A YouTuber Asked Me "How To Business". Here's My Answer

This is unspeakable. He's been doing YouTube for 10 years and has 200 million people who watch his videos every single month. We're gonna break down his business and how he's gonna go to a billion plus. Let's dive in. I have so many puns that I want to say, like speechless, unspeakable. I won't, I won't do any of those, but I want to. This was an idea that airrack, because he and I were talking, he was like, dude, you should do this kind of like a mini series for your channel. Talk with people with big audiences. How would you think through what opportunity to go after, et cetera.

I feel like so many people are just like lost.

Like, what do I sell?

Yeah, what do I sell? There's so many options. Like, I could sell energy drink. I could sell Germx. I could sell these conference tables. Like, it's literally endless.

Yeah. You could launch umbrellas or you could launch Kleenex boxes that are unspeakable, unblowable, one down. And make money. And so the problem is that a lot of I feel like YouTubers, influencers, see one influencer, do something, make some money, and then think, oh, I'll do the same thing. And then end up with a massively under monetized, like, opportunity. Okay, we've got the market here, we've got the brand here, and then we've got different monetization vehicles. Like, what is the thing that kind of overlaps all three? That works really well.

So there's like three kind of vehicles. So you have unspeakable, the main thing, the biggest thing. It's like driving all the revenue.

Yeah.

And then you have 0 to 60, which is a new business. That's actually why I'm here in Vegas for sema. It's an automotive shop paired with content. And then the third idea revolves around a consumable product. I don't, I won't say what we want to call it yet because the names are still kind of in the air. But it's might be, it's not unspeakable, but basically what we really want to build a company similar to what Red Bull has. Because I know so much about content and I know so much about, you know, all these platforms. I could build a marketing company, sell a consumable, whatever fits that, like, target audience that I'm trying to target.

But. And that's all primarily driven off the unspeakable channel. Right.

I don't know. I probably want to do like a Separate channel for it. Just because Unspeakable's kind of got its own thing. Like, it's four kids, you know, what's the age? I would say a large majority are, like, 12 to 16. So right now I sell merch for Unspeakable. But my idea was to kind of launch, like, a toy brand and just see where we can go with that.

We had talked about the energy drink idea, right?

Yeah.

Which I love, by the way.

That would be that third idea. I don't know. I just don't. I don't feel like it would fit the unspeakable audience. Maybe it would. Maybe I'm wrong. Yeah. But they're just a bunch of kids, and I just don't, you know, Like, I wouldn't call it Unspeakable.

Yeah.

If I was to launch a drink.

No, for sure. Well, it doesn't have to be. You know what I mean? Yeah.

But the other thing that worries me is, like, so I'm Unspeakable, Right. The brand revolves around me. The question is, how long can I be Unspeakable? Yeah. Like, you know, right. Right Now I'm almost 25 years old. When I'm 30, you know, when I'm. When I'm 35, am I still going to be wanting to do that? Probably not. Like, I've tied myself to Unspeakable for the past 10 years, so it's like, I can't really get rid of it. I can't, like, hire some other people to come in and just kind of, like, change who I am, you know? That's like, if the Rock was like.

Oh, I don't want to be the.

Rock anymore, so I'm gonna hire this guy. Like, it just doesn't work, you know?

Like, I love the energy drink for, like, the crazy. All the stuff that you're, you know, filling your house with sand.

Today I'm gonna be filling my entire island house with sand. Maybe I'm wrong, Right.

Yeah.

It could fit the unspeakable audience, but I want it to, like, expand. I want it to go to, like, you know, like, skateboarders and snowboarders. And, like, I. I don't want just, like, kids that love ball pit balls and nerf guns to drink my energy streak, you know what I mean?

Yeah. I see the original distribution base is just, like, the launchpad. And the only thing that keeps it going is new distribution and the product itself being good enough that people who are in the first ring tell their friends. And, like, that's the part that Most people fuck up, they're like, I'll just slap my name on this thing. It's white label.

I completely agree. I just know that I'm not gonna wanna film videos for the next 30 years of my life. There's already plenty of days where I dread videos. I still love them. They're so much fun. But I know when I'm 36 years old, I'm not gonna be like, oh, yeah, I'm so ready to fill my house with balls and let's put all the sand in. I don't know if I could see me doing it for that long.

