# How He Got 7M Subscribers (and Made $10M+)

**Channel:** Ed Lawrence
**Source:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pih9SLiJnPs
**Transcript page:** https://www.withtranscript.ai/video/pih9SLiJnPs

## Chapters

- 0:00 — How Charisma on Command Took Off
- 8:52 — Packaging Videos for Views and Sales
- 19:04 — Building a Business Back to Front
- 26:03 — Turning Viewers Into Buyers
- 37:55 — Outgrowing Offers and Moving On
- 45:21 — Future Goals Beyond Financial Safety

## Transcript

**[0:00] Speaker A:** Charlie Hoopert grew Charisma on Command to 7 million subscribers and made over $10 million. But in a world where everyone's told to grind, scale, and suffer until you get rich, he believes there's a way to build a business that's profitable and far more enjoyable. In this deep dive, Charlie breaks down exactly how he grew one of the biggest self-help channels in the world, how he built an 8 figureure business off the back of it, and he takes us behind the scenes of how he makes content and generates sales in a way that almost anyone can copy. So, Charlie, why did you start a YouTube channel, and what did you think was going to happen? So we started with a blog and it was a coaching business that was built off of a blog for the first two and a half years. We used to just run experiments and there was one particular round of experiments where my three were Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn.

**[0:40] Speaker A:** And so I was going to try to tweet some. I was going to make a YouTube video and I was going to do a LinkedIn post and so I did a series of videos that was me on the camera sitting on the beaches of Brazil. Nothing happened. And so I thought YouTube was dead. And I did one different format. This format was a charisma breakdown. And so I took a clip of Bill Clinton at his 1992 presidential campaign where he was in a community hall and he's asked a question by a woman in the audience and I talked about how he answered it in a way that just had her locked in. So I put this video up and assumed it would do just like the others. You know, this was going to get 52 views maybe if I'm lucky from the people that I send from my own email list to watch it.

**[1:19] Speaker A:** Didn't log into YouTube for probably 6 months. And one day I came back because I wanted to check something six months later and we had 7,000 subscribers and there were like a 100,000 views on this one video. And I believe it was over there was like 3 months where our business tripled basically like we'd made we'd each taken home something like $50,000 in our the year prior. And I think I don't know they have these numbers but I think we made like 150 in just three months after getting on YouTube and selling our course. So, it was like, holy. And then people asked me what I did and I was like, I'm a YouTuber.

**[1:57] Speaker B:** So, Charlie, I thought it'd be fun to go back to the start of your channel and just watch the intro for one of your first videos.

**[2:02] Speaker A:** Let's check it. Let's check the hook. Guys, this is Charlie from Charisma on Command and I want to give you a charisma tip of the day. Try to do one of these every single day. Uh, and keep them very short so you can act on it. So, this first one is something that I've been really interested in lately. It's body language and posture.

**[2:17] Speaker B:** Oh my god. Yeah. What a trip down memory lane, man. If you could go back to that guy and give him one piece of advice, what would it be?

**[2:25] Speaker A:** I wouldn't say truly I wouldn't say anything. The naivee required to try and fail and try and fail is something that I would never want to steal from beginner me. And in fact, I think one of the biggest humps in the last 3 to 5 years has been the curse of knowing too much and going, "Well, that wasn't a good hook." But like the fact that I did not notice or care about any of that was the strongest advantage that I had at that time. Whereas now I can be so meticulous and so perfectionist about things that I produce at a rate of like 1/5 or onetenth of my output at that stage of my life. So I think that guy has more to teach me honestly than I have to teach him. That guy that guy was willing to just suck. I love that about like that.

**[3:16] Speaker A:** I've gotten way way too precious.

**[3:18] Speaker B:** You've probably seen a lot of people come and go on YouTube over the years. What's the difference between the ones who make it and the ones who don't?

**[3:23] Speaker A:** Volume of experiments, I think, is a huge thing. And are you creating from analysis, fear, and obligation, or are you creating from curiosity and love? And those those are like the big bifurcating paths that I think you can take. And even if you succeed on the analysis obligation path, which I did for a long time. I got a lot of views making videos out of analysis and obligation. Uh I've learned that that leads to burnout. Whereas creating from curiosity and love doesn't always succeed immediately numerically, but you put enough shots on goal that you win over time.

**[4:01] Speaker B:** So going back to your channel, there's this really obvious change here where you went from talking on camera in front of a blank wall to suddenly breaking down celebrities, in particular, Bill Clinton. What caused that switch?

**[4:12] Speaker A:** I switched because this was the curiosity and love I the best videos that I've made and not all of them have panned out. But when I see something that creates this real excitement in me and I just can't help but want to share and talk about it, that's what did well. So like I think on YouTube I saw the original don't know how it got served to me of Bill Clinton doing this and I was curious about eye contact and I just watched this woman become spellbound by him over the course of his answer and I personally watched it back several times like whoa what is going on? So what made me do that style of video is that I knew that I didn't have that quality so I needed to point to someone who did and then I just wanted to talk about him and I was

**[4:54] Speaker A:** playing the video pausing it. You see what he does here? What he's doing here is da let's keep going. And it became a way for me to learn from people that had skills far beyond my own. So it was really again scratching my own itch, answering my own curiosity. Uh wasn't wasn't an analytical choice. It wasn't a oh, I need to switch up formats here. It was this is the most natural way for me to talk about this topic. So, what I find weird about your story is you went from being on camera to not being on camera on a channel that is about charisma. It doesn't make sense, right? I feel like you should be on camera presenting. So, what was it that caused that change? And then what happened as a result?

