Journey to Financial Independence with Passive Income Part 2: Venturing into YouTube Automation and Print-on-Demand

Welcome to the second chapter in this series of posts where I chronicle my journey of building passive income streams to eventually replace my 9–5 job. In the last post I laid out my plans and which online business models I would tackle. I meant to write this second post a month after the first one, but the first audit call with my YouTube Automation manager could only be scheduled last week, so I wanted to wait until that was done to talk about it here as well.

I started Caleb Boxx’s YouTube Automation (YTA) program around the time I wrote the first post, and the there are two components: the video course and channel production service. I went through the entire video course in the past month, and it was nothing special. Most of the content I could have found online anyway or figured out myself. Alone, the course costs over $500 so I would definitely say it’s not worth it. The real value of the YTA program is the channel creation service. The way it works is that I have channel manager upload two videos per week on my behalf. The only thing I have to do is approve the videos before they’re published and (optionally) make a couple of throwaway accounts to like them and subscribe to boost the channel’s status with the algorithm. So far there are about nine videos up, but I haven’t gotten any likes or subscribers that weren’t from my own accounts. Every month I can have an audit call with either Caleb himself or my channel manager to go over what’s working and what can be improved. In my first call, which I had yesterday, he assured me that its perfectly normal to not have any likes or subscribers yet since the channel has only been live for a month, which makes sense. The main tip he gave me was to disable the public view of my subscriber account so that viewers wouldn’t judge my channel harshly upon seeing the below ten subscriber count. Again, that makes sense. It did strike me as a little weird that no one on the team mentioned this tip when my channel was created, but I suppose its not too much of an issue. The videos themselves are certainly passable, especially for a channel just starting out. I can only start to make money once I have 4,000 watch hours and 1,000 subscribers, so I still have a long way to go. All in all, I think the YTA program is passable so far, but only time will tell if it is truly a money-making machine.

Since I had to put virtually no time at all into the YouTube pursuit, I decided to try out Teespring and Redbubble as its pretty much free. I started last week and so far I have five designs up on both sites. I started watching Greg Gottfried’s videos on YouTube. His channel is extremely informative and all his content is free, so I followed his advice for setting up my accounts on the two print-on-demand websites as well as an Instagram page (with relevant hashtags in each post) to create some exposure to get the first few sales and increase my Teespring seller trust score, which helps expose my designs to the wider Teespring userbase. Soon after I created the Instagram and a couple posts, an account with over 100,000 followers offered to advertise my shirts on their story for only $10. It sounded like a no-brainer deal, so I agreed. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any sales from that, and I still haven’t gotten any sales in general except when I bought a few for some friends. Again, it’s probably still too early to see any income, so I’ll give it a month and continue to upload designs and post them on Instagram in the meantime.

I’ve had a lot more immediate luck with stocks by contrast. I invested $10,000 in SPY as the safe index fund and another $10,000 in stocks recommended by the Motley Fool Stock Advisor, with $500 in all the stocks they recommend as they publish each recommendation (except for the companies I particularly don’t like). So far, I’ve made a couple hundred in both SPY and Motley, so I’ll probably invest a significant portion of the money I (hopefully) make with the other endeavors into these stocks.

One things that I’ve noticed being a month in, especially with Teespring, is that it’s quite difficult trying to pursue a side hustle after a day at a 9–5, even if it’s remote. I can see why many people might not want to take such risks or give up early, especially since I haven’t had any luck yet with YTA or Teespring, but I’m nowhere near giving up yet! I will aim to publish part 3 in a month from now assuming I can schedule my second audit call in time. And of course, I welcome any feedback in the comments. Thank you for taking the time to read my article, and if you’re thinking about going down this path, I hope I provided a little bit of insight as a beginner in this realm and that your journey will also be successful.