Episode 24: Cryptocurrency, Self-Employment, and YouTube Success with Ben Armstrong
Chad:
Welcome back. I'm really excited about today's episode because you're going to learn a variety of ways to produce income outside of the norm. I'm really excited about today's interview with Ben Armstrong. He is a huge YouTube success. He is a cryptocurrency investing master, and he has a lot to share with you today about a few different ways that you can earn income outside of the norm. By “the norm,” I mean outside of the 9 to 5 typical job that many people pursue. He has earned income streams from everything, from investing in cryptocurrency to building YouTube channels. He also earns income from creating content online, freelancing, and by providing services for businesses. He’s done it all. He has really dabbled in so many different types of freelancing and self-employment types of ventures.
Ben is someone who’s not just earning over a hundred thousand dollars a year. He's earning over a hundred THOUSAND dollars a month. And that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the different income streams that he's been able to create for himself. But the key lesson that he shares with us is the importance of sticking with something long-term, even when you're not seeing results. And that is absolutely so important when it comes to building up success in the self-employment world. You're going to be putting in a lot of time and effort for a while without seeing compensation that seems to match that time and effort. Those who make it are the ones who are willing to keep going and to keep showing up 100%, even when the results and the return on investment are not there yet.
So with that said, I welcome Ben Armstrong to the show. I'm excited to have you on, because on this show, we talk a lot about taking the road less traveled when it comes to generating income and finding different ways of building a career beyond the norm by just getting a 9 to 5 job. I brought Ben on the show because he is both a Crypto King and a YouTube king. And he's just been involved in a lot of things that are not the norm when it comes to having a job and creating income. So, I'm really excited to talk to you today, Ben, about that, what you're doing, and what you're involved in so that the viewers can realize that there are a lot of different ways income can be earned in today's world. Ways that we don't even realize and ways we're not taught in school. I want to start by asking you a little bit about what some of the things are that you've been involved in over the last few years to create income for yourself?
Ben:
I've done a lot of stuff. I think when you're doing the show, it sounds like your audience is very similar to where I was in my life a few years ago, or even beyond. I've been trying to do entrepreneurship and online marketing, whatever the case may be for. Let's see, I started my first company in 2011, so I'll go back a long way. And it was very successful. My first company was a ticket business, selling online tickets through a white label or private label program, a company called TicketNetwork. And basically, we had a website and people would go there. I would post ads on Craigslist, they would buy tickets, and I would get a commission. And I went from making $25,000 a year at a carwash to $300,000 a year within two years.
And it was really phenomenal, but it opened this Pandora's box. Eventually, some things changed in that business, on the Craigslist front, and also in the ticket business, which cut my income down about 90%. And I was kind of right back where I started, but the box had been opened. And I knew that there were ways to generate income outside of having a regular job. But once you get that taste for that for more, you're always going to want more. I was actually just talking about this yesterday with someone. Once you realize it's possible to not just make money too, but to live comfortably by being your own boss and doing your own thing, then you're going to continue to pursue that for a long time. And until you get it again. So, basically, Bitcoin Crypto is a YouTube channel and a brand that I created kind of out of that insatiable hunger.
There were so many things though that I did in the middle. I did freelance work on Upwork. I created websites. I did graphic design, I sold football memorabilia. At some point, I kind of did everything. I was really trying to get my YouTube channel going because it takes a few years in most cases to really get to a place where you can establish a channel. I started my channel in January of 2018. I was doing about seven other things at the time, but I'm very thankful that with a lot of hard work and dedication over the last few years, we've been able to grow Bitcoin Crypto under the largest in Bitcoin and cryptocurrency or crypto assets, as we say now, across the board. And it's been really nice that now I don't have to worry about the other “side hustles” at this point.
