Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Has LTT ever been close to failing?”.
Throughout the Run of LTT, as there ever come a time when the channel got jeopardized as in a strike or warning or something similar on the channel or like an All, Is Lost moment uh, I would say that there were some really um scary moments. When YouTube was telegraphing that they were not going to allow third-party brand integration in videos, I mean you guys have seen. How does lmg make money we’ve done that video a couple of times now? That is a huge portion of our Revenue. It’S a huge part of. What’S allowed us to hire people and and build facilities and buy equipment without it we would not be I mean we would survive.
We just. We would not have the kind of amazing world-class team that we have today. So that was a really scary moment when we got uh when we got kicked off of the Amazon affiliate program. That was a super scary moment, because that was a more significant portion of our Revenue at the time. The reason for it is that we were oh. We we felt allowed to promote it nowadays.
We just are super quiet about our Amazon affiliate links just because we don’t want to get kicked off of it again for promoting it wrong um. So so, there’s that oh man, what else what else has been really scary? Beginning yeah, the very beginning, we were almost out of money. Six months in we didn’t have you know, VC funding or anything like that. Yvonne’S bank account was literally our funding and we never did miss a paycheck. We were never late on a paycheck, but it was close.
I I even meant uh before that. Oh almost didn’t even get it right yeah. When we almost didn’t get the channel from NCIX.
It was 11th hour. It was literally the night of December 31st. Yes and lmg was supposed to begin operation. I no longer had a job at NCIX starting January 1. and uh. The the owner of NCIX had not signed the deal selling the channel to us yet over a dispute that, admittedly, I played a role in I. I had uh effectively bailed out of school and no longer had a job either, and I think Ed was in a similar spot.
No Ed was just doing an internship with us. He could have gone back to school at the time. Okay, he never did manage to make it back, but he could have yeah yeah.
That was a that was a tense moment. Yeah, you had probably the most on the line out of all of us. I did which is sort of terrifying. Why on Earth did you do that? I don’t know it’s kind of stupid. Am I that charismatic, like? I don’t think so? What did you believe in um? I’Ve actually reflected on this multiple times and tried to figure out like what the hell? I was thinking uh because I was I was doing really well in school and then basically tanked it all to make less than minimum wage for some weird YouTube channel that when I started, if I remember correctly, had like 60 000 Subs um, but I mean I Saw the trajectory while we were working there and something that I had kind of assumed was like yeah, it’s gon na be super rough, and maybe there isn’t money from Yvonne to pay for paychecks, but we’ll probably figure it out. If we don’t get the YouTube channel, we could start another one right and like it would have been slower, but I was like I’ve gone this far right, like I think a lot of it was that yeah, because at the beginning I was just like. Oh, I want to do this uh and then the four to eight hours that we had discussed initially became significantly more than that yeah per week. Um was the plan that was the original original plan, and then it became more than 40 hours um, but I I I wanted to do it and then I started noticing my grades were slipping and I was like okay, but this is a potential, Maybe career path, I’Ll try to juggle it better.
I mean, I think, both of us like to think we saw web media yeah coming hard yeah like it uh come on. You had to break. I was gon na hold it together.
Luke, I’m sorry um, but yeah no seriously. It was like you could see the path right like it was pretty clear: the growth of not just our Channel but the whole block that was all over everyone’s faces. So Justin TV was around like it. Everything was really cranking up and it and that’s what everyone tells you like. That’S when you want to be on the ground floor.
Yes, so it was like yeah. This is uncomfortable, but this is also the time in my life to do uncomfortable things. So [ Laughter, ] um, so we made it. I think, yeah, there’s still plenty of time. For this to explode. We got to completion yeah, we’re we’re.
I mean we’re going we’re going all the way in we’re in deep right now. I’Ve been very I’ve, been very transparent with you guys about how deeply reinvested Yvonne and I are right now – business is throbbing. We have a, we have a. We have 10 million in debt on the lab more. Actually, I’m rounding okay, we’re at the point where you actually round to to round tens of or tens of millions, okay, so we’re 10 million in on the lab. We are in debt on the lab and then all of our cash is deployed in inventory for a screwdriver and backpack, which is a hundred thousand units of screwdriver and 40 000 units of backpack so like we are we’re all in again um. Fortunately, if this is anything to go by the worst case scenario, is we can just sell all the screwdrivers and backpacks at a loss and we’ll manage to get rid of them, because the velocity on stealth, hoodie sales does not appear to be uh yeah, you guys, Probably didn’t have to go quite to 50 percent. You know, I don’t know man, I I it was.
It was a Thursday afternoon and I was tired and Nick was going to take care of it or no. No Wednesday, Wednesday afternoon was hump day and I was like I don’t know, Nick sure, yeah. Okay, thanks for watching and thanks to xsplit for sponsoring this week’s Clips. Xsplit is perfect for Content creators or businesses, and you can save 10 off with code Linus, using the link in the video description. .