We Make $110K/Year on YouTube Helping People Break Into Tech
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?
My name is Eric and I started the YouTube channel ‘Tech Sales With Eric’ 2 years ago that has since turned into a full educational platform higherlevels.com. There’s been an insane amount that has happened in just 2 years including very early on meeting my cofounder Kris, but we’ve since grown our platform to over $10,000/month with all organic traffic from YouTube, and are just entering our hyper growth phase as we explore paid advertising and affiliate marketing.
Our flagship product is Tech Sales Ascension, an affordable bootcamp that has helped hundreds of students break into the top tech companies in the world as SDRs (Sales Development Representatives). Our customers are usually aged 22-40 looking for their first tech sales job. Many of them are transitioning careers from a salaried position and looking to increase their earnings through sales.
It took 8 months to make a dollar ($5 donation from a fan) and about 12 months to consistently have revenue coming in. We did $4,000 in revenue in 2022, and in 2023 we will do roughly $110k in revenue.
One of the coolest stats to me is that we did $14,000 in 5 days during Black Friday. We are currently reinvesting everything back into our infrastructure, both from an online branding and marketing perspective, as well as for the YouTube channel through camera and audio upgrades including a full podcast studio.
The following screenshots are across our 2 major paywalls and do not include additional revenue through affiliate marketing and YouTube Ad revenue:
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
Finding the Idea:
I was an engineer for 3 years while also playing Team Handball for Team USA, ultimately retiring after playing in a world championship in 2019. After 3 years of working as an engineer while also competing internationally, it was too much and I took a year to focus on sport in 2019, deciding to transition to tech sales in 2020. When I transitioned to sales, I was fortunate to have a lot of success rather quickly, getting my first promotion in 3.5 months and winning President’s Club awards in both of my first 2 years in sales (top rep award).
Before starting on YouTube, I was asked to be a guest coach for a tech sales bootcamp and was honestly blown away by how bad their program was. It was taught by people with zero real sales experience.
They were charging $2,000 and had no consistent track record of breaking students into tech sales. I had only been in tech sales for a year but took a look at their coursework and it was a joke.
I started giving away free advice on YouTube, I didn’t take it that seriously but saw 3 months into making content that one of my videos had gotten over 1,000 views. From there I was hooked and kept making videos at a minimum once a week.
Finding my co-founder:
My background is in engineering and athletics. My co-founder Kris is also a former Olympian in track and field and exited an educational business in college. I met Kris as he was transitioning out of athletics and into tech sales and helped him land at a great company. From there it quickly became obvious that we had a unique combination of skills.
Kris is truly an expert at online education/branding/marketing, while I have been in a tech sales career for a while and can speak as an ‘authority’ at all levels of the career track. This combined with our cornered niche of Tech Sales on YouTube was a great foundation to build the business.
It became clear as people continued to comment on our videos and reach out via email that we needed to build a formal online course. We couldn’t keep up with the demand for 1 on 1 coaching while working a full time day job, it simply didn’t scale.
Before Kris and I co-founding higherlevels.com, I made a simple course on gumroad but struggled to get meaningful traction. Kris moved to Austin for his job, and we quickly decided to combine forces and leverage his expertise in online education. I could figure some basic things out, but didn’t have the knowledge and expertise to build a full fledged online platform.
The original course I made was on gumroad for $597. I made 4 sales in 2022, and Kris and I started building the new platform in December of 2022, finally launching in February 2023 using framer for the front end website, and circle.so to host the educational platform.
To incentivize new customers, we launched at a $197 price point to see if anyone would buy, and we sold 5 courses on the first day we were live. We knew we had market fit not only from the sales but also from the quality of students in our course.
We’ve been fortunate to work with people of all backgrounds, and every person in our initial launch was a perfect persona fit. It validated everything that had been building over the first 12 months.
We are both very fortunate to be in the lucrative career of tech sales, but admittedly it’s been incredibly demanding to build this while still employed and progressing our careers. Long term our vision is to run this full time and continue to grow our offerings.
