I spent 2 years serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Eastern Ukraine from 2009 to 2011. I lived in the town of Kupyansk, a couple hours outside Kharkiv, near the Russian border. It was one of the greatest experiences of my life, teaching me so much about myself and life and the people and culture of Ukraine.

Kupyansk is now on the frontlines of the Russian invasion. The streets I walked every day have been decimated, the bridge into town destroyed, and my old students scattered across Ukraine and abroad, or sucked into the vortex of fighting.

When I landed in Kyiv in September of 2009 to begin my service, the country was at peace. It was a fledgling democracy, having gained its independence in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. At 18 years old, the country was young, which meant naive and unsure of itself, but also deeply hopeful and optimistic about its future.

The word “Ukraine” means “borderlands,” and the land has indeed always been at the crossroads of many frontiers: between East and West, between Russia and Europe, between the Slavic world and the Latin and Germanic worlds, between Orthodox Christianity and Western Christendom. The sweeping, flat, fertile plains that make it an agricultural breadbasket have always beckoned to conquering armies from every direction to try their luck.

This identity of being in-between, of being at the periphery, gives Ukrainians many of their gifts, from their warmhearted hospitality and multicultural mindset, to their peacefulness and spirit of international cooperation. It makes them humble, grateful, creative, and bold. 

It’s also led to tremendous suffering. The Holodomor, the Soviet Union’s equivalent to the Holocaust, killed between 3.5 and 5 million people in a directed genocide and forced collectivization from 1932-33. The Crimean Tatars, a Muslim people who populated the Black Sea shore for many centuries, were forcibly removed from their homes by Stalin in 1944, loaded aboard sealed-off cattle trains, and transferred almost 3,200 kilometres to the barren, remote reaches of Uzbekistan. It’s hard to imagine such tragedies happening anywhere else but the edges of a “great” empire.

I had wanted to serve in the Peace Corps since I was a teenager when a friend of my parents had told me the stories of his service in the 70s. It sounded like the perfect scenario to me: lots of time in an exotic foreign location, immersed in a new culture, learning a new language, and serving people in need. This combined most of my main interests at the time, and I leapt at the opportunity.

When I arrived, I was so determined to put all my energy into serving and teaching that I decided I wasn’t going to write about my experience while I was there, which I now consider a grave mistake. I had been blogging about my travels in South America for about a year at that point, but still saw writing as an optional indulgence, not an essential way to document and understand my life, as I do today.

I did, however, make a video out of all the short clips I took on my iPhone 3G during my time there. It was my attempt to capture the spirit of my experience there – to commemorate the memories of the most exhilarating, and also most challenging, two years of my life.

14 years later, that video is also a record of what life in Eastern Ukraine was like before the wars. It feels like a snapshot of the final days of a beautiful experiment in Ukrainian independence, now undermined by the Russian invasions of 2014 and 2022.

I’ve decided to share it publicly as a small testament to what was lost. As one more piece of evidence that Ukraine once thrived, that Ukrainians know what kind of country they want to build, and could build it again if given the chance by the wider world.

In the US, we have a president and administration who have essentially switched sides, from this innocent nation struggling to defend its freedom and its rights, to Putin’s Russia, an aggressor toward so many countries on its borders and beyond. It’s the most evil act I’ve ever seen from my country, a betrayal of everything we claim to stand for, and I’m ashamed to have anything to do with it.

My hope is one day Ukraine will have independence, peace, and stability again. It deserves it, its people deserve it, and the world will benefit from it being secure, autonomous, and self-determined, not a vassal state under the thumb of Moscow like it’s been for so much of history.

If you want to help me donate directly to Ukrainian relief organizations, my book is now available in Ukrainian (Запасний мозок) and Russian (Создай свой «второй мозг»!). Here are direct links you can use to purchase it in various formats:

• In Ukrainian in Ukraine: on Rozetka and Yakaboo
• In Russian in Ukraine: on Zakupka
• In Russian in Russia: on Ozon and Yandex
• As an ebook in Russian everywhere: on Litres

I’m donating 100% of my royalties from both languages to non-profits and relief organizations in Ukraine forever, totaling $10,000 USD so far. And of course, I encourage you to donate directly if you’re able. Now that they’ve been abandoned by their main champion, the U.S., they need it more than ever.

In many ways, the origins of my work with Second Brains, digital organization, and productivity can be traced back to my time in Ukraine. It was the first time I taught “life skills” such as how to define goals, make project plans, gather resources, and execute on a timeline. There is a direct link between the community service program I created during my service, known as Projects Bring Change, to the central role of projects in all my teaching.

I hope this is one small way I can return the blessings that Ukraine and her people gave to me, and perhaps teach another generation of Ukrainians what it means to succeed with their goals in this uncertain and volatile time.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

17 years ago, at the age of 22, I uploaded my first YouTube video.

My high school friend Derick and I had set up a digital camcorder, faced the camera with our backs to his bedroom wall, hit record, and just started talking about 3D printing, which was to be the first episode in a recurring show about emerging future trends. 

Needless to say, our show never had an episode two, but something was sparked in me that day. I saw that I could share a message with the entire world from my bedroom, without permission from anyone. All I needed was a message worth sharing. It would take me 14 years to find one.

