This is part of a series of extended posts updating my no-longer-available YouTube Book. For the first installment, click here. Here’s an index to the series in chronological order.

Last time I talked about kicking off the 30 Days of Yoga series which was a game-changer for our channel, today wraps up that storyline. Based on comments I received, I did want to clarify one thing: I'm not recommending that you do a 30 Day series for your channel. For us, it was the right thing at the right time. It boosted our watch time, our subscribers and our revenue. We did it for ten years before we wrapped it up. In that time, a LOT of 30 Day Yoga challenges have popped up on YouTube. It's great that we inspired people, but there's another takeaway that I'd love for you to consider.

The 30 Days series gave us a chance to change things up and create a "storyline" that people could connect with. Posting on a consistent schedule is still super-important. But after you've done it for a while, it becomes normal and your audience can take it for granted. You've gotta look for opportunities to give them something new or different to get excited about. If you can create an engaging "storyline" around something, it also gives them a reason to tell their friends. The friends learn about you and what you're doing and they now have a reason to check it out and ideally become a part of the ongoing project.

It's a programming "stunt." It's something different, ideally as an additional layer on top of what you're already doing.

Sometimes it’s valuable to take a step back and look for opportunities to do something slightly different. Something that creates excitement and buzz and stops people from taking your consistent hard work for granted. Ideally you find something that is unique to you and your work.

I'm going to be talking a lot about storylines and storytelling in future posts because I think this is a huge opportunity that can be overlooked when you're in the grind, creating content and hitting your deadlines.

Let's get into part 2 and wrap this up...

CTA #2 - The Downloadable Collection

Our original plan called for two strategic calls to action. The first was to sign up for the daily email. The second would be for a t-shirt (or some kind of physical merchandise) that would roll out near the completion of the series. We didn’t know exactly what we were going to do yet - or how.

However our bank account was at almost zero and we still needed to pay our videographer and a few other looming business expenses.

I noticed something in our support inbox. At first I didn’t think it was significant. I was wrong.

After the first announcement of the upcoming 30 Days series, we started to receive requests for a downloadable version. These started as a trickle but as we got closer to the holidays, the amount was growing.

I couldn’t figure out why there was so much interest. After all the whole thing would be on YouTube for free. But then I realized that due to the global nature of our community some of our international friends are in areas with limited internet connections. Others were going to be traveling for the holidays and didn’t want to rely on internet. For all of these people a downloadable version would be much easier and relieve anxiety about whether their connection was strong enough.

So we quickly put together a downloadable package on Gumroad and made it available for a “Pay What Feels Good” price. You could get (and download) the full series for as little as $1.

To make it a little more special, we created a private 30 Days of Yoga Facebook group for people who had purchased the Downloadable collection. The group was designed to last for just 30 Days - after which it would disappear.

Despite the last minute announcement, the Downloadable Collection was a big success. The average amount paid was $7. The highest amount paid was $1000.

Before the series even launched, we pre-sold 9,604 collections and brought in $97,953.84.

This was mind-blowing. We wouldn’t have even thought about doing this if our community hadn’t asked for it. We listened. And it paid off.

January 1 - The Launch

On January 1st, we kicked off the series by sending out the first email and publishing another vlog-style “Community Builder” video. This one wasn’t a yoga practice. That would start tomorrow.

We suspected that a lot of people would have trouble getting to their yoga mats on New Years morning (hangovers). So we took January 1st to welcome everyone to the series. This also gave us one more chance to remind people to sign up for the daily email. We did recommend an alternative video for people who were really ready to practice yoga that morning.

January 2 - The Videos

On January 2nd, the series officially launched. We now had over 30,000 people signed up for the daily email and ready to get started. The videos launched each day at 6:00 a.m. and we used Mailchimp’s Timewarp feature to try to get the emails to arrive at the same time.

The great thing about having people subscribed to the daily email, is that we could remind them that there was a new video each day. We used the email to push traffic right back to the YouTube channel.

The result: our daily views more than doubled. Our views increased from less than 50,000 views per day to over 100,000.

CTA #3 - Our First Merch Drop

As the series drew to a close, we released our first physical Yoga With Adriene merchandise: two t-shirts and a racerback tank. Once again, this was a response to requests from the community. Making a fulfilling physical merchandise felt like an exhausting amount of work and we weren’t confident they would even be profitable. Luckily, we teamed up with Amplifier who handled all the printing and fulfillment. They have my highest recommendation.

We used a Vlog to tell everybody about it. Once again, we kept the video low-key and natural and just told people that shirts were now available. We had been delivering massive amounts of great free content all month so we felt like we had earned a sales pitch.

The shirts sold like crazy and continue to be a key part of our business.

It was the perfect time to launch them.

After 30 Days

Throughout January, our community spread the word about #30DaysofYoga via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. We had new people signing up every day.

We turned the daily emails into an autoresponder sequence so people could start at any time. The work we did back in December 2014 continues to bring in new viewers, subscribers and customers on a daily basis, but now the entire process is automated.

The project was so successful we have repeated it with a new series every January since. As you can see by the chart below, we’ve experienced similar results each time we tried it. With each series we see a huge spike at the beginning of the year before things settle down to a higher average baseline than we had before.

In addition to turbo-charging the growth of our channel, 30 Days became the single most important project we created from 2015-2025.

It became about something much bigger than just increasing our numbers.

It became a way to bring together a global community of people to practice yoga together.

This project changed everything for us. In February when all the dust began to settle, we found ourselves (and our business) in an entirely new place.

This is part of a series of extended posts updating my no-longer-available YouTube Book. For the first installment, click here. Here’s an index to the series in chronological order.

2014. Things were really working for the Yoga With Adriene channel. We had surpassed 150,000 subscribers over the summer which felt like a huge milestone. Everything seemed to be growing nicely but I was looking for ways to kick things into overdrive.

And I had an idea.

At the beginning of the year, I was recovering from the REBOOT launch by taking long walks with Hilah and the dogs at some trails near our house. In typical Austin fashion, these trails also featured a food trailer park. We decided to grab lunch.

The taco truck was closed so we opted for sandwiches. While we were waiting for our order, I eavesdropped on the two hungover sandwich artists making our sandwiches. They were talking about how they had both already failed at their goal of doing “dry January.” One of them mentioned that she had also signed up for a 30-day yoga program at a local yoga studio, but she had already missed a few days and was embarrassed to return.

“30 Days of Yoga” stuck in my head. It felt like something that could work on our YouTube channel. On our last trip to YouTube, we had learned all about watch time and session time. Publishing a new video every day felt like a great way to ramp these metrics up. It was also a way to recapture some of the REBOOT experience, while making it available to many more people.

10 months later we decided to go for it.

30 Days of Yoga incorporated all of the different strategies I had been experimenting with up to that point: YouTube optimization, a launch sequence, landing pages, e-mails and even a social sharing campaign. But this time rather than dividing our energy across multiple projects, we focused it all on one thing.

It would ultimately be the biggest thing we ever did to grow our channel and our community. Between the launch in December and the completion of the series on January 31st, our channel added over 150,000 subscribers and more than 200,000 people to our email list.

It felt like we had hit a fast forward button and suddenly we were in an entirely different movie. It was life-changing.

This is how we did it.

Production

We shot the videos just before Thanksgiving of 2014. We realized pretty quickly that we might have bitten off more than we could chew. Producing 30 videos was a bigger undertaking than we had anticipated. I also had a newborn baby at home, so things were hectic and I was delirious from lack of sleep. To keep things moving smoothly, for the first time we hired an additional camera operator (the awesome Katie Graham).

We shot all the videos over the course of two weeks and then took a break for Thanksgiving. As I was importing and organizing all the footage I realized this was going to be a MASSIVE undertaking.

My original plan was to have all the videos edited before January 1st, but that didn’t happen. I only had two videos complete when we started the launch.

Pre-Launch

In addition to the 30 Daily practice videos, we included a Community Builder and 2 Call To Action videos. We also offered an optional Daily Email to provide encouragement and additional context for the videos.

This was our pre-launch strategy, devised at the last minute in November 2014. You might even call it a funnel.

This is about as simple as a launch gets. We didn’t use any paid traffic, expensive tools, or marketing tricks. The only things used were YouTube, WordPress and MailChimp. But there is a power in simplicity..

1. A vlog-style YouTube video that explained what this is all about and why it’s going to be awesome. The Call To Action is to visit the landing page for more information and to sign up for emails.

2. The landing page gave more details about the series but was primarily designed to get people to sign up for the daily emails and a downloadable calendar.

3. After the email has been submitted we redirect to a “Thank You” page. We ask them to check their inbox for the confirmation email and calendar. This page also provides sharable graphics and encourage them to tell their friends and to post on social with the hashtag #30daysofyoga.

4. Once the email address has been confirmed (double opt-in) they received an email welcoming them to the 30 Day Yoga Journey and give them the downloadable calendar. We ask one more time to tell their friends and to help us spread the word on social media.

Don’t get hung up on over-thinking or over-engineering. Keep things as simple as possible in the beginning because it will be easier to find out what’s working.

We published the announcement video in December.

The signups started to pour in.

People were telling their friends and sharing our graphics on social media.

Almost overnight, we were welcoming a lot of new people into our little online community. Our subscriber number was increasing every day. We could feel the excitement building.

I just had to finish editing 30 videos . . .

Next Week: all the details of the actual launch, how everything went down, and how it changed our business.

Until then, keep creating

PS. I’m going to start spotlighting some interesting things I see happening on YouTube. I’ve recently become intrigued by a group of vloggers with very small channels. They probably got into my feed because they talk a lot about cameras. But what’s interesting to me, is that they are using their videos to talk to each other. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about.

Sidenote: I’m noticing more videos in the 4:3 rather than 16:9 aspect ratio. I like this ratio a lot. Not just for composition reasons - but because it takes up more screen area on phones and other devices. What do you think about it?

This is part of a series of extended posts updating my no-longer-available YouTube Book. For the first installment, click here. Here’s an index to the series in chronological order.

After seven years and hundreds of episodes, we decided to quit Hilah Cooking.

Hilah Cooking had been a life-changing success. This little project that we started as something fun to do on weekends had turned into a successful. It had given us the opportunity to quit our day jobs, travel the world, meet amazing people, and attend some incredible events.

And then, after seven years and hundreds of episodes, we decided to quit.

People still ask me about it. Why did we quit when it was going so well?

The answer is simple: burnout.

We started Hilah Cooking as two friends having fun making something new together. Over those seven years, we became a couple, got married, adopted two dogs, created a real human child, and moved to California. Our lives had changed. And so had we.

The creative spark that had driven us at the beginning just wasn’t there anymore. We were both getting restless and running out of ideas for more videos about food. Hilah was losing her drive to be a “stand-and-stir” cooking star. She was also tired of thinking about YouTube metrics and analytics.

I was spending more and more time on Yoga With Adriene, which was suddenly growing fast and consuming most of my time and energy.

It wasn’t a sudden decision—more like a slow realization. I can’t remember the exact moment when we said “let’s stop.” But we’d been talking about it for at least a year. We knew it was time. We didn’t have the energy and enthusiasm we would need to keep it going. When we finally made the decision to let it go, it was like a weight had been lifted.

It felt like an ending, but it was also a beginning.

7-Year Cycles

I’ve seen a pattern over and over with creators that I’ve gotten to know. I’ve noticed that many creators and businesses hit a wall right around the seven-year mark.

This isn’t just anecdotal. The idea of seven-year cycles pops up in all sorts of places:

• Rudolf Steiner wrote about human development in seven-year phases, each one bringing new challenges and growth.

• In traditional Chinese Medicine, seven-year cycles are tied to the essence (Jing) - a life force or vital energy that determines growth and health. At each 7 year interval there is a change in the body’s energy. (Technically it uses 8-year cycles for men, but that’s close enough for the purpose of this post.)

• Astrology uses Saturn cycles made up of 7 year phases.

• And we’ve all heard about “The Seven Year Itch” as it pertains to relationships. The idea is that at the seven year mark there is a natural restlessness and craving for change.

Once I became aware of these seven year cycles, I started seeing them everywhere. They’ve shaped the way I view the world.

When you’re building something new, the first years are fueled by excitement, creativity, and figuring-things-out. If you’re still going by year seven, a lot of the novelty is gone and things you used to love have become a routine. You’ve built systems. You’re on a schedule. You may have even hired people to help with some of the work.

This is often when burnout hits. At the very least, a desire to do something different starts to emerge.

For creators, I think this is the moment where you either reinvent or let go.

Push Through or Pivot

For us, it meant letting go of Hilah Cooking. Our creative energy was restless and we need to point it somewhere else.

An unexpected upside is that now - almost seven years since we “quit,” the channel and website still generate meaningful revenue. That’s the power of evergreen content. We’ve even made and published a few videos since then, just for fun - and to see how many of our old friends are still out there.

Burnout isn’t failure.

It’s a signal.

You’ve outgrown the old version of your project.

You’ve changed.

Your work has to change too.

We didn’t start Hilah Cooking to build a huge business. We started it to create something fun. Something that would hopefully let us live on our own terms. I also wanted to see if it was possible.

It achieved all of those things and we had an awesome time doing it.

To put it into perspective: how many traditional shows last for over seven years? It still feels like a huge success and major accomplishment.

But we finally listened to the signal and moved on.

Zero regrets.

PS: Have you ever felt burnout? Or are you feeling it right now? How did you navigate it? Hit reply and let me know—I’d love to hear your story.

I’ve been responding to a lot of comments and emails and that some of this advice might be relevant to a bigger audience. So I’ve expanded and clarified some of my responses and am going to share them with all of you on a regular basis.

