The one thing that might pay off $90,000
It's October 13, 2026 at 2:22 PM. This is my vlog for my real, raw, authentic life as a single dad, full-time YouTube creator, and a guy who's a couple hundred thousand dollars in debt. I think I found a solution to pay off $90,000 in credit card debt. Lots of times in life we think we need quantity. We think we need a bunch of things. But I have the feeling that I just need to offer one single thing, one single service, and then put that in every single one of my videos. That will be my path to paying everything off. Lots of times in our lives, if we can figure out the one thing we can do that is valuable, it makes everything easier. I started heading this direction when I wrote about going from a scattered business to one offering, and today I think I finally found the one. So let me explain how I had this epiphany, exactly what it is, and how it can be here to help you. I hope this will be useful, especially if you're wondering what you're going to do with your life.
Lots of times what we really need to do is just take some time to sit and think, to take some time to look at our situation. A lot of us today are never bored, but we don't have any time to sit and think. So yesterday I did something very unusual. I woke up at 8:30 in the morning. I had gotten a massage the day before, so it was a lazy day and I slept in. I normally get up at about 7 with the kids when they're here, but they weren't here, so I got up at 8:30. I had my usual peanut butter Larabar, one banana, and a pack of the seaweed snacks. And I said to myself: I want to figure out the one thing I'm going to offer in my business that will make everything else I'm offering unnecessary. I need to find the one thing I do in my business that is easiest for me to give value to other people with, and that I should talk about in every single one of my six YouTube channels.
So I decided to go back to bed and just think about that. I was still feeling pretty relaxed, so I did something very unusual and got back in bed at about 9 in the morning. I just lay there and tried to get as relaxed as possible and think as deeply as possible. Some people might call this meditating or focusing. I just tried to think and put my whole brain on solving this one problem. Because if you can solve this one problem, you're going to have so much money, and that's literally all you need to do.
Devin Nash refunded my $200
The day before, I had paid a guy named Devin Nash, and I did a video about it on my Jerry Banfield for Creators channel. You can read the full story in Devin Nash Refuses My YouTube Consulting Payment. Devin puts himself out there as a content creator consultant and signals authority that he's worked with all these brands and big names, which he probably has. He offers a service where, for $150, you pay him on PayPal and email him your YouTube channel, and he'll take a look at it and give you a 15-minute video review. If you pay $200, he'll give you a priority review within 24 hours. So I sent him $200 on PayPal. I sent him all six of my YouTube channels, and I was excited to see what he thought. He's been on YouTube since 2012. I've been on YouTube since 2011. I was excited to see what a guy who to me is a peer, somebody with a similar level of expertise to mine, would think of what I'm doing.
And I felt very rejected and disappointed when, yesterday morning, or it might have been the day before, but right before this day of thinking, he sent me an email refunding my money and saying I had too much going on. He thought someone like me would need thousands of dollars spent in consulting, and that my situation was just too much. I was very disappointed that he sent me an email refunding my money and calling it too hard. He refused to even take a look at it. Plus he said something like, oh, I don't want to get somebody further into debt.
The way I see it, debt is a tool. It's funny to go around thinking of debt as something moral. Debt can be a very valuable tool to leverage, to give yourself incredible opportunities, like what I'm doing to springboard myself into a business. I was full-time on YouTube for a long time until I deleted everything last year to try and save my marriage, and then got divorced anyway. I shared that whole chapter in After 14 Years and 10,000 Videos, I'm Deleting My Last Channel. Debt has allowed me to springboard myself into a position where I've got 1.5 million views on YouTube, over 11 million impressions, plus around a million more views on all the other platforms, starting from zero. I broke down those numbers in I Uploaded 1200+ YouTube Videos on New Channels in 2026. So I know a lot about content creation. It's given me an amazing story. And debt has been a tool that allowed me to borrow so I can set up a business that will print money, way more money than I could make just going to work somewhere.
Everything I've tried to sell this year
But the thing is, I've got to isolate what I can do for you that you will value, that you will want, that you will buy. And I've been struggling to figure that out. I've been testing. For example, the gold satin shirt I keep wearing is for sale at jerrybanfield.com for $234. It's the shirt I've worn on a ton of videos. It's a smaller medium men's, and it's a shirt you could have hanging up in your house, or you could wear it yourself, and you'd think, Jerry wore this shirt. It would have some emotional value to you to have a physical thing that Jerry wore. I've put it in a bunch of videos, and I've got it on right now as I write this. But nobody's bought it yet. Nobody's bought any of the stuff.