I distinctly remember feeling back then, in 2007, that I was too late. I thought I had already missed the golden era of online video. Little did I know, those were prehistoric times, revealing only the faintest glimmer of what the YouTube empire would eventually become.

This piece is a comprehensive retrospective of my 17 years of experience on YouTube, including my path to 275,000 subscribers and 12 million views. It is a deep dive into the different “eras” I’ve moved through, the team and production process I’ve built, and the detailed finances throughout. 

I’ll summarize for you what I’ve learned so far, analyze my successes and failures alike, and distill practical insights that you can use in your own YouTube efforts. Whether you aspire to create YouTube videos in the future, or are already doing so now, my hope is that these lessons will shorten your learning curve and save you from making the same mistakes I made. 

Even after all these years and some notable successes, we still haven’t figured out a business model for YouTube that is sustainable for the long term, so this piece will also serve as a springboard for the next era of our channel.

The 4 Eras of My YouTube Journey

I’ve gone through four distinct “eras” in my time on YouTube, each one with a central theme:

• The Experiment Era (2007-2012): Performing random experiments and trying things out
• The Portfolio Era (2013-2020): Using YouTube as a professional portfolio
• The Startup Era (2021-2023): Starting to take YouTube seriously
• The Factory Era (2023–2024): Building a full production process

Each era lasted between 1 and 7 years, and they seem to be getting shorter over time as we iterate more quickly. These years encompass my entire adulthood, and reflect the stages of my growth both professionally, creatively, and as a human being.

Let’s dive into each era one at a time.

The Experiment Era (2007-2012)

The first era I think of as a series of crackpot experiments, dating from that first grainy video uploaded from my friend’s bedroom to the start of my professional career.

In that time I uploaded anything and everything I could think of, from photo slideshows showcasing my volunteering work in Rio de Janeiro, to profiles of microentrepreneurs in support of my microfinance work in Colombia, to short clips of my adventures across South America, to highlight reels from my Peace Corps service in Ukraine.

I had no particular goal, vision, or mission for what I wanted to do on YouTube. I thought of it as a social media site, like Myspace or Facebook – a place for me to share updates about my life and travels and to document my experiences for future record.

And yet some of the most basic lessons I learned during this period were essential, forming a foundation for everything that would come later: how to point a camera, frame an interesting shot, make sure the audio was working, and import it all to a computer to make simple edits and add appropriate music.

In this first experimental era I made 19 videos, which drew 7,411 views and 20.8 hours of watch time from a grand total of 3 subscribers, one of whom was my mom!

The Portfolio Era (2013-2020)

In early 2012 I returned from my Peace Corps service in Ukraine, excited to finally begin my professional career in the big city. 

After working in consulting for a couple years, I struck out on my own as a freelancer in June 2013. To mark the occasion, I uploaded my first “professional” video, a 102-minute long recording of a workshop I had delivered at a coworking space in downtown San Francisco. 

That video frankly left a lot to be desired. The video and audio quality were quite poor, there was no lead-in or introduction, no titles or animations, and no link to the slides. I had not yet heard of concepts like virality or retention. 

And yet, this early video already contained within it some promising signs of YouTube’s potential. It demonstrated that I could expand the reach of my ideas via digital video. It showed me that there was a place for educational content amidst the deluge of endless clickbait. And by including a link in the description to my first product, an online course teaching the Getting Things Done methodology in more detail, it proved that I could find customers by sharing content freely on the web.

All these seemed like earthshaking realizations at the time. With a single video, I could already see the outlines of a holistic online education business, from testing and validating ideas, to gathering feedback, to building community, to finding customers, to serving them with valuable products.

Despite all the limitations and flaws in what I had created, the essential quality of the material I was teaching managed to shine through, and it soon gathered thousands of views, which at the time felt like a big deal.

I forged ahead, uploading the first lesson of my course as a preview, and then a short promotional trailer filmed by a friend in an afternoon. I later leveled up the production values, hiring a videographer to film a Design Thinking workshop I was beginning to offer companies.

As sales of my first course dwindled over time, and a subsequent one I launched fizzled, I decided to set aside online courses to focus on where I knew I could make money: talks and workshops for companies. My YouTube channel accompanied me on this pivot, becoming essentially my “speaker’s reel.”

I spoke on emerging trends such as the Quantified Self movement, new theories of innovation, and shared my personal experiments in using network science to analyze my habits. My attitude was that I would speak for free if needed, as long as I could come away with a recording I could add to my YouTube channel – a tangible, publicly visible “proof of work” that I could point to for future gigs.

After a couple years, I was fed up with corporate work and wanted to return to where I began – teaching people directly online. I had started a blog in 2014 and found that writing was a crucial medium to fully work through the details and implications of my ideas. After writing dozens of in-depth essays, I decided to take my most successful piece, on how I used Evernote as a “second brain,” and turn it into a full-fledged course.

YouTube again played a crucial role in this new chapter. I published testimonial videos from my earliest cohort students, recordings of Q&As, interviews with experts, quick demos and case studies of PKM tools and techniques, recordings of talks on the subject I delivered, and a promotional trailer for my course, which I called Building a Second Brain. I also continued experimenting with personal interests and developing my videography skills during this period, such as with the documentary I created on my father’s life and artistic career once I realized that smartphone cameras were up to the task.

