I decided like I didn't want to do it anymore. So I basically just went ghost on the internet because I wanted to build something real That was detached from my face. Remember this guy Sebastian Georgia if you've been around youtube the last few years you might have seen him flashy cars Flexing on camera making millions and building the youtube channel that hit nearly 1 million subscribers But then he disappeared. No uploads. No flexing just gone So I reached out bro. What happened and what he told me completely blew my mind Instead of doubling down on being an influencer Sebastian walked away from it completely. He decided to build a software business behind the scenes No youtube no personal brand and today that business is doing hundreds of thousands of revenue with a team of 10 people I brought Sebastian onto the channel to talk about it and he shares Why he walked away from being an influencer at his peak What he learned in the process about the pros and cons of building an audience-based business And how he proved to himself that he could build a real business This was an awesome conversation and I hope you enjoy it. I'm pat walls and this is starter story All right, Sebastian welcome to the channel. Tell me about who you are what you build and what's your story My name is Sebastian Giorgio and I've been doing online business for quite some time now I started out with dropshipping and e-commerce and I got into youtube not too long after that But currently I'm doing a software sass. That's my latest venture today We are a team of 10 plus people and we're generating Multi six figures a month in recurring revenue But we're well on our way in the direction that I I wanted to go in and the direction that I set out When I stopped posting. All right. Well to be honest Sebastian We don't usually bring on big influencers in the space. You have a million subscribers on youtube But there's a reason for that you decided to build a software business without using your personal brand Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Yeah, so, you know after this last stint of posting content on the internet and going mega viral you know, I had this this feeling like I had to Basically turn on a camera and talk and get attention in order to make money and like most of my income was tied to that I really wanted to break away from that I really wanted to break that chain and I set out to build like this real sass company and I didn't want to do it In a way where I was going to use my personal brand to make videos and talk about the sass I wanted to do it like the cave way where I just locked myself in my room and build it the hard way and grow it Naturally and that's exactly what I did. All right. Well before we get into this business that you built I do want to go back. What was it like building an audience-based business and being a huge influencer in the space? It's kind of the dream that a lot of people have growing up and watching Jake Paul or like all these influencers like just blow up and become famous and make so much money and live in these Cool places and hang out with cool people Anything I did would make money and would do well as long as I was talking about it But there were sometimes like a little bit of a mismatch, right? Like people would think that you're this person but deep down you're really actually this person and sometimes Those would deviate and you wouldn't feel so aligned with like your internet personality But it was cool all around it was a great experience like I look back and I don't regret it at all It was really fun. I think what you had is amazing I think a lot of people watching this would kill to be in your position to be able to have millions of subscribers You can build pretty much anything and someone will probably buy I guess my question to you is why did you decide to stop making videos and really kind of go silent? Yeah, so I didn't want to post videos anymore And I think that the fundamental reason why was because I felt very misaligned when I was making this type of content I was making content and I was being someone that either I a didn't want to be or b didn't feel like I truly was I had this clip that went viral on tiktok. Well went viral everywhere And it was like the Lamborghini clip if you're a guy in your 20s and you don't have a Lamborghini You should actually sit down and have like a serious discussion with yourself as to why you don't have a lambo I looked at like how many impressions it had on twitter just twitter alone And it was like a hundred million vox did like a piece on me. I got two fox interviews So obviously that clip made me a lot of money But what I realized through this last stint of going like as viral as I ever have was that I don't Really want to be the guy that says all these controversial things. I wasn't desperate then but I was like I really Would like to build something that doesn't have my face attached to it I would really like to build something in a way that it will continue to grow and pay me dividends Even if I never have to turn a camera on again. So that's kind of when I started to transition Okay, so you decided to go and basically start over build a totally different business Why'd you decide to build a sass business? The first reason was that as I started to learn more about sass I predicted that if I had just built my sass business on the back of my personal brand and me telling my own fans to buy it It wouldn't survive in the wild when I say wild I mean in the market and among the competition of other sass companies that would build similar products of mine And I also saw that other influencers that started sass businesses, you know They come and go I wanted to prevent that and avoid that if I could and I thought that building this product in the wild And creating something that was truly good enough for people to adopt and pay For naturally and share with their friends naturally and to get people talking about it without me convincing them to I thought that was a