How much money I made in January

How to YouTube #40

Right, today we’re talking money.

My personal mission is to help as many educational YouTubers as possible build $100k+ businesses.

And to do that, I want to use my own online journey for learning and inspiration.

I’ve learned so much from other people talking about their business online, and I want to provide the same transparency in return (if for whatever reason the money stuff isn’t your cup of tea, feel free to unsubscribe).

So here’s a breakdown of my January.

• Revenue = $24,285

• Expenses = $3,983

• Profit = $20,302

And these are my audience stats for some context:

• Business YouTube channel: 694 subscribers

  • (Personal YouTube channel: 15,726 subscribers)

• X: 5,058 followers

• Email newsletter: 4,594

I’ve put my personal YouTube channel in brackets because it’s not a focus for the business, even though I still post videos there.

All in all, I can’t quite believe how well this year has started.

The 24 year old dweeb who started writing online about gratitude in 2021 would be proud.

Even 6 months ago these numbers would have blown me away.

But let’s see where that revenue has come from:

• 1:1 coaching = $12,500

• Course sales (55) = $10,925

• YouTube Adsense = $850

• Affiliates = $10

So in 2025, I’m going all-in on affiliates 🚀

No, obviously not. Rule number 1 of business is “do more of what works.”

And my main focus this year has been to figure out what works for me.

Coaching is always very profitable, and I love working closely with YouTubers to help them work towards their dream business. It lights me up.

I don’t mind having meetings in my calendar. As corny as it sounds, I’m grateful for the chance to help people thrive.

Course sales are fun because they’re 90% passive. They can be risky - I spent 100s of hours making my course unsure how many people would buy.

But I can’t lie, the feeling when a sale comes through hits different.

I’ve also been testing paid ads (about 50% of my expenses for Jan) as a fun learning experiment, but more on that another time. We’re focused on building businesses based on organic YouTube audiences here.

What I’m most pleased with is I’ve achieved this with a relatively small audience.

Across platforms it’s 26,000, but ~15,000 of those come from my personal YouTube channel which isn’t about YouTube growth.

So I have an audience of around 11,000 people interested in growing YouTube channels.

And I’m well on track to do $100k+ in profit this year.

Every niche is different, but hopefully this highlights that it’s not about how big your audience is.

It’s about who’s in it and how much you help them.

And the bigger the problem you help people solve, the more money you can make.

It’s strange how long it takes people (including me) to learn this lesson.

And the core driver of this has been my email list. All course sales and clients this year have come through it.

At some point, I’ll need to double down on content to start growing the audience and email list. But for now I’m focused on building the systems and products to set the business up long term.

And before we wrap up, I want to address one limiting belief I think you might have.

It’s easy to read this and think “it’s easy for you, everyone wants YouTube support, what about YouTube businesses that aren’t helping people make money, like make-up tutorials, software engineering or personal development?”

Unless you do reviews, news or entertainment, your niche is not your bottleneck.

It’s certainly easier to charge higher prices when you are helping people make more money, but you can hit $1m profit and beyond in almost any niche.

It doesn’t matter what your channel is about. If you build an audience that trusts you and values your information, the sky’s the limit.

The more value you generate for your viewers and customers, the more revenue you generate. That’s it.

It’s less about the number of opportunities and more about your ability to take advantage of the opportunity.

YouTube is still growing. Internet entrepreneurship is still growing. Your audience is there, and they want you to solve their problems.

It’s up to you to help them in the right way.

Have an epic week!

Tintin 🫡

P.s.

I’m launching a beta cohort of my new coaching programme The YouTube Entrepreneur in the coming months.

I’m looking to work closely for 6 months with 10-20 educational YouTubers who want to consistently hit $10,000 per month in profit.

There will be a 50% discount for this early group of students.

If that sounds like something you’re interested in, fill out the application form here.

P.p.s

Which of these names for the coaching programme do you like the most? (you may have to open a browser or the Substack app to vote).