4,550 to 40,400 Youtube subscribers in 30 days

How Daniel Got Started

Daniel is originally from the Netherlands, but partly grew up in China, due to his dad’s job. He speaks fluent Chinese (Mandarin & Cantonese), which he uses as an advantage for his businesses, as you’ll see in a minute.

He started his entrepreneurial journey at a very young age. When he was 16 he started building websites for businesses as a freelancer.

He immediately knew he was onto something as he made over €100,000 in profit within a year.

10 years later at 26, he’s built multiple companies and even successfully exited a venture in the software space at 23, which he probably talks about in this post.

Not all of them have been a success. For instance, Pabel.App doesn’t exist anymore. But that’s part of a mulitpreneur’s life and it’s all part of his journey to the success he’s had now.

At the moment, he seems to be running at least 3 businesses:

• Ecomflow

• Blank Studio

• Packaging (by Ecomflow)

Ecomflow helps eCommerce brands get access to the supply chain in China with better margins and easier communication, sort of bridging the gap between the east and the west.

Additionally, he’s building a community on Skool where he teaches his audience how to build a SaaS business for free.

He mostly documents his journey on various social media platforms. His goal doesn’t seem to be getting clients with it but to build a community of like-minded people.

At the moment, he doesn’t sell anything to the community. But this certainly opens opportunities to sell programs or get sponsors later on.

Plus, a cool thing about Skool is that if someone in your community starts building a paid community with it, you automatically get an affiliate commission of 40% per month.

I’m sure that’s been part of his reasoning for choosing to build a community on Skool and is a pretty cool way to monetize.

Content Creation

While launching and running multiple SaaS businesses, he started “lightly” documenting his journey on social media.

It looks like Instagram has been his main platform for a while. But then he added Youtube, Twitter and Tiktok later on (and he’s also on Linkedin).

Here are the current stats:

• Instagram: First post from January 6, 2020. Currently has 33k followers

• Youtube: Started in 2022 but deleted all videos before July 22, 2023. Currently has 43k subscribers

• Tiktok: First post from April 12, 2022. Currently has 22k followers

• Twitter: Started posting in April 2021 but mostly related to crypto. Focused it more on business in November 2022. Currently has 7k followers

Since he’s unlisted a bunch of older videos and his Youtube channel has recently grown like crazy, we’ll focus on his current strategy.

Btw, if you’re curious, I found one of his older, unlisted videos:

He only put his social media accounts and his website in the description. His website is sort of like a linktree where you can look at his businesses and join his community.

There have also been quite long gaps between the older videos, which is understandable since he’s got a lot on his hands.

About 2 months ago he discovered a winning concept though, which is when his channel started growing incredibly fast.

Youtube Growth

Since March, Daniel’s Youtube channel has been absolutely blowing up. Here you can see how it has been very stagnant for about a year and then started gaining momentum.

In March 2024 he started posting vlogs in a POV-style, similar to viral videos on Tiktok and Instagram.

These are essentially just very well-edited vlogs where he shows his life as a young, busy entrepreneur traveling between different business meetings.

I think there are a couple of reasons why people love these so much:

• Getting a behind-the-scenes look into a successful person’s life is inspiring

• Watching someone who’s “made it” at such a young age makes other people resonate with him & aspire to do the same

• The vlogs tell a story and as humans, we’re genetically wired to listen to stories

• The videos are well-edited with cuts matching the music and cool transitions

• There’s a lot happening. Sometimes he’s in Hong Kong and 2 minutes later he’s in Amsterdam

• He’s very charismatic, humble and confident. People are drawn to such characteristics and it’s genuinely captivating to watch

He started mentioning his videos on Instagram a while ago. And he’s now also posting snippets on Tiktok. That certainly helps to get some initial traction to the videos.

But he’s been doing that since 2022 and the videos only popped off about a month ago.

So what has really helped him grow is that people on Youtube love his videos. That leads to his videos being recommended after similar videos of other creators.

The more watch time he gets from these, the more his videos get recommended which will eventually help them go viral.

That’s my guess at least.

How He’s Building a Community

Since he’s started posting content on Youtube again, he seems to be focusing on building a community.

I think one of the reasons for that is that he’s currently building a venture studio where they partner with businesses focusing on a niche and building software for them.

By teaching others how to run such businesses, he has a chance to invest in more high-quality startups (similar to what Alex Hormozi is doing).

But interestingly enough, he doesn’t promote his Skool community under his videos. Instead, he now just links his Instagram and Twitter profile where you can then find his website. And that’s the only place I’ve seen him link to the community.

That’s what his website looks like:

The advantage of that strategy is that only people who are really interested in following his journey and who have done some digging will join the group.

Plus, he’s already building cult-like community of subscribers on Youtube. So, once he decides to actively promote his Skool group, people will probably join in droves.

Key Takeaway

After looking through all of his content and his funnel, one thing stood out to me:

He doesn’t really promote.

While most entrepreneurs or content creators try to use their content to lead people to their products or a newsletter/lead magnet, Daniel doesn’t lead people anywhere from his Youtube videos.

And while there would be a lot of potential, it’s probably part of his success. He’s just sharing his story and since he’s successful with his businesses, he doesn’t need to sell to his audience.

Instead he focuses on creating stellar content and he has people on his team taking care of that.

How You Can Replicate His Success

This is an excellent strategy if you’re a founder who doesn’t need to get customers from social media but would like to build a personal brand to potentially create another income source later down the road.

The “only” thing you need to do is vlog your day-to-day life.

People absolutely love behind-the-scene looks.

But to make it successful, you probably need a professional videographer or editor who knows how to put a captivating video together.

Just putting up a camera while you’re sitting in front of your laptop for 8 hours isn’t gonna do much here.

But this type of content allows you to build a following of people who want to have the same lifestyle as you. By watching your content they can daydream about what this would be like and become eager to learn everything from you that they can (aka join your community).

The easiest way to build a community is to create a weekly newsletter where you share valuable tips for people who want to follow in your footsteps. Ideally, you can take these straight from your vlogs and format them in an easy-to-consume way.

For instance, Daniel could share 1 learning from his 8+ years as a SaaS founder every week.

So, if you’re an entrepreneur - even if you just started - sharing your lifestyle is something that will naturally attract a cult-like audience.

And that’s what every brand is dreaming of these days, right?