Disclaimer: The views expressed by our interviewees are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of GradSimple. We only edit these responses for clarity. All opinions remain those of the interviewee.
- Name: Jay D.
- Year Of Graduation: 2023
- College/University: William Paterson University
- Major: Professional Sales w/ Minor in Accounting
What do you do for a living?
I work in sales at a tech company and run a Minecraft YouTube channel with about 300,000 subscribers. This channel is faceless right now so I’m not directly promoting it here, but I also have a personal channel, Medz, with about 5,000 subscribers.
Can you tell me about your job search experience after graduation?
I applied for a sales role back in junior year and initially thought it was an internship, but it was actually a full-time position. They ended up waiting for me for a whole year, which was really great. I initially met them at an in-person career fair, and this was right after COVID so it was harder to make those kinds of connections. Thankfully, I was able to meet them on a face-to-face basis. I think nowadays that’s where the power lies. It just comes down to networking and standing out from the sea of online applications by making those direct connections.
Leading up to graduation, were you actively looking for jobs?
Here and there. I had actually been doing voiceover and voice acting work for clients on the side for a while, both corporate and indie projects. Over time, I got more involved with YouTube which I was working on in addition to an internship, applying for jobs, and school. Thankfully I’d put myself in a position where I had a lot of different options. I focused on building various fallbacks so I could explore the things I wanted to without too much worry.
In my heart, I wanted to go all in on YouTube, but the money side wasn’t clear at the time and my family cared about making sure I was set up financially. They were very understanding and supportive but also encouraged me to follow the sales route and at least explore it for a while. Sales helps build character and really helps build thick skin! You have to be able to take no for an answer and get comfortable with rejection. Ultimately, I’ve been able to apply these skills to my channel as well.
Did you always know you wanted to study sales?
My dad was in sales and he encouraged me. I went into college with an accounting major, but realized accounting wasn’t really for me. I switched to sales because it was a program that not a lot of schools provided and was something that I already had a basic interest in.
Tell me about how working with YouTubers came to be.
I was interested in voice acting for the longest time even in late high school. Over time, I just kept dabbling in it more and more. I took acting classes and started a Fiverr account in college, and I built a little bit of a reputation as the only seller for doing certain kinds of impressions. A lot of creators were asking me to do stuff, but one of the main people I work with found me when he had about 100,000 subscribers. His channel is FatMemeGod. I was like, oh wow, this is a serious YouTuber, I really want to get to know him!
There’s always been a part of me that wanted to be more creatively engaged with something rather than being strictly corporate. I wanted to have that kind of outlet. Over time, my clients became mainly YouTubers that I would work with usually on a weekly basis. It’s always been something I’ve loved. I enjoy meeting creators. I love the platform.
How did you build a relationship with the main YouTuber you work with?
I’m an Indian guy, and I realized he was Indian too. So the first thing I asked him was where he was from in India and we just kind of went from there. We got really close from that one connection between us both being Indian, but then over time, we began to build a strong relationship. He would ask me to do voice work over and over again. I did probably four or five different roles for his channel, and all of those videos did really well for him. I started pushing him a little more, telling him that I’d like to do more stuff with him and that I’d love to work more closely at some point. Rule number one in life: if there is someone you want to work with, do the best you can to provide them with a service that will boost their brand. Provide value first, and you get a friendship in return.
He ended up making me into a little character in his videos, like I’m always around in some way. I’m really close with a whole group of YouTubers in that circle now. They collectively have around 10 million subscribers across all of their channels. They’re a really good group of people that I’m so glad I get to work with.
How did your channel get started?
As I mentioned, when I was doing voice acting, I was able to get in touch with a lot of different creators. One of these people was a YouTuber who had been at it for 10+ years, named Gizzy Gazza. He used to record with SkyDoesMinecraft back in the day. I kept offering different services to him, over and over, and he initially pretty much told me to buzz off, you know. I was just there to help with voice acting, right? Well, one day, he decided to create a channel that I would be operating and running, and I would get a percentage of the revenue. I helped him do everything from script building to thumbnails, to video ideas, and it taught me so much as a content creator and business owner. Now I have majority ownership, so all decisions go through me. I went from managing it to taking it over.
