Host:
What is the most amount of revenue your channels have brought in in one month?

Jake:
That would be somewhere around $320,000. I probably only spent around 4 to 8 hours a week managing all my channels.

Host:
Wow, you're living the life.

Today, we're talking to Jake Tran—a millionaire who makes faceless videos for a living. He’s revealing things that he's never publicly shared before.

Jake:
Yeah, everything changed when I got into all that controversy. So yeah... I don't have any friends.

Host:
I know you'll get a ton of value from his advice.

Jake:
I bought into the lie that consistency is all you need to do. That cannot be further from the truth.

My name is Jake Tran. I'm 26, and I run a few different faceless YouTube channels.

Host:
How did you get into that?

Jake:
I always wanted to do YouTube, but I started out like everyone else—just making videos with me on camera. But back then, I was like 20 or 21 or something like that, and I quickly realized that I didn't have any life experience to talk about on camera.

So that's when I discovered you can do videos where, instead of basing it off your personal experience, you base it off research. You can make a really cool faceless video where you just put B-roll on top of your voiceover. That way, you don't have to be on camera. The videos I put out—they're not limited by my life experience, only by how much I research.

So, I can research a really cool topic like war profiteering and make a video on it, versus me talking about my career or something like that.

Host:
What channels do you run right now?

Jake:
I have my main channel, Jake Tran, which is at 1.8 million subscribers. My other channel is called Evil Food Supply, which has 275,000 subscribers after just a little over a year—super fast growth. Definitely the fastest-growing channel in that niche.

Then, our third channel is called How to Get Away with It—it's a true crime channel that focuses more on the legal side of stuff.

Host:
How did you know you wanted to start doing YouTube?

Jake:
It was always my dream growing up in high school, because YouTube was my main form of entertainment. I thought it was so cool that you could make a career doing stuff from home, just with a camera—or in my case, even without a camera, just a microphone. It was very romanticized in my mind, and it turns out it lives up to the expectations.

Host:
Okay, so let's talk about your childhood. What were you like as a kid?

Jake:
I was always super, super, super quiet. That's just always how it's been. I've never been a big talker. I usually just listened.

In school, I absolutely despised K through 2 because I just never had any friends. I was always a loner, and I never fit into any clique. Like, I didn't fit in with the nerds, I didn't fit in with the anime kids. So, I was just always alone.

Host:
How did that affect who you are today?

Jake:
I think it was the greatest thing that could have ever happened to me, because when you don't have friends, there's naturally less social pressure on you to follow the norm. That's why you see a lot of successful people—they were usually loners growing up.

When you have a bunch of friends, you care about what they think. Now, if I try to do something weird or start a business, they're going to judge me. But I didn't have any of that judgment around me, because I didn't have any friends. So, I think it was the greatest thing that could have happened.

Host:
If you could teleport back to when you were 10 years old and give yourself any piece of advice, what would you say?

Jake:
I would just tell the kid to keep going, because everything happened to work out. If I went back and had friends or whatever, maybe life would have ended up differently. So yeah... don't have any friends. That's my advice.

Host:
Can we break down how you make money with your faceless channels?

Jake:
Yeah, so the biggest revenue stream is going to be sponsors—where companies will pay multiple thousands of dollars just to have a 60- to 90-second ad within your video. My goal is to have every video sponsored, because a video that isn't sponsored is just a waste of digital real estate, in my opinion.

With sponsors, you can make a lot more money than YouTube ads. YouTube ads are probably my second biggest revenue stream. The third is our YouTube membership. For my channel, I set that up so you pay five bucks a month, and you get a private documentary every month that's too controversial to be posted publicly.

That revenue stream is great because I get to make videos I always want to make but probably won't get monetized. And on top of that, it acts as a really good way to make recurring revenue.

Host:
Can you break down the percentages for each of those revenue streams?

Jake:
I want to say sponsors are probably 40 to 50%, YouTube ads are probably like 30 to 40%, and then the rest is the YouTube membership.

Host:
How long did it take you to start making money with YouTube?

