In our industry, it’s easy to celebrate wins. YouTube helped set the standard when it began giving creators plaques for hitting certain subscriber milestones, and we still see the digital content news cycle thriving with stories about entrepreneurial creators snagging big investments, landing Netflix deals, and generally leveling up, turning what was once their hobby into a full-fledged (and often lucrative) career.
But in the spaces between those stories, there are creators struggling. Some simply never manage to find their audience despite significant effort. Others do manage to find viewers, but grow tired of their niche or feel like things are becoming stale. Some are discouraged by platform changes; others hit a growth plateau and don’t know where to go next. Making videos is hard, and creators often don’t have anyone to guide them. They have to figure things out for themselves.
That’s what Minecraft creator SystemZee has been doing. He was a teenager during YouTube’s early days, and grew up watching channels and creators like Smosh and Ray William Johnson. Once he realized he could upload content, too, he jumped into making things like classic machinimas about video games. With his channel up and running, he got a glimpse into the larger world of being a YouTuber.
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“When I found out that there was a scale of achievements, like getting onto [the Machinima network] or getting partnered and having that beautiful old-school banner at the very top of your YouTube channel…I just got so excited about what I could achieve, and that was before I even knew you could make money,” he says.
This level of enthusiasm carried him into doing YouTube as a full-time thing. And for a while, things went well. But then SystemZee found himself trying to boost his content by leaning into a sort of “MrBeastification” element, with “overcomplicated game show elements”–things that his audience “just didn’t care” about, he explains. He also wanted to expand his operation, and started “trying to outsource it and then hire and scale at wrong times, in the wrong cases.”
“That destroyed my sense of self-worth and creativity,” he says. It ended up taking him years to recover. Even up until a few months ago, he felt shaky.
But now? He’s rediscovered his love of content, revitalized his channel, reconnected with his audience, and begun expanding his team–this time in a way that works for him.
We’ll let him tell you all about it below.
Tubefilter: I know you saw the first installment of this series, where I profiled Aprilynne Alter.
SystemZee: Aprilynne is awesome. I’ve seen several of her videos pop up on my feed. It’s so funny, I have horrible imposter syndrome. I feel like I’m so unorganized with the way I run my stuff. So this is gonna be fun.
Tubefilter: It’s hard to be an imposter when you have 1.7 million subscribers. But I get the feeling.
SystemZee: Yeah, but in today’s day and age, with Shorts and stuff…
Tubefilter: I get you. It’s skewed things a lot.
SystemZee: I know this is probably stuff we can get into, but the last few years have been a rollercoaster of nearly losing everything to rebuilding. So I’m coming at this with a new, humble vibe. I’m very, you know, “anything can go in a heartbeat” so I make sure I’m thankful constantly. But yeah, let’s roll. I’m excited.
Tubefilter: Let’s start from the beginning then. Tell me about your childhood. No, I’m joking. What were things like for you before you got into content? What led to you finding YouTube?
SystemZee: You said starting at childhood as a joke, but it really did start there. I had a pretty large family, and for some reason my parents kind of picked me in a way where they encouraged the arts. Playing piano or just drawing or whatever it may be, they were always just super hype about things I was making. And so I think that encouraged me to keep exploring.
There’s a great book called Outliers about being born at the right time. And I think I was born at the right time where I was at the right age to find YouTube in the very beginning. There was Smosh, Ray William Johnson…Very, very early. And I just fell in love with it. So I was hanging out with a childhood friend and we were like, Let’s make a YouTube channel. And I think our first video was literally like Windows Movie Maker, a slideshow of our favorite cars.
So we created that channel, and it didn’t really mean anything to him, but I just kept exploring. I started doing machinimas with Halo, and then I just learned everything I could about the YouTube world. When I found out that there was a scale of achievements, like getting onto [the Machinima network] or getting partnered and having that beautiful old-school banner at the very top of your YouTube channel…I just got so excited about what I could achieve, and that was before I even knew you could make money. So it was very early. Very early.
Tubefilter: So tell me about the development. You didn’t know you could make money, which was the case with many creators who started out back in the day. When did it go from sort of a fun thing to, “Oh, I can make money and have a career with this”?
SystemZee: I think like when I found out that people were making money. Which, I mean, again, I watched before anyone was even officially partnered to make money. But when YouTube partnership started opening up a little bit more, a friend of mine got the idea in my head that we would be able to actually join a company like Machinima. I started getting really excited about it, and a content creator that I watched, Generikb, was part of it. I started realizing these are adults and this is their job, I was like, Maybe I can do that.