Five years after I wrote my first essay on the subject of Personal Knowledge Management, and two years into teaching the Building a Second Brain course as my sole focus, I uploaded a video that encapsulated for the first time my Second Brain methodology. In many ways, it was the culmination of the first six years of my career, incorporating ideas and insights from a dozen subjects I had researched, taught, and coached on in search of my niche.

It was my first “viral” video, reaching hundreds of thousands of views and serving as the default place to send people for an introduction to me and my work.

I had just begun exploring the possibility of publishing a book in early 2019 when this video came out, and it became the first true test of my holistic methodology. Nothing about the video is optimized or particularly strategic. It’s just a bunch of slides with voiceover, a decidedly low-tech style that didn’t even require a camera – just a computer and a mic. 

And yet, it’s difficult to overstate the impact this single video had on my career. It served as an incredibly effective delivery vehicle for introducing a complex topic to a wide variety of new people, including my future book agent and publisher, who in turn would help me spread my message to even more audiences far from my home base.

During this second YouTube era, which lasted seven years, I released 113 videos drawing 885,000 views, 101,000 hours of watch time, and gaining 20,454 subscribers. This small but promising start laid the foundation for the next era, when I would begin to invest in YouTube seriously and make it the focus of my content creation.

The Startup Era (2021-2023)

In July of 2021 I realized that we had only one year left until the release of my book, and I wanted to invest the book advances I’d received from various countries to make the biggest splash possible. This was also a few months after our largest-ever cohort (fueled by the pandemic), meaning I had substantial resources on hand to do so.

After looking at a variety of avenues, I decided making YouTube our primary focus was the most promising path we could take, for several reasons that remain just as or even more valid today:

• YouTube is the world’s most widely used and most influential platform for educational content, reaching millions of people with a highly accessible form of media that anyone can consume and benefit from.
• The algorithmic reach of YouTube is a powerful mechanism for continuously reaching new audiences beyond our original niche.
• Video production is expensive and time-consuming, but my business was finally at a place where we could afford to make those investments.
• Videos can be produced as a collaboration between a team, rather than relying solely on my personal time and energy as with writing.

By this point, I’d been experimenting on my own and uploading all kinds of videos for years, and knew I needed a different approach if I was going to change the trajectory of the channel and make it a long-term driver of book and course sales.

I’d reached 20,000 subscribers through my own personal efforts, but it had taken many years to do so, and I knew I now had less time and energy to dedicate to video creation with a toddler running around the house and a second baby on the way in a few months. I needed to find a way to massively level up both the quantity and quality of our videos, while also delegating most of the necessary work to my team so it didn’t fall on my shoulders.

I started at the most fundamental level of the videos I wanted to create – with a dedicated place where they could be made. My wife and I decided to extensively remodel our two-car garage, including new tile, an attractive brick facade along one wall, new electrical wiring and lighting, high-end cabinets along another wall, and stylishly modern furniture and interior design throughout, tastefully chosen by my wife Lauren according to a “Mexico City cafe” aesthetic.

Between the $50,000 remodel, $30,000 in cameras and other equipment, and $20,000 in consultants, we would eventually spend about $100,000 making the ultimate home studio, as I’ll detail further below. You can see a video recapping the project here. 

The next step was to hire someone to lead our YouTube efforts, since I knew I wouldn’t be able to remain hands-on all the time. After a wide-ranging search, I hired Marc Koenig as our first Creative Director to lead our overall YouTube strategy as well as provide creative direction for our videos from beginning to end.

It took more than 4 months from when Marc joined to the release of our first video in January 2022. This included everything from buying cameras and microphones and lighting, to brainstorming the kinds of videos we wanted to create, to establishing the initial team and the workflow they would use, to experimenting with test shots in the studio. 

We bought specialized furniture, cameras, microphones, lighting, rigging, computers, editing software, hard drives, and various other tools. We recruited a video editor, a production assistant, and several thumbnail designers. Marc flew out from Wisconsin a number of times to help set up our gear, brainstorm ideas, and iterate on everything from the framing of shots to how we would write scripts to my live performance on camera. We mapped out the first year of videos we wanted to create, scheduled a trip to the East coast and Europe to record a series of interviews with leading experts in our field, and built the beginnings of a production workflow to coordinate everyone who would be contributing.

We also hired a studio design consultant, Kevin Shen, who spent a couple weeks helping us improve our production setup and teaching me the basics of how images, sound, and light interact to produce a holistic effect for the viewer. I gave Kevin the mandate to help us make a “classroom that can teach the entire world,” encompassing not only filming videos but also teaching cohorts on Zoom, working and writing day to day, joining meetings with the remote team, recording interviews with guests, and more. It was a small 320-square-foot space that needed to elegantly straddle the physical and digital worlds while projecting a compelling message to the world.