The MedzHaha channel is my personal brand, and the other channel I have is the main one I’ve been running for two and a half years. It’s an anonymous channel right now. I keep it faceless because I don’t really want to mix the two together. When it comes down to it, it’s a channel that I’ve worked on for quite a while. I’ve built up a team of over 15 different people who help me, so it’s like a well-oiled machine. I’m uploading videos pretty much every day. However, when it comes to take-home revenue, it’s not where I need it to be in order to be sustainable and comfortable and also reinvest that money back into the business.
What’s your biggest struggle right now?
A lot of it just comes down to finding that balance and not wanting to do my current full-time job while doing YouTube on the side. At this point, I feel like I could do way better if I mentally put everything into one basket. Financially speaking, though, my job is what’s paying the bills. The channel isn’t what’s paying all the bills, especially with my overhead. So it’s like, do I just thug it out for a couple of months or do I just send it and go all in? It’s a huge risk and I haven’t fully decided what’s going to happen yet. I’m weighing if I’m confident enough in myself and if I’m confident enough to believe I could double my YouTube revenue in the next six months. At my 9-to-5 job, I also want to leave in a good position where I’ve gotten the most out of it. I’m still in a “training phase” of sorts and want to ideally finish that up and be ready to act as an account executive as a fallback plan.
What advice would you have for recent graduates?
Give value to others first and they’ll give you value back. If you do a good job, they’ll keep coming to you. I’ve always prided myself on providing the best I can for people for as little in return as possible, and that has always ended up providing me with greater gains in the future. Give people a reason to care about you and the value you provide. Opportunities will come to you because of this. If you’re interested in working with influencers or content creators specifically, the best way to form a connection is to figure out what they need. Figure out what their pain points are. Find those opportunities, where someone needs a copywriter, thumbnail editor, researcher, whatever, and do it for free. Don’t ask for money, just ask for them to accept your value.
Secondly, you need to start building some actual workable skills early on. You will start finding that things will come easier to you. For me, I’ve always been an outgoing person. I’ve always been an entertainer at heart and someone who enjoys building and creating. Determine those strengths in yourself, and pull your energy towards those things as much as possible. The tough part is figuring it out, but once you do, you lock into it naturally.
Do you think it’s best to drop everything and pursue your dreams or take a safer, more practical approach to career building?
It really depends on your situation. For me, I would say that I was very lucky, but I’ve always made sure to put myself in positions of luck where luck is more in my favor. So, I guess the most important thing is to put yourself in positions of power and put yourself in positions where you find opportunities. With someone like me who’s doing both, a full-time job and a dream career like YouTube, I would say pursue your passions within reason, like pursue them but don’t jump off the cliff entirely. At the very least, give yourself a time limit. Say you’re going to accomplish something in 12 months and dedicate a year to that specific thing.
If I were to ask you three years ago what you think you’d be doing today, what would you say?
I would 100% see myself in a corporate role. I think at that point, I was pretty much assuming I was going to stick with what I know works for most people. Thankfully I’ve been able to nurture my passion enough to make it financially viable by just consistently working at it. You learn more by breaking more pots, not by making one perfect pot one time. For passion to start the work has to start but if you don’t do the work, then there’s no passion.
How do you push through those darker days where it felt like you weren’t working towards anything, and you weren’t seeing any results with your channel yet?
The darkest times make for the strongest of people. If you quit at the bottom, that’s where 90% of people tap out too. In my opinion, the bottom is when you start thinking of things that are different and new, and creative. When we first started the channel, we had a huge boom. We were making almost $15,000 a month. That was a lot of income for me and I was like, my god, this has potential. Then, within two months it dropped down $3,000, $2,000 and we were like, this is unsustainable. We can’t run the business. I knew I couldn’t let that happen, though. This was the one thing that grounded me in the world I’d always wanted to be in. Seeing your efforts work out is the biggest dopamine hit you can get, so we got creative and tried new ideas to keep growing and maintain engagement.
Three years from now, what would you hope you see for yourself?
Finishing with my 9-to-5, for sure! I’d really like my channel to be in as healthy of a state as possible. I’d at least want to be making good revenue that I can sustain myself and my team with. I hope to have my own place and continue to develop my own personal channel and get to a point where I’m posting there on a weekly basis.
Any other thoughts you’d like to share?
If you really enjoy something and you’d love to do it as a full-time job, dive into it. Get in that world. If you commit to something, you’ll find success. If it’s something you love to do, you’ll find even more success. Be smart, pursue what you love, and you’ll figure things out!
Connect with Jay:
- YouTube (Like and Subscribe 😉)
- X (Twitter)
