speak as if you're talking to one client, not reading off of some script robotically. Authenticity and clarity matter more than your slick production. In fact, um, conversational tone can build more trust than a perfectly polished corporate video because it feels personal. As long as you address the question head-on and show you understand their problem and how to solve it, your job is done. Focus on what counts and avoid the shiny objects. By now you can see a theme: focus. Focus on your best clients. Focus on building relationships. Focus on content that directly leads to sales. In practice, this means tuning out a lot of noise and vanity that can sidetrack entrepreneurs. Don't obsess over social media followers, viral videos, or posting every day. These are nice to haves eventually, are actually not need-to-haves to land high-ticket clients. Case in point, many consultants quietly making 7 figures have tiny online followers. They're not TikTok stars or YouTube celebs, and they don't need to be. They double down on direct relationships and targeted value. Remember, referrals built the business world long before likes existed. If 84% of big B2B purchases start with referrals, your energy is better spent cultivating referrals through biz dev conversations stellar results than chasing internet fame. Next, phase 1 versus phase 2 mindset. I often tell clients in our Movement Maker program to separate what I call phase 1 and phase 2 in their growth plan. Phase 1 is all about getting revenue, getting that consistent $30K, $50K, $100K per month coming in. These tactics we've— we're discussing biz dev interviews, buy breakthrough videos focused on conversion. Those are phase 1 tactics. They might not make you internet famous, but they will make you money and build a foundation. Phase 2 can be the broader thought leadership, starting a big YouTube channel, launching that online course, scaling to a much wider audience, right? Being the face of your industry. Those are great goals, but only tackle them after Phase 1 is stable. Trying to do both at once usually means doing both poorly. As the saying goes, chase 2 rabbits and catch none. It's okay to say no to certain projects right now. You're not killing your dream. You're sequencing it for maximum effect. Effectiveness. Next, track meaningful metrics. Since we're being tactical, here's what I suggest you actually measure in this strategy. One, how many biz dev interviews are you doing per month? Two, how many of those turn into follow-up sales conversations or proposals? And three, your close rate on those. Also track, four, how many buyer breakthrough videos have you created? And five, any uptick in inquiries or conversion rates on your website after adding them. These are metrics that matter. If you see your number of meaningful conversations going up, that's a clear leading indicator your revenue will follow. Vanity metrics like website hits or video views are often misleading. 10,000 views from random people in the wrong niche and wrong country mean nothing on a video. 10 views by CEOs who need your service means everything. Keep that perspective and you won't get discouraged by the wrong numbers. Finally, quick note on mindset. Don't let fear creep back in during execution. Fear might show up as a, maybe I should also do a $100 course for those who can't afford me, or I got a low response in my video, maybe this isn't working. Remember the research. Fear makes us pull right back when we need to push forward, leading to half measures that don't create actual value. Commit to this path for a few months and give it a chance to bear fruit. Plant enough seeds and the garden will grow. High ticket both simplified and supercharged. So here's a quick recap of your game plan to land high-ticket clients consistently. Number 1: Focus on your core high-ticket offer. Don't dilute your value out of panic. As data and experience shows, a handful of big clients can out-revenue a heap of small ones, and it's a path that preserves your sanity and your impact. Next, build relationships through a biz dev interview series. Position yourself as a peer and promoter of your ideal clients. It's the fastest way to create trust, and trust is what makes high-ticket deals happen. Aim for one quality conversation a week. Over a year, this network effect is enormous. And if you need our help doing it, check the link below. Next, create buyer breakthrough videos to convert lurking prospects. Capture those visiting your site or checking you out by answering their burning questions via videos. This can dramatically increase your lead conversion conversion. Remember, video can boost landing page conversion by 80%, and people do watch content that educates them, even long content, as long as it's valuable. Next, keep it simple and metrics-driven. In phase 1, all that matters is revenue generation activity, conversations, and conversions. Drown out the siren song of vanity metrics and shiny new tactics that don't serve this immediate goal. As one article noted, every minute chasing vanity metrics is a missed opportunity to focus on what truly drives your business. So zero in on those relationships and conversion metrics. By making these shifts, you'll avoid the low-ticket hamster wheel and instead build a streamlined, high-impact business. No more random revenue swings due to luck or referrals falling from the sky. You'll be engineering a steady pipeline of high-paying clients. How would that feel to wake up each month knowing roughly where your $30,000 or $50,000 or more is coming from and knowing you don't have to frantically launch something new to make it happen. This approach is evergreen. It works today. It'll work 5 years from now because it's built on timeless fundamentals, solving real problems, connecting with real people, and communicating value clearly. Whether you are an executive advisor or consultant or any expert selling high-ticket outcomes, these tactics apply. I've seen it transform businesses that were on the brink of burnout and failure into businesses that are enjoyable and profitable. And I believe it can do the same for you. Remember, high-ticket clients are not elusive unicorns. They are people with big problems that you can solve. Reach out to them strategically, show up with value, and ask for the business. You'll be amazed at how many say, "Yes, let's talk." One of our YouTube Mastermind members, Marshall, built a YouTube channel that landed his business a massive $13 million partnership deal.

One of the things I'll talk about is that $13 million deal with one of our partners, Vetcom. You want to turn your YouTube in an asset that can leverage your brand.

He is a former Army Ranger and doctor who helps veterans get their disability benefits. He started posting videos every single day and completely transformed his company.

We've already to date helped over 10,000 veterans get connected to get the treatment they need. Not only are we helping them from a monetary standpoint. They're getting paid benefits monthly, but now they're getting the medical care that they've been denied for decades.

His channel now generates over 100 highly qualified leads a day with an 85% conversion rate. He even pays his vice president of marketing using just his YouTube AdSense revenue alone.

I had no idea that just me with one camera talking off of a teleprompter could generate generate revenue like that just from YouTube. We generate 100+ leads a day with an 85% conversion rate. I didn't think having 23,000 subscribers you could make really much money, but this last month we were able to pay for our VP of marketing salary just from AdSense.

And in this presentation from our mastermind group, he is sharing exactly how he stopped chasing viral views and built real authority instead.

