How Kasra Erfanian Got to $30,000 a Month With YouTube Automation (Case Study)

When I interviewed Kasra Erfanian (he goes by Kaz), he was 22 and making around $30,000 a month from faceless YouTube channels. He funded them with a mobile detailing business he started in high school, did the scripts, voiceovers and edits himself at first, then hired a team and a manager. The change he gave the most credit to was treating a channel as a brand and spending more on each video: about $160 to $200 on average, or $300 to $400 including management. In the second half we laid out how we'd each start with $500, with a 9-to-5 income, or with a lot of money, and how to vet scriptwriters and voice actors.

Who Kasra is, and where he was when we recorded

Kasra Erfanian goes by Kaz. When we sat down for this, he was my top student. I introduced him as making well over $20,000 a month on YouTube, and he corrected me: around $30,000.

We became friends through YouTube. He joined a Discord group I used to run, posted his results one day, and we started talking. About a year later we recorded this in Irvine, California. He was 22, the same age as me, and still enrolled in college.

Here's how he described his setup:

• When he first started, he did the scriptwriting, the voice acting and the video editing himself. It took way too long.
• Then he hired people for those jobs and managed everything. He had to spend a little bit more money, but he said his job became ten times easier and the videos paid off.
• By the time we talked, someone else was managing one of his bigger channels, which gave him time to focus on other channels.

Why he chose YouTube over Amazon FBA

Kasra had been on YouTube before, with a personal brand. He bought and sold shoes and taught people how to do it. That's where the model clicked for him: you upload a video now, and it can keep earning for months and years.

Counting that channel, he'd been on YouTube for about seven years. The automation side he'd been doing for two to three.

In between, he tried dropshipping and Amazon FBA. FBA worked pretty well for him, but he explained the problem with it. If your manufacturer decides to cheap out (his example was cheaper adhesive on the product), customers get a bad product, they leave bad reviews, and the entire listing is damaged without you knowing. That happened to one of his products.

His point was that YouTube is all in your control. How good your scriptwriters are, your voice actors, your videos.

He also called it the most affordable way to get into investing. You upload a video once and it's there. If it's evergreen and actually high quality, you can look back five years later and it could still go viral. And since YouTube is the second largest search engine and Google owns it, his view was that YouTube isn't going anywhere.

From cheap videos to a real brand

Kasra was doing well on YouTube before we met. What he said really sped things up was what I teach about branding: making an actual brand on YouTube, instead of just posting a lot of content.

My view is that too many people get into YouTube focused on the easiest ways to make money. If you look at the bigger picture (a good brand, videos people want to come back to on a regular basis, real trust with your audience), you're going to make way more money than you will with clickbaity videos that chase views.

Kasra had seen the other side. When he got into YouTube, he looked at a lot of the people teaching and selling automation. He described their channels as low quality, low budget videos, sometimes with inaccurate information. They perform here and there, but they don't have longevity and they don't build a subscriber base.

The big pivot we made together was me telling him to stop being so cheap and actually invest in the content.

If you're getting started, you don't need to go spend $500 a video. You can get away with $100 or $150. Once you start making money, I highly recommend raising it. Kasra's reasoning was the same: it's a higher quality video that you leave out in the algorithm to marinate and get more and more views over time.

We came back to this at the end. My take when we recorded was that gone are the days when you can just do clickbaity videos. It's quality over quantity. The huge channels that were mass uploading videos just to put out videos were on the decline.

Kasra said it twice in the interview: your audience isn't stupid. Feed them good quality videos consistently, and they keep coming back for more.

How he funded it, and why he reinvests

A lot of people ask Kasra how he funded his YouTube business.

He worked at McDonald's his sophomore year of high school and at Togo's his junior year. He was sick of working for a boss, and he wanted a business because there's no cap on how much a business can make. So his senior year he started a mobile detailing business in his town.

It was still running well when we talked, and it's how he funded YouTube.

He admitted he was cheap when it came to video production. He said I changed his mind on that, and that it kind of changed everything.

Reinvesting was the other thing he said he took from me. He used to shovel his money toward investments like stocks and crypto. He still does that, but he puts a lot more back into the business now.

I got that from watching creators like MrBeast. His biggest piece of advice at the time was that he tries to spend more money than he makes almost every single month, because he believes that much in investing in the content.

How to start, depending on your budget

Our camera died partway through, so we re-recorded the practical part and organized it by how much money you have to work with.

One thing to know first. We recorded this in 2021, so read this section as a record of what we were doing then.

A few notes that don't fit in the table.

No money at all. Kasra's idea, if you have a vision you really think is going to work, was to find scriptwriters, voice actors and video editors and give them equity in the channel, so everyone's in it to win it.

Why I'd pay for a mentor. In any business I get into, if I'm very uncertain, I'm all for hiring someone to teach me how to do what they're doing, so I avoid the mistakes they've had. If you go all in on YouTube alone, you might spend $5,000, $6,000 or $10,000 on production just learning how to make good videos.