First up:

Developing a YouTube Show Format

Laurie asks: I'm wondering (beyond trial and error) how you approach starting a new Youtube show format. I've loved reading everything you share, and I have long form podcast video stuff that's just such a blah so far. I want to look at that stuff with fresh eyes and chop it up into something more interesting for youtube, but I'm just not sure where to begin?

My advice:

Trial and error is an inescapable part of this game, but you can make life easier by start with a format that already works.

Don’t try to reinvent the whole thing. Use a proven structure and then tweak one thing. That one thing should be something that is uniquely yours.

I was reminded of this while reading There’s Nothing Like This: The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift. Not a book about YouTube, but oddly applicable. One quote hit me hard:

That’s the move. Take something familiar and remix it just enough to make it your own.

With Hilah Cooking, we built on the classic “stand and stir” cooking show. The twist? Hilah’s personality and humor. Within the format, she could get as weird as she wanted. Everybody has seem a cooking show before, so it was all about the personality and vibe. They either loved her or bounced.

With Yoga With Adriene, again, totally conventional format. But Adriene wasn’t doing yoga in an exotic location or a luxury mansion like a lot of online yoga teachers at the time. She was a regular room that felt like a room at your friends house. Even though she was a highly experienced yoga teacher, she didn’t talk to the audience like she was an expert. She talked like a friend. She was teaching real yoga, but she was also relatable and occasionally silly. That difference was what set the channel apart.

A perfect example of this is Hot Ones. It’s literally just a celebrity interview show—one of the oldest formats in media. With one twist: the guests eat progressively hotter wings. That’s it. The hot wings drop the guest’s guard, and creates something that feels fresh without reinventing the entire structure. And over time, the show has continued to develop its own vibe and “world.” Now it’s bigger than the shows it originally emulated.

Big picture: Start with a proven format. That’s your container. Add your own spin and personality. Then keep doing it and give it a little time. You’ll find your people and they will let you know what areas to lean into.

When Is It Time to Launch Your Own “Mini-Netflix”?

Fang Wei asks (in response to this post):

“Hi Chris, when will you think it’s the right time to start your own mini-Netflix? I want to do a Qigong version of Find What Feels Good. I think at least I need 10k subscribers on YouTube.”

First off, I wouldn’t use YouTube subscriber count as the main metric for deciding when to launch a paid product. Not even close. Our YouTube channel has been very active for years, but we’ve never been able to consistently convert viewers into paid subscribers at scale.

That’s not a knock on YouTube. It’s just that most people are on YouTube to watch. They’re not in a buying mindset. Also, increasingly more people are watching YouTube on their TVs, where it’s not super easy to click a link, pull out a credit card, and start a subscription. They’re in lean back mode, or may be half-watching your show while they make dinner or do something else.

What has worked for us is email. Our email list drives almost all of our sales. It’s direct, it’s trackable, and it actually works. If you’re serious about launching your own platform, focus on building and engaging your email list before you worry about how many subscribers you have on YouTube.

If you’re just getting started, I wouldn’t recommend jumping straight into a subscription model. Instead, create a one-time product. Something simple. A themed Qigong series could be perfect. For example, “Qigong for Deep Sleep.” Keep it small and focused. Make it good. Then put it up for sale.

This does two things. One, it gives you a read on whether your audience is willing to pay for what you make. Two, it helps you gather real data—conversion rates, sales numbers, email engagement—so you can make better decisions when and if you decide to launch something bigger.

You’ll also likely grow your list in the process, which feeds the whole system.

That said, I should be honest: we launched Find What Feels Good before we were “ready.” We didn’t have everything figured out. We just had momentum and curiosity and a sense that we wanted to try something new. And it worked. But it was a risk.

So if you feel the spark, go for it. Just don’t wait for 10k YouTube subscribers to give you permission.

Keep the questions coming! Leave a comment, post in the chat or send me an e-mail.

Until next time, keep creating!

PS: As mentioned last time, I’m in the early pre-production days for a new YouTube project that is unlike anything I’ve attempted yet. This is what we’re doing instead of going on vacation this year.

First of all: It’s not a “How To” channel. It’s scripted. I have zero experience optimizing entertainment content on YouTube.

Secondly: I don’t have a business strategy for this one and no good ideas on how to monetize it. But we’re doing it anyway.

This is a big learning experience for me, and I’m super stoked about it. I’m also excited to share it with you.

This week, we are in the process of talking to actors, developing more scripts, and starting to prep our sets. Yesterday was painting. Today the production design elements start to arrive. More updates soon…

How To YouTube: An Explanation & Index

For the past few months, I’ve been publishing an ongoing series I’ve been calling “How To YouTube.” It’s an expanded version of a book I wrote a few years ago, and my goal is to tell the story of my YouTube experience and document what’s worked (and what hasn’t) for me over the long haul.

This series is focused on a specific kind of content: “How To.” That’s not just a label—it’s an actual category on YouTube. And it requires slightly different strategies than channels in entertainment, podcasting, vlogging, etc. I love all those, but my experience is building educational, evergreen, and sustainable content libraries.

The title How To YouTube is a little tongue-in-cheek. I’ve spent a long time in the world of Search Engine Optimization, and it’s still one of the things I’m best known for. “How To” titles have served me well, for both YouTube videos and written content. The titles for this series are also a nod to one of my favorite filmmakers, John Wilson. I love how he uses “How To” titles as a jumping off point for strange, funny, and personal stories.

This is a long way of saying that not everything in this series applies to every YouTube creator. But regardless of what you’re creating, I hope you find some value here.

I’ve had quite a few questions about how to read them in chronological order, so I put together this index of the articles so far. I’ll keep this updated.

01: How To Fail at Filmmaking

02: How To Start Something New

03: How To Start a YouTube Channel

The creation of the Hilah Cooking channel.

04: How To Make (and Sell) Your First Digital Product

We create a revenue stream that we can control by creating and selling a digital product

05: How To Level Up

Building an Audience Is Kind of Like Playing a Video Game

06: How To Start a Yoga Channel

I decide to create a second YouTube channel to see if this system can be replicated.

07: How To Turn ClickBait Into a Tipping Point

The Chik-Fil-Gay Story

08: How to Make Videos That Get Watched 13 Years Later

We use SEO to turn a competitive keyword into a long-term asset that generates revenue 13 years later.

09: How to Turn Setbacks Into Success

Adriene loses her voice, and we are forced to take a break from publishing new videos.

10: How We Built a 7-Figure SVOD Business From a YouTube Channel

How we launched a membership service and how it transformed our business.

11: How To Run Your Own Streaming Service

Launching our SVOD was only the beginning…

12: How To Quit a YouTube Channel

We decided to quit Hilah Cooking after seven years. Here’s what I’ve learned about burnout, growth, and the natural cycles of creative work.

Coming up: I will tell you all about our 30 Days of Yoga series, our SEO strategy and how it’s changed in the age of AI, building a team, going on tour, creating a real community, why we quit the Hilah Cooking channel, and more…

I will also gradually write more about what we’re up to today. I’ve spent a lot of time in the past. A few of you have guessed that I am working on a YouTube project that is substantially more “creative.” You were right. We are in pre-production right now. Out of all the things I’ve attempted, this one has the highest chance of failure. But if it works… it will be amazing. I can’t wait to tell you all about it.

Until next time… keep creating,

This is part of a series of extended posts updating my no-longer-available YouTube Book. For the first installment, click here. Later this week, I’ll be posting a index to all of the entires in chronological order.

Looking back, it still surprises me that we launched our streaming video membership when we did. We didn’t feel ready. It felt like a half-finished idea—a side project, something we were still figuring out.

But it worked.

In the first four years, 27,000 people signed up. Somehow, while we were busy building the YouTube channel, this little experiment had grown into something real.

That brings us to 2019.

Our focus was still on the YouTube channel. But behind the scenes, FWFG quietly kept growing. We weren’t actively promoting it—just sharing the PDF calendar and including links in our videos—but it had become more profitable than the YouTube channel.

We kept creating content. We even introduced new instructors, and the response was good. I stayed focused on improving the user experience—especially the apps and browser version. I thought about it constantly. But I didn’t promote it because I didn’t think it was good enough yet.

That was a mistake.

Obsession

My obsession with making it better led us into one of the most stressful times our business has ever faced.

I started to distrust the company hosting our SVOD platform. After an acquisition, relationships changed. Some weird things happened behind the scenes. I began to suspect their sales team was using FWFG in their pitches—maybe even sharing sensitive information.

At the same time, I was frustrated by our inability to improve the product. I had a list of features I wanted:

• Integrated calendar in the app

• A full redesign to reflect our brand

• Custom playlists and search filters

None of that was possible with our current platform.

Then I remembered VidApp. I’d worked with them while helping launch Commune and loved both the team and their product. They build apps that integrate with services like Kajabi, Uscreen and WordPress. I’d also been in touch with PJ, the CEO of Uscreen. Their browser platform looked great, but at that time, their apps were a little limited. So adding VidApp into the mix was very compelling.

Over a few meetings at VidSummit 2019, we hatched a plan: ditch our curreant vendor, move everything to Uscreen (browser) and VidApp (apps).

The Migration

This wasn’t going to be easy.

Like many platforms, ours made it hard to leave. We didn’t just need to move our videos—we had to migrate all our members and untangle the payment system. We had to do it all without disrupting the member experience.

But if we could pull it off, we’d get beautifully redesigned apps with new features—including integrated calendars and personal scheduling tools.

The Uscreen team set up our new account. Our team got to work. I spent hours on phone calls and video meetings. There was some subterfuge involved—we didn’t trust our vendor, and we were trying to escape. We were especially worried we wouldn’t be able to get all our customer and payment data out of the system. That uncertainty added a ton of pressure to an already stressful transition.

Somehow, we pulled it off. We moved everyone. We redesigned everything. We kept members in the loop the whole time.

It wasn’t perfect. Android was especially rough. But our support team worked overtime to smooth things out.

When the dust settled, we had a completely redesigned platform, better than ever. The member experience had leveled up—and just as importantly, we were proud of it. We wanted to talk about it and we wanted to show it off, so promoting it was easy.

The Rebound

Our members started spreading the word. Not because we asked them to, but because they were genuinely excited. Friends told friends. Emails got forwarded. The reviews in the App Stores started pouring in—thousands of them, most of them five stars. That kind of organic energy can’t be faked. It pushed us up in the rankings and brought in more sign-ups, completely on autopilot.

We watched our membership count climb: 30,000. Then 35,000. It felt like validation—not just of the migration, but of the years we’d spent building something people cared about.

That energy filtered back to our team. We felt re-energized, like we’d come out the other side of a very long tunnel. We got back to work, releasing new content regularly and finally leaning into promotion. Emails went out. Social posts followed. For the first time in a while, it felt like everything was clicking.

Then came March 2020. Covid hit. The world shut down.

Shutdown

We didn’t know what was going to happen. We couldn’t shoot new videos, and we weren’t sure if people would still want what we offered. We were freaked out. I prepared myself for a year of downtime. We had enough resources to ride it out if things dropped to zero—but that still felt terrifying.

Then something unexpected happened.

With gyms closed and people stuck at home, they started searching for ways to stay active. Many of them found us—thanks to our YouTube channel and the newly revamped FWFG apps. Memberships didn’t just hold steady. They exploded. We saw a massive surge—more than doubling in just 60 days.

Fortunately, we had a deep content library ready to go. A lot of it was new to our YouTube audience, so it felt fresh even if we weren’t filming anything new. One spike of activity briefly knocked our site offline, but otherwise, everything held up.

For the first time in a long while, we could breathe. We had built something solid. And it was working when we needed it most.

Our Tiny TV Station

Today, five years later, things have found a new rhythm. After the wild ride of the covid bump, our numbers have settled around 50,000 monthly members. We’re back to making new videos. We’re promoting FWFG consistently again. It feels grounded—but in a good way.

And now that we’ve fully embraced what we are—a content company, not a tech company—something shifted. Running FWFG doesn’t feel like a scramble anymore. It feels creative. Collaborative. Even joyful.

It’s like running our own tiny TV station. We come up with ideas, green-light them ourselves, and just go for it. Want to try an animated series starring Benji? Why not? Let’s do it.

Because we serve a smaller group, we can really listen. We don’t have to obsess over algorithms or metadata. We don’t have to worry about going viral or chasing trends. We can experiment. We can follow our curiosity. We can make stuff just to see if it works.

And the recurring revenue? It changed everything.

YouTube will always be free. That’s our mission: to make high-quality yoga accessible to anyone, anywhere. But the reality is—free content isn’t free to make.

FWFG funds everything else we do. It outperforms AdSense. It outpaces sponsorships. And it gives us control.

As a creator, you’ve got to keep your business (and yourself) alive and financially healthy so that you can keep creating. Building a recurring revenue stream could stabilize your business, deepen your connection and lay a solid foundation for your future projects. And hey! It might even be fun.

Takeaways

Grow Slowly
Don’t get discouraged if the numbers aren’t massive at first. Growth doesn’t always look like a rocket ship. Sometimes it’s just two or three new members a week. That adds up over time. Focus on steady progress, listen to your audience, and keep improving. If the trend is going in the right direction—even slowly—you’re doing something right. Give it time.

Recurring Revenue Is a Game Changer
There’s a reason just about every company from Amazon to Tesla to Dollar Costco have built recurring revenue products into their businesses. Memberships create reliable and consistent income. A solid recurring revenue product can stabilize your business, reduce stress and potentially become a fun new way to connect with your audience.

Don’t Get Locked In
Technology moves fast, and what works for you now might not work a year from now. Make sure you can take your data with you if you need to switch. That means owning your customer lists, your content, and your billing relationships. Flexibility today gives you freedom tomorrow.

