Building To 1.9 Million YouTube Followers w/Japreet Singh
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My YouTube channel, even if I have a million subscribers, it's not a business. I mean, yeah, it makes good money, but if I die, the business is dead. But the reason why I love YouTube and I really recommend it for entrepreneurs is because it gives you the freedom to screw up and not have to pay dire consequences. When you have a YouTube channel and you want to start a business idea, you can use your YouTube channel to fund your business idea, test your business idea. You got the beta testers and kind of potential customers here.

And if we screw up, you can try another product. Yeah, yeah. If you could go back five, ten years, talk to yourself, what would you really teach and what do you want the audience to walk away with? If I was starting over, I would think the first thing is understanding

My name's Rudy Moore, host of Living the Red Life podcast, and I'm here to change the way you see your life in your earpiece every single week. If you're ready to start living the red life, ditch the blue pill, take the red pill, join me in Wonderland and change your life. Guys, welcome back to another episode of Living the Red Life. Today, we're going to talk about YouTube and how to crush your finances and manage them properly as an entrepreneur. And

And we're going to combine both of those things into one episode. We have Jaspreet on today. He's done both of those things and he's an expert at both of those things. Welcome to the show, buddy. Well, thank you for having me on. It's really an honor to be on with you.

Yes. And when I said you're an expert, just to give context, nearly 2 million people on YouTube that you've grown organically, super active channel where you do the second part of what I mentioned, which is teaching everyday people and entrepreneurs how to manage their finances, which I love because no one teaches financial management to entrepreneurs as I know you know. And I always say, and I think it's pretty famous saying these days that

When you start out, the hardest thing is making money. And then when you make a few million, the hardest thing is keeping and managing that money. Right? Oh, yeah. No, that's 100% true. And that's what got me started on this journey was a little bit on accident because I grew up in a traditional Indian house where the whole idea of entrepreneurship and financial education was really kind of frowned upon. Yeah.

wanted to start a business. I was middle school, high school. My parents were very much against it because they said that I needed to become a doctor. Like they were very kind of traditional that I had to become a doctor. So all the entrepreneurial ventures that I did were in secret. And then when I started investing my money, I had to kind of do that in secret as well, because my parents really wanted me to focus on becoming a doctor.

And long story short, I did not become a doctor. I went to law school, graduated law school, became an attorney, but I never worked a day as an attorney because I was fortunate enough to see success from my business and the investments that I had. So I'm a licensed attorney. People know me for my YouTube channel, but my YouTube channel is actually my hobby. Most of my time is spent running my business, which is Briefs Media.

Great. And, you know, I mean, there's a few things already unpackaged because, you know, not the same upbringing as you, but I came from a small town in England where no one understands money. Entrepreneurship isn't even a thing. I don't think people know what that phrase was 20 years ago. Yeah.

Yeah.

And now I think life's so much easier because I'm with the right people in the right environment. And, you know, I'm sure for you it was a challenge. So firstly, congrats on managing to kind of break out of that and build everything you build. And obviously a big part of what you do is YouTube. And I would love to dive into that. You've done an amazing job, 2 million followers and a really active channel. Can you talk a little about the growth of that?

Yeah, so I publish a video on the Minority Mindset channel one day a week. I also have a clips channel where we publish a video one day a week. So it's smaller forms of my same videos. And then we also have a Spanish version of my Minority Mindset channel where we also publish a video one day a week. So it's a lot of content. And I don't go out and create

three different pieces of video for every channel every day. Instead, what I do is I create one piece of content for my main Minority Mindset channel, and then that gets republished into a lot of different places. So, you know, when you talk about the growth, one thing that really bugs me is when people say you got to work on the SEO, you got to work on the tags, you got to work on the thumbnail, and all those things are good.

But what I like to say is, you know, follow the 80-20 rule. All those things, the little details, the titles, the thumbnails, all these things are the 20%. It's the icing on the top.

versus the main meat, the main thing of what you do is how good your content is. Is it something that people actually give value out of? Is it something that people actually watch? And this is something that they would want to share with their friends and their coworkers and their family. Is that what your content is? Because if you have a horrible title, you have a horrible thumbnail, but it's amazing content that people actually want to watch,

I believe you're going to get way further than if you have the best title, best thumbnail, but a really crappy piece of content. Yeah, I think it's the same. Like I teach a lot, like on general social media, Instagram, all these things and creating ads and all these things. And, you know, it's funny how in life and business that overall arching principle continues, right? So like with Facebook ads, right, I came up as an expert. Like that's kind of how I got my start was teaching that.