Enjoy. Well everyone, my name is Marshall. Thank you for asking me to do this. You know, I think when you see You see the metrics up there. Initially you look at it from a vanity standpoint, it's like, ah, it's not that many, 23,000 subscribers, ah, 1.5 million views. But, you know, early on that's what I thought. I thought it was all about vanity metrics, you know, about clicks going by, being viral, virality. And I learned very early on through Evan Carmichael's team that the key was building long-term authority in the space or niche that you're trying to carve out, and then the views will come, and then the leads will generate from it. Because what we wanted to do with YouTube was to use it as a brand asset to generate leads to our company for which we offer services to veterans. So what I'm gonna do is, I think, a little background context on who I am and what the company is, so you kind of have a better idea what the YouTube channel is. But a little bit about myself, so I I used to be a lot cooler than I am now. Look at that baby-faced killer up there. Yeah, I was in special operations in the Army. I was in the Ranger Regiment, so I went on— Oh, thank you, thank you. So I've been on 5 official combat tours, couple other unofficial ones, multiple locations around the world. I was a medic, special operations combat medic, so I was involved with not only direct action combat, but a lot of life-saving lifesaving interventions of friends and local nationals, and so it was an amazing experience. I loved it, and really being in the Rangers and special operations, it's a very Type A community. You have to go through multiple selections to get in there, and so it really was a foundation of my drive and my entrepreneurial mindset, and it really kind of absorbed what we call the, it's called the Ranger Creed. Ethos that's driven into all of us Rangers. Never leave a fallen comrade, always complete the mission 100% and then some. And these are all things and ethos that Andrew can tell you have bled out through the company and the values and mission that we incorporate. So with that, I came out of the military. I did about 7 and a half years. Great experience, but no one really ever prepares you for the transition. Started struggling with some PTSD stuff, you know. I didn't know what it was. I had some ideas, but it started getting worse, you know, hypervigilance. I was always easily startled. I was having nightmares, started having flashbacks, um, you know. It led to substance abuse, led to, you know, an event where I was thinking about taking my life. And, you know, I was this tough, you know, macho Army Ranger. I can't ask for 'cause that's weakness, right? That was instilled in me in the training, right? You just drive on, complete the mission, suck it up. And it got to a breaking point for me where I needed help, and I didn't know where to turn. And so the most obvious choice is the VA, the Department of Veterans Affairs. They are designed to take care of veterans. And so I reached out to the VA and said, "Hey, I got— I have PTSD. I need help. I need some treatment. I need therapy." You know, what do I do? And they're like, well, you got to file a claim. You got to get service-connected. The government has to say, yeah, the military caused this, and then they'll pay for your treatment and get you the therapy you need. So, all right, I'll do it. I filed, you know, I went to my exam, talked to the doctor. They were crying. They were literally crying based on the stories of loss of friends and everything I was describing. And I left thinking, well, I'm definitely going to get it. 3 months later, I get a letter in the mail and it says, said denied because you have no evidence that you saw a psychiatrist in the service. Or that— what I— what they said as I kept marking no on the do you have mental health problems after deployments. Well, everyone did that because you didn't want to go see the shrink, you didn't want to get pulled off the unit. And so they, they weaponized that against me and I got denied. And so that was a super low point. So I mean, the system that's supposed to help me kind of turned me away and I— it stuck with You know, so what I had to do is I went to the internet and tried to find someone to help me out. And there's these companies of medical providers that can offer these things called medical opinions or nexus letters. And they can offer to make that connection to your service to your claim diagnosis, which for me was PTSD. Problem was, it's very predatorial. It's very exploitative. They're charging $2,500 for a letter. Now, I was a physician, and I was afforded the opportunity to be able to afford that, but most of my peers that are veterans They can't afford that. That's too much. And so that really, really stuck with me over the years. You know, I won the claim, but you know, that's— it stayed with me. So the military taught me a life of service, right? And I wanted to continue that and eventually decided I was going to go on, take that stepping stone of being a medic, become a doctor, you know. So I just felt like that natural extension. Um, I started practicing medicine for several years. You know, it had its great moments but for the most part, I really became disillusioned with it because it became less about taking care of the patient, spending time, learning, really becoming part of their life, and it became more of this healthcare system where you're managed by insurance companies. You gotta see 20, 30 people a day. You gotta meet these quotas, got ICD-10 codes, and it really became the administrators telling me what to do, and I couldn't really practice practice medicine the way that I wanted to. And so I really started realizing, I had this epiphany that if I want to drive impactful change, meaningful change, I've got to create something meaningful and that is aligned with my passions. And so I know that I'm a doctor, you know, they taught me a lot about medicine, but I don't know anything about business. I don't know how to start a business or run a business. So I thought, alright, well, I'll just go get my MBA, that'll give me the foundation. So I went back to school, got my got my MBA and decided that, you know, I was going to try to incorporate all these things that were passions of mine into a singular mission and a singular company. And so that was when Xterra Health was born. It's a relatively new company. July 2024 is when it started, you know, and it was from my personal experience of, you know, being ripped off and realizing that there's got to be a better way, a faster way, a more efficient way, a reputable way to help veterans. And so we became, you know, a physician-led organization that produces these services to veterans, these, these independent medical opinions, or these DBQs, which are just standardized forms the VA uses to determine how severe disability is. We became radically affordable, and that was my goal, is I did not want cost to be a barrier to entry point into these services. And so we set up a sliding scale system them based on needs. And so if you couldn't afford it, we were going to offer it pro bono. And in order to do that, I had to figure out a solution. Well, how do I drastically cut the price, you know, down from a competitor's— how do I make it a fifth of the cost of the nearest competitor? Well, AI, right? So this AI bubble is coming, right? I knew at this point no one else is really doing it. How can I leverage AI to make everything faster, right? So we leveraged it for data extraction. How do we take massive amounts of medical records and quickly, in a HIPAA-compliant way, extract that data? How do we generate different portions of the medical opinion so it takes off work administrative burden from providers? So we can take a process that historically would take days, 'cause you gotta manually go through 5,000 records, and you gotta write, edit, into down, and now into about 30 minutes. So we can do, we can have the providers There's focus on just speaking with the veterans, right? Getting the story, making that connection. And, you know, another thing we implemented was they don't pay until the very end, so we empowered them, right? They're part of the journey, and we're just a piece of that pillar that helps them in their journey. And so we became radically different, and because of that, it changed the trajectory of the company, right? So we knew immediately that that the impact was there. Like, we were making a difference. The people who were seeing— we were helping immediately. We were, we were having— we, we had immediately, and we are continuing to have, the high success rates with our medical opinions. 96% approval rate. You know, we've already to date helped over 10,000 veterans get connected that wouldn't be— we're talking about Vietnam vets that have been struggling with cancer from Agent Orange for over 40 years, and we finally get them connected to get the treatment they need, right? So not only are we helping them from a monetary standpoint, they're getting paid benefits monthly, but now they're getting the medical care that they've been denied for decades. And so it's really a social impact that we're driving, which has been amazing. And then, you know, one of the things I'll talk about is that $13 million deal with one of our partners, VetCom, and they're generating now, just from them, 2,200 veteran referral enrolls a month. And so we knew that the barrier was not the impact, it was how do we get this known to other people? How do we make our brand more— get awareness out, right? And that's when we tried to figure out, okay, we got to do this marketing thing. Now doctors are great at medicine, you know, Vikram, right? But we suck at marketing. It takes a lot of edu— you know, took a lot of education. I didn't know what I was doing, so I did what a lot of people in the beginning do, just kind of throw spaghetti at the wall and hope something sticks. And, you know, we started a YouTube channel, a short-form, you know, Instagram, TikTok. We started doing paid ad spends. We had no framework what works. Sometimes things would go viral, other times it would not, and then we couldn't reproduce it. We had no— we had nothing. We didn't know what we're doing. So I knew that I had to identify an expert, and so Me and Andrew kind of went out, started looking around, doing our research. We found a couple different people that we kind of honed in on, and we narrowed it down to two. One of them was Evan's team, another one was Daniel Ives. It's this guy that promises like millions of views or something like that. And so we were trying to determine, okay, do we go for short-term gratification, the views, or what Evan was saying is, well, no, you don't want to do it. We play the long game. You want to turn your YouTube into an asset that can leverage your brand. And that really resonated with me because that's what we wanted to do. And so that's the kind of— I always say that was the day that everything changed for Xterra Health. It was probably the best single investment that we made early on is in Evan's team. Because before, you can see everything we were— we were just doing spray and pray, like we say in the military. We were just shooting in the general direction, hoping we hit the target. