Last year, I had a problem.
Email leads at Story Learning had dropped to offensively low levels.
Our SEO traffic – which had been a reliable source of hundreds of leads every week – had dried up completely.
I needed to replace it.
And fast.
The target?
500 to 1,000 new leads a week.
That would plug the hole and put the spring back in my step.
But I had a further problem…
I really didn’t want to work that hard.
It was spring 2025, and spring in Hobbitshire is glorious.
Perfect flying weather. Clifftop walks without needing an industrial windshield. Wine tasting. Strolls down to the village stream after school.
This is precisely why I started my business in the first place – the freedom to do this stuff.
So, the thought of slaving away to bring in leads sounded about as appealing as a rush hour commute on the Northern Line.
It takes a lot to drag me out of my countryside slumber.
But needs must.
If I didn’t do something about it sharpish, I might be subjected to the worst hell of all: being dragged back into Zoom meetings.
A fate worse than death.
The lazy solution
Fortunately, I had a secret weapon:
My bird’s eye perspective of the education industry and insider knowledge of what’s working particularly well right now.
And what’s working now — like finding twenty quid in your winter coat — is small niche YouTube channels…
With low production value
Filmed on a bloomin’ iPhone.
Part of me thought I should go the traditional route and work hard to get leads…
But I really didn’t want to.
So out of pure laziness, I started a new YouTube channel.
I had a condition:
it had to take me no more than 15 minutes a week.
That’s it.
Any more would be wholly unacceptable.
So that was my goal:
- 15 minutes a week
- At least 1,000 new leads a month
- That would make Olly happy
The thought process
Here’s how I went about making this decision.
One: I already have a YouTube channel at StoryLearning where I talk about languages. This is a broad, mass-market channel where we focus on top of funnel – reaching as many new people as possible.
Two: To position against this, the new YouTube channel would be niche. The goal wasn’t to go viral but rather to be pure middle of funnel. Talking about specific, helpful content that I know my ICP values. (And that the casual viewer would find boring, but that’s ok.)
Three: I would spend precisely zero time making it look good. In fact, the maximum I was willing to do was sit in a chair and talk.
That’s it.
Four: My team would handle everything else – from titles and thumbnails to editing and publishing the video.
Reminder to self:
15-minute commitment max.
Building the machine
So I made the channel, and we launched it in September.
It took rather longer than I thought to launch, but that’s because I was working on systems first.
- Hiring a producer
- Building a production workflow
- Figuring out thumbnail style
All that jazz.
See, what solopreneurs always fail to understand is that team is what buys you freedom in the end.
[Team + good systems] mean that you can be entirely distant from any of the day-to-day work.
So we spent time building the systems. Getting everything in place.
And hey presto…
The channel launches and right out of the gate, we’re hitting 10,000 views on individual videos with hundreds of leads collected for each.
Mission accomplished.
My new workflow
With this new channel up and out, here’s how I maintain it:
Once a month, I open my Trello board and find four or five episode topics ready to record, fully-researched and with show notes written by my producer.
I sit in my chair.
Pull up the notes on my iPad.
Turn on the camera.
Attach the microphone.
And simply talk about it.
(Sometimes I remember to look at the camera.)
If you’re an expert in your niche, you can easily talk about stuff without much preparation and it’s extremely useful for the right person.
You can script it if you want… but I personally just talk from a few bullet points.
This is how the YouTube algorithm works in 2025.
If you make specific content for a specific avatar, it will get in front of the right person.
Simple as that.
Before long, I started receiving texts from my CEO, James:
“Our leads are at all-time highs!”
Which means not only have we replaced our lost leads from SEO entirely…
We’d even added some more on top to boot.
Meaning the business is looking as Messi’s Miami merchandise sales.
Overall, pretty happy with this result.
I stepped back entirely from StoryLearning a few years ago, but sometimes some intervention from the founder is needed to kick things back into gear.
So I’ll take that bargain in return for 15 minutes of my life every Monday morning.
Namaste,
Olly
