How This Mega Channel Keeps Going Viral on YouTube

- If a creator is trying to handle all of that on their own, you're going to eventually get stale, old, or boring. - Do you have an accounting department and an HR department? - Today, I wouldn't hire friends and family. The reality of renovations is that things go wrong. That felt like we're about to lose the channel. - I'm Christina, the CEO of Home Renovision DIY. We have over 4 million subscribers on YouTube. My father, Jeff, is the creator and host of the channel. And he teaches homeowners and trades professionals how to renovate and repair their homes. - Okay, Christina, could you please tell me about the different revenue streams that you have? - So, I mean, our bread and butter is definitely long form AdSense revenue on YouTube. That would be our most stable and the majority of what makes up our pie chart. But because of the nature of renovations, people are actively coming to our channel to research which products and materials they should be using on their project. And at this point, Jeff has built an immense amount of trust with his audience and so they really do come to him looking for that recommendation. So now with the addition of YouTube shopping, I mean, it makes it so easy both for our viewer and for Jeff to be able to recommend products and then people can shop it right directly from the content. - What's the right way to use YouTube shopping? 'Cause I've used it with my clients. I work for a bunch of people who have written bestselling books and we haven't had a lot of success. So we've actually dismissed it. - Well, I think it has to be super organic and authentic. People, especially today, consumers are very smart when they're being sold to. It's like, I don't know if you ever watch the Truman show but point in the show and the wife turns around and she's like holding up the cereal. You don't wanna be doing that. And sometimes we have to tell Jeff, like, Jeff, you're sounding like an infomercial here. It's not so much him taking a moment to hold up a product and whatever, but it came naturally that people were asking in the comments. Jeff, what was that specific tool you used at 10 minutes and five seconds? Well, now it's so natural that we can link it and sometimes he calls it out, but really, it's mainly just him authentically using products the way he normally would and then us on the back end just linking it in the timestamp manner. Back to affiliate marketing in general, that was a great way in the beginning to help create additional revenue streams for the channel overall through Amazon. Now, lots of other major retailers have their own creator programs, like Home Depot and Lowe's as well. So you can create those links in your videos. And then if you have larger audiences on Instagram or TikTok, that means you can create storefronts on those places as well. When is a suitable time to start taking that seriously? I think when it comes to affiliate, it's something that you can do right away. People are naturally going to ask you, what tile did you use in that bathroom, especially in this category. So why not? But I would be careful about becoming a salesperson right away. I do caution that trust takes a long time to build and an audience takes time building a community. I would focus on that as your primary effort and instead use it more as a way to answer those frequently asked questions because they do think sometimes creators think up from a monetization standpoint first. And I don't know if you're gonna build a long-term career in the creator world that way. Sponsorships would be another category. You know, when Jeff first started creating content, it was 10 years ago. The renovation industry was not spending money on creators at the time. That was a really new thing. And he made a deliberate effort in the early days not to do the typical ad reads in his videos. Now, I am not going to full a creator for putting ad reads into their videos. You do have to make money at the end of the day. There was a decision that Jeff made and I think it has served him very well. And I think over time, as we launch our own product business, this will be something that we're like that was a great decision to make. - Memberships is another revenue stream for you. Could you please talk to that a little? - Yeah, memberships happened super organically. In the beginning days of the channel, Jeff started to notice that homeowners and trades professionals were asking detailed questions in the comment section. So he's really realized that that's an opportunity to grow. So in all of his videos back in the day, he used to say, "Let me know what project you're working on. "What questions you have, I'll answer all of them." And he used to spend hours every night answering every single question. He ran into the issue though that he couldn't quite see what the situation was because his people couldn't share pictures. So at the time, my mom helped him on the back end of the business and so she found someone to create an off platform membership program. And so they enabled memberships on YouTube. And so for years, Jeff has been helping one-on-one. These small groups of members with their projects. - Yeah, I see the passion kind of bleed through. It's not surprising to hear that he's in the comments responding to everybody. Is there any other revenue streams that are part of the pie? - Every once in a while, we'll act as a production company to create