**[5:33] Speaker B:** Part of the reason I wasn't on camera was because I was traveling and in Brazil and you saw the like I could I didn't need a setup in order to shoot. So, I could just speak into the microphone and let the B-roll do the talking, which would made it an easier process. But the other thing that started happening is when I did create a setup and I did shoot on camera, there was like a anywhere from a 3:1 to a 10:1 difference in the views that we would get when I was on camera versus the views that we would get when I was talking about a celebrity. And while I don't I don't think the answer was me being on or off camera, it was was I famejacking or not? Was I plugging into somebody that people were interested in independently of charisma? So I, you know, talking about Conor McGregor and confidence was 3 to 10 times more likely to be viewed than me doing the same confidence content standing in front of a white wall.

**[6:27] Speaker B:** And so that was the big insight. Today, what I've done is you've got a great point, which is I need to be on camera because like people need to connect with you. If it is a charisma channel, how the heck are you not going to show up and do it? So, what we've switched to now is it's me on camera with limited B-roll of the person that I'm talking about, so that it has the best of both worlds, but at the at the beginning, it it wasn't that well thought out.

**[6:50] Speaker A:** So, famejacking is putting someone more famous than you in your thumbnail and your video with the idea being that you borrow their audience. And I've seen this for myself. It's one of the best ways to get views, especially for a small and new channel. The thing is, most people who try it, they can't build a business off the back of it. So what is the secret to using a famous person to get click and then building your own credibility so people come back to you not just for the celebrity's story?

**[7:15] Speaker B:** I think most people uh do use a social hacking and they do it based on news like their their commentary is not additive to the thing. So you can go across niches to anyone you want to talk about, but like there's uh take critical drinker who is not he's he's a movie reviewer who is not ever basically have his face on his main channel, but people are there for his perspective. They want his voice, his take on the video, his political sensibility. Like all of that is what people come for, though it's connected to a large cultural event. That was what we wound up doing with our channel, which is I'm not just reading you a book report about Conor McGregor or about confidence. I'm adding my particular flavor of analysis and insight, which was born from having quit my job, moved to Brazil. I'm telling stories from my own life inside of these videos.

**[8:07] Speaker B:** So, you're not So, you're hooked by Conor McGregor or Game of Thrones, but when you stay in there, you learn about me. And so in every one of these videos, there was the attraction that sort of hooked you into it and then it was the thing that you got throughout that process of watching the video. And I think that's what people miss. If you make just a news channel where you're taking the most interesting topic, Sydney Sweeney posted XYZ, but you're not adding any analysis, insight, commentary, humor, whatever, you're going to run into the problem that you described, which is you're you're literally indistinguishable and commoditized compared to anyone else. Versus if you use that as a hook and then show up with something particular to you, your humor, your take, your analysis, that that's how you build a return audience.

**[8:52] Speaker B:** So you created this style that is insanely powerful for views and sales. Would you break down step by step how you come up with a video idea and then how you turn that into a funnel and title to get a click?

**[9:04] Speaker A:** So what we were doing at the time is we were one getting to know our audience in sort of a conversation which is I would make the content that I wanted to make and we were seeing which of it did better and which of it did worse. I would never have guessed this but athletes nobody really cared. I did a LeBron James video. I did a number of athletes. I was like, why why wouldn't my mostly male audience be interested in leadership lessons from the greatest athlete of all time who's going to continue to produce content for the next 15 20 years, but it didn't work. On the other hand, Jordan Peterson, who at the time was this like, you know, professor, uh, people were super super interested in. So, I was learning about the audience from what they were clicking and what they were saying was step one.

**[9:47] Speaker A:** So, take take, uh, Pey Blinders, Killian Murphy. That was the top comment on several videos. Do Pey Blinders, do Pey Blinders, you got to do Tommy Shelby. I'd never seen it. So, one, I'm I'm listening to my audience. Then we watch Peaky Blinders or watched some of Peiquey Blinders because it was like a several season thing. And we needed to identify why they were getting us like what what is it about this guy that they admire? And so for him, the key thing is how he commands respect. But you know, Don Draper is similar. uh Robert Downey Jr. similar but there's other people like Conan O'Brien who you would not go how to command respect like Conan O'Brien. So what there's basically underneath these admired people there's a quality or trait that we're curious about how they have that thing. So for Conan O'Brien it might be like how to it might be funny or wit or how to be super fast when thinking of jokes like that sort of a thing is why we like Conan O'Brien.

**[10:47] Speaker A:** So, we would try to match what is it that the audience likes about this person with them. That would give us our title. Then what we did was we learned over time and just seeing the click-through rates that if you look at all of ours, almost all when it's a man, he's staring directly at the camera and not smiling. Like that's the respect face that people want. And you can you can check that. But then the big thing was how the text on the thumbnail spoke to the text in the title. And so what we wanted to do, people call it mystery boxes or whatever, is we wanted to open up a specific question in the mind of the reader. What a lot of people get wrong is they just repeat thumbnail text that is like how to command respect and then it's like command respect.

