Why do you consider YouTube subscribers the most important KPI instead of metrics like paid members churn rate or MR?
The most important metric for me is not the amount of money I'm making (MR). It's not the number of people in my community. It's none of that. The most important metric for me is YouTube subscribers. Why? Because I believe strongly that in an age of intelligent machines, in the AI era we are heading toward at breakneck speed, the only thing that will matter and distinguish me from other entrepreneurs or business people is my distribution. I believe strongly that the ability to build and have a distribution in the AI era is the only fundamental thing that will set you apart. Let me give you an example: If I were Netflix and existed in an era where any website or company could clone my entire tech stack by typing 'make me a Netflix dupe' into chat GPT, what value would my company have? The only value my company has is in my customer base. Everything is essentially commoditized. Therefore, the only value I will have in this market is how many customers I currently have. You can call this wealth divide, follower divide, audience divide. But I believe strongly the only real thing that matters and will matter to me is the number of subscribers, the number of followers, and the strength with which those people follow me—like authenticity. I don't just want to be one of a million YouTube channels; I want to be the best YouTube channel talking about the topic I discuss. I want an unbroken chain of me showing up every day and delivering on my promises, because the probability that others will do that is extraordinarily low. That's what I'm optimizing for. Sure, the money I'm making now with school and all that is nice, but what will I do with that money? Let's be real: the difference isn't between people starting at zero dollars and those at $5 million net worth. The difference is between basically all of us and the select few at the top with net worths in the hundreds of millions or billions. So that is the only money-wise divide that actually matters. I won't get there in the next couple years realistically. When you view anything from a sufficiently high vantage point—say, on a skyscraper—nothing down at the bottom that we do really matters. From that height, people with hundreds of billions of dollars and me with a few million dollars look basically the same as everyone else with zero million dollars. Does that make sense? So, in terms of money, there's no point optimizing for money because I'll never reach that level in any reasonable time frame. But the one play I have is the subscriber base, and that's what I'm going for.
Fausto RDS says, 'Nick, how would you to about growing an audience starting from zero? I'm thinking Facebook and Instagram and YouTube. My ICP are service businesses, home services, and I sell custom software and automations. I got a lot of people asking questions like, how do I start my own brand and what's the best way to build an audience? Cuz they look at the way that I built my audience and they're like, well, Nick obviously puts a lot of time, effort, and care into it, so um you know, he'll he'll know. But I'll be honest, I just I just tried 10 different approaches and then I found one that happened to work. Um I did not come with like a highly strategic approach. What I did was I simply asked myself, what provides me the lowest CPMs, costs per meeting? >> [gasps] >> Which platform, if I test it for 30 to 60 to 90 days, will get me the lowest CPMs uh comparatively? And it turns out it was YouTube. So, rather than start at the end, which you're doing right now, which is growing an audience and starting from zero, start at the beginning, which is, hm, why do I want to grow an audience? Well, I work in the home service businesses uh niche. My current CPMs are $45. And that's not very scalable because our lifetime values are, you know, at some ratio where the cost of acquiring the customer to the lifetime value just doesn't make sense. So, how can I get lower CPMs? And then, rather than choosing Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, like you have here, uh just try a bunch and then determine which ones work after the fact. Pre-commit yourself to some sort of test. Cuz that's what I always do and uh that tends to work pretty well. But yeah, man, it's all 100% just about your cost per meeting, if I'm honest, or your cost per, you know, uh intent. In my case now with Maker School, driving a chunk of my revenue, it's it's cost per intent. It's cost per like, basically, each person visiting my landing page. >> [gasps] >> And that's way better than through cold email.'
You clearly have an extremely valuable set of skills; your question is how to take this valuable set of skills to market. Very few people can get 300 million views in two years—you could genuinely change the course of the global economy with this skill, and millions of politicians would be interested in achieving 300 million views in two years organically on a super broke budget. So this sounds pretty good. The thing is you need distribution to begin with; you could show your current audience how to do that. That’s reasonable. But you should also leverage the systems you already have that enable you to do it—this is just your bottleneck. Six to eight hours to make a video is tough; you could bring that down to three or four hours, allowing you to make two videos for two approaches. In six months you’d have a solid base to sell—maybe a fitness channel program or something similar. That’s probably what I’d do.