content for brands that lives on their own and operated. We've created a few television commercials, things like that, but I mean, through the most part, we're pretty focused on our audience. - I want to pivot just slightly. - You have been referring to him as Jeff, but he is also your dad. - Yes, the majority of our team is family members. I mean, it happened kind of naturally. This started out as a side gig for my dad. He was a contractor of 25 years who thought, you know, I'm gonna put marketing material up on my website. And then my brother said, "Dad, you're really good at this. "You should put it on YouTube." And he was like, "What's YouTube?" And so he's a total visionary type and looked around to see who was creating content at the time. And he noticed that none of the HGTV stars were posting on YouTube and he was like, they must not be allowed to. If I'm consistent with this and I focus on community, I can crush this. And that's what he did. So in the early days, my mom was in her evenings and weekends like helping him, you know, paying contractors and helping out. Then I started helping him with social media initially to help promote the channel. And when short form came out and TikTok, I really felt like, "Dad, this is an opportunity, "you have to jump on it right away." And then my husband was a firefighter and we convinced him to take a year leave to come and revamp our content team. And then my brother, Matt, he's like the muscle on the channel. He helps my dad with the renovations as well. - I think it's an easy and sometimes perfect choice to expand by bringing family or friends on board to the team. But I also feel like it could be problematic if you don't do it with sensitivity. - When is the right time to bring on a family or friend and when is the wrong time? What's the right process? - I feel like I could do a TED talk about working with the family. (laughing) So I think in the beginning days, you're really looking for generalists to help you. You're looking for someone who can wear many hats, who is willing to experiment and try new things who can be self-taught and who can just look and identify for areas that need work and then can run with it. You also want people, but see things differently than you. You don't want like-minded people working on building something new with you because then you will miss things because if everyone looks at things the same way without an opposing opinion or without the ability to say, I know you're the creator here, but I think you're making a mistake. Without that, you know, you can run into challenges. But then over time, you stop meeting generalists and you need experts. And so as you build out your team, you're gonna start to be like, I need someone who knows more than me in this category. Today, I wouldn't hire friends and family. Today, we're at that point where we're looking for experts in their field. - What is the trade-off with working with family? It must be hard to separate work from home life. - Yeah, over the years, we've come up with strategies and every individual person has a different amount of energy that they can put into work. I feel like my dad and I, we can be at a family event and just be in the corner talking all night long about work and like never get tired of it. But then other people might be like, we just filmed a 10-hour day and we just are out for dinner. Can we please put this aside? And so we've had to identify like, K, we're overachievers. Let's slow our role a little bit. And it's important for our family members who aren't in the business to also feel like they can talk about what is interesting to them. When you're managing your family, you have to be very careful that like, when we're in a meeting and something happens, I'm not speaking to my brother or my dad or my husband, I'm speaking to Eric, head of content or Jeff, the creator. And so that's why you hear me, when I'm personally talking about my dad, I say dad, and then at work, I refer to him as Jeff. It's kind of like a little trick for me that this is like my co-founder, my creator that I support. It's a little bit different. Let's talk about your role in this entire operation. You are the CEO. What does your day-to-day look like? You know, in the first few years, it was very much like setting up the building blocks for the business. I was doing a lot of networking. I was meeting a lot of other creators and creator teams because I was trying to really solidify what our business model and plan was going to be. It was a lot of meetings. It was a lot of hiring. It was a lot of creating the team. But now that that portion of the business is set up and we know what our goals are, it really is about executing those. So we've been developing a product behind the scenes for about a year now. And so this fall, we are launching our product business. So a lot of my time is spent on that while the rest of the team is entirely focused on YouTube and our media business. The business as a whole is 10 years old. In YouTube terms, that's a pretty longstanding business, which is great. I imagine kind of early on, everybody was wearing a bunch of different hats and titles weren't super duper important. But now that you've expanded into this very legitimate, very strong, company. Does it look more like a standard traditional business? Do you have an accounting department and an HR department? Like are you thinking about business on this level at this point? Oh yeah. Jeff