In this 9‑minute YouTube monologue, Evan Carmichael answers a subscriber’s request by recounting two pivotal stories: (1) how he became an entrepreneur and (2) how he discovered his passion for helping other entrepreneurs. He describes early, small‑scale ventures in his youth, the turning point at university when he joined friends’ software startup, and the decision to reject high‑paying offers from McKinsey and Merrill Lynch in favor of the fledgling company. He details the hardships of the early months (earning $300 a month, living on beans), the eventual growth to customers in 30 countries, sales to NASA and Johnson & Johnson, and the eventual acquisition of his company. After the sale, he began speaking, recalling a first YMCA presentation that attracted only three attendees yet profoundly impacted those participants. That experience sparked his long‑term mission to serve entrepreneurs, leading him to create a website, YouTube channel, and a large following despite not having a clear monetisation plan. Throughout, he emphasizes modeling successful founders, embracing uncertainty, and believing in one’s vision. The video ends with typical YouTube calls to action.
Chapters
What's my story? So I got a question from one of my new YouTube subscribers, Kenneth. Love you guys, welcome to the team. And Kenneth is 19 years old, he wants to become a success in an online business, and he wanted to know what my story was. So I'm gonna share it. Now for those of you who've been on my channel for longer, you've heard me talk about my story in a couple different ways, but you're gonna get it again because Kenneth asked. So here we go. So Kenneth, this is for you. I'm gonna tell two stories, okay? The first one is about how I became an entrepreneur, and the second was how I found my passion about helping other entrepreneurs. So, starting up. When I was young, I had a whole bunch of different business ideas, most of them small things like selling art and doing garage sales and selling baseball cards. Small ventures. But I never thought that entrepreneurship would be a career path for me. I never thought this is what I would be doing for the rest of my life. That changed in university. When I was in university, I met up with two friends and they had a business that they were trying to get off the ground. It was a software company and they put so much into this company, but it wasn't taking off. And so I joined on the business side. I didn't know anything about software. I didn't know anything about biotechnology, but I came out on the business side. I said, hey, I'd like to try to help. And up until that point, I always thought I'd have a corporate job. I looked at my high school yearbook recently and it said, where do you see yourself in 10 years? You know, that stuff. And I wrote down, I see myself as a VP at a major investment bank. That's what I thought I was gonna do. I was gonna be in the banking world. And it changed university. I started with this company, and I just, I loved it. And at the start, I wasn't making any money, and I was barely surviving, not even getting enough to survive. I'm at $300 a month that I was taking out from this company. And just doing everything I could just to get by, just to scrape by an existence. You know, eating beans for lunch, and the way I was living was just terrible. But I didn't really mind because I was doing something that I love doing, that I hadn't experienced this kind of excitement and passion before. And when I was graduating university, I got called on by two companies who I would have previously loved to work for: McKinsey Consulting, the number one strategic consulting company in the world, and Merrill Lynch, one of the top investment banks in the world. And if you asked me just a couple years before, I would have been drooling. Like, what, really? These companies are coming, asking me to work for them? And my friends were all jealous, and I was a little sad. I don't know, I wasn't as excited. And they flew me to New York, and they put me up in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, and they schmoozed me, and I just, I don't know, I just kind of bombed everything. I wasn't into it. Like, why? Why am I— this is my dream, right? I was growing up thinking this is what I was going to do with my life, and here it is, the opportunity in front of me, and I just— meh. I didn't do any preparation. It's because I discovered this business. And my friends were saying, "What? Are you out of your mind? These guys paying $80,000 to $100,000 starting salary, and you're at this company making $300 a month, and that's the choice you're making? What's wrong with you?" But I had to do it. I had to give it a shot. I don't know, there's something in me that said, I'm going to live with regret if I don't try this out. I could always go back next year and take a job, but I don't know, I have to try this out. I know it doesn't make sense in my head, but I have to try this. I owe it to myself to try this. And so I did, and I never went back to getting a job again. Eventually things worked out with that business and I built it up and we went from having little sales to building it up to having customers in 30 countries. And I sold to NASA and Johnson Johnson and got tons of media, and my company got acquired. And after I sold my business, I was asked to do a lot of speaking. I was a young entrepreneur success story. I was 22, 23, doing a