How to Start a Faceless YouTube Channel From Scratch (2026 Guide)

To start a faceless YouTube channel from scratch, I do eight things in order: create the channel (minutes, no banner needed), pick a niche where other channels already make $10K a month, pick one recent channel in that niche to emulate, turn its most popular videos into 5 to 10 ideas of my own, decide whether the videos get made by hand, with AI or by freelancers, hire a scriptwriter, voice actor, editor and thumbnail designer on Upwork, run them on a Trello board while posting one to three 10 to 20 minute videos a week, and get monetized at 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours on the way to the 1.5 to 2 million views a month that $10K a month takes in most niches. I built a channel live on a training call doing exactly this. Faceless Channel Academy has helped 1,200+ students follow the same process, generating over 42 million dollars in combined channel revenue.

The 8 Steps at a Glance

This is the order I built a channel in, live on a training call, from a blank YouTube account to three job posts on Upwork in about 30 minutes.

The definition and formats are on what is faceless YouTube, and the call itself, click by click, is in the full tutorial. This page is the instruction set.

There are people objectively less intelligent than you making $20,000 a month on YouTube right now. The difference isn't talent, connections or luck. They stopped trying to figure it out from scratch and started copying what already works.

Step 1: Create the YouTube Channel

Go to YouTube, create a new channel, give it a name and a basic logo. That is all of step one, and it should take minutes, not a week of logo tweaking. On the live training I called the channel Lettuce Advice and used the first transparent lettuce icon Google gave me.

Name it broad enough to grow into. You can always change the name later.

You don't need a banner and you don't need a description. On one of my bigger channels I literally Googled the word acorn with "transparent," and the first image that came up is the logo. That channel has made $800,000.

Step 2: Pick a Niche Where Channels Already Make $10K a Month

Pick one niche, and pick it by finding who is already making money in it. Not by interest, and not by a CPM table. The question I ask out loud is "who's got my money?", and the answer has to be channels making $10K a month or more.

Here's what I check before I commit.

The search itself: type one keyword ("health"), open every channel that comes up and look each one up. ChatGPT can hand you the common problem keywords for a niche (clogged arteries, burnout, diabetes, chronic inflammation). Subscribe to every channel that fits so your home page recommends more, and click into one popular video so the sidebar shows you channels like it. It took me about 10 minutes and five or six channels to find one making six figures a year. The first ones were making a grand a month, and a lot of people would have jumped in right there. Don't.

Two warnings. Never pick a niche off RPM alone. A niche might pay a $20 RPM and have a revenue ceiling of $5,000 because the audience isn't there (the per-niche numbers are on YouTube RPM by niche and YouTube CPM rates by niche). And if you're shooting for $2,000 a month, don't bother. A $30K a month channel takes the same work as a $1,000 a month channel.

I'll put 10 to 20 hours into a niche before I decide it's a good one. The full scorecard is on how to pick a YouTube niche.

Step 3: Find Your Emulation Channel

Out of everything you found in Step 2, pick one channel to model. I call it the emulation channel, and the rest of the build comes off it. Mine had started 5 months earlier, had 31 videos up, had done 9 million views, and by my estimate made at least $20,000 in two months.

What makes a channel worth emulating:

• It's recent. Started in the last 4 to 6 months.
• It has outlier videos. An outlier has way more views than the channel has subscribers and than its other videos: a channel that normally does 10,000 views and puts one video at 3 million in 2 weeks.
• The outliers are recent too. Model videos that went viral in the last 3 months. The older the video, the less likely it goes viral again.
• It's still uploading. One channel I found looked good and had quit posting. I didn't like it.

Step 4: Come Up With 5 to 10 Video Ideas

Go to the emulation channel's most popular videos and make your own versions of them. You are not inventing ideas. You're taking titles that already worked and swapping the keyword.

On the live build, the channel's popular tab was the same video over and over: "Over 50? 6 movements Japanese elders do every day" and "Over 50? Do these 5 exercises for leg circulation." So I kept "Over 50?" and swapped the parts that can change. Japanese elders became Italian elders. Leg circulation became preventing falls, low back pain, weak legs and blood flow, with ChatGPT listing the problems. The tip was 5 to 10 ideas. I ended up with 12.

I've written this up on X as my Triple-R system: research the top videos, remix their best elements, repurpose them for engagement. On a newer video I call it Mad Libbing the title: "How Elon Musk spends his billions" becomes the same video about every other billionaire, with Google Trends picking the name. The channels that fail are the ones trying to be original before they've built an audience.

On formats: explainers, listicles (we do 50 instead of 10: "50 absurd facts about the Florida Keys"), compilations with commentary, documentaries and educational videos work for new faceless channels. I wouldn't start with ASMR, music or Shorts.

Here's how I value the list before anything is made. Say the average video gets 200,000 views at around seven dollars per thousand. Twelve of those is about $17,000, so each video is worth $1,300 to $1,500 to the channel. Produced well, those 12 ideas were worth $20,000 to $30,000 to me.

Step 5: Decide How the Videos Get Made

There are three ways to make a faceless video: by hand, with AI, or outsourced to freelancers. I outsource, and if you have at least $1,000 to put into videos I'd tell you to outsource from day one.