I've tried so many different offers this year, and they've all flopped. People ruined my eBay auctions with fake bids. I tried offering one-on-one calls, and I'm grateful one person bought a call for $350 for an hour, but then they actually canceled the call and haven't followed up about rescheduling. I sold other calls for $96 for 30 minutes, but that was not efficient with my time. In many cases there was a better way to do things.
And I realized that usually, if you can find what you yourself are willing to throw money out for, that's something to offer. I reflected that my experience with Devin Nash showed me something: I threw $200 at this guy very easily. Now, I normally watch all kinds of YouTubers giving advice about YouTube, and they don't get anything out of me. I reflected on all the stuff I've spent money on with individual creators this year, and Devin Nash made the easiest $200 off me. Out of everybody I've watched, he had to work for it less than anybody else. I've sent $100 super chats out to people. I've sent a bunch of $20 super chats. But in most cases I watched them a lot longer, got to know them a lot longer, and they did a lot more for me. Devin Nash got $200 out of me easier than anybody else.
So I reverse engineered that. Why did it work on me? It's because I wanted him to personally look at my situation and give me feedback.
Then I reflected that one of the easiest things I sold all year was Cameos. I used to have my Cameo set to $25, and you could send me a few sentences and ask me to make a personalized video for you. I did about five of those, and I got five-star reviews on four of them. The last one didn't leave a review, but I consistently got five-star reviews, and people were consistently happy. The problem with that was it was too shallow. Sending a happy birthday message, or sending me just two or three sentences, is not really enough, in a lot of cases, for me to give at my full capacity.
Same offer, clear boundaries
So with Devin rejecting me, I realized I should be offering the same thing he's offering, except mine needs to have clear boundaries. I think the problem with him is he figured, maybe out of some perfectionism, that if he can't give this guy the perfect solution, the absolute best advice ever, then he doesn't even want to do it. Whereas my point of view is that just sharing a point of view can be helpful. And his service doesn't have super clear boundaries on it. He says he'll film a 15-minute video, but I imagine in his mind he wants to take about five minutes to look at your YouTube channel and then tell you to get better titles and thumbnails, or maybe something a little better than that. He wants to do a quick look at your channel, and it needs to be an easy situation for him to take five minutes to look at it and then give some advice. Whereas with mine, clearly five minutes was not going to work.
One offer for every channel
So I realized I need to offer the same kind of service, but I need to have very clear boundaries on mine, because I want to be able to help somebody like me. There are so many other YouTubers out there who could use me looking at what they're doing. And I have a broad audience that isn't just YouTubers: many of you are in crypto, gaming, online business, marketing, and dating. What I realized is that ideally I want to offer one thing to every single channel. Whether you're watching Internet Computer Protocol videos, dating videos, YouTube for Creators videos, gaming videos, or vlogs, I want you to be able to have one single thing across all those channels that makes sense.
And I realized what I do best is make videos. That's what's made me millions of dollars online. That's what's made me millions of new views this year. I've made tens of thousands of dollars starting from scratch, and I can't tell you how much of an outlier that is. It's very abnormal for somebody to start one channel and get it monetized immediately, let alone start six and get four of them monetized, and then get millions of views. That is very abnormal. You're talking the top 1 percent of all the people who've ever tried on YouTube. I wrote about why that track record matters in Why I'm the Right YouTube Coach for Experienced Creators.
And yet, with a call, I was thinking the call is the best experience, but a call is too much commitment. And for the price, ideally it'd be under a hundred dollars. Some people came into my chat talking all this stupid stuff about me, just so much negativity. The way I see it, I have very valuable skills that people have paid a lot for in the past. It's up to me to figure out how to make those skills easily accessible and to charge for them in a format that provides a lot of value.
