How do you find a bunch of ideas for your main channel, and how do you know if they're good or not?
I've tried the outlier approach many times — looking at what other people have done and duplicating it with mild changes. To me that's akin to old-school article flipping from SEO 5-10 years ago. I don't think it's very sustainable or high quality in the long run. When you do that, your channel ends up being a patchwork of different subjects, and though your view metrics look good independently per video, on net you're usually not getting a lot of returning people watching, which ultimately impacts your ability to monetize that audience. What I like to do is talk about what I like to talk about. If I have a subject I really like — for instance, I just recorded a video on how to use AI in learning — I'll record a video on it and try to fit it into some known outlier packaging. A lot of the time it's fitting a square peg into a round hole, but I try to make it work anyway for short-term metrics. And if it doesn't work, I don't care. You can call that a great strategy or a horrific strategy. But I have probably some of the best monetization of channels at approximately my size, for products I sell like low-ticket info products as well as agency work. There are very few people who can meaningfully compete with me on that despite my objective subscriber and view metrics not being very high. So clearly it works really well for me. I just ask: what the hell do I want to talk about? And then I talk about it.
Well, I wouldn't be in your situation in the first place. It doesn't make sense to start a YouTube channel or talk about stuff until you've actually delivered value in the past. If your revenue is less than $20,000 a month, you shouldn't be running this channel right now because lead volume will be too variable and there's nothing to build a business around. Spending time just touching up your content and trying to make it really high quality completely defeats the purpose—believe it or not, your content doesn't have to be very high quality as long as you're somebody worth listening to. For example, I'm just in my room in a tank top after a shower; I might not know what I'm talking about when I started this video, but it's still worth listening to because I've achieved outcomes that a lot of people here want to achieve, and I've consolidated a lot of knowledge. The two are valuable together, but the actual quality of the content aside from that knowledge and the perceived value of being associated with me isn't anywhere near as high. So the hack is: you need to do good first. Don't start a content business and then run another business side by side. Start the other business, crush it, achieve massive success, and then make videos talking about it. If you do anything else, you're really just putting the carpet before the horse and wasting your time.
No, I wouldn’t start a daily updates channel just for the sake of it. I do it now because my own work—running a scrappy AI automation business—is inherently interesting to watch; it’s like seeing a vlog of someone operating at a high profit level that few people achieve. For most people, watching them wouldn’t be interesting unless they’re already skilled at what they do. Running the channel takes extra time (20‑30 minutes daily) that could be spent elsewhere, but I keep it because the distribution and personal accountability it creates are valuable, and there’s a large potential payoff later as people see my consistent effort over months or years. That said, I appreciate when others start their own channels—like the one set up for me posting daily short Q&A clips—or when they share feedback, clipping content, or experimenting with formats (vertical videos, podcast clips). I’ve seen others, such as Marlon, launch similar channels and grow to around 100 subscribers. I’m open to tips, but I think the current approach is solid. I’m currently bottlenecked for taking calls, so I don’t see near‑term upside in spending time on them. Instead, I’d prefer an affiliate arrangement: if you join Maker School and create clips on channels like this, you can earn money when those clips drive sign‑ups, plus a flat CPM payment for views. This aligns incentives and creates a win‑win. I’ve already answered similar questions about the channel before, so I’ll keep it brief.
Well, I think this is a pretty interesting idea. This is basically what I did when I started YouTube. I don't think you truly don't need a niche; if you just talk about whatever you want, people will come, but pragmatically you end up finding a niche as you talk about stuff. You might not find a niche, but there are subsets of people in all niches related to what you discuss—like me with automation and entrepreneurship. I helped grow make.com substantially; without me, that niche would be smaller. I'm not saying it's all or nothing; you can create a niche if you're big enough and gain momentum. However, most viewers lack that momentum and viewer base, making it hard to influence a niche. You could talk about whatever you want and people would come, but it would be slow, yielding a highly engaged audience that likes your specific blend of humor, appearance, voice, and explanation style. Realistically, I'd suggest starting with three or four niches to test, iterating quickly to find which gives disproportionate ROI, then focusing on that niche consistently. As you test other ideas while creating content, you become your own niche, cutting the learning curve. Whether you pursue a niche‑of‑one approach or a defined niche, you eventually get the same upswing from network effects and exponential growth, but the niche‑of‑one path has a long lag. I see it this way, and this is the approach I'm taking to my content.
My content creation process begins with recognizing that my videos haven’t been performing well recently, which serves as a reminder not to pause content creation. I believe it’s better to focus on producing one truly excellent video rather than many mediocre ones. My average performance is boosted by strong search‑based results, but when I look at raw numbers, the performance has been lackluster. I therefore share my current, imperfect process: I start by considering two or three different approaches, aiming to shift toward making videos I genuinely care about, even if short‑term metrics suffer, because long‑term performance improves when I’m more aligned with my interests. I make a good living, so I don’t need to chase short‑term views, but I acknowledge that beginners must prioritize metrics. My recommendation is to base decisions on search trends—using tools like Google Trends to identify high‑performing search terms in your niche over the past two weeks, since platforms and strategies emerge and fade quickly (e.g., the recent Fable trend). Once you have a sense of what people are searching for, see how you can fit your existing activities into those topics. For example, if part of your workflow involves a token‑optimization technique you tested for a couple of days, make a video about it. The challenging part is packaging—crafting a title and thumbnail that work well together. I haven’t fully mastered this yet, but you can try outlier matching or rely on developing intuition about what works; most of my attempts don’t succeed, perhaps around 70% of the time, so I focus on high volume and accept that only about 30% of my videos will be remembered positively. My top‑performing recent video, which gained 77,000 views in 9 hours and 53 minutes, covered topical subjects like Claude manage agents, Claude Opus 4.7, and Claude routines—these do well in the short term, which is how I’m currently judged. However, the video that has generated the most revenue for me is not on that list; it’s my Claude code course. That video was 100% search‑based: I searched for a full Claude code course, found none, recognized the opportunity, and created the course at the right time, earning roughly $30,000 and continuing to grow. Regarding other ideas, a viewer suggested uploading the content to Spotify for morning listening; I think that’s a great idea and plan to explore adding a Spotify upload to my workflow. In terms of growth, my subscriber count is currently 464,288, with a modest 0.16% increase recently, while my Instagram engagement has risen from an average of 0.05‑0.11% to 0.37% after consistent posting. If I had continued growing at 0.11% I’d reach about 609,000 followers by year‑end, but with the current 3.7% growth rate I’m on track for roughly one million followers. My X (Twitter) account has 2,701 followers, which jumped by 70 in the last 24 hours—a 2.58% increase that feels significant, though I’m still figuring out how X works. Maker Zero, my community, now has 1,345 members, a 44% increase, placing us in second position, with the Maker Zero ranking itself having risen dramatically. Overall, I see the recent surge in content posting as having reversed prior declines, essentially recouping losses from three weeks of inactivity with just a modest amount of new content. I’m eager to keep this momentum going, try new formats, and possibly record an extra video before my upcoming trip to Vancouver to avoid slipping back into old habits. Imagine if I had published one video a day from February 1, 2024, through today—that would exceed 700 videos. Even if they weren’t polished, simply speaking openly about what I care about would have built a core audience that appreciates my daily updates and received substantial value from them. I believe my content is genuinely more helpful than most, and I want as many people as possible to benefit from it because understanding AI and automation will be crucial for future economic success. By spreading this knowledge, I hope to accelerate the transition to a more effective economy. I’ve been硬on