Rebranding My YouTube Channel — Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:00] So I wanted to get on here and tell you about some changes that are happening in the channel. Also some things I've been going through personally, in my life, and creatively. And right up front, I don't want to hold out on the juicy stuff because I know a lot of you will not watch the entire video.

[00:17] So the big change that's happening is Pro Home Cooks is no more. That was the name, that was the brand of this channel for the last five years. and you probably can already see that it is changing, or it has changed, to Life by Mike G.

[00:32] So, new banner, new avatar. That is what you'll be seeing from now on. Might be a little weird at first, I would imagine, after, like, looking at the same branding for many years in a row. But that's really what this video is going to be about.

[00:44] Why I am changing things up on the channel. Just make sure I am recording. Yes, I am. This is what my life has become. I'm drinking matcha out of a kid's cup. I love it. So I've been making videos on YouTube for 11 years now.

[01:00] It doesn't feel that long, but the reason I know that is because you can search my oldest video and it says it right there. 11 years ago, my first video on YouTube. I was making videos before that, and that's what I wanted to talk about.

[01:13] How I actually got to this point. We'll talk about what I've been going through recently, where things are going moving forward. But since it has been over a decade on YouTube, I thought it'd be interesting to update you on that journey.

[01:25] Many of you are coming in recently. Maybe some of you have been along for the entire ride. Comment below if you have. And it's been a very interesting ride. A lot of twists and turns. So when people ask me, like, how I became a YouTuber, the short answer is I just put videos on the internet and boom, here we are many years later with a couple million subscribers on my channel.

[01:46] A little bit more complex when you get into the weeds. So when I was growing up, I was not planning on cooking for a living, let alone being a YouTuber, which of course didn't exist at that time. Although I was making some how-to videos early on in my life, which thank God there wasn't YouTube to post it to, because I probably would have, and this type of stuff would have been public.

[02:10] So I went to college to study architecture. I grew up in the workshop with my dad. I loved building. I started working a job in contracting, and that's what I wanted to do. Not being an architect, I was not smart enough academically to be an architect,

[02:24] but I wanted to make a business building homes. And I definitely dabbled in cooking throughout my younger years. I would cook for some friends every now and then. I would make myself bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches.

[02:36] Simple stuff like that. But it really wasn't until college that I started getting serious and finding my passion for cooking to the point where it started to really take over. I started inviting friends over for dinner parties just to practice and sort of gain skills.

[02:51] And I loved cooking because, one, I was good at it, which was very rewarding. Two, I really liked the experience and joy of cooking for other people. Sharing love through food, which I think a lot of cooks, probably a lot of you can relate to.

[03:07] And number three is I loved the art form of cooking. To me, building and architecture was just a little bit more rigid, a little more permanent. Whereas cooking, the art form of just making something, eating it, starting over, there were just less rules.

[03:21] It felt more free, which was a really good art form for me to express myself. Now, I also at the time had a passion for photography. So I took those two skills, photography and cooking, and I started taking pictures of these crazy food creations that I was making.

[03:35] And I posted them on Facebook, which was the only social media platform at the time, I believe. The only one I was on. And I enjoyed posting pictures. People seemed to enjoy looking at these crazy sort of food porn-esque pictures.

[03:49] So I took that one step further. I made a blog called Everyday Appetite. Thank you, Shane, for coming up with that name. And it was completely just a fun side project hobby at the time. But it was, I guess, looking back, the first official food content I was making.

[04:02] Now, towards the tail end of college, my passion for cooking just kept getting stronger and stronger. to the point where I remember calling my brother at the time and being like, I think I'm going to be cooking for the rest of my life,

[04:15] which was a big shift for me coming from just thinking I was going to be a builder my whole life. So once I had that moment, I just went all in on cooking. I still graduated. I made it through. For me in general, school was always a system that didn't work great for me.

[04:30] Quite recently, I've learned that I definitely had some form of dyslexia. I was never diagnosed, but having dyslexia just does not pair well with the standard academic system. I was much more into art classes, things where I could use my hands and be creative.

[04:45] But unfortunately, there was just a lot less of that in school. That's a whole other topic. But towards the end of college, when I knew I was going to graduate, I went all in on cooking. I was watching a lot of Food Network at the time, just consuming as much food content as I could, learning as much as I could.

[05:03] And around that time when I was consuming all this food content on TV, that's when I first started to have this little inner monologue of like, I think you could do that. You could make some version of your own cooking show, which then started the process of figuring out how I could do that.