Use Your Own Payments Account
Some platforms want to process payments for you—but that can create problems down the road. Using your own Stripe or PayPal account means you keep full control. It makes bookkeeping simpler, gives you cleaner analytics, and makes things way easier if (or when) you bring in a finance pro to help you grow.

Keep Creating,

Chris

PS - I’ve recently had a lot of inquiries about some of our behind-the-scenes strategy and technology. I’m considering testing out a 4-week cohort-style class to get people up and running with a minimalist creator business framework. It would give a look at what’s worked for us and a preview of what we’re building for the next phase. You would walk away with a lead acquisition system and a setup to sell digital products. If this is something you might be interested in, respond to this with a YES. If there’s enough interest I’ll send more details soon.

PPS - In the meantime, I’ve published two posts about our camera gear and our digital tools.

The Yoga With Adriene YouTube channel is still what I’m most well-known for, and I’ve already written a lot about it here. But another of our projects is a little more under the radar — even though it’s a huge success (and generates 70% of our revenue).

I’m talking about our SVOD service: Find What Feels Good.

WTF is SVOD?

SVOD is an acronym for Streaming Video On Demand. It’s a membership site where the majority of the content is video. Internet entrepreneurs (and pornographers) have been creating these from the moment video streaming was possible, even when it barely worked. Once bandwidth increased and video got easier, the entertainment industry got involved. The “suits” needed a new term that would look tidier on an Excel spreadsheet; thus, SVOD was born.

You’ll frequently hear the term OTT, which stands for Over The Top, in conjunction with SVOD. That means there is an app that makes SVOD accessible through TVs.

FWFG features the entire YWA library (ad-free) and all our standalone courses. We’re also adding exclusive content weekly. As of this writing, we have over 50,000 members, and the number continues to grow.

We run the entire thing through a platform called Uscreen. It’s an all-in-one platform for the website, mobile, and TV apps. It’s a video-centric CMS that makes it easy to organize and publish content.

We upload a video, add a thumbnail and metadata, and click publish. BOOM! It’s immediately available everywhere.

But it wasn’t always so easy.

2015. An accidental SVOD.

In 2015, the YouTube channel was just three years old. YouTube was finally bringing in a little revenue, but it wasn’t consistent, and we weren’t sure it was dependable. The AdSense revenue was nothing compared to the exclusive courses we had been launching. At that point, Reboot, Prenatal Yoga, and Empower were available. We were gearing up to launch Rise: Morning Yoga.

To sell these courses, we had spent a few years muddling our way through various systems that I had cobbled together with WordPress and various membership plugins. The experience was terrible, took a lot of time, and was a customer support nightmare.

Then we heard about a new company called VHX. (Unfortunately, it no longer exists)

VHX was an all-in-one system for selling video content. It was years ahead of its time. It was created by a group of independent filmmakers who built it to sell their movies. Once we discovered it and talked to them, we moved everything over. We loved the team and the platform.

Our revenue immediately increased, and our customer support issues dropped to almost zero. It was also so well-designed that it was a delight to use.

We had been selling standalone courses for a few months when the team at VHX reached out to us. They were preparing to release a new subscription feature (SVOD). It would be a complete system – not just the website but a full suite of custom apps for iOS, Android, Roku, etc.

Since we were already one of their biggest customers, they asked if we’d consider being one of their first beta clients for the subscription service.

And they offered to set all of it up for free.

We weren’t ready. Or were we?

We loved the idea, especially the idea of having our own apps, which was a rarity for small creators then. However, we didn’t think we had enough content for a viable subscription service. But it was exciting to think about.

In fact, it was so exciting that I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I was confident that this was the direction our industry was moving in, and I didn’t want to miss out on this opportunity.

So we came up with a plan. We decided to offer our three existing courses, the upcoming course that people were already excited about, and the entire Yoga With Adriene content library ad-free. We even had a handful of videos that had received weird copyright strikes on YouTube that we had taken down. We decided to add those as well. And to round it out, Adriene was going to create monthly vlogs.

We decided to launch with that, and if everything went well, we’d devise a plan to create more exclusive members-only content. We decided to price it at $10/month.

We got to work uploading and organizing videos on VHX. We worked with the team to create the apps. Slowly but surely, it was coming together. It was very cool.

We weren’t sure how our community would respond. If you have spent much time in the YouTube ecosystem, you’ll know that putting a price tag on anything can be tricky. It’s not as bad now, but in 2015, you couldn’t sell much without being called a sell-out.

Luckily, we had an email newsletter and a blog.

The Launch

In November 2015, we wrote about the new direction and opened the doors as a soft launch.

There were a few unhappy people, and they made sure to let us know about it in the comments. Those are always a little hard to take since we had worked so hard on it and knew our hearts were in the right place. The negativity caused us to second-guess ourselves and wonder if we had made the right decision.

If we had only been paying attention to the comments, we might have shut the whole thing down and returned to standalone courses.

But sales were coming in, and the new members were excited about the new platform. This brought in a new wave of people who had never purchased anything from us before. The new platform was bringing in a new audience.

By the end of the first 24 hours, we had over 500 members.

And people continued to sign up.

At a $10/month price, we were making an additional $5,000 in monthly recurring revenue.

This revenue didn’t depend on the whims of the YouTube algorithm or how well we executed a course launch. These founding members had expressed confidence in our work.

It re-energized us.

Now it was up to us to keep these people happy, engaged, and benefitting from the videos.

This was a new world; as usual, we had no idea what we were doing.

How much new content should we publish? What the hell is a churn rate? How do we organize everything so that it’s not overwhelming? How do we balance this with the YouTube channel? How do we promote it without annoying people?

From 500 to 27,000 members

The obvious plan would be to start creating new membership videos every week. But we didn’t have the bandwidth for that at the time.

Instead, we decided to prioritize quality over quantity and focus on the community experience.

I hoped this would also help us avoid the issue of content overwhelm. Content Overwhelm is one of the leading reasons members cancel a subscription service. They log on and see a screen full of videos, get overwhelmed by the options, and are unsure what action to take. Many give up, close out, and are more likely to cancel. They’re not getting the experience they hoped for when they joined.

More content isn’t always the answer.

Our strategy: We would continue to do what we had already been doing, create several high-quality standalone courses per year, and work to create a sense of community around them.

Each course would get a proper promotional launch. We would make some of them available for standalone purchases as we had in the past. You could buy the course for $49 or get it as part of a $10/month membership and the rest of the video library. Plus, there was a free 7-Day trial to try the whole thing out.

Luckily, we had a great new course almost ready to launch. We also had a 3-video series we had recorded at a retreat in Nicaragua. Adriene’s monthly vlogs would supplement these and put everything in context. This was all on top of the complete YWA library (ad-free) and the previous premium courses.

We had one other ace up our sleeve.

A few months earlier, a community member had started creating yoga calendars. Our previous courses had calendars, but we’d never done anything for our regular videos.

In January, we contacted her and offered to pay her to keep creating these calendars. We soon hired her as our Community Manager.

Sarah created a theme for each month and suggested a daily yoga practice. The calendars were downloadable PDFs with clickable links for each day. Sarah shared them with the community every month—for free. People loved them!

In the beginning, the calendars only linked to free YouTube videos. As an experiment, we also highlighted some of the membership content. People started to click through and check out what we were up to on the membership.

We weren’t selling; we were providing valuable content. And it worked. With zero advertising, the membership started to grow.

This free PDF calendar now gets millions of downloads per month.

It’s also responsible for driving traffic to the membership every day. If a video is on the calendar, it immediately gets thousands of views – even if it’s available on YouTube for free.

In its first four years, the membership grew from 500 members to 27,000 members. This was with zero paid advertising. We only used the calendar, a weekly email, and links in the YouTube description.

Launching any membership can be daunting. We didn’t think we were ready, we didn’t think we had enough content, and we didn’t think we had a big enough audience.

But it worked.

This brings us up to 2018. There is more to this story, but I’ll save that for next time.

If you have any questions about membership sites or SVOD, please ask, and I’ll do my best to answer them. I genuinely believe that recurring revenue can be a key component in the success of any business, and there are many different ways to approach it.

As part of my ongoing experiment with Substack, I’ve opened a chat for this newsletter's readers. I reserve the right to turn it off anytime if it becomes unmanageable. For now, let’s use it as another way to connect.

So if there’s anything you’d like to ask or talk about, let me know. I’ll answer as many as I can in the chat or comments, and if I think any of them need a more detailed response, I’ll answer them here.

Catch you in the chat room,

Chris

This is a follow-up to my post about our Camera Gear. I still get more questions about cameras than anything else, but questions about the tech tools we use behind the scenes come in a close second.

I’m always tinkering and experimenting with new things, but these are currently our core tools. I’ll do my best to keep this post up-to-date.

1: Membership Platform: Uscreen

We use Uscreen to run the FWFG subscription video-on-demand service, our apps, and our private community. For SVOD, it’s vital to have a video-centric rather than post-centric content management system. Uscreen's CMS is the best that I've seen. We’ve used many different systems and platforms; this is the first time we’ve had everything in one place. In the past, we've had to stitch together different elements so that our apps synced up with the browser version. Now, everything is on a single platform, and it all works great.

2: Landing Pages & Digital Products: Kajabi

We use Kajabi for all our stand-alone courses, downloadable collections, and landing pages. I'm a long-time user of Kajabi and a fan. It's like a toolbox with all the tools for running an online business. I recommend this to almost anyone with a creator business who doesn’t want to spend all their time on the tech/coding/developer side of things. We are in the process of building out even more on Kajabi, and the process has been great. Next month, I'll have a more in-depth post about what we're doing and why.

3: Editing & Post-Production: Adobe Creative Cloud

I hate the subscription model as much as everybody else, but the combination of Adobe Premiere, Photoshop, and Creative Cloud is incredibly powerful. We’ve developed a great workflow with our editors here in LA, uploading to Frame.io so the team in Austin can screen and give notes. The integration between Premiere and Frame.io is impressive and keeps getting better. We use Photoshop for video thumbnails and other visual elements. Generative Expand has been a game-changer. Note: I’m still an FCP die-hard, especially for short-form videos, but I like everybody to use the tools they like the most.

4: Website: WordPress

I’m a little embarrassed by the current state of our website, but a redesign is in progress. We’ve used WordPress ever since we started the business. WordPress was my tool of choice in the early days of my online business experiments when I was building niche websites and trying to get them ranked in Google. I loved it. But as much as I try, the magic isn’t there anymore for me. I love that it’s open source (and free), but it’s become increasingly complicated and challenging (for me) to use. We’ve got a new site launching soon, and it’s not on WordPress.

5: Project Management: Basecamp

We use Basecamp to manage all our projects - not just the videos but also design projects, live events, marketing plans, etc. Everything lives in Basecamp. We've tried almost every project management/workplace tool, and this is the only one that has clicked. It's a straightforward, intentionally minimalist interface. It's easy for new people to wrap their heads around quickly. But you can get sophisticated with it as well. The longer we use it, the more we realize we can do. Basecamp has become integral to how we work.

6: Productivity: Google Workspace

I’m unsure how to categorize Google Workspace because it does so much. This is the professional version of Gmail, calendar, docs, etc. It handles our emails, calendars, video calls, and file storage. We also extensively use Docs and Sheets. It integrates nicely with Basecamp. All of our work, both finished and in progress, is stored in Google Drive.

7: Design: Canva

We use Canva for quick designs or visual elements for things like social media, presentations, and press kits. It’s incredible how much you can do within Canva; they constantly add new features. I even use it to help my son create animated YouTube videos. It’s also great for collaboration. The downside: it’s easy to get lazy and let the pre-made templates do the heavy lifting. There are some great templates, but everybody uses the same ones. If you’re not careful, your brand can quickly be Canva-fied. But the core tools are solid, and there is a free plan so it’s easy to get started.

8: Email Marketing: AWeber & Mailchimp

We've tried almost every email platform and somehow found our way back to these two old-school email tools. The Yoga With Adriene list is massive, and since we don’t need to integrate it with other tools, we keep it separate. Currently, we use AWeber for that list. We use Mailchimp for FWFG because it has a native integration with Uscreen. AWeber is a little easier to use than Mailchimp, and its deliverability is the best I’ve experienced. Even though it doesn’t have a lot of buzz these days, it’s worth checking out. You can get started with either of these for free (up to 500 subscribers).

I kept this focused on the creative side of the business, so I’m leaving out things like accounting and payroll software, which I don’t personally use. I also didn’t touch on any of the newer AI tools we’re playing around with, but haven’t put into “official” use.

I’d love to hear what you use to run your business. Leave a comment and let’s discuss. Let me know what I’m doing wrong and what I’m missing out on!

Keep creating,

Chris

PS — Here’s a quick follow-up to my post about the creation and launch of REBOOT. I recently found this slide from one of my old presentations showing we made $7,706.00 on that first launch. Using the CPI, that’s $10,089 in 2025 dollars. And that was with a small YouTube channel and even smaller e-mail list. It was a massive deal for us at the time.

PPS —Thanks to everybody who has spread the word about this newsletter. You made my week. A big shout-out to Dana Wilde, author of Train Your Brain, for claiming the #1 spot on the leaderboard.

Refer a friend

This is part of a series of extended posts updating my no-longer-available YouTube Book. For the first installment, click here.

In the summer of 2013, things had just started to click for the Yoga With Adriene channel. Views, subscribers and watch time were all building steadily. Comments on the videos were amazing. We loved getting the feedback and it felt like a little community was developing. To top it all off, we were now averaging $100 a day from YouTube.