**[11:33] Speaker A:** That's just slamming the person with the same message twice. But if here we have, you know, psychology that makes people respect you and then the thumbnail says speak like this. I've created an expectation in the mind of the viewer which is they're expecting to learn from Don Draper a particular way that he speaks that commands respect. The size of the question is also very important. Like if I if I make a promise like how to be like a a trillion% confidence and never doubt yourself. Size of the promise can be so big that people don't believe it's answerable in an 11minute video. What I've noticed now is that actually going smaller into your niche, like you know, two words that make people um regret regret speaking to you disrespectfully or something like that. The more niche you can go, the more specific your promise can be, the modern era seems to reward that better.

**[12:27] Speaker A:** And you also don't have to be as you do not have to be sensational today. like almost the more precise you get, the more the more likely your video is to do well, which is really cool. Yeah, there's there's a um supply and demand thing, which is if you if you do this, like there's way too much supply of of thumbnails like this, of videos like this, you're you're not breaking out or competing. People want something new. And so the ability to innovate in your title and thumbnail approach is super important.

**[12:56] Speaker B:** So once you've come up with the idea on how to package this video, what do you do next? Once we had our packaging, we would have our thumbnail guy make 10 to 20 thumbnails. And at the time, this was novel. Everybody does this now. But, uh, he would send us a purple version, a blue version, a red version, a version with these faces, a version with this text, a version with this, and we would just like on our iPhones like I would let the team like the one that they thought was best, and then I would chime in last so that my vote didn't disturb people. We'd send it to a couple friends, that sort of a thing. Uh, and then we would see if we could find cohesion. If we couldn't find cohesion, it normally meant that there wasn't a winner. And there were times where I would sit and just write down like brainstorm.

**[13:40] Speaker B:** Okay, it's Sunday. This video goes up on Monday. It's done. But what I need to do is nail the thumbnail. So, okay, it's Ben Shapiro. Speak like this. Make them regret. and I would just write all like 10 to 20 other options of thumbnail text until we started to get more consensus about what the video would be. Um, that was usually a good sign that we were on to something is where we were like, "Ooh, I like this one, you like this one, and you like this one. There's something to that." It's crazy because so many people really struggle to go on YouTube because they treat their titles and their thumbnails like an afterthought. I think part of them maybe thinks that the effort they put in there doesn't really matter. So, how much time would you spend on thumbnails and titles and what impact do they have not just on your channel but on sales?

**[14:22] Speaker B:** I think there's a curve here which is at the beginning it was zero and that was the period of most enjoyment most fun most high volume of creative output you know like and I there was a unconscious naivee and discovery which is really valuable when you then we started scaling it up and what we saw as we focused more on packages the top line and bottom line of the business skyrocketed right so when when you when you when you have product market fit meaning like you're making content, there's people that are interested and you can get you can go from 3 and 12% clickthrough to 5 1/2% click-through. That's not just like 60 70% bump. That's like a 10x in terms of views that you're going to get, which means that's an 8x in terms of sales. So then we got more analytical with it and I would say I would spend it was still 80 8515 time on content thumbnail but that last 15 was my least favorite part of the process.

**[15:24] Speaker B:** And then where I think we put the cart in front of the horse was when it became we're not going to do that video unless we can figure out the right title and thumbnail. And while this is true of all of the big YouTube channels, like they they they nailed their title and thumbnail in advance, it c it crowded out the joy of making the video for me. So maybe I wanted to make a video of exobscure character, but I knew that it wouldn't perform. Instead, I'm going to do this guy that everyone has asked for. So now my whole week, that 85% is spent on a topic that I'm not passionate about. And so now I've traded my old corporate job where I have to do that I don't like to my entrepreneurial job where I don't have to do that I don't like but I choose to anyway in order to

**[16:06] Speaker B:** get more views and you know I we're cheating ahead here but that created tremendous financial gain, tremendous growth in subscribers and burnout. Um so I appreciate the upside of it but I definitely do not want to do it again. And good news, YouTube is very different today. the niche stuff like you can if you can do your niche interest with passion. I I love how the algorithm has evolved like it's got a space for that stuff which is really cool.

**[16:36] Speaker A:** So you keep talking about testing. The thing is when you're a new channel or a new business on YouTube and you're posting stuff and nothing's working yet, there's not really anything to test. So if you're a business owner just starting out on YouTube, what do you think you should focus on? And and when do you start testing?