I think at the time, it was so funny, I calculated how many views I would need to make $2,000 a month, because in my mind, I was set for life if I made $2,000 a month. [laughs] So that unlocked the possibility. I didn’t know what that would become. I didn’t know if that would be a thing where I genuinely have financial freedom, or if it was even going to be a full-time job. I didn’t really think of that. I didn’t care. It was a cool idea to just make money making stupid videos.
Tubefilter: I know you now have a more business-minded and analytical approach to YouTube in this era of MrBeastification, but you’re still able to have fun with it. I think that’s a real skill.
SystemZee: That’s actually a really good talking point there. Just FYI, a little backstory before I get into this. I’ve now been doing this for 15 years, making videos. And I’ve been full-time since 2018. It’s a complete bell graph of happiness, hating it, and happiness again.
I think everyone’s journey, everyone who’s in any sort of creative position and they monetize it or make it a business or explore that side of it, it’s a tough path. So when I ended up really disliking where I was at, it was a three, four year gap of just really struggling.
But I’m just now on the flip side, where even four months ago, I was still kind of in a scary place. Now I have some new lessons and new moves that I’ve learned and implemented. I’m back at a new peak, I feel like, for how much I love it. So many new ideas are coming that don’t even necessarily involve the channel, but are just centered around the community that I’m in. And like, I don’t know. I feel like I’ve got a good head on my shoulders now for longevity and where I’m at. And I think it took those years of hating it to really get here.
Tubefilter: What’s happened in the last year or so to change things?
SystemZee: It’s funny, to the topic of MrBeastification, I kind of obsessed with that for a while. And I think I’m someone who, I definitely chase perfectionism. I’m not unique in that, I know a lot of people also do. Something I’m having to still constantly remind myself is the details that don’t matter versus the ones that do. I really locked in on the thumbnails and the overcomplicated game show elements of Minecraft videos and trying to create this big world for myself with my content.
The truth was, my audience just didn’t care. And most Minecraft viewers really don’t like that kind of content. So I was trying to take a huge, viral game show element and stuff it into my own content. I met contacts in that side of the industry that gave me some advice that was great, but not necessarily great for my circumstances. And so after trying things, implementing things, seeing failure, trying different things…You can keep throwing paint at the wall, but the color’s not gonna stick if you don’t let the paint set. So it was just a lot of ups and downs of trying things and then getting discouraged and losing the beginning of it all. Like why I did it, why I loved it.
Also, trying to outsource it and then hire and scale at wrong times, in the wrong cases. That destroyed my sense of self-worth and creativity. Coupling that with external things–you can’t predict what’s gonna happen.
So it was just a lot at every angle, and it caused, like I said, a lack of confidence. I didn’t know what my audience wanted, so there was a huge disconnect. I would only see the negativity in the comments. I just didn’t want to do it anymore. I had several nights of genuinely thinking like, I’m gonna hang up the hat and move on and never do YouTube again. It got scary. So it’s really cool to be here on this side.
Tubefilter: I’m glad you made it through. I know you’re not alone in any of these challenges. I was just on a call with a creator who was presenting at VidSummit, and she is also hitting this place where it’s like, Should I hire? Should I not hire? To me, that’s one of the scariest inflection points for a creator.
SystemZee: I’ve spoken with large creators with 80+ employees, and all of ’em kind of said the same thing: Write down a mind map of what it takes to make a video, and from there figure out what you can outsource and what you can’t replace. What you have to do.
I did that and naturally went through that path. But you can start to get overly excited about what it looks like to hire for all of those bullet points. Taking as much as you can off your shoulders, but too fast. And like, sure, you’re freeing up your time, but you’re also losing your creativity, your control. You have to train people, suddenly there’s a lot more pressure on your shoulders. You really have to respect the beast that is your business and grow as necessary. You can’t grow faster than the speed you’re going at.
I’m just now at a point now where I’ve got an editor and they’re full-time, and then I just hired a full-time developer, so I also develop while they develop. That way, we can get ahead of schedule. Then I’ve got, for the other side of my business, which is the Minecraft Marketplace, I’ve got a time-contracted developer. It’s a three-man team and then me, and that feels perfect for where I’m at. I definitely think I can grow in there. But to reach this place, it was four months of completely restructuring and honestly getting super lucky again with algorithms.
Tubefilter: Tell me more about the Marketplace side of things.
