How I actually grew on youtube…

Back when I was a kid, I didn't have a camera, a computer, or a smartphone. So, I used to sneak into public libraries to, against their rules, record the computer screen, and I was recording Runescape videos. And then I would also edit those videos on the public library computers and upload them to YouTube. Right? So, picture this, 12-year-old me nervously looking over my shoulder, downloading uh video editing and screen recording software on their ancient computers. And I had never imagined that those grainy screen recordings would become the foundation of a multiple six-figure per month business. And I also remember making my first $4.14 on YouTube. I literally thought I was rich. And those were simpler times when getting one positive comment felt like winning an Oscar. And I had no idea what was coming. And today, I'm going to walk you through my realistic YouTube growth journey. The real story behind how I went from almost getting kicked out of my local library to six figures a month in YouTube revenue. Now, if you like me doing this type of content, by the way, and you want me to do it more in the future, gently tap that like button and let's jump into it right now. All right, quick break. This Tuesday at 9:00 p.m. Eastern time, I'm hosting a free live workshop called The Greatest Business to Start in 2026 with YouTube. If you've been struggling to find your YouTube niche, or you don't want to spend months or even years building a channel around something that isn't profitable or just doesn't work for you in general, then this workshop is for you. Because for everyone who shows up live, I'll be giving away the hidden nichefinder 2.1. This is the most advanced version of my GPT powered niche validation tool yet, and it's designed to help you instantly test and uncover profitable YouTube niches before you invest your time, money, and effort into the wrong one. And it's the most refined data-driven version so far, and I'll be giving it away completely free, but only during this live workshop. So, attend the free live workshop by clicking that link down the description and the pin comment below to grab it. You'll also be able to ask me questions live. So, I look forward to meeting you. Oh, and just a heads up, this will be probably one of the last times I'll be giving away a version of the Niche Validator for free. So, make sure you click that link and show up to the workshop. Make sure you put in your calendar, and I look forward to seeing you there. Now, back to your regularly scheduled programming. All right, so we're going to start off in year zero, and this is going to be kind of like the prologue. Now, I mentioned this at the start of this video, but I just wanted to go more in depth on this. So, I was around 12 to 14 years old at the time. And I would basically sneak into the public library and use their computer. And this was around 2005 to 2007 when YouTube was just becoming a thing. So, I would sneak into the public library and I'd use their computer since I didn't have my own computer and I certainly didn't have a camera. And what I would do is I would download software that would allow me to record my screen. And I would also download video editing software. And I think I used Lime Wire at the time. If you know, you know. And I was basically playing this game called Runescape. And if you didn't know, this is an MMO RPG game or a massive multiplayer online role playing game. I think that's what MMO RPG stands for. And it was almost like a way to replace your normal life with a second life, but a second life where you had cool weapons, you could fight dragons, you could fight other players, you could do magic, or you could level up other skills like wood cutting or mining or fishing. And I started recording a bunch of random stuff that I was doing in the game. For instance, in the game, I would buy items from other players and I would hoard them and then I would sell them to other players for a higher price. And on Runescape, this was known as being a merch. So, it's the classic buy low, sell high, and I would earn a lot of gold from doing it. And also, I would fight other players in the wilderness, which is also known as PKing. And I would record a compilation of those fights, chop them up, put some really cool music over it, and post it to YouTube. But unfortunately, I didn't realize that you can't use other people's music because that would cause copyright issues. And so my videos got taken down and I spent a massive amount of time on this game and I also spent a pretty good amount of time creating these videos. And you might think, well Shane, you kind of just wasted your time. That channel didn't go anywhere. But the truth is, if I hadn't been such a goofball in the library, Shane Hummus, as you know it today, wouldn't have ever happened. And this is how other famous YouTubers started off. No thoughts, just recorded. Just like PewDiePie and Mr. Beast, when you look at their oldest videos, it's just them playing Minecraft or them just doing random stuff. And I think a lot of people start off this way. They probably do some sort of passion content or they do some sort of entertainment type content or they try to get paid to play video games, which is insanely hard. That's probably the most competitive niche that you can possibly get in because let's be honest, who wouldn't want to get paid to literally play video games, right? But eventually I realized that it is very very difficult to do that. And so I moved on to more educational type content and I created a bunch of different faceless channels. One of them, for instance, was Guys Life Hacks. I also started a channel about pharmacy school and how to do well as a pharmacy school student. I started another channel about study skills and then later on another channel making one minute videos that was inspired by NS