**[16:52] Speaker B:** You you need to make content regularly. You could define what regularly means, but for me that was every Monday at 10 a.m. a video had to go up. Didn't matter if I'd worked all week on it and made my masterpiece or if I recorded 30 seconds Sunday night that I just posted. So step one is not to make excellent content that is well tested. It's to make regular content. That is the 99% gate. Most people are are solving problems they don't have, which is how do I test and make things perfect when they're not making things. So step one is you have to regularly make stuff do that for 3 to 6 months before you even ask the question okay how do I tweak optimize etc my approach because if you're unwilling to just create freely for 3 to 6 months go find a different game like this is not you don't like this enough in order to win or in order to do it presuming that you've passed that gate you've made stuff the first

**[17:45] Speaker B:** thing you do is look back and if it's maybe the views are flat but you might see that one video has you know 3x views like it might be 75 versus 25 that's giving you some directional indication, but it's still not a breakout. So, what I would actually look at is if you have anything that's a 10x breakout, it's got a,000 views, etc. Ask questions around format, topic, title, thumbnail in that order. I think format is the easiest way to multiply views. What are formats? You've got the talking head, you've got game shows, you've got challenges, you've got like uh video essay style. All of the different styles of video that you can make, you can play with. And that would be the first thing that I would explore which is then you've got topics. So you can experiment with different topics, right? And I think that's pretty self-explanatory.

**[18:32] Speaker B:** And then honestly title and thumbnail are further down the line of like things to test. But if to start I would I would play with format and topic first. Uh and then of course today on anything that you put out, YouTube has the AB testing feature. It is just silly not to give yourself multiple cracks at a title and a thumbnail today cuz you never know. like you might have the content, but one of your three tested titles might be the one that that actually breaks through. Um, so I don't know if that answers exactly the question for a beginner, but those are the things that I would that I would look first at.

**[19:04] Speaker A:** Right, Charlie? So, let's talk about the business now because you have an insanely successful one. You've had over 30,000 people come into your program. And I think a great place to start is with what you were doing before Charisma. Come on. How are you making money? So, we read the 4-hour work week and Tim Ferrris became my idol for for many years. This was like we're going to quit our jobs, travel the world, live a rich life, retire early type of a thing. And in order to do that, he advises looking at the marketplace and finding a niche that you can break into. So, at the time, this was post Casino Royale. There was this parkour thing that people seemed to be getting into. I was curious about it, but had never done it. So, we looked up a guy in New York, hired him to shoot a parkour training DVD.

**[19:47] Speaker A:** Came with like, "Here's the moves that we want you to demonstrate. You demo them. We're going to pay another guy to bring a camcorder, and then we'll chop it up and sell it." Chopped that up uh into 30 or 45 minutes of like how to do a Kong, how to do a wall run, etc. Added B-roll uh commentary over top of what he'd said, and then sold it on Google using Google Adwords. We had no organic way to do it. and all costs minus what we sold, it broke even after many, many months of effort. And that was like fun and cool to make money, but also demoralizing cuz I didn't really care about parkour and it wasn't working. So the breakthrough there was I'm only going to stick with something if it is personally meaningful to me and this is going to be a marathon, not a sprint.

**[20:27] Speaker A:** So this is where we got into social skills and charisma.

**[20:29] Speaker B:** So a lot of people want to come up with something to sell their audience, but I think they really struggle with knowing what to make. How do you come up with an idea that will actually sell and make money?

**[20:38] Speaker A:** I think this is one of the most unspoken but necessary business lessons. You want to build backto front in terms of a business. When you build front to back, you get confused. And what I mean by that is if you start going top of funnel, which is like, let me get views on YouTube. Okay, I got all these views. Okay. Um, here's me falling on my face. Oh my god, 10 million views. People love that. Then you go, now I need to figure out how to monetize that. Now I'm going to do a show where I uh fall on my face. you wind up in a place it's like oh this isn't what I want right like you're building top of funnel what will people show interest in all the way here versus if you go what's the transformation that I want in my life like what what sort of thing even if nobody ever paid me would be worth my time and effort to transform so for me it's like if nobody pays me but I become more outgoing make

**[21:26] Speaker A:** more friends and I'm dating women that I'm excited to be dating that's pretty awesome even if I never make a Can I do that in my life? Okay, great. I can. Then can I help someone for free? Like a friend asks me a question, which they did because they would see the transformation. Can I help them? Then can I charge someone? Usually someone that I don't know that well because the friends are might feel awkward about paying you. Can I charge them, coach them one-on-one? Okay, now can I coach one to many? Okay, now can I digitize this coaching practice, which is where we wound up? After months and might have been over a year of coaching, I realized, man, I'm tired of answering the same questions in the same way and getting the same headnod at the same moment. Like, I know what's going to hit and I just don't want to repeat myself.

**[22:14] Speaker A:** Then it became time to record the product. So, that became Charisma University, which was based on a lot of the coaching that we' done at the time. And we built it with a cohort of people that were defining the curriculum with us as we were like, "Hey, what do you guys want to learn in week one?" And it was like first impressions, that's the hardest thing for us. Great, cuz I might have started somewhere else. And so I let them define the curriculum, got to track with them what was landing for them and not. And then we did a number of iterations, there were ultimately four, of me recording and re-recording Charisma University, the course. And then when that was done then I attached that to the YouTube channel that I had been built around 2018 2019 which is where like the new version we we had some version of it in 2015.

**[23:03] Speaker A:** Uh but once I really dialed it in and iterated it, we just attached it to the back of some of our videos and then the business just exploded. Like now it's not just YouTube ad revenue to a course that isn't really connected. It was the topic that they were interested, feeding the course that they were interested, and that was huge. Still not the perfect business architecture that I would aim for now, but infinitely better than just asking, "What are people clicking? Oh now how do I monetize it?"

