BIG Ideas with Unspeakable

BIG Ideas with Unspeakable

With over 20 million subscribers and a catalog of wild, high-concept videos, Nathan (also known as Unspeakable) has turned creative chaos into a full-scale media business. From Minecraft to tornado chasing to building a Lego Lamborghini, his pieces are unpredictable and highly engaging to his audience. In this BIG Ideas creator catch up, Nathan shares what’s driven his success, the lessons behind his biggest flops, and how he’s thinking about the future beyond himself.

Unspeakable’s Creator Journey

Q: Tell us about your channel! What niche are you in, and what type of videos do you make?
A: I run a channel called Unspeakable. We have a bunch of channels under that name, but our biggest one is just called Unspeakable. The content we make... I mean, there's not really a “challenge” category on YouTube, but I’d say it falls in the comedy space. A lot of our videos are funny and super creative. Every video is like a mini movie. One day we’re hunting tornadoes, the next day we’re building a giant Lego house, the next we’re sailing across the sea or something like that. Every video is completely different.

When I was first growing the channel, there was a lot more consistency because I was trying to build an audience. But now that we have millions and millions of subscribers, I can kind of post whatever I want as long as it aligns with our vision and strategy. People are gonna love it.

My audience is definitely younger. When I first started it was mostly 7 to 12-year-olds, because I was just playing Minecraft. But ever since we started doing bigger videos like hunting tornadoes and buying a house on Amazon, I think the audience aged up a bit. Now it’s probably more like 10 to 20.

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Q: Let’s start at the beginning. Why did you first start creating YouTube videos? What inspired you to hit publish for the first time?
A: At the time, I was in school when I started making YouTube videos. Like every kid in middle school, I loved playing video games. On the weekends I’d not only play games, but I’d also watch YouTubers play the games I liked, like Call of Duty and Minecraft.

One day I just thought to myself, “Why don’t I try to make my own videos?” I don’t know. I just loved the idea. The thing that really captured me was that I could make a piece of content and share it with the world, and people could interact with it. As a 14-year-old kid, that felt like the coolest thing in the world—just that everyone could see something I made.

I started with Minecraft because it was my favorite game at the time and it was really easy to play. Plus, there was a huge demand on YouTube. Channels were getting millions of views off Minecraft. I was like, “Okay, I gotta go after this.”

I liked Call of Duty too, but back then if you weren’t a pro gamer, you didn’t really get views. And I was not a pro gamer. So I leaned into Minecraft because people just watched it for fun, and that felt a lot more doable.

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Q: What’s the journey been like since then? How has your life changed over the course of your YouTube journey?
A: Oh yeah, it’s completely turned around. Just for reference, it took me five years to hit a million subscribers. I started YouTube in eighth grade, and by the time I graduated high school, I think it was just a couple months after that when I hit a million.

But even before I got to a million, I was already making good money. I was probably making like 15 to 20 thousand a month, which is obviously crazy for a high school kid. So I was like, “Okay, I guess I don’t need to go to college, because I’m already making a salary.”

And if I keep scaling this up, making more videos, what if it turns into 100K a month or 200K a month? Now we’re obviously doing big numbers, but yeah—I never went to college. I also never had a job. Like, I’ve never worked at a restaurant or done any of that stuff.

I do feel like maybe I missed a critical part of life, but at the same time, I have no regrets. I worked extremely hard. It wasn’t like I just got gifted a million subscribers as a graduation present. Every weekend I was filming. My friends would go hang out, and I’d stay back to make videos. My entire summer was filming.

I’d get home from school around 3:00 and film until 2:00 in the morning, then wake up at 6:30 and do it again. In high school, I was doing 250 to 400 videos a year while in school. It was a grind, but I loved it. It was my passion. I was chasing something. I was also trying to prove to my parents that I could make money doing this so they wouldn’t send me to college. I was racing graduation with a goal.

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Q: If you achieved everything you’ve ever wanted with your channel, what would that look like?
A: I don’t know if this answers the question exactly, but I feel like I got addicted to the actual process of making content. That’s what kept me going. I just loved the journey of making videos and scaling a YouTube channel.

That was the coolest thing to me. I didn’t really care about being famous or anything like that. Some people start YouTube because they want to be actors or they want to be known. Everyone has a different reason.

For me, it was always about the process. I loved writing down an idea on a whiteboard, starting the script, ordering stuff, filming the video, editing it, building the story, publishing it, and then watching people react and say, “This is the coolest video I’ve ever seen.” That whole process was just so exciting.

And yeah, I still love it. If I didn’t, I’d be doing something else by now. I’m in a position where I could go do something else if I wanted to. I could move to Hawaii tomorrow. I could sell the office. But I wouldn’t trade what we’re building here for that. The freedom you get as a creator is crazy. You can make videos from anywhere in the world. It’s underrated.

Q: What has your experience been like hiring and managing a large team as a creator? What advice would you give other creators thinking about scaling up?

A: I’d say I’m a pretty good manager. The average employee that works for us stays for five to six years, which I feel like is really, really good.

