How Charisma on Command Got 7 Million Subscribers and Made $10M+
A 46-minute interview with the founder of Charisma on Command on fame-jacking, back-to-front offer building, the call-to-action bridge, and why he let his biggest channel die.
Posted
today
Duration
Format
Interview
sincere
Views
781
29 likes
57 · 43
Big Idea
The argument in one line.
Build a creator business back to front: solve a transformation in your own life, prove it one-to-one, then package it, and use borrowed attention only as a hook for your own perspective.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
A coach or educator with a YouTube channel that gets views but no reliable path from a video to a sale.
A small channel owner considering celebrity or pop-culture breakdowns as a format and wondering how to avoid becoming a commoditized news channel.
A course creator with a low completion rate who suspects the product, not the sales page, is the real bottleneck.
A creator who has outgrown the topic that made them successful and feels trapped by audience expectations.
SKIP IF…
You want a step-by-step thumbnail design tutorial; packaging is covered at the strategy level, not in a design tool.
You are looking for paid ads or cold outreach tactics; the whole funnel here is organic YouTube to a single sales page.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
A charisma channel grew to 7 million subscribers by breaking down famous people, not by its host talking to camera, because celebrity videos drew three to ten times the views. The guest argues the format only builds a business when the commentary adds something personal, so viewers return for the creator, not the celebrity. His business model works back to front: change your own life, help a friend for free, coach one-to-one, then digitize it into a course and bridge every video's final point into the product. He now warns that optimizing everything for clicks caused years of burnout, that self-paced courses finish at about 10 percent, and that cohort formats and genuine belief in the product matter more than sales tactics.
Free for members
Chat with this breakdown — free.
Sign in and you get 23 free chat messages on us — ask for the hook, quote a framework, find the exact transcript moment, generate a markdown action plan. Bring your own key when you want unlimited.
Experiments on Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn; on-camera beach videos flop, a Clinton charisma breakdown quietly hits 100K views and triples the business in three months.
02:19 – 04:01
02 · Advice to his beginner self
He would tell his early self nothing, because naivete enabled volume. Winners run more experiments and create from curiosity, not obligation.
04:01 – 08:51
03 · Fame-jacking with your own take
Celebrity breakdowns drew 3-10x more views than talking to camera. The fix for commoditization is commentary and personal stories that make viewers return for the creator.
08:51 – 14:07
04 · Ideas, titles and thumbnails
Mine comments for requested characters, find the admired trait, pair thumbnail and title to open a specific question, then pick from 10-20 thumbnail variants by team consensus.
14:07 – 19:04
05 · The cost of optimizing, and what beginners should test
Packaging focus multiplied revenue but crowded out joy and caused burnout. Beginners should post on a fixed schedule for 3-6 months, then study 10x outliers by format, topic, title, thumbnail.
19:04 – 23:52
06 · Build the business back to front
A parkour DVD sold via AdWords broke even and taught him to only build what matters to him. The ladder: self, friend, one-to-one, group, digital course built with a cohort.
23:52 – 26:23
07 · Get rich slow
Two years to a product, four to five to its final version. Businesses built on a real transformation last; coaches-coaching-coaches models spike and die.
26:23 – 30:37
08 · The call-to-action bridge and testimonials
The video's last point should explain what the product offers that a video cannot, so the pitch stays short. Testimonials follow a before, after, recommend structure.
30:37 – 33:29
09 · The rainbow sales page
A decade-old, story-driven page with the buy button far down has beaten every test against it. Focus is on redesigning the product, not conversions.
33:29 – 37:49
10 · Completion rates and selling from belief
Self-paced courses finish near 10 percent; cohorts reach 93-97. A CTA recorded with real belief in the finished course converted 2-4x better.
37:49 – 41:08
11 · Your next offer is your next problem
An early emotional mastery course was made too soon. New offers come from the edge of your own transformation, now relationships and intimacy in his late 30s.
41:08 – 45:19
12 · Outgrowing the channel
Fighting his outgrown topic caused three years of burnout and resentment. He let the channel decline, mourned the identity, and argues meaning matters more than an annuity.
45:19 – 46:20
13 · Five years out and close
Next focus is emotional and spiritual growth in service of others; the host closes with a link to the channel and his next video.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
Videos breaking down a celebrity's charisma drew three to ten times the views of the same lesson delivered straight to camera.
Borrowing a famous person's attention only builds a business if your commentary is additive; otherwise you are a commoditized news channel.