Chad:
That's really great. And you bring up a good point that once you head down that road, it's almost impossible to go back. Once I left a full-time job several years ago, even though it was rough for the first couple of years trying to figure out how to make income consistently, I still couldn't imagine going back after that point. You start to earn some money. And even if it's not as much as you want to be earning, you realize that this type of career is for you, and there's no way that you can go back to just getting a “normal” job. And if I’m struggling, it just means I have to figure out a different way of making this business work. It doesn't mean I can just go and get a job.
Ben:
That's the grind. I couldn't work for anybody else. There was a time where I was executive director also of a rehab facility for teenage boys helping through the recovery. But that was something I was passionate about. I didn't start out as the executive director there, but I was doing that along with doing a bunch of side hustles. But it was because I was very passionate about what I was doing and I was helping people. In that perspective, I could say, “okay, I don't have to be in charge of my own schedule. I can commit to something.” If it's not something you're super passionate about, you're never going to be able to go back to that regular 9 to 5 job lifestyle, because you're always going to have that in the back of your mind, knowing you could be doing something else, you're making money for someone else.
You know what I mean? It's kind of like running a house. You rent a house and that money's not really going anywhere. You're just burning it month after month, after month. Whereas if you're buying a house, you're putting money into it, but it's giving you equity and you're storing up. That's very similar to the way it is when you have a job. Having a job is like renting a house, except that you're the one who’s actually being rented, because you're making money for somebody else. And you're getting no return on that. And not only that, but it's sucking the life, the energy, and the time out of you that you could be using to do something else. You certainly don't want to just quit your job tomorrow. Not if you don't have any kind of side hustle or anything that you can turn into a full-time income.
But what having a 9 to 5 job will do is it will make it to where you don't have the time to pursue that. I think everyone will tell you when they started down this road, just like you said, you had a job, and there is a time where you got to really grind and kind of have split focus, whether it's in your regular job and also on your side hustle. But over time, that's not going to work. You're going to have to develop that into something that you're going to be able to take the training wheels off of, and having a job will really stifle all of that.
Chad:
Definitely. One of the main things that you teach on your YouTube channel Bitcoin Crypto with cryptocurrency is something that I want to talk a little bit about. It’s that there are different sides of this thing where you can make money outside of a normal job. You have freelance work, which is a big part of what I'm involved in, where you're providing a service for businesses or individuals using a certain skill, and then you have investing and you have content creation. So, let's talk a little bit about the investing side you've been involved in cryptocurrency. Tell us a little bit about your involvement with that and why that is a viable option for people to invest in cryptocurrency?
Ben:
Yeah, so investing in crypto has absolutely changed my life. But the funny thing is, if we go back to the very beginning, when I got into crypto, it was actually through that ticket business. As I said, I was posting ads on Craigslist while I was using a service to help me with that. And in 2012, they started taking Bitcoin. So, I invested in Bitcoin in 2012. That's actually not true. I didn't invest in Bitcoin in 2012. I bought Bitcoin in order to use it, to pay for that service. They were only $12 back then. And I think today it's ticking in around $33,000. So, what happened is that very early on, I didn't understand what I was investing in. I just looked at it as a currency. I wasn't saving it or setting any on the side. So, I had some in an account to pay for the service, and then a little bit down the road, several months later, I would look at that count and it had exploded.
In November of 2013, I was like, “oh my gosh, this is like $3,000 that I had, let me sell this, let me get this money.” I took my family on a vacation. I paid off some bills, did some stuff. Then in 2017, I started looking at how much money I should have had if I just would have actually invested and kept it there. And it was eight figures. So, I traded $3,000 for $10 million, because I didn't understand what I was investing in. On the crypto side, you really have to understand, and that's why we run. We want to educate people about what crypto is about, what Bitcoin is, what blockchain is, how it can change people's lives. Bitcoin and crypto have overall been one of the greatest transitions of wealth that we've ever seen. Not just in America, but in the history of the world.