**[23:32] Speaker B:** I think people often expect to start a channel and then have a product and then just instantly get rich. How long did it take for you between doing sort of a simple one-to-one coaching offer and then ending up with a product that sold to around 30,000 people?

**[23:46] Speaker A:** V1 would be about 1 to two years. So from from like coaching to product, yeah, two-ish years. Um we did a while of coaching and and that sort of stuff, but from V1 to what became the final version of it, four or five years of like stuff. And I and I'm in that process again right now, which is asking again, okay, I'm I'm now 39. What is the transformation that I want to make in my own life? It's no longer making friends in the same way. It's more about like deep lasting relationships, intimacy, all of that sort of stuff. Can I do that with my life and my closest people? Then can I teach a friend? And so we're going through that process in our own lives, just at a different life stage now. And I think we'll be able to speed that process up to your point.

**[24:34] Speaker A:** Like I don't think it will take as long because I've been through it. But what I have seen is that the people that can for whatever reason they have the financial means, the patience, etc. to really dial in the transformation before rushing to scale it. Those are the robust businesses that last. And the people that go, I need to make a bunch of money, so I'm going to teach people how to make money. I'm going to coach coaches coach and coaches all the way down. Those businesses sometimes spike but then often die because you don't have the bedrock capacity to transform someone's experience. And the idea being that if you could do this in your own life and you could do 90 to 100% of that one to one and you could do 90 to 100% of that in groups, you're going to get a fraction of that as you scale out.

**[25:21] Speaker A:** But it'll be a fuller fraction of that than if you just start trying to talk out of your behind on how to be charismatic or how to make money or how to get views on YouTube because you can't do it yourself.

**[25:32] Speaker B:** So you're better off making less at the start than making the product really good and then trying to scale it. So does that mean there's no online get-richqu schemes?

**[25:40] Speaker A:** I think there's this is it. So if there is no real get-richqu scheme and it's only a get-rich slow scheme, what would you love to do slowly? what like that's that becomes the question and to me that is such a more firm foundation upon which to build the thing that you want to do because even if you don't make money you still get the personal transformation and so that that for me has been my guiding star.

**[26:03] Speaker A:** It's served me well.

**[26:04] Speaker B:** Charlie, would you mind taking us through your current business? I'd love to see the journey that someone goes on from being a viewer to suddenly becoming a buyer.

**[26:12] Speaker A:** So for many people it's to become a client they click a video. Um, at this point we've got, you know, existing. You watch this, you have hopefully a wonderful time. If you go to the end of the video, there's going to be some sort of call to action. There you go. So, this is our call to action. This is something we're experimenting with. Back in the day, we could get away with 60 to 90 second call to actions and still get 3 to 5 million views on a video. Today, it's proven much harder to just have that at the end of a video and get the size that amount of views. So, we're experimenting with shorter calls to action, etc. Um, but what happens is you've got a call to action bridge. It's really important like this. This was a huge breakthrough for us. Your core if if this is well constructed from back to front, you've got this ultimate transformation that you can offer people.

**[27:05] Speaker A:** They can become more confident, they can make more money, they can become more fit, etc. But you you're showing up and just giving them like here's five exercises that'll, you know, going to make your abs ripped. But there's something else that they need that is going to do that. They need accountability. They need a community. They need a particular um weight product or something like that. And what you want to do is if it's honest, this is like this is the way to do it. That your last point alludes to that. So if you look at the last point of some of my videos, it's like this stuff can be done over time. Like the the mindset is 5 minutes a day and you can transform this. A lot of people think that it's not possible to change how people respond to you, but my experience if you just focus on one thing per day over time, you get transformation.

**[27:48] Speaker A:** This is still very much in the realm of advice and content of the video, but it's a perfect bridge to the product, which is and if you want the exact exercises that I recommend you do for those five minutes, you might be interested in this product. So there is education going on over the course of the video, right? You're like letting people know that charisma is learnable. First off, that's in the video that you know what you're talking about. You're giving them tips that are valuable. But in that final point, what you want to do is start to speak to the form factor shift that your product takes and what it offers that a YouTube video cannot possibly. So examples of that, like I said, YouTube videos cannot offer accountability. They can't offer one-to-one coaching. They can't offer customization. they can't offer you the physical product that supports you on the way.

**[28:36] Speaker A:** And if you include that education in the final bit, and I've seen you do this in your videos where the whole video is like, you know, you're talking about how to grow your channel, but you're doing it with your software and like showing how the analysis of knowing which videos are making sales is the thing that's going to blow up your channel, then you don't need a long call to action. And it's just like you, by the way, like I made this and uh it costs this much and if you want to do it, you can just click here to do it and I'm going to know which video sold because I'm using this software as well. Um then the thing that I see within the call to action is testimonials are very very valuable. So people in similar situations to the audience that are answering questions that they may have in their head, which is basically will this work for me?

