Started my YouTube channel 3 months ago. Your idea that outbound is better from a sales perspective and overall and inbound got me intrigued. I have no problem putting in hours on my YouTube channel. Would appreciate an explanation of how and why outbound is better. I'm looking to get as much leverage as possible.
He explains that the advantage of outbound versus inbound depends on your distribution, money, and power. When you have no distribution (no audience, no money, no power), outbound is the straightest-line path to making money because you go directly to a person who suffers from a problem and present yourself as the unique solver, guaranteeing a return on investment. Inbound—relying on content that draws people to you—requires distribution to be effective; without it, you're just shouting in a town square alongside billions of others doing the same. He notes that in his own video he said outbound is a much straighter line path to money at your current stage, but overall it's not better than inbound; if it were, he'd drive the vast majority of his traffic through inbound, which he doesn't. As you gain distribution, money, and power (more followers, success, revenue), the optimal strategy shifts from outbound to inbound because you can leverage ads, funnels, and scale. In your case—starting a YouTube channel three months ago with no real distribution—outbound remains the better leverage approach. He adds that he himself is now mostly inbound because he has built distribution, money, and power, and expects that to continue.
My AI and automation agency makes significantly less money than my coaching. Coaching is extraordinarily scalable—when you run a YouTube channel with distribution like I do, the optimal next choice is to sell something hyperscalable with zero delivery or logistics, which is what my coaching stuff is. If you're a total beginner, your optimal choice changes depending on whether you have distribution: with distribution, you'd go for e‑commerce or info‑product with a templated service; without distribution, you'd run an agency because agencies let you get your first 10, 20, $50k in revenue super quickly. Agencies allow you to make a lot of money very quickly, but you tend to plateau relatively fast, with further gains being incremental. Contrast that with an information product business (like a community or SaaS), which has zero marginal cost after a fixed development cost, so you make little money at first but way more later. Does this make sense? From my perspective, when I started my agency I was up here, made money quickly, hit resistance, wanted to scale with as little headcount as possible, moved over here, and now I'm significantly higher. Would I recommend doing what I'm doing now to total beginners? No—many people throw away their businesses after starting coaching because they stop doing the main service, become disconnected from implementation, lose skill, and start teaching the wrong way. That's why this YouTube channel is valuable: I'm showing you how I actually generate leads for my agency. I want to change the fraction of my total revenue that comes from this channel; I don't think it's the most effective use of my time per dollar, but I believe it will indirectly lead to more money through authenticity, so I'm getting back to selling outbound for the agency, setting up more inbound funnels, adding calls‑to‑action at the end of videos, and going to hire a team eventually.
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.
The most important metric for me is not the amount of money I'm making (MR). It's not the number of people in my community. It's none of that. The most important metric for me is YouTube subscribers. Why? Because I believe strongly that in an age of intelligent machines, in the AI era we are heading toward at breakneck speed, the only thing that will matter and distinguish me from other entrepreneurs or business people is my distribution. I believe strongly that the ability to build and have a distribution in the AI era is the only fundamental thing that will set you apart. Let me give you an example: If I were Netflix and existed in an era where any website or company could clone my entire tech stack by typing 'make me a Netflix dupe' into chat GPT, what value would my company have? The only value my company has is in my customer base. Everything is essentially commoditized. Therefore, the only value I will have in this market is how many customers I currently have. You can call this wealth divide, follower divide, audience divide. But I believe strongly the only real thing that matters and will matter to me is the number of subscribers, the number of followers, and the strength with which those people follow me—like authenticity. I don't just want to be one of a million YouTube channels; I want to be the best YouTube channel talking about the topic I discuss. I want an unbroken chain of me showing up every day and delivering on my promises, because the probability that others will do that is extraordinarily low. That's what I'm optimizing for. Sure, the money I'm making now with school and all that is nice, but what will I do with that money? Let's be real: the difference isn't between people starting at zero dollars and those at $5 million net worth. The difference is between basically all of us and the select few at the top with net worths in the hundreds of millions or billions. So that is the only money-wise divide that actually matters. I won't get there in the next couple years realistically. When you view anything from a sufficiently high vantage point—say, on a skyscraper—nothing down at the bottom that we do really matters. From that height, people with hundreds of billions of dollars and me with a few million dollars look basically the same as everyone else with zero million dollars. Does that make sense? So, in terms of money, there's no point optimizing for money because I'll never reach that level in any reasonable time frame. But the one play I have is the subscriber base, and that's what I'm going for.
You clearly have an extremely valuable set of skills; your question is how to take this valuable set of skills to market. Very few people can get 300 million views in two years—you could genuinely change the course of the global economy with this skill, and millions of politicians would be interested in achieving 300 million views in two years organically on a super broke budget. So this sounds pretty good. The thing is you need distribution to begin with; you could show your current audience how to do that. That’s reasonable. But you should also leverage the systems you already have that enable you to do it—this is just your bottleneck. Six to eight hours to make a video is tough; you could bring that down to three or four hours, allowing you to make two videos for two approaches. In six months you’d have a solid base to sell—maybe a fitness channel program or something similar. That’s probably what I’d do.