Repeating the thumbnail text in the title slams the viewer with the same message twice; the two should open one specific question together.
A promise that is too big becomes unbelievable in an 11-minute video, and smaller, more niche promises now perform better.
Raising click-through from 3.5 percent to 5.5 percent can multiply views roughly tenfold when the content already has product market fit.
Posting on a fixed schedule for three to six months is the 99 percent gate; most beginners are optimizing content they are not yet making.
When something breaks out by 10x, investigate format first, then topic, then title, then thumbnail, in that order.
Building front to back, chasing views and then asking how to monetize, traps you in an audience you never wanted.
The ladder is: change yourself, help a friend free, charge a stranger one-to-one, coach a group, then digitize the coaching into a product.
Letting the first cohort pick week one's curriculum surfaced first impressions as the priority, which the creator would not have chosen.
The last point of a video should explain what the product does that a free video cannot: accountability, customization, community, or coaching.
Ask customers for testimonials in three parts: what you thought before buying, what you experienced after, and who you would recommend it to.
A ten-year-old rainbow-colored sales page has beaten every redesign tested against it because it reads like the blog that built the trust.
Self-paced courses complete at roughly 10 percent; cohort courses with paired accountability partners reach 93 to 97 percent.
A call to action recorded with genuine belief in a finished product converted two to four times better than one with the same structural elements.
Your next offer is usually the next problem you hit after solving your first one, because your audience follows you into it.
Letting an old channel decline can be healthy; the hardest loss is the identity, not the income.
Takeaway
Build the transformation first, then the audience.
WHAT TO LEARN
Borrowed attention gets the click, but a business lasts only when the product reflects a change you made in your own life and the content leads naturally into it.
02Advice to his beginner self
Early naivete is an asset because it lets you publish at volume; perfectionism later can cut output to a tenth.
Create from curiosity rather than obligation, since obligation-driven content can still win views but leads to burnout.
03Fame-jacking with your own take
Featuring a famous person can multiply views three to ten times, but only additive commentary turns those viewers into a returning audience.
Weave your own stories and perspective into celebrity breakdowns so viewers stay for you rather than the subject.
04Ideas, titles and thumbnails
Mine your comments for requested figures, then identify the specific trait the audience admires in them to set the title.
Make the thumbnail and title split one specific question between them instead of repeating the same phrase twice.
Keep promises small and niche; oversized promises read as unanswerable and precise ones now perform better.
05The cost of optimizing, and what beginners should test
Post on a fixed schedule for three to six months before testing anything, because regular output is the first gate.
When a video breaks out by 10x, investigate format, then topic, then title, then thumbnail.
Optimizing every video for packaging can grow revenue sharply while draining the joy that made the work sustainable.
06Build the business back to front
Start with a transformation you want even if nobody pays, then prove it with a friend, one-to-one clients, and groups before building a course.
Let your first cohort shape the curriculum, since their priorities may differ from what you would have taught first.
07Get rich slow
Expect years, not months: about two years to a product and four to five to its mature version.
Offers built on real capacity to transform people outlast businesses that teach money-making without a proven result.
08The call-to-action bridge and testimonials
End videos with a teaching point that shows what the product supplies and a free video cannot, so the pitch can be one sentence.
Collect testimonials by asking customers what they believed before, what happened after, and who they would recommend it to.
09The rainbow sales page
An old, story-driven sales page can beat polished redesigns when it carries the voice that built the audience's trust.
Place the buy button lower when buyers need to read what is inside before deciding.
10Completion rates and selling from belief
Self-paced courses finish at about 10 percent, while cohort formats with paired accountability reach 93 to 97 percent.
Genuine belief in a finished product converted two to four times better than the same pitch structure delivered without it.
11Your next offer is your next problem
Do not launch a course before the transformation is complete in you; an early version may need to be shelved.
Look for your next offer in the next problem you face after solving the first, because your audience is following the same path.
12Outgrowing the channel
Forcing yourself to keep serving a topic you have outgrown breeds burnout and resentment toward your audience.
Letting an old business decline can free you to experiment again, though losing the identity attached to it is the hardest part.
Treat money as fuel for meaningful next work rather than as a number that lets you stop working.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
Fame-jacking
Featuring a famous person in a video's thumbnail and topic to borrow the audience already curious about them, then using that attention to deliver your own lesson.
Packaging
The title and thumbnail of a YouTube video considered together as the pitch that earns the click before anyone sees the content.
Click-through rate (CTR)
The percentage of people shown a video's thumbnail who actually click on it.