What a personalized video review is
I think the best thing I can do is offer a personalized video review where you send me something to review. It could be almost anything. And I will take 20 total minutes of my time. That means if you send me a 10-minute video to watch, and I don't put it on double speed, I'll make a 10-minute video reply. Or you can send me a 20-minute video to watch, I'll put it on double speed, and then I'll make a 10-minute video reply. Or you can send me a video to watch and I'll do a 20-minute live reaction to it. Or I'll just record. For example, let's say you're a YouTuber, somebody just like me, and you make the same kind of request I made to Devin Nash. Instead of saying, whoa, I can't handle that, what I would do is look at your email, hit record, and give live impressions as I'm looking at everything, so you could see and hear me speak my evaluations. I'd say, all right, look at this first channel. Why is there no website here? Where's the offer? I don't see the offer. Nice, you got a lot of views on this. Why haven't you done more videos like this? Why are you publishing one video a week instead of more often? That last one is a question I've been asking for years, going all the way back to New YouTubers: Publish One Video a Day to Win Long-Term. I would immediately fire off rapid-fire thoughts and fire a video back.
And the best part is I could do that about crypto, about dating, about gaming, about any online business you're running, about personal life questions, live streaming, money, debt. If you say, here's my debt situation, how would you manage to be at peace or relaxed in this situation, I can answer that from my own experience. I've realized what you could really use is some personalized attention. I want you all to have a chance to share your exact situation with me, because I'm stuck making videos that are less personal when I'm talking to more of you at once. But the beauty is, if I have one single thing and one single person to look at, I can make a video that's ultra specific.
So I've got this new service. You could send me one of your YouTube videos and have me react to it. You could make an unlisted video on YouTube talking about your dating situation and get my feedback. You could send a video you want to post and have me react to it. And then you could do whatever you want with the video I send back, because I never go after people for copyright or anything. I think this is the best idea I've had so far for what I have to offer. And ultimately, the money coming in on my website will be the number one sign of whether that's accurate or not.
Ten times the value you paid
What I love is how endlessly I just keep trying. But I do give up on things quickly if they don't work. I tested the calls, and they didn't work to generate sales. And then there are the haters who say, you're a scammer. A scammer is when somebody fakes offering you something and then doesn't provide it. I'm obsessed with how I can offer you something that gives you 10 times the value of what you paid for it. That's what I'm trying to do. I'm imagining some of you could go to jerrybanfield.com/review, pay for a review, and you would get a thousand-plus dollars back in value, whatever that looks like for you.
Let me give an example. I can't stand all these people offering these dumb coaching programs with an "apply here" button. I will never apply for one of those garbage programs. I don't even watch creators who offer that crap, because it's so exploitive. I shared one experience with paid YouTube coaching in I Tried vidIQ YouTube Coaching—Here's Why I'd Never Pay Again, and I described what I actually wanted in I Built the YouTube Coaching Offer I Could Never Find. This review, to me, is what's valuable. It's like sending a message to ChatGPT, except you know me, you know how I think, and then you get that applied to your situation.
A peer, not an expert
So let's use an example with a dating situation instead of YouTube. Most of the Cameos people sent me were actually about dating. They wanted to ask my thoughts on different dating situations. So let's say you want my specific thoughts on your dating situation. What's beautiful about offering a review is I don't need to be an expert. So many people think, unless someone is an expert at something, or unless I go to the very biggest guy with the most views, I don't even care about that feedback. What I've found is, think about academic research. Peer review, review by somebody who is your equal, is the highest review standard in academic research. That means someone on your level. And that's what I love. My service is not here to be an expert. It is a peer. Even if you think you're just as good at dating as me, I can have a point of view that will be unexpected and helpful. That's why my service is set up so that another YouTuber at a similar level to me would just be interested to see what I have to say about their channel, about their business.
So here's the dating example. You have a dating situation and you want me to make a video back to you talking about it. You go to jerrybanfield.com/review and pay for the review. Then you send an email to review@jerrybanfield.com. You could write out the entire email for me to read. Or you could just grab your phone, start recording a voice memo, and talk for 10 minutes about your dating situation. You could even talk for 20 minutes. Then you email that to review@jerrybanfield.com. What I'll do is hop on my computer, take whatever you've sent me, process it, and react to it in a video.
