You’re sitting there right now, rewatching your own video to see if the end screen triggered correctly. You’ve got three tabs open: one for TubeBuddy SEO scores, one for the best time to publish according to some Reddit thread from 2018, and one where you’re A/B testing thumbnails with a tool that cost more than your monthly coffee budget. Meanwhile, the guy who titled his video I made $37,053 With 2 Faceless Videos is laughing. Not at you, exactly, but at the entire ritual. Because he already knows the ugly truth your analytics dashboard will never spell out: nobody’s clicking away from your content because you forgot to add a card. They’re clicking away, or never clicking at all, because 30 seconds before you ever pressed record, your idea was dead on arrival.
And that’s the core takeaway I want to pull out of this video. Not the money. The money is the carrot. The stick is realizing how much brain power you pour into the wrong end of the process.
I’ll admit, when I first saw that $37,053 number, my brain did the same thing yours did: it re-ran a mental inventory of every settings panel in the YouTube studio, hunting for the one dial I hadn’t turned. But then the creator drops the bomb early on, and it’s the kind of simple truth that feels like a personal attack. He essentially says the post-upload checklist isn’t a strategy; it’s a security blanket. It mimics productivity so well that you can spend a whole year tweaking publish times and never once ask the question that actually prints money: Would anyone outside my immediate family stop scrolling for this idea?
There’s a moment where he recalls a specific faceless video of his own that flopped. He had color-coded chapters. He had a custom watermark. He uploaded on a Tuesday at 2 PM Eastern because the gurus told him to. Dead. Flat. And then, almost as a joke, he threw up a second video with zero chapters, a single auto-generated caption file he never checked, and a thumbnail that looked like it was made in Microsoft Paint circa 2007. That one did numbers. The difference, he points out, had nothing to do with what happened after the upload bar filled. It was the raw concept. One idea tapped into a lurking curiosity the viewer already had; the other was a video the viewer could comfortably ignore forever.
The part that caught me off guard was how calmly he dismissed the entire checklist industry. Not with anger. With boredom. As if he’s watched a thousand creators microwave the same “Upload Checklist to Blow Up” video and marveled at the theater of it. He’s not wrong. These feel-good lists give you 17 things to do, and all 17 things let you avoid the horrifyingly simple work of staring at a blank page and screaming at yourself, “Is this remarkable, or is it just a topic?”
This is where the video earns the view. He drills into what happens before any camera turns on, faceless or otherwise. And his framework, while not new, lands because he ties it directly to his own bank account.
He walks through how he picks an idea. It’s not keyword volume. It’s not “low competition high volume” nonsense that has 400,000 other people chasing the same combination of words. It’s a gut check with rules:
I see how people can relate to the idea that post-upload optimization feels like the “real work” because it’s mechanical. You can do it while half-watching Netflix. You cannot, however, dream up a painfully sharp idea while half-watching Netflix. That takes a quiet room and a willingness to discard 10 okay ideas before you land on one that makes you a little nervous because it’s so obvious you can’t believe nobody else did it.
Here’s my slight pushback, because the video itself practically invites it. The title is a hook, obviously, but it risks sending the wrong message: that two faceless videos is all it takes and the rest is passive income candy land. The creator, to his credit, addresses this around the halfway point, almost rolling his eyes at his own title. He shows that the two videos are outliers, not replacements for a business. One of them rode a news cycle he saw coming from miles away. The other tapped a pain point so universal and underserved that it became evergreen. Both were the result of pattern recognition built over years of failing quietly.
What’s missing from the flashy revenue screenshot is the pile of faceless videos that made three dollars and a weird comment from a bot. The claim here is not that you can quit your job after two uploads; it’s that when you finally nail the pre-record idea, the post-upload settings become embarrassingly insignificant. You don’t need a masters degree in YouTube SEO when you’ve built a video around a thought your audience was already two seconds away from Googling.
I’d add another layer to this: the post-upload checklist isn’t useless, it’s just useless in this order. If your idea is a 10/10, a bad title might drop it to a 7, a mistimed upload to a 6.5, and a lousy thumbnail to a 4. You still have something breathing. If your idea is a 2/10, no amount of chapters, tags, or pinned comment wizardry will resurrect it. The checklist only amplifies what’s already there. A lot of faceless channels die because they take a 2/10 idea, dress it up with a checklist, and mistake the resulting 25 views as a packaging failure instead of a conceptual one.
Late in the video, he offers a pre-record checklist that feels like a riddle. He doesn’t give you a Notion template. He gives you four questions to stare at until you want to throw your chair. I’m paraphrasing from memory here, but the essence was:
That last question is a killer. If the answer is “It was an interesting video about… exporting from Notion to Google Sheets,” nobody’s calling a friend. If the answer is “This faceless channel just showed me how to get 4 hours back without even showing their face,” that’s a text message sent at midnight.
He then shows a split screen of two video analytics: one where the average view duration was high but the title was a yawn, and one where the duration was lower but the click-through rate was monstrous. The monstrous one made money. The lesson? YouTube rewards the click first, then judges the watch time. But the click is entirely downstream of the idea’s ability to whisper something irresistible before any playback begins. You can’t put that whisper into the settings menu.
A small moment that stuck with me: he pulls up the YouTube Studio app and points to the “Impressions” line with a kind of reverence. He says, “This number isn’t a measure of your thumbnail. It’s a measure of the mental demand you created. YouTube saw two million people who might be interested in your idea because the idea itself carved a clear path through the algorithm’s brain.” If you’re only getting 200 impressions, the algorithm is not punishing you for a missed tag. It’s telling you, politely, that nobody’s indicated they’d care about this slice of reality.
My own view lands somewhere between his confidence and a small caution: idea-first thinking can become its own form of procrastination if you’re just endlessly journaling “what if” while never shipping. But for most faceless channels I see stuck at under 500 subscribers, the problem isn’t shipping cadence. It’s that they’ve built a factory that efficiently manufactures cardboard boxes with nothing inside. The checklist gave them a sense of forward motion while the essential creative act, the design of curiosity itself, was entirely skipped.
So what do you do tomorrow? You kill the ritual. You don’t check the “best upload time” for a month. You don’t open the tag explorer. You spend that stolen hour sitting with a blank document and you ask the only question that ever made a stranger click: “What is the least boring, most useful, borderline controversial spin on this topic that would ruin my day if I found out someone else published it before me?” Then you record that. Faceless or not, you record that. The rest, as the $37,053 video demonstrates, is just noise with a good PR team.
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