Connor Minogue

Operating Quietly: Scaling to 100 million in 3 years. Every Business Is Now A Media Company - those who act like it will win.

[Connor Minogue @QuietConnorM]

@TheCoolestCool Every business should have a YouTube channel.

Every business should treat its YouTube channel as a business itself, while not letting the tail wag the dog.

[Connor Minogue @QuietConnorM]

The future of video editing is wild.

[Elliot Padfield @ElliotPadfield]

if you're using claude to edit videos, give it 17M+ films and 14M audio recordings for $0

the internet archive has a free api. no key.

10,000+ prelinger films (public domain stock footage)
187,000 78rpm records
300,000+ live concert recordings

give it https://t.co/xsb6D6t8fQ and ask:

“whenever you need archival b-roll or period music, search the prelinger and 78rpm collections on https://t.co/NYoHVW7fzm and use them in the edit”

some great clips that are amazing for slightly more artsy ads for tech

[Connor Minogue @QuietConnorM]

The opportunity has shifted, but the opportunity is stil there. We're building a suite of battle-tested tools for media companies, a suite that is always growing.

What is a media company?

Today, every company is a media company. Even the random dude with 50,000 subs on YouTube.

[dvb @notdvb]

thinking SaaS is dead because "everyone" can vibecode their own shit is as retarded as assuming ecom is dead because everyone can order shit from temu.

[Connor Minogue @QuietConnorM]

@notdvb The people who don't have time to code still don't have time to fiddle with AI. We're still early.

The opportunity has shifted, but there's still a ton of opportunity.

[Connor Minogue @QuietConnorM]

@FaradayYouTube Love it. You have to grab attention first. We spend about as much time on titles and thumbnails as we do recording videos.

[Connor Minogue @QuietConnorM]

We're turning away very large influencers and creators right now.

They want us to double their income while they get to take a break from the daily grind of chasing the algorithm.

We've turned them down, not because we think those opportunities won't be fruitful, but because we think those opportunities won't be fruitful FOR US.

They would be shiny objects distracting us from the main thing.

Even if they did yield a return, and even if the return is a healthy MOIC or IRR, returns of non-essential business are like foreign maidens and women of the evening.

We want the bigger return. We have counted the cost and demand better. We want to focus on our main thing. To pursue a wife and her fruit and disavow the temptress of allure and of foreign opportunity.

[Connor Minogue @QuietConnorM]

John Wesley said: "Give me 3 men with a heart that burns for God and we'll conquer the world."

When I build a team, I want men whose hearts burn for glory. I'm not hiring insects based on a checklist. Small, insignificant dung beetles tasked with only rolling and rolling and rolling.

Man is made for greater.

And it is these great men whom I wish to befriend and beget on this journey into eternity and into email, recording set, camera, publication, landing page, and average view duration. Men who burn to be faithful with what God has put in front of them RIGHT NOW, and then enter into the glory of their master.

[Connor Minogue @QuietConnorM]

Is it possible to scale a $10 million company to $100 million in 3 years?

We're going to find out.

[Connor Minogue @QuietConnorM]

AdSense should be the smallest share of a YouTube channel's earnings.

[wannercashcow @wannercashcow]

Marc is already monetizing his channel without actually being monetized on YouTube!

You never want to be 100% reliant on one income source, so E-books + Vidrush or AI Avatars is a great way to monetize before even joining the YPP.

Congrats Marc on your very early results!

[Connor Minogue @QuietConnorM]

@theryanjamesmil Fatherhood is what prepared me to scale a business.

No way I would be where I am if I hadn't had kids first, which is the opposite of most advice you hear.

[Connor Minogue @QuietConnorM]

@JamesonCamp You have to develop good taste before you can judge AI's output.

[Connor Minogue @QuietConnorM]

A creator with zero products is just running an agency for one client: the platform. He posts, the platform keeps only 45% of the adsense, and he wakes up and has to do it again and again every morning.

That's the hamster wheel James is describing, and he's right that it burns people out.

However, distribution is the most underpriced asset on the internet. The mistake most creators make is taking that distribution and renting it out for $5k brand deals while someone else pockets the 10x on the back end.

Grow your platform, but then work toward owning your platform. Delight, then invite them to something valuable. Own the backend and you'll never have to think about adsense ever again. If the algorithm shifts or you get banned, you never have to start from zero.

But you need an offer, a real product.

[James Camp 🛠,🛠 @JamesonCamp]

Most creators leave a 9-to-5 to stop trading time for money, only to trade their boss for an algorithm.

Then the daily hamster wheel starts. Post a video, watch the view count stall, scramble for another hook, film, edit, ship, and wake up tomorrow morning right back at zero.

People run that cycle for years and realize they built nothing. Rented attention evaporates the second you stop feeding it.

If your entire model depends on the algorithm, you lose everything the moment distribution drops.

Content made just for the sake of creating content burns everyone out. It only works as a feeder to an actual business where you have real expertise. That domain competence is the only reason people follow you in the first place.

Every post should show what you know, bring in customers, and feed a backend you control.

If taking time off drops your revenue to zero, you didn't build a business. You just built a job you can never leave.

[Connor Minogue @QuietConnorM]

YouTube is not suppressing you. Your content probably just sucks.

But you can make it better by obsessing over 3 numbers.

- Average view duration (AVD)
- Average percentage viewed (APV)
- Click-through ratio (CTR). Don't have anything for them to click? DM me, because you need to start thinking about that now. And no, a merch store doesn't count.

Good AVD + good APV = more impressions. YouTube shows your video to more people when the people who clicked kept watching.

100,000 impressions at 15% CTR = 15,000 views.
500,000 impressions at 3% CTR = 15,000 views.

Same views. Wildly different success.

So what controls impressions? How the video performs once people are watching it. That's it.

Can you get shadow-banned? Sure. It's happened to channels I've run. But YouTube is hunting big fish. At your size they mostly want to make money off you, not bury you.

Make good videos people actually watch. If the views aren't coming, then the problem is your content.

[Connor Minogue @QuietConnorM]

There is no greater a battlefield that a young man may embark than the war of raising children and nurturing a wife.

Be young and full of blood, deny oneself, take up the sword and thy shield and embark on the greatest adventure man is always, generation after generation, newly discovering.

After that, all business, all entrepreneurial endeavor is all at once, frivolous, unimportant, charming, and fun.

And you're more likely to succeed, because you have already succeeded.

[Connor Minogue @QuietConnorM]

Every day at 3:30 my wife and kids show up at the office. We drink tea, eat dark chocolate, and talk about our day for thirty minutes.

Then I go back to work.

I don't believe in work-life balance. I believe in building a life you don't need to escape from in either direction.

[Connor Minogue @QuietConnorM]

I don't think the AI future will not be something smooth, sterile, and beige.

Right now, people are building rockets while others are keeping chickens and walking back into churches.

I think the future will be more technological and more traditional at the same time. The first building on Mars might be a cathedral. And a man might sell raw milk to his neighbor for a sliver of bitcoin.

[Connor Minogue @QuietConnorM]

One dollar of real revenue will teach you more than every book you've read, every podcast you've listened to, every online course you've bought, and every mastermind group you're a part of.

[Connor Minogue @QuietConnorM]

If I had have not raised children in my 20s (6 of them) I would be in no position to grow a monster company.

Many will tell you that you should only have children once you have assailed to success.

I argue the opposite.

The men who choose profession over legacy, who choose entrepenurial endevour over snot, diapers, and c-section, sell the fountains of their youth to the traders of markets, and their birthrights for soup.

Men who are wed, happily, and raise happy and loving children are the true upholders of economies, ecosystems, balance sheets, and main streets.