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't, right? But there was no system, no strategy, no reproducibility. And so then meeting Evan's team, now he's coaching me, I'm meeting Ida, I'm learning about what it means to build long-term authority, what it means to be a thought leader, because that term I just thought was like Tony Robinson, right? I didn't know what that meant, that you could be a thought leader in your space. And so learning what that means in your niche, right? Learning how you leverage YouTube not just as a marketing platform but as a brand asset to really leverage and just be your top funnel lead, right? Source generator. And so, and I learned real quickly that all that short-form stuff, people love it for entertainment. They're on the, you know, they're on the toilet, they're scrolling, you know, it's just quick dopamine hits. But they're all coming to YouTube to learn. They wanted the education from me. And so I was— and I learned really early on it was about being consistent intelligent, strategic, and also mission-driven in my content. And so I met Ida. I always say she's my spirit animal in this whole journey. She is synonymous or analogous to what I would call a drill sergeant in the military. You know, she's no nonsense. You know, she would, you know, I get direct feedback from her. You know, that's a bad idea. It sucks. You know, she would tell me that. You know, and And I needed to hear it. She would give me homework. She knew that I was very driven with achievement. And if she gave me an assignment, she knew that I would do it. And so she would give me almost like professor-level homework assignments that I would go out and do. If I tried to experiment or go outside the norm, I would get yelled at. You know, "That's a dumb idea." I really learned that she became my sensei and I was her grasshopper. And I learned that if I just listened to what Ida was saying and I just used her mouthpiece and just copied it, the results would follow. And she said, you know, early on, just consistent. It's gonna take time. It's gotta build. It's gotta build. The algorithm's gotta find you. Trust the process. Because, you know, when you start out, nothing really sticks right away. YouTube's gotta learn your content, your style. The algorithm's gotta push it out. But— and I learned really early that what I thought was initially just art was a combination of art and science, right? So, and that's what I love about YouTube. Really any of these short-form channels, but YouTube specifically, there is that, the analytics section, and I, you know, being a data scientist and a researcher in my previous life, I love it, right? Because now I get to take the subjective portion, the art portion, but really get to dive into the analytics the objective facts, right? Like Evan pointing out, well, you look at here and then all of a sudden you have a dip. You gotta go look at that dip consistently in every video. Why are people leaving? 5% of your people leaving at that point. What are you doing? And then I can go back and review what I'm doing, my behavior, what I'm talking about, and I can change that behavior and that pattern in my scripts. I can see what resonates, the thumbnails, the brand. I mean, Brandlytics is amazing, right? Because now I can actually test things against other things and get the information in real time. I can let science and objective data change my behaviors and my pattern and my strategy moving forward. And so, and I learned really quick that hooks were important. I learned about storytelling. I learned that stories resonate with people, right? People want to hear who you are, what's your story, why should I trust you? And so it really resonated, and I started involving more and more of that in my content. And I learned early on that I thought that it had to be this production-level event, right? It had to look beautiful, it had to have great, great B-roll, you know, text popping up on the screen, and I learned that my audience doesn't really care. Some of my best videos were just me talking in front of my iPhone, and so I learned really quickly that my audience didn't care about all the frills. They just wanted the content. They wanted to hear from someone who was credible, who cared, who was empathetic, and could deliver content content in a way that they understood. It wasn't full of jargon. And so, yeah, it's— so for me, authenticity beat it. It continually beats the production value. You saw one of my latest videos I posted today. It was just me in my office with a bunch of military apparel in the background. Got two cameras— one camera and two lights on me, and I'm talking on a mic. And that's what I do for all my videos, and they perform. So I think I want to include this because a lot of people are like— because I put a video out every day, every day, 7 days a week. And I did that early on because Ida challenged me. She said, well, Evan puts a video out every day. I said, all right, well, Evan can do it, I can do it. At one point I was doing 2 videos a day and she yelled at me. She's like, you can't do 2 videos a day, that's too many, it'll compete against each other. So I, I tailored back. But in the beginning I was trying to figure out, do I do a a content day where I just shoot all 7 videos and then I post them throughout the week. It was disruptive to my workflow running, trying to run a company. So I had to try to figure a way to, you know, carve, make a system in my current day-to-day workflow that I could do this. And so the best time was in the morning because I was by myself, you know, before 8 AM when everyone shows up to work. So I get there at 7 AM. You know, I, I use Claude to help me with with my scripts. And you can create the projects in Claude to really hone into your personality, how you talk, who your target demographic is, how you want to do stories, the format, the hooks. And it does it. Then all you do is put in your topic and it pulls out— you put the length script you want on and it pulls it out. And I just put that into my teleprompter and I just read a teleprompter every day. And so what I'll do, I'll go on that day at YouTube, I'll look at some of my competitors, I'll see what's gone viral, what's, what's a current event that is being talked about. I can just click, you know, summarize the video, put that in Claude, make mine better, more authoritative, and it'll pull it out. It'll pop out a nice script. Or I'll find out topics that are going to be, I think, evergreen and will perform well over time, and I'll create a video like that anxiety one. That's probably not going to get a lot of views up front, but it's an evergreen topic. People are always wanting to— they're always going to these exams about anxiety. They want to learn about it. So in 5 years people are still going to look that up organically and it'll perform well. And so I get up there, I create my script, I set up in my teleprompter, I shoot the video, and then I just take it over to Adobe. You know, I'm at the point now where I've read the teleprompter so many times I do it in one take. I just cut the front, cut the back end, and I'm done. And then I upload it into YouTube, and then I put the thumbnail. I tell Claude, you know, you know, give me the title, give me the SEO and CTR optimized description, put that in, and I schedule it for 11 AM every day. If I'm going traveling, I shoot 3 videos before I leave, so that way I have something to put out every day. But that can— that has allowed me to be consistent. It allows me to have a rhythm. It allows me to not interrupt my workflow with running the company. And so it's been something that has worked for me. I'm not saying this is the— I'm not a guru, you know, that's Evan's job. But, um, I— this has been the secret sauce for me to be able to do daily content generation, right? Um, I don't know how people are still coming back to the channel because I, I just keep coming up with ideas and it just— but they resonate. So, um, hopefully I don't run out of ideas. Uh, so So when I met Evan's team, we were at 100 subscribers, and before our strategy session with Ida, Andrew created 3 accounts just so we could get to 100, so it looked better. And so, yeah, I mean, it was like family and friends, you know. We, yeah, we didn't know what we were doing, right? We were throwing things at the wall, right? And, you know, now it's grown. I think we're gonna cross 24,000. 2,000 a day. You know, we're over almost 2 million views. We've got, you know, 200,000 hours of watch time. And you can see on the next slide here— oh yeah, the AdSense. I didn't realize you can monetize YouTube. You just click monetize and then it runs ads on your channel and then you get paid for it. And so now, I mean, I didn't think having 23,000 subscribers you could make much money, but we're— this last month we were able to pay for our VP of marketing salary. So it's just from AdSense. And so it's incredible. I had no idea that just me with one camera talking off a teleprompter could generate revenue like that just from YouTube. But you can see some of the analytics here. The arrows there denote when we signed on with Evan's team. You can see it's pretty flat and stale. Some of the spikes before the arrow were our short-form content, so obviously that's always going to get more views. Learned really quickly that that is a bad idea. Don't put short-form stuff with your long-form. Got a lot of yelling at for that, so we ripped that off really quickly. And then we started implementing Ida's strategy—everyday consistency. Started out twice a week, then 3 times a week, and eventually we got 7 days a week. And you can see it was just kind of a slow, slow burn in the beginning, right? But we started getting traction. And then right around January 2026, things just exploded. You know, the algorithm started to recognize us and started to push us out more and more. But also in that time frame, we started— we started to understand— that was right around the time when she started really teaching me about the analytics and how to understand them. And then I started taking that information that Evan was taking and giving. Well, and, and from the— actually, from that last mastermind, I took a lot and started applying it in December, January, and that's when we started seeing this boom. And it's just been a phenomenal increase over the last 3 months. And not only has it been a phenomenal increase in views and subscribers, that's— it's had a trickle-down effect into the company, right? So now if It's become our number one lead generator for all of our services, where we generate 100+ leads a day with an 85% conversion rate. So it's been amazing because the people that are coming to YouTube are buying into it, right? Because they're sitting there watching it. Well, a lot of our guys will spend 3 months watching YouTube channel, the channel, and then they commit because, oh man, you just seem like you know what you're talking about. We had a guy— we have guys flying from Arkansas just to come see me because they believe in what I was saying, you know. And then 23,000 subscribers, they see me and they think I'm a celebrity. They're like, oh my god, you're Dr. Barr! I watch you on my TV every night. And it's this old man with a cane, he's like, I just love watching you, Dr. Barr. And so it's, it's really gratifying that it's making— you get to see that impact in real time. I'm told that this is good, the suggested video. She always says you want to be in suggested. And so that was one thing she had that she was really targeting on how I made my videos and how I was creating them and making sure that they feed into other recommended videos that maybe competitors are making or past videos I've made. And so I started making my videos target that, and it's been able to flip from— it was initially browse, but now we're predominantly suggested videos. And Evan can talk more about what that means and what that does, but apparently it's good, so we want to try to shoot for that. I can't explain why, but it's there. It's good. So yeah, I think we first started here, we're talking about some of the wins, and, you know, he highlighted that we had that $13 million win at the last Mastermind. And, you know, I don't want— you know, I only get too much in detail. I talked about it a little bit, but when it says Dr. Barr, it