Just start and keep iterating. Don’t over-emphasize a ‘launch’ in my opinion because you’re going to want to adjust quickly and not get too attached to the thing you spent months building.
Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.
There were a few major factors that contributed to us deciding to make an online product.
1) The current offerings in the market are either overpriced, predatory in nature, and/or they are poorly designed and taught by individuals who have no business teaching tech sales
2) Affordable offerings are also incomplete and don’t offer live coaching with the instructors
3) Many of the offerings have things like tests and quizzes which we fundamentally believe are poor indicators of success in sales. We focus unlike any other program on the core essentials needed to break in and don’t add extra fluff around industry knowledge, etc… You can learn that on the job.
This led us to create the first course that had a full end-to-end curriculum that is a self-paced academy of videos, while also creating a community chat (think discord), forum (think reddit), and weekly live calls with the instructors. Courses that exist today have some of these elements but do not truly combine all of them.
Our offering went from a gumroad product to a framer website, to now being our platform at higherlevels.com. I truly believe a key decision to the quality of our community has been transitioning to www.circle.so for our educational platform. I am not affiliated with them in any way, but it is by far the best offering on the market for a full fledged community and has made our lives and our students' experiences incredible.
For our pricing strategy, we can undercut traditionally more expensive boot camps because of our long term vision. Many bootcamps are priced anywhere from $2,000-$15,000, but they only sell one course. Higher Levels is unique in the sense that we are making courses for the entire career trajectory of a tech sales career.
This means that we can offer our entry level bootcamp at $497, our second course that just went live at $997 (for students who break into tech sales), and our next course that will launch in the summer of 2024 for even more. This makes Tech Sales more approachable for many with limited resources, while also allowing us to grow our lifetime value of a customer if we are successful at each level of coaching.
Our startup costs were around $500 as we transitioned to our brand Tech Sales Ascension. We were paying monthly for most of our software until we confirmed the market fit. As we quickly generated revenue, we decided to lock in annual plans on most of the software we use to run the business today.
Starting the business meant I would either make videos in my apartment or head to Kris’s place quite literally every single day.
First setup (my apartment):
First Ever YouTube Video:
Recent video (much higher quality):
Filming on Kris’s Apartment Balcony:
We decided to move in together in 2023-2024 as we grow the business. This is now our setup:
Do not build a product before you know people are willing to buy it. I see so many people trying to build something and then realizing they have no way to distribute it without taking a huge hit on their margins.
Describe the process of launching the business.
Launching our formal business was rather easy given the distribution we have with the YouTube channel. For our launch of tech sales ascension, we did a formal YouTube video and made $1.1k the first day it was live.
That being said, our YouTube growth has been a 2 year journey that took a long time to get going. In our first year we gained 1,000 subscribers, and this past year we gained another 6,000 subscribers, just passing 7,000 recently. We have been very intentional about cornering ‘tech sales’ for SEO which has started to pay off substantially.
Additionally, I took the advice of creators like Alex Hormozi who advised making your free stuff better than your competitors paid offerings. We’ve created some incredible free materials that before our channel were paid courses like this 46 minute free tech sales resume bootcamp as well as many other guides and content that were traditionally paywalled before the channel existed.
Our launch of higherlevels.com was a bit bumpy as we had to transition links on almost 300 videos to call out the new website and found there were a few broken links on the site when we went live, but they were quickly corrected.
Our initial presence was on the framer and was well received. Thankfully due to the 1 on 1 coaching we offered and a few affiliate and course sales, we had enough money at this point to self fund all of our efforts through the business. It’s been profitable basically since the beginning. The biggest change we implemented was getting a corporate credit card once we hit market fit so we could accrue points for business travel.
Biggest lesson learned from launching is to just start and keep iterating. Don’t over-emphasize a ‘launch’ in my opinion because you’re going to want to adjust quickly and not get too attached to the thing you spent months building.
