My Best Video Isn't the One with 120k Views

This deep dive is a bit different than usual - instead of breaking down how a founder reached $250k in revenue, I'm diving into my own creator business in 2024. And to be upfront, I'm nowhere close to $250k in annual revenue yet. Even with that, I've picked up some interesting lessons about content creation this year that might be helpful to share.

Let's start with the data:

The Data Behind My Creator Business in 2024

This year, I tracked my entire creator business in a single spreadsheet. No fancy automations - just me manually updating it every Monday morning. It's not perfect by any means, but this weekly habit has become a nice time to reflect quickly and see what's working (and what's definitely not).

Having all my metrics in one place has been super helpful - no more jumping between a few different dashboards to spot trends. Major shout out to Jay Clouse for inspiring this tracking system. I've liked it so much that I'm definitely keeping it for 2025.

Looking at the three main metrics - LinkedIn followers (blue line), YouTube subscribers (red line), and newsletter subscribers (green line) - things might look flat at first glance. But when we isolate the newsletter growth:

Since shifting to creating deep dives on how bootstrapped founders go from $0 to $250k in annual revenue (marked by the gold star), I've almost doubled my email subscribers to just over 850. The newsletter has been my main priority in the second half of the year. While I'll fall a bit short of my 1,000 subscriber goal, the progress feels significant - especially considering LinkedIn and YouTube growth remained relatively flat.

A deeper dive into YouTube

Above are my YouTube metrics for 2024. You can see views, watch time and subscriber growth are all down compared to 2023. Revenue growth is a bit misleading here - I wasn't monetized on YouTube until July of 2023, so it's up just because I've had a full year of monetization compared to just a few months last year.

Much of this decline stems from my most popular video by views plateauing significantly. The "Best No-Code Mobile App Builders" video from 2023 has seen declining daily views, which makes sense - it's nearly two years old, tools have changed dramatically, and the no-code space has many more creators now.

So, in May of 2024, I created an updated version with better production value and what I think is much better packaging.

The view count is pretty high compared to most videos I have on my YouTube channel, but is still less than 10% of the original video in 2023. Still a valuable video for me, but since I'm moving away from no-code tools, I won't be doing a 2025 version.

Even though this video brought in a lot of views for me this year, it's still not the best video in terms of revenue. Neither is the 2023 version of this video. That honor goes to my Circle vs. Mighty Networks comparison, which has just over 6,500 views but has generated about $3,000 in revenue, mainly through affiliate links.

Overall, it's more proof that yes, YouTube Adsense is a nice perk and being monetized on YouTube is an easy benchmark to measure for a channel, but it's not a great way to monetize. Brand deals, affiliate links, and your own products go so much further in terms of revenue than YouTube Adsense for most.

Why YouTube still feels successful this year

At the end of the day though, I'm not really looking deeply into the growth of that Circle vs. Mighty Networks video. It's a nice perk, but it's not what I've been watching for most of the year.

What I've been watching for the second half of the year in particular is the trend of growth for my deep dives. That's been promising.

As you can see, my deep dive with Allea Grummert from Duett has been trending up compared to previous videos. I've taken this as I'm starting to find my groove as a creator with better packaging, better storytelling, and that I'm building consistency in terms of content style.

I care way more about hitting 1 of 10 right now than comparing these deep dives to some of my successful videos in terms of view counts.

Eventually, those 1 of 10s and green arrows lead to better reach and attracting the right audience in the long run. Seeing the trend with these deep dives makes me feel like the foundation for a strong 2025 is built and I just need to keep going.

Goals for 2025

1. 10,000 subscribers (YouTube & Newsletter)

With the systems and strategies I'm working on, getting to 10,000 subscribers on YouTube and my email newsletter each seems more doable than ever before. That also feels like a solid foundation to build the business around to eventually get to $250,000 in annual revenue.

2. Continue Deep Dives (26 deep dives)

I'll keep writing these deep dives as it seems like there's some good traction with them, but I've realized I can only publish them every other week. Once a week was burning me out quick and no one wants that 🙂 With these deep dives being higher quality than past content of mine, they feel more like products rather than one off marketing content. As a result, I feel like I can re-use them in ways I've never been able to with past content.

3. $20k+ in revenue

Hopefully, with all of this I'm putting my first revenue goal into play. My goal is to be able to do $20,000 in annual revenue next year as a creator which would open events up, and potentially allow me to hire some freelance help. If I can hit these goals, the pathway to $250,000 in annual revenue seems pretty clear.

Strategies for 2025

1. A great lead magnet

First, I'm working on a lead magnet that feels like it's going to be central to my creator business for 2025 at a minimum. Don't want to share too much just yet about it, but feel like it's going to be one heck of a resource for you all. It's a supercharged version of the deep dives 🙂 That lead magnet I think will help get people to join the newsletter, helps me build more evergreen content library and gives me something I can interview about.For LinkedIn and any more text based types of platforms, I want to be able to recycle content and not have to recreate the wheel in terms of content to create. This lead magnet should set me up for that quite a bit.

2. Borrowing Audiences

I've also learned via other creators and these deep dives that borrowing audiences is really key to growing a sustainable creator business. Bryan Harris led a workshop on this topic as part of the Growth in Reverse Pro community and that flipped a switch for me.I don't want to be solely reliant on the algorithms of the social media platforms, so borrowing audiences feels like the best way to grow. The algorithms feel like just a bonus eventually in terms of growth.

3. Events?

I have events with a question mark as I would love to do fireside chats with founders in a live audience setting, but that takes more resources than what I have at the moment. Hopeful I can create enough revenue and partnerships to make these happen at some point in 2025 though.