[05:18] Because this was way before the days of high quality iPhones and TikTok, or you could just film a video on your phone, pop it online, go viral overnight. That did not exist. So all of this cooking show stuff was kind of floating around in the background,

[05:33] but I was still thinking about more of a traditional career in the cooking space, but I did not want to work in a restaurant. That was something that I just never had a desire to do. So I started catering for people, taking on any job I could get. And my brother at the time,

[05:47] he was living in Brooklyn and he was in a band called The Cannon Logic, which I've linked below, some of my favorite music of all time. They're not playing anymore, but you can still listen all their music and it is amazing. And Josh was really living the struggling artist's life. And

[06:02] he was actually supporting this musician life through cooking as well, doing some side gigs. So when I got out of college, the area I was in, I just wasn't really satisfied with the type of gigs I was getting. And there was a roommate moving out of Josh's loft, who was actually my

[06:17] best friend. He moved out and Josh called me up and he said, you should move in and we'll make it happen together. Like we'll start cooking together and we will get by. And Josh had already created a little underground network in the cooking space in Brooklyn So when I came up to live with him we just started getting any job we could get We catered a few weddings We did business lunches We did meal prep for people like delivering lunches every day We did a lot of private dinner parties which is actually how I met my wife

[06:47] But all of the money that we were getting from catering was just meant to supplement the creative stuff that we were doing on the side. Josh being a musician, me trying to make these cooking videos.

[06:59] But by the graces of the universe, another band member moved out of the studio and in moved this guy, Adam, who was a filmmaker from NYU at the time. And I remember being in college watching some of his videos that he actually made of my brother's band, like little music videos.

[07:16] and thinking in my head, damn, this would be a cool collaboration. This style with cooking content could be very interesting. And this is just when the first Canon 70mm 5Ds, they came out for the first time.

[07:29] The first DSLR cameras, where you took these photography cameras and gave them the ability to film things, which completely revolutionized the film industry at the time. And still to this day, I would say 90% of YouTubers, I'm filming on one right now, use DSLR cameras.

[07:46] So Adam at the time really just started filming our life. We had no idea what we were doing or what we wanted to do. And that kind of went on for close to a year. We were never actually producing content. It was just filming things.

[07:58] Until finally one day I said, it is time to just make a cooking show. I don't know what I'm doing, but let's just go up to the roof. I had this big roof garden I created. And we just went for it. he started filming me making some fried squash blossoms.

[08:12] And my brother was there hanging out, and he came in midway through, and that's when something very interesting happened, which is Adam caught this dynamic of Josh and I on camera cooking together, the banter, the antics, and that was really the foundation of Brothers Green.

[08:27] And in hindsight, looking back, I don't think I was ready to make my own cooking show at the time. I needed Josh. We needed each other to make it. And that's why we joined forces. We trusted each other.

[08:39] We knew we could do this together. We had something that we could package up. And we just went for it. So we ended up filming 10 more episodes in this style over the course of about a year.

[08:51] We called the show You North. And we put it on Vimeo, which was considered like the cooler filmmaker place to post your videos. YouTube at the time was not considered cool, at least in my eyes.

[09:04] This was 2011, maybe? You can still watch some of those New York episodes below. It was really just, uh, how do you explain it? Our cooking musician hipster lifestyle packaged up and edited into a cooking show, I guess.

[09:21] Whatever it was, we loved making it, and it actually caught the attention of some executives. Now, at the time, YouTube was trying to make a push to be a little bit more legitimate and compete with television.

[09:33] So Google granted like $300 or $400 million to YouTube, which they then divvied up to all of these production companies with the goal of making these sort of official channels. It was a big experiment.

[09:45] One of those channels was considered like the food network of YouTube, and they called it the Hungry Channel. And the producers at the Hungry Channel saw what we were doing with you, Norik, and brought us in to make a show, an official show for the Hungry Channel.

[09:59] And we filmed three seasons of this show called Midnight Munchies. which was so crazy to film. We had a blast. It was super high production value. I learned so much from just filming those shows,

[10:11] from being on set. But there were a few things that just completely failed with this entire experiment of Google trying to up production and investing all this money. Number one is they just didn't understand at the time the economics of having a YouTube channel and making money.

[10:26] Our first season production, I think they gave us $120,000. There was probably 15 people on set. We're talking full-on TV production, which is completely unsustainable. They were just burning through budget.