I've spent up to 200, 250 grand a day on Facebook ads. I've been doing it over 10 years, seen as one of the top experts. And everyone wants to know, Rudy, what's the one setting that's going to blow up my Facebook ads, right? And I'm like, guys, I can teach my assistant, my wife, my best friend, my mom how to set up a Facebook ad in 20 minutes. That doesn't really matter. What matters is the funnel, the landing page, the brand, the hook, the offer.

the foundations of your business, right? And I kind of ignored YouTube most of my entrepreneurial life and I really wanted to dive into it the last year or two.

And so I hired a ton of experts, consultants, paid a bunch of money because I learned over my 12 years of doing this, like you can shortcut success if you get a lot of wisdom up front. Right. And I learned a lot and kind of really got a lay of the land. And yeah, everything came back to like, if you're making content that people want to watch, then not only do they watch it, they watch it till the end and they share it with their friends. The algorithms are pretty much all the same on every social platform that

content is king and great viral content will always win. And then, you know, all those little things maybe come after, right? 100%. I mean, if you can master the content, everything else will come into play. And I 100% agree that

You can shorten the path to where you want to go by investing in learning. And that might be studying what other people are doing, buying books, buying classes, or whatever it might be. If you can study what other people do, you can shorten that path. And there's a lot of content on the internet out there. Learn, learn, learn, listen to podcasts, watch what people are doing. I mean, there's so much information out there.

Yeah, and I like to, my background was a sports scientist. So I became a researcher. I have a master's degree in exercise science. And unlike you, I think I got three years of using my degree before I switched to industries totally. So I got a little longer, a little better value for money than you. But, you know, what has stayed with me of that is I love to research and then reverse engineer, right? So I love to like pay all these consultants that go on this YouTube binge

Because now I love to watch like a top YouTuber and really reverse engineer like, wow, there's the first five seconds and how they did that and how they, you know, hook someone in that something's coming a bit later and just, yeah. And that's the, that's the scientist in me. And it's like being in a lab playing and testing things. Right. Okay. And the interesting thing about that and the YouTube space in particular is, you know, is,

many times, and I kind of went down the same route, is you can end up thinking and become the business itself on YouTube, which is dangerous to an extent. Because YouTube has a unique platform, unlike Instagram, where if you put out good content on YouTube and you go viral, you can make a lot of money on YouTube. I mean, you can start making AdSense, you can start doing sponsorships. And now you can run into this conundrum that

you want to really think about what is your business. And I had the same thought because I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur. And when I started to see more success on YouTube, I started to do more and more of that. But the problem was I realized,

is my YouTube channel, even if I have a million subscribers, it's not a business. I mean, yeah, it makes good money, but if I die, the business is dead. I mean, the channel is gone. I mean, I know it's kind of an extreme example, but my family then is going to see their checks start to go down because if I'm not putting out new videos, the YouTube channel is not also making more money.

So then I have to think about it from the perspective of, well, what do I do with this money? And there's really a few things that I could do. Number one is I can take this money that I make from YouTube and I can use it to buy a nice car, use it to buy us a nice home, buy some fancy vacations, which gives me the lifestyle. But I essentially just created my own job where I can make a lot of money and spend a lot of money and live a great life. But if I don't

Make more money, but I'm screwed. It's that I make a lot of money and spend a lot of money mentality. Like a high-paid Italian. A high-paid, exactly. And you see it with high-paid employees and high-paid business owners, it's the same thing. Option number two is I can take this money from YouTube and then use it to buy real estate, rental properties. I can use it to buy stocks, which is something that I was doing and I still do.

But it didn't fulfill my kind of entrepreneurial itch. Like when you are an entrepreneur, then you just have like this, there's something that you have to create. Exactly. You need to build something. There's a different need there.