All this was an incredible amount of work, and took much longer than I expected. There were so many twists and turns, for example:

• We had to buy a commercial-grade AC unit to make sure we weren’t sweating on camera, and to minimize the risk of cameras overheating.
• We needed a backup battery to keep everything online even during a power outage, and a second Internet connection in case the primary one went down.
• We found we needed full blackout curtains across every window to be able to keep the lighting constant, and a door with an access code so various people could come in and out at all hours of the day.
• Lights had to be mounted on walls or ceilings and folded away so we could use the space as an office whenever we weren’t filming.

We faced a constant tradeoff between aesthetics and functionality – we didn’t want an ugly space that we wouldn’t want to spend time in, nor a beautiful one that didn’t support our needs. This creative constraint led to a number of innovative solutions, such as using sound blankets that could be put away instead of wall-mounted pads.

Here’s the “before and after” comparison:

We kicked off this new era with an interview with Thomas Frank in January 2022, instantly 10xing our production values from one video to the next, wowing our viewers, and setting the stage for an epic run in the months to come. The video skyrocketed to hundreds of thousands of views and, more importantly, we now had a team and a process that would allow us to produce such videos regularly.

I was totally occupied with the launch and promotion of my book throughout 2022 and 2023, which meant that Marc led virtually all aspects of our video production, from generating ideas and choosing the most promising ones, to outlining and scripting, to coordinating and managing the editors and post-production workflow, to configuring the look and feel of the channel. This was by far the most control I had ever delegated to anyone, and forced me to give up my perfectionism and trust the process we were developing and iterating on, even when a given video fell flat. 

In August 2022, a full year after making YouTube my primary focus and beginning to feel secure in my new identity as a YouTuber, I wrote a blog post on Why I’m Becoming a YouTuber. It laid out my vision for how and why we would become a YouTube-centric company, after a first decade dedicated mostly to text-based content.

Despite all the talented people I had the privilege of working with during this period, I still had an extremely steep learning curve to climb. It felt so much riskier and more vulnerable to open up my creative process to so many other people, compared to the solitude and privacy of writing. My brain had to think about so many more factors than I was used to – technical problems, creative problems, communication problems, and logistical problems all interacting with each other, across multiple timescales and distributed geographically around the world. 

My most important lessons fell into three categories:

1. On-set production

Initially I thought I could create a “push-button” studio, where everything was already set up and automated and all I had to do was sit down in my chair and hit record. This quickly turned out to be a fanciful dream, for a number of reasons.

Conditions change from one day and even one hour to the next: the sun moves, the temperature fluctuates, sources of noise come and go. Every video also has different requirements, from where I’m sitting or standing to what I’m wearing to which devices I’m using.

Despite having the support of an on-set producer, I still needed to learn how light worked, including how the shutter speed, aperture size, and ISO settings influenced each other and how to adjust them dynamically based on what I was trying to accomplish in a given segment. I had to learn how sound worked, such as how far away the mic should be from my mouth, how to adjust the gain so it’s not too high or too low, and what effect my decisions would have down the line when the editors loaded up the files I’d created. 

Likewise, I needed to learn to always work from a checklist (such as the one below, about how to ensure our cameras wouldn’t overheat) rather than relying on memory, because one wrong setting could make hours of footage unusable. Checklists also ensured any given job could easily be handed off to someone else, so no one person became the bottleneck.

2. On-camera performance

I’d spent years creating content for the Internet at this point, but it had been primarily in the form of writing, either on Twitter or my blog. I thus had a rude awakening when I realized that communicating a message on camera required a radically different level of energy.

It wasn’t just that I needed to be more lively and animated for video. It went far beyond that. There is so much more being communicated in video form: my body language and hand gestures and posture; my emotions and vulnerability; my facial expressions and eye movements; my tone of voice, diction, pacing, and volume. Even the words I used and the structure of sentences had to change, from long-winded and technically precise to punchy and emotionally resonant. All this while reading from a teleprompter, and trying to “act natural.”

I still have a lot to learn on this front to be honest, as it isn’t natural for me to be effusively charismatic on command. I’d also like to move away from word-for-word scripts and incorporate more spontaneity and improvisation into my delivery, as that seems to result in more engaging, natural performances.

3. YouTube strategy

One of the most pervasive and damaging misconceptions I held about YouTube, and one that many creators seem to share, is that “All you have to do is create great videos and the audience will come.”

As much as I would love that to be true, this attitude fails to capture a crucial aspect of the platform: that the algorithm is everything. I’ve never paid much attention to algorithms, never optimized my content for SEO, and never tried to pursue “trending topics,” so this pains me to admit, but it’s plainly true.

When you see two of your videos – both of which you’ve invested similar amounts of time and attention into and which you believe offer important and valuable ideas – but one gets picked up by the algorithm and receives hundreds of thousands of views while the other merely thousands, it really forces you to stop and reconsider. YouTube makes it so excruciatingly clear which videos are succeeding and which are not, with so much precise data about every possible metric of success, it forces you to reckon very directly with the “why” behind each video.

If I was creating videos as an art form, or for the pure pleasure of it, it wouldn’t matter whether they were boosted by an algorithm. But the entire point of growing our YouTube channel is to expand the reach of my message, so it absolutely does matter how many people see it. If I believe a video’s message is important, and that by “packaging” it in a certain way I can have 100x the reach and thus 100x the impact, why would I not do everything in my power to make sure it gets seen by as many people as possible? Any other attitude, I believe, is a matter of stubborn pride.