lot of interviews. And one of the things that saved me through my business to that point where I thought like this is not gonna work. I need to make money to survive. Like I'm not talking millions of dollars, I need like money to survive, right? One of the things that helped get me through that crisis in my business was modeling success. I looked at the guys who had built software companies. I realized I'm not the first guy to try to sell software before. People have done this before and I can model their success. And I looked at Bill Gates from Microsoft, and I looked at McAfee, I looked at Intuit, I looked at how they got started and applied those strategies to my business, and I started seeing some results. And so after I sold my business, I thought this would be really cool to share with other people. This really helped me, and I think it could help other entrepreneurs. And one day the YMCA, I guess they saw one of, you know, my interviews or whatever after selling my company, and they said, we'd like you to come and speak to our group of entrepreneurs. And they're all, you know, small entrepreneurs just getting started up, just an idea, and a lot of them didn't have lofty ambitions. I want to be a dog walker or something else. I said, "Yeah, I'd love to. This is great. I'd be happy to share my experience." And I spent all this time working on my slides and my preparation. I wanted to pack everything I had in my head into this presentation. It was going to be amazing. And I started promoting it to the people that I knew and said, "Come on out," in my audience and talked about it in the media, and the YMCA promoted it to their Their audience, their group of entrepreneurs that they already had. And the day came, the presentation, and I was nervous and excited and my heart was pounding. I remember walking to the door and I'm sweating a little bit and I wanted to just provide great value. And I get in the elevator and I go up to the room that has my, you know, name on it and with this big room full of chairs and I walk in the door and my heart stops. Because only 3 people showed up to that first event. 3 people for a free event with all this promotion happening. 3 people, are you kidding me? I'm like, I thought this was a stupid idea. Like, what did I just do? What did I sign up for? You know, I didn't want this failure on my record. And from the outside world, that would be seen as a big failure, right? Free event, weeks of promotion from 2 different people, dude 2 different parties and you can only get 3 people to show up, that's a failure. But I had to, you know, I was there, people showed up, so I had to do it for the 3 people. And it was amazing. You know, I was nervous getting started, but it was an amazing event and I changed the lives of those 3 people that day. And they walked out having answers and having confidence and going off to you know, being ready to go and do their business. And having helped those people overcome their problems and have the confidence to keep going inspired me. And after that presentation, I knew I had to keep doing this. I knew I had to keep helping entrepreneurs. I didn't know how I would do it. I didn't know if it would be presentations or, you know, like Twitter didn't really exist back then. I didn't know how I would do it, but I knew I had to keep doing this. And even though I had no idea how I would make money from this, right? Like, nobody came to a free event, and entrepreneurs don't have money to spend in the first place. So what am I doing trying to help entrepreneurs and make money? Even if I couldn't figure out a way to make money, I realized I had to keep doing this because I needed to get that feeling again. I love that feeling of helping entrepreneurs. I kept working at it, and I kept doing things that weren't for the money but were for helping entrepreneurs. And slowly built up a website and built up a following and started doing videos and more presentations and it's become what it is now, right? We have a million views on YouTube, I've done all these videos, 20 million people on the website, and I wish I could say this was my vision, you know, I had it, mm, I knew, I knew it was gonna happen, this is all planned out from the start, I'm a genius. But I had no idea. You know, and I didn't know if I was gonna make any money from this at all. And that's gonna happen in your business. You know, the plan that you have going in is never the plan that you end up with. Businesses continue to always change and evolve, and you have to run with that. And my business is not the same as it was 10 years ago, 12 years ago. It will constantly be a reflection of me and my thinking and what I want to do to help entrepreneurs. So that's my story, two quick stories. Hopefully that helped inspire you and give you some knowledge to help you go out and build your business. Thanks for the great question, and believe, you know, believe in what you're doing. Believe that it's important, believe it's going to work out. For those of you watching, you like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. You have a comment, leave it below. I love seeing the comments come in, they make my day every day. You have a question for me, leave it in the comment section below and I'll do a video response just like I did today. And subscribe to the channel up there if you want to see more videos like this. Thank you so much, and I'll see you soon.
