A decade ago my SMB eCommerce clients kept asking me the same questions so I started making YouTube tutorial videos to answer them. I didn't intend to "become a YouTuber," but I enjoyed the one-to-many approach and naturally transitioned into it. The shark in the space was Shopify and 99% of YouTubers were teaching "get-rich-quick" eCommerce methods to retail because the pool was massive and the affiliate payouts were up to $200 per conversion. Ecwid eCommerce was unknown, their commissions were hardly double digits, and my audience was tiny. I was promoting the underdog in a sea of noise and getting paid poorly for it, but I knew from my own and my client's experience that Ecwid was genuinely better and cheaper than Shopify. My channel didn't grow very quickly and never made nearly as much money as those promoting the bigger player with deeper pockets, but I slept well. That's all that mattered to me.

The dynamic today feels identical. Bitcoin lives inside the crypto space on YouTube and so the fiat incentives around it have the same structure: You either play the clickbait game, chase NGU narratives, shill shitcoins, and ride the algo, or you focus on signal and experience slow/stagnant growth. Same trade-off, different space. Going back to making a tutorial video like this reminded me of that whole journey.

https://youtu.be/1FZrYDHqFkY