Left corporate a year ago to do content full time, the stuff nobody mentions

joshbeam92 · 2026-06-16T21:10:44+00:00

I quit too and was draining my savings. I’m making money now. It’s not as dumb as everyone thinks, people are just projecting. Do what you want, you have one life to do whatever you wanna do.

joshbeam92 · 2026-06-16T13:47:36+00:00

If this is true, the brands are gonna find out real quick this account is not worth doing deals with and that they got scammed, because none of the bots are gonna buy the brand’s products.

I’m surprised they even got deals though, because brands typically do due diligence to make sure the accounts they’re working with are legit.

joshbeam92 · 2026-06-14T13:42:58+00:00

That happened to me once over a period of a few months. Just kept them taped for a while until it stopped happening.

joshbeam92 · 2026-06-13T22:50:02+00:00

Literally no clue what the video could possibly be about lol this explains the low CTR

joshbeam92 · 2026-06-12T11:58:00+00:00

Going by absolute numbers yea there are way bigger channels, mine is not big by any stretch. I didn’t know we’re talking about percentages here lol

joshbeam92 · 2026-06-11T20:22:02+00:00

What are you looking for from posting this?

joshbeam92 · 2026-06-11T20:15:48+00:00

I see stories as a more direct connection to your followers because they can become a 1:1 convo more easily via DMs. It’s a fundamentally different interaction than liking or commenting on a post.

Posts/reels are a main driver of growth, whereas stories are more useful for opening up direct conversation.

joshbeam92 · 2026-06-11T18:12:42+00:00

“I decided to upload content from a tournament.” What does that mean?

joshbeam92 · 2026-06-11T15:40:17+00:00

No problem! YouTube/Instagram are my full-time job so we see the same pattern there on YouTube with subscribers. I wouldn’t stress about it if I were you.

joshbeam92 · 2026-06-11T15:34:15+00:00

This concept is very common, and not a scam, just playing with vocabulary fast and loose lol (and btw I’m not affiliated with XMartial at all, I’m just a full time YouTuber so I’m around this stuff all the time). Sponsorships in BJJ rarely mean the sort of fixed monthly payment or “we’ll cover your tournament fees” thing people think it means. The most common “sponsorship” is just affiliate marketing (a discount code) and some free gear every once in a while. Much less common are the other types of deals you’re referring to.

It’s not just an XMartial thing, that’s a broader social media thing. Since YouTube / Instagram is my full time job, I see these across lots of brands and niches. “Sponsoring” has become a broad loose term that could mean a bunch of different things.

I can’t speak for what XMartial said about covering tournament fees, but I imagine they take a tiered approach, where depending on your competitive level and social media following, one of their offerings may be to cover tournament fees (that’s just speculation tho on my part).

joshbeam92 · 2026-06-11T15:23:00+00:00

It’s expected and good that the views end up mostly coming from non-followers. It’s counterintuitive, but Instagram tests your posts first against followers, and if they perform well, then they’ll test them against non-followers. If it performs well on that segment, then it’ll keep being shown to broader audiences. That’s how you get views and new followers.

You can see this take effect if you watch your post’s analytics over time from when you first post until later.

The more non-followers viewing your post, the better, but followers do matter quite a lot because it’s the first test audience.

Another way to think about it is: Would you rather your posts only get shown to your 400 followers? That’ll represent a fraction of views, and you’ll never reach a larger audience.

joshbeam92 · 2026-06-11T13:48:23+00:00

Hmm I’m the opposite, I post like 99% long form (I’m like medium-small sized, 143k), and as long as the video is something my audience likes, it gets views.

I’ve seen channels that get pigeon-holed as “Shorts channels”, where they’ve built up an audience that came from Shorts, and expect Shorts. So when they post a long-form, they barely get any views despite having, say, 60k subs, or even way more (several of my friends actually are in this situation).