can really focus on the creative side and creating the best content for our channel ever. And he doesn't have to think about like where the taxes filed. Was that contract executed? Are our rights being protected in that contract? Or on the product side like are we still on track for launch date? Have we hired the next editor all of those things that can really cloud your brain? That's the kind of stuff that like if a creator is trying to handle all of that on their own, they're not going to achieve the type of success that someone like Jeff is wanting to achieve. One thing I'll add to that is we haven't hired everything in house. We're quite deliberate about keeping our team small, but then outsourcing things. So I have outsourced our accounting and our legal and our bookkeeping services. And then we have several contractors for things like thumbnails and editing and it just helps make it so that we are not so in the weeds of building a massive bloated company that now the majority of my time is spent in HR. Is that the best way for someone in your position to learn how to be great at your position? Because there's not a lot of CEOs in this industry. They are coming, but there are people who are years behind you where you know they kind of started out in content or they wore multiple hats and then all of a sudden it's like, Oh, we've got something really big and substantial here. How do I learn how to do that job effectively? Where are you finding these resources? Well, you know, I've never been afraid to teach myself something. And today we have everything available to us on our fingertips. Like we can pull up cloud or chat and I can go into deep diving on a topic that I knew nothing about. Pretty incredible. And it has been super, super helpful as we're approaching launching a product business where this was entirely new for us. But for the years leading up to now, I would say don't be afraid to hire professionals and say to them, Hey, I've never done this before. You have the experience. Can I but can I pay for an hour or two of your time where you can just give me advice on this? What specific resources have been the most helpful for you in your role? In the media business side. So like learning what's to come, calling in Samir's podcast was immensely helpful. Podcasts like yours where you can just like listen to other creators and honestly creator teams. You know, because we often focus on the creator, but the people behind the scenes running the show is really, really helpful. Also reading books from people like Bob Iger, the CEO or former. Yes, his memoir is incredible. Oh, it's such a good book. I think there's so much to learn from the past, even though our future in the next 10 years from now is going to look vastly different from today. There is some way of repeating cycle and things that you can learn from the past to see like knowing what I know about YouTube and what I know about the future of commerce and media and then knowing what happened before I can piece those things together to go. I have a pretty good idea of where things are going. One thing that I am always a little bit fearful of is I don't know what I don't know. So I need to uncover those things, growing into a role, it's like, okay, we probably need an accountant. That's pretty obvious. But what what things do I not know that I need and how do I uncover those things? You're speaking my language in the amount of times I've said that to people and been like, what don't I know is coming my way ahead? Because that's the truth and you can listen to every podcast and read every book and things will still surprise you. But what gives me comfort in those moments is I can look back on the last six or seven years of working in this industry and building this company with Jeff. And every single time something big has happened or an obstacle has been put in my way, I found the solution in a step forward. I have a lot of trust in my future self and I tell myself this often. I'm like, oh yeah, I don't know what the answer is in October. But I trust that I will make the right decision as I approach that. And so that gives me confidence. It like helps me sleep at night, that kind of stuff. I can look back. What were some of the the major obstacles that you came across and how did you solve them? Mistakes that we've made along the way is maybe just like misreading a situation. So in the early days of the channel, it was following Jeff renovating his farmhouse. And then after that farmhouse was done, he really like wasn't sure what to do next. And so he thought that, you know, it's YouTube, you got to go big, you got to do crazy things, you got to do something different. And so he bought a church. And he was like, I'm gonna renovate this church. And really quickly, it was like not the greatest idea. It was like going to be a lot of boring work on camera like installing like HRV systems a complete plumbing overhaul. Like it's not that the audience was looking for something new. In fact, what they wanted was to be able to go, that's what my kitchen looks like. That's the problem I ran into with the silicone on the edge of my sink. And so at the time it felt like, oh my god, we just invested all this money into a property. We're probably two or three years out before this is even done. Like, what do we do? And the renovations already started. So no one's gonna want to buy this, you know, so how do we get rid of it? Now I can look back and think