How he makes $1.2M a year on Youtube without showing his face - Jake Tran

0:00 I created my own little niche where viewers really only had me to go to the reason why McDonald's is so big and they make billions of dollars is because they create a system to make the burgers for them so it's like 50 hours of video I should not be working this hard and I should be you know making a lot more money while working less my people are all over wherever they're the best first video 555,000 views second video 253,000 views so we've definitely created a system that's pretty repeatable you're building an like the whole media Empire here if anyone can really you know make the same videos that me and you make why isn't everyone successful me Jake Tran he runs multiple faces YouTube channels he's a popular YouTuber and entrepreneur he makes videos about political power the dark sides of big businesses jerk crime and videos about how to recognize crypto and

0:46 corporate scams I really appreciate that on his channels Jake covers American issues that I see as an immigrant for example he made this video about the problem of food served in American schools and it's a really serious problem this video got almost 3 million views and hopefully hopefully we'll see some change because as a mom I'm really worried about what my kids are going to eat at schools here I met Jake back in 2021 and he was the first Creator who I met who had a faceless Channel and of course I became quite interested because I run a company where we teach people languages and I always thought that a language Channel without a face could be something could be a great resource for students and also a great marketing tool for my company so in this conversation I wanted to dig deeper into the processes that Jake has in his company to see how

1:31 I and also you could potentially build a faceless channel for your business or just for yourself and I also want to understand how he navigates criticism hey guys welcome to silon Valley girl I have someone who's doing something amazing on YouTube which I want to learn about his name is Jake he runs a documentary Channel and you barely see his face there and this is what I'm fascinated about cuz I love the end product I just watched your video about why celebrities are always unhappy like I really wanted to watch that video but also how the Dynamics inside the video like how you change the frame how you tell the story like genius and also with the new technology like 11 Labs I don't know if you're using it already to clone your voice I mean like with your strategy you can just scale your channel

2:17 Beyond you and you don't have to be on the camera this is what I wanted to talk about today can you talk about like how how long have you been doing this your Jake Tran Channel this channel you know all the years kind of Blended together but it's probably been three or four years by now oh wow but the progress is amazing wow thank you and I started out you know being a traditional on camera Channel where it was just it was like a personal brand channel uh but the problem I quickly ran into is I quickly realized that if the entire channel is based on me and my experiences and what I've gone through in life uh you quickly run out of stuff to talk about because you've only you've only lived so much um so that's why a lot of YouTubers who are on on camera all the time they quickly burn out after you know maybe they're in

3:03 the Limelight for 3 to 5 years and then they usually fizzle out or they their views just drop dramatically or they just quit entirely and I saw that very early on and I wanted to avoid that at all costs and what I realized was there are these channels out there that aren't connected to a name that don't show their face and instead of the content being based on them it's based on stuff that they research or stuff that they come up with M so in that sense you never run out of video ideas yeah cuz that's a really big bottleneck and a really big fear of a lot of people starting out is like how do I come up with video ideas exactly well if you're just like 18 20 years old like I was and you don't have much life experience you're going to run out of video ideas very quickly M but if you base your videos on something that you research or

3:48 you come up with or like a storyline that you create uh from nothing then you never run out of ideas yeah you had several channels before you had a take on do channel right yeah my first try in high school uh very cringey I removed all the videos so you can't find them okay but yeah back in high school that was when I first fell in love with the idea of being a YouTuber and one of my f favorite channels at the time was a channel called lus Tech tips uh super big channels they're still around today and you know they have this giant office giant Warehouse with all these different filming sets and like a giant video editing team and a giant production team and I thought that's what I wanted um thank God I never went that down that route because although their channel is great and everything that just sounds

4:34 like a giant headache that I don't want to deal with the real big light bu moment came when I read the book Blue Ocean strategy that book changed my life and it basically shows you how to go into any crowded niche in any industry and carve out your own unique blue ocean interesting where um you don't have any competition what's the main takeaway from that book you remember yeah they used the example of the wine brand they talked about how entrenched the wine industry is um there's all these big players super high competition very hard to break into so how do you break into it well this brand that I can't remember right now they basically looked at all the factors of the wine industry um how complex the flavors are how uh

5:19 pretentious the labels are all these different factors and then they looked at what all the big players are currently doing and then they just looked at all those factors thought about what they wanted to keep MH what what they wanted to remove and what they wanted to change entirely and the result was this very super unique uh brand that just went viral in a super crowd Niche so I took that basic idea and applied it to um finding a profitable Channel or a viral channel so basically what I did was I looked at all the different niches on YouTube that I'm a fan of so one was like the personal finance Niche or the money Niche or whatever ever another one was the video essay Niche where people would review video uh movies like The

