Can you explain your thumbnail creation process, especially after Mr. Beast reached out?
I use AI to take the transcript of this video and generate candidate title and thumbnail options. I then apply constraints—no more than seven characters per line (so it doesn’t overflow my face) and exactly three lines—and select the best options from a training set of reasonable thumbnails that must confirm the title. The system then creates three thumbnails, we split‑test them, and pick the winner. It’s fully automated; I let the market choose high performers. The value is that I can produce a ton of content very quickly with zero post‑ or pre‑production—I just show up, answer questions, and deliver value. On the business side: we’ve hit about $500 K this month (still waiting for final numbers, but on track). We’ve landed several big affiliate partnerships that are crushing expectations and bringing in far more money than anticipated. There’s also a major insurance client in the works worth roughly $2 M per year—we’ll confirm once payment arrives. I run an annual promo for Maker School; while the MRR shown excludes annuals, the actual cash flow each month is higher because I front‑load the annual payments. Selling around 40‑50 annual spots at $1 104 each adds roughly $50 K, which combined with community revenue (~$280 K) puts us in a strong position. On a lighter note: the smoke from the Canadian wildfires is clearing a bit, it’s windy, and I was able to go outside briefly. I paused my daily updates after realizing we’d already hit the $500 K milestone in just over a month—a testament to consistent daily effort. My thumbnail system is “goated”: I tested many styles (cartoon, 3D, pixel) and found the 3D approach consistently outperforms, backed by AB‑test data. Faceless thumbnails are interesting too—when I use my face, growth stays steady; when I hide it, I see occasional double bounces, likely due to timing effects. Looking ahead, I’m inviting all the Maker School winners I’ve worked with to jump on calls like the one with Justin (which was rough around the edges—I love the guy but messed up some questions). My plan is to run many interviews and, through sheer volume, make the 100th one the best interview you’ve ever seen. On a personal note: I saw the Odyssey with my girlfriend; I’d expected a political rage‑fest over Elliot Page being cast as Achilles, but the film turned out to be a solid movie despite the American accents—totally fine. The whole experience reminded me how much online outrage is just stupid rage bait. Finally, regarding the Canadian wildfires: they’re tragic but also reveal potential upsides—melting permafrost could unlock arable land for new communities, assuming we improve forest management and stop burning the country down each year. I’m not looking to become a political commentator; that was just a joke. Thanks for watching—I’ll see you tomorrow.
If you’re earning $2,500 per year, you’re essentially being robbed in broad daylight; but if you’re making $2,000 per month ($24k per year), you’re on the lower end yet not necessarily being exploited. To think about your situation, imagine you’re paid $25,000 per year while generating $500,000 in value for the YouTuber—that’s about 5% of the value you create. Most people receive only 1–2% of the value they generate, while strong salespeople earn 15–20% through commissions. My advice for contractor‑partner roles like yours is to aim for 10–15% of the value you deliver, which translates to roughly a 10× return on investment for the client. If the client is smart, they’ll happily pay you $1 to make $10 for them. The mistake many people make is realizing they’re underpaid and then demanding more money outright—a losing approach that comes across as a loss‑based demand and triggers ego or risk‑aversion in business owners. Instead, frame the conversation around growth: remind the client of the results you’ve already delivered (e.g., over $3 million generated together), share your vision for scaling to $10 million, $20 million, or $30 million, and propose a concrete roadmap (start with X, then Y, then Z). Emphasize that you want to take on more responsibility because you believe you can execute better than others, and assure them you won’t take any of their time. Then, at the close, add that you want skin in the game—more upside when things go well, and a corresponding adjustment when they don’t. Present this structure directly to the client. Because you’re leading with growth and a clear path to multiply their business, the likelihood of them agreeing to partner on a new initiative is vastly higher than if you simply complained about pay. In short, if you’re only making a few thousand dollars a year, you are being underpaid; but if you’re earning tens of thousands per month, you’re in a reasonable position. My overall approach to every job or partnership discussion is to focus on mutual growth, not to threaten to walk away unless paid more—that’s blackmail and damages trust. Successful business owners refuse to negotiate with that kind of pressure. When you approach from a desire to grow the pie together, you’ll achieve far better outcomes.