My AI and automation agency makes significantly less money than my coaching. Coaching is extraordinarily scalable—when you run a YouTube channel with distribution like I do, the optimal next choice is to sell something hyperscalable with zero delivery or logistics, which is what my coaching stuff is. If you're a total beginner, your optimal choice changes depending on whether you have distribution: with distribution, you'd go for e‑commerce or info‑product with a templated service; without distribution, you'd run an agency because agencies let you get your first 10, 20, $50k in revenue super quickly. Agencies allow you to make a lot of money very quickly, but you tend to plateau relatively fast, with further gains being incremental. Contrast that with an information product business (like a community or SaaS), which has zero marginal cost after a fixed development cost, so you make little money at first but way more later. Does this make sense? From my perspective, when I started my agency I was up here, made money quickly, hit resistance, wanted to scale with as little headcount as possible, moved over here, and now I'm significantly higher. Would I recommend doing what I'm doing now to total beginners? No—many people throw away their businesses after starting coaching because they stop doing the main service, become disconnected from implementation, lose skill, and start teaching the wrong way. That's why this YouTube channel is valuable: I'm showing you how I actually generate leads for my agency. I want to change the fraction of my total revenue that comes from this channel; I don't think it's the most effective use of my time per dollar, but I believe it will indirectly lead to more money through authenticity, so I'm getting back to selling outbound for the agency, setting up more inbound funnels, adding calls‑to‑action at the end of videos, and going to hire a team eventually.
Well, yeah, I'm just going to pitch the same thing I just pitched to Christian. It sounds like you already know, but you should double down on the stuff that works. I'm going to post a video in a few hours that will run you through a bunch of client acquisition methods. So maybe get everything in the S tier list and just start spending some money on it. All right, ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to call it there and now do my brand stats. Thank you very much for listening. I'm thinking back and boy have I done a lot of videos today. If I was talking a little bit faster than usual, apologies on that. I don't like to do it this quick, but I just have somebody picking me up in exactly 7 minutes, and I wanted to make sure that I could get through some valuable content. So, let's see how many subscribers I gained. 47,494. That's almost 800. Good. Almost 1% growth. Instagram, for whatever reason, is not popping up. Come on, ladies and gentlemen. Come on. All right. I'm pretty sure it's 99,000. So, I'm just going to write 99,000. So, I unfortunately do not have the time to fix this. Okay. 98,500. My phone here. Yeah. No, my phone's not here. Sorry. Um, daily updates. Whoa. That's not me. Not me yet. Okay. 3,357. Um, 2.19% growth. So, I'm actually focusing less on the absolute numbers now and more on the percentage growth because the percentage growth is more representative. I got to scroll way up to get to this. But uh yeah, this is now past 95,000. So my Instagram is actually kind of up here. It's pretty crazy, huh? All right. I'd like to do a lot more, but um unfortunately I have to jet my uh yeah, my father's picking me up in a minute. We're going to spend some family time and uh to be honest, I just have a ton of videos I have to record. So I'm just going to take a breather and uh probably get back to this later this evening. But with all those new people that joined Maker School, um I just have one thing I want to share with you. First of all, we're at 1.9K members. Second of all, um it's at 131,000 MR with 16.62% churn. So everything that I've been doing churn reduction wise has been working. We've obviously got a big flood of signups recently. So that is decreasing the churn temporarily, but everything else that I'm doing with churn is working really well. I've made probably over $200,000 now if you do the churn math with just a few hours of work. I have a couple of daily um or community exclusives that I have to land, but you know, um what I really like is you just saw me do it all live on this channel. Make money with make just hit 429 members. Okay, so we just scaled it up. I just had my um my weekly office hour. We had a bunch of new people on there, but we've now gotten almost an additional 30 people in. A lot of them are really high quality, very intelligent, very ambitious people. So, everything that I have told you guys I was going to do, I'm doing. And hopefully you guys get to see what it looks like when you brainstorm, distill a list of strategies, pick a couple strategies, do them, and then do some iteration and testing later on. I'll leave it there. Hopefully you guys enjoy this sort of content. You'll really enjoy Maker School, and make money with Make. Thank you very much for watching. Looking forward to answering your questions.