6:05 Dark Knight or like while the Joker was the best villain ever written I also looked at uh these like b-roll type channels um like Kaza in a nutshell mhm and I basically looked at all those different niches I took what I liked out of all of them I removed what I didn't like I thought about what I could add from other niches or other Industries and the result was this very unique Channel that was very new at the time because no one else was doing I created my own little niche where viewers really only had me to go to if you just frame yourself as another personal finance Channel well there's like a thousand other channels people could watch but because I created my own Niche the moment where I transitioned into like the type of content I make today was I watched a documentary or or some book or something

6:53 on how fractional Reserve banking Works MH and how sketchy the world of banking is so I a video on like the bit the Absurd business of banking mhm and at the time I thought like no one would be interested in this because this is just like super nerdy stuff MH but I just wanted to make it anyways just to scratch my own itch and I remember I scheduled the video for like 3:00 p.m. in the afternoon but it turned out to be like 3:00 a.m. I scheduled it correctly okay but even though I did that the video still took off mhm so that was the first first step in the direction of like the darker topics I covered today we know that click bity headlines on YouTube get views but it's very easy to get too click baity and sometimes

7:39 viewers just don't enjoy it on the one hand it's Jake's superpower to have a channel without his face on the other hand longtime subscribers note a decrease in the quality of content compared to old videos because they noticed a decrease in Jake's involvement he was also criticized on the internet for advertising questionable companies what about the controvers about your brand deals I just watched like coffee SE all the what was your reaction to that I mean it definitely didn't feel good cuz yeah I've I've always gotten hate comments but this was like the first big I I don't know like the whole drama but it feels like he started and a lot of other YouTubers they just followed the yeah it's pretty crazy like he started it then like a bunch of other YouTubers that you know the easiest route to fame is like criticizing others that's true yeah so all these other like

8:25 smaller copy Zilla types like jumped on the bandwagon yeah it was definitely overwhelming looking back there's probably some things that I could could have done better have you changed your process of like thinking about brand deals yeah we definitely vet them a lot more obviously I didn't know obviously I could have done a better job vetting them and we've definitely improved our process how do you select topics for your videos it's a really big mix I have a really big Network now of like very unique people from all the videos I make so sometimes they S Suggest videos to me um sometimes I have guess on like the celebrity video where uh they'll give me a video topic he's like my adviser arvet Ali and yeah we can talk about him he was part of the video right the guy who was talking about like working with celebrities yeah so he's your adviser

9:13 yeah interesting how does that work in the YouTube world it's it's not like an official YouTube thing so he reached out to me as I was blowing up cuz he was a fan so one day I just get this random email it says like the president of Jordan Belford The Wolf of Wall Street and it says Hey Jake big fan of your videos let me know if you have time to chat today wow and yeah super random email and I was like okay the president of The Wolf Wall Street wants to talk to me so I get on the phone with them he turns out to be a big fan and he turns out to have worked for a lot of celebrities like um Jordan Belfor and a few other ones and he's an adviser to a lot of like Ultra rich people we were talking and you know I was telling him at the time I was really working hard I was working like 10 12 hour days the

9:58 channel was like blowing up and back then I was making all the videos myself editing everything idea research doing all the editing thumbnail M so I was working like 10 12 hour days like 5 six days a week it would take me around five six days to make one video so back then that's why I only could post one video a week W so it's like 50 hours of video Yeah and at the time I was making like a doctor salary like I don't know 200 250k a year which is really good Google mostly that and sponsors yeah and I thought I was like the man mhm and I was telling him like you know I'm making a doctor salary but you know I'm working super hard but it's okay and he kind of just burst my bubble and he said that I

10:45 should not be working this hard and I should be you know making a lot more money while working less and you know my instant reaction to that was like yeah sure yeah would everyone want that uh um and he explained to me that I'm doing it all wrong and that you know why is McDonald's so successful is it because they make a Better Burger well no because there are thousands of places out there that make a better hamburger than McDonald's the reason why McDonald's is so big and they make billions of dollars is because they created a system to make the burgers for them M so that anyone can buy a franchise and they just get that system pre-made and it just works he explained it like I'm like the small burger shop right now or the small business owner where I think that no one can make the videos better than me no one can write

11:31 the videos better than me um no one can serve my customers better than me it's like the artist mindset like yeah yeah yeah who could do it yeah yeah so he explained it to me like that and that if I stick with this route I'll eventually burn out like most YouTubers do and I'll never be able to like scale my income so he told me that I need to find a way to create a system just like McDonald's that creates the videos for me while maintaining the quality and he explained to me like how I should go about doing it and at first I was very resistant as any like artist type would yeah um but you know I swallowed my pride and I just like did what he told me to do and I slowly started um Outsourcing the production of the videos and I started you know really small bit by bit I think the question of growth is crucial for every Creator who started a channel by

