Alphabet says to So, to give you a little bit of context, I have grown a Tik Tok to 266K followers and 300 mil views in 2 years. But I did it faceless with AI voice. The videos I make are highly edited faceless videos, which take 6 to 8 hours to make. But posting almost every day. And in doing so, I've developed a test of how short form content works. thing is since I use AI voice and faces, my RPMs, revenue per mill, which is the amount of money that you make from let's say ad platforms by posting on social media are super super low. Like in the month of June, I got close to 10 mill views and got like a 1k payout. Wow, that blows. So my question is what to do next? I could charge and teach people how to make faceless content in the process of making my content better and break it down hundreds of short form videos and I have kind of a good grasp on many niches. So I also show people how to do and monetize that or I can start posting myself and within like 6 to 3 months believe I can grow at 100K with lifestyle content but with this I have no clue of monetization. Yeah, fitness opinions and philosophy. These are all pretty unmonetizable inherently. Um still could you apply it to anything that's more of like a monetizable niche with higher RPMs? I don't know.
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.
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 first point: you're claiming the video editing market is saturated. I'd say there are far more new market entrants in AI than in video editing, and many are applying AI to video editing, changing the economics. Is AI just automation drag-and-drop backends, AI agents, or does it encompass all knowledge work? If so, there are many entrants, making it very saturated. However, I like highly competitive markets because they suggest opportunity and money to be made; competitors often do a poor job, so with a little first‑principles thinking you can be vastly better. For example, Upwork is saturated but the average proposal is terrible spam. By improving basic elements—profile picture, message bubble, cover letter, spelling/grammar—you can stand out and dominate. When you do that, you don't need to worry about cheap hourly rates because you'll be in the top 1% of the 1%, following a power‑law distribution. How to charge for outcomes with video editing: I often get pitched outcome‑based deals. The better outreach is to say you've managed channels for big names or done editing for any video, letting you claim views from those channels (even if the views came from brand growth). You can guarantee improvements in metrics like watch time or CTR. For instance, guarantee a lift in average watch time. You take their starting statistic over the last 90 days, run your service for a set period, build a relationship while editing, and by the end they'll know and like you, having worked with you. If you're a thumbnail designer, you could guarantee CTR improvement. Finally, how to start selling with no proof: use the service on your own business. If you were selling cold email, you'd run it on your own business, generate opportunities (e.g., 28 meetings in 4 days for an IT or software firm), then bootstrap that into proof with each client you work with.
Fausto RDS says, 'Nick, how would you to about growing an audience starting from zero? I'm thinking Facebook and Instagram and YouTube. My ICP are service businesses, home services, and I sell custom software and automations. I got a lot of people asking questions like, how do I start my own brand and what's the best way to build an audience? Cuz they look at the way that I built my audience and they're like, well, Nick obviously puts a lot of time, effort, and care into it, so um you know, he'll he'll know. But I'll be honest, I just I just tried 10 different approaches and then I found one that happened to work. Um I did not come with like a highly strategic approach. What I did was I simply asked myself, what provides me the lowest CPMs, costs per meeting? >> [gasps] >> Which platform, if I test it for 30 to 60 to 90 days, will get me the lowest CPMs uh comparatively? And it turns out it was YouTube. So, rather than start at the end, which you're doing right now, which is growing an audience and starting from zero, start at the beginning, which is, hm, why do I want to grow an audience? Well, I work in the home service businesses uh niche. My current CPMs are $45. And that's not very scalable because our lifetime values are, you know, at some ratio where the cost of acquiring the customer to the lifetime value just doesn't make sense. So, how can I get lower CPMs? And then, rather than choosing Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, like you have here, uh just try a bunch and then determine which ones work after the fact. Pre-commit yourself to some sort of test. Cuz that's what I always do and uh that tends to work pretty well. But yeah, man, it's all 100% just about your cost per meeting, if I'm honest, or your cost per, you know, uh intent. In my case now with Maker School, driving a chunk of my revenue, it's it's cost per intent. It's cost per like, basically, each person visiting my landing page. >> [gasps] >> And that's way better than through cold email.'
Very interesting question. I think your issue is you are attempting to find leverage where it probably doesn't make sense. Why not just record your ads yourself? If you're going to go through the process of scripting them and stuff like that, just record a video of you saying it. You're trying to make your team seem larger. Actually, there's a tremendous amount of value in consolidating that team into one public-facing person. If they like, you know, a piece of content that they watch with you, then when they see an ad of you in their feed, you'll get significantly lower CPMs. So, I think you're just trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. What are you planning on doing? Spinning up 4,000 AI avatars talking about all different types of of services and whatnot? No, I mean, if you're here on my channel asking me that question, you probably don't have the ad budget. So, don't worry about that at all. Just do it yourself. I don't know if you've noticed, but I do all my videos entirely myself. I also do all my ads entirely myself. And the reason why is because this is the most important part of my business. It is the top of my funnel. It is the step that every single person that ever gives me any money needs to go through before they eventually get to the point where they transform into a paying customer or client. If you think about it that way, you'll realize that there is no point in trying to save money at this stage. You should focus entirely on growing, not saving. And all AI agents or AI ad avatars and UGCs things can do for you at that stage is typically save.