Honest side hustle you can start outside your full time job
Honest side hustle you can start outside your full time job

How Sam Grew His Faceless YouTube Channel To 50k Subscribers and Earns $2000 Monthly

How to start a faceless youtube channel with Sam from sidehustlestories.co

Full Name • Published January 31s, 2024

ABOUT

How to start a faceless youtube channel with Sam from sidehustlestories.co
Youtube Link

Sam Y.

Owner, AI Search

From Toronto, Canada

Side Hustle Started Feb, 2023

Former Full-Time Job

Worked in Digital Marketing

at Cruisebound

Full-Time Business In Nov, 2023

SIDE-HUSTLE STATS

8

Hours Worked Per Week

$2000

Revenue Per Month

1

Founders

1

Employees

$620

Startup Cost

6

Months Before Profit

YouTube Analytics

Main Growth Strategy

95%

Net Profit Margin

Table Of Contents

Quitting Your Full-Time Job To Start A Faceless YouTube Channel
Sam is the founder and operator of AI Search, a faceless YouTube channel and website that covers the topic of AI news and tools.
 
With a background in digital marketing, he started AI Search, which is a directory of AI tools, back in February 2023, plus a Youtube channel in July 2023.
 
Sam’s goal is to become an authority in the AI space and build a large audience, which he can then monetize down the line. His YouTube channel has 51k subscribers and is currently getting over 500K views per month.
 
Originally, Sam started YouTube to supplement the website, which currently gets about 20k monthly visitors, but it turns out that YouTube is crushing it more than the website. Today, his YouTube channel brings in the most traffic to his website, more than Google organic search.
sidehustlestories.co faceless youtube channel
Coming Up With The Idea

What made you decide to start a faceless YouTube channel?

There are certain points in history which only occur every few decades, that offer huge growth and opportunity. The Internet boom in the late 1990s was one of them, and I think that we are in one right now with the AI explosion.
 
So back in late 2022, when ChatGPT first came out and AI blew up, I knew this was an opportunity of a lifetime and I needed to take advantage of it.
 
However, being a non-tech guy, I was not confident in building an AI app myself, as I would likely be easily out competed by a better developer. Coupling from a marketing background my strengths are in SEO and content creation. So I decided to build a directory of ai tools, and use my marketing skills to grow traffic organically to the site. My goal was that eventually, with enough traffic, I can monetize it via affiliate links or ads.
First Steps To Starting

Creating YouTube videos takes scripting, filming and editing. How did you get good at your creative process?

The one-word answer would be practice.
 
I’m naturally an introvert. I suck at communication. I suck at talking to the camera. The only way I improved my YouTube video creation, which right now is still imperfect, was by putting in the reps. My first video sucked. I would cringe watching it. The second video sucked again. But if you make 100 videos and you’re not improving, something is wrong. You should improve just by putting in the reps.
 
The skills I developed along the way were just charisma and trying to be funny. Trying to find the right information that would go viral.
Coming Up With Video Ideas

How do you come up with your video ideas? Is it based off what you feel is interesting?

One great tool for this is right in YouTube analytics.

If you go to the research tab, you can explore topics here. It looks like they changed the user interface. But if you just search for “AI tools” (or your own niche), there should be a content gap.

This is the key part. This is where there’s a lot of people searching for a topic, but there’s not a lot of videos on it, meaning there‘s low competition. This includes AI tools for video editing, AI tools for students, content creation, etc. And this is why I created this video that shows how I made an automated YouTube channel—because I saw there was a content gap that says AI for YouTube. This video I made got 268K views.

sidehustlestories.co faceless youtube channel
How Sam uses the Research tab in YouTube Studio to find video ideas.
sidehustlestories.co faceless youtube channel
Sam types in his niche of "AI Tools" to identify content gaps.
sidehustlestories.co faceless youtube channel
This research process inspired him to create this video, getting 268k views.

So that’s one way to do it. Another way is to just manually search for videos that have a disproportionate amount of views compared to the channel subscriber count.

Something in that video or title is making it viral, but not the actual channel itself. And then you iterate and make it better.

Growing YouTube Subscribers

How did you grow to over 50k in YouTube subscribers?

A lot of this is analyzing other YouTubers, analyzing similar channels, and especially looking at videos that have a lot of views but don’t have a lot of subscribers. Why is that particular video topic getting so many views, even though that person doesn’t have so many subscribers? There’s an imbalance in the algorithm.
 
And you can see this metric using the VidIQ Chrome extension and just basically copying what others are doing—their titles and their thumbnails. You can even go as far as seeing their trends, transcribing their audio, and looking at how they are talking to see what words they are using. 
 
What I found is that you really need to dumb it down. Like, explain it like I’m five. You can’t use really technical words or else your audience will drop off.
 
There’s a really nice chart in your YouTube analytics. So the X axis is the time span of your video. And the Y axis is the point where people drop off. So pinpoint where people are dropping off the most and try to find what factor is causing that drop-off.
 