Additionally, make sure you have the infrastructure in place to capture leads early and often. In every single one of our videos, I have a link to a free tech sales lesson that provides an overview of how you break into the career and requires you to sign up with an email to access the free course. I didn’t do this originally and wish I had.
I would honestly expect your initial V1 launch to not go perfectly at all, but if you are capturing emails and future leads, that is almost more valuable long term. Just start, launch as soon as you’re confident your MVP is working, and then be ready for unexpected issues to arise that you can quickly correct.
V1 Gumroad listing:
First website (framer):
Current website (webflow):
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
Our YouTube has continually brought in new customers. We do plan to introduce affiliate marketing and paid ads in 2024, but right now all of our business (~110k in revenue) has been generated from YouTube without paid advertising. You can see that it’s taken quite a lot of time to grow YouTube, but now we are consistently adding about ~15 subscribers a day, and planning to broaden our niche into more entrepreneurial topics in the future:
We have introduced new products and converted many of our first time buyers into repeat buyers. The nice thing about our products is that they truly get you a result (getting a job) so the upsells continue to provide value to them along their entire career trajectory and are also dependent on our first product delivering the result we want our students to achieve.
With the influx of growth we’ve had in the last 3 months alone we don’t have exact numbers on what percentage have landed jobs. That being said, some of the wins we are most proud of are having a student break into AWS, Okta, Snowflake, Rubrik, Outreach.io, and many other prominent tech companies as well as numerous students without college degrees breaking in and finding success.
There are tons of success stories on our YouTube, check them out! Additionally, our SDR Accelerator course for active tech sales reps has helped our students become the #1 SDR at companies like Outreach.io and Brex.
If there’s any advice I have for founders it would be to use social media to build a following (I talk about this in more depth in another answer) and also perfect one product before moving on to the next.
While it’s been painful at times to refine our first product (once it was already working and having a little success), putting in the time to have it well positioned to become a market leader has been critical. I was tempted to start doing a bunch of different things once we had a small amount of success with our first product, but doubling down on it and making sure it’s 100% polished and working repeatedly has laid the foundation for us to expand. If we had expanded earlier I don’t think we would have the same result we do now.
A great way we have gained market share is by being strategic with our YouTube SEO. A few of our students have taken courses from competitors, so by associating ourselves with large brands, we start to capture mindshare.
For example, one of our biggest competitors is Course Careers. There were no videos on YouTube comparing Course Careers to anything else, so we made a video titled “Course Careers vs. Tech Sales Ascension” and had a student talk about their experience with both. It’s made us more relevant in search and also converted quite a few customers looking at both programs. (YouTube video for reference)
When you’re selling a product online for under $1,000, you need to make the value so clear that they are comfortable buying it online without talking to anyone.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
We are doing well as we just crossed $100k in revenue this year and have incredibly high margins on our products (~90%). We expect that margin to go down a bit as we focus on distribution this upcoming year with affiliate marketing and paid ads, but the overall growth will justify it.
We will also be rebranding our YouTube to Higher Levels as we continue to grow, and just reinvested all of our profits into high quality camera gear for a full podcast setup in our apartment.
Today 100% of our sales are through YouTube which will be a big focus for us in 2024. We also plan to expand the scope of videos beyond tech sales to include sales related, but more entrepreneurial topics. We have a great niche in tech sales but want to expand to cover broader topics that are sales related like entrepreneurship so we can attract a wider audience and grow our funnel. Kris exited a business in college, and since we have grown Higher Levels to a six-figure business in 2 years, we also want to share more about our own experience growing this business.
Kris and I continue to build this out on nights and weekends as our day jobs (which we are fortunate for) demand a lot of our time and attention. I block out 8-10 hours a day where I don’t even look at the business and focus 100% on my day job. The nice thing is that the skills we are learning in our jobs directly contribute to our ability to create high-quality content and courses for our audience.
We do plan to do this full time and it's unclear exactly when it will make sense, but it's not unreasonable to think that one of us will make the leap in 2024, and the other by 2025.