like that wasn't that big of a deal. That's so solvable. Like we came up with a unique strategy where we created a bit of content. And we were able to sell the property to another DIY couple that was looking to take on a big challenge. But at the time, that felt like we're about to lose the channel. You know, like no one wants to watch us anymore. What are we going to do? And so it's easy to look back now. But I think it's really coming back to like the importance of trusting yourself and like take a beat. Like no one needs to freak out. I want to pivot this conversation to content itself. Can you please walk me through the process from start to finish from ideation to upload of a long-form video? Well, with the renovation industry, we have the, it's two-sided. It's really great because we don't have to spend hours thinking about what are we going to create today? Because we can look in a house and go, okay, next up is the kitchen or next up, we're building a deck, you know, and then it's pretty, it easily follows the story of the renovation. So when we look at a video, it used to be that the camera would just follow Jeff on his site and in the moment, he was like producing in his head on what this video is going to be. And then they would film the content and then come up with the thumbnail and title afterwards. And that would be that, you know, over time, especially as Eric came in as our head of content and built out a team, we've now come up with a strategy so that we're not posting everything Jeff does. We are simply posting what we know the audience is going to want to watch. So we'll look at a house holistically and be like, all right, in this bathroom, we're going to show, of course, the installing of the tile, the shower pan, but we're not going to do a video on installing a vanity because vanities have historically not performed very well. Let's maybe film a short form for that instead or have an off camera day so that Jeff can take a bit of a break and just install it without filming. From there, our team will meet and we'll talk about what's the reason of you want to click on this video. What's the value we're offering here? And is there like a unique angle on this video? Is there some, is there a mistake that most homeowners will make that Jeff can fix? Is there a product that will make this process easier for them? And then from there, Eric will meet with our producer and Jeff. And it's evolved over time now where it's a little bit more of like a writers room where they just shoot ideas at each other. Jeff will talk them through the renovation process. And from there, the content team will make like a video framework, which then is brought on to sight when they're filming. Our videos take longer to produce than most because he's actually filming these projects in real life. We don't have a contracting crew that comes in to do it for him. And then our editors will work off of that framework. Our producer will update them on any changes that happened because the reality of renovations is that things go wrong. And so Jeff will show what went wrong, how he fixed it, and then it'll go into post. You're renovating a house, maybe a kitchen or a deck or a bathroom. Is there a window where you wait before doing another one? Do you feel like some older videos are getting remade a bunch of times and are you having success remaking similar videos? Yeah, I mean the strategy on YouTube is always like once you see something works, do it again and do it again and do it again and do it again. And I think that was like a mental block that Jeff had to kind of break out of initially. Because in his mind, he was like, well, he already did a toilet install. Why would I do another one? You know, I've got to do something different now. But in reality, as we've now had like multiple toilet installs, do really, really well. Just because we've put a new one out, doesn't mean that the old one, all of a sudden, doesn't perform. What we find is like, our viewer is actually, they love researching projects. And so they may watch three of Jeff's toilet installs because he may say something in one that he doesn't say in another or encounter a problem like in real life in one that he didn't encounter in another. So it's okay to do that multiple times, getting 1% better in every single video and always looking for a little bit of experimentation. Because naturally, like when you're filming or when you're creating content for over 10 years, what worked 10 years ago doesn't necessarily work today and it won't necessarily be what an audience wants to watch five years from now. So if you're only ever doing your one format that works, you're going to eventually get stale, old, or boring, or fall out of relevance. So it's really important to always be experimenting with new styles of content. So that way, like don't be afraid of a 10 out of 10 with those experiments because every once in a while you'll get a one out of 10 and you're like, oh, that's something that I need to drill down on. And then you might discover you have a new content bucket that you didn't know existed. YouTube is a very extreme platform. Everything is either the biggest or the smallest or the best or the worst. Have you ever resisted the urge to, okay, I've made a kitchen? This one looks great. The next kitchen is going to be a little bit crazier. The next kitchen is going to have a water slide in it. The next kitchen is going to be on a roller coaster, like