Jake:
Back when I was doing the face videos—just me on camera—I was making nothing for pretty much a year. I remember very specifically because YouTube ads only pay you out once you reach like 200 bucks. So it would take me like three months to make $200. For an entire year, I was making $0.

Looking back, the biggest mistake I made was I bought into the lie that consistency is all you need. If you're just consistent, eventually you'll magically blow up. That couldn't be further from the truth.

I believe consistency is the baseline thing everyone needs to do, but if you're just consistent—like posting the same video a million times—if it's a bad video, it's still going to be a bad video that gets no views.

I went for a year straight without really improving my videos, just posting the same thing, hoping I'd magically blow up. It wasn't until I got a lot more strategic and systematic—like "Hey, this is what I'm going to do differently for this next upload"—that I started seeing a lot more results.

Host:
Once you started making faceless videos, how long did it take before you started making actual money?

Jake:
Once I decided I wanted to make these faceless videos, and I found a really good channel idea that was different from everyone else’s—something that hadn't really been done yet—I started making those videos.

I had my first viral video after the third or fourth upload. That just shows the power of finding a really solid channel idea. Most people, when they start, naturally want to copy the other channels they look up to.

Let’s say I copy one of your videos, but I do my research a little bit better than you, and I output a video that is like 10% better than yours. You would think I should get 10% more views than you.

But the problem is, people are already bought into your channel. They know your face, your thumbnails. If my video gets shown on the YouTube homepage next to yours—even if I have a better title, thumbnail, even a better video—your video is going to win every single time.

People will always click on yours because you have the name that people already recognize, the verified badge, and you already have 50K–100K views on that video. Even if my video may objectively be 10% better, it won’t matter.

That would be one of my biggest tips for everyone: You have to really find a good channel idea where you're not directly competing against others. You carve out your own little blue ocean.

Host:
Can you take us through the first few years—when you hit your first 10K month, 50K, 100K?

Jake:
It went really fast.

Once I had that first viral video, I started making a few thousand dollars a month right away. Then, maybe six months in, I was making around 10K a month. I specifically remember hitting 20K–30K a month a few months after that.

You know, Asian parents—their dream is for you to be an engineer or a doctor. The max you can make is maybe $200K–$300K, maybe $500K a year. So I was hitting that right away, and my parents were just blown away.

From there, I plateaued a bit at around 30K. That was when I met my business mentor, Arvid Ali, and he taught me how to outsource everything and scale up my content. That’s when my income really exploded.

I spent the next year of my channel just outsourcing everything: writing the scripts, growing the team. From there, my income went from like 20K–30K a month to 100K–150K a month, even 200K a month. It was pretty crazy.

Host:
What does it feel like to go from not making much to all of a sudden making that much?

Jake:
When I was making 20K, I thought I was the man. I thought I was winning—life was amazing. But I was doing everything myself. I was working 10–12 hours a day to make these videos, and I was definitely going to burn out if I didn’t figure out a way to create a system that pumps out videos for me.

At the time, I had pretty much every limiting belief you could have as an artist. But my mentor didn’t take my excuses.

So, I started slowly outsourcing each part of the business, starting with getting an audio editor. That was the first hire. I probably got a VA before that. Then, I got an audio editor who would take the raw file and chop it up into the final voiceover.

Once I saw that he was able to do it on his own, just as good if not better than me, that gave me a lot of confidence to outsource the next thing. The next thing I tackled was video editing, which definitely takes up the most time.

My videos are pretty substantial, so I was really hesitant about whether this was even possible. So, instead of outsourcing the entire video at once, I gave the editor the task to just edit the last 30 to 60 seconds of the video.

Once he was able to edit the last part really well, I slowly scaled him to the next 60 seconds. Then I hired a second video editor to help him out. I just kept repeating that process until the entire video production process was outsourced.

Host:
What does your team look like today? How many people do you have?

Jake:
We have well over 30 people. It’s pretty much everyone you can think of in the video production process: researchers and writers, thumbnail designers, lots of video editors, audio editors. I have some managerial people, like someone who helps me with sponsors.