Other than the Powerball, what other place can you put in 20 bucks, and then years down the road that 20 bucks is worth $10,000. And we see that very consistently in crypto, that if you invest, if you stick around for four years or more, in general, if you've been investing during that time, you will become wildly rich. And there are some reasons for that. But the main thing is a long-term perspective. I had a short term perspective on crypto, so I just saw it come up and I said, “man, that's some money. Let me do something with that.”
When you have a perspective, you look at it and you just can see from the Bitcoin chart and its history, it goes from what we call bottom left to top right. It always goes up. It always sets new all-time highs on average about every four years since its inception. And it usually goes wildly past its previous all time high.
When it comes to Ethereum, that's the number 2 crypto, and then other what we call “alt coins,” a lot of these still present some of these same opportunities that Bitcoin presented early investors when it was created in 2009. You couldn't actually invest in it, I think, until about 2011. Your audience just needs to get educated on crypto. It's the future. I always tell people, “Just think about it. Do you really think in a hundred years, we're going to be trading pieces of green paper and metal coins?” You can see the way the world's going. It's going digital. Crypto is going to be the thing that ties together the world.
Chad:
You share some really good insights on that. And thanks for sharing some of your experience with that. What advantages does it have by being decentralized?
Ben:
Right now, we're living in a completely centralized world. If you have a website and someone doesn't agree with your standpoint on something, they can just come in and shut down your website through your domain services or through your hosting services. You can get de-platformed. This happens when you’re building a brand, and then all of a sudden it's gone because none of the social media websites won't let your content be seen, or they just totally remove your accounts overnight. And the worst part about it is that there's no recourse. Once your accounts are gone, there's no larger entity you can go to and be like, “okay, but can I get this stuff restored?” I worked on it forever. And they don't even have to tell you why. And that's the really most frustrating thing to me, that centralization is a central point of failure in a decentralized world.
Basically, a good way to think of it is Facebook, right? We know what happened with the Cambridge Analytica scandal from 2016, where Facebook was stealing so much of our information. They’ve got over 5,000 data points on every single person. If Mark Zuckerberg wanted to go into Facebook right now and said, “you know what, pull Chad's account for me, I want to see everything he's ever posted. I want to see all of his information on him, every data point,” he has the power to do that in a decentralized world. All of that data is not stored anywhere. There's no central entity to where all that information is going, and somebody can come in and say, “you know what, show me the pictures from 2011 for this person, or show me show me all their deleted posts.”
Whereas right now, they can. And so we want to move to a place in crypto and blockchain where we can create a more balanced world, a more fair world, where everybody's on the same footing has got the same chance. And as you probably know, just look at everything that goes on in the world economy right now it's rigged so the big people win all the time. And that's something that we want to change in the future. And you look back through history, there've been a lot of different revolutions. If you look at what the printing press did, basically you had people that didn't have information. And then all of a sudden, they had information and they started realizing, wow, the world isn't what we thought it was. Well, we're going through the same thing right now in crypto through the internet. The internet is the modern printing press. And people are starting to wake up to what's going on with larger entities in the world, whether it's the banking system, whether it's governments, whether it's other forms of control. And we're trying to fight back against that with blockchain and crypto to create a decentralized world where everything is balanced.
Chad:
That's great. So, anyone who just heard that, if you want to protect your freedom to create and invest and build wealth for yourself and financial security, crypto is one way to definitely do that and get involved in something that is deregulated. For those who are just getting started, what are some tips you have for somebody that just wants to get started in crypto? What are some of those first steps?
Ben:
Like I said earlier, the number one thing is to get educated. You can download an app like Coinbase which is a very common app that a lot of people use, especially in America. You can buy and sell crypto there, including Bitcoin Ethereum, and some of the other top coins.But outside of just opening apps and starting to invest, you have to get educated. So the number one thing you gotta do is start looking at books, looking at YouTube channels, going to forums on the internet and looking at what people are saying about it, and just start investing in education. Don't be like me, someone who got in very early and didn't understand what you were looking at. And you just throw the baby out with the bath water and don't continue pursuing this.
