Welcome to YouTube Millionaires, where we–in partnership with content creator tool Gyre–profile channels that have recently crossed the one million subscriber mark. There are channels crossing this threshold every week, and each creator has a story to tell about YouTube success. Read previous installments here.
Adam Boro has tens of millions of views for videos where he takes travel to new heights.
But planes aren’t quite enough for him.
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He wants to go to the moon.
Before he started uploading videos to TikTok, Boro went to college for aerospace engineering. But, as passionate as he was about space, he eventually realized it “wasn’t for me,” he says. “I wanted to explore something more creative, more along my passions, and I felt like I wasn’t putting myself out there enough in the world and there’s so many things on my bucket list I wanted to do, but I never actually went for it.”
Then the COVID pandemic hit, and suddenly having a bucket list was a little more serious than he’d thought.
He’d begun traveling in late 2019, and while locked down in 2020, he started going through the footage. “I just made a YouTube video highlighting the highs and the lows, like a lot of vulnerable moments for me, and it only got like 2,000 views, but the DMs I got after that, like dozens of DMs, paragraphs, saying how much it impacted people and inspired people,” he says. “For me, this propelled me forward and made me realize what I’m doing, with sharing my voice, is meaningful and people care. That was really inspiring for me.”
Now, Boro is a full-time creator who just hit a million followers on TikTok. And while aerospace engineering isn’t in his cards anymore, he’s still got an eye on the stars: He wants to make a movie on the moon.
Check out our chat with him below.
@adamboro Flying on the the next flight out 😅 The most spontaneous flight of my life… Big inspiration from the movie Yes Man 🔥 #travel #adventure #yesman #spontaneous #bucketlist ♬ original sound – Adam Boro
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tubefilter: Give me a little bit of a rundown about where you’re from and your journey up until joining TikTok.
Adam Boro: My name’s Adam Boro. I make videos on pretty much all social media platforms about living life to the fullest, what it means to live life to the fullest. I go on adventures and put myself into the unknown, to experience the best adventures, to meet amazing people, and to share the stories online. How I got here. It was a very crazy story. I started out my whole life, just loved making videos. I used to use my parents’ VHS recorder thing. It was so passionate about making little videos. I started random YouTube channels that failed.
Then I went to college for aerospace engineering and then I did a lot of internships within that. Almost right at the end of college, I realized this wasn’t for me. I wanted to explore something more creative, more along my passions, and I felt like I wasn’t putting myself out there enough in the world and there’s so many things on my bucket list I wanted to do, but I never actually went for it. Once the pandemic hit, I decided, “This is the perfect time to reinvent myself, to go after the things in my bucket list, and I just started going for it, traveling, going after the things on my bucket list, and sharing the stories online.
Tubefilter: What prompted you originally to go online with this?
Adam Boro: Mainly, I started really traveling in 2019 and that year, I experienced so many serendipitous stories, many life-changing stories while traveling and while living my life to the fullest. I knew if I shared it online, it would inspire other people to also live their life to the fullest. That’s what sparked me to want to really share and put myself out there because I always loved making videos, but I was too shy to share my story. I thought my story didn’t really matter.
Tubefilter: You were shy? You do not come off shy.
Adam Boro: In terms of being online, I was so scared of putting myself out there online. Especially being in front of the camera for– I used to love making videos, but I was always the person behind the camera. I would always be the one editing for my friends, filming my friends, not really showing my face because– I don’t know.
Tubefilter: It surprises me. Wow.
Adam Boro: Then, I don’t know, once I started learning all these experiences and lessons and stuff, it became almost– The only creative outlet, the only way to fully express myself was to be in front of the camera. That’s when I started doing it, and slowly and slowly, I got over my fear.
Tubefilter: That’s so wild. You’re so natural in front of the camera, and it’s such a surprise that was a process to get there.
Adam Boro: Thank you. Honestly, I’m not that natural. A lot of times it takes me a few tries to record the same thing.
Tubefilter: What’s your current production process? Do you aim to post a certain number of pieces of content per week or is it more spontaneous? How do things work for you?
Adam Boro: For me right now, it’s a few different phases. Pretty much every day, I just come up with a lot of random ideas and I jot it down in my Notes app, and then sometimes I’ll hear a song or I’ll see an old clip on YouTube or from a movie, and I’ll start combining these random ideas, and then I’ll turn that into an official video idea. Then from there, I’ll script out how I want the intro to look like and then plan out the itinerary of what I want to do. Then the whole middle process of me filming it is super spontaneous, usually.