really should be Andrew up there because he was the go-getter to do this. He was the setter and helped kind of close all this. So I want to make sure I give him the recognition of that. But, you know, it was the biz dev thing. You know, we started out, you know, we were doing it and made it— oh yeah, it makes sense, yeah, because we're gonna get referrals. We started doing it and we get like 100 views on the video, 500 views on video. It's like, man, this sucks. Like, why are they telling us to do this? No one wants to watch this crap. And then they reframed our mindset that it's not about the views, it's about the relationships. And so then we changed how we approached the potential partner, it was still the same concept. Get them in, offer to get them on the podcast, talk about yourself. I mean, this is VA disability. It's not very, you know, it's not very glorifying. You're not going to be on TV talking about it. So if you go to someone and you're like, hey, we got— you want to put you on our channel, talk all about your business, how you're helping people, they lit up. Yeah, I would love to do that. And we kind of made a list of some of the whales, and this one company, VetCom, was a whale. We knew it would be very difficult to land, but we're gonna try, be aggressive, DM them, LinkedIn them, get every— just find the CEO and just bother her until she says yes. Took 5 nos until it turned into a yes, but every no they started to recognize us, and eventually it turned into a fine, okay, let me hear what you have to say. And Andrew pitched it, and he did a wonderful job, and it was like, yeah, we wanna host you, we wanna do this, we wanna amplify your brand and your message, All right, let's do that. And then it turned into, hey, we think we could, we could help you. You don't even know what we could help you with, but we think that we can make you more successful. And so then it turned into, well, let's talk about that. And then it turned into this organic process and relationship, took 3 to 4 months, and it turned into, yeah, let's sign a deal and we're going to refer all our veterans to you to do this service and help us grow more. And that's how we landed this deal. And, you know, that's the biggest biggest deal to date, but there's all these little micro deals of other little mom and pop claim reps that do this, other attorneys that do this, and we're doing it moving forward, and we continue to do it. And so we had to pause the biz dev for a period of time because our growth was so exponential, and with this deal, it was, we had to build the infrastructure to support it. You don't want to over-promise and under-deliver, so, but it's been the biz dev, yeah, don't get sucked into vanity metrics because they will underperform, swarm with views all the time, it seems like. But it's not the views that matter, it's the relationships you're building with that potential partner. So you want to target people that could benefit your company. Who is— for me, it's veterans, right? What companies out there can give me veterans to help? And so we identified early on it's these representatives, the people that represent them in the process. So if we target them and we offer our services, choices in the backend, it could turn into a nice beautiful relationship. And that's how a lot of these partnerships have developed organically. Yeah, so I've already touched on it, but yeah, YouTube is for us in the beginning was a social platform. I looked at it like no different than a TikTok or an Instagram or LinkedIn, but it's so much more. It's everything that Evan had promised in that initial call, right? It's, um, it has has really become the tip of the iceberg for our company. It really has become the number one lead engine. It's become a brand asset. It actually brings value on its own now with the AdSense revenue generation. You know, it has positioned me in a position of thought leadership in my space. It's very niche, right? I'm targeting 40-year-old men and women or older, right? Veteran populations who have disabilities. It's a very small demographic part of the population. Will we ever hit a million subscribers? I don't know. I don't even know if there's enough veterans to support that, but we're gonna try, you know. The goal is 100,000 by the end of the year, and I think we're on track to do that based on our current growth. It's also become this partnership gateway. It's the number one way that we can pitch— we can sell ourselves to a company. Like, instead of a cold call, we want to sell our product and want you to use it, it's we want to talk We want you to talk about yourself, and we want to amplify your brand. We want to make you more successful. And then it turns into relationship building from there. It's also become what I love. I love helping veterans, right? It has become a free resource and a trusted resource. And we try to empower veterans to be able to do this process on their own. And through it, you know, we know that it's difficult, and likely if they try it on their own, they're going to fail., but we want to try to empower them to do it. But by the time they do fail, if it's in 4, 5, 6 months, they've built trust in us because we've given them all the tools to be successful. They believe in what I'm saying, so then when they fail, they come to us naturally because it's already been described. I want you to try, but the success rate is very low if you try on your own. If you do fail, we're here for you. And so they will come to us. And so it's— but it gives all that free information, right? And it really has been the brand authority, brand amplifier, right? So it's been the fastest way that we've been able to get our brand out. We do no paid ads anymore, so all of our leads are organic and primarily coming from YouTube. And so it saved us money, saved us overhead, and it's just been a phenomenal journey that I— that we've been on with, with Evan Carmichael's company, with YouTube. YouTube. And so, you know, what I would tell anyone starting this journey, and again, this is all anecdotal, it's just my personal experience from what I've experienced, but I just echo it again, authority trumps virality, right? I know it looks good when you get 100,000 views, 200,000 views, a million views, but, you know, once I learned I gotta stop chasing likes and just build trust, the clicks followed the credibility 'cause our conversion rates went higher. When they believed in what I was saying, when they thought it was credibility there. I learned that the story is the brand. So what I thought was a weakness for the longest time, my PTSD, my substance abuse, my suicide attempts, I thought, you know, I don't want anyone to know about that. They're gonna think I'm weak, that I don't know what I'm doing. They won't believe in me. They'll think I'm a bad doctor. I learned that to leverage that, right? Because if I don't tell, then someone else is gonna tell a story for me. And so I wanted to make sure that I told my own story from my version and, and, and passed it to the world and leveraged it as a power to inspire others, right? To get others to believe in me, 'cause I know if I'm struggling with this as a doctor, how many other veterans are struggling with it that are not doctors, that are uneducated, that work blue-collar jobs? 'Cause that's a lot of, that's a lot of the veteran population. So I'm gonna tell my story. If I can suffer and I'm this person, then I'm here to help you. I can hear you, right? And so turning that story story into credibility. Systems beat willpower, right? So trying to develop a system that works for you. For me, it's just that 45-minute daily kind of workflow system where I go in my office, I set my camera up, my mic up, my cam— you know, do the script, put it in, read it, put it up, and I'm done the rest of the day. I don't think about it, right? It's— I just have to worry about the next day's content. But I just get in there and For me, it was way better than just a block out a whole day for a creative session. 4, get a coach that will tell you the truth, right? Whether it's good or bad, right? You need to know, you need to be, and you need to be able to handle constructive criticism because you're here for a reason, right? 'Cause you probably all sucked eventually in the beginning and you identified that as a barrier you knew you needed some coaching or someone who's an expert in this, right? So buy into the coaching, right? I mean, whoever your strategist is, right? Whether it's Mary, Ida, whoever else, but they are the subject matter experts. They have learned from Evan, and so who else not— who— I would rather have them tell me I'm dumb or stupid or it's a bad idea because they are saying it from a place of love and care because they want to see success too, right? Because it's their brand. They have to be successful, so they want to see you be successful. So just listen to them, commit. And then consistency, right? And I, I don't really understand the algorithm. I can't pretend I know it today. It seems like it changes every month. But one thing that seems true is, is consistency. If you— for me, posting every day, it seemed like that was the key to kind of getting that boom. And so, you know, I Just every day, just put, try to put something out every Monday, every Tuesday. I mean, start somewhere, right? For me, it was once a week, and then it became more and more until I found a flow that worked for me. You know, I think that the channel does reward reliability above all else. You know, for me, it's just 11:00 AM every day. If I post at 11:30, I know that the following Tuesday she's gonna yell at me, why did you post at 11:30? It's supposed to be every 24 hours. It's ours. She denies it, but it's true. I think last one, uh, is just kind of to summarize everything up. Uh, for me and for us and for our company and the channel, YouTube is now a very integral part of our infrastructure. Uh, if it were to disappear tomorrow, we would have a pretty big significant drop-off in our company. We would— there would be a crash. Um, and so, uh, I think if you start viewing YouTube as a brand asset and not just a marketing tool, not just as a way to speak your thoughts, if you can really think about how do I leverage YouTube to benefit what I'm actually trying to do, right? 'Cause everyone has a channel with something in the background, right? Like I want a service to sell, real estate to do, you know, a product that you're doing. You're trying to get people's eyeballs on it so then you can direct them to what you're really doing. And so if you can start to look at YouTube as that asset, then it will change how you, how you, how you interact with it, how you create that content. It'll make you more interested in doing the content and being more reliable with posting consistently because it's not just a typical social media account. That's my story. You know, I wanted to give you some context on why we do what we do, kind of a little background on what the channel is. It really is just me, a doctor, who's a former veteran, got injured overseas, you know, telling my story and trying to equip other veterans with the knowledge in a level that they can comprehend, that they can trust me, and then eventually, hopefully, that turns into them wanting to trust me with the services that we provide. But, you know, I gotta, gotta thank you, Evan, and I gotta thank Ida, give them shoutouts, because none of this would have been possible possible probably at the current rate that we're doing without them. Could we have gotten here? Probably, but it would have taken probably 5 more years. Now we've done it in a very, very truncated time. And it's created a unique set of problems, but I would rather have these problems than the problem of not having enough people. So thank you guys. That's great.

