'Nick made me rich thanks to Maker School' — do you worry that keeping people consuming your content instead of just letting them act on their own could trap them into over-consuming instead of building a life outside of work?
My whole point is that you probably already know everything you need to know — your issue isn't knowledge, it's action — so I try to make my content as actionable as possible, but it's still content. That said, there's a fuzzy line between total asceticism (giving up any entertainment or enjoyment to grind on your business nonstop) and the opposite extreme (playing League of Legends for 14 hours a day). I don't think I'm trapping people — my honest opinion, even if biased, is that if you compare watching one of my videos to watching most other creators for the same amount of time, you'd probably get more value out of mine, even though I'm sure there are creators out there who put in even more value than I do.
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?
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.
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.
Yeah, I like to think so as well. I deliver a ridiculous amount of value—whether it’s $60, $70, or whatever the current price is, sometimes around $3,000 depending on when you watch this. To make a long story short, I don’t actually recommend posting on YouTube for a while; most people see creators like me posting and assume that’s how you make money, so they feel they need to post and showcase their systems. I can only do that because I’ve already had success selling this through cold outreach and built a business model aside from YouTube. Only once I had the cash flow to justify spending time on YouTube did I start making videos consistently. Before you start making videos about a money‑making topic, get to the point where you’ve achieved more than 99% of people at that thing. If you’re a standout 1% with some accomplishment or social proof, people will be far more likely to listen to you. There are literally a million‑plus people waving light poles online talking about stuff they don’t really understand. When you can demonstrate real results—say, making $42,000 a month—and show how you did it, you cut through that noise much more easily. The key is to do it without bragging; come across as genuine, not ungrounded. Based on our interactions in Maker School, you’re not that kind of guy—you’re good. For me, it’s more about reputation than follower count; I care about the strength and quality of each follower, not just the number. I’m not missing out on money by focusing on goodwill; in fact, I’m accumulating more goodwill than pretty much anyone in the industry by doing this. Thanks for the advice—you totally get how to play the game.