And so for me, that was when I kind of dabbled into what is that thing for me? And the nice thing about YouTube and the reason why I love YouTube and I really recommend it for entrepreneurs is because it gives you the freedom to screw up and not have to pay dire consequences. And I'll give you an example. My first thought was I need to get diversified from YouTube.

So I then started investing in building the Minority Mindset blog. So I hired some people. I hired the best blog consultant in the world. I wrote them a six-figure check, and we had hired a number of writers as well. And I said, all right, you guys lead the blog. I'm just going to make YouTube content. And then when we build this blog, we will be able to generate affiliate traffic, ad traffic, whatever, sponsor traffic and revenue.

And two years and $500,000 later, we were making next to no money and had no real kind of vision. And so I shut that down and I realized if I want to build something, I have to be involved. And it's not as simple as just dumping money into something. So that was when kind of what related to me was

building market briefs, which is my free financial newsletter where we cover what's happening in the markets. And the nice thing about this was it very much related to what I was talking about on my YouTube channel. It was like a supplement to my YouTube channel.

Because I was talking all about personal finance. How do you invest your money? What is investing? What's happening in the economy? What's the Federal Reserve Bank? What are these interest rates? What's happening with inflation? So I'm talking about all these things. But if somebody wants to stay up to date on what's happening in the financial markets with a quick five-minute read, well, then you can join Market Briefs, which is this newsletter.

And this was started originally by me just talking about it on my YouTube channel. And that kind of brought in the first 250,000 or so readers. And I didn't have to pay any money to acquire these leads, these readers, these subscribers, whatever word you want to call it. I was able to promote it onto my YouTube channel.

which then was the foundation for building this business, which then allowed us to grow and then scale beyond my YouTube channel through paid advertising and other things like that. But the point that I want to make is when you have a YouTube channel and you want to start a business idea, you can use your YouTube channel to fund your business idea, test your business idea. You got the beta testers and kind of potential customers here. And if you screw up,

you could try another product. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's a great testing ground. Yeah, I see that. And I think, you know, the great thing about YouTube too is that I was saying this when I was talking about podcasting too because I think they're hand in hand that people are spending a lot of time with you, right? And I've

I've learned over 10 years, there's a massive correlation and value with the amount of time a customer spends with you. So like if you can get them on YouTube, watching 10, 20, 30 minute videos on a podcast, listening for 20, 30, 45 hour long episodes, it's

It's pretty incredible what it can do for your brand over time. And I think all the podcasters and all the YouTubers get this, that it's like what I call top of funnel. It should be content driven. You're not trying to sell. You're trying to add tons of value. And I always teach like the goal with content in my eyes is make it so good that it's the equivalent to what other people would charge as a course. Right. And if you do that, they owe you a favor versus you just asking and trying to sell, um,

And I think that's like one of the key rules, I mean, for YouTube, I feel, is that over-delivering of value. 100%. And

It's the competition of value. I mean, why are people are going to watch your video, your piece of content, your podcast versus somebody else's and you want to make it valuable, get to the point, value somebody's time and give them something interesting, teach them something. And I, and I mean all the good YouTubers also one mistake I do see entrepreneurs make is like, I had to get much better at this as an educator over the last 10 years and speaking precisely, making it practical, not waffling. Um,

And making sure you've got continuous value, right? Because I think when we all start, we waffle and talk our mind. And it can, you know, sometimes you can get away with that. But over time, you learn, like, especially YouTubers. I think you guys are world-class as a YouTuber at, like, retention, right? And looking at, okay, did I waffle for seven minutes here and maybe lose the audience? Should I have edited that out and cut to...

a takeaway but I do think YouTubers are like world class at retention can you talk a little about like lessons tips for retention in content I think it's so important and the algorithms are so weighted on it in my opinion as well

Yeah. So we used to internally look at something called VPI value or sorry, VPN value per minute. And then we changed that to value per second because of what you just said. A few years ago, you know, you could look at longer periods of time, but now with TikTok, YouTube shorts, that attention span keeps becoming shrunk. Now, here's the thing. That doesn't mean that

You can't have longer form videos, longer form content where you dive deeper into something. It means you got to make sure you hook somebody and you got to make sure you got somebody interested and keep talking about something. So, you know, YouTube, just like any other social platform, they want to keep people on their platform for as long as possible because the longer somebody is on YouTube, the more money that YouTube is going to make, the more money you're going to make.