Everything felt like it was working… until Adriene lost her voice and needed vocal-cord surgery.

We couldn’t make new videos and we weren’t sure when we would be able to go back into production.

Inspired by the black-and-white Bob Dylan film (Subterranean Homesick Blues) in which he held up cards with written messages and dropped them to the rhythm of the song, we shot a short video of Adriene doing the same to say we were taking a break from the channel.

Now we were officially dead in the water. We didn’t have a choice.

Everything stopped for a few months. It felt endless at the time. We knew how important it was to post consistently and now we couldn’t do it. I worried that we might not be able to continue with the business—that the idea would die before reaching its potential.

It gets worse. Recovering from surgery prevented Adriene from working her other jobs or making videos. This created financial hardship for her. She needed help to pay for the surgery and just daily survival. She also couldn’t use her voice yet, so we couldn’t provide the type of content our audience had come to expect. Almost desperate to do something rather than feel stalled, we created a few yoga videos inspired by the silent-movie era, complete with old-timey music and title cards.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to keep us from losing views and our momentum on YouTube. Views dropped and so did the money. Now we were lucky to bring in $20 a day. I had failed to deliver on my promise of a profitable business.

Everything felt pretty bleak.

That moment of crisis, however, forced us to discover strengths we didn't know we had and taught us an invaluable lesson: what got us here wouldn't get us to the next level. We needed to try something fundamentally different. Of course, you know the business survived, but it might not have if it had been just me in the business. I had gotten Adriene into this thing, though, so I felt a responsibility to find a pathway forward and not give up. She wouldn’t give up either.

When she recovered enough to speak in videos, the audience started to return—but slowly. It took a long time to return to the engagement levels and the meager $100 a day we were earning before our break.

Once again it was time to try something different. Inspired by the success of Hilah’s book, I was ready to try a digital yoga product. Instead of a book, this would be a series of exclusive videos not available on YouTube. An online course.

I pitched Adriene the idea of the “Reboot” product (a symbolic name for us, it turned out, not just the audience). It gave us both a sense of hope, even though we weren’t sure what the response would be or how well it would sell.

Reboot consisted of four progressively challenging videos, a digital PDF guide, and a downloadable calendar. It was designed to be practiced over a 29-day period. The guide provided additional context, and the calendar allowed you to stay on track and mark off the days. At the last minute, we added a private members-only Facebook group to ensure we offered enough value for the $27 price tag.

This decision to include community access proved to be the most valuable component—a reminder that sometimes the highest-value additions aren't the ones that take the most production time but those that foster connection.

We planned to launch it over the holidays and deliver it starting January 1st so members could use this as part of their New Year’s resolution.

We finished the videos the day before Christmas Eve.

We promoted Reboot with two vlog-style sales videos on the YouTube channel. (We also sent out emails, of course!)

However, there was still one problem I had overlooked. I had no idea how to sell a digital product with videos on our terrible WordPress website. I ended up lost in a confusing nightmare of plug-ins. I couldn’t get it to work. I found a company called Digital Product Delivery, uploaded everything to their platform, and sent out the announcement email.

The sales came pouring in.

Our community validated Reboot with their enthusiasm and money. This gave us a much-needed psychological boost. It felt like a loving thank you for all the free videos we had released. That validation reenergized us to keep moving and keep serving our community.

We engaged with our community for a month in a private Facebook group. This is where the YWA community started to grow. It was one of the best online community experiences I’ve ever had. Members would share their daily practice photos, support each other through challenges, and even organize local meetups. One member wrote that she'd found her 'yoga family' after years of practicing alone—exactly the connection we hoped to foster.

When we relaunched REBOOT in early 2015, we sold even more. Those people joined the Facebook community and started to actively engage. This engagement also seemed to translate to growth on the YouTube channel.

Our audience was now more deeply engaged and felt like they were a part of something. They felt part of a real community, and they were telling their friends.

For the first time, we had money in the bank and a clear plan to move forward.

Finally, we felt confident that this thing had a chance to truly succeed.

Looking back on this now, what seemed like a devastating setback ultimately became the catalyst for our greatest growth. Had Adriene not lost her voice, we might have continued along the same path, happy with the slow, consistent growth but potentially never getting around to creating and selling a product. Sometimes, the universe forces change upon us when we're not brave enough to make it ourselves. If you're facing your own business challenges, remember these key lessons from our experience:

• Forced innovation creates opportunity: What looks like a business-ending crisis can be the push you need to try things you wouldn't otherwise consider. The vocal cord surgery detour forced us to try new things and created a sense of urgency around creating something we could sell.

• Content brings people in, Community makes them want to stay: While great content brought people to our channel, it was the sense of belonging in our community that transformed viewers into devoted members willing to invest in premium offerings and spread the word to others.

• Revenue diversification provides stability: Relying solely on YouTube ad revenue left us vulnerable. Adding direct-to-customer digital products increased our income, gave us more control over our business destiny, and deepened our relationship with our most engaged followers.

Keep Creating,

Chris

This is part six of a series of extended posts updating my no-longer-available YouTube Book. For the first installment, click here.

Since I am still writing about the early days of YouTube, I thought this recent graph from the BBC might help put things into some context.

As someone who has been fully immersed in YouTube since 2010, this graph “feels” accurate. It also feels like the growth is only accelerating. The creator ecosystem was tiny. Nobody outside of it had any idea about what we were doing.

What I’m writing about today happened during that tiny yellow block labeled 2013.

We had been creating and publishing Yoga With Adriene videos for about six months. We had practically zero traffic. It was an agonizingly slow start and I was starting to doubt that this was even going to work.

No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get traction for any of our videos.

People weren’t finding the videos and the YouTube algorithm wasn’t doing anything to help.

I felt like we needed to do something drastic. If it failed I’d just chalk it up to being another experiment. Another great learning opportunity.

I went back to my original list of potential keywords and picked the biggest and most competitive one: “yoga for weight loss.” Based on keyword research and studying the videos that ranked for this phrase, I knew there was a lot of interest. It had the highest search volume of anything related to YouTube.

However, it was tricky.

The term “weight loss” can trigger a lot of emotions and backlash especially when used in relation to yoga . While Adriene and I believe yoga is great for overall physical and mental health, weight loss wasn't ever part of her teaching philosophy. But knowing how many people were searching for "yoga for weight loss," we thought it might be a gateway video for people new to yoga. It took careful positioning to pull it off in a way that felt true to Adriene's principles.

Even with the potential downsides, I felt like we had to try it.

I knew that a lot of people were typing “yoga for weight loss” into YouTube every day.

I wanted those people to find us.

I also wanted to beat the videos that were already ranked for it, because I knew our videos were better.

We just needed to “package” our video in a format that people were actually looking for.

Adriene and I talked about it a lot and eventually decided to go for it. We felt the upside would be worth any potential controversy. And we made sure to approach the topic sensitively in the video.

Our “Yoga For Weight Loss” video ended up running over 40 minutes. It was our longest video yet.

At the time, nobody was making long YouTube videos. The thinking was that long videos would hurt your retention and that would hurt your chances with the algorithm

The upside: the video was really good.

I optimized the title and all the meta-data for the video taking into account the factors above. I made a new playlist for “Yoga for Weight Loss” even though I only had two videos that really fit that category.

I even changed the video title to proudly declare this was a long video: “Yoga For Weight Loss - 40 Minute Fat Burning Workout.” I posted the video on yoga forums, social media, Reddit and basically anywhere I thought somebody might be interested in the content.

Initially, the video did get a few more views than normal. Nothing dramatic. But slowly but surely, views started to climb.

I noticed that another YouTuber added it to one of their playlists of yoga workouts.

Two months later we had moved from way down on the 4th pages of results to #2 in YouTube for the term “yoga for weight loss.” Eventually we hit #1. (This is when YouTube search worked a little differently).

This video was the first tipping point for the channel and is directly responsible for turbo-charging its growth.

I truly believe that if we hadn’t made this video, we wouldn’t still be making videos today.

It was a tipping point.

The video now has over 13 million views, has added almost 80,000 subscribers and generated over $100,000 in revenue. Even more than ten years later, it gets viewed over 1,000 times every day.

This story (along with the one I wrote about last time) illustrate an important truth about tipping points in the creator economy: they rarely happen by accident.

The Chick-Fil-Gay breakthrough came from intentionally positioning content that could capitalize on a cultural moment. Meanwhile, the Yoga With Adriene success emerged from strategically targeting high-value search terms and ignoring conventional wisdom about video length.

Key takeaways:

1. Viral tipping points often come from connecting your content to larger conversations. You can't predict when that moment will arrive or if it will work. You’ve just gotta keep creating and keep listening both to your audience and what’s going on in the world.

2. Search-driven tipping points are more predictable but require patience and strategic positioning. Sometimes you need to ignore "best practices" (like keeping videos short) to give your audience what they truly want.

3. In both cases, success came from having a clear understanding of the audience and being willing to take risks. The Chick-fil-A video risked alienating some viewers but strengthened our relationship with the core audience. The 40-minute yoga video broke platform norms but met a real user need.

Tipping points aren't just about luck. They're about creating the right conditions for success and being ready when opportunity strikes. Whether it comes through a viral moment, SEO growth, or getting traction with the algorithm, the breakthrough happens because of the foundation you've built.

Keep creating!

Chris

PS - This is the last thing I’m going to write about YouTube SEO (for a while). I realize it’s fallen out of favor as a strategy while also evolving over time. But I did recently notice in our analytics that 75% of our views come from videos that are over six years old. Our early videos are still out there connecting with people and generating revenue. It’s always been my goal to create an “evergreen” library of content and using SEO for positioning our content has played a huge role in that.

I had major plans for starting 2025 with lots of momentum and new content. But the universe had other plans. My family and I all got sick after holiday travels. Then our dog died. Then Los Angeles burst into flames. It’s been a little hard to concentrate. Thanks for your patience.

This is another installment in a series of extended posts updating my no-longer-available YouTube Book. For the first installment, click here. Let’s get into it.

In the early 2000’s, I was fresh out of college and trying to figure out how to build a career in the advertising business. This meant going to lots of cocktail parties and networking events. At every event, it seemed like all anybody could talk about was this book called The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.

In all honestly, I’ve still never successfully read the whole book. But, I skimmed my boss’s copy so that I could carry on a conversation about it. I’ve also had it recapped to me endlessly by half-intoxicated copywriters at happy hours. I think I get the gist.

In the book Malcolm Gladwell explores how small changes can create a big impact when they reach a critical threshold, or “tipping point.” It explains how ideas, behaviors, and trends spread, driven by specific factors and individuals.

Even though I got really tired of hearing about this book, the concept of tipping points stuck with me.

And ever since, I’ve always been on the lookout for tipping point opportunities. Sometimes they happen naturally and you just have to give them a little nudge. But other times, you can create them.

I’ve identified three major tipping points in my YouTube “career.” Today, I’m going to tell you about the first one.

In 2012, things seemed to progressing nicely for the Hilah Cooking channel. I didn’t have anything to compare it to at the time, but it was slowly and surely growing. The search optimization strategy was working, but I was looking for something to get the channel into a bigger spotlight.

My brain is always working on ideas for stunts and gags that can potentially get our work on the radar of new people.

My IDEA: A video that taught viewers how to make a Chick-fil-A style sandwich at home. A copycat recipe. But I also wanted to poke fun at the company’s reputation for donating money to anti-gay organizations by calling it a Chick-fil-Gay sandwich. I also wanted to get a joke in there complaining about Chick-fil-A being closed on Sundays when people are hung over and really need fried chicken sandwiches.

This was long before there was any mainstream controversy around Chick-fil-A, but it was something you knew about if you had gay friends. I thought it would be a popular recipe wrapped in a good joke that would resonate well with our audience.

The video was on our “to-do” list for over a year. While Hilah appreciated the joke, she had never eaten a Chik-fil-A sandwich and wasn’t interested in eating one. I’m from Oklahoma so Chick-fil-A is part of my DNA. I loved it and knew that it had a fanatical base of customers.

Finally, on a road trip, I conned Hilah into eating a Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich. She begrudgingly admitted that it wasn’t terrible and started working out how to crack the recipe. Part of her researched involved finding and talking to people who had actually worked at Chick-fil-A. The secret ingredient: pickle juice!

We finally made the Chick-fil-Gay video. Our audience DID love it, but it wasn’t the huge success I had hoped for. We got to 7,000 views within the first day (which was really good for us at the time). We even got a little write-up in the Advocate.

Then, a few weeks later . . .

There was suddenly a huge increase in traffic. I checked our analytics and noticed it was coming from the Huffington Post. The day before, the Chick-fil-A CEO made some anti-gay marriage statements. I honestly can’t remember what the details were, but it doesn’t matter - suddenly the company was all over the news. It was an early example of a news story that somehow manages to stir up everybody for different reasons - and therefore generate a lot of clicks and engagement.

The Advocate revised and reposted their original article and it was now on their home page. From there, the Huffington Post picked it up and ran with it. At the time, The Huffington Post was huge and their popular articles would get picked up by dozens of smaller sites. The video was suddenly everywhere, boosted by the controversy. THIS was the viral success I had hoped for from the beginning.

(Unfortunately, this was before we went all-in on YouTube. Most of the sites were using the Blip.tv embed instead of the YouTube video. The total combined views would have been over 10 million in a week, but only a fraction of those were on YouTube.)

This video was a turning point for the Hilah Cooking channel. We got a huge boost in subscribers and the baseline for all our metrics rose. The channel was suddenly on the radars of a lot of influential people. This video opened a lot of doors. We even met a lot of people who ended up being real life friends when we moved to Los Angeles.

