Watch Me Start a YouTube Business in 21 Minutes

The people who are building real businesses on YouTube and having huge success on the platform right now are not doing it the old way anymore where they had to build a huge following, get millions of views, hire people to make videos, or even make videos themselves. And that's because there is a new method that's working way better for building a business on YouTube that gives you time freedom so you can do whatever you want with your time. You can run an entire YouTube business completely by yourself and keep 90+ percent profit. Obviously, this is not a guarantee of that. I can't guarantee you'll make any money, but I'm gonna show you how I've radically simplified my business using AI in a way that's not going to be commoditized. In fact, AI is only going to help this more and more. Now, why am I doing this? Well, I got my start on YouTube making entertainment top 10 videos, and those channels, while they got billions of views and they even got millions of subscribers earning me tons of play buttons and awards, those channels were entirely dependent dependent on ad revenue, which meant that they needed millions of views per month just to make a sizable amount of money, which meant that I had to hire dozens of freelancers. And it got to a point where there's just way too much complexity and it wasn't fun. Then I started a course business. I started teaching people how I was running these channels, and this business made millions of dollars with relative simplicity. In fact, I got this award right here for making over $10 million from selling courses. But then again, I let things get out of control. I hired a sales team, started selling high-ticket programs, and it got to the point where it was just way too much complexity and it wasn't fun. And I even got scammed by multiple team members because I couldn't even track where the money was going due to the enormous amounts of complexity. But now I found a new way of monetizing that's incredibly fun and simple, and it can allow you to keep over 90% profit. Plus, we're entering a new time now where AI is getting so good that channels like my old entertainment channels are getting commoditized because people can just generate those types of videos easily with the click of a button. And those types of channels have no competitive edge. But I found a type of channel that isn't being commoditized. And the amazing thing is that you can run these types of channels whether you wanna do it completely faceless or if you want to build a personal brand. This process I'm gonna show you works for both types of channels. And if somebody copies your channel, it'll just build your brand and it will only help you. And the better that AI gets and every single time a new model drops, you're going to be excited for it because it's going to help you succeed more instead of getting replaced. And there is a simple way of monetizing these channels that works whether you're an expert who wants to share their expertise and monetize it and they want to package their knowledge into the absolute best thing that will give them the highest profit margins right now in 2026. And no, it's not just selling courses or high-ticket coaching. Or if you're an absolute beginner and you have literally no idea what to sell, this will work for you as well. This will allow anybody to monetize their channel from the first day that they start it. And in video number 3 in this series, we're gonna go deep into the monetization stuff. I'm gonna share some things that I've never shared before, exactly how I'm actually monetizing now. But right now, to show you how easy it is to start a YouTube business right now in 2026, I'm gonna let you watch over my shoulder as we start one in the next 10 minutes. Now, first things first, we need a niche. A niche is simply a category of content, and a lot of people go wrong when it comes to choosing which is why in the next video in this series, I'm gonna show you the only niches that I would start right now. But ideally, the niche is something you know at least a little bit about, or even just have a slight interest in. And if we go to my tool called TubeMagic, we have a niche explorer where I have a list of all of the niches that I recommend for YouTube, along with example channels and how much money they make per 1,000 views. Now, something that I'm very interested in is, of course, YouTube growth. And if you're watching this, you're probably also interested in that. And by the end of this series, you're gonna have a lot of knowledge on YouTube to the point that you could run a channel on it. I know most people think that they have to be the world's foremost expert on something to run a channel on it, but I have students who make $10,000 per month helping people learn how to use different software, and then they're an affiliate for that software. I have other students like Musa who made a couple hundred thousand dollars in just a couple days doing the strategy I'm going to show you in this series, and then he sold his own thing which monetized his expertise and made a ton of money. One of the secrets for doing YouTube is every new channel that you start should be related to one of your past channels, granted you monetized it correctly. So here on Make Money Matt, I'm monetizing it correctly. I make hundreds of dollars per 1,000 views on this channel. I have things to sell. So making a faceless channel also makes a lot of sense. Plus, if you were doing a channel within this niche, you could be an affiliate for so many different software out there, like my software TubeMagic, where we'll give you 50% recurring commissions for life, or my other software that generates videos called vid.ai. And this is actually the reason that I made this channel right here called Stickman Matt, which is getting 50,000 views per month, is making more money than my channels with millions of subscribers. Now let me ask you a question. What do you notice about this channel right here? It's not like most faceless channels where we're just going over top 10 lists or random entertainment subjects which might get millions of views. However, they're not helping people solve a real problem in their life. And you'll see in