Hey, thank you. Yeah. Question?

Yeah. You have a relatively narrow product. How do you come up with content every day? Medicine. You gotta go to 4 years of medical school just to learn the fundamentals of medicine. I thought you had to take medicine to get into it. Yeah, no, no, no, no, no. Oh yeah, I do. I also, yes, I am heavily medicated as well. My medicine. Drug conversations begin in December. I'm sorry. Yeah, no. So when you're talking about VA disabilities, you're talking about every possible possible medical condition under the sun, right? And so that, that is a very deep pool of content that you create, all the way from a specific kind of prostate cancer all the way to COPD, right? And these are all different topics. Some are more high-click, right? People with sleep apnea or anxiety or PTSD, that affects a larger population of the veterans, but there is always going to be a small— smaller subset within that that are— that that is interested in some of those more niche ones that are applicable to them. Like asbestos exposure for old Vietnam vets that were in submarines, right? And so, well, there is not a, there has not been, I have not exhausted the content creation yet because medicine is just such a—

And you can double down.

Yeah, and then you find the top, the videos that perform well, oh sleep, they're really interested in sleep apnea. Now I can do top 5 causes of sleep apnea. Oh, they like that, I can do top 5 conditions caused by sleep apnea. Apnea. I can, you know, it just, it just kind of compounds off itself.

How do you do the script?

Is it an AI tool? Claude. Yeah, Claude. Yeah. And finally, what was the equipment that you used for the teleprompter? Elgato. Yeah, it's an Elgato teleprompter. Yeah. Yeah, it just, the camera sits right behind it, you plug it in your computer, and then it rolls the script.

Okay, clarifying your system So you wake up, you write the script at 7 AM, you film it, you edit it, and you post it all in the same day.

Yeah, 45 minutes. And you do this? Yeah.

You don't have a VA or anybody else to help you do it?

No. You edit your own stuff? Yeah, but the editing is just the front end and the back end, right? Because I'm doing it all typically in one take, and I'm not putting any B-roll in, I'm not putting any bells or whistles in it, because I learned that my my viewers didn't really care about that.

So how many different types of content did you try to create before you figured that out?

It was probably like 3 or 4 months. Even when I had Ida, I was still doing it, and she kept saying, "Hey, you don't need to do that, you don't need to do that." And I was like, "Well, I don't want to give that up 'cause it looks pretty, you know, people, I bet people do like that." Do what? Do what? Like B-roll, like, you know, like those stupid— I mean, we had a studio, we were in a studio. We were paying someone that produced it for us, you know, paying $1,000 a video, you know, because I thought early on that, you know, it's gotta look high quality or people aren't gonna buy into it.

So Linnea, just to answer a little bit more on that, when he started, I think you guys were only doing the podcast?

Yeah, just the podcast.

And then the very first thing I got them doing, and I think all your growth strategies tell you the same thing, buy a Breakthrough Videos. What are the questions your clients are asking you, right? Came up the same day, they came up with like a list of maybe 50 or more. I said I needed 20 to 40, like they put so much more. I'm like, okay, let's make these videos, right? So they really just started with the buyer breakthrough videos, which is specifically the questions their clients are asking them. And then from there it's just doubling down on like, oh, sleep apnea and VA disability, there's so much more there, like let's do so many more, right?

So the easiest place to start is the buyer breakthrough videos.

What are your clients asking you? Let's create content around and then you continue to go from there, right?

So, and I found pretty early on is the— log into a competitor, someone that is doing it, that what you want to do better than you right now, and find their top— the videos that outperform their subscribership, right? And then you just literally rip that video off. I mean, that sounds cruddy, but, but you're doing it in your style, right? And you're, you're presenting it how you would present it. And so you can and really make it yours, but you know they've already done the market research. You know it's out, it's performing well, so why spend hours and hours trying to find something that people are gonna like when you know people already like that? It just makes it easier for you. Let your competitors do all the market research for you. I think you answered one of my questions, which was like, when did you get started being consistent like that?

And I think you said 3 to 4 months and then it started taking off.

Yeah, right around, I would say, November. Was like every day? You were doing one video every single week from the very beginning.