SystemZee: The Marketplace. So I’d heard the Minecraft Marketplace was a pretty good platform, lots of potential. It’s extremely hard to get approved as a team. It’s over two years, I think, I got approved. I sat on that for two years after I got approved, and literally the month before we were about to release our first add-on, they closed my account for inactivity. So I was like, Please, no, I promise we’re gonna post. They reverted it, they’re super cool.
But yeah, I love making mods for Minecraft. I love game design, and I felt like I was only ever creating temporary little goofy mods for my videos. And, you know, I wanted a chance to create products that people can actually play and experience. I knew nothing about it, but I knew how to reach the people who did.
I had friends who’d had success with it, and I was able to get a ton of advice from so many different teams. I’m still definitely in the early stages of growing that side of the business. But I’m excited. I like it. We’re working on a third add-on right now. We’ve seen what works, and I’ve seen what doesn’t work. And it’s just fresh. It feels fun.
It’s lucky as well because what I do primarily is develop content, right? And then I make content out of that content. I’m able to divide it into two different businesses, with YouTube for videos and Shorts, and then on the Marketplace.
It’s a blessing in that I think it’s equivalent to other creators doing merchandise. Where one creator might sell coffee, I can’t necessarily sell coffee to my audience. Not that my audience needs to be sold things, but if there is something I can create that is marketable and monetizable in the Minecraft Marketplace, that’s kind of the merch shelf for my channel.
Tubefilter: What products have been most successful for you?
SystemZee: I’m pretty sure it’s public knowledge that there’s a lot of different products you can push on the marketplace. And every season, the product that wins is completely different. It used to be maps, sometimes skins, but now it’s add-ons. Add-ons are what we really locked in, because it’s sort of the equivalent of like a model–Minecraft Java edition. You’re able to do a lot with that, and they’re way less restrictive. You can do that, but you can only post for a year. The Marketplace is on a cycle, so if you post one and it does really well, that’s great, but then you might post another and it doesn’t, so it’s very volatile. I have heard from other teams that if you consistently update add-ons and you consistently create to a good standard, you can create a good blanket.
But all that is to say, this is before revenue sharing and all that kind of stuff. I worked with people to create those add-ons, so they obviously get a percentage. For a minute there, the revenue actually outperformed YouTube. That was definitely at a point before my channel got back off the ground. But I genuinely think that with the right dedication, the right time spent on it, that it could probably rival at least the current iteration of my channel’s revenue.
Definitely an exciting venture. It’s 100% worth it for any Minecraft creators. I think it’s a great way to give back to our communities, and you can make enough revenue to put quality back into it and create genuinely excellent product. There is insane stuff on the Marketplace, and there’s a large network of players. I think a lot of Minecraft content creators would probably benefit from exploring it.
Tubefilter: I guess the only other question is…Where do you go from here? You’ve come so far, what do your plans look like for the future?
SystemZee: Well, the mic drop answer is wake up tomorrow. But again, this is really good timing, and I feel like this is an answer I could definitely ramble around, so I hope you don’t mind.
Tubefilter: Not at all. Go for it.
SystemZee: Like I said, I’ve learned so much. I’d love to one day be able to have an interview just to talk about how I recovered, because I think that’s like a very valuable thing. So many creators go through that, where they’ve lost their stride and they start to see lower numbers, and it’s a trap. It’s horrible. And I think I thought it was impossible. I thought I was done. But I finally found a very clear path to get back in a good place. It definitely involves creative therapy.
The beautiful thing is– It could also be that I’m 29 years old, so obviously there’s experiences there, but I feel so much more clarity with what I want to do and where I’m going. I’ve been thinking about different ways to give back to my community. I had an awesome fundraiser idea pop up today, actually, that I’ve been talking with some friends about. I’m just getting more and more excited about things that really aren’t about me and aren’t about the channel.
Touching base with what I said earlier about people striving to be at the top, I don’t think there is a top of YouTube. I mean, you could argue it’s MrBeast, but I think just the fact that we’re able to make money doing this at all and reach people is crazy. So if you’re doing it and you’re sustaining, you’re doing great.
I think where I want to go from here…The people that have stuck around and invested in me by joining–like I said, full-time editor, and the developer I’ve been kind of on and off working with for a few years, they’re officially full-time now–I want to take care of them and I want to give them longevity. I want to create something bigger than just me here.
I’ve got a few different ideas for channels related to the brand and then also the Marketplace and other areas where I can expand. But waking up tomorrow, getting the next video out, that’s been what saved me. Just get the next video out. Just do it.
This series is sponsored by Spotter, a Tubefilter partner. Check them out here.