It’s important to note that we didn’t change anything about our video format, production style or overall strategy. There was really nothing different about this video other than optimizing for a slightly different “hook” that made it easier for other people to promote.

As you might expect, despite being a really tame video, “Chick-Fil-Gay” was one of our more controversial videos. This was great for the brand. It was an opportunity to articulate our values. Some people were turned off by those values and decided not to watch the show anymore. But I never want to make something that appeals to everybody. I would rather have a smaller community that is focused and engaged.

Other viewers found something that resonated with them and became even more passionate fans of the show. Lots of people just appreciated being able to make a great chicken sandwich at home.

Keep creating,

Chris

This is part six of a series of extended posts updating my no-longer-available YouTube Book. For the first installment, click here.

At this stage in the story, Hilah Cooking is working and I decide that I should start a second YouTube channel to see if my strategy can work twice.

TLDR: Short on time. Scroll to the end for a great video from YouTube Creators where Adriene gives her perspective on starting the channel.

By 2012, Hilah Cooking had gone from being a fun hobby to an actual business. It was still small-scale, but Hilah had quit her day job and was now working on it full-time. It was getting bigger every day.

A few years earlier, I never could have predicted that I would be spending almost all my time creating educational “lifestyle” content.

Learning how to make a web series was fun, and I was now obsessed with YouTube. I felt like I had found the perfect combination of filmmaking, publishing, marketing, and the geeky search engine stuff I had spent so much time studying.

Perhaps the most gratifying part was that a lot of people actually wanted to watch what we were making.

To my surprise, I discovered that I liked making creative, educational content. I also loved the entrepreneurial aspect of it.

I wanted to see if I could repeat the success in a different niche. I also thought that if I had TWO successful channels, I could also go full-time.

Starting a Second Channel

Looking for a new niche, I found an article (on Business Insider or Facebook) about the ten fastest-growing industries. Two of them—hot sauce and yoga—caught my eye.

I got excited about building a hot-sauce company. I love hot sauce, and was confident that Hilah and I could sell it under the show’s brand. I did a lot of research, created a business plan, and even had a co-packer selected. But I realized I just didn’t have the enthusiasm I felt was necessary to launch a physical product company. I wanted to spend as much time as possible making videos and getting better at YouTube.

So my thoughts turned to yoga.

At the time, I wasn’t a practitioner… or a fan. Every time I’d tried it, something about it had always turned me off. The teachers didn’t connect with me (in-person or on YouTube), and the class styles seemed dated. Maybe there was room to do something different.

I immediately thought about Adriene Mishler. I loved working with her on The Spider Babies. No matter how terrible things got on set, she was always a happy and positive presence. I also felt I owed her a favor for being such a good sport.

She was already a yoga teacher and had an extensive background in theater and film.

I also thought she might be available.

At the time, she was working odd jobs, auditioning for and booking acting jobs, and teaching donation-based yoga classes at a local theater.

So I approached her with my idea for a YouTube yoga channel.

She didn’t immediately jump at my awesome idea.

It took many conversations—spread out over a year—for her to warm up to the idea of teaching yoga on YouTube. Among the downsides, one was putting herself and her body out in front of all these people.

In 2012, there weren’t a lot of good yoga videos on YouTube. The production quality was low. The teachers weren’t that great. And a lot of it was presented in a sleazy way (lots of focus on cleavage and butts). That was precisely what I did not want to do.

But Adriene and I kept kicking around the idea. Eventually, we started talking about what we did want to do: creatively and sensitively present yoga in a way that would feel authentic to us and to the foundations and spirit of yoga.

I also felt like there was an opportunity to reach an audience that wasn’t being served by the yoga available at the time. Yoga was expensive and felt a little elitist. It was for rich ladies in Santa Monica who strolled the Promenade with yoga mats on their way to hot yoga classes. I had a vision of reaching the people in flyover country with busy lives, jobs, kids, and little time to for health and wellness. I knew a lot of these people were curious about yoga but wouldn’t go to an actual yoga class for a variety of reasons (cost, body-image, tight schedules, their pastor told them it was satanic, etc.).

These were my people and I was confident we could speak their language.

Testing…

Whether it’s a creative project or a business venture, I believe in the power of getting started as quickly as possible. Once we were aligned with what we wanted to do, we got to work.

To figure out our tone, Adriene and I shot two videos that were just for us. We had no intention of releasing them, so the pressure was off, and we were free to experiment and play around.

I edited the videos fast. We could see a few problems right away. They weren’t working.

In these videos, there was an invisible wall between Adriene and the audience. It felt like she was an actor on a TV show. It felt like a performance by someone professionally trained to talk in front of a camera.

My camera angles and on-screen graphics also got in the way. Once again, my cinematic ambitions were getting in the way of building an actual connection.

We didn’t have what we wanted: the feeling of Adriene talking to friends from her yoga room.

Even though we never released them, those videos were incredibly valuable. They changed our direction. We stripped everything down to basics.

Our first official video couldn’t have been more basic, both in presentation and content: It teaches Sukhasana (the easy pose.)

It wasn’t very exciting, but it showcased Adriene’s yoga knowledge, compassionate teaching style, and actual personality.

We hoped we would start to build a connection with people.

How would we know if we did?

We uploaded it and clicked publish.

To be continued…

As promised, here’s a video from YouTube Creators in which Adriene talks about getting started on YouTube. A lot of the B-roll in this video is from that very first photo shoot mentioned above.

Keep creating!

Chris

This is part five of a series of extended posts updating my no-longer-available YouTube Book. For the first installment, click here.

At this stage in the story, we’ve been making Hilah Cooking videos for 18 months, had lauched our first digital product and were finally seeing some success.

We were on the verge of unlocking the next level.

We had just passed 4,000 subscribers. (This was a much bigger deal in 2012 than it is today.) We had just published our 100th video. We had successfully launched a digital product that continued to sell well. Our website traffic had tripled, and subscriptions to our email newsletter had exploded.

These numbers might not blow your mind — but we were incredibly proud of them in 2012. We started at ground zero — with little more than a second-hand camera, an ancient iMac, and a used shower curtain.

We had no idea what we were doing. But we had pulled it off.

As we entered this second phase, we were proud of what we had accomplished creatively and of the audience that had grown around the project. These were not empty numbers generated by Spam or paid traffic. We had a very loyal, highly engaged audience that actively watched the show, responded to what we were doing, tried out the recipes, and even sent us photos to prove it.

We had successfully started something new, and it was working. But some of the initial creative excitement had worn off. We were in a new phase, and it was time to recalibrate and take different things seriously.

Be Prepared To Spend Some Time “Leveling Up”

The early days of launching any project—whether it’s a series, a website, or even a blog—can be frustrating. The numbers are small, and it feels like you’ll never have a good audience for your work.

This early stage reminds me of a videogame where you have to wander around and explore a new world, fight monsters to build XP, and gather gold to forge weapons, so that your character gets powerful enough to do the cool stuff. You may be doing great work, but you’re not seeing the reward because the foundation just isn’t there yet.

Then, finally, you are strong enough to beat the “boss,” and a whole new level unlocks.

It Gets Easier

Just like with a video game, once you have a certain foundation built, it gets easier.

On level 2, your wins start to stack up. Soon after we published our 100th video, we started getting featured in bigger publications and on bigger websites. We also won several significant awards, including YouTube Next Chef, where the prize was a bunch of production gear and a six-week training program.

This program filled in a lot of gaps in our knowledge about both YouTube itself and professional video production. We also got the opportunity to meet a bunch of other YouTubers who were also making cooking videos. We became friends with many of them, shared tips, collaborated, and promoted each other’s work. Perhaps most importantly, it broadened our idea of what was possible and what true success might look like.

Hilah was invited to moderate a panel at VidCon, where we connected with some of our Next Chef pals in person.

Soon after, we were offered the first of several deals to produce shows for other companies.

None of this would have been possible in the first few months of our project. But once we were in year two, the opportunities came quickly.

Before people will take a risk on you, you need to have a proven track record. The only way to establish that reputation is to keep creating, publishing, and promoting. Make your work good as possible, and DON’T STOP.

Assess What’s Working and Crank It Up

As we entered phase two, we took a long hard look at everything we were doing and analyzed what was giving us the highest ROI.

One of the most significant decisions we made, was that we were definitely going to turn this into a full-time job for both of us. Until that point, doing it for fun had been enough. But it was time to get serious. We prioritized this and all of our decisions were guided by what would make the company more successful.

Yes, we were thinking about it as an actual business - not just a show.

We Went All-In On YouTube

We had been throwing a lot of stuff against the wall and seeing what would stick. One example is that we uploaded to multiple platforms - not just YouTube. (At the time, I was convinced that blip.tv would be even bigger than YouTube.😂) We were now finally in the Partner program but hadn’t even turned on ads. We didn’t think it would be enough money to make it worth annoying our audience. But our Partner rep convinced us to turn them on during the YouTube Next Chef training. We went for it.

Since we already had a big library of videos, we suddenly had a new revenue stream. Ka-Ching!

Now, we wanted to focus all our energy on getting our audience to watch our videos on YouTube, so we ditched all the other platforms and focused on YouTube.

Until this point, I had not prioritized production quality. I was limited by money, time, and equipment. But now I had a box full of YouTube-approved gear. We had been using camcorders, and I didn’t even know how to use a DLSR for video, yet. So, I learned everything I could and got serious about making the videos as technically good as possible. Slowly, the videos got brighter, sharper, and more colorful. We even got a professional wireless Lavalier mic to improve the audio (and stop fumbling around with the annoying wired mic we started with). I was finally starting to feel really proud of how the videos looked and sounded.

Next, we doubled the number of videos we published. We even started a Q&A vlog, which meant we sometimes launched three videos a week.

All of our numbers increased: views, watch time, retention, subscribers… and revenue.

We Prioritized E-Mail

We had just witnessed the power of email marketing when we launched the Learn To Cook e-book. I had always known email was important on an intellectual level, but now we had first-hand experience, and I felt it viscerally.

Hilah took the email newsletter and ran with it. She’s a great writer and a fast one. The newsletter expanded during this time and added a very valuable layer to the project. People found us through the YouTube channel, but the people who subscribed to the newsletter took the relationship to a deeper level. They were much more invested.

Not only was the newsletter a great place to answer readers' questions, share recipes, and crack jokes, but it was also a natural place to sell more e-books. We didn’t have to hard-sell anything; she just mentioned the book organically, and the virtual cash register kept ringing.

Most importantly, the readers loved it.

We Created More Products

The first e-book was an ongoing success, so we made more. But instead of another epic project, we made a series of smaller books. Initially, we focused on PDFs, but we received many requests for Kindle versions. We learned how to make ePubs and published them on Amazon.

Not only did they sell even better on Amazon, this became an additional place to build our audience. We provided easy links in the books for people to see the how-to videos. We also asked people to sign up for e-mail updates. The Kindle books became a list-builder.

Sales on Amazon were so good that we updated Learn To Cook and published the second edition as a physical book. It’s still available.

Although I’ve written a lot about audience size and increasing numbers here, it’s important to remember that numbers are not a completely accurate gauge of how successful your project is. It’s easy (and cheap) to artificially inflate video views and traffic numbers. If you are an independent creator, don’t fall into the trap of comparing yourself to the big players in your field.

If your audience is growing, you will feel it. If you cultivate a real community, you will know it deep down.

So lean into it, and:

• Keep producing content.

• Always strive to improve the quality.

• Consistently release work on a regular schedule.

• Spend time and energy cultivating a real community.

• Become allies (rather than adversaries) with other Creators.

• Listen and communicate with the people who love your work.

• Stay focused on the long-term goal - rather than short-term wins.

When we unlocked “level two” with Hilah Cooking, I suddenly had a whole new vision of what was possible on YouTube and with small, focused digital businesses. I knew it was going to be an even bigger success. I knew we would be going full-time soon. And I knew our lives had been changed significantly - for the better.

Hilah was able to quit her day job and go full-time. I was still clocking in Monday through Friday at my desk job and was looking for a way to accelerate my exit. I also wanted to see if I could replicate the framework and build another successful YouTube channel in a different niche.

That’s when I thought about my friend Adriene. We hadn’t worked together on anything since The Spider Babies fell apart. Back then, she worked at a vegan ice cream store, picking up occasional acting gigs and teaching a small donation-based yoga class in the lobby of a theater in Austin.

I decided to reach out and see if she’d be interested in starting a YouTube channel.

Until next time, keep creating,
Chris

PS: Next week, I’ll send a very brief Thanksgiving e-mail, and then we’ll get into what you’ve all been waiting for: the creation of Yoga With Adriene.

This is part four of a series of extended posts updating my no-longer-available YouTube Book. For the first installment, click here.

At this stage in the story, we’ve been making Hilah Cooking videos for a year and a half, but we weren’t making any money. We decided to create and sell an e-book.

We weren’t sure it would work.

June 2011

We had been up almost all night working, but when I woke up, I was immediately alert and invigorated.

It was launch day.

This was the morning that the Learn To Cook e-book would finally go on sale. This was our first product and the moment we’d worked towards for months. I still had a day job, and for once, I couldn’t wait to get to the office. Everything was set, and I needed to sit at a computer and not leave. My day job was the perfect place for this.

We ate a quick breakfast, and I warned Hilah to be prepared that EVERYTHING THAT COULD GO WRONG WOULD GO WRONG. But that we would deal with it.

We had about an hour until the launch emails started sending out. I hurried out the front door to my car to find my passenger’s side window had been completely smashed. A paving stone sat in a pile of broken glass on the seat. Nothing was stolen; it was just a pointless hate smash.