This realization has led me to seriously study the “strategy” of YouTube – that is, the often secret or subtle tactics, techniques, and creative decisions that the algorithm looks for when deciding which videos to send to the stratosphere. For example, how to design a title and thumbnail that attracts a click, how to write an introduction and hook that keeps them watching past the first few seconds, and how to structure a video to maximize retention across different segments. 

Despite countless lessons learned, I have to admit that this is still the area where we need to grow the most. I still don’t really see myself as a YouTuber, am not immersed in the nitty gritty details of the platform every day, and as a result, it’s been a challenge to acquire the rapidly evolving “insider knowledge” that the most successful YouTubers seem to thrive on.

Marc decided to move on from Forte Labs in July 2023, capping off an incredible run of 31 videos that were watched over 5.7 million times, or over 183,000 views on average per video (compared to 7,800 views per video on average during my previous DIY era, a 23x improvement). Astonishingly, our channel attracted 392,000 hours of watch time during this period, or more than half a human lifespan. We added 161,000 subscribers in two years, or 6,700 per month (versus 243 per month on average during the previous era, a 27x acceleration). 

My hypothesis – that by making large investments of time and money we could rapidly level up every metric on our channel – was strongly vindicated.

(Marc now runs his own solo YouTube agency working directly with business owners, authors, and creators to launch their channels using many of the techniques and workflows he developed at Forte Labs – if you’d like to partner with him on your YouTube strategy, go here!)

The Factory Era (2023–2024)

In the summer of 2023 I was faced with a huge challenge: continuing to make high-quality YouTube videos without the creative lead who had driven the whole process forward up until that point.

And even though our creative director left the company on good terms and with a clear handoff, it was at this moment I realized the downside of having a point person who I’d completely delegated creative direction and project management to: key man risk, in which the departure of one person endangers a whole line of business. I realized it was time to create a more structured, predictable, and transparent process for our video creation.

We started by restructuring the team, putting our head of marketing and content Julia Saxena in charge of all YouTube efforts and bringing our two video editors and other contractors into direct contact with the rest of the core team (they had operated independently and outside our normal communication channels up until then). 

I was surprised to find this required a lengthy acculturation process, as they didn’t have a lot of context around the ways we worked, our values and priorities, and what was going on in the rest of the business. That isolation had allowed them to work in a focused, distraction-free way, but I could see they now needed to come into alignment and synchronize their efforts with ours.

We instituted a weekly all-hands meeting every Tuesday morning to talk through all things YouTube: which videos were coming up, the progress of already filmed videos, metrics and feedback on videos we’d recently released, and sharing lessons about titles, thumbnails, editing, and many other aspects of the craft. This ensured that ideas and insights were flowing between the three main parts of the company: marketing/content, operations/product, and YouTube.

Here’s what the team looked like once we integrated YouTube as a core function of the company:

During the prior two years of our “startup” era, the video team had worked in a relatively unstructured way, treating each video as a bespoke project being created more or less from scratch. This resulted in extremely successful videos from a creative and metrics standpoint, but also meant I had little visibility into our production process, such as which videos were planned or underway, which stage of post-production they were at, and most of all, when I could expect the next video to be released, with timelines ranging from two weeks to two months. This meant it was difficult to coordinate promotion across our newsletter and social media to give it the best possible chance of succeeding.

I’ve noticed this principle repeatedly: the factors that make one era successful become the weaknesses and blindspots of the following one. Conversely, the weaknesses of one era become the greatest opportunities and areas of growth for the following one. Like a pendulum swinging from one extreme to the other, we decided to pivot away from bespoke videos guided by a singular vision toward collaborative videos guided by a predictable process. 

This meant primarily focusing on two things during the subsequent 12 months of the Factory Era: adding predictability and visibility to our process.

To enhance predictability, we decided to stick unwaveringly to a two-week video release schedule going forward – every Thursday morning, 9 am ET. This unlocked several benefits:

• It provided a predictable cadence to synchronize all the moving pieces and contributors at various stages of a video’s lifecycle.
• It gave us a lot of lead time before each video’s release, allowing us to promote them across all our channels and with extra collateral like lead magnets or bonus resources.
• It forced us to lower our standards and ship a video to meet the next deadline, instead of spending an indeterminate period of time polishing it to perfection.
• It made it easier to compare metrics between videos and across time, as well as more accurately calculate the ROI of each video.
• Our publishing schedule was mapped out far in advance, allowing us to schedule around vacations, PTO, holidays and other events, and seasons of the year.

Once each video’s release date was fixed on the calendar, everything else needed to hit that deadline also became predictable. To hit publish on Thursday, we knew when we needed to have an initial A-cut, and then a B-cut, and then a title and thumbnail, and then a final review. This told us when we were behind schedule long before it became a crisis, and allowed us to tweak and tune our schedule to align with weekends and staff availability.

