- Before you quit your job to make YouTube videos full time, you should string together a few months where you earn enough money doing it to meet your financial needs, Ben Sullins, who runs a YouTube channel about Tesla and electric vehicles, said.
- And you should be able to hit that goal without having to make videos at an unsustainable pace, Sullins said.
- Sullins has over 200,000 subscribers, and his videos have received more than 38 million views.
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If you want to become a full-time YouTube creator, quitting your job to focus entirely on your videos won’t guarantee success. Just because you have more time for filming and editing, it doesn’t mean people will want to watch the result, Ben Sullins, who makes YouTube videos about Tesla and electric vehicles, said.
When you start off, “you probably don’t know what your audience wants,” Sullins said in an interview with Business Insider. “But once you start to have a few videos that do well, those are all just little beacons to help you focus in on what is really valuable that you can bring to the conversation.”
Sullins quit his job as the chief data officer for the online-education company Pluralsight in 2016 to make online courses focused on data and business. He also began making YouTube videos, many of which offered advice on using data software like Tableau and Microsoft Excel. One video, titled “What Is the Monthly Cost of a Tesla?” received far more views than the others — it’s his biggest hit to date — and suggested he had found a promising niche. Since then, Sullins has focused the vast majority of his work on Elon Musk’s automaker.
“Spending my whole career in data, the thing you tend to do is you look for the signal in the noise,” Sullins said. “And to me, that was a strong signal.”
In summer 2018, Sullins dropped the online courses and started working on YouTube full time.
“It took me a year and a half, or a little over that, to get to that point,” he said. “It’s just been kind of a wild ride ever since.”
His channel now has over 200,000 subscribers, and his videos have racked up more than 38 million views.
The key metric for knowing when you can ditch your 9-to-5 is consistency, Sullins said. Don’t take the plunge before you can string together a few months in which you’re earning enough off of videos to live. And don’t do it if you’re hitting that mark by pumping out content at a pace you won’t be able to sustain for long.
“It’s easy to just kill yourself and be like, ‘Yay, I made some money,'” Sullins said. “But you can’t keep that up forever.”