Aprilynne Alter set herself a deadline. One year. She was going to give herself one year to figure out her future.
As a kid, she’d wanted to be a writer, but when it came time to pick her college profession, she went with hospitality operations. During college, she started working with VC-backed startups, and after graduation ended up in finance on Wall Street.
Her job was the start of a solid career, but she could feel it: Something wasn’t right. She needed to do something different. Something more.
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So, in 2021, she quit. One year–and if things didn’t work out, she’d go back to hustling at startups.
During that one year, she tried launching her own startup, and while listening to podcasts about productivity and biz dev, she came across an episode that featured doctor-turned-YouTuber Ali Abdaal, who has 6.4 million subscribers and makes his living with life coaching videos and paid courses.
“That blew my mind,” she tells Tubefilter. “Because prior to that, I just thought about YouTube in terms of like, ‘Oh, you’re a MrBeast. You’re an Emma Chamberlain.’ Or you look up a video about how to change a tire. That was all I thought about YouTube. But then I heard Ali say, ‘Wait, you can teach on YouTube. You can educate on YouTube.’ I’d never thought of myself as an entertainer, but I’ve always thought of myself as an educator.”
Alter decided that instead of just focusing on a startup, she’d put her eggs into “many many baskets,” and one of those baskets would be YouTube. She started her first channel, and for content, began by making some of her long-form Twitter content (about her experiences with startups, business, etc) into YouTube videos, and then expanding into other niches. The channel reached around 23,000 subscribers, and by then, she already knew two things:
(1) She wanted to launch a second channel, and
(2) That channel would be about how to succeed on YouTube.
Alter arrived at that niche inspired by Abdaal and other productivity experts, and because she knew that she wanted her second channel’s topic to be something “I could talk about for a decade and never get tired of,” she says. “The biggest thing I learned from my first channel is if it’s not a hell yes, it’s a hell no.”
She introduced the second channel in 2023, and was “very, very diligent about only taking on opportunities or putting myself into positions where I genuinely wanted to do the thing,” she says. “I mention that because there are a lot of different ways to monetize on YouTube, and a lot of people in the beginning were asking if I could offer consulting for them, one-on-one. I tried for a couple people and realized that I don’t love it. It’s not something I enjoy doing.”
But those experiences got her thinking. How could she combine her lifelong love of teaching, her newfound knowledge of YouTube, and the coaching people wanted from her?
“In a group environment, I loved it,” she says. “I love breaking down different videos and giving my thoughts and helping people, and the cohort model was particularly intriguing to me because I had taken a cohort myself back when I was just starting YouTube. It was a transformative experience for me, so I wondered if I could create an experience of my own, in a group setting, and curate a number of people who are all intermediate. All above a certain level, but I’d help them get to that next level by providing more personal support and feedback than they would get from watching YouTube videos.”
From these ideas came Creator Crew, Alter’s six-month course. For this first cohort, she’ll accept 30 intermediate-level creators, and the program will be “incredibly action-oriented,” featuring “workshops, time with me, personalized feedback, and action sessions all centered around the exercises and activities that actually drive results,” she says.
Want to make 2025 the year you crush YouTube?
Announcing: Creator Crew 🎉
– 6-month coaching program
– Workshops to level up your YouTube knowledge
– Personalized feedback on your videos
– Action sessions to actually do what matters
– 30 spots
– Intermediate creators only👇
— Aprilynne Alter (@AprilynneAlter) April 11, 2025
But what about Alter’s own leveling up?
She says Spotter plays a major role in it. The creator services and catalog licensing company has expanded over the past year, getting into AI with production platform Spotter Studio and making appearances at creator events like VidSummit and Open Sauce. It also recently held a creator upfront, spotlighting some of our industry’s top makers, from MrBeast, Dude Perfect, Kinigra Deon, Ryan Trahan, and Rebecca Zamolo to Jordan Matter, The Try Guys, Sam & Colby, Airrack, and Michelle Khare.
Alter partnered with Spotter in October 2024 and began using Spotter Studio in her creative process. Even more than that, though, she says having Spotter as a partner has worked for her because of “the reach they have within the creator economy space.”
“There’s the concept of working with a brand in terms of using their product, but there’s also working with a brand when it comes to partner relations,” she says. “On the partner relations side, what’s really freaking cool about Spotter Studio is their presence and the network they have within the creator economy industry.”
She adds that working with Spotter was “an eye-opener for me in terms of the brands I choose to work with, because in brand deals the money you receive for an integration is only one part of it. What else does a brand provide you? What else could come from being affiliated with this brand?”
Events like Spotter’s Ideas Summit, held earlier this year in Los Angeles, are “surreal experiences to be a part of,” Alter says. “That’s something only Spotter could have provided, and those in-person elements are so special in this world where so much is virtual.”
Alter thinks she can accomplish big things with Spotter’s backing. For now, she’s focused on the first Creator Crew cohort, and says that’ll take up much of her time over the next few months, since it’s a “beefy program.” After that, though, there are “larger-scale” things she wants to do, on top of continuing to run one or two Creator Crew courses a year.
“My main thing I love doing is really, really deep research into certain areas of the YouTube world and breaking down the psychology of why things work and why people are doing what they’re doing,” she says. “A lot of people have told me that huge creators use my videos as training material for new members of their own internal teams. How cool would it be if I made my own program training people up to potentially be editors or thumbnail designers? I could maybe help them get placed at big creator companies, or even have those companies send me their people to go through a training program and level up their knowledge.”
Ultimately, Alter says, she’s “an educator at heart, and there’s so much that can be done within the education space and the YouTube space and working those two together. That’s where I’m going.”
Spotter is a Tubefilter partner.
