You Don’t Have to Do YouTube Alone Anymore.

I Started With Almost Nobody Watching

I created my first YouTube channel in June 2011 while I was in graduate school studying criminology.

At the time, I was working toward an academic career. I imagined getting a doctorate, becoming a professor, doing research, and publishing ideas that a relatively small number of people might read.

Then I discovered that I could turn on a camera, speak, upload a video, and have someone anywhere in the world find it.

That felt like where I belonged.

My first videos were not polished. I did not have a beautiful studio, an audience, a refined niche, or a proven strategy. I made simple videos, experimented with subjects, and sent links to friends to get the first views.

I tried helping people with video game addiction. I tried selling T-shirts. I tried business videos. I tried tutorials. I tried ideas that made sense for a day and then disappeared.

The most important thing I did was keep learning how to turn an idea into a video and put it in front of another human being.

That is still the foundation of everything I do today.

I Chose YouTube and an Independent Online Career

After earning my master’s degree, I left my doctoral program in 2012 to work independently online full time.

I have not gone back to a traditional job since.

At first, that decision did not look impressive. I lost money. I tried services people did not want. I chased ideas that went nowhere. I had to learn sales, advertising, websites, email, client work, course creation, public speaking, video production, and how to keep going when almost no external evidence said I was making a good decision.

One of my early breakthroughs came from teaching Facebook advertising.

I had figured out a service people were paying me to perform. Then I made a YouTube tutorial and gave away the central method for free. The video showed exactly what I had learned.

That transparency damaged the service business because some potential clients realized they could do it themselves.

It also helped create the next phase of my life.

The tutorial spread through an online business forum, reached tens of thousands of people, and introduced me to the opportunity to teach through online courses.

I learned a lesson I still carry: sometimes giving away your best information changes the business you thought you were building and opens a much larger one.

YouTube Helped Me Become a Top Online Instructor

I built a large catalog of online courses and used YouTube to teach, demonstrate, attract students, and build trust.

By 2015 and 2016, I was one of the top ten instructors on Udemy by instructor earnings.

My courses generated millions of dollars in sales on Udemy, and Udemy paid me a total of more than $600,000. My final payout report was approximately $663,000.

I taught subjects including online advertising, business, technical skills, course creation, entrepreneurship, and YouTube.

Some people teaching creators today first learned from my courses and videos during that period.

My YouTube channel crossed 100,000 subscribers. Across my channels over time, I built audiences reaching hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

YouTube careers are not a straight line. I reached that peak, then later deleted most of what I had built and started over.

A snapshot can make one creator look like a genius and another look irrelevant. The full story is usually much more complicated.

One Live Stream Changed My Channel After I Had Forgotten About It

In the spring of 2016, I was terrible at League of Legends and wanted help.

I paid a retired professional player thirty euros for a coaching session. We connected on Skype, I shared my gameplay, and I live streamed the session to YouTube with a title built around a simple question: could a professional coach help me get out of bronze?

Almost nobody watched live.

For most of the stream, I had roughly two to five concurrent viewers, and it ended with fewer than one hundred views.

I moved on.

Then, weeks later, YouTube started recommending the recording.

The video grew from a forgotten live stream into more than 800,000 views and millions of impressions over the months and years after the stream ended. At its peak it was generating tens of thousands of views a day. The coach’s contact information had appeared during the stream, and he received so many requests that his rate later increased from thirty euros to around three hundred euros an hour.

That video built a large League of Legends audience on my channel.

It also created a problem.

I did not enjoy playing League of Legends.

I had accidentally gone viral for something I did not want to keep doing.

The audience wanted more. The analytics told me to make more. The comments demanded more. I spent thousands on additional coaching and in-game purchases. I live streamed the game repeatedly. Some videos performed well, but the original magic never repeated in the same way.

The larger lesson was painful: a successful video can take your channel in a direction that is wrong for your life.

A viral video is not automatically a gift.

Sometimes it is a contract you never meant to sign.

That experience is why I care about sustainability when I look at your channel. I do not want to help you build an audience that traps you in content you hate.

I Tested Nearly Everything I Could Think Of

After my course business changed dramatically, I experimented aggressively.

I made business tutorials, educational videos, gaming videos, live streams, interviews, technology videos, music, book discussions, personal development content, and more.