12:18 himself so there are basically two ways to grow on YouTube to build a media company and scale to multiple channels or to continue working on the same channels creators often choose the first way because they're confident that they will be able to repeat their success with current resources but in reality there are many risks here for example the audience will not accept the new format or a new face and also you can't predict how your audience will react to the fact that you participate less and as we see long-term viewers definitely noticed decrease of attention of a Creator to his main Channel Jake was able to build multiple huge faceless channels and build a team around them so how did Jake start delegating so the first step was hiring an audio editor cuz I thought that was the easiest part to Outsource cuz you're you're just dealing with audio so I did that that saved me probably like an hour a week

13:05 and then what I did next was I think hiring a video editor mhm and you know my videos are very complex so that was very intimidating for me how do I train someone to you know do the super complex video so I took it one step at a time I had them start by editing just the easiest part of the video so at the time um I would like show up on camera for the last 30 seconds so it would just be a simple a-roll edit so I trained someone to edit just that like 30 second clip at the end once I was confident in that and I saw that they were doing good and they were doing just as good as me I was slowly scaled it up to like the last minute of the video and then a little once I made sure the quality was was good I sceduled up to like the next 2

13:50 minutes and eventually the entire video and I kind of just repeated that process for the rest of the production process next was probably I don't know thumbnails or something mhm but yeah I research now I have a lot of writers that do all the research for for me as well how did you find them there's two routes so if a YouTuber ever gets over that hump of actually you know hiring people the main route most YouTubers will take is you know they'll hire one person like one Jack of all trades that just learns how to do everything and then their entire business becomes relying on that one person yeah um so it's a very fragile situation to be in um I did not want that but the problem is there's no industry of like YouTube script writers out there so you have to train them from scratch so most people

14:35 you find online that are writers um they've probably written a lot for blogs or SEO articles so you have to take th those people and just train them to write your videos for youhm so you train them how to come up with like a captivating intro and then how to tell a story exactly so you did the whole the whole learning thing for them yeah okay can you talk about like how much it costs for you now to produce a video and how many people work on a video um I rather keep that on the down low okay but like okay is your staff are are the people here in the US or are you hire remotely so back back to that channel L duct tips you know they had like this big studio all these inperson people and originally that's what I thought I wanted and but what I found is that statistically speaking there's 7even 8

15:22 billion people on the planet there's a very low likelihood that the best people are going to be in your geographical area that's true so my people are all over wherever they're the best doesn't really matter is every video profitable for you know okay so it covers the the team how do you select like you have probably have like a 100 ideas all the time how do you select the one that you're going to work on that's a good question um after a while you build up some intuition mhm like what will go viral and what won't by now we've come up with a few different series that we always repeat on the channel like the rich people depressed series that we're doing right now yeah yeah it's do so well right like get I got recommended that video like many many times before I actually watched it so great good to know so yeah we have a few different series like that so um that makes it a

16:07 lot easier too where if you have a successful series already you can find another video topic that aligns with that Series yeah so that's another way and I think that's it and then so you come with the topic write a script then b-roll is there does the editor come up with b-roll or you tell them where to take like how does that work so by now our editors are familiar with our editing Style and what types of b-roll we typically use MH um so I don't have that much input anymore if there's if there's like one line where I want to specifically show this thing on screen um I'll tell them to do that mhm but they're they're like pretty autonomous on on their own do you watch the final version of the video before posting yeah I still do uh just because I found that

16:54 where I add the most value in this entire system that I've created is you know the the video I ideas and making sure I'm kind of like the the Master Chef I make sure the food comes out good yeah yeah do you have any other channels or is just the one that you're running so we have the J CH Channel 1.8 million Subs um the channel I'm most excited about is called evil food supply documentaries exposing how bad our food system is today it's blowing up definitely the fastest Channel Growing channel in that Niche there's nothing like it let me let me take a look at it evil Foods Channel evil Foods suppli wow it's growing super wow that's exciting and you just started it and basically every video has done really well yes was your intuition behind this channel how did you come up with it I literally just reapplied the same strategy that I came

17:39 up with to come up with my Niche and applied to here so I looked at um the food Niche or like the Health Nutrition Niche I saw all the gaps in the marketplace for that like at the time the food Niche was either or the the alternative nutrition Health Niche it was either you know old white doctors like Dr erab bir mhm like I'm sure he's a great guy but that's like usually most of the influence there in that regard the other ones were probably were usually like these white girls that appealed to like the female crowd mhm so there was no high-end premium documentary Channel making the videos the way I make videos so I saw that Gap and then so we have that channel we just launched a third channel oh yeah so that channel we