You can send up to 20 minutes, as long as I can understand you. If you've got a pretty straightforward speaking voice, I can probably listen to you on double speed. If you've got a thick accent, don't expect me to listen on double speed, because I might have to do 1.5 speed or normal speed. But if you've got a pretty standard American or UK accent, I can usually put you on double speed. So you can send me a 20-minute unlisted YouTube video or a 20-minute audio message, I'll put it on double speed, I'll listen to everything, and then I'll hit record. I'll make a personalized 10-minute video for you and send it. I'll email you back and say, boom, I listened to everything you had to say, and here are the thoughts that came up.
Why I say cold approach is for losers
And that could be worth a fortune. Just my thoughts alone could stop you from buying some stupid dating coaching service from some supposed expert who's going to teach you a garbage skill you probably shouldn't even learn. Cold approach, for example. I can't stand these guys out here teaching cold approach. In my opinion, cold approach is for losers. I know because I tried it. When you're walking up to some woman and giving her a compliment on her appearance, it indicates that you're a loser, because if you weren't a loser, you'd have women as friends. You'd have other people to talk to. You wouldn't need to go act like that and disturb a random person who doesn't want to be disturbed and has headphones in. I've had to try some of these things myself. I'm glad I didn't get fooled into buying cold approach coaching from a bunch of these predatory dudes who are preying on lonely guys and trying to teach them a skill that just proves they're a loser by even doing it. Warm approach and social circles, that's what I believe in. Maybe matchmaking. We'll see. I'm going to test the rest of that out. That's the way to go.
Big decisions, personal messages, and reactions
So if you have something, some big purchase you're thinking about, or some big decision, just having my thoughts on it could be massively helpful. Or you might just want to send me a video saying, hey Jerry, I've watched you for 10 years, I'd like you to get to know me, and here's a video of me. I'd just love to send a video back commenting on it, responding to your story or to a personal message you've given me. That's what's so cool: this format is very open. You might be a content creator yourself, and you want me to watch a video you've made and react to it. Somebody like the Barry Janfield Show has said he has a video he wants me to watch. This is the perfect service for that. You send me the video, I'll watch it, I'll react to it, and I'll send you a video back.
And I love that I can do this across all the different kinds of content I create. For example, somebody who watches my gaming videos could ask for a personalized video on what I think of their gaming channel, or what I think of their gameplay. Or you could say, hey, I want you to try playing this video game for 20 minutes and see if you like it and give me your feedback, or make a video of you playing this new game. It's so open.
The time math on $100,000 in 100 days
And when I do the time math on this, I set a goal to make a hundred thousand dollars in the next hundred days, and this is something that could make me a thousand dollars a day in three or four hours of work. Then I could be delivering tens of thousands of dollars a day back to people in value. I've been doing this kind of per-hour math for years, as in Maximize YouTube Views Generated per Hour of Time.
The baseline behind this is that so many people today have fewer and fewer people to talk to. People are at record lows when it comes to having friendships, and especially people who spend their time online tend to have fewer friendships, fewer people you feel like you can really talk to. I figure one of the big things with watching my videos is that I would hope you feel I'm someone you could talk to, or someone whose opinion you'd be interested in when it comes to your exact life situation.
And the beautiful thing is, being there to review whatever you send me will also help me be more understanding of exactly who my audience is. For example, if all I got were gaming channels asking me to review their channels all the time, I'd have a better understanding: oh, a lot of people with gaming channels are watching my Jerry Banfield for Creators channel, so I should do some more content specifically for gaming channels. Or in crypto, if everybody hates meme coins, for example, then maybe I shouldn't be showing my meme coins in every one of my crypto videos. That'll be a valuable opportunity for me to learn and to get to know you as an audience better.
Crank up the time for bigger projects
What's nice with this too is that if you do have a big project you want me to put some serious thought into, you can crank up the time at checkout. For example, if you had six YouTube channels like me, or you wanted me to audit your online business, or you wanted to send me your web traffic for your business along with videos to watch. If you're a business that's making millions of dollars a year and you think, okay, this guy knows a lot about online marketing and content creation, maybe we're wasting some time, maybe we could save some money, then this sets it up where a business could say, look, we're going to give you a thousand dollars, Jerry, and we want you to take three hours to really look at our business, watch the videos we're making, look at our sales funnel, look at all of it, and then send us a very detailed video with very specific things like where we're wasting money and how we can rebuild with AI. For example, I've had a one-on-one call with a business that wanted to rebuild their infrastructure on ICP with Claude. So that's something you could take off with one personalized video.
