# I Quit YouTube & Built a $1M App (Without My Audience)

Channel: Starter Story
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laRliIVNZgU
Duration: 16 min
Language: English
Words: 3532
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/laRliIVNZgU

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[0:00] I decided like I didn't want to do it anymore. So, I basically just went ghost on the internet because I wanted to build something real that was detached from my face. Remember this guy, Sebastian Georgu? If you've been around YouTube the last few years, you might have seen him flashing cars, flexing on camera, making millions, and building a YouTube channel that hit nearly 1 million subscribers. But then he disappeared. No uploads, no flexing, just gone. So I reached out, bro, what happened? And what he told me completely blew my mind. Instead of doubling down on being an influencer, Sebastian walked away from it completely. He decided to

[0:41] build a software business behind the scenes, no YouTube, no personal brand. And today, that business is doing hundreds of thousands of revenue with a team of 10 people. I brought Sebastian onto the channel to talk about it, and he shares why he walked away from being an influencer at his peak, what he learned in the process about the pros and cons of building an audience-based business, and how he proved to himself

[1:05] that he could build a real business. This was an awesome conversation, and I hope you enjoy it. I'm Pat Walls, and this is Starter Story. [Music] All right, Sebastian, welcome to the channel. Tell me about who you are, what you build, and what's your story. My name is Sebastian Georgu, and I've been doing online business for quite some time now. I started out with drop shipping and e-commerce, and I got into YouTube not too long after that, but

[1:31] currently I'm doing uh software, SAS. That's my latest venture. Today, we are a team of 10 plus people, and we're generating multi6 figures a month in recurring revenue. We're well on our way in the direction that I I wanted to go in and the direction that I set out when I stopped posting. All right. All right. Well, to be honest, Sebastian, we don't usually bring on big influencers in the space. You have a million subscribers on

[1:54] YouTube, but there's a reason for that. You decided to build a software business without using your personal brand. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Yeah, so, you know, after this last stint of posting content on the internet and going mega viral, you know, I had this this feeling like I had to basically turn on a camera and talk and

[2:12] get attention in order to make money. And like most of my income was tied to that. I really wanted to break away from that. I really wanted to break that chain and I set out to build like this real SAS company and I didn't want to do it in a way where I was going to use my personal brand to make videos and talk about the SAS. Um, I wanted to do it like the cave way where I just lock myself in my room and build it the hard way and grow it naturally. And that's

[2:35] exactly what I did. All right. Well, before we get into this business that you built, I do want to go back. What was it like building an audience-based business and being a huge influencer in the space? Um, it's kind of the dream that a lot of people have growing up and watching Jake Paul or like all these influencers like just blow up and become famous and make so much money and live in these cool places and hang out with cool people. Anything I did would make money and would do well as long as I was talking about it. But there was sometimes like a little bit of

[3:01] a mismatch, right? Like people would think that you're this person, but deep down you're really actually this person. And sometimes those would deviate and you wouldn't feel so aligned with like your internet personality. But it was cool all around. It was a great experience. It's like I I look back and I don't regret it at all. It was really

[3:16] fun. I think what you had is amazing. I think a lot of people watching this would kill to be in your position to be able to have millions of subscribers. You can build pretty much anything and someone will probably buy. I guess my question to you is why did you decide to stop making videos and really kind of go

[3:31] silent? Yeah. So, I didn't want to post videos anymore. And I I think that the fundamental reason why was because I felt very misaligned when I was making this type of content. I was making content and I was being someone that either I a didn't want to be or b didn't feel like I truly was. I had this clip that went viral on Tik Tok. Well, it went viral everywhere and it was like the Lamborghini clip. If you're a guy in your 20s and you don't have a Lamborghini, you should actually sit down and have like a serious discussion with yourself as to why you don't have a

[4:01] Lambo. I looked at like how many impressions it had on Twitter, just Twitter alone, and it was like a 100 million. Vox did like a piece on me. I got two Fox interviews. So, obviously that clip made me a lot of money. But what I realized through this last stint of going like as viral as I ever have was that I don't really want to be the guy that says all these controversial things. I wasn't desperate then, but I was like, I really would like to build something that doesn't have my face attached to it. I would really like to build something in a way that it will

[4:30] continue to grow and pay me dividends even if I never have to turn a camera on again. So, that's kind of when I started to transition. Okay. So you decide to go and basically start over, build a totally different business. Why did you decide to build a SAS business? The first reason was that as I started to learn more about SAS, I predicted that if I had just built my SAS business on the back of my personal brand and me telling my own fans to buy it, it wouldn't survive in the wild. When I say wild, I mean in the market and among the competition of other SAS companies that

