I'm a 20-year-old CS student from the Middle East, lost in picking a niche and service because I'm consuming so much content it's making things worse. How do I set a plan and stop jumping from video to video, and what's the best way to learn fast after picking a niche — is it by doing projects instead of just consuming educational content?
Let me make this abundantly clear: I don't want you watching videos like mine all day. They help with knowledge, but for most people who aren't hitting their monetary goals yet, the problem isn't knowledge — it's applied action. You already know more than enough to succeed. Use videos like mine as a mechanism to go do something, not as a substitute for doing it — otherwise you're just mentally masturbating and you'll never get anywhere. Commit today to take what you've learned this past week and actually use it: send five or ten Loom videos or cold emails even if you have no idea what you're doing. Entrepreneurship is operating with limited information, and you already have more information than I did when I started knocking on doors with zero idea what I was doing. On picking a niche: you just pick two or three niches you're maybe 70% confident in and try them — there's no way to know for certain a niche will work ahead of time. I've probably tried over 50 niches and most didn't work, but I still went and sent thousands of cold emails or applied to dozens of Upwork jobs for each one before moving on. One more thing on the US-vs-Middle-East point: yes, there are real cultural and economic differences, but you're not limited to working with people around you. I'm Canadian, and Canada has lower labor productivity than the US — workers there earn roughly 30-40% less per hour of equivalent work — so I specifically chose to work with American clients instead of Canadians because it pays more per contract. Your Middle East/US situation is probably similar. There are extra hurdles like time zones, but you can absolutely work internationally rather than only with people physically near you.
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
The reason I can make really long videos is that I use the software in my day‑to‑day work long enough to know it thoroughly, then I just record a video on it—no extra learning time needed. For example, I recorded a 6.5‑hour Claude Code marketing course and published it without spending a second learning for it; every build I showed was from client work over the past year. This lets me turn on the camera and start talking immediately. It’s not the highest quality content per minute, but it unlocks much higher volume, letting me make videos on topics I’m already good at. The secret to high‑volume, high‑growth content creation is to make a lot of content, but you can’t do that if you have to research and pre‑produce an hour every day for a 10‑minute video. So, make content only on stuff you’re really good at, which requires you to become exceptional in that field first—this makes you interesting. In short, don’t make videos all day unless you have something worthwhile to film about; when you do, you’ll be good enough at it that you won’t need much pre‑production and can be more natural.
That's a really interesting question. The reality is with content you have an explore-exploit trade-off. That means you are constantly faced with a fork in the road: should I continue doing what's already working, or should I go and find greener pastures elsewhere? It's a fork in the road human beings have had throughout our history, even from the agricultural and hunter-gatherer times. Essentially there is an optimal ratio of exploration to exploitation based on how big you are. The bigger you are, the more exploitation you should be doing — the more you should be taking advantage of proven formats in order to make money. Whether that's on social media or your business or whatever, the reality is the bigger you are, the more you have to lose, and so the safer you have to play. The smaller you are, the more you can explore, the less safe you have to play, and the more you can look for greener pastures. When I was really early on, I spent a lot of time exploring. Now that I'm getting bigger and bigger — although by no means am I a big channel on socials — the more exploiting I am doing. That's just how it works. Big corporations have way more to lose — why do you think they focus on compliance and really honing in on one product-market fit and so on?
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.