Host:
Are most people in the US, or are they overseas?

Jake:
Almost all of them are international.

Host:
Has that worked well for you?

Jake:
It’s worked incredibly well for me. I think they work way harder than Americans. You know, Americans, when you hire them, most of the time their goal is to work for a couple of years and move on to the next thing.

Whereas, if you hire overseas, this is their dream. They’re super loyal.

Host:
Talking to Jake, I like how delegating was the main thing that basically took him from 30K a month to 100K, 200K, 300K a month—particularly hiring overseas.

Jake:
Personally, I believe in overseas hiring so much that I started my own overseas staffing company, which is called Paired.

If you have a small to medium-sized business and want to save 80% to 90% on payroll costs while finding superior talent, I’ll leave a link down below to my free salary guide. It goes over typical salaries and the most commonly outsourced positions. Hopefully, you’ll find that helpful.

Host:
Anyway, back to the video. What makes a good video? Why are your videos performing so well?

Jake:
At the core of it, again, is the channel idea. I like to think of the channel idea as the foundation of a house. If you start on a rocky foundation, it’s never going to work.

The first step is finding a channel idea that has a new angle to it, that no one’s done yet. That sounds hard, but it’s actually pretty simple.

One super simple method is just looking at the niche you’re going into. Let’s say I’m interested in the alternative health niche. I look at all the big channels, all the big players in that niche, and I write down—literally write down on a piece of paper:

• What do I like about these channels?

• What do I not like about these channels?

• And what do I want to change?

• What can I bring in from other niches on YouTube that others aren’t doing, to create my own unique channel idea?

The second step to what actually makes a good video is emotion.

Why do you take out your phone and pull up Instagram or YouTube? It’s usually when you’re bored. That’s the psychological trigger people have to open up social media. It’s the same with YouTube.

What I noticed is that every single viral video has one thing in common: they all elicit emotion from the viewer. They take the viewer as far away from boredom as possible.

Even if you look at your channel—the videos that go viral are the ones where you ask strangers questions, because that elicits a response out of viewers. It makes you really engaged.

Host:
What is your formula for storytelling?

Jake:
I kind of think of it like a movie. I start with a super, super strong hook. Only then do I set the foundation of all the boring background information we have to mention. Then, we rise to the climax—there’s usually a climax.

At the end, we have a resolution, where we summarize everything.

Host:
Let’s talk tools that you use in your business. I’m sure you use a bunch of software and platforms.

What do you use to run your huge team and create all this content?

Jake:
There are really only two apps we use to manage everything: Slack and Notion.

I’ve tried pretty much all the other major task management apps, like ClickUp or Monday.com. I found Notion to be the most powerful and the most flexible. I can customize everything. We organize all our videos, our sponsor spots, everything in Notion. Then we just use Slack to communicate.

For storage, we use Google Drive.

Host:
What about Frame or anything like that?

Jake:
Oh yeah, we use Frame.io to review edits.

For our people who are paid hourly, we use Hubstaff to track hours.

Host:
What do your editors use to edit the videos?

Jake:
Premiere Pro.

Host:
Premiere Pro solely?

Jake:
Yes. For animations, we use After Effects—also by Adobe.

Host:
So this is a pretty lean business in terms of software.

Jake:
Yes, because I quickly realized that software can get really expensive, really fast, if you just have a bunch of apps.

Host:
What have been some key things you installed or implemented into your business that made a huge change?

Jake:
I’d say one of the biggest game changers was partnering with my now business partner, Rob Oliver.

We just launched a product called Evil Goods. It’s an all-natural moisturizer made of beef tallow and a few other natural ingredients like manuka honey, olive oil, and an extract from the pot marigold flower. It’s a whipped-up consistency that’s as satisfying to use as mainstream toxic skincare products.

So as you can see, it’s branded under the Evil Food Supply channel.

To make this, I started on my own. But I decided to partner with my good friend Rob Oliver, who’s a really big expert in building brands—especially on Amazon. That has been a super big game changer.