how do you draw the line between doing the same thing and maybe just changing the color of paint versus actually leaning into the craziness of the platform where your constraints. I think that's where Eric, our head of content, does a lot of his work with Jeff. Like, Jeff is naturally always looking to make it crazier and crazier and crazier. And Eric's the one kind of like pulling the reins just a little bit because let's do what no one else can do. Definitely, Jeff is the largest renovation channel on YouTube. Let's make sure that we're using the resources that we have available to us to create the best videos ever. But also, remember who the audience is. It's got to be relatable. It's got to make sense for the viewer. It has to be like, like I said earlier, that's what my kitchen looks like. And so if we install that water slide, all of a sudden, I'm people going to like Jeff is out of top. What happened? What happened? Another YouTuber off the deep end, you know? Fair. That's fair. Okay. It is the year 2026, and YouTube is a turbulent place. The only constant is change. How are you thinking about social media this year compared to the past few years? I think we don't quite fit in the typical. A lot of times you hear about like, niching down, niching down, niching down, and I think that's really important in 2026 because we all see very hyper algorithmic feeds. Everything is very tailored to me. When you and I open up our algorithms together, we're going to have very different content. So I think it's really important. Because we have been creating content for 10 years now on the platform, our audience is really spread out. We have homeowners looking to research and renovate themselves. We have homeowners looking to research and then hire a contractor. And then we have trades professionals who are learning to upskill or a plumber comes home at the end of the day and they want family-friendly content they can put on. That's interesting. And so they put us on the television. So we have to appeal to a wide audience. And so niching really, really, really niching down doesn't necessarily work the same way for us. So we tend to think a little bit differently than what would work in the 2026 content strategy. Because extremes work, right? If you're in the middle, you are just not seeing. You're either on one end of the extreme or the other these days. And so we just really nail down to providing a ton of value for our audience. So that way, if someone watched us and learned how to build a shed six years ago, when it comes time to renovate their bathroom and they turn us on, they know exactly what they're going to get. But they're like, wow, Jeff really improved his production value. Like that's what we're looking for is the long term. There are opportunities coming out to YouTubers this year and maybe some of last year that we're kind of new. So things like fast channels, for example, licensing your back catalog to Samsung TV and Roku and Pluto and all those things. There could be speaking tours for certain creators. Are any of those like side opportunities that have emerged? Are they things that you discuss within your team? Yeah, you know, it's really crazy because when I talked about how my dad is super visionary even 10 years ago, we created like a chart of all of the aspects that our business could be at one day and where we eventually want to be. And like all of those things you just mentioned are on that chart. And more, you know, I really think we're building a really unique media business from the very first decision that my mom had of putting him in that blue polo shirt that was super recognizable. All of those early decisions have really positioned our channel in a really unique way for that future growth. And so I think that all of those things are on our horizon. It always just comes back to is that 2026 or is that 2027. And so we're very focused on our product launch this year. But I think you'll see a lot of those other things fallen to play over the next few years for us as well. Who is a creator that's on your radar that's worthy of a shout out? Okay, so I have a Canadian creator that I want to shout out and it's accidental because I didn't even realize they were Canadian initially. They're a DIY couple that are renovating their house, Sabrina and Andrew. And they are an incredible example of creators that found traction on short form on TikTok and then leveraged it over to YouTube and they have an incredible long form series where they're renovating their house and they are absolutely crushing it. Are you friends with them now? No, I mean, I've DMed them as like a fan girl, but I don't think they make the connection that I'm a part of home renovations. So I hope to meet them one day. Make sure collab, hopefully this little podcast can make it happen. Thank you so much for watching or listening to the show. If you're new here, please consider subscribing or if you're on the audio platforms, leave us a review. It helps us to book new guests and also helps us to reach wider audiences, which is ultimately the goal of any podcast. If you are the creative director, head of content, producer, or even the CEO of a YouTube channel business with over a million subscribers, please reach out. I would love to interview you. I'm sure you have some excellent knowledge to share and I would love to talk to you about it. We'll see you next week with another interview. Thank you so much for tuning in.