Daily. And by the way, all these channels I started over the years, right? I didn't start them back to back to back or anything like that. But for one reason or another, none of them really panned out. And during this time, I had gone to pharmacy school. I'd gotten my doctorate and I'd become a pharmacist. And it was 2019 and I was living in this tiny room in an apartment with six roommates in Bellingham, Washington. And that's where I got my first taste of YouTube success when I made a whopping $4.14. Right? So this is year one. This is basically when I first created a personal brand, the Shane Helmus channel, and I had some success on YouTube. And I remember the reason I started a personal brand YouTube channel where I was actually sharing my face is because I got the opportunity very randomly to visit a rich friend or acquaintance's house who had Lamborghinis and Ferraris and a very nice house. And basically I came over when they were doing a content day. They were recording a lot of videos and it was a husband and a wife who did content together and they were in a super random niche where they targeted businesses and sold them a very expensive software. And at the end of that night, he held up a camera and said, "If there's one thing you take away from tonight, this camera will make you rich. Don't forget that." And I took that to heart. You see, before that, I didn't really understand the power of actually having a personal brand, actually showing your face and relating to other people. And after watching my friend record content, he basically told me that they had probably made at least $10,000 in those few hours recording content. And they explained to me that the reason they're able to make so much money is because they're known as an authority. Now, at the time, I was a pharmacist making about $10,000 a month. And I know that sounds like a lot of money, but I also had to get multiple six figures in debt in order to make that type of money going to pharmacy school. So, when he told me that he was able to make $10,000 in a few hours just recording himself, and they pretty much only worked those few hours a day and they had a nice house, they had amazing cars, I really took their advice that this camera would make me rich. And so, I started a channel, Shane Hummus, and I started recording myself. Now during this whole time I was working in pharmacy and this was what my view looked like every day. And although it was a nice view, I literally wasn't even allowed to step outside of the store. Like I could not go outside for 12 hours at a time. So the moment I walked into that store at the beginning of my shift, I was going to be there for at least 12 hours before I could walk out of the store and breathe some fresh air again. And usually it was longer than 12 hours. And then the pandemic hit. A lot of the staff at the pharmacy quit. So I was working basically 3 to five people's jobs. and my store got robbed three times. And let's not forget about that $300,000 in student loan debt that basically felt like a sword constantly hanging over my head. Now, around the same time, I not only started YouTube, but I started taking like every freaking make money online course out there. I bought courses from Tai Lopez, Kevin David, all kinds of different people. For instance, I tried launching this product on Amazon FBA, which was basically a way of working out your your booty or your butt, and I thought it would be really great during the pandemic. I also tried starting an SMMA. I tried uh building websites for a living, doing freelancing, all kinds of different stuff. And by the way, I promise you this is relevant to the YouTube lore. But yeah, I was trying just about everything. Like almost all of my free time was spent trying a bunch of different side hustles and make money online opportunities and just trying anything I could do to escape from the 9 toive job that I had. But one course changed the way that I think forever. And it was Sam Ovens Consulting Accelerator. And this was an amazing course that really taught people how to start a consulting or a coaching business or just like an online information product business in general. He recommended coaching and consulting. You could use it for online information products like a course for instance if you wanted to. And also around the same time I started following Graham Stefen and I really liked what he was doing with YouTube. I really enjoyed his videos and I was incredibly inspired by the fact that he was making like $33,000 in a single month on YouTube. And additionally, I ran into my first real life money mentor, Sam, who had a successful YouTube channel about photography and a business built off of the YouTube channel related to wedding photography that was making six figures a year. So, he's making around $10,000 a month. And he basically taught me how to grow and make money with YouTube. And I started getting really serious about YouTube at this point. So, I set up a uh legitimate studio with a gray bed sheet as my background. No, literally that that was my background. I got like the cheapest possible camera and audio equipment I could find and I started treating YouTube like a real business and I started getting subscribers and I was already making a full-time income on YouTube within a few months of starting. My first viral video that really took off for instance was the most useless degrees. Now this video has over 4 million views now. And because of my YouTube channel, uh, affiliate links on my channel, and also doing a coaching business where I was basically just charging people for one-on-one calls, I had already made it to $10,000 a month on YouTube. Now, the funny thing is is almost immediately I had to stop taking one-on-one calls cuz I literally just didn't have enough time. Now, one of the biggest reasons why I didn't have enough time is because I still