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.
Yeah, it's cool—I don't play many video games. My League of Legends sessions are just occasional half‑hour meet‑ups with a buddy I rarely see, so it's not a crippling addiction; even if someone like Elon Musk got hooked on Diablo, it wouldn't be a problem. Playing a game or having a vice like Netflix doesn't stop you from making money. Regarding work hours, I put in about 50 to 60 hours per week, roughly eight hours a day, every day of the week. Not all of that is intense brain work; a lot is low‑stakes tasks like community management—I spend at least an hour a day responding to YouTube comments, which is about 12‑15% of my week. I do this because nobody else justifies the time, and it actually scales by boosting engagement. I manage my time as effectively as possible. From a leverage perspective, content is high‑leverage: recording one 8‑minute video that gets 1,000 views turns 15 minutes of effort into 8,000 minutes of watch time—a massive multiplier. It may look like I'm working more than big entrepreneurs, but I'm actually doing a comparable amount; I'm just not working crazy hours. When I was poor and scraping by, I worked far harder and longer, but much of that panicky, sub‑effective activity never produced results. Now I focus on impactful ways, especially the non‑scalable work like comment responses, which improves the likelihood that any subscriber will buy. That's why my channel is now the most monetized in the space—around $2.50 per subscriber at 50k subs—while others with larger audiences aren't achieving that. I credit this shift to people like Matthew Larson, who taught me monetization and a straight‑line approach. Overall, I hope that makes sense.
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
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?