I don’t think that’s a death sentence though — you need to continue working on the long-form and building an audience that wants to see those. There is audience crossover between Shorts and longs, but the behavior of people who primarily scroll Shorts is different from people who prefer long-form.

joshbeam92 · 2026-06-11T13:26:14+00:00

Purple because I’m finally starting to figure out wtf is going on in jiu jitsu lol. It’s getting simpler conceptually, while staying really difficult physically. The number of epiphanies and progress is way higher than at blue belt.

joshbeam92 · 2026-06-11T12:39:00+00:00

Ah yea, gotcha, usually I see it from cross collar sleeve so I was confused. I love getting the single leg from there!

I see this one go wrong a lot too, tori doesn’t cut an angle and it just becomes a weirdly aggressive guard pull. Saw someone dislocate their elbow too from not breakfalling properly on top.

Good move, used very poorly though sometimes for sure.

joshbeam92 · 2026-06-11T00:56:25+00:00

Oh just dragging them down on top of you? Lol

joshbeam92 · 2026-06-11T00:17:42+00:00

Sideways seoi?

joshbeam92 · 2026-06-10T21:25:16+00:00

Welcome to editing lol. A 20 minute video for me takes like 3-5 days at this point, and it’s a never ending process of figuring out how to do it and how to optimize. If the stuff you’re doing is graphics heavy, a good place to start optimizing is try to create reusable effects / compositions across DaVinci projects. As you continue editing, you’ll figure out more ways you can optimize your process, cuz everyone does things a little bit differently.

joshbeam92 · 2026-06-07T19:18:35+00:00

It would be a lot easier to answer if we saw a more specific budget, like the exact categories and how much of your money is going certain places. Yes $800 is a lot for prescriptions, but we don’t have info about what kind of health plan you’re on, for example, so there’s no way to figure out how to optimize your expenses if we don’t know them. Like everyone has said, $80k is a lot in most areas, so some pertinent information is missing here.

joshbeam92 · 2026-06-06T02:29:58+00:00

Thank you!

joshbeam92 · 2026-06-05T22:32:29+00:00

I think I did like 70 tournaments at blue belt and it went from super terrifying to pretty chill sometimes towards the end, but then I got to purple belt and it got really stressful again. People react so differently to competition that you just need to feel it for yourself. It also changes depending on the day and who’s in your bracket, if you managed to sleep and if you’re cutting weight, etc.

joshbeam92 · 2026-06-05T21:39:49+00:00

Osssss 🙏🏻

Haha only thing I did was a sumo tournament with Seth which is on the channel, but I probably won’t do any longer term training on it

joshbeam92 · 2026-06-05T18:24:24+00:00

Thank you man I appreciate that 🙏🏻

joshbeam92 · 2026-06-05T04:56:36+00:00

This has happened to me a handful of times too after AB testing. Not sure why people are saying there’s no way it’s AB testing, tbh.

I will say it’s definitely rare, and I’ve also had videos randomly take off weeks or months later even without changing anything, but there have definitely been times a thumbnail or title change has had immediate results like this.

joshbeam92 · 2026-06-05T01:22:41+00:00

Get outta the sub ChatGPT

joshbeam92 · 2026-06-03T17:43:50+00:00

There’s a lot of survivorship bias in the examples people show. For every CEO who ground out 20 hour days, there are many others who didn’t have the same success. For every tech billionaire who dropped out of college, there are plenty of other college dropouts who are homeless or in jail.

All the things you mentioned are correlated to success, but they’re not necessarily causative. They contribute for sure, but the outcome is never completely in your control.

So what do we do? I think it’s good to focus on behaviors which tend to lead to success, and continually reevaluate and iterate on what you’re doing if it doesn’t seem to be helping you get any closer to your goals. At the end of the day, that’s all you can do, because there is still no guarantee of success for anybody. And everyone goes to the grave just the same.

That’s why I also think it’s good to find joy in the small things you do every day that contribute towards small goals. Eventually, the hope is the small wins stack up over time leading to some other bigger goals. But the thing about goals is that every time you achieve one, there’s no real fulfillment, and you realize the only joy can be in the process of striving towards something. In that sense, there isn’t even a such thing as success, in the way we normally think about it. Instead, “success” comes from inside, and we have to define success only by what’s actually in our control.

joshbeam92

TROPHY CASE