From the time you started, it was one every, every week, right? And then it went to two a week, and then three a week, then like seven, right? But consistency was— he was always consistent, but just adding the cadence more frequently, yeah, that changed. Yeah. Okay.

Okay, question two: who's your competitor? Like, who—

what, what were you looking at to be like, okay, so I'm want to take their videos and change it?

Like, do you have a competitor? Yeah, there's, there's a, there's one. She's a nurse practitioner and she's trying to, to do this, but I think she's just herself. Um, and she had no competition at that point, so she was kind of dominating the market. And then there are several channels of veterans who have gone through the process and they're just giving their opinion piece, right? But they're talking about medical things when they have no authority to talk about medical. So they can't really actually dive into the whys and the context that the veterans actually want. And so I identified early on that that was my differentiator. That's how I can be different than all these other people doing it.

Hey, Nina, you think there's a book deal with him?

I need to look at your content, but I would think that you already have a book within all the content he has on YouTube. But also your story too. So hello. I mean, you know, your personal story.

We'll talk. All right. That's next.

Nicole, I think I heard you say this. I just want to ask, make sure I understood. So it seems like you're just doing this content by looking at your competitors, taking their existing video that already did very well. You're plugging it into Claude and saying, how— by your—

you're downloading the script, plugging that script into Claude.

And saying, how do I essentially use my authority and expertise to do it better? Yeah, yeah. So I will take their video, I click the summarize button, right? And it gives you kind of bullet points what the video is about. And I say, all right, this is the competitor's video that I want you to create a script for. You're going to do it better, a better hook, better storytelling. Use my everything that I've told you before about my, my voice, who my target audience. It needs to be delivered in 8th grade comprehension. So my audience can understand it, and then it creates it. And then you're essentially— that's how you flip the script to becoming— I can't remember. We have the same flip. We're trying to get more in the suggested, but we primarily— what is it called? Traffic source. Yes, thank you. But we're doing better with suggested. I think we've almost doubled it. So I think we've gone from like 4.5, 5 to like 9 or something. Not consistently.

But I guess we're sort of struggling with doing everything.

And so I guess that's my second question is, are you still doing the interviews with people in your field on top of this? No, we paused that. Yeah, we paused that. Because we had a, like, we couldn't take any more groups. Right, right, right. Yeah. Yeah, and I think our battle is supporting the products that we carry, right? People wait on those and then also doing the videos with the, whatever, the people that influence our market, Biz Dev. Biz Dev, yeah. And people hearing from him. So you had to just make a choice. Yeah, yeah, and I think for that suggested, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I went into that feature where you can see other videos that are being, where your videos get suggested. I found either my— one of my previous videos, and I make a script that complements it, or I find a competitor and I just make a script that complements their video. Because the thought is, is that's performing well, so then hopefully my video starts getting suggested at the end of their video. Because we have a lot of people in our space—

well, this is what we've learned and seen over the last 5 years—

everybody makes headphone review videos. Everybody. Like, everybody on YouTube. There's like so many people, but but there's a lot of people who have really large channels that also do them that really don't have the authority and expertise that we do. And so that's— I'm gonna use that idea to flip the script. I think that's a great idea. I think that's a great takeaway. So thank you. Veterans that call our call center, and they will use the exact words I use in the video, "I am an actual doctor." They're like, "Well, I wanna see you guys 'cause Dr. Barr is an actual doctor." Right? Not like— they're just literally repeating what I'm saying in the video in like the bit in the beginning portions. All right guys, thank you so much for letting me talk. That's great.

Can we give Andrew a mic here? I'd love to hear your quick perspective on everything that's happened and what he said. Yes, thank you, Aida and Evan. Thank you, seriously. It's been a crazy whirlwind of the past several months here, but I joke because he does do that.

He will— if we know that Aida is going to yell at us or give us more homework.

He will say, hey, you're going to jump on that meeting on Tuesday, right? Yeah, got it, buddy. Um, then we started throwing it on our executive assistant Brittany to then— because we didn't want to get yelled at. So, um, but as you know, we are taking on your homework and using that, you know, constructive criticism to build upon that.

So we can't thank you enough for that.

Um, you know, building that, that authority, and that's what we wanted to do. That was the whole purpose of YouTube, right, was to get out in the market and to show veterans that there is a company out there that cares. There is a company that's led by a physician who is going to help you through this process. So YouTube has helped that, it has set the base for that, and I mean, the rest is It's just, you know, we haven't reached our ceiling yet. We are continuing to grow each and every month, hitting new records every month. And honestly, it's a huge part of that is YouTube. So thank you for everything you guys have done for us. Cool. Awesome. Okay, so this is Marshall's backend. I pulled the past year of data. And there's a couple fun things to look at here. So the orange line was Shorts. The blue line is suggested, the green line is browse, right? So you can see this is funny. I think of Ana when I look at this. Ana here, she has this graph that she used to share where it's like, I met Evan and then almost quit and then like actually listened to what he said and then it like started to take off, right? And so it's like you look at the shorts and how— look, like when you're getting you know, 20,000 views on your Shorts, it's hard to turn that off when nothing else is working, right? Like a little bit from search here, but then like nothing, everything is dead. It's like, you're asking me to quit on this thing that's like the best thing on my channel. It's really hard to do, right? And so I don't know when, when Ida told you kind of to stop doing that, but like the Shorts work. July 29th. What? July 29th. That's when you told him? Yep. So like kudos to you for like just listening. Yeah, because that's hard to do, right? The only thing that's worked at all on this channel is Shorts up to this point. Ida tells you to turn it off and like you do and like stop posting, and you probably unlisted everything too that was on there, right? Because like it's dead afterwards, right? Uh, Evan? Yeah, um, do you see the— that there's a flat part towards the end in the blue and green right there. He had the flu for 5 days and didn't post consistently every day. Here, this. Yep. So it— when we talk about like just doing the work, and she told us like 2 months ahead of time, hey, build up, build up your videos. Like, you know, make sure if you're going to stay consistent with it, you know, make sure you build up this, this backend stuff, right? Well, that's what What happened? 5 days, he got sick, we didn't have any backup stuff, so we couldn't shoot any content. So it's just, it's like, just listen to him.

You guys know what you're doing. I mean, seriously.