Instead of being upset about it, I was elated. I took this as another sign of resistance from the Universe, got in the car, and drove to work. I had an e-book to launch!

Note: Don’t do this. If your car window gets broken, have your car professionally cleaned before driving it.

I parked my car in the parking garage, ran up eight flights of stairs, crashed-landed in my beige, fluorescent-lit cubicle, and fired up my computer. We had set up a simple sales page and used E-Junkie to sell the PDF eBook and a series of bonus videos. I had tested it countless times, but we were about 15 minutes from sending the launch email, and I wanted to make sure everything was perfect.

As I clicked through the sales page to test everything out, I noticed my mouse was red with blood. My blood! I had cut my hand on some of the broken window glass, and the last thing I wanted to do was look for a Band-Aid. I grabbed a leftover Starbucks napkin and used it to stanch the bleeding. Another sign from the universe.

Five minutes before launch, one of my supervisors dropped by to get an update on a work project I had been neglecting. This was guaranteed to be a long, slow, painful conversation. The truth is, I had been letting my day job responsibilities slip, a lot. I had been working on the book pretty much full-time at work. (Sorry, co-workers!) But I didn’t have time for that conversation right now. I held up my bloody hand: “Do you mind if I go find a Band-Aid real quick? Somebody smashed out my car window this morning, and I can’t get this to stop bleeding.”

Conversation averted, I went downstairs, found a Band-Aid, and walked outside to the courtyard. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and checked my email. There was an email receipt from PayPal for $19.95.

Our first sale!

Seconds later, there was another receipt and then another. I got a notification every time we made a sale.

$19.95

$19.95

$19.95

$19.95

$19.95

And the notifications weren’t slowing down.

It was the best feeling in the world. It felt like magic. The work was done. There was no physical product to package or take to the post office. Just bits of information being delivered via email.

I went back inside and stared at the screen as orders came in.

Eventually, I used my broken window as an excuse to leave at lunchtime. I went home and kept an eye on things while a window repair guy fixed my car.

As exciting as the “Payment Received” emails were, the personal emails we got were even better. The truth is, most of our audience already knew how to cook. They weren’t buying this book because they needed it but because they loved the show and wanted to support what we were doing.

This was almost two years into the project, and we had never asked for money or sold anything. We had authentically earned the trust of our audience, and the feedback on the book was outstanding.

We hadn’t set a very ambitious financial goal for Learn To Cook, but we hit it on the first day. It wouldn’t make us rich, but we could finally get a decent computer for editing and a few other things. We re-invested all the money into the business.

The most important lesson of the best day ever: We knew how to make money online.

The Secret Weapon: E-Mail

The launch was the culmination of months of intense work.

Hilah did the bulk of it. She wrote the book, tested the recipes, starred in a photo shoot, and went on camera for the bonus videos. I came up with the idea (which you may have guessed based on the title, which sounds like something pulled straight from keyword research), designed the book, and planned the marketing.

In addition to the YouTube audience, we had a secret weapon in our back pocket: our e-mail list. Our list had been steadily growing. We promoted it on YouTube by offering access to some exclusive videos that weren’t available anywhere else. Hilah consistently wrote and sent emails every week. They not only promoted that week's YouTube video but were funny, answered viewers' questions, and provided a glimpse behind the scenes. Our open rates were strong, and readers were very engaged.

We used this to tease the upcoming book and get everybody excited. When we sent the email announcing the book's availability, our readers were primed to click the BUY button.

Across all of my businesses, email has consistently been the #1 sales driver. My rough estimate is that over 80% of our sales have been via email. Social media doesn’t even come close.

Even with a big YouTube audience, we’ve found it more effective to get people onto our email list first. When people are on YouTube, they’re not in the mood to spend money, and taking people away from the platform isn’t great for your channel.

So now, the primary call to action we use for YouTube is to ask people to subscribe to our newsletter.

Always Be Building Your List

Second Edition

Sales eventually slowed after the initial launch, but they didn’t stop. The books became a regular, consistent revenue stream. Over time, we refined it, added more products, and got even better at promoting it.

The feedback on the book was overwhelmingly positive, but there was one big request. Our readers really wanted a physical copy. The following year, we reformatted and expanded the book for a print edition and launched it just in time for Christmas. It was an even bigger hit and continues to sell well on Amazon.

It was even more work than the PDF version.

I Love Digital Products

Even though we have since expanded into print books and other physical products, digital products are still the foundation of our businesses.

A significant upside is that once they’re created and out in the world, your work is pretty much done. You don’t have to store, pack, or ship anything.

They’re like little money-making machines with a profit margin that is tough to beat.

If you’re considering selling a digital product, here’s my advice.

1. Email will be a big sales driver, so keep building your list. If you don’t have an email list, start today.

2. Choose a simple idea and get it out into the world quickly. Don’t overthink it. If you already have an audience, what do they ask you about a lot? Use that.

3. Please don’t get hung up on the technology you’ll use to deliver it. Use Gumroad or something similar. Don’t spend money until you know what the demand is.

4. Use your email list and social channels to build anticipation so your audience is primed for the launch.

5. Customer feedback is precious. Ask for feedback and use it to improve your product and generate ideas for the next one.

The Learn to Cook launch may seem insignificant compared to some of the things that happened later. But it changed the trajectory of my life and opened my eyes to what was possible.

So, if this has inspired you to launch your own product—whether it’s an e-book, an online course, or something entirely new—I’d love to hear about it. Tell me your story, share your wins (and lessons learned), and let’s keep building together.

Until next time, keep creating,

Chris

PS: As a bonus for reading to the end, here’s a free copy of the first edition of Learn To Cook. If you notice any typos, ignore them. We fixed everything in subsequent editions. I just wanted you to have a chance to check out the book in all its original glory.

Learn To Cook

24.2MB ∙ PDF file

Download

The original uncut first edition of Learn to Cook by Hilah Johnson.

Download

Note: This is part three of a series of extended posts updating my no-longer-available YouTube Book. For the first installment, click here. This backstory is important because it lays the groundwork for everything that comes later. In this issue we pick up in early 2010 as we start production for the first season of Hilah Cooking.

You’ve no doubt heard this a million times, but it’s true: Consistency is critical to building a successful YouTube channel.

As a creative person, you’re going to be tempted to reinvent the wheel on the regular. Trust me - you don’t have time to do that. To build a loyal and engaged audience, you have to produce and publish on a consistent schedule.

Consistency is critical in both your video format and your publishing schedule. I’ve found that they go hand in hand. If you can’t produce videos quickly, you’ll have a hard time hitting a regular schedule.

Developing a Format for Hilah Cooking

In the last issue, I wrote about how Hilah and I were eager to start a new project and had been kicking around ideas for a YouTube channel.

After a few weeks of brainstorming ideas for our internet cooking show, we had:

1. A list of 100 episode ideas (with keywords we thought would bring in good organic traffic

2. A general concept for an instructional cooking show that was also funny. It would also be simple to produce, so we could release episodes every week.

3. A shared commitment to produce 100 videos. After 100 episodes, we would evaluate whether the project was a success or a waste of time.

Now, it was time to stop talking and start creating.

We got started by playing around in the kitchen.

We had a video camera (Canon HV30), one light, a rickety photography tripod, and a wired Lavalier mic I got from Amazon for $12.00. By wired, I mean the microphone had a wire that had to be physically plugged into the camera. It was attached to Hilah at all times. Old school.

We shot two test episodes that were never publicly released. These were experiments to find out what was working and what wasn’t. Knowing that they would never be seen took some of the pressure off both of us. We were free to experiment.

During the test shoot, I was in “filmmaker” mode. I spent a lot of time exploring elaborate angles and camera moves.

Shooting a cooking show with one camera is not much fun. I found a wide shot that worked for Hilah to address the audience and demonstrate her cooking. When we needed a close-up of the food, I’d turn the camera off, walk it in to get the shot, then turn it off again and return to the wide shot. It reminded me of making movies as a kid where I had to edit them “in-camera” while I was shooting.

To complicate matters, the kitchen set was very challenging to shoot in. It had a dropped ceiling, orange countertops, some weird cabinets, and it was small and a little dark—not ideal shooting conditions.

Shooting these two videos took almost an entire day, but we had a lot of fun, and I was excited about the footage.

Until I got it into Final Cut and started editing.

It wasn’t working.

Some of the shots were cool, but none of it really flowed together. The video felt like it was jumping all over the place, and there was no sense of connection between Hilah and the audience.

I quickly realized that these videos weren’t a showcase for my filmmaking skills. Instead, the camera’s job was to showcase Hilah’s personality. We needed her to be on-screen as much as possible. I was also looking for a format that I could replicate every week. It had to be as simple as possible.

I found three shots that worked. They weren’t great, but they were good enough. I decided to use only those shots. Over and over and over again.

By our third video, we had figured out a simple format that we could use for each episode. This format allowed us to show up and make videos even when we felt tired, burned out, hungover, or just didn’t want to make videos. Sometimes, the energy and inspiration just aren’t there, and you need all the help you can get.

We launched the show in January 2010. We didn’t set any world records for number of views, but people responded to it – for better or worse! – from the very first episode.

Publishing the first few videos was very rough for me. I thought they looked terrible, and I was embarrassed. I thought these would expose me as an utterly incompetent failure as a filmmaker. I didn’t want to release them at all. But we had committed to a schedule and were determined to stick with it, so we kept going.

And little by little, we got better at it. It got easier.

Our ultra-simple format looked like this:

1. Cold Open (30 seconds)

This is a quick introduction that teases you about what’s coming up in the video. We found the first 7 seconds to be particularly important. Ideally, we end it with a joke or something that is a good lead-in to the intro music.

2. Intro/Title (7 seconds)

An introductory sequence with some music and the title. In 2024, I would advise eliminating a title sequence unless you have an excellent strategy for it.

3. How To Section (7-10 minutes)

Time has been of the essence in everything up to this point. Now, we can slow down and get into the video itself. The subject matter determines the pacing. Towards the end of this section, I like to use a spoken call-to-action to ask the viewer to subscribe, check out another video, sign up for the email list, or maybe even purchase a product. I’d rather have them jump to another one of our videos than search for something else. Then we cut to the:

4. Outro (20 seconds)

This bookends the branding we established in the title/intro but has at least one call to action, if not several. If someone has made it this far into the video, they are either already invested in your show or interested in seeing more. This is a great chance to give them something to do next. 90% of the time, I like to send them to another related video to keep them on YouTube and increase the session time. But if there is a good reason to send them elsewhere, I’ll do it here.

This is about as simple as you can get it. But this was just the starting point.

Once we started getting data for the channel, we began optimizing each segment. I obsessively studied our analytics to optimize the cold open. I realized I could dramatically increase view duration by tweaking this segment. For example, getting great food shots in the first 7 seconds made a huge difference. Also, if we teased something coming up later in the video, people watched longer. Our retention rate went up.  

In the Outros, we noticed retention dropping when Hilah took a bite of the finished recipe. Our format up to that time would have her finish the recipe, take a bite, and then talk a little more (usually including a Call To Action). When we noticed people were bouncing after she took a bite, we rearranged so that she did the CTA after she completed the recipe but before she took a bite. This moved the bite to the VERY end. This increased audience retention on every video and increased click-throughs on our Call-To-Action (CTA).

I guess people really like to see her taste the food.

Determining a Schedule for YouTube

There is no perfect publishing Schedule.

I’ve tested almost every conceivable variation of an upload schedule: weekly, three times a week, once a month, and even daily (during the multiple 30-day yoga series).

Based on this testing, the most important factor seems to be consistency.

We always intended the Hilah Cooking videos to be released weekly, like a TV show. When the channel started to take off, we scaled it up to three times per week. This increased overall revenue and watch time (more videos) but didn’t speed up the channel's growth.

If you can pull it off, I highly recommend designing a show that you can produce weekly. Communicate this schedule to your audience and commit to releasing the videos at the same time every week. Pay attention to your analytics, and once you have a solid baseline of data, you can make an informed decision on how to optimize your schedule.

Numbers Worth Your Attention

Before jumping to conclusions, give yourself at least 8 weeks of analytics. That’s enough time to start seeing genuine patterns instead of knee-jerk reactions to one-off spikes or weird outliers. With two solid months of data, you’ll get a better sense of what’s actually working and where you should pivot.

Once your data starts to accumulate, it can be overwhelming. In your early stages, zero in on these areas:

• Click-through rates – Optimize those thumbnails to boost this.

• First 30-second retention – Refine your openers to keep people watching.

• Average View Duration – A great pulse check on how well your content is holding attention.

Use these metrics to guide your strategy and adapt. Not every video will crush it, and that’s okay. Focus on the long game—steady improvement, smart adjustments, and creating content that genuinely connects.

The numbers are a guide, but they can only measure what’s already happened. Don’t let them distract you from what got you here in the first place.

Your creative instinct is what will truly take you to the next level.

Chris

PS - Thanks for all the great feedback on this series so far. As always, feel free to respond to this email or leave a comment below (if you’re reading this on Substack). I read all of them and try to respond to as many as possible.

Note: This is part two of a series of extended posts updating my no longer available YouTube Book. For the first installment, click here. This concludes the Introduction. Next week, we’ll get into the weeds, but this backstory is important because it lays the groundwork for everything that came later.

Winter 2009

It only took me a few months at the new job to build systems that automated almost everything I was responsible for. I had learned a lot about systematizing things while building my tiny empire of niche websites, and I put all of that to work at the day job. Now, everything was humming along smoothly, and I had a lot of downtime in my cubicle. All I had to do was show up.

I finally had a steady day job with benefits and a secondary revenue stream. The niche websites had started making consistent money. It was a small amount, but it was something, and the number was steadily climbing. Most importantly, it was proof that the concept worked.