the second video in the series how that's gonna be a recurring theme in this. We wanna help people solve a real problem in their life. Another thing you might notice is the fact that I have a character who's the face of this channel, and this character could potentially even outlive me because it's not dependent on me to continue going. So even if you run a personal YouTube channel, and like I said, this process will work amazing for you if you do, you can also have multiple related helping channels on top of it. So if you don't feel like uploading a video one day, you're still getting traffic, you're still getting leads, and most importantly, you're monetizing them correctly, which I'm going to show you how to do. Now, another AI tool that we're going to use to help us do this is a tool called Higgsfield. Now, Higgsfield is the sponsor of today's video. Huge thanks to them for that. It's something that I legitimately use myself every single day within my YouTube business, and I'm going to show you just how easy it is to set up a whole YouTube business in just a couple of minutes using this. The first thing we're going to do is go to Higgsfield and then go to generate image right here, and we're going to create a character character for your channel. This character is going to allow you to differentiate your channel from all of the other AI slop that's out there, because even if somebody copies you, they're just building your brand. Something happens to your channel, you just make another one because you've got a brand built. And when AI gets better and better, it'll allow you to put out more videos at higher frequency and higher quality that gives more value to people, all while actually building your brand, not just uploading AI slop that might get some views but isn't going to actually make you money. So within Higgsfield, what I'm going to do is upload a photo of myself and then give it a prompt. Make a stickman version of him, just keeping the hair. Make it animated, full body shot on a white background. We'll go 9:16 for the aspect ratio. Make sure we're using GPT Image 2, which is the best model right now for images. Keep mid for quality and we'll do 4 at a time right here. And go ahead and generate. The thing about these characters as well is that it doesn't necessarily even have to be you. Look at channels like Zinni Studio, for instance, who makes $15,000 per month with a simple AI-generated character. How do we know who's really even behind that channel? It could be anybody in the world. I could be running that channel. I'm not, by the way, but I do have multiple character channels where the characters aren't even of me, but I'm still building brand and I'm building IP. And you can too. So here's the results that we got. They're pretty good. I'm going to actually ask it to make sure to keep some color as well and get some more options here. And there we go. Now we got some additional options. I kind of like this one right here. It even got the green drink that I was drinking within the image. And from there, simply crop this down. That will be your profile picture. Generate up an image for the channel art as well, and then come up with a name for your channel. If you're having trouble with that, you can use the channel name generator on TubeMagic. Stickman channel about YouTube growth. Generate names. And all 3 of these are great names, but it is always good to give your character a name as well. In this case, it's just named after me, Stickman Matt. And now it's time to get our first video idea. And this is actually incredibly simple. All you do is go to a channel that is a competitor that's doing very well, go to their most popular videos, and then combine 2 ideas. For example, this video about how much YouTube pays for 1,000 views did incredibly good. And this video about the top 30 YouTube niches without showing your face also did incredibly good. Let's combine them. Let's do a video called the YouTube niches that pay you more per 1,000 views. We're taking two concepts that worked and creating a brand new concept that will also do very well. For some of your ideas, you can also just model videos that have already worked. But this combination strategy is how I've been getting incredibly great ideas that are getting millions of views lately. Now for the script, you can use any AI that you'd like. My recommendation is always just to use it as a first draft and double-check every single script yourself and make sure that it actually gives value. Within TubeMagic, if you go to make a new script, you can actually add context videos. So I can go to this video right here since this was one of the videos we're using for an idea, add that as a context video, and then go ahead and add this video about the top 30 niches as well as a context video. And then it will pull the best parts of those videos into our own script while following all of these frameworks that I've trained TubeMagic on. So you have all of the best information for doing this. Then we're simply going to type our title, the YouTube niches that pay the most per thousand views in 2026. And my recommendation is doing videos typically over 8 minutes long because you can put multiple ad breaks then on those videos. But for this one, we're going to do a shorter one just to show you as a proof of concept and an example. We'll do a 1.5-minute one right there. And we use Claude by default for the backend for these scripts. But you can also choose Gemini or Opus 4.6, which will give you the absolute best results. So we're going to do that and click Generate. And now TubeMagic has our script generated. And what's cool is it gives us 3 different options for the hook. And you can also regenerate the hook as well, since the most important part of the video is the first few seconds. We have "Not all YouTube niches pay the same and the difference is absolutely insane," or "A channel with 50K subs in the right niche will outearn a gaming channel with 500K." I'm gonna go with the most straight-to-the-point one, which is this one right here, and then click save. And then for the voiceover, if you're recording your videos yourself as a personal channel, then of course you sit behind a camera, you film the video like I'm doing