And there's two different kind of routes that you can go with this on YouTube particularly. You can go the YouTube Shorts route, you can go the long-form YouTube route. And the YouTube Shorts route is kind of like TikTok. It's nice. You can get a lot of views quickly. You can get viral. But the problem is...

the retention of any one of those users is very difficult and it's very hard to convert anybody there into something more because it's such a quick hit and they don't build that real... I call it like transactional, right? It's transactional and like you're giving them a drip of adrenaline they need in the middle of the day or like 10 seconds to break their attention, but it's not loyalty like a 20-minute YouTube video. 100%.

And so in that 20 minute YouTube video, it doesn't have to be like a stream of TikToks where you just hit them with sentinels, you're going to burn somebody out with that too. But what it means is now if it's a 20 minute video, you got to get somebody interested in the first seven seconds and then keep the mistrust into the first 60 seconds. Because if you can do that, now they're much more likely to stay past the first 10 minutes.

Now, not everybody's going to watch all 20 minutes, but if you can get them to watch 10 minutes, that's still really good. I mean, that's a lot of TikToks. 10 minutes of TikToks is a lot. So that's what you want to be aiming for. But in order to get somebody to watch 10 minutes of this 20 minute video, you got to make sure the first seven seconds are interesting and that they interest the person.

And so that's really ultimately where it comes down to, just like with any paid ad, it's what's the hook? What's the idea? What's the thing that you're going to speak to somebody about and then elaborate upon it within the next 53 seconds. So the first 60 seconds are really crucial. And if you can keep somebody, now you can start to go a little bit deeper and start to talk about it more and just stay focused on what the topic is. There's a book, it's

Completely separate to this, but there's a book by the guy at Wolf of Wall Street. What's his name? Jordan. Yeah. He's got a book called The Straight Line Method, which is a sales book. But the interesting thing, though, it works well for content as well, because what he talks about is when you're trying to go from here to a sale,

Focus on the straightest line to the sale. And what he wants you to avoid is stop talking about random stuff. Stop talking about golfing and what's happening in the latest football game. That's completely irrelevant to the sale. And with content, it's similar to

But stay focused. I'll see people make a video about, let's just say, investing in money. And then they'll go on a 60 second tangent about their vacation with their wife, which really isn't that relevant to the video. If we can tie it in, great.

If you can't make it relevant and you're just telling stories just because you're telling stories, it doesn't make, I mean, save that for a makeup channel where it's get ready with me and now people are just following you for your personality. But if you're trying to educate somebody, focus on the education and keep it valuable with spurts of, you know, that kind of

personality. Yeah. And I think all around it. I think the personality can work if it's like a financial tip that allowed you to make $22,000 to go on vacation with your wife. Right. But it has to like link and come back to the main topic quickly. And that's where the waffling comes in. So, uh, yeah. So I, just to recap where we've gone so far, like, cause there's already been a ton of nuggets and stuff that we've talked about with YouTube, like

You know, I always emphasize in everything I teach, the first five seconds is everything. If not, you've lost everyone. You said seven. So I love that. So we're pretty much aligned there. You've got to hook them in. I also love the tip about once you've got them for 60 seconds, you can probably get more into the meat and potatoes then and really start, you know, getting on with the content because they're likely to stay as long as you keep coming back to it.

I would love to, you know, maybe we'll save the whole finance talk for a second episode because we're down to the last few minutes. But in those last few minutes, I would love to like ask you this question. So I always ask experts this. If you could go back five, 10 years, talk to yourself and give yourself, you know, three, four, five tips for starting your YouTube all over again. What would you really teach and what do you want the audience to walk away with?