You're sending about four proposals per day on average. If you increased that to 10 per day (2.5× more), you'd see roughly 2.5× more results. Your main bottleneck is the view rate, currently around 12 %; improving your CV, profile, how it stands out, and your writing to avoid generic templates could push that to 20‑25 %. Make sure the first 150 characters show you read the post, give something free, and present yourself as a professional. With a 12 % view rate, 16 viewed proposals translate to about five replies, which is rough but not hopeless. In my early days I sent 20‑25 proposals a day; I would have completed your 30‑day volume in about five and a half days, outperforming you six‑fold on views alone. Even without improving my view rate, that would have yielded roughly 90 views, around 30 replies, and three or four calls—enough to eventually land a deal. You can make up for any shortfall in volume with strategic effort, something I've done since day one. I'd still recommend you do it more effectively, but the principle holds.
Yeah, so for big builds, don't just do it all in one shot; avoid big all-encompassing systems because scope creep usually leads to a situation where you haven't clearly defined what you’ll do for the client, which is impossible to specify ahead of time, causing the client to expect something you didn’t agree to for payment, breeding resentment and harming the relationship. Instead, start with a small starter project that’s tightly scoped and agreed upon by both sides, then vibe each other out to learn what the client likes and demonstrate your aptitude—this lets you pitch more later and gives you insight into their business before committing to a massive scope. If you’re doing this for a company and need to send 10,000 depersonalized emails, think logically: using Make, first you get the leads (one op), then you iterate through the leads (n ops), generate icebreakers (another n ops), and optionally upload to Instantly (another n ops) or bulk‑upload to Google Sheets (effectively one op). Roughly, that’s about three n ops, or two n ops if you use the bulk‑upload shortcut. For 10,000 records that works out to roughly 20,000 operations, give or take. As for the Make plan, the $34‑per‑month Core plan gives you 40,000 ops, plenty of headroom; you don’t need the Pro plan unless you want better error handling, in which case the Pro plan is $62. You can start with Core and upgrade later, paying only the difference. On a personal note, I’m about twenty minutes into this video and feeling locked in; I’ve gotten more done today than in the past week because I’ve committed to stop daily posting on my main channel. My growth has slowed—my first‑24‑hour view‑to‑subscriber ratio dropped from about 15% (≈15,000 views on 100k subs) to around 5% (≈5,000 views). Comments suggest this is because my niche‑specific content has saturated its audience, and broadening the topic would attract less‑interested viewers. Elrico noted that my recent videos repeat earlier material, which may also be hurting growth, and suggested exploring other tools besides Make, like voice agents and live builds. Parker joked about throwing me on while cooking to start a riot over quitting daily, and shared ideas such as adding an automation bucket for publicly traded codes to save Coinbase money, using customer‑support headcount as an input for percentage assessments, and targeting big logos to pull in the right audience. My daily updates channel now has about 5,600 subscribers, while the main channel sits at 110,750. I’m checking follower‑count tools like Trend Hero, though I’m not sure about the daily‑limit metric. Reflecting on all this feedback, I’ve decided to stop posting daily and instead pursue a multifaceted strategy: focus on what makes me unique—my calm, low‑production‑value, high‑signal‑to‑noise conversational content—and develop a new, less‑replicable format. With my team, we’ve decided to pursue the “complete and utter uncopyable thing”: building a business with this stuff in front of everybody, doing it extraordinarily well by spending time generating leads, selling them, securing proposals, onboarding clients, fulfilling projects, and growing the company. Nobody else can replicate that live business‑building demonstration. My earlier live video of starting and selling an AI service in ten hours went viral precisely because it proved I can generate leads on camera; it’s a litmus test for knowing how to do this.
I get about 10 people each day offering to design thumbnails for me, often using some scraper to find channels in a niche and offering a free demo thumbnail. I take them up on the offer; for example, I worked with a designer named Hanan from India/Pakistan, paying $30 per thumbnail. My workflow is simple: after recording my daily update, I record a quick 10‑second clip of myself making ugly faces at the camera—only my thumbnail editor sees this. I then tell the editor to upload the finished thumbnail to the same Google Drive folder, I post the video, and the next day I update the thumbnail. For my other thumbnails (like the ones on Nix), I start with a Canva template, grab a smiling screenshot from the earlier clip, delete the previous face, paste the new one, add another copy, use the background remover to isolate the face, creating two layers so I can place hair over a green section for a 3D effect. I then add platform logos (Instagram, NN) and do light editing in Clarity to make my face pop without maxing it out. The result looks like a YouTube‑sized thumbnail when zoomed out. I don’t spend much time on thumbnails, but they’re effective because consistent, quality content makes viewers associate my face with value, turning thumbnails into a self‑fulfilling market signal.