• By hand. Write the script, record the voice in your phone's voice memos app, edit in iMovie or a free editor, make the thumbnail yourself. How I made my first videos. Free, but easily 10 to 20 hours a video, and four skills to learn first.
• With AI. AI tools write, voice or illustrate parts of the video and you assemble it. Everything but the editing can be AI. We keep human voice actors to avoid monetization issues.
• Outsourced. A scriptwriter, voice actor, editor and thumbnail designer on Upwork, managed on Trello. What I do. $80 to $130 a video on the live build, and I keep every channel between $15 and $150 a video.

My first faceless video is the proof that cheap works. I wrote on X that it took 3 days to make, cost $150 ($50 for the script, $30 for the voiceover, $70 for the editing), did 2.8 million views and brought in 11,200 dollars. The tools don't win. The process wins.

Whichever route you take, the script and the packaging matter most. A 10 to 20 minute script is 1,500 to 4,000 words. Fulfill the title in the intro, only cover the most interesting things, and write for the ear. For the thumbnail, copy the emulation channel's font, colors and layout until yours looks like theirs. Idea, packaging and hook are about 80% of the result. The content is 80% of the work and about 20% of the result, which is why I pay someone else to do it.

The by-hand loop I drew out in 2021 is on how to get a play button without recording videos. Thumbnails are on the faceless YouTube thumbnail guide.

Step 6: Hire the Team on Upwork

Create an Upwork account (not Fiverr) and post three jobs: scriptwriter, voice actor, video editor. Add a thumbnail designer when you're ready. Upwork's AI writes the post from one line ("I am hiring a script writer for my nutrition YouTube channel"). Clean it up, set the English level to fluent or native, set the price and post it for free. I had three posts up in about 5 minutes and five applicants before the call ended.

What I normally pay per video, from the newer video where I go through the rates:

On price, I say I'm paying $500 and explain in the post that it's $50 a script for 10 scripts a month. The bigger number attracts a much bigger crowd, because freelancers want repeat work.

Don't wait to hire until the channel is paying. The first proposal on my post came from a writer with three published romance novels. You won't out-write her after a year of practice. If money is the issue, drive for Uber Eats or DoorDash and use that to pay her. Then get the best two or three on a Zoom call and work out the terms.

The $30K a month version of this team (about $200 a script, $50 a voiceover, $200 an edit, $20 a thumbnail) is on how to make $30K a month with a faceless channel.

Step 7: Run It on Trello and Post One to Three Times a Week

Set up a Trello board with six columns (ideas, script, voiceover, video editor, thumbnail, done), put your ideas in as cards, invite the team, and move each card left to right as each person finishes. Then post one, two or three times a week, 10 to 20 minute videos, long form only.

You check the board every day and do quality control. You're learning two skills, hiring and management, instead of the twenty you'd need to do it all yourself.

Give it about 30 videos before you judge anything. Look at what the results tell you and change the content around that. On my own channels, a video under about 100,000 views in its first month gets a review, and a real flop comes down, because I don't want the team thinking weak videos are fine.

Step 8: Get Monetized, Then Get to $10K a Month

You get monetized at 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time, which is about 40,000 views. In practice that is one video that works. Then the target is $10K a month, which in most niches means about 1.5 to 2 million views a month.

One of my students did exactly that on an art channel. Her fifth video got 55,000 views, she was monetized, and she'd made about $300 in her first five videos. The fastest FCA students have monetized in 30 to 52 days. For what moves the timeline, read how long it takes to monetize a faceless channel.

Once ads are on, YouTube pays you 55% of what the ads make. These are the income streams and what they paid when I recorded the videos behind this page:

AdSense was 50 to 60% of my revenue when I recorded the older video. The full math on real channels is on how much do faceless YouTube channels make.

Here is my own timeline, as I wrote it on X: month 1, $0. Month 6, $400. Month 12, $3,000. Month 18, $42,000. The best advice I have is to just start. Since then I've run over 50 channels, and what I showed on the live call is literally what we did for my geography channel. It did $107,000 in 90 days. Don't stop at one channel either. As I put it on X: don't spend $30K on a car you can't afford, build a YouTube channel that pays $30K a month instead.

The student results this page has always listed (more on success stories):

Faceless Channel Academy gives you the niche selection framework, script templates, production system and daily coaching that 1,200+ students have used to build channels generating over 42 million dollars combined. The process above works. FCA makes it work faster. Book a free strategy call and an advisor will map out your niche and your production setup in 30 minutes.

Video Chapters

• 0:00Introduction
• 0:54Step 1: Create a YouTube channel
• 3:12Step 2: Pick a niche
• 10:52Finding a six-figure channel in the niche
• 16:48Step 3: Find your emulation channel
• 17:30Step 4: Come up with 5 to 10 video ideas
• 22:49What 12 video ideas are worth
• 26:16Step 5: Make the videos (outsourcing)
• 32:52Step 6: Hire freelancers on Upwork
• 37:21Setting up the Trello board
• 39:52Step 7: Fully outsource and post
• 41:18Step 8: Get monetized
• 42:18Get to $10K a month

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