Long term we will do this by consulting business to business in addition to the direct to consumer sales. We are uniquely positioned to have video courses created for every position in tech sales. We will long term be able to consult a fast growing startup and build out their long term GTM strategy while also enabling them to have video content for every sales position they have to hire long term.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
If you are not an expert in something, take some time trying to make the best decision you can, but especially if you run an internet business, do not spend an excessive amount of time sweating the details when you’re trying to launch.
If you have an organic social presence, your followers are willing to forgive a lot of little mistakes so long as you’re still putting forth a strong effort and not just clearly trying to make money off of your audience.
It’s also been really interesting to see that our lowest cost course is the most time intensive. Our initial offering is $497 and those customers are always the ones that are the most demanding and have the most problems. Our students in our $997 course are all great and trust in the value of our offering. They are also much more likely to watch all of the content and participate in our weekly calls.
Lastly, coming from a B2B sales environment, B2C is a different beast. I used to think that the people who wanted to reach out to me and ask to talk to me before buying the course were a sure thing to buy the course, and it couldn’t be further from the truth.
When you’re selling a product online for under $1,000, you need to make the value so clear that they are comfortable buying it online without talking to anyone. Not only did I find talking to customers largely a waste of time, but I also found that oddly enough the people who want to talk to you are subconsciously looking for a reason to not buy your course, not the other way around.
If they are hesitant to buy a $500 offer, you need to improve the quality of your website, the number of testimonials, and the presentation of the value. Talking to you will rarely make a difference and just waste your time.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
- Circle.so
- Webflow
- Stripe
- Zapier
- ActiveCampaign
I cannot recommend circle.so highly enough. It has been an incredible tool for us to build out a community without having to invest in building it ourselves.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
Given my career and what we sell, I find sales books to be the most beneficial. I enjoy customer centric selling, however, it’s rather specific to the profession of tech sales.
I’m currently listening to the Founders podcast as well as My First Million fairly often, but nowhere near as much as I did earlier in my career.
When I was previously an engineer (and hated that profession) I spent a lot of time reading and listening to podcasts for hours a day as I was planning my escape from engineering.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
Social media is the most incredible free way to test any idea that you have. Before you spend a ton of time trying to make a product, just make videos and/or content about the niche you’ve selected. If people respond positively to your content, it’s a sign that you’re onto something.
Do not build a product before you know people are willing to buy it. I see so many people trying to build something and then realizing they have no way to distribute it without taking a huge hit on their margins by paying influencers, etc…
Start your social media, and then launch your product from there. It doesn’t mean that you won’t partner with other influencers and run ads in the future, but stop wasting 6 months building something that no one gives a shit about.
You can use any social media platform of your choice to see if people care about what you have to say. Once you find that thing, then you build the product.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
At the moment the only thing we need is a video editor. Long term we may hire sales trainers as we branch out and sell to corporations, but at the moment Kris and I are building this together and are largely able to contract out bits and pieces.
Where can we go to learn more?
- 4,818 founder case studies
- Access to our founder directory
- Live events, courses and recordings
- 8,628 business ideas
- $1M in software savings
- 4,818 founder case studies
- Access to our founder directory
- Live events, courses and recordings
- 8,628 business ideas
- $1M in software savings
- 4,818 founder case studies
- Access to our founder directory
- Live events, courses and recordings
- 8,628 business ideas
- $1M in software savings
- 4,818 founder case studies
- Access to our founder directory
- Live events, courses and recordings
- 8,628 business ideas
- $1M in software savings
- 4,818 founder case studies
- Access to our founder directory
- Live events, courses and recordings
- 8,628 business ideas
- $1M in software savings
- 4,818 founder case studies
- Access to our founder directory
- Live events, courses and recordings
- 8,628 business ideas
- $1M in software savings
- 4,818 founder case studies
- Access to our founder directory
- Live events, courses and recordings
- 8,628 business ideas
- $1M in software savings
- 4,818 founder case studies
- Access to our founder directory
- Live events, courses and recordings
- 8,628 business ideas
- $1M in software savings