Although I was able to create a good product on my own, we’re able to use his expertise and his operations team to run the actual business. We have a CEO in place now, so I don’t really do much. They’re doing a way better job than I ever could have done on my own.

Host:
You are not afraid to partner up with people, share equity, stuff like that. Why?

Jake:
Back when I was doing everything on my own, I was very stingy.

But once I got over that hurdle, I saw just how much more I could accomplish if I just hired and outsourced—along with partnering. I’d rather have a smaller piece of a bigger pie than trying to spread myself so thin.

These days, I literally can’t do more stuff. All my hours are taken up by various projects. If I were to try to manage all the channels and run this as the CEO, it wouldn’t be a good outcome.

Host:
Would you be willing to share some numbers about your new product?

Jake:
It’s only been, I want to say, like two or three weeks since launching, and we’ve already sold over a thousand units. So, it’s growing super fast, and people are loving it. I’m very proud of it.

Host:
That’s a really smart way to monetize a faceless channel—building a product behind that channel.

Jake:
Yeah. There are so many ways to monetize, and it really just depends on what fits your channel best.

For example, with the main channel, Jake Tran, I don’t have any physical products because I haven’t really found anything that matches the brand.

But for the Evil Food Supply channel, I thought this was so perfect.

The benefit is, it’s already running on its own, even without the YouTube channel. That’s really powerful.

Host:
What are your intentions for the next 5 to 10 years with your businesses?

Jake:
For this, we want to have a whole sweep of non-toxic alternatives to everyday products.

For the YouTube channels, I’ll probably launch a few more, just keep scaling up the team and pumping out more content.

Host:
So, what does a typical day look like for Jake Tran?

Jake:
Once I started making money, I looked back on my life and thought about what really fulfills me. I realized that my favorite thing in life is just learning.

That’s part of the reason why I love my channels—because I just learn a bunch of new stuff. I love learning new skills, so I kind of orient my daily routine around that—just learning new stuff.

I take lessons for all sorts of different things. Every day, I do Muay Thai kickboxing. I was doing boxing, but I took a break from that. Almost every day, I do weightlifting. I got a personal trainer in that mix.

I probably only spend around 4 to 8 hours a week managing all my channels.

Host:
Wow, you’re living the life.

Jake:
Yeah, I’m happy to say that I get to just do whatever I want every day.

I still like having a routine, but every month I’ll travel. I travel at least once a month, and that’s when I get more variety and I don’t have a routine.

But when I’m at home, I usually have a pretty strict routine of educating myself and stuff like that.

Host:
What is some unconventional advice that you truly believe?

Jake:
One of my favorite quotes is from John D. Rockefeller.

John D. Rockefeller wasn’t the perfect man, but you’ve got to respect what he accomplished in business. One thing he always said was:
"Competition is a sin."

So, everything I talked about earlier—about finding a different angle to a channel in the niche you want to go into—that’s all centered around not having to compete.

Because competition is always a race to zero.

One of my favorite quotes from Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, is:
"All happy companies are different. They all solve a different problem to create a monopoly in their niche. All failing companies are the same—they fail to escape competition."

I apply that same principle to YouTube. The way I think about it is:
All happy channels are different. Every channel finds a different angle to dominate and monopolize their niche.
But all failed channels are the same—they fail to escape competition. They always try to copy the next guy, and they’re always playing catch-up.

Host:
What is the best part about being a business owner?

Jake:
Back when I was doing everything myself, I was only able to pump out one video a week.

But now, with my team, I’m able to pump out like 12, sometimes 15 videos a month. So I can literally accomplish four times more in my lifetime versus doing everything on my own.

And on top of that, while we’re pumping out more videos, I’m doing other stuff. I get to pretty much travel and do whatever I want.

I think entrepreneurship and being a business owner is the real way for you to live a longer life. Even if you live the same amount of years as someone else, you get to experience and accomplish way more.

Host:
Could you also tell us about the lowest point you’ve had in your business career so far?

Jake:
Yeah, everything changed when I got into all that controversy with my sponsor spots.