**[29:20] Speaker A:** Will this work for someone in my situation? I'm a guy, a girl, young, old. Uh I want to do charisma in a way that is authentic. Like if you can get testimonials that speak to some of the doubts that your uh prospective clients have, that's going to be really really valuable. And there's a whole way to do that. And you know, cuz people people often want to give testimonials for products, but they don't know how. Like this is great. And the simple idea of say what you thought before you bought the product, say what you experienced having bought the product, and then if you recommend it, just close with the recommendation to whoever you would recommend it for, whether it's business owners or whatever. That that helps people frame testimonials in way that are supportive of you cuz you might have a lot of happy customers that just don't know how to do that.

**[30:06] Speaker A:** You know, before I did Revra, I was struggling to d after that, you know, we watched our business go up 400%. I would definitely recommend this to anyone who's trying to make money off YouTube. Great testimonial.

**[30:17] Speaker B:** I've not actually seen many people do that. So So how long have you been putting a call to action at the end of every video like that?

**[30:22] Speaker A:** 2019. So we were early. We were early. We were one of the first people to treat YouTube as a business platform. It is far more common now. Like everybody gets this. Uh but that was experimental at the time.

**[30:37] Speaker B:** So they clicked on the call to action. they land here on your lovely rainbow sales page. Now, your sales page breaks a lot of the traditional marketing rules, but this is kind of something I've noticed for a long time now. Sometimes the ugly weird thing that shouldn't work works kind of better than anything else you try. You just do what works, right?

**[30:53] Speaker A:** The rainbow sales page. Oh boy. Yeah, this thing this this kills me. I made this in 20 I mean one of this is like this was the sales page that survived multiple iterations with small changes. We have run a battery of tests against this garbage page and cannot beat it. I I can't and I think what's beautiful about that is I think it's because it was written like it was written from the place that I was writing the blog posts like you know was this was it's got a story in it and I I can't even I can't even look at it anymore because it's so it's 10 years old 12 years old and well let me think 2026 yeah 10ish years old but it's it's been our sales page for for a long long time. Yeah. Yeah, here's the rainbow colors. Yes. Now, do I think that now with AI enhanced design and all sorts of things, we could improve upon it?

**[31:40] Speaker A:** Definitely. Definitely. I think we could increase our our sales rate, but what we're actually doing is we're we're redesigning our product suite. So, we're not we're not focused on dialing conversions again. We're going back to front, which is before you focus on selling more of the thing, make sure that you're getting the transformation as dialed as it can be. And one of the things that this program is missing and this is a big hole in a charisma company is it's missing community connection and accountability which is which worked at the time and that was they didn't have all these zoom options discord etc but it's do at your own pace which can be very lonely. So you're like getting this stuff you're going out and practicing it you can comment on it but I want to make something that has a more communal aspect. So that's something that we're working on now and when that comes out it'll have hopefully a prettier sales page than this.

**[32:28] Speaker B:** So one thing I found really interesting about your sales page is for years the advice has been put the buy now button right at the top of your page. One of the first things that people can see but yours I had to scroll down for about 10 minutes until I found it. Why did you do that? Is that based on your test?

**[32:43] Speaker A:** This was based on tests. We tried one that was shorter. We tried having buttons higher. What we find is that people that buy, they'll they'll stay on the sales page for like 60 seconds and they'll read some. They'll take a look. They'll like have something that they want and expect versus if they just go through and then go, "Okay, what's the price? Do I want to get this?" Want them to take a look and see what's inside of it before they uh make their decision. So, this has served us.

**[33:04] Speaker B:** So, it sounds simple. It's a video, a call to action in the video to a sales page and then they buy. Not really rocket science. That is it. It's been incredibly successful for you. But I think what would be good to talk about now is just how things are changing fast. I think faster than probably I can ever remember online. What are you doing right now to adapt your business and to keep growing it?

**[33:24] Speaker A:** The thing that we're seeing, which is the thing that I want to change, which is not unique to our course, is that if it is self-paced and there's no accountability, there's a really steep drop off and people that go through these things. um you can you can raise it by 50% but it still doesn't matter because the number of people who finish a book that they buy or a course that they buy across the industry is roughly 10%. And I think in our course it's like 11. So we're like 10% better than that but it's we're not getting people through it which is okay let's say we doubled that. Okay we're still at 22%. like the all the things in the world that we could do are not going to solve that problem which interestingly takes us back to the question about well what do you do when something isn't working you change the

**[34:07] Speaker A:** format so instead of a talking head video I did the famejacking videos what I realized is that there's a category of courses that have 97 completion rates like across the industry and those are cohort-based courses those are courses where you sign up you show up at the first class at 4:00 and they pair you with another human being that is going through the course with you, that is going to be there waiting for you every Tuesday at 400 p.m. And when you make people accountable to one another and have them do exercises in tandem, you move from 10% to 93 to 97% completion rate regardless of the quality of what you're doing, which is like so this is the format change that I'm really excited about. Um, and I don't know exactly what we're going to do. We might have we're still going to have some do-it-your formats maybe in an app form now that apps are so much easier to make with AI.

**[35:02] Speaker A:** But uh I'm very interested in how we can tweak the delivery mechanism of what we do to to increase uh completion rate and therefore the likelihood of transformation which in increases every other metric which is they're going to want to buy another course more likely. They're going to want to leave a testimonial. like all of those things I expect to improve once we make this a change to to the delivery of what we teach.

