35 With a Wife, a Kid, and a Full-Time Job. He Still Hit $10K on YouTube Shorts.

Alex is 35 years old. He lives in Australia. He has a wife, a kid, and a full-time job. And four months ago... he had never uploaded a single YouTube video in his life.

Not a short. Not a long-form video. Not even a test upload. Nothing. Zero experience. Complete blank slate.

"My first video ever was four months and a week ago," Alex told me. "I've never had any other channel. I've never done any YouTube video."

That context matters. Because when you see the results he got, you need to understand where he started. Not from $5K/month trying to get to $10K. Not from an established channel that needed optimization. From literally nothing.

He started the channel, posted some videos for about a month on his own, got almost no views, and realized he was going the wrong direction. Then he joined the program. And everything changed.

Alex found me through the free content I post on YouTube. And his logic for joining the program was honestly one of the cleanest I've ever heard.

"You're giving so much for free," he said. "I thought, maybe you'll give me more if we work together."

Simple. No overthinking. Just... this guy clearly knows what he's doing, the free stuff is already valuable, so the paid stuff is probably even better. Let me just jump in.

But there was a deeper reason too. Alex knew he was starting from absolute zero. No YouTube skills. No audience. No understanding of how the platform works. And he knew that figuring all of that out on his own would take years.

"I'll gain two years of knowledge," he said. "It's very important to get someone to help you, especially when you just start. Because you don't know anything. You have everything to learn. It's like a jump start in knowledge."

He was one of the first students in the program. So early, in fact, that we were still figuring out the format. I originally wanted to do calls every day. Alex was the one who told me... we don't need that. Once a week is enough. Just tell me what to do, I'll go do it, and we'll talk again when I hit a new problem.

That became the model. And Alex was the proof that it worked.

This is the detail that I bring up every single time someone tells me they don't have enough time for the program.

Alex works full-time. He has a wife and a kid. He lives in Australia, which is basically the opposite timezone from the US. Finding time to do calls was a genuine problem.

So you know what he did? He took the calls in his car. While driving home from work.

"Most of the time we were having our call while I was driving," Alex said. "Just because I didn't have time."

I'd record the calls. He'd review them later. And then he'd spend two to three hours per day, max, working on his channel. That's it. Two to three hours. With a full-time job. With a family. In a completely different timezone.

And he still hit $10K in revenue. Still got 100K subscribers. Still got his Play Button.

Whenever someone applies and says "I don't know if I'll have enough time for the calls"... I tell them about Alex. If a 35-year-old dad in Australia doing mentorship calls from his car while driving home from work can make it happen, you can too.

Here's how fast things moved once Alex started implementing.

After the first or second call, we made some changes to his channel and talked through a few ideas. Alex posted a short. That short exploded. Went viral almost immediately.

That single video is what got him monetized. He hit 10 million engaged views in about a week and a half. Just from that one short and the momentum it created.

But here's the wild part... that video is still generating views four months later. When we checked during the interview, it had pulled in 100,000 views in just the last 48 hours. A video from four months ago, still working.

"Those small changes make such a big difference," I told him during the call. And he agreed. Because he'd gone from posting videos with almost no views to having a single short carry his entire channel into monetization.

The changes weren't massive overhauls. They were small, specific adjustments to direction and strategy. But when you're starting from zero, even small corrections in aim make a huge difference in where you end up.

Let's run through the numbers because they're honestly hard to believe for someone who uploaded their first video four months ago.

Revenue over 90 days: almost $10,000 USD. Alex shared his screen, refreshed the page, showed the currency set to USD. Real numbers.

Total views: 110 million. One hundred and ten million views from a channel that didn't exist four months ago.

Subscribers: over 100,000. He hit the milestone the day before Christmas. Got his Silver Play Button. Hadn't even taken it out of the wrapper yet during our interview.

"It feels lighter than I thought it would," he said when he finally opened it. "Feels a bit cheap, actually."

But cheap plastic or not... that plaque represents something. A 35-year-old dad who never made a video in his life, working two to three hours a day around a full-time job, in a completely opposite timezone, and still hitting numbers that most full-time creators never reach.

And here's the line from Alex that stuck with me most: "I can finally see money in my bank account going up."

When you have a family and bills and responsibilities... that sentence means everything.

Alex started with shorts. Got some viral hits. But the consistency was uneven. Some videos would get 30K views. Others would get 30 million. He wanted more consistency across the board.

Then something unexpected happened. His kid said, "Hey, let's make a music video about this thing."

Alex made it. It went viral. And just like that, he pivoted into long-form content too.

Now he's running both short-form and long-form. The shorts funnel attention to the long-form videos. The long-form videos generate more revenue and deeper engagement. They feed each other.

"The skills you learn from short-form helped you with those long-form videos," I told him. And he agreed. Understanding hooks, pacing, emotional engagement... those principles transfer directly. Shorts are the training ground. Long-form is where it compounds.

But honestly... the fact that his kid sparked the pivot into long-form? That's the kind of detail you can't make up. A family man, building a YouTube business around his real life instead of in spite of it.

Alex said something at the end of our interview that perfectly captures why personalized mentorship works differently than free content or courses.

"The difference with working one-on-one is you can give people direction. Not just tips and tricks. It's a direction. Follow this path."

That's it. That's the whole thing.

Free content is broad by design. It has to be, because it's made for everyone. A course gives you frameworks. But direction? Specific, personalized, "do this exact thing on your specific channel" direction? That requires someone looking at your analytics, your content, your niche, and telling you where to go.

Alex was going the wrong way when he started. Completely wrong direction. He was posting videos that got no views because he didn't know what he didn't know. One call fixed the direction. One short went viral. And the rest is in the analytics.

He doesn't think too many calls are necessary, either. "He gives you direction, you work on it for a few days, you incorporate the skills, and then you get another call when you're ready to move forward. Having too many calls? Waste of time, I think."

Give me 20 minutes of your week. Go execute for seven days. Come back with results. That's the model. And Alex proved it works, even from the driver's seat of a car in Australia at 10 PM.

Alex's goal is simple and specific: $300 per day. That's $10K per month. Consistently. That's the number where he starts thinking about leaving his full-time job and going all-in on YouTube.

He's not there every day yet. But he's close. And with both short-form and long-form content working together now, the revenue has more paths to grow from.

The money has already changed things for his family. He's traveling to Sydney next week. Going back to his home country next year. When you have a family, travel isn't just one plane ticket. It's three. The extra income from YouTube is making things possible that weren't before.

"I can finally see money in my bank account going up," Alex said. Not "I'm rich." Not "I'm balling." Just... the number is going up. For a 35-year-old father working a full-time job, that kind of steady growth means security. It means options. It means freedom is getting closer every month.

He started from zero. Literally zero. No videos. No experience. No audience. Just a decision to try, a willingness to learn, and two to three hours a day of work.

Four months later: $10K in revenue. 110 million views. 100K subscribers. A Silver Play Button his kid probably thinks is the coolest thing in the house. And a path forward that didn't exist before.