Like I mentioned before, every single video of mine is sponsored. So, naturally, eventually, some bad sponsors crept into the mix that I wasn’t super aware of. That led to a bunch of hate videos made about me.

That was the first time... I’d never had a problem with hate comments before, but that was the first time people were making videos about me, calling me a bad person and stuff.

Host:
What did you learn from that whole experience?

Jake:
I learned that I definitely could have handled it better. My response could have been better.

I made a smartass community post about it, and I think that just made it worse.

What I really learned was: The truth doesn’t really matter. It’s all about optics. It’s all about the public perception.

Because even though I didn’t do any intentional harm, I didn’t intentionally choose these bad sponsors, people were able to spin the narrative that I was a terrible person.

I could have framed that better.

Host:
Do you realistically think that anyone can build what you’ve built?

Jake:
Absolutely.

Because now is actually one of the greatest times in the history of YouTube to start.

Traditionally, YouTube would only recommend really established channels and videos on the homepage, because that’s their prime piece of real estate. You’ve got to show the best videos.

But a few months back, I started noticing that YouTube was recommending me a ton of videos from brand-new channels with only a few hundred views each. I think that’s a super big shift in the YouTube algorithm—where they’re pumping new channels more than ever before.

So, if there’s ever been a time to start, it’s literally right now.

Host:
What would you do to start?

Jake:
First, I’d find the right channel idea—like I mentioned before—because that’s the foundation of everything.

Figure out how I’m going to be different from the competition so I don’t have to compete.

The next step would be finding the right video idea, planning out the title and thumbnail first—before you even start working on the video. Because the title and thumbnail are so important.

Obviously, then you make the video and publish it.

Jake:
Not only have I applied this method of finding channel ideas to the two other channels I’ve launched (just to prove that it really works), but now I have a coaching program where I’ve taught over a thousand students already.

The same methodology I used to launch new channels—I teach them. And the first videos they’re publishing... they’re like miles better than the first videos you or I have ever published. They’re shockingly good.

Like one channel, his second video has 72K views. One student’s channel I’m really proud of is called Salt and Pepper Economics.

He went into a super crowded niche of economics, finance, and history videos, but he applied the framework I taught him on how to find channel ideas. He created this channel called Salt and Pepper Economics. The videos are super unique—shockingly good.

And there are countless other examples where brand-new students, who’ve never published a YouTube video before, are making super big strides.

Part of the reason is what I teach them. Another part of the reason is that YouTube recently changed the algorithm.

Host:
I think a lot of people watching this video want to build something similar to you. They want to build a business—whether it’s media or whatever.

What resources do you have for them to check out?

Jake:
Yeah, so I have a coaching program that teaches people specifically how to make faceless channels just like me.

I walk through the same framework—how to find channel ideas and everything else that goes into making a channel and videos.

I also have a quiz—people can fill it out to figure out if this is something they actually want to do, like how much money they could make, stuff like that.

Host:
All right, that’s been amazing. Thank you so much.

Jake:
Totally. Thanks, man.

Host:
I know many of you watching this video probably want to build your own channel, just like Jake did. And like we said, right now the algorithm really pushes these brand-new channels and videos, so it really is the perfect time to start.

Since recording this video, Jake has actually kickstarted his new 5-day program. It’s called The Faceless Income Fast Start.

Basically, in 5 days, he’ll help you find your next viral channel idea, set everything up, get his personal framework for your video ideas, monetize, automate, and even scale your own channel.

This is all without having to actually be in the videos yourself—or even do most of the work.

If you’d like to try it out, I’ll put a link down below in the description. It’ll take you to a page with a short video where Jake explains how it all works.

Host (closing):
Anyway, thank you so much for watching this video. I really hope you enjoyed it and learned something.

I absolutely love interviewing all types of entrepreneurs because we can learn so much from their stories.

Make sure to give this video a like and subscribe if you want to see more videos just like this.

I do a ton of content about personal finance, entrepreneurship, and investing—everything to help you live a financially successful life.

Thank you so much for your time, and I’ll see you in the next video.

Peace.