Mystery box
A title and thumbnail pairing that opens a specific unanswered question in the viewer's mind so the video becomes the only way to close it.
Call-to-action bridge
A final teaching point in a video that naturally leads into the paid product by showing what the free content cannot deliver on its own.
Cohort-based course
A course delivered to a group that starts together on a schedule, often with paired accountability partners, rather than consumed alone at any pace.
Back-to-front business
Designing the transformation and product first, then building the content and audience that feed it, rather than chasing views and monetizing afterward.
“Talking about Conor McGregor and confidence was three to 10 times more likely to be viewed than me doing the same confidence content standing in front of a white wall.”
specific number, surprising contrast→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
17:17
“Step one is not to make excellent content that is well tested. It's to make regular content. That is the 99% gate.”
punchy rule for beginners→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
20:40
“You want to build back to front in terms of a business. When you build front to back, you get confused.”
names a reusable principle→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
25:56
“If there is no real get-rich-quick scheme, and it's only a get-rich-slow scheme, what would you love to do slowly?”
“You move from 10% to 93% to 97% completion rate, regardless of the quality of what you're doing.”
hard numbers on cohort vs self-paced→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
42:16
“Thank God that this dies. It forces me to grow.”
emotional, unexpected about a declining channel→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
The Script
Word for word.
Read-along
Don't just watch it. Burn it in.
See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.
17px
metaphoranalogystory
Charlie Huppert 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 eight -figure 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.
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.
Didn't log into YouTube for probably six 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 100 ,000 views on this one video. And I believe it was over, there was like three months where our business tripled basically.
Like we'd made, we'd each taken home something like $50 ,000 in the year prior. And I think, I don't know if they have these numbers, but I think we made like 150. in just three months after getting on youtube and selling our course it was like Holy, and then people asked me what I did and I was like, I'm a YouTuber.
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. 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.
It's been 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.
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? I wouldn't say, truly, I wouldn't say anything. The naivete 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 three to five 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 one fifth or one tenth 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 i've gotten way way too precious 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 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 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
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? 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... playing the video, pausing it. You see what he does here?
What he's doing here is da, da, da, da, 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. 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? Part of the reason I wasn't on camera was because I was traveling 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 three to one to a 10 to one 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 think the answer was me being on or off camera, it was, was I fame jacking 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 three to 10 times more likely to be viewed than me doing the same confidence content standing in front of a white wall.
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 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 beginning, it wasn't that well thought out.
So framejacking is putting someone more famous than you in your thumbnail and your video, but 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? I think most people do social hacking and they do it based on news.
Their commentary is not additive to the thing. So you can go across niches to anyone you want to talk about. Like there's, take Critical Drinker, who is not, 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. 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 topics, Sydney Sweeney posted X, Y, Z, 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 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. 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? 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 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, people were super, super interested.
And so I was learning about the audience from what they were clicking and what they were saying was step one. So take Peaky Blinders, Cillian Murphy. That was the top comment on several videos.
Do Peaky Blinders, do Peaky Blinders. You got to do Tommy Shelby. I'd never seen it.
So one, I'm listening to my audience. Then we watch Peaky Blinders or watch some of Peaky 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 is 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 funny or wit or how to be super fast when thinking of jokes.
That sort of a thing is why we like Conan O 'Brien. 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. That's the respect face that people want. And 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 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 trillion percent confidence and never doubt yourself size the promise can be so big that people don't believe it's answerable in an 11 minute 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.
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 likely your video is to do well, which is really cool. Yeah, there's a supply and demand thing, which is if you do this, like there's way too much supply of thumbnails like this, of videos like this.
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. 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 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 of friends, that sort of a thing.
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. 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 that. And I would just write 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 onto 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? 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. And there was an unconscious of naivete and discovery, which is really valuable.
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 you have product market fit, meaning like you're making content, there's people that are interested, and you can go from 3 .5 % click -through to 5 .5 % 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 eight X in terms of sales. So then we got more analytical with it.
And I would say I would spend, it was still 80, 85, 15 time on content thumbnail, but that last 15 was my least favorite part of the process. 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 nail their title and thumbnail in advance, it crowded out the joy of making the video for me.
So maybe I wanted to make a video of X obscure 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 shit that I don't like. to my entrepreneurial job where I don't have to do shit that I don't like, but I choose to anyway in order to get more views. And we're cheating ahead here, but that created tremendous financial gain, tremendous growth in subscribers, and burnout.
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, if you can do your niche interest with passion, I love how the algorithm has evolved.