You're gonna want to get educated. And I think that YouTube is such a great place. So, every day at five o'clock Eastern standard time, I do a show called Around the Blockchain. We bring on three other creators or three other personalities on crypto, every single day. We have a host. There's five of us total having a conversation about crypto and giving a rounded perspective about it. It's not just my opinions or one person's opinions. It's everyone talking collectively. And we have different people on that show every single day. So the lesson there is to get well-rounded perspectives. Don't just go to one source and say, “oh, well, you know, I read this book. Now I know everything about crypto.” It's a constant pursuit. No one is going to come into crypto and get rich overnight.
What generally happens is those who come into crypto during peak times and make a lot of it in the short term, they usually lose it all because they don't understand the way that the cycles and crypto, as we call them, work. The prices go wildly up, and then they go wildly down. You're going to want to get educated on things like that. And going through earlier statistics show that four years is what you really gotta be in crypto in order to make a lot of money and do what we call “huddling.” This comes from a typo in a forum in 2012, where somebody accidentally wrote “HODL” instead of the word “hold.” It’s now a big meme.
Chad:
Ben just shared a really important lesson with us for anything related to your life and anything related to your career when it comes to having that long-term perspective. So, that kind of leads us into the last thing I wanted to talk about today, which is YouTube. And I definitely encourage anyone listening and watching to go to Ben's YouTube channel, Bitcoin Crypto. If you want to learn about cryptocurrency, everything you need to know is there. And he has several other channels as well, some new ones. With YouTube, that's another long-term investment, right? You are creating a lot of stuff, doing a lot of things for a while and not feeling like you're getting a return. Tell us a little bit about your YouTube journey and how you're making money on YouTube and just being a content creator.
Ben:
So in January of 2018, I started my channel. For the first two years, we'll just say it was not going great. All of 2018 and 2019, I was really struggling, and I was making so much content. I made about two videos a day since the start of my channel. And I just wasn't getting views. I actually started my channel kind of as a comic series. That's what Bit Boy is, he's a comic superhero and it was supposed to just be like a kind of comedy. We were going to do a cartoon, but the time investment was so much and people weren't really excited about crypto in 2018. It wasn't getting the views. So, I moved to doing news videos about crypto.
I should probably help educate people. And that's really how we got started on the track we're on. However, no one was watching. I like to share a pretty funny story about another large content creator. It’s two twins. Their names are All Coin Daily, and I think they’re the third largest crypto channel. So, I went and met with them in 2019 at a conference. And they basically gave me all their secrets. They were to tell me how they make their titles, how they know the titles work or not, how they look at their thumbnails, how they come up with ideas. And I was talking to one of them recently and we are the largest community with the biggest social media following total, but he was on my show and he said, “listen, the reason why I told you all that stuff is because I never looked at you as competition. Like I never thought your channel was going to grow. I was like, ah, help this guy. He's not going to be around a few years anyways, who cares?”
And so they were very nice. Gave me a lot of information. Of course, you know, I passed them on YouTube a couple months ago. They're good friends of mine, of course. But that really speaks to what my channel was doing for two years. People looked at me and they're like “this channel’s never going to make it,” but I kept grinding. And it was all that work during those times when nobody was watching that not only was I getting better at making content, but I was also learning more about my craft. Learning more about crypto. When you're talking about something all day, every day, and you're researching, you're going to naturally learn more.
I'm sure a lot of your audience knows something like the 10,000 hours thing, where you do something for 10,000 hours and you become an expert. And I feel like that's really true in a lot of ways on YouTube. If you actually track the average number of subscribers, it's not time. It's not like, oh, after two years, you'll have about this many videos. There's actually a direct relationship between the number of videos you make and the numbers of subscribers you have. I think the average, I think it takes the average channel, like 1500 videos to get to a hundred thousand subscribers, somewhere around there, while I was doing two or three videos a day. So it didn't take me too long to get to that a thousand to 1500 range of videos, even though nobody was watching. So in 2020, things really started taking off for me slowly but surely ramping up.