I’ll have the initial goal of– For example, a recent trip I went on was hiking an active volcano in Guatemala. I knew what I wanted to record for the intro. Then once I actually got to the volcano, I made sure everything was spontaneous. I would just film a lot of my interactions with my friends and lessons and just the things I was experiencing on the hike. Then once it’s all over, I just import it all on onto my computer and spend a really long-time editing everything.
@adamboro Replying to @adamboro PART 2 – WE ACTUALLY WENT ✈️🗽 🚁: @flynyon 🏙️: @empirestatebldg #travel #bucketlist #ESBVIP #nyc ♬ original sound – Adam Boro
Tubefilter: Then you do all your own editing?
Adam Boro: Yes.
Tubefilter: Do you have anybody else working with you behind the scenes? I know obviously you have Viral Nation.
Adam Boro: Recently, I got an intern.
Tubefilter: Oh, cool.
Adam Boro: He helps me with a lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff. In terms of editing, he helps me do captions. Overall, just a lot of random stuff. Then Viral Nation as an agency.
Tubefilter: Perfect. How do you– Let me think how to phrase this. How do you decide– because you do a lot of traveling and a lot of, I think, things that a lot of people consider spontaneous?” How do you decide what to do? How do you choose a video idea? Do you choose a video idea based on what you already plan to do? Do you plan around videos? How does that work for you?
Adam Boro: It’s a little bit of both. I say I get very inspired a lot by watching videos. Sometimes, if I watch a video on TikTok or YouTube and it shows a really cool place or a cool experience, I’ll write it down. Then, sometimes, I want to– Sometimes, I’ll reverse engineer a video idea. I want to experience something super spontaneous. For example, this movie, Yes Man, I watched is one of my favorite movies. There’s a very specific scene in it where he takes his girlfriend and takes the first flight out. I saw that, and I knew I wanted to make a video about that. It’s not a typical experience that you’d normally do. It’s a very crazy, very spontaneous thing. I knew that’d be a really cool video, and I just went for it.
Tubefilter: That’s wild. The spontaneity is– I feel like really inspiring. A cool thing.
Adam Boro: Yes, spontaneity, the cool thing with that is just you never know what’s what can happen, and, most times, it’s way less scary than when you imagined. The positives are way more unbelievable and amazing than you could’ve imagined too.
Tubefilter: What’s your favorite city you’ve been to?
Adam Boro: Favorite city. That’s a good question. I’d say my favorite city I’ve been to is probably– This– Actually, I’m thinking.
Tubefilter: Don’t worry, I know I put you on the spot.
Adam Boro: I’d say New York is probably my favorite city, actually, that I’ve been to, yes.
Tubefilter: What about your favorite country?
Adam Boro: French Polynesia.
Tubefilter: Why is that your favorite?
Adam Boro: The people there are the most selfless, positive, contagious personality people ever. They’re just so nice, so friendly, and it felt like 100% of the people there are just the most pure, happy people, like happiest people I’ve ever met. Also, of course, it just looks like paradise. Bora Bora is within those islands and, yes, the islands are just– it has the craziest, the most beautiful nature.
Tubefilter: That should be on my bucket list?
Adam Boro: Yes, for sure. It’s so beautiful there. It’s like Hawaii, but, in my opinion, really way nicer.
@adamboro Bucket List: ✅8th wonder of the world🌍… thanks @efultimatebreak for hooking me up with the epic tour! #travel #bucketlist #thisisultimate ♬ original sound – Adam Boro
Tubefilter: What’s your top place that you want to visit or your top thing that you want to do in a future video?
Adam Boro: I’d say the top thing– If we’re talking like very unrealistic, I’d say– or that’s crazy, it’s, I want to eventually, in my lifetime, make a video going to the moon. Make a full movie on the moon.
Tubefilter: It can happen. They’re working on commercial space travel.
Adam Boro: Yes, exactly. It’s becoming more and more commercial and stuff. Being an astronaut has always been the biggest thing on my bucket list.
Tubefilter: Right in line with the aerospace engineering school. I wanted to back up a little bit and just ask about the growth of your audience online because you said, as a kid, you made some YouTube videos and they weren’t very successful, which is very typical of young creators making stuff. Was there a specific video where your audience started taking off and your audience started building?