better strategy The second reason why is because honestly, I wanted to prove it to myself people always saw me as this business guy And I had influencer businesses, but I never truly felt like a good competitive player in the space So part of me was just like, you know what? I'm going to do this like I know I can do it I can do anything I want so I went all in literally all chips on the table which was super risky Into a new area, but it worked. I mean we hit 250k in june a couple months ago Now the business is on a growing and sustainable path. All right, so you decided to build this software business But how did you vibe code this? Did you hire a developer? How did you actually build this thing? I had a co-founder neither of us were technical You know, we've hired a lot of developers a lot of them weren't very good because we didn't know what we were doing But every time we made a good hire the boat lifted for everyone, you know what I mean? And then in january of this year, I literally chucked myself into the deep end of the water I bought out my co-founder for a lot of money at the time and that was when we were at like 13 or 14k mr It was extremely scary and I remember putting it in my notes. I put on january 6th I bet everything on myself. I also wrote like a revenue target and funny enough the revenue target right under that note Was you know exactly what you need to do to get to 250k a month in recurring revenue? So just lock in and do it one thing at a time and now we've gotten to a point where We're pretty lean team, but all of the engineers. They're all like the best we've ever seen They're really really good and that being said it still is incredibly hard to find talent And so if anyone is watching this we're always willing to work with talented people So if you're a designer if you're a developer even if you're good at cro any sort of value You think you could provide in that area Definitely reach out to us. We'd love to talk to anyone Okay, so what I really want to kind of talk about and I think you might be one of the only people that's done both You've built an audience-based business million subscribers on youtube And then you've built a completely different business that didn't really rely on your personal brand I want to ask you the question. Do you think that audience really matters when it comes to building software? Or any sort of online business in 2025? You could do it with an audience. You could do it without an audience as well But there's no question about it. No doubt audience makes everything way easier And it was that case for me too. Like I said, I didn't post videos on my youtube channel and directly drive traffic to the software But I did use my personal brand as a leverage a lot. I mean people knew who I was It was easy for me to reach out to people You know developers did want to work with me from time to time If I made a post on twitter about hiring people I would get applications And I think that also definitely contributes quite a bit to how fast we were able to do it and like the speed at which we're going So it doesn't matter in the end because like I said, you can do it no matter what but having an audience Definitely definitely makes it easier Okay, I mean we kind of talked about the pros and the cons of being an influencer and being big in the space and building a business around that But what are the cons of the downsides that you noticed of building a product-based business without a big sort of audience basis? Well, I'll start with the cons the cons are you're going from like an audience from applause to straight performance Like you have to be Straight competent. That's all that it is. You need to be working all the time a lot more You're going to have stress. You're going to have problems. You're going to have Payroll it's way harder But the pro is that it's just way way more fulfilling and you have freedom like genuine freedom And if you have a business or that's attached to your face in a personal brand you are kind of cuffed to the camera in a way So I wanted to break that chain for myself. That's kind of like the the tail end of like the journey or the path on a motto All right, before we go back to sabashan's story Let's talk about the bigger lesson here He built a business that makes hundreds of thousands of dollars per month without his youtube audience Which proves that what really matters is finding an idea that people actually want And just shipping it and that's exactly why we created starter story build It's our program where we help you take a simple idea build it with ai coding tools and actually ship it to the world You don't need to have a million subscribers or even a big following at all with ai You can build and launch your first app in days not years and we'll guide you through it step by step If you're ready to stop waiting and actually start building check out starter story build The first link is in the description now. Let's get back to sabashan What I think is really cool and what you're talking about a lot is this sort of identity change that you went through Once you decided to drop the sort of influencer based business and go to a business that didn't use it Uh, how did that feel in that moment and what was hard about it? Yeah, it's a good question It was really hard, especially when I felt like I didn't want to post anymore on the internet And I didn't want to turn on the camera anymore and I was like Well, how am I going to make money if I don't do that? You know what I mean? Like how am I going to make money if I don't monetize attention? and I was like Kind of a burn the boats moment where it's like I'm either going to swim or drown Well, thanks for sharing that if you were starting over from scratch Would you go build that audience build in public? Or would you go behind the scenes operator mode like you're doing today? If you're going to build an audience, you have to be talking about something. That's the only way I built mine You can start a business that you like