To gain visibility into our pipeline, we worked to thoroughly document every aspect of our production process in ClickUp. Having a “single source of truth” that everyone could see also unlocked a number of benefits:

• We now had dedicated documents for ongoing ideation around titles, thumbnails, video concepts, formats, insights, feedback, and analysis of our metrics, so we always knew where to look for these things.
• People could be assigned to specific videos and specific stages, and receive an email notification the minute a new milestone was reached and a video handed off to them.
• All comments, feedback, and decisions were centralized in comments that anyone could see, ensuring that key information wasn’t siloed away in 1-to-1 communication channels.
• Clickup allowed us to work in a highly iterative, collaborative, and asynchronous way among many people both internal and external, while minimizing meetings.

Looking back over the last year, we’ve seen substantial improvement across a variety of metrics. Comparing only videos released during the Startup versus Factory eras:

• Our subscriber growth rate grew from 6,737/mo to 7,428/mo, a 10% improvement
• Views per month grew from 80,110/mo to 107,923/mo, a 35% improvement (although the average number of views per video 30 days after publication went down, from 62,020 to 51,803)
• Our click-through rate (a measure of what percentage of people click on our thumbnails) grew slightly from 4.2% to 4.5%
• Average View Duration has remained basically unchanged, from 3:50 to 3:52 minutes
• We reduced the number of days needed to produce each video from 28 to 13 days on average, doubling our publishing cadence

And of course, all cumulative metrics have improved as the “back catalog” of our channel grows and compounds over time:

• Watch time grew from 16,355 hours per month to 28,052 hours per month across all videos, a 72% improvement
• AdSense revenue went from $1,326/mo to $2,067/mo, a 56% increase

We’ve found significant savings on the cost side as well:

• Total YouTube costs declined from $14,406/mo to $11,493/mo, a 20% decrease
• Cost per Subscriber (how much we spend to acquire each new subscriber) decreased from $7.63 to $4.71, a 38% drop
• Cost per View (how much we spend per view) decreased from $0.11 to $0.05, a 55% drop
• We cut the average cost per video by more than half, from $11,146 to $5,094

My takeaways from these results are two-fold:

1. The steady cadence of a new video released every two weeks, produced using a highly predictable and transparent workflow, is a powerful forcing function for consistency and keeping our rate of learning high
2. However, seeing as how the most important metrics (click-through rate, average duration viewed, and views per video at 30 days) are all unchanged or with only very slight improvements, this suggests that we’re not improving the essential quality of our videos, as defined by YouTube

In other words, while we successfully made the transition from “startup mode” to “factory mode” in terms of our internal production process, we’re only treading water when it comes to the value we provide our viewers. And since everything on YouTube is designed for rapid growth, merely maintaining our performance is at best a mediocre outcome.

The Underlying Business

Since I began investing heavily in YouTube over the last few years, the question of return-on-investment has become paramount. No matter how successful our channel is, it can’t be justified or sustained unless it contributes to the bottom line of the business.

Starting with the top of our funnel, it’s very clear that YouTube audience growth is in a category all its own, far outpacing all other active platforms including our two primary ones, X and the newsletter:

The overall Forte Labs audience across all platforms has grown from 13,600 in March 2020 to 578,000 in June 2024, a 42x increase. 264,215 of those followers came from YouTube, or 47%, meaning that YouTube alone has accounted for almost half our audience growth since 2020.

In terms of financial results, the channel has made $517,955 in revenue over the last four years, across the following 6 monetization sources (the two tiny slices are book sales made directly through YT Shopping, and YT Premium payments; course referrals are inferred by asking customers where they heard about us):

In terms of costs, we’ve spent $483,651, including $345,734 during the Startup Era to get the new system up and running:

Plus $$11,493 in monthly recurring expenses on average during the subsequent Factory Era, or $137,917 over 12 months:

In other words, over the last 3 years in which we’ve invested seriously into YouTube, we’ve spent $483,651 and made $517,955, for a profit of $34,304.

These numbers represent a paradox for me: on the one hand, they are probably in the top 0.01% of all YouTubers. To make a profit from content creation at all is a rare thing. And yet, from a business perspective, it’s quite unimpressive. For the amount of time and effort we’ve all had to put in, $952 in profit per month is a meager sum.

I continue to do it anyway for a couple main reasons:

• These numbers can’t fully capture the value that YouTube provides to me personally, to our team creatively, and to the wider business in terms of audience growth, goodwill, and expanding the reach of our message
• YouTube is a long-term play, expanding our sphere of possibilities for the future in ways we can’t currently imagine and opening doors we don’t even know exist

I’ve repeatedly found that our YouTube following can be leveraged for other, seemingly unrelated pursuits. For example, when we started outreach for potential sponsors for our first in-person conference, the Second Brain Summit, being able to include a sponsored video in our proposals made them much more attractive. If I ever land a TV show, the track record and viewership of our YouTube channel will be a pivotal part of it.

That said, I continue to find my much more highly involved role in our video production challenging. My natural inclination is to obsess and pour myself into it, but I’m constrained from doing so both for lifestyle reasons and, more importantly, because I don’t want to create a system with myself as the central element. I don’t want to build a successful channel that I can never take a break or walk away from – that cost is too steep, so I’m trying to find another way, with the team at the center.

The Next Era (2024–?)