Somehow, I had turned things around in less than a year. It felt like my life was back on track.

Now that I had some breathing room, my mind inevitably wandered back to new creative projects. I kept reminding myself that I was still on my self-imposed one-year break.

Instead of starting a new project, I tried my hardest to just be normal.

I got up early every day and went to work. At work, I would knock out my tasks, make sure all the systems were running, and spend the rest of the time working on my websites. After work, I ran on the trails at Lady Bird Lake. After my run, I made myself dinner. By dinner, I mean a basic grilled chicken breast and steamed, frozen broccoli. It was edible, but not necessarily delicious. After dinner, I usually met my friends at a bar. I’d also see a few movies every week. I was focused on having fun. But it wasn’t enough.

I still had the itch to make something new, and it was getting harder and harder to ignore.

Since I was a kid, movie-making has been in my blood. I have always loved making videos. Even between my two feature films, I spent my free time making sketch comedy videos and short films.

I had the itch again. I was getting bored with carousing around Austin every night, and I wanted to create something. But this time, I was determined to keep it small, control it, and, most importantly, NOT lose money.

I was still just getting back onto my feet financially, so if I were going to do something, it would have to be cheap.

And by cheap, I meant FREE.

I didn’t have any money to spend, but I DID have a very basic video camera, a janky photography tripod, and my old MacBook with Final Cut Express. I wanted to try something fun and straightforward that would combine making videos with all the new internet stuff I had learned.

This is where Hilah re-enters the story.

We had been close friends for several years, and she acted in several sketch comedy videos I directed. She was also one of the leads in The Spider Babies. I mentioned that I wanted to start a new project. After some brainstorming, we decided on a funny cooking show for people new to cooking.

Hilah is a natural on camera, hilarious at improv, and a great cook. We also had a good working relationship (and I loved her cooking). It seemed like a winner all around. We decided we were going to make Hilah Cooking as a web series. There was no established roadmap to success on YouTube, and we didn’t even know if we would ever be big enough to get accepted into the Partner program. We just wanted to make something as good as possible. We’d do our best to get better with every video. If people liked it, maybe we could get a deal to make a TV show.

My research showed that there was a potential audience of people who had never been exposed to their parents' cooking. They had grown up on fast food and microwave dinners but now desired to learn to cook for themselves. Since we had zero money to promote the show, I planned to use search engine optimization to find these people when they were searching for a recipe or topic.

I figured if we could rank high enough for things like “How to Poach an Egg” or “How to Make Chili,” we would have a constant stream of new viewers. Some would probably hate the show, but some would love it. And the people who loved it might stick around.

Our initial goal was to make 100 episodes. Then, we would take a break and evaluate whether this was a business or a hobby. I compiled a massive list of heavily searched food and cooking terms that I thought we could successfully rank for. We used it as a basis for putting together our list of 100 episode ideas.

We decided on a schedule. We would shoot every Saturday and publish a new video every Monday night.

We released our first episode on January 26, 2010.

February 2013

I turned off my PC, flipped the switch on a fluorescent light, and – for the last time – walked out of the cubicle where I had spent most of my working hours for three and a half years. It had been a great experience and everything I had hoped for when I set out to get a job.

But lots had happened since we launched that first episode. I was now bringing in more money from my side businesses than my bi-weekly paycheck. Hilah Cooking was thriving, and I had recently launched the Yoga With Adriene channel.

We had launched several successful products and started producing additional series for outside companies. I had spent all my Paid Time Off traveling around Texas, shooting a new travel show for Tastemade.

Between my real job and side businesses, I worked around the clock, and everything started suffering. Quitting my day job seemed crazy at the time. But nothing had captured my imagination like internet video, and I felt like I had only begun to scratch the surface. It was time to put the pedal to the floor and go for it.

I turned in my security badge and walked to my car.

I was now a full-time YouTube producer.

Chris

PS: Next Time - How To Start a YouTube Channel.

PPS: Here’s the first Hilah Cooking + Yoga With Adriene collaboration video. The intro gives you a few quick glimpses of The Spider Babies. This is one of the only places on the internet where you can find footage from this project.

Note: The following few issues of this newsletter will be longer than normal. In 2014, I wrote and self-published a book about YouTube. I sold it exclusively on Kindle, and it sold really well. There weren’t that many How-To books about YouTube available at the time. After a year or two, several of the chapters were out of date. It also barely touched on Yoga With Adriene. I never found time to update it, so I turned off the ability to buy it.

I still get questions about it at least once a week. So I’ve decided to publish it in segments here. I’m updating and expending it as I go. So you can consider this the “directors cut.”

Spring 2009

It was the last day of production, and I was dirty, sunburnt, and completely exhausted.

I was at the end of a multi-year struggle to make a post-apocalyptic feature-length comedy called The Spider Babies. I had spent a year writing the script and another year trying to find financing. This was a bigger-budget project than I had ever attempted before.

My last feature was completed in 2006, and I felt like the clock was ticking. I quit my job, sold all my stuff, and was committed to doing whatever it took to make this movie.

The production got off to a rocky start when our lead actor broke his leg in a motorcycle accident, and we had to quickly recast. Then, we lost our primary location the week before production was scheduled to begin. We had already built several sets in that location, so we were behind schedule before we even started. Believe it or not, things got progressively worse from there.

On this last day of shooting, all I knew was that the movie would never see the light of day.

The last shot of the day was a party scene at the bank of a pond at a ranch in the middle of nowhere. My co-writer and production designer, Craig Staggs, had taken the rest of the budget and driven to a fireworks stand. He spent all of it and returned with a trunk full of patriotic explosives. He was on the other side of the pond, staging an impressive fireworks show. We got the shots we needed, but there were still fireworks left. So he kept going.

I told the camera guys to go crazy and shoot whatever looked cool. I grabbed a beer, sat down in the tall grass, and watched the explosions of light bloom over the pond's surface.

We were wrapping up production, but we had not completed the script. We were still missing a big chunk of the movie, everybody was worn out, and we were out of money. Also, I wasn’t sure if anything we’d shot was any good.

As a director, this is what you call a complete and utter failure.

I failed my primary task: I didn’t get the movie in the can.

So, as I watched the fireworks explode, I decided to GIVE UP. Maybe forever. But definitely for a year.

I had spent years trying to get movies made, and so far, all I had to show for it were a few short films and a micro-budget feature that got an international distribution deal, but from which I hadn’t seen a dime.

I was bone-tired and broken-hearted. Maybe I could just get a job and enjoy life like regular people. I had put everything into getting this movie made, but now I had no money and no place to live. So, after I called “cut” for the last time, I finished my beer and did what any reasonable person would do.

I drove to my mom’s house.

Summer 2009

It’s easy to get discouraged when you’re in your 30s, living with your mom, have no money, and have no idea what you will do to get a job. I’d spent most of my adult life trying to make a living in the film industry with limited financial success. As far as “real jobs” were concerned, I was unemployable. This was also in the middle of a massive recession, and the economy was still shedding jobs like crazy.

I spent a few weeks wallowing in self-pity and reflecting on the journey that had brought me to this point. In hindsight, my life and career decisions weren’t looking so bright. Why the hell did I go to film school instead of law school? Or any kind of school where you can get a job when you graduate? Why had I spent so much money making movies and comedy videos instead of investing in a Roth IRA? Why had I never just settled down and figured out how to be happy with an everyday life?

Looking back, I saw that my entire life had been a strange combination of creativity and entrepreneurship, but I had never found the right balance—the balance that would result in both creative happiness and financial prosperity.

But there wasn’t much time for soul-searching or feeling sorry for myself. I was dead-broke. All my physical possessions fit into my 2000 Honda Civic.

Luckily, I still had my MacBook. And a video camera.

My most immediate concern was money.

I needed some.

I figured my best bet at getting some was to find some kind of internet job. So I learned how to do search engine optimization. I signed up for a one-dollar trial of an online class that taught SEO and how to build niche websites. I figured if I could learn SEO while polishing up my web design skills I could get a nice government job with insurance, benefits and a regular paycheck.

For the next six months, I did nothing but study SEO, HTML, and CSS. I was motivated and relentless. Other than filmmaking, I had never taken something so seriously. The course had an online community. Members shared their stories of building their own profitable niche websites. And they shared their numbers. This whole thing seemed very legit. I became very involved in the community. I made some good friends there that I still talk to today.

Around the third month, something clicked. Everything suddenly made sense. It was like I could actually see how the internet worked.

Winter 2009

I built a few incredibly boring websites and got them ranked for some pretty competitive terms. I was starting to rank for terms like “weight loss drinks” and “high thread-count sheets.” The traffic was building steadily. I put some Adsense on them and even had a little income trickling it. But it wasn’t coming in fast enough. I still needed a job because I wanted to get back to Austin.

I started sending out resumes and driving to Austin for interviews. Eventually, I got the boring desk job of my dreams. I was hired as a Website Content Specialist for the State Bar of Texas. I moved back to Austin, found an apartment, and started showing up to my cubicle every day.

For the first time in my life, I had successfully given up. I wasn’t even thinking about trying to make a new movie or get a new project off the ground. I was just going to work, punching a clock, and living life like I thought normal people did. I had health insurance. I had a 401k. I had just enough cash and plenty of free time. Life was feeling pretty great.

Mission accomplished.

Little did I know how soon I would get restless.

Or how fast everything I had just learned about the internet would collide with my love of filmmaking.

It would send me off in an entirely unexpected direction: YouTube.

Next Week: How To Start a YouTube Channel

I snapped a photo while Grant was rolling cameras on Adriene and Benji. The cords are a little less tidy than usual, but that’s because we had been moving everything around and experimenting just moments before.

The electric fly swatter is always funny to me. But the flies are still out in full force in Texas and can ruin a shot. We even had a wasp make an appearance.

Other than that, I didn’t give the photo much thought. I uploaded it to the FWFG community, where we are all currently investing a lot of energy.

The response was not what I expected. Members were a little taken aback to see so much happening behind the scenes. We’ve always wanted our production to be as “invisible” as possible. Apparently, we’ve done a great job.

Our audience does feel like they are in a room with Adriene and Benji. However, the fact that other people were there (and cameras, cables, and lights) shattered the illusion.

It was great feedback.

It let us know that the “invisible” production style was working.

It also informed us that the community might not be the best place for this behind-the-scenes content.

Luckily, I can get all that out of my system here!

Keeping It Simple

“What cameras do you use to make the Yoga With Adriene videos?”

“What do I recommend for people who want to make their own videos but are just getting started?”

I’ve been asked both of these questions hundreds of times.

First, I have to make a disclaimer. I’m not the one who shoots or edits these videos anymore. Grant Harling is our head of production. He not only flies to Austin to record them, but he also supervises the entire post-production process. He’s amazing. He even took most of the photos in this post.

But I love to talk about cameras, and I’m the one who chose these.

So let’s get into it.

We have now produced over 1,000 videos, and our setup has evolved. Since we make so many videos, the entire process—from setup to post-production—must be as fast and seamless as possible. Today, the image quality of even entry-level cameras is fantastic. You don’t need to spend a lot of money. For my personal/experimental projects, I’ve been shooting almost exclusively with an iPhone 15 Pro, and I’ve been thrilled with the image quality and the editing workflow.

However, for our workflow, when knocking out 5+ videos daily, we need to ensure there are as few glitches as possible. We also want to make sure everything sails through our post-production workflow. That’s the primary reason for using professional (and expensive) gear.

If you’re just starting, I recommend keeping things as simple as possible and working to improve a little each time you make a video. Then, you can gradually refine and add new gear to enhance the quality and speed up your workflow.

Our Main Camera: Canon EOS C-300 Mark III

We shoot with 2 Canon C-300s so that we always have a wide shot (A-camera) and a second angle (B-camera) to which we can cut away. We’ve had these cameras since 2020, and they still feel like they’re on the cutting edge.

We first moved into Canon's cinema line with the C100 and eventually upgraded to the C200 and now the C300 Mark III. Since we are still a small team working in a small space, we often have one camera operator to run two cameras. We keep the A-camera locked off in a wide shot and then manually operate the B-camera in a roving medium shot. Shooting in 4K gives us a little more margin for error. 

These cameras are workhorses - we have shot hundreds of videos with them. If we set up everything right in-camera, the footage cuts together seamlessly and doesn't require much extra post-production work. These cameras are relatively big (and expensive), so they stay in the "studio," and we have a smaller kit for when we are out on the road. 

If you don't need to shoot in 4K, I still highly recommend the C100 Mark II. I love the ergonomics, and there's something about the image straight out of the camera that is a little more pleasing in some ways than the C300. Plus, you can find used ones that are very inexpensive.

Our Non-Studio Camera: Canon C70

This is similar to the C300 Mark III but a lot smaller. It uses the same 4K Super 35mm DGO sensor, so we can easily match footage.

The major difference is that this camera has the newer RF mount instead of the legacy EF mount, so the lenses are different. However, we can use an adapter if we want to use our older lenses.

The size of this camera makes it perfect for run-and-gun travel-style shooting. However, we also use it as the primary camera for the YWA videos in Adriene’s new space. The space is smaller than her previous room, and the smaller camera footprint makes a big difference.

Adriene’s Vlogging Camera: DJI Osmo Pocket 3

Adriene's vlogs for FWFG members are some of our most popular videos. For years, she’s recorded them with different point-and-shoot cameras. But she frequently ran into little annoying quirks, especially with the sound.

