Meet The Strategist Who Can Make Any YouTuber Go Viral (Leroy ter Braak)

**Leroy ter Braak** (0:00)
Frankly, like I made a video on this, like I do like around $25,000 a month from clients alone. The thing that keeps coming up every time is that they need to stop looking at the metrics and start looking at the ideas more. They stole one of our shorts and it got like 90 million views. We're very salty about that. Beast transferring is definitely my favorite way to go about it. It's just a fun way to try and make your own bionic puppet. Like we take the arm from that niche, and then we take a hook from a completely other niche, and that's the legs, and that's what I do most. I think one of the biggest things you need to have as a strategist with your client. Yeah, I'm Leroy. I'm 31 years old. I just turned 31 Still doesn't sound right, but I guess that's my age now. Live in the Netherlands. And I've been on YouTube ever since, before it was cool kind of, like when you still got bullied, when you were like making videos for people. Like I think my first video was like 2008, 2009 And I've been on the platform for all that time, built two businesses in between, and now since almost two years now, I'm back full time on YouTube as a strategist, not like necessarily as a creator anymore. And yeah, I've worked with a ton of creators now. I don't even remember everyone that I've worked with, but I've worked with some big gaming creators back in the day, like Doom 49, like those kind of guys. And nowadays I've worked with help start up new travel channels, like Chris Stakes Off. I work with someone who Fex knows really well as well. We are no-code, Christian. His plaque just got added to my wall. So I work with entrepreneurs. I work with entertainment creators. I work with faceless doc channels right now. And kind of blew up quite a few channels in the past year or so. And that's what I'm kind of iterating on right now, just to helping people become creators and kind of go a little bit against the grain of the YouTube automation gurus and try to fight them every now and then, and tell people why you should do YouTube and make it a sustainable living.

**Vex** (1:50)
I mean, obviously, I know you quite well, and I've got some questions based on that. Maybe we can start off. And you kind of mentioned that you were doing YouTube before it was cool. I'd love to know how you kind of got started into that. Like, you know, what kind of made you like, I'm going to do YouTube. And then from there, you know, turn it into a massive career because in terms of YouTube strategy age, you're ancient, right? You've been around forever.

**Leroy ter Braak** (2:08)
I am ancient, yeah. You didn't have to say it that way, but you are right. I am ancient. But yeah, no. So this dinosaur over here, this living fossil, I started... I think I started like every young man ever started on YouTube. They played video games, and they thought that the world needed to see them play video games. Nobody needed to see my Call of Duty clips. Nobody really wanted to see my FIFA clips, but I thought they would. So and I figured out back in 2008, 2009, it was pretty hard to actually capture gameplay, especially if you were on like a console. And so that was like a huge thing that I was into. I was like, okay, I need to like get the most crispy footage, and I'm going to put that on a video sharing website. And back then, like YouTube was on the calm up, and I was like, okay, I'm going to put it on there, and then I can show my friends, like I'm actually really cool. And some of my friends thought, but once they started finding out in my school, that's when they were like, you make videos about gaming? Like, would you go outside? I was like, sometimes. But that's how I started all the way back then. And then I kind of stopped for like a year or two, I think. I still uploaded. I was very creative. I loved making videos. So I stole my, stole like, you know, legal. For legal reasons, I didn't steal it. I borrowed my mom's camera. And she never, she never saw it back. But, you know, I borrowed the camera. And I love making videos and trying to figure out, like, you know, action scenes. That was something that was really into. So I had a friend that was also really into filmmaking. And we started making like short films and that kind of stuff. And we posted them online. And some got some mediocre success. Like we had a few that did like 40, 50,000 views. But then in 2012, that's when I started working together with my then business partner that turned out to be later my business partner. And he was really into gaming like I was, and he was really into filmmaking. So we were like, okay, do we just become best friends? I guess we are now best friends. Like we love the same things. And he had a brother who was really good, especially back then, with visual effects and 3D animation. And we were like, okay, we can take our love for gaming, and we make short films about gaming with all these explosions and really cool effects in them.