It's got a space for that stuff, which is really cool. 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 when do you start testing? You need to make content regularly.
You can 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 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 three to six months before you even ask the question, okay, how do I tweak, optimize, et cetera, my approach? Because if you're unwilling to just create freely for three to six 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 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 1000 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 show, you've got challenges, you've got like a 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. And then honestly, title and thumbnail are further down the line of like things to test. But if to start, I would play with format and topic.
first. And then of course, today, on anything that you put out, YouTube has the A -B testing feature. It is just silly not to give yourself multiple cracks at a title and a thumbnail today, because you never know.
You might have the content, but one of your three tested titles might be the one that actually breaks through. So I don't know if that answers exactly the question for a beginner, but those are the things that I would look first at. 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 on Commodity.
How were you making money? So we read the four -hour work week and Tim Ferriss became my idol 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 I'd never done it. So we looked up a guy in New York. hired him to shoot a parkour training DVD, 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 into 30 or 45 minutes of like how to do a Kong, how to do a wall run, et cetera.
Added B -roll 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 because 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.
So this is where we got into social skills and charisma. 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?
I think this is one of the... most underspoken but necessary business lessons. You want to build back to 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, here's me falling on my face. Oh my God, 10 million views. People love that.
And then you go, now I need to figure out how to monetize that. Now I'm going to do a show where I fall on my face. You wind up in a place that'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 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 more friends, and I'm dating women that I'm excited to be dating, that's pretty awesome even if I never make a dollar. 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 head nod at the same moment.
Like I know what's going to hit and I just don't want to repeat myself. Then it became time to record the product. So that became Charisma University, which was based on a lot of the coaching that we'd done at the time.
And we built it with the cohort of people that were defining the curriculum with us as we We're 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, because 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 had some version of it in 2015. 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 shit, now how do I monetize it?
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?
Yeah, two -ish years. We did a while of coaching and that sort of stuff. But from V1 to what became the final version of it, four or five years of stuff.
And I'm in that process again right now, which is asking again, okay, 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 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 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 patients 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, coaching 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 can do this in your own life and you could do 90 to 100 percent of that one to one and you could do 90 to 100 percent of that in groups, you're going to get a fraction of that as you scale out. 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. So you're better off making less at the start, then making the product really good, and then trying to scale it. So does that mean there's no online get -rich -quick schemes?
I think this is it. So if there is no real get -rich -quick scheme, and it's only a get -rich -slow scheme, what would you love to do slowly? 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 it served me well 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 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.
But what happens is... You've got a call to action bridge. It's really important.
This was a huge breakthrough for us. If this is well -constructed from back to front, you've got this ultimate transformation that you can offer people. They can become more confident.
They can make more money. They can become more fit, et cetera. But you're showing up and just giving them like, here's five exercises that are 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 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 mindset is Five 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. 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.
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. It's just like, by the way, like I made this and 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. 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?
Will this work for someone in my situation? I'm a guy, a girl, young, old. I want to do charisma in a way that is authentic.
If you can get testimonials that speak to some of the doubts that your prospective clients have, that's going to be really, really valuable. And there's a whole way to do that. Because people often want to give testimonials for products, but they don't know how.
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 helps people frame testimonials in a way that are supportive of you.
Because you might have a lot of happy customers that just don't know how to do that. Before I did RevTrack, I was struggling. After that, we watched our business go up 400%.
I would definitely recommend this to anyone who's trying to make money off YouTube. Great testimonial. I've not actually seen many people do that.
So how long have you been putting a call to action at the end of every video like that? 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. But that was experimental at the time. So they clicked on the call to action and 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?
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 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.
you know this was it's got a story in it and like 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 20 26 yeah 10 -ish years old but it's it's been our sales page for for a long long time 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 definitely definitely i think we could increase our our sales rate.
But what we're actually doing is we're redesigning our product suite. So 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 worked at the time and 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 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? 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 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? I want them to take a look and see what's inside of it before they make their decision.
So this has served us. 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? 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 in people that go through these things. 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 we're not getting people through it. which is okay let's say we doubled that okay we're still at 22 like they're 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 format so instead of a talking head video i did the fame jacking videos what i realized is that there's a category of courses that have 97 complete percent 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 o 'clock, 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 4 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. So this is the format change that I'm really excited about. And I don't know exactly what we're going to do.
