In this interview excerpt, Matt Paulson explains how his team assessed the need for a new traffic source after email and SMS channels became saturated or regulated. They experimented with a podcast, which failed to gain traction, leading them to pivot to YouTube because of its strong discoverability for investing content. Their strategy involved sourcing guests, cross‑promoting the YouTube channel to existing email and SMS audiences, and reinvesting all AdSense earnings back into YouTube video promotions to boost organic reach, ultimately helping the channel grow to over 400,000 subscribers.
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In terms of the YouTube organic, I saw you guys got to, I think it was 400K subs, insane, quickly. First question here is how do you kind of evaluate adding like a new traffic source or a new kind of channel in that way?
You know, a lot of it was like, we just kind of knew, like, we kind of feel like email is tapped out for us for now. It's harder to get in the inbox. SMS is regulated. So it's great. But like, you could trip up a roll and just kind of be done the next day. So that would be bad. We kind of felt like we had done what we could with the web. So we, we tried a podcast and like that didn't really take off. So we thought, okay, let's try YouTube 'cause like it was great discoverability there. So we, you know, we like, we knew it worked 'cause there are other investing YouTube channels. We kind of knew what we had to do in terms of like go find talent, you know, find guests. And then like we had to point all of our other traffic at the YouTube channel to grow it. So like, You know, get people on email list to go to the YouTube channel, get people on the SMS list to go to the YouTube channel, you know, all the stuff like that. So like that certainly helped from an organic perspective. The other thing that we did on YouTube that really helped us grow is we took all the AdSense money we were making and just put that back into YouTube promotions to promote our own videos. So they get a lot of extra discoverability that they would normally get.