But when you start doing the car stuff, isn't that still gonna be video too?

Yeah, but we're actually looking for, like, co hosts, so I just want to be the creative brains of the channel. Just kind of, like, help direction.

Can we segue real quick into the car shop thing?

Yeah.

Is the primary motivator for the car shop making money? Eventually franchise. Is it to have, like, lots of locations, or is it just for content? To have a spot to make content.

So there's, like, three branches to the business. Like, you have the shop, you have the content side, and then you'd have the marketplace side, which doesn't exist right now, but we're working on building it. Like parts. Yeah, so, like, parts, custom mods and things like.

Yeah.

That I see being the biggest part of the business. I have a lot of people that follow me that are actually interested in cars. Because when I first started my Unspeakable Channel, like, six years ago, all I did was car content. Oh, yeah. So I started doing car vlogs. I had, like, a gtr. I went to, like, car meets. I, like, went on rallies. Because at the time, I just did daily vlogs. I was just like, yo, guys, this is my life. That was what the Unspeakable Channel was like, six or seven years ago.

And then you started seeing what was hitting and the crazier shit you did.

And it just kind of more. Yeah, because YouTube, like, six years ago was like vlogs. Like, Casey Neistat was, like, the biggest YouTuber, and he literally just walked around New York City making really good, entertaining videos. But it was just a day of his life. That's what YouTube was. You had a bunch of other creators, like Mr. Beast, and other guys come in and they're like, okay, this is the new YouTube. This is challenges.

Yeah.

Where people are like, all right, survival this. Survive on this. So I was like, I need to, like, change to that. So that's where everything else came in.

So if we're optimizing around how do we make you the most money short and long term. Right. And really more so long term. It's clear that you love this one. Like, I mean just from like your energy when we're talking about it and this is just like your cash cow per world is. This didn't start just from a business perspective is that you only had Unspeakable. You're making a good amount of money from Unspeakable and Adsense every month. Of all the things I'm going to do, I'm going to leverage the existing massive media audience that I have and find one thing that they can all buy. And then that would be all that you would do. Then we have a phase out, do one of these and then they're leading it, most of it, and you're making a couple appearances and then you fall off the table.

Yeah, yeah. Unspeakable could transition to something like Red Bull. When you think of Red Bull, you don't think of one person. Like you just think of like crazy. Anything crazy. Yeah, right.

I still think that an energy drink is not bad.

I feel like the energy drinks market is so saturated.

Totally. If you put the same amount of attention to making the product the way you do videos, where it's like, how does it taste in the beginning? How does the aftertaste? Like, if you like, if you were to break it down at that micro level of really making an exceptional product, you're excellent at what you do. So like that character trait will carry over, you know what I mean, if you apply it to this. So if we're analyzing opportunity, it's number of units sold times gross profit potential per unit divided by competitive mode, number of people times amount of money made. So like for me, we do deals with a very tiny percentage of people, but the amount of money that I make on a deal is significantly higher. And so for me, that cross section, even though it's itty bitty bitty, still makes it worth it for me.

Right.

Because for that small person, helping them go from 10 to 100 million is very meaningful. And so I can help a tiny amount of people a lot and then help everyone else for free. And so we just have to figure out what that slice is. What do you like? So you've got the car thing. You dig that? What else do you dig? What do your people know about you?

I mean, just having fun with friends and just making videos, it's just kind.

Of the whole vibe of like, yeah, so you get money from adsense and whatnot, but do you have any other brand sponsorship deals, like integrations into videos? Okay, so which, so what are those?

Advertisers, Nerf, Legos, Elmer's Glue. We've done some with wwe, five Hour Energy, Hot Pockets, honey. Like the website?

Yeah.

Bunch of like small mobile game companies.

Do they reach out to you? Do you reach out to them?

They all reach out to us, really.

Of opportunity vehicles, the game would be by far number one. It would hit the most amount of the audience. You'd make the highest gross profit per user. It's operationally, from a fulfillment standpoint, the easiest to handle. The big hard part is like building a software game that's actually really good.

I've seen so many YouTubers make games and doesn't matter the following that they have.

Like, if the game sucks, the game sucks.

The game sucks.