I was actually considering quitting in January of 2020, which is pretty funny. I was like, “maybe I do just have to go get a regular job.” But the stubbornness inside me just wouldn't allow me to do it. And I grinded and I pushed through. Now if you look back over the last 18 months, we've gone from about 10,000 subscribers all the way to 1.12 million. So it's definitely been very refreshing to see all the hard work pay off and all the time that I put in. I got a return on the investment and there were a lot of times along the way where I doubted myself for sure. And I was like, “is this the best thing for my family? Like, I'm, I'm 36 years old at the time and I'm a failed YouTuber. Like, what does that really say about me?” But a phrase that I think about a lot is, “just on the other side of a wall, it's a breakthrough waiting to happen.” And so I hit the wall, I pushed through, and we broke through. The last year and a half has been the most amazing.
Chad:
I’ve witnessed that happen. You really have to change your mind and perspective on how this works because what you're talking about is, you're putting in all this work and all this effort, and you're not getting a paycheck every two weeks. You're not just showing up to work, creating videos for two weeks and getting paid. I mean, you're talking about investing time into giving away a lot of value. You were giving away everything you knew, on cryptocurrency to educate people. It’s the fact that you continued to give away what you knew for free and not get paid for it. And eventually, the payment came. But very few people are willing to stick it out long enough to see that return. How did you keep going? Were you crazy? How did you keep going when you weren't getting that return as quick as maybe you hoped?
Ben:
Yeah, it was extremely frustrating because when I started my channel, it was the worst possible time to start a channel. It was January, 2018, in crypto. Remember back in 2017, Bitcoin went way up, it was all over the news. People were excited and it peaked out in December. And then in January of 2018, the overall crypto market peaked out and it started tumbling and it fell and it fell and it fell for about two years. During that time, I just kept thinking to myself, “okay, if I can make content now, while the prices are going down, it's going to be so much easier when the prices are going up, because I saw what happened to a lot of channels. They created channels in 2017, like over the summer or maybe in the spring or in the fall.
And because the interest was so high, they just grew so quickly. People were going from zero to a hundred thousand followers in three to six months at that time in crypto. And I saw that. I was like, “man, I just want to experience that type of growth but looks like I missed it for this time. Maybe I can prepare myself so that when these prices do start to go back up, I can be in a good position.” And I just wanted to prepare myself to be in a spot where when the market did go up, I would actually be able to just get followers. I never dreamed that by the time it started going up, I would be rising to become one of the largest YouTubers because it happened so quickly, but I kind of had those long term visions in mind, long-term goals.
I think that's what you should do. If you have a channel that looks like, obviously whatever you're doing, it may not have kind of a natural cycle to it like crypto markets have. But if you can just look and say, “if I can just stick it out for this long, or when this is going on, I can create great content around that.” Then that'll help you to kind of push forward. But ultimately it is because I'm not a quitter. I'm very stubborn. I believe in what I believe in. And I believe deeply in crypto and, and here's the lesson. The lesson is passion. And I think it's very frustrating when you're starting a channel. Cause I had actually one of my many side hustles I did like I've done. I did probably about 20 different side hustles.
Some of them worked out okay. Some of them didn't, some were miserable in between about 2014 and 2019 or so early 20 or so. And one of those was another YouTube channel. I'd started a YouTube channel back probably about 2016. And it was about subscription box reviews. How I came across this was I was just looking at videos or browsing the internet. And I found this niche. I was like, this niche is underserved. There's not enough people out there doing subscription box reviews. So I said, I'm going to do this, but I wasn't passionate about it. So after about three months, I closed that thing up and said, “I'm never going to do another YouTube channel again.” I actually thought maybe I would just never be good at that. But when I discovered crypto, I found something I was passionate about.
