How Stanimus Built His YouTube Empire
An interview with the YouTube influencer.
In today’s post, we are going to interview Stanimus, a YouTube influencer with over 1.5M subscribers.
Stanimus, formerly PapaStanimus, used to be a full time twitch streamer earning about $5,000 a month just playing games and hanging out with viewers.
After 6 years, he realized how small twitch was compared to YouTube, and decided to quit twitch full time to focus on YT, where he gained a million subscribers in just one year.
What follows is an in-depth interview with Stanimus.
What’s your niche and why should someone choose you over your competitors?
My niche is personality based reactions to funny and crazy situations. People choose to watch me because I keep it real and can relate to people on a personal level. I am not over the top and talk to my audience as if we are friends hanging out, which in my mind, is exactly what is happening.
People can count on my channel to always bring new exciting content to them all in one place, and they always leave my channel with a smile on their face. Take that to the bank!
What are the three things that mostly helped your YouTube channel succeed?
Realizing that you can’t just randomly make things and pray it works. Take the time to understand why videos go viral and why people like them. Then build videos around those concepts.
Building a relationship with your audience and truly understanding them is also critical to being a competitive channel. Those who understand their audience the most win. I’m also a very confident and capable person, and whatever I set my mind to I achieve. I knew from the start I would build a successful channel.
What are your three biggest accomplishments?
- Selling two previous companies before becoming a creator.
- Building my content channels on various platforms to large sizes.
- T-Pain retweeted me once.
What were your three most important challenges?
- Learning how videos go viral and how to captivate an audience.
- Quitting twitch cold turkey (it’s so fun but so time consuming with no reward).
- Stopping trying to bring all my peers along with me as I grow, and just focusing on myself. You can’t force them to come with you. They need to do it on their own.
How did you overcome those challenges?
Simply realizing the reality and taking action on it. I was doing a lot of things wrong like, spreading myself too thin with too many projects, and making too much variety of content instead of focusing on doing one things really well. You just gotta be real with yourself and identify the things you are doing that are holding you back and fix it.
How do you structure your videos?
I mostly do shorts, and with shorts you need to hook the viewer with the first frame and first 3 seconds. The hook is arguably more important than the actual video, because the hook determines if people convert to a viewer, or just swipe away. After that, you just gotta retain them as a viewer until the end of the viewer.
What’s your piece of advice for our readers who want to achieve wealth and success in life?
Stop thinking about it and start taking action. Go in knowing you are going to screw things up, but thats one of the most important parts of moving forward. It’s how you gather data to improve your way of approach. The sooner you get started, the sooner you can start screwing things up and learning.
What do you think is the key to a truly successful YouTube channel?
Make videos people want to see. I think a lot of people trying to do YouTube are making videos they personally like without validating if anyone else wants to watch. At the end of the day, you are trying to get other people to watch. Cater to that and they will reward you with viewership.
How much does your channel earn?
I have multiple channels, and collectively I currently make between $10-$20k per month. My goal is to hit a minimum of $100k per month, so I can have a bigger budget to make more exciting videos for people to see.
Where do you see yourself and your business in 5 years?
I want to launch more channels and have a team that helps me with the logistics and setup for all the content. I’d like to start a comedy based challenge cooking channel where I recreate other youtubers recipes, and see how I would change them.
I’d like to start vlog/irl channel where I do exciting things and bring the audience with me. And I’d like to start a podcast, and potentially a criminal psychology channel. There’s a bunch more ideas I have too, but it’s essentially just expanding on all the content I can make. Sky’s the limit.
What’s your piece of advice for people who want to quit their 9–5 job and start a business?
Start your business on the side first, and don’t quit your job until you are making a lot more than you do at your job. Wait until it literally costs you more to be at your job over focusing on your business. If the time you spend at a job is costing you money, it’s time to quit.
Until then, keep your day job, unless you are under extraordinary circumstances that allow you to quit right away.
What’s your piece of advice for people who want to start a Youtube channel from scratch?
Study how the algorithm works, then start researching the psychology behind why people like videos. Identify popular niches that you wouldnt mind getting into, and then just start making videos.
They very likely won’t be very good, but at least you started. If you really want to do it, just take action and stop sitting around thinking about it. Everyone starts off bad at something, and the more you focus on it, the better you get.
Just don’t get complacent and keep doing the same thing over and over that’s not working. Always focus on improvement.
How can people find you?
Open up YouTube and start watching shorts. I will pop up eventually ;)
In case you don’t find me, here’s my channel.
Do you have any app, digital course, or book you would like our readers to know about?
Join my discord and I will help you focus on the art of getting good: discord.gg/gamerebel
