YouTube

Scooter Braun discovered Justin Bieber on YouTube with under $100K saved

Scooter Braun got his start as a college club promoter working with Jermaine Dupri's mom's label. At 22, with less than $100K saved, he found a 7-9 year-old boy singing and playing guitar on YouTube, flew him to Atlanta, and signed him. That kid was Justin Bieber.

“He finds this guy on YouTube. Who is a little kid. He's like 7, 8, 9, 10 years old, and he's playing the guitar, and he's playing a guitar, and he's singing. And Scooter goes, this kid's going to be a home run, he's going to be a winner. So he flies this kid and his mom down to, uh, Atlanta, and he goes, I want to manage you.”

Ben Mallah: the 400-lb cigarette-smoking Florida real estate tycoon

Sam's obsession of the week: Ben Mallah, a gregarious, cigarette-smoking South Florida real estate tycoon who buys $20M hotels and drives a $500K Bentley, and who got into YouTube in his mid-50s after already being successful. Off-putting on the surface, but Sam can't stop watching.

“He's this big old fat guy, like 400 pounds fat because he's probably like 6'3" and he's disgusting. He's like, smokes cigarette and he like looks like he smells and he like always hits people like on the back real hard. He's just gregarious and in your face. And on the surface he appears like incredibly dislikable and cocky. And I love him. He turns out to be, he seems pretty quite charming and he's a real estate tycoon down in South Florida.”

Creator-platform economics are an unstable equilibrium

Jake Paul argues YouTube creators capture a tiny, lopsided share of the value they generate, which is why top creators are fleeing to OnlyFans, BitClout, and their own subscription platforms. Woo frames it via Netflix: YouTube gets billions in content for free and kicks back an ad-rev split.

“It's very one-sided. And I think that's why you see, you know, YouTube and creators not as, you know, in sync as before, because they're finding ways to go off platform and make money like OnlyFans, Bitcloud, their own subscription platforms. So it's not the same ecosystem that it was before, but even before it was still very, very lopsided.”

Shaan estimates Jake Paul's media side at ~$10M/year

In the debrief, Shaan back-of-the-envelopes Jake Paul's media business: YouTube ad rev-share at a ~$5 CPM plus 7-figure sponsor deals, landing around $10M/year. Sam guesses higher, at $15-20M.

“How many monthly views does this video get? Okay, then you assume a $5 CPM for his YouTube ad, you know, rev share. And then you say, okay, he has these sponsors. I think they're going to be 7-figure, you know, I would say his media side of things should be bringing in about $10 million a year. That'd be my guess.”

Why Clubhouse will fail: the growth-vs-retention catch-22

Shaan predicts Clubhouse fails because it serves two incompatible jobs: content (great growth, terrible retention) and chilling/making friends (great retention, no growth, since you don't recruit friends to a make-friends app). He forecasts a pivot, a Facebook acquisition, and the founder quitting.

“So any platform where the value prop is to make friends, I'm not gonna bring friends. So now you have sticky retention, but now you have no growth. And in the other world, you had fast growth but no retention. And so you're stuck in this catch-22. And so then, just to kind of round it out, you eventually get disillusioned. You realize this shit's not gonna work. You try to pivot. You eventually sell the company to Facebook.”

Creators should own the platform, not just rent attention on it

Shaan notes platforms like YouTube and Twitch are worth ~100x even their top creators despite the audience showing up for the creators. He claims the envelope math shows a surprisingly small number of creators—few enough to fit in one hotel ballroom—could band together to spin up their own platform.

“isn't that weird that the creators, which is who the audience shows up for, don't have any equity stake in the platforms, YouTube or Twitch? The platform is worth, you know, 100x what even the top creator makes.”

Steal thisOrganize the small set of top creators who drive a platform's audience and give them equity in a breakaway platform.

An artist incubator: own your masters, distribute yourself

Shaan's build-out of the YC-for-music idea: tell up-and-comers to skip the label, take a tiny fraction, let them own their work. It's viable now because artists distribute via YouTube/Spotify and get famous on their own social media without label-radio deals.

“every up-and-coming artist, don't sign with a record label, come to our— come to the incubator first. We're gonna take a tiny fraction and you're gonna own your own shit and we're gonna try to blow you up. Um, because today we don't need to put the same amount of money and resources into each creative talent as the record labels did before, because today you're able to distribute through YouTube and Spotify and you get famous through your own social media.”

Steal thisRecruit creators pre-fame, take a small cut, give them ownership, and lean on self-distribution to cut label-level costs.

Build a Figma-style video editor purpose-built for YouTubers

Shaan points out that YouTubers still edit on pre-YouTube tools (iMovie, Final Cut, Sony Vegas), and pitches a video editor built with YouTube as the output, bundling everything creators have to do anyway, sold as a paid Figma-style product.

“even if you just took that as the premise, like, hey, I'm going to build the video editing software that's best for video for YouTubers and I'm going to build it with YouTube in mind. YouTube is the output. And I'm going to build in all the things that everyone has to do for YouTube anyways. I think that's a service you could charge for in a Figma-style, Figma-style tool”

Steal thisRebuild a legacy pro tool around one modern output platform and charge creators a subscription.