Grant and I have been testing the DJI Osmo Pocket 3 in Los Angeles and on the road. We’ve been blown away by what is possible with such a tiny setup, so we got one for Adriene to use for her vlogs. The increase in quality and ease of use has been substantial. The Pocket comes with a wireless mic that sounds great and is very easy to use. You just clip it on, and it works.

The real selling point of this camera is the gimbal for stabilization. Using the app, you can even have it follow you around and keep you in the frame. This is great for vloggers and anyone who needs to self-record a video.

Highly recommended!

Audio

It has been amazing to watch microphone technology advance and miniaturize. These are so tiny! We started with Sennheiser wireless lav kits, which were the industry standard but now seem unbelievably big and clunky. We’ve been experimenting with two different mic kits.

• Rode Wireless Go

• Hollyland Lark Max

The quality is excellent on both, but sometimes, depending on the instructor's clothes, one of the transmitters might be a little easier to work with. Currently, the Rode is the slight favorite, but both are excellent.

For the Microphone - we use a Sunken COS-11D. We’ve been using this for years. The wire is tiny, and the quality is outstanding.

We attach the mic directly to the talent with Rycote Undercovers.

Lighting

That covers the big stuff. There are always a lot of other little odds and ends that are inevitably part of production, but those would be too tedious to write about here.

We haven’t changed cameras in quite a while and are still very happy with this setup. I’ll keep you posted if anything changes.

I’d love to hear what you use to make YOUR videos. Are there any cameras or other video creation tools you’re excited about? Reply to this email or leave a comment to let me know.

I’ve never started a project with the primary objective of making money.

The driving force has always been to make something new.

That’s why we’ve never taken outside investment.

Everything has been bootstrapped.

No strings. Full control.

I can (usually) figure that part out later once the project is up and running.

I’m not saying this is the best way. It’s not for everybody.

With Yoga With Adriene, we had no external funding, no fancy equipment, just a shared vision for what we wanted to create.

For the first few years, the cash was only flowing in one direction - out.

We kept making new videos every week. But at the same time we were experimenting and exploring and figuring out how this might work as an actual business.

While we waited for ad revenue to slowly increase, we created and launched paid courses, we sold t-shirts, we held live events and eventually we built our own SVOD service. Looking back, these decisions were not only critical for growth - it was an invaluable learning and growth experience for both of us.

Creation first.

Cashflow second.

This is how my mind has always worked. And it’s the same for a lot of Creators that I meet. They’re in it for the love of the game, creating because they are driven to do it. They’re figuring out the money as they go.

These are my kind of people.

Unfortunately, this mindset is easy to exploit.

What are we talking about when we talk about the “Creator Economy”?

I don’t know when the term “creator economy” became so prevalent. I am willing to wager that a creator didn’t come up with it. We do know that YouTube started using the word “Creator” in 2011 because they didn’t like the sound of the word “YouTuber.” The “Creator Economy” termed pick up a lot of velocity once venture capital started entering the space. Over $2 billion has been invested in Creator Economy start-ups (platforms like Substack, Teachable, etc.).

It probably sounds great in a pitch deck.

The Creator Economy is estimated to be worth over $250 billion globally. This includes revenue from platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Patreon, as well as platform subscription fees, brand deals, merchandise, and direct audience monetization.

At first glance, it seems amazing: a way for creative people to do what they love and make money doing it. This is the dream.

But an economy is a system comprised of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. Let’s break this down in creator terms:

1. Production: Creators. These are the people creating work for audiences to engage and connect with. Creators usually start because they want to make and share something with the world. Over time, some build businesses via ad revenue, brand integrations, selling products, etc.

2. Distribution: Corporations. These are the companies that make the platforms to distribute content and the tools creators use to build a business. This is where the vast majority of the money is made. Whether through companies buying ad space, creators paying to use platforms, or agents brokering deals, this is where most of the money is.

3. Consumption: Audience. These are the people who engage with the content usually via corporate platforms and tools. The audience pays with attention, which is monetized via advertising and sponsorships. Sometimes, they also buy products, but the real value is their attention.

Ultimately, the system depends on the audience’s attention and the creators’ willingness to create. The attention drives the entire ecosystem.

The attention and the money flow upward.

The bulk of it ends up with the corporations.

None of this is inherently bad, but it’s important to distinguish between these layers. We’re all part of this ecosystem, but our interests aren’t always aligned for mutual benefit.

Recent studies show that while creators contribute billions of hours of content, the platforms hosting them often take the lion’s share of the profits. For example, YouTube is by far the best platform for direct creator monetization and even they take 45% of ad revenue, leaving creators with just 55%. When you factor in production costs, the creators often end up with far less than what their content is worth in terms of generated attention.

There are over 50 million content creators worldwide. This includes professional influencers, streamers, YouTubers, podcasters, bloggers, and other creators who monetize their content. Of these 50 million creators, only 2 million make a full-time living.

The Rise of the Hyphenate

A 2023 study by Influencer Marketing Hub found that only 10% of creators earn enough to support themselves full-time. This highlights one of the key challenges in the creator economy: it's tough to make an actual living. Those who do break through often become hyphenates. They have learned to combine various skills or jobs (e.g., content creator, entrepreneur, marketer) to grow and sustain their business.

You may have started out as a YouTuber or Instagram influencer, but before you know it you’ve got an actual business.

Now you’re a creator-entrepreneur.

Before you know it, you’re a creator-celebrity-CEO.

I used to call myself a writer-director. That evolved into writer-producer-director. Now I’m more of a producer-entrepreneur. But I’ve always had a hyphen.

And you probably do, too.

To truly succeed, you have to become more than one thing.

I never expected to know as much about business as I do now. And I never would have expected to enjoy it as much as I do.

Navigating the creator economy requires ongoing personal evolution. To get to a certain level, it’s no longer enough to just create, you also have to develop business skills, build your brand, and leverage your creative work to sustain yourself.

The problem is that it’s difficult to find accurate resources and information on how to navigate this new economy.

The Corporate layer depends on the ongoing work of creators. They also depend on the fact that creative people love what they do and will do it for pennies on the dollar -if necessary.

Just like rich people benefit from poor people not really knowing how money works, these corporations benefit from Creators not really knowing how the whole ecosystem works. They may pretend otherwise. But keep in mind, your “buddy” who’s negotiating a great brand deal for you is working a day job. They’ve probably got a great salary, health insurance, stock options, and other benefits. As an independent Creator, you probably don’t have any of these things. They will continue to get a paycheck no matter what happens with the deal.

Your goals are not mutually aligned.

I made a decision in the early days to look at other Creators as allies rather than adversaries. I wanted to help wherever I could. Because of this decision, I’ve built a close-knit group that has been exchanging knowledge and experiences for years. This has been invaluable, not just for business growth but for emotional sanity.

The writing I publish here is a continuation of that desire to connect and share with other creators.

We may all be in the same industry, but there is plenty to go around.

Let’s continue to explore this new world together.

And let's have each other's back.

PS - This is more of a conceptual/mindset piece than I normally write. This is an attempt to articulate something that has been on my mind for awhile. In the future, I will continue to pull on this thread and see where it takes me. I’d love to know if any of this resonates with you. Even if you disagree with me! Do you consider yourself a hyphenate? How do you label yourself?

Next time I’ll be back with more stories from behind-the scenes. In fact, I just got back from a trip to Austin where we were in production on a bunch of new videos at our production HQ.

Subscribe now

This is the first in an occasional series of posts about my experiences in the very early days of YouTube and online business.

In this series, I'll share what I’ve learned from my early days on YouTube, hoping that my experiences can provide insights and lessons you can use in your creator journey.

My son and his friends are all obsessed with YouTube.

It’s TV for their generation with one big difference—they can make it themselves.

He’s starting to connect the dots and ask more and more questions about what I do for work.

Now, he wants to be a YouTuber.

He is fascinated by the fact that we’ve been full-time YouTubers since before he was born. He’s even made a few guest appearances in some Hilah Cooking videos as “Chef Baby.”

I wanted to show him some of our old videos, which are no longer available on YouTube or anywhere else.

Luckily, we still had access to our Vimeo account, which we used to share video drafts with production companies for feedback. We still have a huge archive of videos, including rough cuts and some that were never released.

Logging into our account brought back a flood of memories.

One of the things that enabled us to quit our day jobs was producing shows for other companies. Hilah and I produced them together; she hosted, and I shot and edited the videos.

Many of the companies we worked with back then have changed a lot. Some were acquired by even bigger companies, some changed their business models, and others are out of business.

Because of this, most of the videos we made for them have disappeared.

Cooking With Kids (2013) - Our first show for someone else.

My son loved watching these videos, especially the Cooking With Kids series. It must be fascinating for him to glimpse what our lives and personalities were like before he was born.

Watching these videos transported me back to a period of my life that has become a little hazy.

Like a flash, everything snapped back into focus.

Going Full Time (or trying to…)

From 2012 to 2015, we embarked on a series of ambitious projects that taught us invaluable lessons about the production process, business growth, and the value of experimentation.

I was still working a full-time cubicle job. On the side, I was making weekly videos for the Hilah Cooking and Yoga With Adriene channels. We weren’t making enough money from YouTube and digital products to go full-time yet.

Back then, there wasn’t any model for YouTube success to follow.

I was friends with a lot of YouTube creators at the time. While we were all making money, we weren’t making much. Almost everyone was doing it because they loved it.

We thought it might lead to something bigger—like a TV show.

Something was definitely happening with YouTube. The problem is that nobody knew what it was. Or where it was going.

Legacy media companies wanted to figure it out, and the easiest way for them to do this was to work with creators who were already active on YouTube. We began to get inquiries from companies asking if we had ideas for shows they could finance (and own). In 2012, we produced a series called Cooking With Kids, followed by Hilah’s Texas Kitchen and Lunch Lady.

Almost overnight, we had more money coming in than either of us had ever seen before.

But now, we had to make a lot more videos—and fast.

Hilah’s Texas Kitchen (2013) - Hilah and I traveled all over Texas for this one.

This was long before we had outside help, and we had no idea how to hire anybody. At the time, I was shooting the videos with a Canon 60D (which we won in a YouTube contest) and editing on an iMac. We had recently switched to the first version of FCPX for editing.

Today, we could probably do the whole thing on an iPhone.

I shot and edited videos on nights, weekends, and vacation days. During the week at my day job, I managed the websites, optimized YouTube videos, and kept the day-to-day operations of both businesses running. I didn’t know anything about "business" yet. All I wanted was to make the best videos I could and get them seen by as many people as possible.

Even with their rough edges, these early videos are pretty great. I love them. They’re more humorous, fun, and warm than I remembered. They have a raw energy that came from the fact we didn’t really know what we were doing.

We worked around the clock, stayed up late, and figured it out as we went, channeling all our creative energy into these new businesses.

Lunch Lady (2014) - I still love this title sequence. We did the stop-motion on the coffee table with a DSLR, a tripod and a MacBook.

From 2012-2015, I shot and edited two videos a week. Sometimes more.

This included contract shows and the YWA standalone courses. I went full-time in 2013, and we ramped up to an average of four or more videos per week. By this time, Hilah had learned FCPX, and she was managing files and assembling rough cuts while also coordinating talent and locations for new shows.

It was a lot.

Then, in October 2014, we had a baby. That should have slowed things down, but we had already committed to the first 30 Days of Yoga series, launching on January 1. I spent countless bleary-eyed nights editing. The reality of making 30 full-length videos began to set in. But it was too late to turn back. We had already committed and promoted this big series. I finally hit a wall, and it felt insurmountable.

I finished all 30 videos, and we launched the series on New Year’s Day. It was a success beyond anything we had hoped for.

But I didn’t have time to enjoy it because I had to pivot right back into the weekly videos and another seven-video yoga course. We were also in the middle of production on yet another contract series for Hilah Cooking.

This was a pivotal moment that taught me the importance of pacing yourself and bringing in help before you hit a wall.

It was beyond time to start bringing in more help.

My first hire: a therapist.

Fast Forward to Today

I now spend almost no time making videos. So, what do I spend my time on? Zoom calls, marketing strategy, managing to-do lists, approving financial reports, business development, schedules.

I’m back to cubicle job stuff.

We are now an actual business. It’s a stark contrast to our early days.

Bureaucracy creeps into any business over time, and the processes meant to streamline things can easily turn into their own monsters. Over time, everything starts to slow down.

This may sound like complaining, but it’s not. We now generate reliable, consistent revenue. Profit margins are high. We all have health insurance, retirement plans, and regular paychecks. The early years of insane work have paid off.

In retrospect, I miss those early days.

Late nights... grinding hard... too much coffee... too much whiskey... last-minute brainstorms... implementing ideas fast... stomping the gas and seeing the needle move... building new things.

I was so focused on making it work that I never stopped to appreciate what was happening.

I blinked, and it was over.

Showing these old videos to my son reconnected me to those early days of creative energy and excitement.

Back then, I didn't know if anything I was doing would actually work.

But it did.

If you’re in the early days of your life as a creator, you may be feeling drained and burned out.

My advice is to take a moment to pause and celebrate how far you’ve come.

One thing I wish I had done more in those early days was to take the time to celebrate small wins. Don’t let the hustle make you forget how far you’ve come.

As much as I love the stability we’ve built, there’s something irreplaceable about those early days of raw creativity. If you’re in the grind now, take a moment to appreciate it and celebrate how far you’ve come.

💡 TIP: Working with outside companies taught us the importance of balancing creative freedom with business needs. If you're approached by brands today, remember that it’s essential to protect your own creative voice.

Have an attorney check the contract. It’s worth the money and the inconvenience.

Try to avoid anything that includes requirements for arbitration outside of the state where you live. We learned this the hard way. 😬

Above all, don’t let the need for short-term money compromise your long-term success.