This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with the former YouTube employee Alex Costa, who left the company to become a full-time content creator and men’s hair care entrepreneur. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
When I was first hired at YouTube to work in the gaming division after six rounds of interviews, it was the happiest moment of my life. But I joined with another dream in mind: being a full-time content creator.
I’ve always been entrepreneurial. I’d started a channel before I got hired, and held various jobs in the online gaming industry.
When I joined YouTube, I already had about 130,000 subscribers, which still didn’t feel like enough to branch out on my own. But the company was supportive as I continued building the channel while I worked there.
In the summer of 2017, there was a transition in my content. I was getting sick of gaming, and pivoted to men’s grooming and fashion videos. Viewers were asking questions about what I was wearing and how I styled my hair. I didn’t have any training or even a passion for it, but the concept of self-improvement as a whole has always resonated with me.
Those videos outperformed anything I had ever posted, and I started to gain traction with brands.
I’d set a goal. I told myself that once I’d saved $100,000, I could quit. I achieved that by the end of 2017, and in early 2018, after almost three years at the company, I walked into my director’s office and told him I was taking a leap of faith. He said he knew it was coming, but didn’t realize it would be so soon.
Quitting YouTube was the toughest, scariest, and best career decision I’ve made in my life. I was scared, but there was no plan B.
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I landed one of my first 6-figure brand deals a year after I left
I became a millionaire as an influencer before starting my own brand.
There weren’t many men’s lifestyle influencers when I started — now it’s almost the norm. But I was the top dog at the time and it was very profitable. In 2018, the year after I quit, I made five or six times my YouTube salary. I landed one of my first six-figure brand deals with Old Spice roughly a year after I left YouTube. There were others, including with Whoop and Amazon.
Hair has always been my No. 1 topic, and reviewing products that sometimes had more feminine packaging or scents gave me the idea to develop my own brand. There was space for something that speaks directly to men, and I knew my audience, which is mostly male, could serve as the best feedback loop in developing it.
Forte Series was completely bootstrapped, and I’ve never taken any money out of the company. We sold out of our first launch in October 2019 — about $50,000 worth of product in a month and a half. Today, it has eight full-time employees, in addition to myself and my cofounder, Brian Yang.
And we’re growing. The company drove $3.8 million in sales in one year starting April 1 on Amazon in the US. That’s not counting other sales channels like Shopify, Amazon International, and the roughly 100 barbershops where it’s available worldwide.
The brand is on track to do $10 million in revenue in 2025.
A costly mistake
There have been stumbles along the way. One of the biggest was trying to launch separate brands for skincare and clothing, Apricus and Aetos. The skincare has now been folded under Forte, and the clothing line has stopped production.
It was a costly mistake because the same team was working on multiple brands, which created resource constraints because everyone’s focus was split. We were also taking money from Forte to pay for purchase orders from the other brands, rather than reinvesting that money back into Forte, which was the real winner.
I was initially embarrassed about having to tell my audience that I’d failed as a businessman, including everyone who had supported me by buying the products. Thankfully, they were understanding, and as much as it hurt, it was also a huge weight off my shoulders.
As I look to the future, the scariest thing for a content creator is to be irrelevant. I get bored easily, and I’ve become good at being a chameleon. And I have a lot more to offer than just being the fashion and hair guy on YouTube. Recently, I started a new YouTube channel sharing more about my journey as an entrepreneur.
At the end of the day, I just want to give guys confidence. That’s been my entire purpose. I see what I do as not just entertainment, but about building confidence through value.