Gabe Bult was cleaning offices, dabbling in real estate, and picking up construction work when he made a decision that changed the math entirely. The people around him were refreshing their resumes, applying to the next job, hoping someone else would hand them a better future. Bult went in a different direction, pointed a camera at an infrared sauna, and posted a video. His argument now, backed by real income numbers from genuinely small channels, is that most people chasing job security are solving the wrong problem. What they actually want is options.
Why the resume treadmill keeps you broke
The core problem with the job-to-job cycle, as Bult frames it, is structural. Every dollar you earn is tied to showing up somewhere and trading labor for pay. A more efficient worker just gets more work without more money. He points to a study he cites showing roughly 80% of people are disengaged at work, which he traces directly to that incentive structure: the system rewards compliance, not output. ‘If you can get eight hours of work done in two hours,’ he notes, ‘they just give you four times the work and don’t pay you more.’
The alternative he landed on was YouTube, specifically long-form YouTube, and the reasoning is more mechanical than motivational. Unlike a short-form post on Instagram or Facebook that earns attention for a few days and then dies, a YouTube video functions as a permanent search result. YouTube is the second-largest search engine behind Google and is directly connected to it, which means a video about sauna boxes or Japanese floor futons can surface at the top of both platforms years after it was posted. Bult says he still collects hundreds of dollars a month in affiliate revenue from videos he uploaded two or more years ago.
The numbers from channels most people have never heard of
Bult’s most striking data points come from his smallest channels, not his biggest one. On a sauna and cold plunge channel with around 1,200 subscribers, he had already generated over 30,000 dollars in revenue. The first video he posted to that brand new channel, a sauna review, pulled in roughly 3,200 views and earned $2,900, closer to one dollar per view rather than the AdSense average of about eight dollars per thousand views. He puts that gap down to affiliate structure: matching buyers who are already searching for a product with a direct recommendation that solves their problem.
One of his students, Noah, took a similar path talking about refinishing cast iron frying pans. Noah built a following around something he genuinely cared about, made a thousand dollars in a single day, and eventually left his job. Another person Bult helped launched a first video that hit 10,000 views. A friend named Antonio started at 2,000 subscribers when Bult first met him and has since grown to nearly 800,000, funding a career built around reviewing long-haul flights and Airbnbs.
Bult is direct about the inconsistency involved. ‘Out of 10 shots,’ he says, roughly two will perform well, one will carry the channel, four will tread water, and four or five will underperform. Most people trained by school and employment to expect a guaranteed hourly exchange find that ratio uncomfortable. He spent the first two years on YouTube making nothing. After that, his income doubled repeatedly, and in the past year it doubled again while his view count stayed flat or declined slightly, because he shifted focus from chasing views to building monetization structures.
A Facebook funnel he set up and outsourced, putting in about one hour of his own time, generated $16,000 in 30 days.
The barn and the lawn mower
Bult owns a barn now. He bought a second lawn mower in cash without selling the first one, which he calls ‘a weird flex’ but uses to illustrate a specific point: none of it would have been reachable at office-cleaning wages, even with years of aggressive frugality. The ceiling was simply too low.
The full-circle truth is that the sauna channel sitting at around 1,200 subscribers, the one most hiring managers would never notice on a resume, is the one writing the checks.
That infrared sauna, the one someone sent him, is still sitting there generating affiliate clicks on a video Bult hasn’t thought about in months.
