How I'd Make $10K in 7 Days With a Faceless YouTube Channel

If I had one week to make $10,000 from scratch on YouTube without showing my face, I would start with research: find a faceless channel where one video went viral and the creator never properly remade it. Then I'd turn that video's script into a template, write a new video on a different subject in the same format, voice it with ElevenLabs, pay a strong editor around $300, quality control it up to five times, and try to get three videos out in three to five days. In most niches $10,000 is about 1.5 million to 3 million views, so the whole plan is built on a format that has already pulled numbers like that.

The 7 day plan on one page

In the video I drew this on a whiteboard as a timeline, day zero on one end and day seven on the other.

I opened with the Abraham Lincoln line about having five hours to cut down a tree: spend four hours sharpening the axe and one hour actually cutting. That's how I'd treat the week. The sharpening is the research.

I'll preface it the same way I did on camera. I've spent a lot of time doing this stuff, so this is exactly what I would do, with the experience I already have.

Step 1: Find a faceless channel with one viral video

The first thing I'd do is a very broad blanket search on YouTube channels. They need to be faceless already, so that I can just replicate them and their strategies.

Personally I like topics of interest where there are already lots of viewers, a fan base, a current audience that's always hungry for more content. When I recorded this, the niches I listed were:

• History
• Sports, which would probably be one of the easier opportunities (MMA, boxing, WWE, basketball)
• Science, biology, space and technology
• Elon Musk, SpaceX, Tesla and the whole EV race, which was my big one for a while

Then I'd go further out. Bowling, ping pong, mystery channels, true crime, documentaries, motivation, mindset, personal development, health and fitness, nutrition, cars, trucks, street bikes, Formula One, NASCAR. I've even seen plants. I'd look in all these different corners, anywhere there's a niche audience.

What I'm looking for on each channel page is a pattern. You go through their videos and you see one with 800 views. One with 2,000. One with 5,000. Then one video with something like 2.3 million views. Then back to 1,000, 3,000, 4K.

That one video is the opportunity.

For the longer version of this search, read how to find viral YouTube video ideas.

The mistake that creates the opening

A lot of creators pick a niche and spend all this time, all this money and all this energy creating a bunch of content. Sometimes one of those videos goes viral. I see this often.

Then they go right back to what I'd call the shotgun approach. They keep trying all these different approaches and all these different strategies. What's funny is that the one video that hit is the secret to their riches, and they don't remake it.

My usual example is a video like "How Elon Musk Spends His Billions." Say that's the one with 2.3 million views. Maybe they try it again with Michael Jordan. But they don't fully copy it. The next one is about some person you've probably never heard of, or somebody nobody really cares about right now. Or they don't copy the strategy at all, and they just move on.

I have a lot of people who come into my programs with exactly one viral video like this. Going back to that video and remaking it properly is how we 10x those channels.

So that's what I'd go find: viral videos that are obviously faceless, where the creator just messed up the follow through.

Step 2: Turn the viral script into a template

Once I've found the video I'm trying to model, I take its script.

1. Go to the video and click "show transcript."
2. Toggle the timestamps.
3. Highlight all of it and copy it.
4. Go to ChatGPT and turn that script into a template.
5. Take the template and write a video on a different subject.

The example I pulled up on screen was a "how to survive animal attacks" style video. I wouldn't make that one again. I'd do a video along the lines of how to survive something else.

The ChatGPT part will take you 30 to 60 minutes. Then here's the real advice.

The more you can put it in your own language, the better. Run it through a few times. Have it describe different situations. I have a full walkthrough of this in ChatGPT for faceless YouTube.

Step 3: AI voiceover, human editor

I take that script and throw it into ElevenLabs. There are a lot of these AI voice tools out there. You paste the script in and take the voice. I tested it live in the video, just on their demo, and the software is actually pretty proficient.

The edit is where I'd spend the money. I'd go to either Twitter or Upwork and hire a video editor.

If you have a $300 video editor, and you get the right person and go through a vetting process, you're not getting ripped off. You end up with a video that's better than 99% of YouTube at that point, because everyone else is putting out low effort AI videos, or going the cheap route, or going the easy route.

If I was doing this on no budget, I would just go and edit the video myself. It would probably take a couple of days to learn Premiere Pro. (When I recorded this I hadn't really edited videos in two or three years.)

More on finding the right person: how to hire YouTube editors.

Step 4: Quality control it up to five times

I'd model the video that got 2.3 million views. I'd tell the editor exactly how they do it, the whole structure. I'd even try to do it better.

Then I'd quality control it hard. I send over the script and the voiceover. They edit it. I watch it and make sure it's really dialed in. If it's still not dialed in, it goes back, and I QC it again.

I'd go through that process maybe up to five times, just really making sure this video is exactly like what the other video is, and what that audience wants. Maybe it takes a couple of days.

And I wouldn't stop at one. To really make sure I hit that 10K in seven days, my goal would be three videos out, in a span of three to five days, six at the most. That's just to get my chances that much higher.

I've done this before. I uploaded two videos (I was planning on doing three), and the second video did three million views within the first five days of me uploading it.

Step 5: New subject, same format, same thumbnail

I wouldn't steal the concept. If the viral video is how Elon Musk spends his billions, I'm not making that video. I'd go find someone else that people care about right now and talk about how they go and spend their millions.

Everything else stays basically the same. The same type of script. A voice actor with a similar voiceover style. The same exact format.

The thumbnail is the best part. Say their thumbnail has Elon Musk on one side, and the text is something like "Elon spends" and then a dollar amount. I would take that thumbnail and replicate it on my channel. Instead of Elon, I'd put Jeff Bezos right there, change the name in the text, and make the thumbnail look exactly the same.

The view math behind $10,000

To make what I called a measly $10,000 on YouTube, in most niches it's equivalent to anywhere from about 1.5 million views to, on the low end with a bad RPM, about 3 million views.

Now look at what the research turned up: a video that got 2.3 million views in less than three months. If I produce three more of those and take that exact format, there's no reason I can't hit 1.5 or 3 million views.

I see this on a regular basis. One of my students, the other day, did 2.3 million views in the first 24 hours on a video. I think it went over four or five million views within the first couple of days (I'd have to look again to be exact).

This video is the plan. At the end of it I pointed to a different video, where I show how I actually made $7,000 in 10 days.

Video Chapters

• 0:00The seven day challenge
• 0:37Four hours sharpening the axe: niche research
• 2:01The channel with one viral video
• 3:41The mistake: never remaking the winner
• 4:40The niches I'd search
• 5:45Turning the viral script into a ChatGPT template
• 6:49Voiceover with ElevenLabs
• 7:52Hiring a $300 video editor
• 9:18Quality control, up to five times
• 9:54The timeline: 8 to 12 hours, then three days
• 10:59New subject, same format
• 11:29The view math behind $10,000
• 12:34Copying the thumbnail layout

FAQ