So I don't know, I just think that's interesting when you're looking at that. Yeah, I mean, and to give you guys credit, most people don't just listen and just do it, right? Just like, you know, part of any coach is also like human psychology of trying to coach the person, not even just the advice. Like, all of you guys are coaches too, right? If people just listen, they don't get results. The problem is they don't listen. So like, this is really hard to do. I thought you were gonna say it was like back here somewhere, and then you kind of held on for a little bit, and finally you agreed. Like, no, I just shut it off. But then you look at when the channel just started to grow, like, he shuts it off and then it starts growing. Now, not, not in the same numbers course yet, but it starts to really take off, right? And so the next two things that I really love was one, you said, hey, I just— I went to Mastermind in December and then I applied the things that you said and I just started rolling with it. And like December, I don't know, it was like here, right? This is somewhere here and he applies and then boom, right? So like all the stuff we talked about earlier this morning with the thumbnails and the tests, like just go and do that. And you can start to win. Evan, what's wrong with the shorts? Oh, here, like, why did you stop the shorts? Shorts, I love shorts, just not on the same channel. The problem with shorts is it brings in the wrong audience, and so the people who watch the short form don't watch the long form. And you can see that in your— I don't know how much Ida, like, if you wanted to see the data, because you can see it in the analytics analytics, or if he's just like, okay, you're gonna tell me, I just trust you and go. Some people need more, uh, convincing than others. Um, but that's the biggest challenge is you do a lot of Shorts, you bring in the wrong people. You can see who's coming in. Has— has— if we looked at his analytics from back here, it's probably all sorts of like random traffic sources coming in in terms of like when you're going to suggested. He's not showing up in suggested because he's showing up against completely random videos because Shorts is bringing in wrong audience. But Shorts is valuable to do, just on a different channel. Well, in general, short-form content is entertainment or inspiration. It can be inspiration, and depends on how— like, I'm not an entertaining person most of the time, right? Like, I'm not— people don't watch me because I'm funny, right? You're not here because I'm that funny. I might be a little inspiring, but hopefully there's education that you you're learning from. Otherwise, I don't know why you're here. But like most of us, we're not in the comedy business. Like, the people aren't watching Marshall's channel because he's really funny, right? I mean, I'm sure he's funny in life, whatever, but like, that's not the purpose of the channel. So short form is entertainment or inspiration. And inspiration is more this world probably than entertainment. But education is where you start making the sales. And like, you can't teach in a a 45-second video, right? So that, plus it's just a different audience. Now, I think everybody should be doing short-form content, and you make your short form, and that can live on TikTok and YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels and Facebook. Like, that's awesome. You should do that, especially if you're making long form. You can just clip it and put it to short form and be on every other platform. Just make your YouTube Shorts a different channel. So Do you guys have a Shorts channel or did you just completely kill it?

Yeah, we have a Shorts channel.

You have a Shorts channel and it's just— what's the name of it? Dr. Marshall Shorts. Perfect. Dr. Marshall Shorts.

So what length are these videos? Are they 10-minute videos? 15 to 25 minutes. 15 to 25. Average around 20 minutes. The biggest takeaway for me was there's no editing because we definitely do too much of that.

Yeah, I mean, his is just literally beginning intro cut post. Yeah, that's pretty boring background. Yeah, but I mean, you have, you have your military stuff in the background. There's like, I don't know what they mean, but it's obviously you're from the military, which is helpful, and it's authentic. Yeah, for sure. The teleprompter thing, like, I think that's a great idea. I, I was told that you have to be more authentic and just say it because it doesn't look—

you don't want to be reading, but it's over to Marshall.

I think it makes it where you're guaranteed consistency.

Is that correct? Yeah, you can prompt Claude, include natural pauses and breaks, use crutch words occasionally, right? And so, so you can insert your inflections. And if you control the scroll speed, you can pause it and you can go ad-lib all you want, right? If there's something that you felt like it didn't give enough context to, you have a joke you want to put out there. But even when I'm doing the teleprompter, if I stumble, I I just keep going because it looks natural, right? I'm just like, "Oh, what I actually meant to say was..." So I don't go back and re-edit it because I think it adds to the credibility. It doesn't take long to get very good at it. And in fact, you can go off script, the script will stop, and you can talk about something else and then go back to the script and it starts moving.

I mean, after about doing it 10 times, it's like second nature and it doesn't even look like you're reading the script.

If Donald Trump can do it, I can do it.

Is that the benchmark?

What's the tech you use? It's Elgato Prompter.

That's the— is that the same?

So Elgato is the brand, and then I think it's called Prompter. You can go even simpler than that. You can get one for your iPad, and we use an iPad, but we do have a camera setup, and so it does an inverse view of a mirror for the iPad, but the iPad's really easy to use because then you can edit it right there there. If you make a mistake, you can edit the iPad, put it back on there, and redo that little piece.

Yeah. Voice activated. Yeah. If you're using a teleprompter, the most important thing is that you have emotion for your first— like, nail the intro. Because it almost doesn't matter in most thought leadership, like, what happens after the minute, as long as you're giving good information. But you have to hook the attention. So if you're gonna read something, even if they can tell that you're reading, the first minute has has to be powerful. So like, do the first minute a couple times. You might even just do the first minute and then go back and do it again, and then do it again, and then continue. It only takes you 3 minutes, right? You're not doing like a 20-minute video 3 times. Because you can, you could say the right words with not the best energy, and then it doesn't land. The energy can fade over— not that I'm recommending the energy fades, but like, it doesn't have to be as good later on. If the first minute really captures their attention. 'Cause by now they're hooked and they wanna watch. Now you have to screw up for them to leave. But that's where people will make mistake with the prompter is like the, it feels like you're reading the whole thing and then you just lose it. You can look at your attention curve. It often tank. So just practice it so that you got it. Like whenever you're memorizing something or reading something or going, the first versions you could say the perfect words but it doesn't have the feeling and then you work to get the feeling. Feeling in. The feeling actually matters more than the words.

So when it comes to teleprompting, one of the things I used to do is I try to land the hook. I use a different prompter called an Ikan, A-K-A-N-N. So the teleprompter actually is an LCD screen, so whatever you put in front of it, you just connect your computer to it and it just mirrors your screen. And you can just put up in a Google document and then you can completely control the speed. So you stop, say your piece, ready to go on, move it up a little bit. Say your piece. I always center the text as well, so it doesn't look like my eyes are going left to right or right to left. So I just center the text so it breaks where it says 'and,' like, you know, 'and'— always put 'and' on the next line, right? And these are just like super, like, really quick.

And then I riff in between personally because I'm better that way. I want to make sure I land the hook.

I want to make sure I land the bullet point statement. I want them to— like, I want to stick in their head.

And then I kind of give the the data or the content that fills it.

So I use a bit more of an outline kind of mentality, and that allows me to riff and just kind of like be more me, hand gestures, whatever. And to his point, like, if you don't like what you say, I'll just, I'll just do it again, you know. And, you know, the camera doesn't know the difference.

You're going to edit it anyway. So anyway. Yep. Cool.

Garrett. Okay. This is a question for Marshall and Evan Carmichael. And Evan both. So obviously everyone only has so much time in the day, especially for tracking metrics and that sort of thing. So when you guys have the Shorts channel set up, like, I know the majority of the time is going to go to really focusing in on the content for the long form, but how much of the time do you spend then also checking Shorts and how those are performing? Like, if you were to kind of do like a percentage comparison, what time are you spending analyzing those analytics? I spend all my with the long form. We have a social media manager that handles the Shorts and all short-form content, so we farm that out to her and she manages that. Okay. Because it's what we're posting on YouTube Shorts, it's the same stuff we're posting on TikTok and Instagram. And so, you know, we're just seeing where, which one, what platform it resonates most with. And it's, it's hit or miss. Okay. Do you guys like suggest prioritizing that quite a bit more? More? Like, or like—

So it depends on what we're trying to accomplish, right? Like, long form will help get you a lot more if you're talking about authority and deals and partnerships. And the long form is— they're not even close to being equal. And so if you're going to do 80/20, cool. But like, you could go— like, not all work is created equal. So that's the challenge of like, you're spending time on something that's almost a hobby versus like what actually matters. And so if you have extra time, then cool. I mean, we have— I love short-form content too. Like, don't get me wrong, we have 1.5 million on TikTok. I'm not anti-short-form. I think it's great. It just doesn't yield a lot of business results. And a lot of people who are pitching short-form content, they just don't have long-form content channels, so they don't know the difference. They're just saying like, yeah, short, short, short, short, great. But you look at their long-form content, they have like 4,000 subscribers. So they don't even know what what it can generate if you actually do long form really well. So it just depends on the goals. Like limited time, limited resources, I would almost always advocate for just go, if you have extra time, make another piece of content. Like longer. If you have extra time, like Jim's doing how many? Twice a week? Great, like do 3 times a week. If you had extra time.