had a pharmacy job that I was working 40 plus hours a week. And at this point, I decided not to quit my pharmacy job just yet. And this is where we go into year two of YouTube. And this is where I get to the 10 to 30K per month range. Now, around year two in my journey, I'm already making an income from YouTube. Now, just before this time, I hired my very first VA, who now is my general manager, and he does basically everything for me. And I basically just taught him everything from creating thumbnails to video editing and script writing to answering my emails, responding to comments. I trained him how to do everything because when I started, I was doing everything myself, of course, and I was way too busy doing everything myself. So, it made a lot of sense for me to hire somebody else. I was making, you know, $10,000 a month from my job, another $10,000 a month from my YouTube channel. And if I wanted to scale my income up to maybe, you know, 20 $30,000 a month, then I needed somebody else to help me, especially considering I was kind of doing it as a side hustle and I had a full-time job. And hiring a VA from the Philippines was probably one of the smartest things I ever did because Paulo ended up learning everything about my business and basically being able to replace 90% of the things that I was having to do myself with him doing it instead. And because of this, it was able to free up a lot of my time. And then I was able to just simply do more of what was already working. And that is how I scaled to about $30,000 a month. And at this point, after about 2 years, I finally decided to quit my pharmacy job after I was making two to three times more than what I was making in the job. And I started traveling the world while running the channel. So I went to Puerto Rico, I went to Canada, I went to a bunch of different places in the US. Now around this time, we hired a few more people, mostly video editors. Now, around this time, I'm already earning, you know, $10 to $30,000 a month while traveling. It is going up and down. You know, sometimes it'll be a $30,000 month. Sometimes it'll be, you know, $10 or $20,000 month. But this is where year three happened. And the truth is, I actually made it to $10,000 a month very early in year 1. So, it took me a significant amount of year 1 and year 2 of being stuck around that $10 to $30,000 a month range before I was able to jump up to the $30 to $100,000 a month range. And the biggest reason why I got stuck here, and this is by far the biggest reason, is simply because I didn't quit my job. That's it. I was spending over 40 hours a week, 40 very intense hours at that, working a very stressful job. And I just simply did not have the emotional or mental energy or bandwidth to grow the business past 10 to 30K per month. And I met other YouTubers making much more money with much smaller channels. And I thought to myself, what the heck am I doing wrong? And around this time, I found the book called Expert Secrets. Now, this is a great book for proper monetization and pricing. So, I recommend everyone read this book, by the way, to become an expert in charging what you're worth and also charging the correct clients the correct amount. So, I stopped relying primarily on AdSense, affiliate, and courses. And I put more of my focus into affiliate marketing because it is really passive once you've done it. And also opening a coaching program. Now, this isn't one-on-one coaching. This is a coaching program. And this makes it much more scalable. And I implemented proper sales funnels and lead magnets to convert viewers into paying customers. And I scaled my income to around $100,000 a month by focused on valuebased pricing rather than timebased pricing. Now, during this whole time, I was also kind of switching niches, trying out different niches, trying out different video ideas. You'll notice that I don't really make that many videos about college degrees now, for instance, and I used to make a lot of them. Now, I made it to over 100K primarily through affiliate marketing. I basically partnered with the right people. And so I had months, for instance, where I made about $20,000 from AdSense and $80,000 from affiliate marketing. And I was doing a little bit of coaching here and there, but I hadn't really figured it out. And my team was starting to get big enough that it was starting to become very difficult to manage them. And this is where another problem comes in. And this is where year four starts. So since I have a few people working for me, it's getting all messy. And I read this book called Traction by Gino Wickman. And this helped me organize my 10 employees and learn proper business organization. So I implemented what's known as EOS, which is the entrepreneurial operating system to organize my team and I created clear processes for everything, right? Because when you have a tiny team, just a few people, you're kind of all on the same page, right? You all kind of know what's happening and what's going on. But once you scale past like 5 to 10 people, you know, maybe 12, 15 people, that's when different departments start not being on the same page, and it's kind of like a dinosaur whose head doesn't know what its tail is doing. And this is where you have to actually implement processes and systems into your business if you want to try to scale. So this is when I really figured out how to automate the content creation process. And I taught my team to do literally everything. So, so before this, I was kind of coming up with the video ideas, writing the scripts, my team would edit the videos, but then I would do the quality control on their editing and they would also create the thumbnail. But I was still spending a significant amount of time coming up with the video ideas, writing the scripts, and doing the quality control. And year four is when I really figured out the system of