And so regardless of how my content creation journey was going, I knew ultimately crypto is going to win out. And I knew that I was super passionate about it. I want to change the world. I want to impact people's lives. I want to help people find financial freedom. I just like to help people. And so, because of all that, I was very passionate about crypto. That's what led me to be successful and to be able to keep going in those dark times for that other channel where it was just about making money. It wasn't something I was passionate about. That was never going to work. It was never going to be successful. I hated making those videos from the first week that I started it. So that's a pretty good sign. You might be doing it for the wrong reasons because I understand having side hustles, it's all about money. You want to provide for your family. You want to be able to make money. You want to be comfortable. You don't want to have the 9 to 5 grind. You don't want to get in the car and drive to work every day. Even though that's what I do now, I have a corporate office now, so I drive to work everyday. But, I understand that's what you guys want, but when it comes to content creation, you're going to have a really hard time creating a long, sustainable career in something that you're not passionate about.
Chad:
That is a fantastic lesson. And that’s passion that really does drive you and that drives us. And the key is to align that passion with something that people need and want. And then boom, you're able to show up consistently with YouTube. You create content, what are some of the ways that you have been able to monetize? Obviously, you've gotten a lot of subscribers and views, but then how does that translate into the income? What are just a couple of the ways that you actually earn money from creating that content?
Ben:
So the three main ways that we generate income here on the channel. We actually have four ways. I would say number 1, I mean, obviously YouTube ads, we're doing six figures a month pretty consistently at this point. So that's definitely been good. I've got 20 employees now, so it's not just me. A lot of that goes to help sustain my business and things like that. But the YouTube monetization, that's not ever what you should look at, like kind of first that's not going to generate the most money for you in the early stages. Even when you start getting a little more successful, just put that in perspective. I think we did 16 million minutes of watch time in the last month. And that equals about a hundred thousand dollars in our niche for other niches. It won't even generate that much income like in the comedy niche or, you know, whatever, some of like maybe fitness I'm not sure about, but I'm in finance and tech. So we even have higher rates here. But if you think about it like that many views generating a 100K, especially if you have employees, it's not like a huge amount you're going to be able to survive on alone, especially in the early stages. You're going to be much better. Like I made $200 a month on YouTube ads or a year of where we really started growing in 2020. So, 2019, we were doing about $200 a month. So $200 a month to a 100K like, yeah, I'll take it. But you know, that would not have been enough to sustain the business early on.
We do sponsored videos. We have companies that we work with. We're very particular. We actually turned down like over 99% of requests. We've now kind of got into mainstream YouTube. So we work with partners now, like Skillshare, Manscaped, SoFi Bank, some really big names, but then we have other crypto companies we work with as well. We do sponsored reviews, projects. Then we have other partnerships where we kind of serve as marketing advisors for them. We'll make a video on them once a month. Of course, we always disclose all of that on the channel. In crypto, that's where a lot of the big money is, because crypto is an industry where people are overpaying for stuff pretty consistently. And so even early on, I could get 5 or $600 for a video, even though I only had like 5,000 subscribers.
So I know for a lot of people just trying to get out of that rat race and generate an income, you look at working for a year and a half, and then you can make, you know, $500 a month. Or if you did two of those, a $1,000.00 a month, that can be enough to kind of help you continue on.
Third, we do affiliate links, referral links. This is very big for us. And I know this is one of those things that’s like, you want to get guaranteed money. But when you're smaller or you don't feel like anybody cares about your opinion and they don't want to click on your stuff and you're like, oh, referrals, aren't the way to go. I'd rather get a flat fee up front. We make way more of our referral links than we do off of our sponsored videos, like over a month's period. That’s because we have influence. People trust us. They know they're getting my real opinion about things. And so when I say, “Hey, this is a great product,” they will go and check it out and they will decide whether to buy it or not. But then we get a portion of that.
