 The year was 2070 and it was in the evening after a busy day. I pulled out my phone and out of curiosity I typed into Google the most popular websites in Nigeria. I wasn't doing anything serious. I just wanted to have an idea which websites are most visited by people in my country. Google took me by hand to Alexa and there at Alexa I saw Google.com as number one. That's no surprise. I was expecting Facebook to be number two. When something happened I saw YouTube in number two. This was strange to me because at the time I hardly hear anything in my circle of friends talking about YouTube and I knew everyone and their cat is on Facebook. How on earth can YouTube be this popular? I mean people in my country always complain about the cost of data. How do they have so much data to consume so much videos? While these thoughts consumed me I started to think about a simple business principle I had learned a long time ago, which is people are money. So wherever people go money goes. It's a simple principle actually. Whenever you see many people whether in a city, country or an online platform be sure that there is money. A lot of money. You may not know how to make that money or you might have to sacrifice a lot of time before you figure out what to sell but be sure it's available amid multitude. Believe in this I decided to invest heavily on YouTube. But this would happen until the following year 2018 because I was busy creating some products from my company. By April of 2018 I was ready for YouTube. I created a particular YouTube account a few years ago with no reasonable posting on it so I decided we're starting with it and that's what we did. To cut a long story short this channel hit 1 million subscribers by June or July of 2020. Okay, now let me share with you a few things I think we did right so you may learn from our experiences. 1. Passion is the blood of content. I know you've heard it said like a trillion times and you're already tired of hearing people say that you must follow your passion. Well, maybe nobody told you why that's important so I'll try. Listen, almost everything in life is extremely difficult because things are difficult. Success is often achieved by people who focus on what makes them leave the human realm. Let me explain this with a personal example. I'm writing the script for this video on a Tuesday morning. I resume to my office about 5 am and I'm going to write a script for 4 videos before I stand up from this chair. You know what? After many hours of writing all the scripts I often ask myself what have I done today? I mean, writing about entrepreneurship is what I will do for free if there's no need for money in the world so building a channel about that is like stealing money in the bank. I've been an entrepreneur for the most part of my life. I talk about entrepreneurship to my friends, employees, wife and even pets if they can hear me. So talking about it on YouTube is not a work at all. This is important because if you do what you love you don't get tired easily. Since I read somewhere that optimism improves our brains functions as much as 31% and makes us more creative, it simply means that people who are in love with what they are doing are far more likely to work harder, do far better works and be more creative. You can hardly beat such people. 2. If you want to go far, never go alone. So most people don't know this but there are many people working on this channel. Take for example, after writing the script for this video I will simply send it to my assistant who will help proofread it. She will then send the script to a voice of our artist whose voice you hear now. Okay, you're getting confused already. Don't be. The voice you hear now isn't mine. I have a terrible voice and my accent is the worst in the world so I begged someone who finished school to voice our videos. If you wish to see my face and hear my ugly voice, simply check the description box to join my personal channel. Now let's get back to what I was talking about. This video would have been on 5 to 6 people's tables before you could play it. Here is my point here. This channel would still be in 10,000 subscribers if I were to be the only person working on it. This is because of a few reasons. First, I have other businesses to attend to. Second, I'm terrible in so many things. For example, my English will make you deaf if you listen to me too much. So think about how you can work with someone else. When the Bible says that 2 are better than 1, it's true. I know this will be difficult for many people watching this video but I have a piece of good news for you. I too started my first business all alone. In the year 2016, I had an idea for an agri-technology company which I built in Nigeria because I was broke. I had to be a loan ranger in the business until I started making some money. I had my first employee, the second one, third, fourth, tenth and so on. So if you're a loan ranger right now, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Just know that you're not buying a new iPhone or car with your first income. As an entrepreneur, the first and best thing to buy is people's time. And that leads me to the third thing I want to share with you. 3. Don't Be a YouTuber I was in a hospital yesterday and my doctor recommended that I run some tests. When I got to the lab, the guy that will take my sample was looking at me to recall something. After some time, he said, you're a YouTuber. It happened that he had been following my personal channel which you can see in the description box. I paused and said to him, hmm, I own a YouTube channel. From day one, when we started this channel, I never saw it as being a YouTube channel. Instead, I see what we're doing as building a media company and we try to approach everything else from that perspective. You see, if you see yourself as a YouTuber or your channel as a YouTube channel, it's easy to take so many things for granted. And I'll give you a personal example because I see this channel and other channels are company owns as a media outlet. I had to sit down to study the history of radio and television. While you may think that those two previous media channels have nothing to teach you about YouTube, well, humans are essentially the same. We only invent new technologies and a new way of communicating. So if you understand how someone was successful on TV, that can teach you a few things about succeeding on YouTube. My point here is, be entrepreneurial in your approach. Talk or write about what you're truly passionate about and you'll work harder and be more creative than your competitors. As fast as possible, get other people to work with you. This helps you grow faster. Don't just be a YouTuber. Be entrepreneurial in your approach. I hope this video helps someone out there. My name is Steve Courage. I am a Nigerian entrepreneur based in Lagos. If you wish to know more about me, see my Ogle Face to Consume videos I specifically make for Africans, check the description box and join my new channel, where I show my face and teach Africans how to build successful businesses. I love you.