By Curt Roese | July 2026 | 4 min read
I posted my twenty sixth video to Main Street Ledger this week.
Eleven people subscribe to the channel.
About three hundred have watched anything at all.
The channel covers buying a business, SBA loans, franchise ownership, and small business finance. The same work I have done with real clients for decades, now delivered as financial education instead of across a conference table.
I built it faceless on purpose because I wanted the content tested before I put my face on it.
Twenty six videos is real work:
research
scripts
recording
editing
publishing
then doing it again the next day
Most people would look at those numbers and call it a stall.
I'm not sure that's the right read.
Here is what I actually built in June.
Not an audience. A system.
A topic becomes a script. A script becomes a recording. A recording becomes a published video, part of a process that no longer depends on whether I feel motivated that day.
None of that depended on anyone watching.
Most second-act businesses don't fail because the idea was bad. They fail because the business depends on motivation instead of process.
The first twenty six videos were never about finding winners.
They were about building enough volume for YouTube to understand what the channel actually is, before I spend time optimizing anything.
I have made the opposite mistake before. Early in Retirepreneur I chased audience before I knew what they actually wanted from me:
a newsletter
a course platform
a no-code tool I started and never finished
Each one taught me something. None of them found the right demand.
The system was there. Forty weeks of weekly newsletters proved I could show up consistently. What I had not figured out yet was whether anyone was waiting for what I was building.
This time I built the system and tested the demand together.
Old habits die hard.
Most mornings in June I opened analytics before I opened my email. Forty years in finance trained me to watch the numbers.
Eleven subscribers does not move much on a dashboard. Checking it daily was not telling me anything my production schedule did not already know.
Shari asked me last week whether I regretted starting faceless instead of jumping on camera from day one.
I told her no. The eleven people who subscribed watched something with real substance behind it, not just a thumbnail that over-promised.
Nobody shuts down a new business after four weeks because the phone has not rung enough. You ask whether the model works once enough people know it exists.
Eleven subscribers is not a verdict. It is simply where the curve begins.
Going into July, I am adding something new.
A three minute on camera version of every topic. No slides, just me and the facts. Some ideas require a face before they earn trust.
Each topic now becomes:
a long form video
a short on camera version
several shorter clips for faster-moving platforms
One idea. Multiple ways to discover it.
I am also catching up with my old boss from my SBA lending years, the one who has since built a new lending platform of his own.
We both reached out around the same time, which tells you something about how relationships with real history actually work.
He wants to talk about some CFO advisory work. I want to explore a referral relationship. Neither of us is asking for anything the other is not already open to.
After forty years I have learned the best opportunities come through relationships you already earned, not strangers you are trying to impress.
One thing I got wrong this month.
I assumed twenty six videos in a row would build faster momentum than they did. I underestimated how long YouTube needs to understand a brand new channel, even one built correctly from day one.
The bigger mistake would have been deciding that a slow start meant stop.
If you are building something that feels too small to matter, do not measure today's audience.
Measure whether you are building something worth discovering a year from now.
The work either compounds or it does not. But it cannot compound if you stop before anyone finds it.
Keep building.
Curt
From the Retirepreneur Channel
A new video went up this week on the four income mistakes I see most often in someone's last year of work, the kind that have nothing to do with how a portfolio is invested. I walk through my own gap, including the one I got wrong, in real numbers.
Still building.
Curt Roese, CPA | Retirepreneur.com
Retirepreneur | @Retirepreneur on YouTube
Main Street Ledger | @MainStreetLedger on YouTube