[5:04] would build similar products as mine. And I also saw that other influencers that started SAS businesses, you know, they come and go. I wanted to prevent that and avoid that if I could. And I thought that building this product in the wild and creating something that was truly good enough for people to adopt and pay for it naturally and share with their friends naturally and to get people talking about it without me convincing them to. I thought that was a better strategy. The second reason why is because honestly, I wanted to prove it to myself. People always saw me as this business guy and I had influencer

[5:35] businesses, but I never truly felt like a good competitive player in the space. So, part of me was just like, you know what, I'm going to do this. Like, I know I can do it. I can do anything I want. So, I went all in literally all chips on the table, which was super risky um into a new area, but it worked. I mean, we

[5:51] hit 250K in June a couple months ago. Now, the business is on a on a growing and sustainable path. All right. So, you decided to build this software business, but how did you vibe code this? Did you hire a developer? How did you actually build this thing? I had a co-founder. Neither of us were technical. You know, we've hired a lot of developers. A lot of them weren't very good because we didn't know what we were doing. But every time we made a

[6:11] good hire, the boat lifted for everyone. You know what I mean? And then in January of this year, I literally chucked myself into the deep end of the water. I bought out my co-founder for a lot of money at the time. And that was when we were at like 13 or 14K MR. It was extremely scary. And I remember putting it in my notes. I put on January 6th, I bet everything on myself. I also wrote like a revenue target. And funny enough, the revenue target right under that note was, you know, exactly what you need to do to get to 250K a month in recurring revenue. So, just lock in and

[6:45] do it one thing at a time. And now we've gotten to a point where we're pretty lean team, but all of the engineers, they're all like the best we've ever seen. They're really, really good. And that being said, it still is incredibly hard to find talent. And so if anyone is watching this, we're always willing to work with talented people. So if you're a designer, if you're a developer, even if you're good at CRO, any sort of value you think you could provide in that area, definitely reach out to us. We'd love to talk to anyone. Okay. So what I really want to kind of talk about, and I

[7:15] think you might be one of the only people that's done both. You've built an audience-based business, million subscribers on YouTube, and then you've built a completely different business that didn't really rely on your personal brand. I want to ask you the question, do you think that audience really matters when it comes to building software or any sort of online business

[7:34] in 2025? You could do it with an audience. You could do it without an audience as well. But there's no question about it. No doubt. Audience makes everything way easier. And it was that case for me too. Like I said, I didn't post videos on my YouTube channel and directly drive traffic to the software, but I did use my personal brand as a leverage a lot. I mean, people knew who I was. It was easy for me to reach out to people. You know, developers did want to work with me from time to time. If I made a post on Twitter about hiring people, I would get

[8:07] applications. And I think that also definitely contributes quite a bit to how fast we were able to do it and like the speed at which we're going. So, it doesn't matter in the end because like I said, you can do it no matter what, but having an audience definitely definitely makes it easier. Okay. I mean, we kind of talked about the pros and the cons of being an influencer and being big in the space and building a business around that, but what are the cons or the downsides that you noticed of building a product based business without a big sort of audience

[8:35] basis? Well, I'll start with the cons. The cons are you're going from like an audience from applause to straight performance. like you have to be straight competent. That's all that it is. You need to be working all the time a lot more. You're going to have stress. You're going to have problems. You're going to have payroll. It's way harder. But the pro is

[8:56] that it's just way way more fulfilling. And you have freedom, like genuine freedom. And if you have a business that's attached to your face and a personal brand, you are kind of cuffed to the camera in a way. So, I wanted to break that chain for myself. That's kind of like the the tail end of like the

[9:12] journey or the path that I'm on now. All right, before we go back to Sebastian's story, let's talk about the bigger lesson here. He built a business that makes hundreds of thousands of dollars per month without his YouTube audience, which proves that what really matters is finding an idea that people actually want and just shipping it. And that's exactly why we created Starter Story Build. It's our program where we help you take a simple idea, build it with AI coding tools, and actually ship it to the world. You don't need to have a million subscribers or even a big following at all. With AI, you can build

[9:44] and launch your first app in days, not years. And we'll guide you through it step by step. If you're ready to stop waiting and actually start building, check out Starter Story Build. The first link is in the description. Now, let's get back to Sebastian. What I think is really cool and what you're talking about a lot is this sort of identity change that you went through once you decided to drop the sort of influencer based business and go to a business that didn't use it. Uh, how did that feel in

[10:09] that moment and what was hard about it? Yeah, it's a good question. It was really hard, especially when I felt like I didn't want to post anymore on the internet and I didn't want to turn on a camera anymore and I was like, well, how am I going to make money if I don't do that? You know what I mean? Like, how am I going to make money if I don't monetize attention? And I was like kind of a burn the boats moment where it's