[10:39] And number two is that a lot of these people that were running these production companies were coming from TV looking to do something kind of new and exciting, but they still had too much TV ingrained in their brains.

[10:51] So they thought they were running an actual television channel. And on television, you have multiple shows, you have multiple hosts. And I think at one point on the Hungry Channel, there were like 15 shows going with 15 different hosts.

[11:03] And as all of you know now, that's not how YouTube works. You want to go to the channel and you expect to see that one person you connect with and you subscribe to multiple channels to get different personalities. So, of course, everything just crashed and burned and they ran out of money.

[11:17] But we knew that we had a good fan base from the Hungry Channel. And at the time, I did not want to start a YouTube channel and do everything myself. It sounded very overwhelming. But one of the executives at the Hungry Channel, he had just gone to like a VidCon or something.

[11:32] And he came back and he's like, the future of YouTube is just starting your own channel. You guys should just go for it. So Josh actually convinced me. He said, let's do it. And we started a channel.

[11:44] And the great thing about being on Hungry is we had maybe 20,000, 30,000 fans that just instantly came over from the Hungry Channel to kind of just get us up and going. And those early episodes on YouTube were, I mean, you can still see them if you search by the oldest videos.

[12:01] We're talking filming on iPhones, no lighting, probably no sound. And to me, that is the beauty of being a YouTuber. It's all about upgrading over time, just starting.

[12:13] And then, you know, 10 years later, I've got a full studio. I understand production and lighting and sound and cameras. And a lot of that I learned from YouTube, which is this perfect synergy. I love it. But even though we had a YouTube channel at the time, being a YouTuber was still not the goal.

[12:28] For us, it was having an actual television show, which I think is kind of natural. Whatever you grow up with, singing all the time, thinking that that's the best, that kind of continues on into your dreams. And we sort of willed that into reality, and we got a television show on MTV International a few months later.

[12:46] Now, MTV at the time was trying to rebrand itself a little bit to get out of the sort of trashy reality television. So they brought us in to create this sort of wacky cooking variety show where we would be able to bring in some celebrity talent and musicians entering into that MTV system and cook for them and interview them, which was kind of wild.

[13:06] We traveled around the world for two years doing exactly that which I will say kind of turned me off of celebrities in general that a really bad taste in my mouth I will not say specific people of course people

[13:20] are people some famous celebrities are great some are not so great but in general I just have trouble with people that think they're just better than you because they're famous it was a

[13:33] Good learning experience. The show in general was fun. Unfortunately, MTV was not able to rebrand out of this trashy Jersey Shore, Acapulco Shore, Warsaw Shore.

[13:47] There was like a hundred shores at the time. And I mean, I don't even know what's going on with MTV anymore. It's even a thing at this point. But the beginning of the end for MTV was long before we got there. The show got canceled. And the entire time we were making that show, we were still filming for our YouTube channel, just flipping things in.

[14:05] We'd film in hotel rooms on the road. When we got back, we'd make videos. But it was still a little bit of a side hustle. And we thought that having a TV show would also bring people over to our YouTube channel, which was not the case.

[14:17] Another great lesson learned. Different platforms are different platforms, and they don't always interconnect. And that TV show did nothing for our YouTube audience. So, once that was over and we were done with TV, we went all in on YouTube.

[14:31] That's when we started getting more production gear, that's when we got an agent, and that was when we really started doing consistent videos and just getting better at making videos on our own. We were finally figuring out some viral concepts.

[14:44] Both Josh was filming his own videos, I was filming my own videos, we were filming together. It was the wacky world of Brothers Green Eats, which I'm sure a decent chunk of you followed along with. There were some cracks in the foundation of Brothers Green.

[14:59] Josh and I were having some personal issues at the time. I'm not going to get into them to just protect our own privacy. We have since worked out all of these issues. We are great friends again.

[15:11] We recently collaborated on camera for the first time in many years. But creatively, we were also in different places. It was kind of like we were two CEOs trying to run one company, and there was just too much clashing happening.

[15:25] They wanted things to go in different directions. And for me at the time, I was starting to go deeper into my cooking practice, learning how to ferment things, becoming a better baker, learning how to make all of these different things from scratch. And the Brothers Green brand was really about munchies,

[15:40] cooking in your dorm room, quick four-ingredient meals, and things were just not in sync, which of course is a problem. So I don't think anyone actually knows this. I don't know if I've told anyone this. People think I just like took over the channel and kicked Josh out.