We're still going to have some do -at -your -own -pace formats, maybe in an app form, now that apps are so much easier to make with AI. But I'm very interested in how we can tweak the delivery mechanism of what we do to increase completion rate and therefore the likelihood of transformation which 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 so it's interesting i rebuilt my own program multiple times a year for sort of five four or five years and 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 yeah and and i mean it 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 five years
let alone 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. I did the final version, and we did a call to action that had almost all of the same elements. Like we'd learned, okay, it needs a testimonial, needs of this, needs of that.
But it converted, I forget it. I don't want to get the numbers wrong, but sometimes between somewhere between two and four X better just because of the way that I did the read. And 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 put your all into the thing and that from your experience, 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 actually love the book. You love the movie.
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. But if you don't and you have secret doubts, which 10 % completion rate doesn't feel good for me, 11 % completion rate doesn't feel good for me.
and you can solve that problem, yeah, I can see how that's going to be really valuable to us to address. So once they bought Crispr University, was there something else that you then tried to sell them after? Or was that it?
We've offered a variety of 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 only if you 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. I still left it up there because it's been valuable for some people.
But ultimately, I'd like to come back and address that question next, which would be, OK, like you've figured out how to get people to like you. Congratulations. Now you've graduated to the next problem.
So someone wanted to create a new offer. How could they make it a really good one? 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? It 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, 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.
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 the amount of comments that are going to be on the cat, because we just completely ignored that there is a Siamese cat behind you. Yeah, this is my life. There's always a Siamese cat behind me.
My girl, this is Artemis. Now the problems that I have being in a relationship for nine years are not the same problems that I had when starting relationships. It's all sorts of questions about 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 solve 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. 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 hold the ship.
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 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.
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 sold. 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 fight it and just keep going or do you embrace it?
So I've tried both. I tried fighting it. It was like, hey, let's keep making content about making people respect you.
That created three years of burnout in me. And, 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 can't control me. But 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.
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, well, how come I have to do the hero's journey again?
It's like, because it's great. It's the best 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 churns 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 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 years 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 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 the people whose lives I'm transforming. And when I remember that. This is 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?
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 start thinking like that. That is one of the most 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, 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 shit 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 shit, 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? 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. They do not want the reality of it because it just leaves them with the stark question of meaning and purpose, which is not addressed by...
being financially safe. So just to finish up, Charlie, where do you want to be in five years time? Once the question of safety is addressed financially to a level where you're like, hey, I might feel unsafe, but it's not true.
Like 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. 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, 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 visit. Yeah.
Charlie, thank you so much. go check out Charlie's channel. I'll link to it below, Charisma 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 in the way that Charlie said and the way that I believe in too, watch this video next and I'll show you exactly how.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
The pitch is in the title: 7 million subscribers and more than $10 million in revenue. What follows is less a growth hack than a confession, because the guest credits his biggest wins to a format he stumbled into and blames his biggest burnout on optimizing it.
Add Modern Creator as a preferred source and Google shows you more of our breakdowns in Search, Top Stories, and AI Overviews. It only changes what you see, and you can undo it in your Google settings anytime.
Add to Preferred SourcesOpens your Google source preferences with us pre-loaded. Tick the box and you're done.
A live channel-and-offer teardown where Ed Lawrence puts five creators' YouTube channels and sales pages through the same pipe, and finds the same blockage each time.
A live audience Q&A where a YouTube monetization coach diagnoses four real sales pages in real time, and the fix is always the same: sell clarity, not information.
A 21-minute breakdown of Ed Lawrence's 13-step system for turning a tiny channel into a million-dollar business — niche UP not down, build a sticky-note avatar, and snowball offers from a $30 workshop to a $10K program.
Six years, 5 million emails, and 19 blunt lessons on why a neglected list almost never backfires, why a four-line email can outsell a long pitch, and why email now earns four times what the channel that built it brings in.
00:54
01:11
01:57
03:12
04:04
04:51
05:19
05:52
06:28
07:04
07:33
08:13
09:25
09:59
10:48
11:03
11:51
12:36
12:56
13:45
13:57
15:10
15:55
16:36
16:52
17:39
18:03
18:42
19:43
20:29
21:09
21:32
22:18
22:36
23:12
23:46
24:30
25:32
26:04
27:30
28:05
28:38
29:14
29:45
30:17
31:34
31:54
32:28
33:04
34:27
35:02
35:27
36:11
36:46
37:21
38:30
38:50
39:40
40:15
40:53
41:59
42:34
42:54
43:37
44:18
44:53
46:05
1:04:38
1:08:02
21:29
17:23
12:41
17:05