Adam Boro: Yes. I’d say there’s like…Probably, the most foundational video for me was a YouTube video I made in the beginning of 2020, like January 2020. It was about the best year of my life. It was 2019, that was the best year of my life. I just made a YouTube video highlighting the highs and the lows, like a lot of vulnerable moments for me, and it only got like 2,000 views, but the DMs I got after that, like dozens of DMs, paragraphs, saying how much it impacted people and inspired people, and, for me, this propelled me forward and made me realize what I’m doing, with sharing my voice, is meaningful and people care. That was really inspiring for me. Then I’d say in terms of virality, my first video that hit over one million views was a video about the craziest layover of my life, in San Francisco where I met a few strangers and a lot of cool things happened.
Tubefilter: Do you feel like you ever had a point where you were worried if it was going to work out, or did you throw yourself in and were very committed?
Adam Boro: Oh my. I still doubt myself all the time. I think I doubt myself like at least twice a month. Maybe once a month, I would even, especially in the beginning, once a month, I would seriously consider if I should quit or if it’s going to work out. Especially the views, like my views were really inconsistent back then. I’d make a video, it would get tens of thousands of views, and then the next video would get like 400 views. There were some moments where– especially financially, I just didn’t find– have a way to make money and there wasn’t momentum for me. I really was considering quitting.
Also, this is like on the more spiritual side, but all those times where I hit my lowest, so many– every single time, some kind of serendipitous, almost miracle, happened– something incredible that you could have never predicted happened. There’s this one time where I didn’t have any money, and I was just very scared about the future. I didn’t know how to make this keep going. One of my viral videos somehow reached a person at a company and then they hired me as the “Head of Adventure” for their company.
Tubefilter: Oh, wow.
Adam Boro: Then once that ended, the same thing happened where I doubted myself, and then something else happened where I got connected to someone else or another opportunity that helped me go a little bit further. I think a lot of it is hard work and persistence, but, also, I think the beautiful thing about putting yourself online is “You open yourself up to a lot of luck too” because luck is about putting in the hard work and the preparation and also putting yourself out there and allowing those opportunities to come to you. If you put yourself out there online, show your true authentic self, you’re almost inevitable to find some luck along the way.
Tubefilter: The timing of that is amazing.
Adam Boro: Yes.
Tubefilter: I know a lot of creators feel like they’re just at the whims of the algorithms across all these platforms and they just have no chance for luck of something taking off.
Adam Boro: Yes. Also, just another important piece of advice I give to other creators is to have a really strong purpose in your videos. Whether it’s across all your videos or each video has a purpose on its own, if you have a purpose, it doesn’t matter how many people see it because if 100 people see it and it’s a really important message, then that’ll keep you going, I think. I think a lot of creators don’t really know why they’re making videos. Maybe they’re just seeking fame or something, and it’s really easy to get discouraged if you don’t really have a why.
@adamboro Reply to @sortakindasadie ♬ original sound – Adam Boro
Tubefilter: Yes. You have to have your own individual internal purpose. Do you have any other advice for somebody who’s starting out or looking to build an audience?
Adam Boro: Yes. Ask yourself, what is your message that you want to provide to the world or to people? What is the message you want to give to people? Then a big one is you have to believe in yourself before anyone else believes in you. Especially in the beginning where you have no followers or anything, people are going to doubt you and people are probably going to make fun of you. That definitely happened to me, where people were like, oh, that’s so cute. Adam’s making these little videos on TikTok and stuff. I had to really believe in myself before other people did.
Then I think once you believe in yourself so much, then people will also support you too. It is very important to have that why, and it sounds cheesy and obvious, but you need to be your biggest supporter and believe in yourself.
Tubefilter: That’s not cheesy at all, and I do feel like it’s not obvious to a lot of people. A lot of people…I feel like there’s this self-consciousness about truly enjoying the stuff you make. Like you’re supposed to be self-deprecating. No! You’re supposed to feel like you rock! C’mon.
Adam Boro: Yes. Exactly.
Tubefilter: Aside from going to the moon, which is a very lofty goal, do you have any plans or goals for your content?
Adam Boro: Yes, so I guess like right now, I’m on a road trip from Florida to Alaska, the southernmost point of the U.S. to the northernmost point. I’m halfway through. My immediate goal is to reach the Arctic Ocean and make an impactful video about all the lessons I’ve learned and the stories that have happened and stuff. Then, say, my more long-term goal is I want to make a movie that inspires people and impacts people to want to live their lives to the fullest.
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