[15:55] That is not what happened. Over the course of time, we were figuring out that it was not working, but there's no answer on what to do moving forward. So actually my wife one day was like, you should buy the channel from Josh,

[16:07] which seemed crazy because that wasn't a thing that like you did on YouTube. I still don't think many people do that. But the feed was planted and I started thinking about it. And that's exactly what I did. I actually bought the channel, so pretty much bought the business of Brothers Green from Josh,

[16:24] and then I was able to rebrand it into Pro Home Cooks. At the time, it was about a million and a half subscribers, I believe, and I turned it into Pro Home Cooks, which for me just really signified what I was going through at the time,

[16:38] this journey on becoming a better home cook, because what I was realizing through Brothers Green, through putting out these cooking videos on the internet, seeing all of these comments, what I felt like was missing in the cooking space was content

[16:51] 100% dedicated to home cooks. And since I never was professionally trained and never entered into any professional kitchen, I felt like I could be the person to deliver that content. And that was

[17:06] the beginning of Pro Home Cooks, a channel dedicated to just deepening your home cooking practice, learning meal prep, learning fermentation, learning how to use these appliances that can help

[17:18] you elevate your home cooking. These ideas, this concept was really just like exploding out of me at the time, which led to a lot of immediate growth with the channel. And I had always been filming in my apartments. I finally decided to get an official studio. I got a space in Brooklyn. I

[17:33] built it out completely from scratch, knowing that I would be able to produce more content. And I was just off to the races. And that's the content all of you have been experiencing for the last five years. But as a human being, things are always changing. Life is changing. Your surroundings

[17:50] are changing. YouTube is changing. And a few years ago, the biggest change happened in my life, which was having my first daughter. So we had our first daughter at the very pinnacle of that first

[18:02] COVID wave, to the point where I almost wasn't allowed in the delivery room. That's how crazy things were. I was only in my Brooklyn studio for like two or three years. I was planning on putting in a bunch more years in that place. And my wife was from Long Island. We had always planned on

[18:17] coming here at some point. But I still had, personally, I had a few more years at least to put in in Brooklyn, in that studio. I loved being in Brooklyn. It was so creative. I loved that studio. But we left the city. It was kind of like ripping a band-aid. We left earlier than planned.

[18:32] We came out to Long Island and it was a tricky transition because I was still commuting back and forth on Long Island to my studio in Brooklyn, which anyone who knows that commute knows it's terrible.

[18:45] And I was hauling food and then trying to be on camera. It sucked. So I was getting a little depressed after doing that for a year and I knew I had to put some roots and shift my business out to Long Island.

[18:57] It was the only way things were going to work. So I was looking all over the place for a studio, kind of trying to recreate exactly what I had in Brooklyn, because that's what I knew. But just couldn't find a classic loft-type studio space here on Long Island.

[19:10] And then I came across this place, which just kind of blew me away. Loved the potential of the kitchen, all of this natural light, which I love filming in when it comes to food. and of course the outdoor space and the potential of growing food,

[19:24] which for me, really, when I thought about it, was the ultimate dream. Although I got away from it for a long time, when you look back at the original videos, the first thing I ever was filming was just myself in the garden,

[19:39] making cooking videos inspired by what I was growing. So I came into this space I renovated the kitchen I started making gardens and I was still just cruising with videos for Pro Home Cooks And at the time the channel was still really growing And there was sort of this

[19:53] internal pressure that I was putting on myself that I had to build it into something bigger, like turn the brand into something bigger than just making YouTube videos, which I think also came from a little bit of a macro trend on YouTube. A lot of creators were turning just

[20:09] this passion for making videos into a bigger business. And that's what I tried to do. I started a multi-brand shop at ProHomestooks.com, teaming up with all of these brands that I had worked with and formed these relationships over the years through making content. I was also working on

[20:25] creating a few of my own products. And all of this felt right at the time. It felt good on paper. But what happened was, slowly, it was like a cruise ship just kind of gearing off course. Very slowly,

[20:39] things started to fall out of alignment for me. And it was such a slow, gradual process. But one day, I kind of realized that the thing that I used to love, like wake up every day just so excited to go to work and make content,

[20:55] that joy had faded away a little bit. It started to feel like a job. Which is crazy because I created this whole job out of nowhere by just following my passion, doing things that I love. And then out of nowhere, I'm like, this isn't fun anymore.