18:25 launched early this year over 250k Subs videos are blown up so really proud of that one is it your voice there no okay voice over actor nice so it's no longer you it's just the whole team and we just launched a third Channel recently called how to get away with it wow two videos 15K first video 555,000 views second video 253,000 views wow so we've definitely created a system that's pretty repeatable it looks like the idea of having multiple channels without your face really works if you approach it in a smart way and minimizes emotional burnout and allows you to release more content but of course you will need to be able to scale and monetize this without losing the quality going back to Li Tes he had like a bunch of channels so that was always

19:11 in the back of my mind like I wanted multiple channels but on top of that the Practical purpose of it is that you have less risk you're not entirely dependent on one channel so there's less risk involved I kind of like having different channels in different niches that have like their own set of videos that we can make for them um that makes come with video ideas easier and then we can also it's a lot also a lot easier to post you know a video today on one channel and another video today on another Channel and you'll still get a lot more views versus if I post two videos in one day on my main Channel yeah yeah that's true so yeah there's a lot of benefits to it what's the strategy with your channel because it looks like these two are doing even better than than your main channel right yeah um the strategy with my main channel it's kind of like the center of everything mhm um that's where

19:58 I experiment a little bit more with different video ideas yeah I kind of use it for experimentation that kind of thing okay and do you plan to go into the short video nich as well I went into it hard back when the YouTube algorithm was really pushing shorts yep and then all of a sudden in like February of this year something my short reviews just crashed that same happened to me I think I think it actually started December last year okay yeah for me it was on literally like February 1st okay I haven't focused on it because you know I have something that's working already that I'm really good at and I'd rather just keep making more long form videos are you planning to do more channels yes yeah um this year Pro in 2024 probably two maybe three more channels W

20:43 that's fascinating yeah I I love that strategy can you talk about monetizing the channels what would be like one two three top three sources uh top sources probably sponsors so brand deals will be number one yes second is probably AdSense third is is the YouTube membership so on the main Channel you can sign up for five bucks a month and you'll get a private documentary every month that's too controversial to be posted publicly wow I love that approach cuz I tried YouTube memberships I'm like extra content like what what can be fasc this is fascinating I feel like people would would want to buy that can you mention the topics that you don't know or it's like oh yeah I can definitely mention them um we've done one on you know Epstein Jeffrey Epstein we've done one on on MK Ultra the caa's mind

21:31 control program where they would like drug okay I haven't heard about Americans unknowingly do you advertise your membership saying like Hey we're releasing a video on this topic yes and this is how they subscribe because they want to they are excited about the topic yeah that's great I think you're the first YouTuber who I meet and uh you talk about like memberships being a one of the top sources of income yeah that's great can you give advice to people who are starting a faceless Channel and also trying to build a an Empire around rounded like starting multiple channels I think one of the best advice that I could give is number one you know nothing that I do or you do is impossible it's not like we're trying to discover a new particle or launch a rocket into space we're literally just making videos and everyone watching this

22:18 you guys all know what videos look like you watch it all the time everything that me and you do it's far from impossible mhm I think that's the first thing people have to keep in mind and then the follow-up question last is if anyone can do this if anyone can really you know make the same videos that me and you make why isn't everyone successful it's because people don't have a strong enough why because if you have a strong enough why where you like fully believe what every ounce of your being like I need to be successful with this or I need to have a a profitable fa this channel if you have a strong enough why you'll figure out all those all the gr details exactly so for me you know I grew up poor and all other stuff so that was a big motivating factor I wanted to to take care of my parents um I wanted

23:03 to like you know prove all the doubters throughout my life wrong so people have to find like their own internal why that will like push them through all the all the times that suck that's great great answer can I ask the last question about your watch looks great what is it it's called from a brand called GP Gerard Parago uhuh and it's a skeleton rose gold watch that I got for a million subscribers wow it looks great thank you so much it was super useful um I'm doing this because I also want like I have a YouTube channel where I talk about languages so I I'm starting different channels like tofl GMA like all of the standardized tests that people take uh and I'm learning from you from Charlie how to build that yeah feel free to reach out if you have help and I think your situation is great because language

