How a Small YouTube Channel Made $16,000 Last Month

The channel is called Native Nomads 🚙

It’s mostly about van life and offroad adventures, run by married couple Josh and Courtney.

Looks like they started taking YouTube seriously in early 2020 and have since published 300+ videos and racked up more than 1.6 million views.

But their channel still only has ~13k subscribers 😕

And they’ve only got ~10k followers on Instagram.

I heard about Josh and Courtney in a recent edition of the Copyblogger newsletter.

There’s no online edition I can link to, but the newsletter told how the couple long struggled to earn money from their channel.

They tried a bunch of things and didn’t really find anything that worked well 😢

Until…

Josh and Court knew there was [potential] because the bigger their brand got, the more companies were reaching out for sponsorships. But sponsorships were a lot of hassle and they knew there had to be a better way.

Finally, they decided to build their own store. Josh created relationships with many product suppliers and Courtney taught herself how to use Shopify and built an ecommerce store called Adventure Rig Shop. They launched their company and made $16,000 in revenue in the month of May!

Josh officially announced the opening of that online store in this April 21st video, a day after the first post on the store’s Instagram…

Looks like the main products they launched with were a bumper and winch for a Subaru Outback Wilderness.

The cheapest price listed for the bumper is $449 💰

So that’s how they were able to do $16k of revenue the first month: you don’t need to sell many products at that price point to hit the mark 🎯

Copyblogger’s take away…

[Josh and Courtney] knew that if they kept serving their audience by creating great content then they would establish themselves as authorities in the space. Eventually, they would find a business model that worked for them and ultimately, they took matters into their own hands by building a brand that they own, they control, and that gives them leverage in the industry.

They kept building, experimenting, iterating, having fun and eventually, they discovered the model that their audience wants. As a result, they’re now making a ton of money.

Nice 🤘

Unclear though how much of the $16k is actual profit. I assume they have to pay the product suppliers out of that.

But even if their profit is only 20-30%, it’s still an impressive first month for an ecommerce store built off the back of a 13k-subscriber YouTube channel.