And if I was starting over, I would think the first thing is understanding what is a lead magnet and use more of them in the beginning. Because my channel, I don't know how many times it's been viewed, but let's just say about 100 million times. It's been more than that. And when I was starting out, all my businesses were not really digital. It was completely different. So imagine having 50 million subscribers.

organic views and not knowing how to monetize it beyond just having a penny per view. So yeah, it's the opposite, right? I was the marketer that learned funnels and ads 12 years ago. And then I had to learn how to grow an audience. I didn't have to keep running for everything I did. And I meet a lot of creators where, you know, and some of them are business funders now and a lot of clients where they have

5 million followers and they're like, Rudy, I only make half a million a year in AdSense. And I'm like, dude, if I had 5 million followers on YouTube, I'd make 5 million a year, right? Because you come from this other end of the coin. Right, right.

Exactly. It's something, you know, it's, it's, uh, you put your, you live and you learn and you learn, but yeah. And you have strengths and weaknesses, right? You can't be amazing at everything. And that's where collaboration comes in, right? Like you, or you get with people that know what you need and, and vice versa. So, so I love the, you know, the lead magnet. And I guess for you really, that is like how,

how to build the brand beyond YouTube and have the audience in different platforms and also the diversity of course. And I see that a lot with YouTubers. Like what I help is how to like then build a coaching program around it, products and the email list and all those things. What else would you say? Any other tips on growing the channel if you were starting out? Not being scared to let out my own opinion. I would say that too.

I don't think I've necessarily been scared to, but sometimes, especially in the beginning, you start to really value what the comments say. And then the comments always want you to be vanilla and not have an opinion on what the reality is.

You gotta have your own opinion. Stick to it. That makes the best, the best, you know, creative. I mean, it does. In one way or another, right? I had to learn that too. As a scientist, I was very neutral. Like, oh, it depends. It could do this, but the research isn't like that. I mean,

Some studies showed this, and I learned that was the worst thing to do because people want to hear carbs are the enemy. Don't ever eat carbs again. You've got to go low-carb. And I learned that, wow, you actually have to go more polarized. Yeah, it's just having an opinion. If you're not super polarizing, have an opinion and stick to it. I think that's the most important thing and understanding it's okay that people disagree, and the Internet will. The Internet will always disagree.

Yeah, good. So I love that. So building the ecosystem, having a, you know, a solidified opinion, any sort of channel tips like topics, thumbnails, how much to post? I see that question all the time. I know at the start we talked about, hey, put that to the side and focus on the content. But any sort of tips you've seen there to wrap up today?

If you have something to say it, say it. And secondly, I think in terms of frequency or more beyond frequency, I think the important thing for you to understand if you're creating content is take a look at the last pieces of content that you publish or the last 100 pieces, find the most popular. When you see what is working, do more of that thing. And the reason why many times people don't is because they say, well, I just talked about that two weeks ago.

Well, people are waiting to hear more about it. And if your competitors are talking about it today, they're going to listen to your competitors about it. So don't be scared to talk about a topic again, just because you've talked about it before. Add more to it. Keep building on it because if people like it, they want to hear more about it.

Well, a great example of that, Mr. Beast, right? Like he'll get success of, I lock this person in a bunker, then he'll lock them, put them in an abandoned city, then he'll put them in a nuclear warehouse, then he'll put them in a container, and then he'll put them out at sea on an island, right? Like he's a great example, you know, of someone that he finds success. And if you understand this, you can see it in his channel. He'll find success and then he'll do 10 variations of it.

and get 10x that piece of content. Exactly. Similar content

But if that's what people want, they're going to want to watch it again and again and again. Yep. Yep. Good. Love it. Well, let's have you back for the whole finance side. I do really want to touch on that for the entrepreneurs listening. Just last question. Where do people find you if they want to learn more about you? We'll see the YouTube channel in action one more time for them. Well, thank you for the support, man. If you want to watch out the YouTube channel, it's Minority Mindset on YouTube and socials.

And if you want to check out our free financial newsletter called Market Briefs, you can Google Market Briefs or go to briefs.co.market.

Love it. All right, buddy. Well, we'll bring you back on down the line, the whole finance side. And I, you know, we just kind of got carried away with YouTube because there is so I think we could have probably took for another 30 minutes on YouTube growth. I lose so much, right? Yeah. So but lots of value, guys. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you're trying to grow your YouTube, you got a lot of great tips there to get you started. Thank you so much for coming on and I'll see everyone soon. Keep living the red life. Take care.

Bye.