Could you break down where you started with your social media profiles, whether you were running them all at the same time and cross‑posting, what specific strategy you use for each platform, and what advice you’d give a beginner making $5‑$10k/month on which organic strategy to grow and monetize that traffic through school?
He runs one of the largest school communities generating about $300,000 per month while working roughly 90 minutes a day himself. He tracks brand growth across major social platforms on a page. He started YouTube on February 1 2024 growing from about 100 subscribers to over 45,900 by February 1 2025. He launched Instagram in early 2025 and LinkedIn a couple of weeks before the video. His daily updates channel began about 194 days prior. His four main content methods are YouTube (oldest highest value) daily updates Instagram and LinkedIn (experimenting). He does not manage LinkedIn himself; a helper creates content based on YouTube videos following a waterfall approach where YouTube is the core platform and other platforms repurpose its content. He does not run all platforms simultaneously; he started with YouTube then added Instagram then LinkedIn. For beginners he advises that YouTube remains criminally undervalued. The key metric is total minutes of content watched: YouTube averages about five minutes per view (≈300 seconds) while Instagram averages around five seconds giving YouTube a roughly 60× advantage in monetizability per view. Consequently his YouTube channel drives the overwhelming majority of school signups with Instagram contributing only about 2–3% and LinkedIn similar to Instagram due to higher consumption time. He also shares that after recovering from a shoulder injury his confidence and gym performance improved dramatically making his life fantastic.
social mediaplatform strategybeginner adviceyoutube
It's a good question. I'm the automation guy, yet I manually update a janky Google Sheet each day because the value isn't just the metric—it's the awareness and reflection it brings. Spending about 30 seconds daily yields far more value: I notice trends and spikes in follower growth that make me investigate causes. If you had many metrics and worked with a company, you wouldn't do this manually every day—it would take too much time—but as a small portion it's fine. I had meant to mention Mr. Beast because we're collaborating. I recently hung out with school friends Marty, Ryan, and Michael; Marty has over 5 million YouTube subscribers, Ryan about 160 k Instagram followers, Michael many millions on Instagram. It was cool to watch the local cactus squad and discuss optimizing school as part of a big challenge. School is going well; I'm in the platinum group for educational creators with 100 k+ followers, where we help each other grow. I comment on posts for five minutes daily and have reached number two on the leaderboard, meaning I'm a valued resource; people constantly ask for my opinion. I achieved this with little effort—just voice‑transcribing posts and noting my thoughts (X, Y, Z) in 15–30 seconds per post—yet I now get massive exposure. I love giving value and seeing how communities make interaction easy and human‑focused. The free school community is thriving at 7,400 members, and we've celebrated two members hitting 10 k‑month milestones. Each day I review new posts, quickly scanning for obviously AI‑generated content (e.g., a YouTube‑video‑style post) and delete it, then ask if it's truly a YouTube video; if so, I delete it. I must be trigger‑happy for time, but the rest of the community is great: I spot AI‑generated posts, remove them, and spend about five minutes leaving a few comments. New members often feel uncertain; seeing that success is possible encourages them. The no‑AI‑post rule has raised discussion quality. A recent post from Rodrigo looked suspicious due to odd M‑dashes, but he noted it was a Google translation, so language may explain it. I appreciate Nick's style—no hype, straight talk that works. Regarding a journey‑maker school example, I noted it was obviously AI, less tinkering, more doing, and deleted it. I can give a reason for deletion, but my rule is two strikes: first AI‑post gets benefit of doubt, second results in removal. I've become familiar with AI writing patterns, so I ban them aggressively, keeping the community high‑quality. I also sprinkle in posts as needed, though the top‑level look lets people market low‑value offers in the intro tab (e.g., 'Hey, how's it going? Do you want to make money online?'), which I only see when reported; then I ban the offender. I enjoy the community and will defend it with my Warhammer 40K sword metaphor. Direct messages have become a burden—many users just say thanks—so I read them but don't reply to stay true to my promise. Reading 40–50 DMs daily makes me reflect on how far one person can go; I might be the only one sustaining this volume for over a year. I use AI everywhere except for the actual coaching deliverable and my personal presence, which I haven't replaced, preventing the perception of being fake. It's an interesting thought experiment: could I scale the community to a million members a month while still managing it alone? Possibly, but we'll see. My stats show slowed growth (0.11 %), then a rise to 0.66 % after a Maker Zero boost to 7,500 members. I plan to add an email‑address question to Maker Zero to capture all member emails for promotions, accepting some leakage as inevitable. I'm aiming to return to the top three rank again.
Connecting deeper to my online community before school was really about doing the same things I do now on School, just on the platform I was growing—YouTube. One big trend I had, that few others my size did, was responding to nearly every YouTube comment on the main channel. I kept that up until around 30–40k subscribers, which is about ten times more than most people stop at. The key insight for me is having some element of two‑way communication. That’s why the daily updates channel works so well, and why I’ve grown to almost 12k subscribers in 183 days of consistent posting. As long as you can create some back‑and‑forth, it humanizes you, moves you from a pure creator archetype to something more approachable and equalized. I try to do that by replying to YouTube comments, joining other people’s Schools, commenting in their Schools, doing Q&As, sharing knowledge drops and value drops. Those are the main parts.
community engagementyoutube commentstwo-way communication
Your connection is very fast—around 1,850–1,900 Mbps download and roughly a tenth of that upload (about 185–190 Mbps). At those speeds a video upload that once took 30 minutes now completes in about 15 seconds, and opening dozens of browser tabs drops from minutes to a few seconds. If you shave just half a second off each of 6,000 daily HTTP actions, you save roughly 50 minutes per day—almost an hour—eliminating a major bottleneck. Beyond the speed test, I’ve been working on Maker School exclusives to reduce churn. I’ve posted long‑form videos (like an hour‑plus content‑machine walkthrough) and plan another exclusive (perhaps a calendar). Tracking metrics shows our monthly recurring revenue dipped from ~305 K to ~34.5 K, indicating a 23.6 % churn that I’m addressing with exclusive content. Even if Maker School vanished, I could fall back on my agency, scaling it to $150‑200 K/month and using that social proof to boost my YouTube channel. I’m also exploring private‑equity and other ventures, but the core takeaway is that the skills I’ve built—community building, content creation, sales process—are transferable to any business model.
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.