And if you have a source of income, just keep producing videos. Don't expect anything to work for a period of time. Give it a long runway (I said two years in the interview) and try to make each video just a little bit better.

Make every video better than the last

This was Kasra's rule, and it's a good one.

1. Upload your first video, then look at it very analytically. What can you do to make it better? Is it the script, the voice, the editing, or everything?
2. The second video should be better. Make changes again based on that one.
3. Do the same on the third and the fourth.
4. By the fifth video, you should have a template for your entire team to follow.

The reason is that once you upload a video, it's there forever. You can always change the thumbnail and the title. You can't change the content of the video.

His second rule was about your team. He notices a lot of people are timid about telling their scriptwriters, voice actors and editors exactly what to do differently. His answer: you're paying them. Tell them exactly how you want it done, and send links to videos that show it. If they can't do it, you go to the next person.

Then there's the opening. Kasra's tip was that the first 30 seconds of a video is a key factor in it going viral. Even if the average view duration on the whole video isn't as high, if it's incredible in those first 30 seconds, the algorithm sees that you hooked people and shares it more.

Here's what I added. Show your video to someone else and watch how they react.

• I have some friends with very short attention spans. Those are the best people to show it to. If they get bored five seconds in, you've got some work to do.
• Kasra's approach is to beg for constructive criticism, because people are going to be nice and say it's good.
• My approach is to not tell them it's my video. Just say "check out this video I found" and see how they react.

I showed my sister some MrBeast videos once. She was laughing while she watched, and she'd say "no way" out loud.

There's more on holding attention in YouTube retention secrets.

How to hire and vet scriptwriters, voice actors and editors

Kasra started on Fiverr, then settled into this:

Scriptwriters. Kasra prefers Upwork because of how the hiring works. On Fiverr, you typically have to reach out to writers to see what they're capable of. On Upwork, you write a description of the job, put in links to channels you want the script based on, and ask for a sample. A bunch of people apply and tell you their background. They may say they're passionate, so take it with a grain of salt and ask for the sample.

When he was getting obsessed with this, Kasra would message 20 or 30 scriptwriters the night before and wake up excited to find the best two or three.

How to tell if a sample is good. This is something I did when I was really in the details on my channels: read the script aloud and see how it flows. If the intro is two minutes long and you haven't even talked about why people clicked on the video, that's probably not going to be a good performing script.

And don't read it in a monotone. Read it the way a voice actor would.

If it's boring and flat, like you're in a college lecture, you're going to have some issues. Kasra's addition was to see if the script has character to it. If you weren't good at English in school, give it to someone who was and ask them if it's engaging.

Voice actors. Kasra listens and asks if the voice matches the style of his videos and the niche. If you have mysterious videos, look for someone with an ominous tone.

The thing he watches for is energy. Give some voice actors a 10 minute script and the first two minutes are super high energy. Listen to the end, and it's gone. The viewer subconsciously gets bored. Tell them they have to maintain that energy all the way through.

I have full guides on both sides of this: how to write YouTube scripts and how to hire YouTube editors.

How we each pick a niche

Kasra didn't name his niches, but he did explain how he found the first one.

He was posting all types of content on one channel, a top 10 style channel. Then one of those topics hit hard. It got about a million views within a week, and he gained 10,000 new subscribers from it. So he kept posting in that topic, built a base of returning viewers, and ended up with an actual niched down channel.

He doesn't always recommend doing it that way, because you can waste money.

Here's how I do it. I usually find something where people are making at least $10,000 a month. If there are people making $50,000 a month plus, and I see new people getting into it recently and getting the same type of numbers fairly quick, then I'm interested.

Unless I'm adding something new or exciting to it, it's going to be pretty hard to make a good amount of money there.

So find one niche. History, cooking, tech, sports. Something where there's always a fan base and always new things to talk about.

Kasra added a strategy for small channels: start by posting trending topics only. Once you have a good base of subscribers and a lot of momentum, start adding evergreen topics.

That led to a concept I came up with for the niches we do. I call it ever trending.

My example was the World Cup. Say you make a video on how Lionel Messi spent $110 million. Any time he wins a game, that video is popping off, and that holds for his entire career.

For a full process, read how to pick a faceless YouTube niche.

Video Chapters

• 0:00Introduction: Kasra at around $30,000 a month
• 0:57What Kasra's operation looks like
• 2:16How we met
• 4:16Why YouTube instead of Amazon FBA
• 6:19Branding and cost per video
• 8:56Getting obsessed and the first $100 days
• 12:05Funding YouTube with a detailing business
• 29:08Starting with $500
• 31:44How to start, depending on your budget
• 34:05Starting with a 9-to-5: hire a team, find a mentor
• 40:14The first 30 seconds and testing videos on friends
• 42:49Vetting scriptwriters and voice actors
• 47:23Picking a niche and ever trending topics
• 51:05Starting with a lot of money

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