right here. But if you're doing a faceless channel, then you can go ahead and go to the audio tab on Higgsfield and paste in your script right here and choose from any of these voices. And you can also even create your own voice right here. Now I've already got my voice cloned on ElevenLabs, so I'm going to go ahead and use that. In fact, if you'd like to use my voice, feel free. It's on ElevenLabs to use. I'll go ahead and generate this. And now this is where things start to get absolutely insane. In some previous videos on my channel, I've showed connecting Higgsfield with Claude Code to generate full, complete YouTube videos with a character. In fact, I showed how to do it in the last video, but you still had to download Claude Code and use multiple different tools. Well, now Higgsfield recently released something called their supercomputer, and the supercomputer basically has Claude code built into it, and it's all completely online. And when you open it, it looks something like this. And what we're going to do here is click this plus button, go to elements, and then we're going to create a new element. And this element is going to be a character. I've uploaded the picture of Stickman Matt right here. I've given him a name. And then I can click save. And now that element is created. So I'm going to click to use it. That attaches it right there. And I've also just uploaded our ElevenLabs voiceover along with a TXT file of our script. But as I mentioned, if you wanted to make this a lot easier, you can do this all within Higgsfield. You can just clone your voice on Higgsfield if you want to use it or use one of their prebuilt voices. And then for the prompt, we're going to say, this is an animated YouTube video that uses the attached voiceover audio. The script is also attached for reference, but make sure to use the attached audio and don't generate any new audio. I just need the visuals and the full complete YouTube video. Use the character Stickman Matt as the host of the channel. Make it engaging and make it change scenes often to keep people's attention. Have movement and titles throughout the video to keep people's attention. Also have graphics that are engaging. Have stickman Matt be talking and moving around throughout the video, sometimes talking headshots and other times he's in the corner talking. Give me a complete finished video using the uploaded audio. And we're going to make sure that we're using Claude Opus 4.7. That's the absolute best model right now. And we will run this on the supercomputer. Now, by default for this, Higgsfield is going to select the models that it uses by itself. Which means it may sometimes use more expensive models, even though Higgsfield is the cheapest place to use flagship models like Seedance 2.0, which is the best out there right now. So you can be looking at it costing anywhere from $5 to $50 per video depending on the models used. And you can edit your prompts to say use less expensive models. And you can also do things like mixing in screen recordings, like for example, Zinni Studio does. A lot of her videos are mostly just screen recordings, and then you could just have the character in the corner of the video. That would cost basically nothing. But going back over here, as you can see, it's prepared everything. It'll have 14 to 18 second clips at 5 seconds each to keep visual variety high. It's planning the scenes, alternating talking headshots with the host in the corner and everything else and titles throughout. It all looks amazing. So we'll click continue. And right now we have it set to ask to run, but you can set it to automatically just go through everything and make all the decisions for you. Just keep in mind, if it does something that you don't absolutely love, you will be spending credits for that. But it's the same thing with hiring a freelancer. You wouldn't be able to QC their work in real time as they're doing something that would take hours and hours to do. Like you can with this AI. And check this out, it's literally preparing all of the different shots. So we have the talking headshot right there, and we have another wide shot where the host is on the left and it has this text on it, and it's planning it all out. And now in order to generate these images, I'm going to click Generate. And then on the right-hand side here, you can actually see that it's generating the first assets in real time as it's putting this video together for us. And these are honestly looking incredibly good. This is going to be a very good video. So you could walk away, get a coffee, spend time with your kids, do whatever you want to do, and you have AI doing the work for you in the background. And now it's preparing the actual video generation. All right, now we have some of the first videos done right here. As you can see, these look really good. This looks amazing. I mean, just look at the expression on his face. Like, this is almost better than 90% of stickman videos that are out there, and AI is doing it all for us. Now we're just missing 2 additional clips, so we'll go ahead and give it approval to generate those. And now, just like that, Higgsfield finished up generating all of the different videos downloaded the clips, put them all together, assembled them all together into a video, muted the audio from the clips it generated, and then it put in our voiceover that we gave it. And now we have literally a finished video right here. And so let's take a look at the video that it generated. Not all YouTube niches pay the same, and the difference is absolutely insane. While most channels earn somewhere between $1 and $30 per 1,000 views, choosing the right niche can push you toward that upper end consistently. So this is amazing that we literally just prompted this and made this. Now, one thing that I do want to say is that if you wanted to, you could make this even more engaging because the only limit is how you prompt the AIs. For example, you could tell it, switch up the scenes every 3 seconds. That would actually be a really good best practice to do. And scrolling through this video right here, these animations are amazing. As you can see, it demonstrates all the concepts and we made an entire video in just a couple of minutes