[10:28] like I'm either going to swim or drown. Well, thanks for sharing that. If you were starting over from scratch, would you go build that audience, build in public, or would you go behind the scenes operator mode like you're doing today? If you're going to build an audience, you have to be talking about something. That's the only way I built mine. You can start a business that you like, build an audience, don't get carried

[10:46] away in the audience side of things. Always focus on the business. At one point, when you can sustainably live off the income from the business, double down on that and go all in on the business. It's going to be hard for people because it's more of a long-term play versus a short-term play. If you get to a point where you have like a business that let's say you're making 10k a month and you have an audience and you're making 10 20k a month, there's going to be a moment where you have to pick. It's like, do I tweet more? Do I make an info product? Do I look out for

[11:12] sponsors or do I code more and do this? And one of those things is going to bring you very quick cash and it's very shortterm. The other one is going to be better for you long term. And I would advise people to try to stay on the long-term path instead of the short-term path. I mean, that's great. Without a personal brand, how did you actually grow this business? How did you take this business

[11:31] from zero to 250K in about 9 months? What were the actual marketing channels? Yeah, the way we got it off the ground was we would share it with some people. People would use it in like Discord communities a little bit to help out. We kept on improving it. We kept on listening to the customers and it grew to 10K a month fairly organically as it got to a much better place and to a good place where we felt pretty confident. We reached out to a couple people on YouTube to make videos about it. And then we started up with short form content. So at first we weren't getting

[12:01] any views um but we were studying like what others were doing and then we created a system with content that would get a lot of views and go viral and bring a lot of awareness to the brand. And then eventually we started paid ads as well. All of these things started to reinforce each other together and they built like a flywheel of some sort where somebody would make a YouTube video and then like we would have shorts made of that video. We'd post the shorts. Uh we would have ads made with that video. We would use ads and then people would kind of start to see it everywhere. So

[12:30] YouTube videos, short form content and paid ads makes up 60 to 65% of our total traffic. Of course, we have affiliates chatbt. If you ask the right questions, you will get put up in Chadbt. SEO, of course, it's ranking quite high now. Like the app store itself brings in traffic as well. People just searching for the tools. It's very diverse. What I think is sort of interesting about that is the growth channels here are content, right? YouTube short form content and paid ads, which is probably a lot of content as well that are being shown as ads. Do you think that all your skills and experience that you'd built up on

[13:05] YouTube helped you in indirect way to build the kind of growth machine for this business? Yeah, I mean there's no doubt about it. Like these skills that you build, these people that you know, these things that you learn, they benefit you in some way and it creates like this compounding force that makes you like somebody that's good at business or good at marketing or good at whatever. So, I absolutely absolutely think that everything that I've done has led me to this moment and the reason why it's working is because of everything that I've done and everything that I've gone

[13:35] through. Like 100%. Awesome. Well, thank you for sharing that. The last question that I have for you is a question we ask all founders who come on Starter Story. If you could stand on young Sebastian's shoulders, either before you were getting started or when you kind of made this big change in the type of business that you wanted to build, what would be your advice? The biggest thing is um failure is normal, right? So it's in those moments that you fail that you wonder if like are you smart enough? Are you good enough? Do you have what it takes? But that's just part of the process. Every single person

[14:06] fails. And really the most successful people are just the most successful failures. They have the most failures, but they are crazy enough to keep going. And then also I would say never compare yourself to others. Like I know no matter what I say, no matter what I do, people are going to watch this video and some people will be jealous. Some people be like, "Oh, he had it easy. he had his personal brand or a like lucky him like whatever. They're going to compare themselves to me and I would advise you to try to not do that. Everyone in the world does it. I do it all the time. I

[14:34] look at people above me and I feel envious or I feel jealous. What you really should be doing is just comparing yourself to yourself. So, as long as you keep winning, then that's that's all that matters. All right. Well, thank you, Sebastian, for coming on the channel. I think that super cool to see your journey going from big creator in the space and now big behind the scenes building an awesome business. Personally, your channel was a huge inspiration for Starter Story. I remember watching your videos and seeing, man, one day we can maybe get to a million subscribers. So, that's super cool. So, thank you for

[15:03] coming on, taking time out of your day, and uh hope people watching this enjoyed it. I just wanted to thank Sebastian again for coming on to the channel. I personally love his story because it shows that followers don't automatically equal a good business. What matters in the long run is building something durable, something people actually want. And I know a lot of you watching want to do the same. So why not start building now? This is why we created Starter Story Build. It's our platform where we will guide you step by step on how to use AI to go from an idea to an app in

[15:34] just a few days. You don't need millions of followers or a huge audience. just an idea and the willingness to try. So, if you're ready to take that first step, just head to the first link in the description to learn more about Starter Story Build. Thank you guys for watching. Let me know what you thought about this in the comments. I'll see you

[15:49] in the next one. Peace.

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