Evan Carmichael tells a creator with 13 videos how to turn YouTube into full-time income: stop planning the perfect business model and build an audience first. He missed a $40 million deal by over-planning. Without people who care, Patreon and merch won't work. Let the audience show you what to sell next.
Chapters
What's the right business model? Hello everyone, welcome to the TGIM where I answer a question for one of my mastermind group members in our online mastermind group. I am coming to you from New Orleans today. I'm doing this presentation tomorrow and the next day, and I am lying on my hotel bed and answering the questions because I want to help my group. And this is a great question that came in. So one of my mastermind members has a YouTube channel. She has 13 videos that she's done in 2 months, I believe. She's making almost nothing on her channel and she's wondering, "What's the right business model? How do I get this going? I don't want to have to go get a job. How do I turn this into a full-time income that I can continue to follow my passion and be really successful with?" I'm going to throw a curveball. I'm going to do something that I think is against the traditional advice that you may get. As much as I love business models and figuring out a plan, there's such a thing as over-planning at the start. And the funny thing is, the plan that you start with is rarely going to be the plan that you end with. And I learned this lesson the hard way when I was 21, 22, and I thought I had the perfect plan for my software company, and it wasn't the right plan. And I missed out on a $40 million deal because of it, because I was too slow to react, because I was so busy trying to find the perfect plan that I wasn't actually paying attention to what was happening in the market, and I lost a huge deal. And so the $40 million deal when you're 20, 21, 22, that's an expensive lesson to learn, but one that I've carried with me for the rest of my career so far. Here's what happens, okay? And I see this a lot on YouTube and I see this a lot with startup entrepreneurs, web-based entrepreneurs. You look at all the models and there's nothing wrong with looking at all the models and say, "Okay, you know what? I'm going to create a Patreon campaign. I'm going to create a t-shirt line. I'm going to launch an ebook," whatever it is. And then you're still working on your YouTube channel, but then you divert some of your attention so you can focus on the landing pages and the products and everything else that you're trying to create. And so say you're creating a landing page for a Patreon campaign, okay? And it doesn't do well. You put it out there, it doesn't do well. And then you think, "Okay, well, my headline didn't work," right? Or, "The way I marketed it didn't work," or something else. You convince yourself of another reason, so then you take more time again away from doing stuff on your YouTube channel and invest it on this, and then you launch it, and again, it doesn't work. Surprise, it doesn't work. And it's super frustrating. You think, "Maybe I should give up. Maybe I'm not meant to make any money from this. Maybe I don't have the right plan." And the problem was never with the plan. The problem was, the honest truth is, you don't have an audience that cares yet. That's like the hard, like, hit me in the heart and twist it, like, over and over and over comment, but it's true. You don't have an audience that cares enough to buy a t-shirt line from you, to donate to a Patreon campaign, to buy your ebook or whatever other business model you're trying to make outside of AdSense. Your audience doesn't care enough about you yet because you haven't invested the time to make an amazing contribution to the community so they care about you. Because you're diverting your attention away from making great videos to try to monetize them and create a business model too soon. And so my favorite way of doing it is let your audience take you where they want to go and see if that's aligned with you. So an example comes from a great video that was on Tim Schmoyer's channel not too long ago where he's with the podcast Answer Man. This guy is like the guru of podcasting, and he started off in podcasting, and he had his podcast and put a ton of love into it and a regular series, and then people started asking him, hey, do you "Do you do consulting? 'Cause I want to do my own podcast and I'd love some help." And so he said, "Sure, yeah, sure, I'll do consulting, why not?" And so he started his consulting business. And then as he started doing consulting, he realized one day that he was training, he had like 3 or 4 calls back to back, and they were all about how to use a certain Adobe product to help create and edit the show afterwards. And he basically took somebody from scratch to knowing how to use it, and then he had to do it for the next call, from scratch to knowing how to use it for their podcast, and then one more time, take it from scratch to knowing how to use it the next time, and he said, "This is ridiculous. This isn't fun for me. I'm answering the same thing over and over and over and over and over again," and then the light bulb went off. "I should turn this into a product," and that became one of his best-selling products, and that's how he got into the product business. So he started off doing what he loved, His community came to him and said, "Hey, we want— we need consulting. Will you do this for us?" And he built it. And then he took the consulting clients who were paying him and turned that into products based on what they were asking for. And so that's what I would encourage you to do. I would encourage you to put more love into your YouTube channel because 13 videos in 2 months, it's not enough. It's like, if you want to turn this into a full-time career, you want to make some serious money from this, you got to be doing it once a day. You got to find a way to do it once a day. Get more content up there, and if you have to go take a job on the side part-time to support this passion of yours and this is where you want to go, then do it. Do whatever you need to do to get that happening. Build up your audience, put a lot of love into it, and wait for them to come up with ideas. People say, hey, you know, people write to me and say, hey, I'd love to donate to you. Is there a way to do it? I created a Patreon campaign. People saw some of the quotes that I had and said, "That'd be a great t-shirt." So we created a t-shirt line, but even that's on a small scale, and that's not even doing massively well for me either. People asked me if I did consulting, and so I created the mastermind group. Brands found me and they said, "Hey Evan, we'd love to have you." Sage, why am I here, right? They found me on social media because I've been pouring tons of love into it, and they asked me to come and speak. At their event. I'm doing an event, I'm speaking tomorrow, I'm speaking the next day. And so that's what I encourage you to do, is pour tons more love into the channel, kick up a ton of noise, and then let your audience take you where they want to go and see, is that aligned with what you want to do? And I think you'll have a lot more success. I think you'll have a lot more fun doing the stuff you want to do. I think you have a lot more— a lot less stress. Trying to figure out what the perfect model is, and I think it allows you to be flexible in, in being able to follow what the market wants instead of you trying to predict where it's going, because your prediction is always going to be wrong, and it's way better to listen to your customers and go with them. So that's my advice. Little curveball today for a Monday night, but hopefully that helps, and I'm looking forward to seeing how you do this month. Take care, everybody.