with Higgsfield. And again, if you wanted it to run all this itself, just click this and do auto run without asking and it'll go through. It'll make the entire video itself. So you can see now, you know, how easy this is to set up and do. But you might be asking, okay, Matt, that's great, but if it's so easy, then everybody's going to do this and there will just be way too much competition. And the answer is yes, everybody will do this, but they're going to be running Shorts channels that don't make any money. They're going to be running channels that aren't building any brand equity and real IP because they won't have a character associated related with their channel. And they also will not be doing what I'm going to teach you in the next 4 videos in this series. Very few people will actually do this the right way. But imagine you're one of them. Imagine you take action. Imagine waking up 6 months from now and you have 3 automated YouTube channels that are running using this new method. Maybe also you even have a personal channel if that's something that you want to do. But otherwise, you've just got these channels that are essentially assets working for you 24/7, and you don't have a team, you don't have an editor, you don't have invoices to pay. You spend maybe an hour or 2 a day reviewing what the AI made and uploading it. And speaking Speaking of uploading, you will need a thumbnail for your video. So you can just simply go to create image right here on Higgsfield and then find a similar thumbnail that you like, copy it, paste it in right here, find your stickman character, also copy that on over, and then say remake this thumbnail but using the stickman instead of the person and make it animated instead. And then we'll select 16:9 and we can go 1K for resolution. Generate again using GPT Image 2 and boom. Now we have some amazing thumbnails like this one right here. This is incredible. These will do really good. And we've made a whole YouTube business in just a couple of minutes. So you spend a couple hours a day or maybe even just a couple hours a week working on this and the rest of your time is completely yours. Maybe you go to the gym, maybe you spend that time with your kids, maybe you're at a coffee shop in another country and you potentially have money coming in to pay for what you want to pay for. Now, if you want to get the best deal on Higgsfield, they put together a special offer for you and it'll be linked down in the description below. Check that out if you'd like. Now, in the next video in this series, I'm going to show you the only YouTube niches that I recommend right now, and I'm going to also show you me generating videos in each one. You can have the best tools on the planet, but if you use them to create commoditized garbage in niches that are just going to get overly commoditized, and there's some niches that YouTube will just straight up ban you if you create low-quality AI content, then those tools are worthless. But if you use them to create what YouTube loves, and I've spent the last 10 years discovering exactly what that is. And if you use them to build a real brand on YouTube over the next 5 years, you're going to be in a really good position with a business that you love. And for those of you who are watching this who are like, Matt, I want the full thing, the full system, every tool, framework, checklist, every template, every AI prompt, the community, the calls, and I want to do this right, then I have some big news. In a couple of days, I'm launching Tube Accelerator 2.0. This is the complete rebuild of my flagship program, top to bottom, with this new method that I'm showing you with brand new AI workflows, brand new tools, and brand new ways of monetizing to make this into a real business long term. I'll also be showing you how I've made millions of dollars selling my own knowledge as education and the real right way of doing that right now in 2026. And this works for both personal channels or faceless channels. If you're a coach or a consultant, or if you're just someone who works a 9-to-5 job and you want to know the absolute best business to do right now with AI projected to take over so many jobs, this, in my opinion, is it. And I'll only be taking on a limited number of students before closing this down again because I want to make sure that everybody who joins actually gets supported properly. And that means having smaller cohorts where we can give more attention to each individual person. So due to the fact that spots are limited, I'm opening up an early bird waitlist before the public launch. If you put your name on the waitlist, two things will happen. Number one, you'll get access to Tube Accelerator 2.0 one day before the general public. And number two, you will get the best price that this program will ever be. So if you are even remotely thinking about doing this, Please get on the waitlist. The link is right below this video. Click it, drop in your name and email, and you will be registered. And then you will get an email on Monday, May 25th at 10 AM Eastern time with your early access link to join. And then we'll be closing access again on the last day of this month. And it's going to be a lot different than anything you've ever seen out there. This is not just going to be a course, even though you're going to get that as well. You'll also get access to a bunch of AI tools that will make this easier for you. Prompts, templates, even an AI version of me where you can get coaching 24/7, even though you'll also get access to the real me. But I can't reply 24/7. And It's gonna be epic. So that's the new way to do YouTube in 2026. And we've literally just scratched the surface. There's 4 more videos in the series and each one is gonna be going deeper and deeper. And in the next video, I'm gonna break down the exact niche selection framework as well as the only niches that I would even recommend doing right now, doing this process in. And that video, if it's out, it'll be on the screen next to me right here. And if it's not out yet, it will be very soon. Make sure to hit that subscribe button so you don't miss it and put your name on the early bird waitlist down at the link in the description. And I will see you in the next video.