I streamed to YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch. I rented a computer that cost around $10,000 so I could multi-stream before the tools creators use today were widely available. I learned Wirecast and OBS. I built studios. I tore studios apart. I made courses about the tools I was learning. I tested memberships, Patreon, affiliates, services, sponsorships, advertising, donations, and direct sales.

I experienced massive reach with almost no income.

I also experienced strong income from content that left me uncomfortable with the direction of the work.

I learned that views, money, and creative satisfaction can move in completely different directions.

I Quit Gaming, Returned, Quit Again, and Eventually Reached the Goal

I quit gaming after the League of Legends burnout.

Then I returned because I still carried the dream of becoming a full-time gaming creator.

I tried different games, different platforms, different schedules, different titles, different monetization models, and different channel arrangements.

In 2020, I sold most of my studio and tried building an in-person show in St. Petersburg because I was tired of living through a screen. When the chairs stayed empty and the business did not work, I returned online.

By 2021, I became one of the top Facebook Gaming partners. I finally reached a version of the professional gaming dream I had chased for years.

I also learned that getting the dream does not guarantee you will enjoy the daily reality of it.

Playing a game for fun is one thing.

Playing the same game for hours because an audience and an algorithm expect it is a job.

I know what it is like to live stream to hundreds or thousands of people, to have streams reach hundreds of thousands of views, to earn money while gaming, and to still feel exhausted by the obligation to show up and perform.

That experience is why I will never tell you that a certain content model is right merely because it is getting views.

Multiple Channels, Dead Channels, Rebrands, Monetization, and More Reinvention

I kept creating.

I started more channels. I deleted channels. I changed names. I separated subjects. I combined subjects. I made one broad channel and several focused channels. I saw focused new channels sometimes outperform an old channel with a much larger subscriber count.

I started a new channel that reached the YouTube Partner Program in about forty days. That was my result in one specific subject and moment—not a promise that another creator will do the same.

I also saw old channels with large subscriber counts struggle to move new videos.

I learned how little a subscriber number can tell you about the health of a channel.

I learned that an audience built for one subject may ignore another subject even when the new videos are good.

I learned that changing direction can work, but the cost of confusing an existing audience can be real.

I learned that a new channel is sometimes the cleanest test, while other times it is simply a way to avoid doing the hard work on the current channel.

I had one sponsorship pay me $25,000. I also had periods with no sponsorships at all.

I earned money through ads, courses, affiliates, services, calls, communities, memberships, sponsorships, donations, and other offers.

I saw that the same number of views could produce dramatically different income depending on the subject, viewer intent, offer, geography, format, and relationship with the audience.

I Burned Out So Badly That I Deleted Everything

By 2025, I had been doing this for fourteen years.

I was uploading at a pace that became destructive.

Some days I published ten or twenty pieces of content. I made Shorts, long videos, live streams, clips, interviews, and scheduled uploads every few hours. I woke up thinking about what to publish. I went to sleep thinking about analytics.

I had already deleted thousands of older videos trying to clean up or optimize channels.

Then I deleted the rest.

I deleted channels, videos, views, subscribers, search traffic, and thousands of dollars a month in passive income.

At the time, deleting everything felt like freedom.

Looking back, deleting more than 4,000 YouTube videos was one of the biggest mistakes of my career.

I now tell creators not to delete videos merely because they are old or underperforming. There are legitimate reasons to remove a video—such as a serious policy, legal, privacy, or rights concern—but low views alone are usually not enough.

I had spent years creating a library, and I destroyed it during burnout.

That gives me a perspective most coaches do not have.

I know the emotional state in which a creator can make irreversible decisions just to feel relief.

I know what it feels like to be sick of your own channel.

I know what it feels like to believe the only solution is to burn it down.

I can sit with you before you make that decision and help you separate the temporary feeling from the permanent action.

I Came Back With Six New Channels and a New Way of Working

After deleting everything, I spent time writing books and rebuilding my life.

Then I came back to YouTube.

This time I started six channels from zero so I could test different subjects and audiences with cleaner signals.

I built a production system that lets me move from an idea to a finished video, a thumbnail, metadata, a transcript, and a permanent article on my own website with very little administrative friction.

I track my output in a spreadsheet.

I use AI to help me think, research, organize, transcribe, package, repurpose, check, and publish.

I keep my human voice at the center.

I am not interested in building a factory of anonymous videos that say nothing.

I am interested in using AI to remove the repetitive work that stands between a real human idea and another real human receiving it.

That is the work I am doing now.

That is the work I can help you build around your own strengths.