How I Grew My Online Business Using Youtube

One year ago, I was making below minimum wage editing videos on a freelance platform. Then, one day in July 2023, a client asked if I could just teach her how to edit for herself. I was happy to do that, but I had no idea how it would work. What should I charge? What do I teach her? Am I even good enough to teach this?

So, I proposed 15 for a 30 minute lesson. We got on a Zoom call. She asked questions about how to do certain things in Descript. Descript, by the way, is the video editing software I mostly teach. And I showed her how to do it. And that was it. After the platform fees, my cut for that session was 12. But I loved it.

I loved teaching. So I set that service up as a gig and students started rolling in. 

Things were picking up every week, more and more bookings were coming in and I had built up dozens of reviews and five star ratings when suddenly the platform banned me. I don't know why. They never explained it to me and I didn't really care.

I didn't fight it. I was sending them hundreds of dollars per month in business. And if they had treated me like that, I wasn't going to give them my business anymore. I was upset, of course, that my reputation I'd built there was gone. And my income from that source was gone, but that was a turning point in my business.

It forced me to set up a simple one page landing page. I used card. com. It only took an afternoon and a calendar link for people to book calls. 

And then the YouTube channel that you're watching right now. Now I had already had this channel and had been posting little Descript tutorials, but had never thought to get business from it.

Well, that changed when I started posting more videos and adding my calendar link to the description of every single one. And then people started to book calls that way. and it was at that point that this became a real business because I no longer owed fees to a middleman anymore. I had more freedom about what I could do and I was unbannable. Within a couple months I was getting booked up from organic search engine traffic. and mostly from this channel, people finding me on this channel.

And whenever I got too busy, like three or four calls in a single day, I'd raise my hourly prices and that would help to slow things down. All the way up to today, I charge 150 per hour for a single session of Descript tutoring. 

Now one note on raising prices. Every time that I did it, it was extremely uncomfortable.

I'd be thinking, am I about to kill my business? Are my existing students going to hate me and stop booking calls? Am I worth this? Typical imposter syndrome thoughts. But every single time, demand would dip for maybe a few weeks, and then it would pick back up. And with only a few exceptions, I've been able to help every student who's come my way.

And if I can't help someone, I'm transparent about that and I don't charge them.

I'm making this video because I've gotten benefit from other entrepreneurs stories like this. I'm not making six figures yet, I'm not rich by any means, but I am building a real business that's helped a lot of people and has allowed me to live and work remotely from my favorite city on earth. Mexico City.

Before this, I started my career as a military officer and I then went from that to a corporate America consulting job. In both of those roles, I made significantly more than I am now and got tons of perks and benefits, but I would take this over that any day. 

And don't get me wrong, it's been hard.

There's been weeks where I get no bookings at all and I wonder if this thing is even gonna work. There's been months where the YouTube channel declines despite putting more time than ever into my videos. The point of all of this is you can steal my playbook. Take something you love teaching, make free YouTube videos teaching it, set up a calendar page, and boom, you're in business.

It's not going to be fast and it's not going to be easy, but if you enjoy teaching and you want to run your own business, this is an awesome path. And the internet has made it all possible.