Email is the only audience channel you fully control

Noah Kagan argues every platform (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok) is incentivized to make you pay to reach your own audience, because they have to make money. Email is the only scalable channel where you fully own and control the relationship.

“So I think, you know, the one problem that I noticed with all the channels like YouTube or Instagram or TikTok or any of these is that ultimately they are incentivized to get you to pay to talk to your audience. Why? Because they have to make money. And so email is the only channel I've ever found that can scale communicating with an audience that you can fully control.”

Steal thisBuild an owned email list as your audience foundation before relying on any rented social platform.

Let the bottom 99% of creators monetize one viral piece

Altucher is actively building a way for ordinary creators to monetize content. Today only the top 0.1% (like Logan Paul) can monetize YouTube, and someone with 300 followers can't monetize a tweet 20M people see, even though the platforms have the ecosystem to enable it.

“So you have to be like, you know, Logan Paul to monetize your YouTube channel and the other 20 billion people on YouTube, even if they have one video that goes viral, they can't monetize it. So, or, or like even if you have a, if you have a tweet that 20 million people see, but you have only 300 followers, you can't monetize it. So I've been figuring out a way to use these ecosystems to allow people to monetize content.”

Steal thisBuild the rails that let a creator monetize a single viral post even without a large following.

80 million YouTube views earned just $242K in a year

Shaan reveals a screenshot from a content site's acquired YouTube channel (~2M subscribers): full-year 2019 estimated revenue was $242,000 on 80 million views, his evidence that buying YouTube channels for cash flow is a bad idea.

“The revenue starting in January of 2019 to December 31st, 2019, your estimated revenue is $242,000, and that is with 80 million views, right?”

One 'Day in the Life' video added 50K subscribers in 30 days

Nick Bare's YouTube channel crept along for two years, then a single 'Day in the Life of an Infantry Platoon Leader' video hit a million views and pulled in 50,000 subscribers in a month, taking him from 30K to 80K.

“that million view video gained me like 50,000 subscribers in 30 days. So my channel went from 30,000 to 80,000 in like a month.”

Steal thisDocument a niche, hard-to-access part of your life on camera; authenticity in an untapped niche converts views to subscribers far better than generic content.

A $1M+ SEO/YouTube business that died when the algorithms changed

Shaan describes a friend who bought a business for over $1M that depended on SEO and YouTube rankings, doing close to $1M in annual revenue. Two years later, after Google and YouTube algorithm tweaks, the business fell off a cliff and was essentially dead, illustrating the danger of platform dependency.

“Now, 2 years later, like I just talked to him and he said, It's fallen off a cliff. YouTube changed their algorithm and Google changed their algorithm slightly, and my business is essentially dead. Um, and now that's a, you know, that's a business he bought for, for over a million dollars.”

YouTube now does $14-15B/year after a 'horrible' $1B deal

Shaan uses YouTube as the example of why a few extreme winners justify big-company acquisition appetite: everyone called Google's billion-dollar YouTube purchase a horrible deal, and it now generates $14-15 billion a year in revenue.

“Yeah, $14, $15 billion a year now in revenue. And so you need a few of these. Instagram, another one where it's like, you need a few extreme winners, and then big companies will continue to have the appetite.”

The 'anti-guru': hoodie and shorts on stage to beat the sleaze stigma

Tom Wang addresses the sleaze accusation around course-sellers by positioning as the 'anti-guru'. As a broke Chinese immigrant who got no help growing up, he speaks in a hoodie and shorts, gives away free YouTube content, and frames the paid course as a fast track rather than the only path.

“So when it comes to sleaziness, I think I'm kind of like the anti-guru. I go up on stage wearing hoodie and shorts, 'cause I tell people, I'm like, this is the real me. I'm not like, This is the real me. This is what I wear on a daily basis. I don't wear a big suit, a fancy tie, a pocket square trying to sell you into a weekend workshop. If you want to come and learn from me, great. If you don't want to come learn from me, I have tons and tons of free information on YouTube that I'm going to share with you anyway.”

Cody Ko unlocked product-market fit

After roughly 6 months of failing to find product-market fit with pro athletes, co-founder Devin suggested putting his roommate Cody Ko (3M YouTube followers) on the platform. The moment Cody joined, Cameo took off, with ex-Vine stars becoming the first great talent.

“Cassius Marsh, who was my co-founder Martin's client and is an NFL player, he was the first talent to come on very quickly after about 6 months of not finding product market fit with pro athletes. Devin one day was like, hey, I think Cody, his roommate with 3 million followers on YouTube, and people like Cody, Cody Ko, would do really well on this platform. And the second we put Cody on, that's when it really kind of blew up”

Sam's teenage YouTube clickbait scam: fake fight videos, charging bands to host their music

Around 2009, Sam exploited YouTube's autofill and lack of thumbnail filters to make clickbait 'street fight' videos that were actually just a single static image with no real footage. One racked up 10M views, and he charged bands $10-$50/month to run their music as the background audio.

“And so I would— was kind of scammy and I would create these videos with these clickbait titles and the thumbnail would be the only image that existed. So it was a video with just this because YouTube didn't have that filter to like catch that. —So the video was nothing? —Yeah, it was nothing, but if you— I can go and find it somehow, and it probably has 10 million views, and then I would charge bands money, $10, $50 a month to have their music as the background.”