[21:11] And that's when I started to make some big changes in my life. Maybe two years ago, it started. And my North Star at the time, the main focus for me was writing this in my journal every single day, was just finding the joy again.

[21:24] I just wanted to wake up again being excited to go to work because that's what I had lost. And to do that, it wasn't an easy process. Whenever you're trying to go through a big change like this, it's not easy.

[21:36] It's like you got to turn that cruise ship that got off course back on course. And it's not a speedboat that just scoots right back on course. Oh man, you got to put in the effort. And for me, it was reading books.

[21:49] It was journaling. It was therapy. It was coaching. It's a slow, gradual process. Just having that North Star of finding the enjoyment again. And from that, I started making a lot of changes in my business.

[22:02] I got rid of the weight. the things that were weighing me down and not serving me. So we shut down the shop at pronecooks.com. We turned it all into affiliates. Ultimately, again, it made sense on paper, but it was just not creative enough for me.

[22:16] And even though I had people helping me run it, it just still took too much mental energy away from the stuff that I really love doing, which is making videos. And for anyone who did buy products from pronecooks.com,

[22:29] I appreciate the support at the time. Hopefully those products worked out for you. Again, they were all brands that I did love. It just wasn't the right business for me. So I got rid of the shop. I tightened up my team and just kept focusing on that North Star.

[22:43] And one thing at the time that I was realizing was my Instagram, which was liked by my gig, not by choice, but because Instagram would never let me change it to ProHomeCooks.com. That ended up being a little bit of a safe haven for me.

[22:57] As I was experimenting with different types of content, more garden stuff, more lifestyle stuff and cooking stuff, I felt a little less restricted on that platform. I felt more expansive creatively where the Pro Home Cooks brand on YouTube, it just felt like it had these walls

[23:12] and my content had to be contained in them, which is when I started thinking that, okay, maybe the Pro Home Cooks brand is not serving me anymore. And one thing I've learned that to me is

[23:24] like the key to success on the internet and on YouTube is that you've got to stay inspired. YouTube has kind of turned creativity into like a professional sport. It is this sort of professional league of creativity to some degree.

[23:39] And to do it at a high level, I think as a creator, you have to stay inspired. Because all of you, you probably feel if we're bored or we're uninspired and we're just producing the same content, you'll just stop watching.

[23:52] And for me, the game is to do this for a long time. Been doing it for a decade and I want to keep doing it. That is one thing that I've learned through this whole process is I just love making videos.

[24:04] I want to continue making videos, putting out inspiring content. And to do that now, I felt like I needed to change the brand from Pro Home Cooks to Life by Mike G. Really, because it just feels like I have more space to do what I want under that brand.

[24:20] And I don't really think outside of the branding looking a lot different, this is a major change. The content that I've been slowly shifting to and making over the last year or two, That's the content that I'm probably going to keep making and I'll keep growing and finding new formats.

[24:34] But I do know that Pro Home Cooks, that mission, that brand is just not serving me anymore. I made hundreds of videos under Pro Home Cooks. I had a lot of success with Pro Home Cooks. I hopefully inspired a lot of you to become better home cooks.

[24:49] And that journey in my life is over. I also think that concept was more niche at the time when I was doing it. Now there's thousands of people doing similar types of content. and really life by my g it represents where I'm at right now which is being able to share what's

[25:04] going on in my life I've always just loved learning things making videos about them and sharing them and right now a lot of that is still focused around food but there's just more lifestyle stuff

[25:16] as well there's more gardening and I want to just be able to make the content that inspires me I can say that over the last year of making some of these changes I have found that joy in making content again. I think this rebrand will just take it a step further and the ideas are just

[25:31] flowing again and most importantly every day I'm excited now to come to work and make content. So that is my rant. That's I guess what's coming. Can I answer what's coming? We'll have to see. But the

[25:45] last thing I'll say is just thank you. Wherever you got on board on this journey on this channel, If you've been watching since the hungry days, brothers green, throw home cooks, or maybe you just subscribed,

[25:57] thank you for watching and supporting this channel and letting me, you know, keep on doing what I love to do. This really is my passion. It's a dream job. I'm very grateful I get to do it, and I take that very seriously as well.

[26:13] I want to keep doing this and keep putting out great content. And, yeah, thanks for making that happen. and thank you for watching.