What's nice is this sets itself up for repeat customers too. Maybe you have a dating question you send me and I fire a video back. Then maybe you have a business question you want to ask about. And then maybe after that you start a YouTube channel and you want me to review your YouTube channel. I wanted something that would have repeat customers also.
And some of you who have your own YouTube channels, including some of these channels that clowned on me and want me to do a video specifically for them: I'm not going to go on their show. Instead of dropping a super chat or asking me to show up and go on their show, which I'm not going to do because it's much more valuable for me to just record videos on my own, what they could do is say, here, we're going to give you 100 bucks, here's a 10-minute clip, give us your reaction. Then they play my entire reaction on the show, post my clip, rip my clip. Somebody could even set me up with some stupid question, get my reaction to it, and then make fun of it. That would expand my mind. Obviously, if anybody asks some really crazy stuff, I can just do what Devin Nash did and refund it and say, no, I'm not going to respond to this crazy stuff. But I'm interested to see if this works. I'm optimistic.
I give up on ideas, not on evolving
I hope what I've shared shows how I think. After all the things I've tried, so many different things, like selling the shirt I keep wearing until it sells on jerrybanfield.com, because somebody is probably going to pay $234 for it, you should see how I don't just give up. I may give up on an individual idea, but I continue evolving. I continue testing. I continue until I find the one thing I need to sell. And this looks like the most promising thing I've offered, because this is what I want. I would love to find 10 YouTubers who had this exact same service, and I would pay every single one of them. I'd pay all of them to look at my YouTube channels. I might pay all of them for an hour. That's three thousand dollars. I might charge three thousand dollars to my business credit card and pay all of them for an hour to look at my channels and give me feedback, because then I'd put all of that together and see anything I was missing.
The one thing it looks like I've been missing is that I just need to be doing videos. I know I've gone back and forth on live streaming so much. I once told small YouTubers to stop making videos and go live for 30 minutes instead. But the more I go live, the super chats just die, which is the trap I described in Being a YouTuber and Twitch Streamer SUCKS Unless You Do THIS. And in the time I take to live stream, I could do what I did today. I filmed four videos today, and this is the fifth. Let me look at the exact time so I have exact numbers. I started filming videos today after I got my kids up, took them to school, and went to yoga class. The first video was finished at 12:01 PM. It is now 2:47 PM, and this is the fifth video I filmed. That's two and a half hours; call it three. So I filmed five videos in three hours. Plus, I've uploaded the rest of them and got them published or scheduled. In three hours. It often takes me three hours to do one live stream.
Now, I'm obsessed with this. I know some of you might think I'm not good with money. But I'm calculating all the time. Once I get the right offer, all the rest of my money is just going to go nuts, because all I'm missing right now is the right offer. I have everything else in position. And I'd love to think this is the right offer. If it is, my money is just going to print from here. I'm setting everything up based on how much per hour my time is worth. This values my time at $300 an hour, and it gives potentially thousands and thousands of dollars back in value in exchange for about a hundred dollars paid. That to me is a good formula for everyone.
And if I look at it honestly: am I going to do a three-hour live stream, and how many reviews or super chats am I going to sell right now? It looks like if I sit here and film five videos, those videos should have the chance to make a lot more in sales, especially over the long term. They should have a chance to make a lot more money than sitting there doing super chats. And my live streams are not watchable. So I may still occasionally do a live stream, but everything just looks like videos, videos, videos, videos. That's the strategy I laid out in One Video a Day: The Simple YouTube Strategy Nobody Wants to Hear. And I want to shorten these vlogs up too, because I don't really need to do a vlog this long, 30 minutes every day, especially since I'm filming videos on other subjects. So I'm going to wrap the vlogs up earlier. You can follow along with every day of this in my Daily Vlogs playlist.
This is the day I launched my review service. I hope some of you have been waiting for me to offer something like this and have something for me to look at. I'm very excited to see your orders. I appreciate you being a part of this journey, and I hope to be looking at whatever you'd like me to review soon.