Like, I like the energy drink angle. The only issue with these though is that they're cash eaters, which sucks. What I'm gonna say you may or may not like, so just take it for. For what it is. How can you do more of what we're currently doing? Because, like, of the plays, like, I like that one a lot. High likelihood of success right within your wheelhouse. Like, there's only a couple tweaks. It's like, okay, find the other co hosts. Like, if you're like, well, that's kind of hard. It's like, well, so is building a fucking software company.

Like, it's all hard, right?

It's all hard. But like this one, you know, like all the other variables you've got down. I feel like doubling down on the media might be the play. You could probably like tomorrow 5x. How much money you make just by building out the sponsorship bar. That's all that you have to do.

I kind of limit my scale on Unspeakable because I have to be in.

All the videos, right? Yeah. I have to figure out who my co hosts are and start sprinkling them in, seeing how the audience reacts to them. Finding one or two people that are three people that they really like and then rotating them in to the point where ideally and speakable will be a group, two or three people that are kind of like hosting and leading things along, playing off each other characters, right?

Yeah. So like scaling the content that way because I think the growth for the channel could be so much faster. We put out 52 videos a year. Right. We could put out 100 or 150 that are all the same quality of those 52. But it just limits all my time because, you know, I have to sleep eventually.

But when someone pays you a million bucks or whatever to do a year of sponsorships, it's like that goes straight to your bottom line. That is not common. Like, which is why media businesses are wonderful business. Like Warren Buffett had all of these newspapers because it's media. It's one of those profitable businesses on the planet and you're good at it, which is hard.

What's the saying where it's like, I don't know who said this, but it was like, if you're good at sales, you can, you know, make a million, 5 million, 10 million. But if you're good at marketing, make billions. Right.

Well, there's an issue from Naval Ravicom which is you only sell because you don't know how to market. And you only mark is you don't.

Have to build a product. Yeah.

And what's cool about your product is that it is both marketing and product. It's one of the unique things about the media business is that how you market the thing that you have is also how you fulfill that thing. That's only a media thing. Like no other business is like that, where the marketing is the fulfillment. If we were to plan this out and say, hey, if you could 4x your income in the next four years, would you do it just from the unspeakable income? Well, if the answer is yes, then it's like, well then we could reverse engineer that. Like that's super doable. I would bet that in that four year span there is an opportunity, like somebody who approaches you, who's got another energy drink brand is like, we already have funding, et cetera, and we just want a face for it. Or we want a brand to associate with. And then you can do a brand deal with that company, but you do it for equity. Litmus test number one is like, you love the product. The road path for Unspeakable now feels pretty clear to me. How do you feel about that?

No, I like it.

And then you also have this car thing even here. Building the car parts thing, like that'll definitely make money. I like that as a business model. And if Unspeakable didn't exist, I would say, yeah, just do that. You thought about it before you built it. Like, I'm going to build the content arm, I'm going to monetize over here, ensure we'll make some money at the shop, whatever. That's a complete business model in my mind. And it Makes sense because it's fully integrated into the videos. It's like, hey, we just put this custom mod thing on the Lambo, by the way, you guys can check it out. I've got 20 available first. 20 can go get it.

On the shop side, I already have a partner to kind of run and operate the whole shop.

The shop, okay.

Yeah. The shop is what is going to open first. The content. It's kind of like whenever we get a piece of content, whenever we get access to the new Mercedes that came out, you know, my main role is just to kind of oversee, like direction and making sure the creative is, you know, on point. The marketplace doesn't even exist yet.

If you were to do the marketplace, it would take the same amount of energy and attention and effort as scaling. Unspeakable likelihood of achievement lower than unspeakable upside. About the same. You already have a partner who's running the ops. That's good. I think all you need is just have somebody who's junior running the content who wants to like mentor under you, which you have, I'm sure can find somebody who would just like live with you and breathe this stuff. This is the main thing. This is the baby. This is what you're the best at. I really want the best in the world at do more of that. And then the only thing that you're going to attribute over here, you're dropping the marketplace. You have the partner to run the day to day. Ops is just somebody to run the content for the car shop. And then you can sell sponsorships and whatnot that'll go through there, which is actually kind of nice because then this one starts to merge with the path of this one. So then your attention will start to consolidate in terms of like how you make money and how you think through things. But now it feels really simple. Yeah. Feel better?

Easy enough.

Yeah. Well, both. All of these are hard. This one has so few unknowns based on what you already have in the experience. Congrats on everything.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, you bet.