23:50 is inherently a more like content thing yeah there is a lot of content around language it's a different type of audience not too many brand deals but we have a course that we can sell yeah yes I decided to jump on a call with Arvid to ask him all the questions because Jake was telling me so much about you so I I just needed to chat with you for this video um can you tell me a little bit more about how you came to this recommendation for Jake that he needs to build this McDonald's type of system out of his channel because I think it's really Innovative for a lot of creators cuz every Creator thinks I think I'm a star no one can replace me like it has to be me in the video when realistically thinking you know there's so many people who can replace me so be the strategy for a YouTuber like me who wants to

24:37 automate the business but the problem is I have three channels uh where I'm the face and uh there's like I don't see any uh viable way how can I exit them right now so what would be your strategy for YouTubers like me who build their whole media into Empire on their look yeah so I think I would just take it one step at a time so I wouldn't like jump the gun and just completely take yourself out of videos and hope for the best type thing it's more like okay uh let's start with everything on the back end so do you have courses that you sell do you have um a team of video editors like you know how involved are you really on the backend side and most YouTubers that I know they're a little bit too involved especially when it comes to the research and script writing side so every single

25:22 thing you can do on the back end that's the first thing that I would focus on and I've rarely found a YouTuber that's just purely you know just shows up says what what he or she needs to say and leaves um uh that is the level that you want to get to First and um some of the I'll be careful on you know not to mention specific names but like some of the Hollywood famous people that ever show up on on on YouTube or you know they are really good at just doing what they do which is the scripts everything's fully written for them they don't like get in get themselves involved into anything really and so you want to get to that place first which is like can you just show up and was all the research given to you was the format at least given to you um and I definitely would take acting classes uh for YouTubers that haven't um that's one

26:09 of the big distinctions that I've seen with like the very big YouTubers that succeed long term is they've taken acting classes uh because it just switches your mindset as to what your role is um and allows you to really just focus on like uh your tonality the way you present yourself and being as just like purely entertaining as you can once you get to that phase where you're really showing up just on the camera when you need to then phase two is like okay um can I adjust my video a little bit so it's not as much about like me talking into the camera you know maybe you show other people talking to the you know you show other individuals or you're or you're talking um uh you're doing a voice voice over over parts of the videos it's not just you um showing your face all the time and uh and then the third phase is among the channels

26:56 that you have certain channels you'll notice is really driven around you and your personality and your face other channels you can really embed other individuals and allow them to show up as an expert or as a guest or whatever it might be so um often times I I've really not found that like the energy drain is not necessarily from uh the pure amount of time you spend like looking at the camera it's from everything else that led up to it and it's from everything else that you need to think about afterwards the first thing I would say is most people don't accomplish First Step which is the most important which is like can you get yourself outside of all backend operations and a key part of that is that it can't be too expensive as well like you really do need to find people um who you train who are cheap both

27:41 locally and internationally Park figure for like producing one video if we find people internationally yeah uh I have a very firm rule that all expenses everything included including like anything that you can think of um you cannot go above 50% of Revenue in expenses I I feel like for a lot of YouTubers especially who are just starting out right they don't have any they they're not even monetized yet but they're already like what is the minimum that you can pull off with with an okay quality sure sure I think you can get I think um if you're paying people hourly internationally um like let's say people in Indonesia or Bangladesh or these kinds of countries like if you're even able to pay them um

28:27 $7 an hour $8 an hour that's a lot of money like I was born in Bangladesh so I you know speak from it that view um that's a lot of money that they can be very grateful for um and the key thing is that they tend to be very trainable you know they might not be the best starting um but they take feedback really well and they'll keep improving if you can give them good feedback so I tend to prefer um usually Indonesia Bangladesh um South Africa tends to be good especially for this for the research research and script writing side um Eastern Europe tends to be really good for the thumbnail design especially that's where a lot of people go for thumbnail design and thumbnails they're not expensive you know $25 $30 so at the end of the day you can have a very good video um and you know few hundred like I I think if you take your effort plus a$ few hundred you can start

29:13 to have really good videos maybe $1,000 Max but it really shouldn't be costing you know way too much money but I think where you can save money is if you focus on people who are pretty cheap to begin with expect that their first draft might not be the best but really focus on giving very specific feedback and seeing if you can improve upon that and that is one one other recommendation is um initially you need to expect that like for every five people that you try only one person is really going to be good for you ideally maybe two but like you need to give it a shot with five people with the same project so the way that we test people is um we will U uh let's say for a thumbnail it's like you'll give very specific instructions to five different thumbnail designers see which of the those five really produce the

29:58 right thumbnails and then you might give a second you know feedback and then see who's really good at taking feedback same thing with the video editing you don't want to give a whole video just the first you know first 30 seconds first 60 seconds just test people out and see what they can produce thank you so much AR that was amazing yeah awesome that was super useful thank you and and hopefully I will start implementing your advice because it's amazing sounds good