But what's interesting, those are podcasts and, um, Mary, you know what I'm saying? I won't have to argue anymore on the Insight videos because your production capability, you're thinking about what can be done. The scripting, which has been a challenge to build. I know how to build script, comes like quick, like we turn around 4 days, but getting at least to once a week is going to be a big deal. And then the podcast be almost the sub-subject matter.

Yeah, anything that involves somebody else is always a lot harder, especially if you're doing If you're doing like a coaching show, you can book and get people in batch to come to you. If you're doing a biz dev interview, or you're gonna have Kevin O'Leary on, or who was the other one you just had? Vanessa? Tom Peters. Tom Peters. But who's the— Jennifer Hudson you just had on, right? That is not— you're not able to do that every week. But you sitting in front of a camera and filming, like you could do that. Every week. And so that's, that's the most controllable thing. You filming your solo content is the most controllable thing. And so if you had shorts versus long, I'd much rather you be doing that. Now Garrett, you're saying, but I have extra time, what should I do with my extra time? Well, that first I'd say, okay, split test your thumbnails and titles and like try to increase the— that's going to be the most important thing. You still have extra time after that? Cool. How do we clip the content for YouTube Shorts, Reels, everything else, because it all helps with the brand. And the virality numbers still help with the brand. Like, your Shorts channel should grow a lot faster. We're like, Marshall was getting here, he had more views than he's even getting now from any traffic source, right? Which, if you're doing a brand deal or you're trying to make a pitch to MasterCard or whatever, to say I have a long-form channel like this and I have a Shorts channel that's also this much bigger, you can include that as part of the deal because vanity metrics still matter to people. It's not going to convert to sales or people like— he was getting 2,200 leads a month or whatever. Like, you're not getting that from Shorts. So it just depends on the business goal we're trying to achieve. I think it's valuable for, for your case. I just— it's not in our top 3 priorities. And then it's something that like you could take on on instead of Jim. But if it's Jim's making dedicated Shorts content, I'd much rather he spend that time doing the long form. If you're pulling clips from it, cool, then that's extra time for you, but I'd still rather you be doing thumbnails. Even just the one that you showed me that you pulled up, the guy's getting 3 to 5 times more views on a video because he has a better thumbnail title. That's way more impact and leverage for the business than you spending time on Shorts.

It's so mechanical for me now, like it doesn't take me very long to build the shorts. I just was wondering like how much more time should go into making sure that they are the most efficient or like they're staying on top of the trends versus spending more time on—

Yeah, it's like it's a solid B- strategy, right? It doesn't suck, but it's not great. So there are times where you spend time on B- stuff because you're running You ran out of A+ stuff to work on. Right? So the other interesting thing was like December Mastermind, Marshall comes and he says, "Hey, I really started to kick it in hard drive or overdrive after we learned from you in December." And like wherever that is here, right, is like awesome, like great. The best thing about Marshall I think is just he just does it. Like, "Okay, you tell us what to do, we're gonna do it." I listen to my spirit animal, Ida, and we just go.— and like even here you're already doing better than you were back here, right? Like whatever this number is compared to this, you're already like 10x more than what you used to be. And so if we stop the curve here, it would look like you're growing like crazy, but then we zoom out and like, oh my god, then it really took off, right? So that's awesome. And then the suggested traffic source, why it's so important. The thing that YouTube cares the most about is what? Is watch time, right? Like YouTube's goal is keep people on YouTube all all day long. The more you give them watch time, the more they reward your videos. Why suggested is so valuable, and again, it's like, we have enough data over people's channels, but I always love looking at your actual channel to make sure that it's still the same thing. You look at the average view duration. How long are people staying on the video? Suggested is the blue one, and it's 9.5 minutes. Browse is the green one, it's 5 minutes. So they're literally spending twice as long long on the videos when it comes from suggested versus browse. And again, browse is the homepage and suggested is what gets recommended when you're on a video and tells you what to watch next. That's suggested. So you get— Marshall is basically double the view time when they come from suggested versus browse. When they're watching longer, YouTube rewards you more, but these are the guys who also buy more. So browse is just showing up on the homepage. If you go to your YouTube.com right now, you'll see a whole bunch bunch of different random things. It might be music, it might be headphones, it might be some meditation. It's like all over the place. When you start getting recommended— somebody's on a VA video and they get recommended another VA video, which is Marshall, they're in the VA disability, like they're in the mindset of I want to figure out a solution to this. So they're watching longer, but they're also the clients. I'm going down the rabbit hole right now. I want to solve this problem right now. I might have been met from 40 years ago from Vietnam. But like right now I'm trying to solve this problem. That's when we want to catch them because they're looking for a solution and we are the solution. So not only does YouTube love it because we're giving them more watch time, our client— like those are where your clients are coming from. So if you're selling a program, product, service, these are your best clients more than somebody just hitting the homepage and definitely more than Shorts, right? Like our Shorts average was 23 seconds versus 5 minutes versus 9.5 minutes. If you're doubling your suggested, that's awesome. Now, 9% is still not where we want to be, but those— what's that? Only on some videos, but yeah, we're getting there. You'll see more sales coming from it too, because those are the people who are really trying to learn about that product that you're reviewing or talking about.

That's really interesting because I think one thing that I talked to Jim about is, uh, with respect to his Shorts. So, and keeping Shorts on the channel, taking Shorts off the channel. And I think this sort of validates for me that your viewers that are coming from Shorts are only watching 23 seconds, which means these are not really your viewers.

These are not the people that want to be watching your long form.

Hence, the Shorts are targeting the wrong people for your content.

Yeah, and this is worth pulling up for any client. Like some people might just listen, great. Like again, I don't know if Ida had to show this to Marshall before he listened and just like July 29th or whatever, just like— Threatening. Oh, threatening, oh perfect, okay, well. Just as long as I don't get FTC violation or something, you know, problem there. Marshall, you play too much. I don't threaten him, never. But we looked at it together on the call and literally it's like I gave recommendations, it's like, okay, let's do it. So we did it on the call and nothing came on it again. So we took it all off on the call. Yeah, it's like anytime you guys have been— you guys are all coaches, right? Like you guys all have clients, you coach them on different things, you tell them what to do. The more people just do the thing, the more they get results and faster they get results. The more you have to explain it, cool, you sit there and explain it, they're slower to get the results. And the more they fight you with it, cool. I'll fight you on it too. And then we'll eventually get there. Right? So for the growth strategist side of things, sometimes I tell this to people and they just do it. Great. That's the best. Like, we can move so much faster. Sometimes, though, you need to— like, let's pull up your actual data. And let's take a look together and see what's going on. Right? And then you can prove the case, hopefully. And then some people just still— Well, like, this is hard. Like, to credit to Marshall, to give that up is really hard. It's the only thing that's working on the channel. He had one day with like 500 views from search or whatever you wanna call that. And then the rest is completely dead. And you want me to stop doing that 'cause it's some hope that it's gonna turn out? Right? So that's why I like— Austin from Marshall Company shared the story because it shows that, hey, if you actually stick with you do it, like, great things can happen. And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be. Believe. To learn the top 10 rules of success from MrBeast, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there.

A lot of people get analysis paralysis, and they'll just sit there and they'll plan their first video for 3 months.

And your first video is not going to give views, period.

It's not. Your first 10 are not going to give views. I can very confidently say that. So stop sitting there and thinking for months and months on