In August 2024, I moved with my family to Valle de Bravo, a small town outside Mexico City. Our desire is to embrace a slower pace of life, immerse our two kids in the Spanish language, and focus on writing my next book (I announced the move, fittingly, as part of a “life update” YouTube video).

That move also represented the end of one YouTube era and the beginning of a new one, because it means I no longer have easy access to our home studio in LA. I’ll need to find a way to continue planning and recording videos while in a remote location, while also respecting the limits of family time and my desire to focus mostly on writing.

But there’s another, much more important reason it’s time to embark on a new era, which has been very hard for me to accept: it’s time for us to fully embrace, immerse ourselves in, and master the intricate and subtle strategy of YouTube algorithm-driven growth. 

We focused on the internal-facing and operational aspects of our YouTube process over the last year, which yielded strong results on the backend. But from what I’ve learned recently at YouTube-centric events like VidCon, and from talking to and listening to the YouTubers I look up to, our next frontier will be about leveling up the viewer-centric aspects of our videos – the curiosity-provoking, retention-enhancing, and virality-creating aspects that determine whether our videos get watched by a few thousand people, or a few hundred thousand, or even millions.

It’s taken me a long time to internalize the importance of virality on YouTube, mostly because I never paid attention to it on any other platform. For years I tweeted daily, never thinking about what was trending or what people wanted to see. Same thing on the blog: I never looked at the analytics, only writing about what I thought was interesting and important based on my own curiosity.

But YouTube is an altogether different beast. The algorithm is all-powerful, determining which videos will be targeted at likely viewers and aggressively boosted, and which will languish in obscurity, like a temperamental god deciding which of his subjects will perish in obscurity and which will be exalted to the heavens. If the algorithm’s divine judgment resulted in a 10% or 20% difference in viewership it wouldn’t matter so much, but in reality it’s more like a 10-100x difference, or even more. Our least viewed videos only receive a few thousand views, whereas our most successful receive more than 500,000, despite the fact that we’re spending similar amounts of time, money, and effort on them.

The artist in me wants nothing more than to ignore the importance of algorithmic growth. It offends my creative sensibilities, as I hate catering to the crowd and maximizing hype. That attitude works fine when it comes to my writing, because I enjoy doing it for its own sake, because writing is more about evergreen ideas that stand the test of time, and because writing is essentially free to produce.

But videos are different on all three counts: I don’t really love doing them for their own sake, they don’t really stand the test of time, and are quite expensive to produce. It’s hard for me to ignore the distribution element when each video is costing me about $5,000. Each one needs to have a return, to make an impact, otherwise what’s the point of making them at all?

This leads me to conclude that it’s time for the pendulum to swing back the other way. Now that we’ve built a finely tuned machine for spitting out high-quality videos, it’s time to return to the more subjective, subtle, strategic aspects of video making. On YouTube, this specifically means:

• Idea generation, which I’ve learned needs to be a near-constant activity taking place behind the scenes, to ensure that only the top 1% most promising ideas get made.
• Improve and double down on our most successful “formats,” which has become a major trend on the platform recently, as channels become more like TV shows with a highly consistent, repeatable formula that people come to expect and make part of their routines.
• Bigger bets, as video performance tends to be non-linear, meaning a 10% or 20% greater investment of effort might yield a 10-20x greater result; the trick is to know which ideas and videos to put extraordinary investment into, such as by releasing a single video and then only doing follow-ups or a series if it performs well.
• Titles, thumbnails, intros, and hooks, which I’ve learned are an endlessly subtle and rapidly evolving domain whose importance is impossible to overstate.
• Making the filming process enjoyable for me, as that is key to making it sustainable and viewers can always tell whether you’re having fun (this likely means finding someone to record videos in person with me in Mexico, whom I can iterate and improvise with in real time, which I find far more fun).

There’s another constraint I’m facing that adds a challenging wrinkle to this new era: the business is shrinking. 

After peaking around $3 million in revenue in 2021 at the peak of the pandemic, and plateauing at around $2 million the last two years, in 2024 we’re likely to see a 30-40% decline, or about $1.2–1.4 million. We’re experiencing the post-pandemic slump faced by many creator businesses these days, the continued impact of discontinuing our flagship cohort-based course last year, and significant headwind from the rise of Artificial Intelligence both in terms of lower search traffic and a lot of the enthusiasm around PKM shifting to AI.

As a result, I’ve had to let go of several team members, effectively reducing the team to the smallest core group necessary to send out our newsletter, support our courses and membership, and produce YouTube videos, while also giving me the time and space to write books.

Open questions for the next era

These are the five questions I’m currently grappling with, the answers to which will define the next few years of our channel.

How can we optimize for public metrics while keeping personal enjoyment high?

This obviously isn’t a binary choice, and any long-term successful channel requires some of both. But I’m considering where on the spectrum we should lie, between extrinsic motivators like viewership, subscriber count, and revenue, and intrinsic motivators like curiosity, pleasure, and making videos I think are important even if they don’t perform well.

This also affects the kinds of ideas we produce. From a metrics standpoint, we should probably only make videos that are directly Second Brain-related, as that is what I am by far the most known for. But my interests and curiosity lead me in many directions, and I don’t think I can stomach churning out such videos endlessly.