**[35:27] Speaker B:** So, it's interesting. I rebuilt my own program multiple times a year for sort of five, four or five years. And it it's very rare to hear of anyone in this space talk about trying to improve their product rather than just trying to make money. Why is improving your product so important to you?

**[35:42] Speaker A:** Yeah. And and I mean to to all of our own detriment, which is it is the best thing for you if people complete your course and get a tremendous amount of value, even if you don't have anything to sell them immediately. Like that's your that's your raving fan base looking to buy the next thing when you release it in 5 years. Um let alone it's it feels good to sell stuff to people that benefit from it. This is I think a thing that people don't get. People spend so much time learning sales tactics and sales hacks and here's the thing and add a testimonial. How do I get the testimonial? It all has a very extractive quality to it. When I recorded the final version of Charisma University, I was disappointed in the third version. It just wasn't as good as I could make it.

**[36:23] Speaker A:** I did the final version and we did a call to action that had almost all the same elements, but it it like we we'd learned, okay, it needs a testimonial, needs this, needs that, but it converted. I forget it. I don't want to get the numbers wrong, but sometimes between somewhere between two and 4x better just because of the way that I did the read and it was it wasn't a read. It was like, "Guys, I just completed this. This is the best I can offer you. I'm super excited for you to check it out. If you like the channel, I think you will like this." Like, the ability to say that from my gut increases conversions. And so if you're focused on sales tactics and what are the words that I say, you're missing the essence of it, which is your own self-belief that you've put your all into the thing and that from your experience,

**[37:07] Speaker A:** this is a really valuable decision for people to make even if you weren't making money. Think how much more effective you are at recommending books and movies that you really love to people compared to your own product because you're not you're you actually love the book. You love the movie. you like you're there's nothing in it for you other than wanting to share the thing that you think would be great for someone else to experience and if you can pair that with and I make money when you do it and it's great for my business and it's good now you've got just a really virtuous cycle of a flywheel uh but if you don't and you have secret doubts which you know 10% completion rate doesn't feel good for me 11% completion rate doesn't feel good for me um and you can solve that problem yeah I I can see how that's going to be really valuable to us to to address.

**[37:55] Speaker B:** So once they bought Krisma University, was there something else that you then tried to sell them after or was that it?

**[38:00] Speaker A:** We've we've offered a variety of like courses. I think I offered them a little bit too early in my understanding. We had one course that was called emotional mastery that is I think technically findable, but like only if you like really search for it. And I made it early 30s when I started realizing that all of like I'd learned how to get people to like me, but there was still the question of like what to do with my own inner thoughts and inner world. And I had some breakthroughs that I wanted to make a course out of, but I made it too early. I like the transformation wasn't in-depth and complete in me. So, I made it. I was excited. And then when I realized, oh, this is this isn't my best. Like, I need to come back and work more on this. We stopped talking about it, selling it.

**[38:39] Speaker A:** I still left it up there cuz it's been valuable for some people. But ultimately, I'd like to come back and address that question next, which would be, okay, like you've figured out how to get people to like you. Congratulations. Now you've graduated to the next problem, which

**[38:50] Speaker B:** So, someone wanted to create a new offer. How how could they make it a really good one?

**[38:53] Speaker A:** So this is mine. People do it differently. Like there are people who have waste management companies and they go to their customers and they figure out what their problem is etc. I have always been in the realm of find the edge of my own transformative desire. So like what is the thing that didn't seem possible when I was in my when I was 23? was like, can I go out and make the friends that I want, be treated well at work, and date the women that I am really attracted to and want to date without having to earn a ton of money or get jacked? Like, like, can I can I just do that through who I am, my personality? It was an ambitious question and one that I was like solved in a way that felt really good in my own life. So, that became my offer to people, which is I will teach you to do this thing that I have done.

**[39:33] Speaker A:** So, if you're looking for an offer, look to the problem in your own life. And so now I'm in a long-term relationship. You can see my girlfriend's got a bunch of cats. And

**[39:41] Speaker B:** the amount of comments that are going to be on the cat because we just completely ignore the fact there is a Siamese cat behind you. The whole

**[39:47] Speaker A:** Yeah, this is my life. There's always a Siamese cat behind me. My girl, this is Artemis. Um, now the problems that I have being in a relationship for 9 years are not the same problems that I had when starting relationships. It's all sorts of questions about um how do you maintain and like passionate intimacy and how do you guys work together and like what would it be like to start a business with your girlfriend wife all like all of the questions that I have that I see hit mid to late 30s and into 40s and 50s and then people have children and they have problems there. What is the problem that you have personally after you solved your first problem? That's probably the problem that your customers having. If you can help yourself with those problems, you will be able to help the audience. You did this.

**[40:28] Speaker A:** You solved your views problem and then you had a money problem. You're like, I need to solve my money problem. Okay, how do I do that? Well, I need analytics. Okay, I'm going to build the software and this is going to holy my money went up and my time time invested went really really down. Like, I'm going to share this. And what do you know? That was as I understand it like an incredible shift in your business where you just crushed it. You've got a new problem now. If you can address the problem that you have now, everyone who went on that journey with you is going to find themselves in the same damn place. I think the problem with this whole game of making content and then selling things off the back of it is we all just tend to outgrow the topic we're talking about and it's exactly like you just said.