And then lastly, just being in the world of investing, we also get a lot of private investment opportunities. A lot of times the sponsor videos that come along with, “Hey, we'll let you invest in this early at a very low price if down the road, you give us some support, maybe retweet us on social media,” things like that. And then I would add of course not just on YouTube, but across our other social channels, we have almost 500,000 followers on Twitter, you know, 250,000 on Instagram, 2.7 million on TikTok. So we get a lot of opportunities to do other social media posts for income as well. But those are the really the five main ways that we generate income here.
Chad:
Ben, thanks for sharing that. You've really opened our mind today on how we can make money outside of the norm. And you've shared some really valuable insights and how you got out of bed. You never went back to bed, you never quit. You kept with it. And you were continuously getting outside of your comfort zone. And that's why you were able to find success. Ben, where can our viewers learn more from you and learn more about you and follow your company?
Ben:
You guys can just go to either my website, biblocrypto.com or Biblio Crypto on YouTube. Any of our socials, if you just Google “Bitcoin Crypto” in whatever social platform you want, will definitely come up. We're a force to be reckoned with in the social media world. So, it's not too hard to find us.
Chad:
Wow. In only 30 minutes, Ben shared with us some of his most important lessons he shared with you how to get started. If you want to invest in cryptocurrency, how to build a YouTube channel, and find success there and all the different ways that you can monetize content creation, that what he's teaching you about, how he makes money on YouTube that applies to any type of content creation online and being able to build an online business and make money there. He shared with us all the random jobs that he did as a freelancer throughout his career. And just how many different ways that you can make money. That is not part of what we're typically told in school. And that we typically understand as the only way to build a career. And I wanted to reiterate what he said about how once you head down this road, once you start down this road, even before you're making money, it's very difficult to go back. Especially after you have a couple of small wins and you realize, wow, this is possible. You know, for me, I quit after my first nine months of attempting to freelance, but then I went back. It’s very difficult to dabble in this world and realize the freedom you have to create the income that you want doing what you love. And then go back to a typical job. So, if you're in that position where you feel like you're not getting what you want from it yet, that you're putting in a lot more effort and time than you feel like you're getting compensated for, follow Ben's example by not giving up. Follow Ben's example by sticking with something a hundred percent for years. Even when it seems as if it's not worth the time. Now, he had to pivot a few times as he wasn't making money, he had to keep adjusting his approach and his strategy.
And like he said, he was learning and he was becoming more of an expert in what he was doing every time he showed up. And so there was growth that was happening regardless of whether he was making money or not. And eventually that growth finally was enough for him to start making a lot of money and for him to be compensated for all the time, all the thousands and thousands of hours he spent where anywhere he wasn't getting paid, he finally got paid for all of that. And like he mentioned, he then grew very quickly, and that tends to be the case. The compound effect is a real thing. You invest a lot of time into something consistently and you do small things consistently over a long period of time. And eventually things can just take off. And all of a sudden, there's this huge acceleration in the return that you get for all the time and the effort that you put in.
And that's what he experienced in crypto. That's what he experienced on YouTube is that eventually he got paid for all that time. He invested years prior because of how much his income increased over a short period of time. Once things started to take off. So it's worth it to pursue the career of a self-employed entrepreneur, who is figuring out how to make income in a variety of ways. And you get to contribute to the world in whatever way you want. And you get to pursue your passion. You get to live your passion and you get to feel passionate about what you're doing, and you're able to then provide a comfortable living for your family. And it's a win-win for everyone and you're providing value for the economy. You're providing value for everyone that you're helping through what you're doing. And then in return, you're able to help and support your family in a really big way.
If you liked today's interview, be sure to subscribe to the YouTube channel. Also, you can go to any of the podcast apps and find us there to listen. If you prefer to listen, also go to arrowlight.tv, where you can read a transcript from this episode, and where you can learn more about how to find success being self-employed. I will see you in the next early morning conversation.
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