What one piece of advice would you give to your younger self?
If I could give one piece of advice to my younger self, it would be to understand that outputs lag behind inputs. When you put in a lot of work, you won’t see the results immediately because there’s a natural delay—often about a month—before the effort pays off. If you have a tight feedback loop and expect quick results, remind yourself that the lack of immediate outcomes doesn’t mean your effort was wasted; it’s just the system’s lag. To work with this, ground yourself in the belief that what you’re doing is right, based on the logic and research you’ve done. Trust that belief deeply, and keep going. For example, if you were to send ten Loom videos daily to creators you admire and message them on platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, or X, you’d mathematically expect a result. By sticking with it over a long period, the inputs eventually catch up to the outputs, and you start seeing results. I learned this from my own experience: I blogged every day for 30 days as part of a challenge, saw almost no views, and felt discouraged. But a year later, those posts were ranking on Google’s first page, driving hundreds of hits and sales opportunities. Had I kept that pace, I would have become one of the more prolific bloggers online. The same pattern happened with my YouTube channel—once I committed to daily videos for a month, the market rewarded me later, and I grew into a bigger, respected creator in my space. So, if you believe in your work, give yourself grace and extra time—maybe double or triple your estimate for when results will appear. That heuristic makes success far more likely.
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.
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
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.
Hey man, congrats on getting started with any sort of business at 14 years old. The extent of my business knowledge at 14 was playing Runescape and reselling Rune Essence from west to east to west Varac bank. If you know any fellow Runescape entrepreneurs, let me know in the comments. In terms of doing this, I guess it's kind of like a video game, which makes sense. In terms of what you would do, I wonder if you're butchering the probability of success because you're 14 and doing a personalized Loom video. A lot of people won't take you seriously if you're 14 and visibly 14. I don't mean this to disincentivize you; I think what you're doing is fantastic. I wish I had started this business stuff around your age. But being pragmatic, if you're pitching to someone in their 30s or 40s, they'll wonder how young you are, whether you have experience, and if you've had time to build it. They likely won't see that you have a competitive advantage: your ability to learn things quickly, which is the only real skill set that will matter as we head toward the AI era at breakneck speed. Am I doing all things right? Yeah, I think so. For you, it's just about consistency. If you keep this up for a full year and do 10 of these every day, you'll accumulate 3,650 independent touch points. You're going to crush it.