**[41:02] Speaker A:** You had a problem, you solved it, you tried to help other people do it and then you personally had another problem which you then solved and now your interests have moved on. Your existing channel just starts to feel like a burden. So, how do you deal with having a channel in a business that you're no longer as interested in? Do you do you fight it and just keep going or do you embrace it?

**[41:20] Speaker B:** So, I've tried both. I tried fighting it was like, "Hey, let's keep making content about making people respect you and that created three years of burnout in me and an, you know, it created resentment between me and the audience that they didn't deserve. It wasn't their fault that I was chasing the applause of, you know, hey, make this. They they can't control me, but uh it built a relationship with between me and my audience that was one of frustration and obligation. They want another one of these videos." And it's like again that's and so there is a very important death cycle that occurs which is like yo you built this first business one you can set people up to run it but you can also just let it die. You just let it drift away and then do the work that you want. And what I've seen is that it's cyclical.

**[42:01] Speaker B:** There was something really fun about the beginning of my business which was the exploration and the this and the that and the not knowing and the charting uncharted territory. It's the hero's journey man. You're like hey how come I have to do the hero's journey again? It's like because it's great. It's the best if if you embrace it. Um, so yeah, that's been that's been my realization lately is that my goal is not to sit on top of an annuity and go, "Oh, wow. This turns out money and now I just feel this big hole because I'm not contributing meaningfully." It's like, no, like, thank God that this dies. It forces me to grow. It forces me to step into the next thing. Except I'm doing it now with resources and understanding and at a different life stage. Now I can call Ed if I have a question about YouTube and like like I get I get to do it at just bigger and bigger scale which is the last thing I'll say about that is that um

**[42:47] Speaker B:** the hardest piece for me has been the death of the identity. What is really really hard for me was to go, you know, we're getting 10 views, 100 views, 10,000 views, 100,000 views, 10 million views, 500,000 views, 300,000 views. Like, like to watch that death cycle occur was not like, oh, I'm not going to be able to feed myself, but it was my identity as the YouTuber who just had it. Man, dude, that that is sliced into a core of how I saw myself. Thank God, though. Thank God it's put me back in the ability to experiment and lose and try that doesn't work and discover that I didn't just have to chase the audience around forever and ever. The goal is the goal for me is not have a waste management business that makes me a lot of money. It's do work that lights me up and that I'm compelled by and to connect with people whose lives I'm transforming.

**[43:36] Speaker B:** And when I remember that

**[43:37] Speaker A:** that's really interesting because the common advice online is start a business, focus on it intensely for 20 years, optimize for money. You want to grind, you want to hustle. Do you think people actually want to do that or are they just better off building something to a certain level and then when they outgrow it just moving on to the next thing?

**[43:51] Speaker B:** Everybody thinks I've seen this, man. I know you know a bunch of people that have crushed it. Everybody thinks they want to make they've all got a number in their head and it rises as they make more money. If I have this much and I can park this in investments, then I'll never have to work again. and they they they start thinking like that. That is one of the most um depressing ways of approaching your life that you could possibly do. It presumes that work is miserable, not meaningful, and doesn't add to your life. And I know that what I found is that work at its best can be like the engine of so much that is good in my life. And it pushes the edges of my fear and my boundaries. And I wouldn't go to that conference if I didn't have a YouTube channel.

**[44:32] Speaker B:** But I did go and therefore I got to meet Ed and you know what I mean? Like I never would have done that without quote unquote work. And so I think if it's different at different stages if you're just trying to get your head above water, there's times where you just have to bite the bullet and do that doesn't feel good. But for so many of my cohort that have come up, made a decent amount of money, have a nest egg, they don't look at that as, oh this is fuel for me to invest into building the next thing that creates fire. they go, "How can I lock this into safe annuities that make me a bunch of money?" Uh, and it doesn't it doesn't make them feel good, excited, alive, or anything. And so, to your question, people think they want the waste management business.

**[45:11] Speaker B:** They do not want the reality of it because it just leaves them with the stark question of meaning and purpose, which which is not addressed by being financially safe.

**[45:21] Speaker A:** So, just to finish up, Charlie, where do you want to be in 5 years time? Once the question of safety is addressed financially to a level level where you're like, "Hey, I I might feel unsafe, but it's not true like like there's there's a deep level of safety." What I have found is that emotional and spiritual concerns all of a sudden emerge. And that's where I've spent a lot of my attention and that's where I'd like to help people. Um, not so that we can all sit on a mountaintop and be separate from the world, but so that I can contribute from a place of service and support others in doing that, which is like, yeah, feels like it feels like we're starting now. So, check in in five years. I hope that that's the case. And I want you to come out. I want you to I want you to visit.

**[46:03] Speaker B:** Yeah, Charlie, thank you so much. Go check out Charlie's channel. Link below, Chris on Command. And if you want to grow a channel that generates views and leads and sales without having to do stuff that you hate and the way that Charlie said and the way that I believe in too, watch this video next and I'll show you exactly