build an audience Don't get carried away in the audience side of things always focus on the business at one point when you can sustainably live off the income from the business Double down on that and go all in on the business It's going to be hard for people because it's more of a long-term play versus a short-term play If you get to a point where you have like a business Let's say you're making 10k a month and you have an audience and you're making 10 20k a month There's going to be a moment where you have to pick it's like do I tweet more? Do I make an info product? Do I look out for sponsors or do I code more and do this? And one of those things is going to bring you very quick cash and it's very short term The other one is going to be better for you long term And I would advise people to try to stay on the long-term path instead of the short-term path I mean, that's great without a personal brand. How did you actually grow this business? How did you take this business from zero to 250k in about nine months? What were the actual marketing channels? Yeah, the way we got it off the ground was we would share it with some people People would use it in like discord communities a little bit to help out we kept on improving it we kept on listening to the customers and It grew to 10k a month fairly organically as it got to a much better place and to a good place where we felt pretty confident We reached out to a couple people on youtube to make videos about it and then we started up with short form content So at first we weren't getting any views But we were studying like what others were doing and then we created a system with content That would get a lot of views and go viral and bring a lot of awareness to the brand And then eventually we started paid ads as well All of these things started to reinforce each other together And they built like a flywheel of some sort where somebody would make a youtube video And then like we would have shorts made of that video. We'd post the shorts We would have ads made with that video. We would use ads and then people would kind of start to see it everywhere so youtube videos short form content and paid ads makes up 60 to 65 percent of our total traffic Of course, we have affiliates chadgbt. If you ask the right questions, we'll get put up in chadgbt SEO of course, it's ranking quite high now. I like the app store itself Brings in traffic as well people just searching for the tools. It's very diverse What I think is sort of interesting about that is the growth channels here are content, right youtube short form content and paid ads Which is probably a lot of content as well that are being shown as ads Do you think that all your skills and experience that you'd built up on youtube Helped you in indirect way to build the kind of growth machine for this business Yeah, I mean there's no doubt about it Like these skills that you build these people that you know these things that you learn They benefit you in some way and it creates like this compounding force that makes you like somebody that's a good at business or a good at marketing or good at whatever so I Absolutely, absolutely think that everything that I've done has led me to this moment And the reason why it's working is because of everything that I've done and everything that I've gone through like 100 percent Awesome. Well, thank you for sharing that the last question that I have for you Is it a question we ask all founders who come on starter story if you could stand on young Sebastian's shoulders either before you're getting started or when you kind of made this big change in the type of business that you wanted to build What would be your advice the biggest thing is um failure is normal, right? So it's in those moments that you fail that you wonder if like are you smart enough? Are you good enough? Do you have what it takes? But that's just part of the process every single person fails and really the most successful people are just the most successful failures They have the most failure But they are crazy enough to keep going and then also I would say never compare yourself to others Like I know No matter what I say no matter what I do people are going to watch this video and some people will be jealous Some people will be like, oh, he had it easy. He had his personal brand or all like lucky him like whatever They're gonna compare themselves to me and I would advise you to try to not do that Everyone in the world does it. I do it all the time. I look at people above me and I feel envious Or I feel jealous what you really should be doing is just comparing yourself to yourself So as long as you keep winning then that's that's all that matters. All right. Well, thank you sabashin for coming on the channel I think that super cool to see your journey going from big creator in the space and now big behind the scenes building an awesome business Personally your channel is a huge inspiration for starter story. I remember watching your videos and seeing men one day We can maybe get to a million subscribers. So that's super cool. So thank you for coming on taking time out of your day And I hope people watching this enjoyed it. I just wanted to thank sabashin again for coming on to the channel I personally love his story because it shows that followers don't automatically equal a good business What matters in the long run is building something durable Something people actually want and I know a lot of you watching want to do the same So why not start building now? This is why we created starter story build It's our platform where we will guide you step by step on how to use ai to go from an idea to an app In just a few days. You don't need millions of followers or a huge audience Just an idea and the willingness to try so if you're ready to take that first step Just head to the first link in the description to learn more about starter story build Thank you guys for watching. Let me know what you thought about this in the comments. I'll see you in the next one. Peace