What is my relationship and level of obsession toward YouTube?

Veteran YouTuber Samir recently said in a video, “To do YouTube right requires all of you…your constant obsessive attention.” I see this attitude reflected in all the biggest names on the platform. They live and breathe all things YouTube, and it defines who they spend their time with, how they spend their days, and even their personalities and beliefs.

But this is where my background comes into play: I didn’t start as a YouTuber, especially not the classic profile of an early 20-something obsessing over videos 24/7. I don’t even particularly like consuming content in video form. I’m nearly 40 years old, have two kids, and a wonderful business that already sustains me financially and artistically. I don’t feel the pressure to “make it” on YouTube as a jumping off point for the rest of my career, nor am I interested in any of the negative effects of that level of obsession on my lifestyle, my health, my family, or my other interests.

At the same time, I don’t want to “phone it in” and do subpar work. I’ve always believed that if something is worth doing at all, it’s worth doing well. In this paradox I see an experiment: for me to learn what it looks like to produce extraordinary outcomes without my time and effort as the primary input. I know that I have the capability to accomplish anything if I put my mind to it, but what does it look like to reach the same, or even greater, levels of accomplishment by harnessing a team and systems instead?

I think that is the current frontier of my growth as a founder, a CEO, and a leader, which is why I’m purposely holding back from throwing my entire being into YouTube and learning to depend on the team instead.

What are the video formats that work best for us?

We’ve experimented with many different formats over the last few years, and these are the ones that seem to have worked best:

• Case studies of Second Brain setups/workflows: Showcases of real-life applications of a Second Brain and PKM tools
• Techniques: Notetaking and productivity techniques that the viewer can use right away
• App and tool walkthroughs/reviews/reactions: Which apps Tiago uses and how; help viewers decide which app is right for them and get started with their choice
• AI: How Tiago and our team use AI tools, what impact AI will have, the overall mindset to deal with this shift
• Expressing yourself/becoming a creator: About the ultimate purpose of a Second Brain, what different ways of expressing yourself look like, how to become a creator or realize the potential of your creativity

My question is to what extent and how we should continue doubling down on and evolving these proven formats, or branch out into new ones that have more potential in the future. 

How can we engage with our audience to incorporate their feedback into our work? How can we learn what our audience wants?

One thing I’ve noticed from spending time with successful YouTubers is how incredibly close to their audiences they are. They interact frequently through comments and the community feed, among other venues. They often consume the same content and are part of the same online circles. They have a lot of inside jokes and subculture knowledge in common. Most of all, the best YouTubers are extremely sensitive to the slightest desires and shifts in perception among their viewers.

While I don’t necessarily want to be subject to our subscribers’ every whim, I do think this is an area I am weak in because I didn’t “grow up” on YouTube. I don’t have that much interaction with my viewers, and have chosen to cultivate the hermit life of a writer instead. I think there’s significant room for improvement in how we expose ourselves as a team to our audience, but am not sure how to do that without changing how I spend my time, which I don’t want to do.

How can we better measure how YouTube is driving business results? 

The most challenging contradiction of the last year has been watching our channel grow to unprecedented new heights, and receiving so much praise for that success, while at the same time, watching the underlying business decline.

As exciting as it is to watch our “top of funnel” grow so much, it means nothing if it’s not measurably contributing to the underlying business that makes it all possible. If profit is the permission to keep going, we’re not currently gaining that permission from the marketplace. Something needs to shift.

This could mean improving conversion rates to our courses and other products, doubling down on sponsorships, or other avenues, but I would say we haven’t yet found the business model that works for us long term on YouTube.

Our new (old) vision

What is my grandest vision for what our YouTube channel could become?

This isn’t particularly measurable or objective, but my vision is simply to change the culture. Specifically, the culture around notetaking, reading, learning, productivity, and creativity. To make those subjects more accessible and less daunting. To open up many new entry points for different kinds of people to harness them, whether via technology or otherwise. Creating a profitable business is just a stepping stone to carry us toward that vision.

This vision remains unchanged from its first articulation on the blog two years ago: “To build an open-source Library of Alexandria for the PKM world.” I’ve learned so much about what it will actually take to achieve that vision, and I can now see it’s a much longer and harder road than I first naively envisioned. But I’m also more inspired and dedicated to it than ever.

YouTube is the world’s most important media platform, with more than 114 million active YouTube channels publishing 2,500 new videos every minute, all competing to reach 2.6 billion monthly active users in over 100 countries. I continue to believe we should have a horse in that race, and make our best attempt at shifting the perception and behavior around some of the most important facets of a 21st century undergoing rapid, daunting change.

As I write this, we’ve been living in a small town in Mexico for a week. In that time, two people have recognized me. In both cases, it wasn’t for my blog, or my books, or my newsletter, or my X posts. It was from my YouTube channel, where they said they had learned from me how to organize their information and make use of it.

These anecdotes are more meaningful to me than any quantifiable metric. They are signs that I’m escaping the confines of my niche, going beyond the narrow subculture of productivity bros, and having an impact on people who might never otherwise have access to such powerful ideas. 

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