YouTube content creation that makes all the difference. And this is an automated content creation process where the team handles almost everything. The only thing that I have to do is record the videos. And this is where I reduce my workload to just 4 hours per week. A 1-hour team meeting and 3 hours of recording videos. And that's pretty much it. And now with AI, I can pretty much do this in one hour a week. Of course, I do work more on my channel than 1 hour a week, but it's a choice. I don't have to. And there's actually been two-month periods where I only worked about one hour per week on my channel. And I can work on a script if I want to since I still enjoy making videos. But I don't have to do it, right? That's the point. And I can come up with video ideas. Like there's some types of videos that I want to cover and I do that sometimes, but I don't have to. And this is what was able to get me from the 30 to 100K range all the way to the 100 to 300K per month range. So this is where I scaled to multi6 figures per month while content quality improved because the team could focus on research and scripting. And this is where we get to year five, which is helping others. So I got to 300k per month on YouTube. In fact, I was pretty consistently doing that. And year five is when I started helping other people. So I basically absolutely perfected the entire system of YouTube. We're talking generating traffic, monetization, as well as operations like hiring people, putting them in the right position, and giving them a system so that content creation happens very naturally and automatically. And we're not talking about any content, but very highquality content. And then this time, I started actually helping other people start and scale their YouTube channels. Like Sean, for instance, who we helped scale from 30K per month, and he was stuck at 30K per month for several years to over $500,000 a month. So Shawn actually passed me up. or Allan, we recently brought him and he's in the Spanish speaking market and he posted one video that got 20 views and he closed a $2,400 contract with that video. And also my own 50-year-old brother who sought out my help because he'd basically been working for almost 30 years in the trades and it was starting to be really tough on his body and he wanted to figure out how he could make money online so he didn't have to put any more wear and tear on his body. And so of course I told him he can do YouTube and my brother agreed. Now keep in mind he had no prior experience about recording a video. didn't even like YouTube that much and he's also not technologically savvy. But we implemented the same system that we'd used with my channel. He followed all the instructions I told him to do. We posted his very first video and this video got $136,000 views in a single month. And he got monetized almost immediately. And within 29 days of posting that very first video, he earned $214 just from AdSense alone in a single day. That's a $78,000 a year run rate. And just recently, less than three months after posting his first video, he had a $447 just AdSense day. Now, that's a $160,000 a year run rate. Plus, he's making money from affiliate marketing, too. Now, by the way, if you want to crush it with YouTube, just like my brother did, and you're very serious about growing and making money on YouTube, go ahead and book a call with us down in the description in the pin comment below. This is only for people who are very serious and they want to work directly with an expert. And I totally get 99% of people are not going to be a good fit to work with us. So enjoy my free content and my free live streams because that'll absolutely help you as well. But if you want to speed up the process, work with coaches, an entire team of coaches and a professional, go ahead and book that call in the description in the pin comment below. And this brings me into year six, which is where I am right now. And we are basically scaling my business to million-dollar months. And it looks like September, this month, is going to be our first million-doll month. I can't 100% confirm, but it's heading towards that. And yeah, that's where we're at right now. got to $300,000 a month before I ever taught anybody how to do anything on YouTube. And now with my YouTube channel as well as my second business where I teach people how to grow and make money on YouTube, we are probably going to have our first million-doll month this month. So yeah, it's been a hell of a ride. Um 6 years to get to million-dollar months. Around year three or so, I made it to millionaire status. And now around year six, we're probably going to have our first million-dollar month. So yeah, it's been incredible. Um, I've helped a ton of people grow their YouTube channels, um, which is super super cool. I've also helped a ton of people get jobs. I've helped a ton of people with alternative education or to graduate college faster and just live better lives and have more control over their finances in general. And so, YouTube has been incredibly rewarding. If you want to learn more about the exact strategies that got me to this point, go ahead and attend the live training down in the description in the pin comment below. It'll be Tuesday, 9:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. And if you're really chomping at the bit to blow your YouTube channel up as fast as possible, go ahead and book a call with us down in the description in the pin comment below. We do work with a select number of people in a one-on-one coaching capacity. So, yeah, it's been super fun. Um, just to give you an example of one of the clients that we help blow up their channel, you can check out this video right here where I actually interview Sean on how we helped him grow from 30K per month all the way up to over 500K per month. And again, you can check that out by clicking right here.