Keep iterating positively. One video after the next. And in theory, if you keep making these incremental improvements, you’re going to improve substantially after 100 videos.
 
One of the first videos I made got over a million views. That was the one that got me past 10,000 subscribers in, like, a week. That was a pivotal moment. It was that one video that really surprised me and made me reconsider doing YouTube full-time.
sidehustlestories.co faceless youtube channel
Reasons For Quitting Your Job

Why did you decide to quit your full-time job to pursue your YouTube channel?

A few things. One is that after working at a few jobs, I quickly realized that the time I put in to the job, I didn’t get back. I’m not investing in myself. Everything I build, the value that I build, stays at the job; it stays at another person’s company, which will eventually be none of my business if I leave the job.

So why not spend the time to invest in myself? To build my own wealth and value for myself? So that’s one reason.

I was very hesitant to actually leave my job, which was making ten times more than my YouTube income. But just looking at the growth of my YouTube channel and income, if I were to project that into the future and maintain this exponential growth, it wouldn’t be long for me to surpass my job’s revenue.

I would rather focus on this and take a hit, making less right now, but in a short amount of time, eventually surpassing that revenue goal.

Because if I stay at my job, I have to wait for a raise or find a better job. Maybe it’s only a 20 or 30% increase in my salary, whereas this could really increase by multiples.

How You Decided To Quit

What had to happen for you to quit your full-time job? Was it a revenue goal?

It was more of a qualitative thing. So right now, from AI search, my website, plus AI Search, my YouTube channel, I’m making $2,000 a month.

So $24k per year total, which is enough for me to survive. 

I wouldn’t quit from the beginning if I wasn’t making any income. But I think the minimum of $2K per month would be good enough to stay alive. And I’m not married. I don’t have kids, so I don’t have any financial burdens at the moment, which allows me to go all in on this.

My advice is that if you do have kids or parents that you need to take care of then I wouldn’t take the risk at this early stage.

Revenue + Earnings

On average, how much do you earn from your side-hustle each month?

So it took six months for my website, from January to July 2023, to make $500 a month. And in the first few months, I made zero dollars. That’s still growing in traffic.
 
For YouTube. It was faster than that. It took about one month when I started seriously doing YouTube in July, 2023.
Startup Costs + Tools

How much did it cost to start your YouTube? Do you use any tools to run your business?

It cost about $120 to buy the domain and $500 for a good microphone and video editing software. Everything else was free.

 
For analytics and coming up with video ideas, VidIQ. For images, mostly Canva. I’m using the paid version of Canva for stock footage, but I rarely need to use it, to be honest.
 
Most of my videos are either tutorials, in which case, my videos are just going through the product. Or it’s AI news, in which case, I just scroll through the article and highlight the sections I’m voicing over, so I rarely need to actually use any stock videos.
Tips For Starting A Faceless YouTube

Faceless YouTube channels have exploded with improved AI tools. What advice would you give for people wanting to start one?

I would say starting a face channel would definitely do better than being faceless. And the only reason I’m doing faceless is because I don’t want to show my face yet. I don’t want to expose my last name because I don’t know the repercussions of exposing my identity online.
 
Maybe it’s not that, um, dangerous, but I don’t know yet. I haven’t done my research on that. So for now, I’m just keeping it faceless. But if you really want to grow, develop a brand, and develop credibility, I would show my face 100%.
 
Then there are two types of faceless channels. A lot of them are automated faceless channels. They use AI to generate a voiceover, and everything is just made with AI.
 
That is the worst of the worst because it still sounds very robotic and not human. Whereas for me, I’m using my real voice to say things, and it just sounds more charismatic and human.
 
Another nice advantage of showing your face is that you can add your face to the thumbnails. I’m sure you’re aware of these very classic “shocking face” thumbnails or just a very exaggerated face slapped on the thumbnail with eye contact. Like it or not, it works on people. People like looking at a face. It attracts them more than just a thumbnail without a face.
Staying Updated With AI News

With how rapid AI news is released, how are you staying ahead on the latest AI news?

So there’s one key thing I learned from doing YouTube and it’s that you don’t have to be the first to be the best.

A key example of that is my most-viewed video, “How to Turn Yourself into an Anime Girl” or something like that.

It was on this tool called W-Okada. And there were already a ton of videos out there. When I published this, there were things like tutorials or reviews of this voice conversion tool. But when I published my video, it became the most viewed video. 

That was a key lesson learned there. I don’t have to be the first at publishing AI news content.

So the next step is that I follow a lot of these AI influencers. So one is Grid AI. Another one is Matt Wolfe, and AI Weekly Co. Tech Xplore is also a good platform that I use to find AI articles. They have tons of new AI- or machine-learning-related articles every day.

I look at what all these influencers or newsletters have mentioned, and I take the most interesting ones and consolidate them to inform my video and my newsletter.

Where Can People Find You?

Where can people support you?

Check out Sam’s YouTube channel, AI Search, to get the latest AI news and reviews.

For AI tools, you can visit his website here.

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