Now, also consider that we’ve only been hiring people for about seven or eight years, so we’re not some 30-year business. A lot of the people on our team have been here since day one and they’re still here. They’ve built themselves and grown with us.

There’s still a lot I need to learn, for sure. Being a creator and being a CEO are two completely different things. It’s a whole new skill set. I’ve read so many books about leadership and management. I got mentors. I talked to other people who run big businesses. I just tried to learn—same way I learned how to be a creator in the beginning.

And I don’t think every creator needs to have a big team to succeed. But I do think it’s a smart thing to do.

As a creator, you do everything—filming, editing, all of it. But in reality, someone out there can probably edit your videos better than you can. I used to think no one could edit better than me. Then I found someone who could, and once he started editing, our output doubled. Actually, it tripled.

When I hired our first few editors, I went from posting 500 videos a year to almost 900. We were posting three videos a day, and I wasn’t working any more than I was before.

That’s the goal—to find people who are better than you at certain things. Now, there are parts of your channel that can’t be replaced, like creativity. That’s something I’ll probably always have to lead, because the channel is kind of built around me.

But everything else, you can find great people for. And when you do, it changes everything.

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Q: Help us fill in the blank: “The best ideas come when I’m ______.”
A: Desperate. Some of the best ideas I’ve ever had came when I was desperate to get a viral video. Like really desperate.

When I coach creators, I always ask them, “How bad do you want it?” Because that mindset determines if you're actually going to grow or not.

I remember when we came up with the tornado video. It’s a simple idea, but I was at a point where I felt stuck. Things were flatlining. I needed something to spike. I was like, “I need to do something crazy.”

We had six video ideas written down, and the tornado one stood out. It stood out because I literally thought, “I could die doing this.” And then I was like, “Okay, that’s a good video.”

I was just in that mindset of needing something big. We ended up making the video, and it was one of the best we’ve ever done. We’ve done it twice now. Just four of those videos brought in around a million dollars in ad revenue—no sponsorships, no brand deals.

So yeah, when I’m desperate, that’s when I find something wild that ends up working.

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Q: How has Spotter Studio helped your channel? What do you love most about it?
A: I’d say it’s definitely helped us with video ideas and brainstorming.

We’re always looking for new brainstorming tools because creativity is always going to be a constraint for creators. In my opinion, creativity is difficult and it doesn’t have a formula.

We have some frameworks we use in Blueprint to help think of ideas, but at the end of the day, creativity is just all over the place. Sometimes I’ll think of ideas in the shower. I’ve even had viral ideas come to me in a dream. I’ll wake up, write them down, and they actually go viral.

So the creative process is something you can’t really time or predict. That’s why we’re always looking for tools to help us brainstorm better. It’s something we always need to improve on.

Unspeakable’s BIG Ideas

Q: What book, resource or creator expert have you recommended most to other creators, and why?
A: Honestly, it’s Blueprint—all the courses we’ve made.

When I built Blueprint, the goal was to make something that could apply to any platform, any content category, and any era. Like, even in 2050, the principles would still work.

Everything in there is based on human psychology. One of the big things I did to grow my channel was focus on word of mouth. I tried to come up with video ideas so wild that people couldn’t help but talk about them.

People talking about things is never going to go away. It doesn’t matter how much the algorithms change—what’s always going to matter is making good content that connects with people.

If you think about it, it’s the same reason successful businesses thrive. They focus on their customers. That’s what Amazon did. They were obsessed with the customer. They lost billions doing things like free two-day shipping, but they did it because they knew it was what people wanted.

It’s the same for creators. Focus on your audience. That principle will never go away.

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Q: What $100-or-less creator tool or purchase has made a surprising impact on your channel?
A: Education.

I always recommend signing up for courses or programs. Honestly, the only creator courses I’d personally sign up for are ours—because they’re really good—and probably Ali Abdaal’s if you’ve seen his.

Education is such a powerful tool. It can accelerate everything you do. I don’t get why people wouldn’t invest in it. It’s like trying to become a doctor without going to med school. That’s actually illegal.

It takes years to get a master’s degree, and it should take years to master being a creator too. But if you invest in learning, you can save yourself so much time.

I’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on education, courses, mentors—all of it. And it’s saved me years. Otherwise, I’d just be troubleshooting everything myself, getting frustrated, wasting time.

There’s this great quote from Jim Rohn that goes something like, “I find it easy to read books and better myself. I find it easy to work on myself and get better, and other people find it so difficult.”

It is easy to work on yourself. You just have to do it. And it helps so much.

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Q: What’s a video flop that taught you an important lesson on your creator journey?
A: I remember this video really clearly because I lost a ton of money on it.

It was a couple years ago. We had this idea to do a stadium hide-and-seek. We’ve done hide-and-seek videos before that got 40 or 50 million views, so we were like, “Let’s do the biggest one ever. This is going to get 100 million views. It's going to go crazy.”

So we rented out an entire NFL stadium. It was $100,000 just to rent it. Then we flew in a bunch of creators, TikTokers, all that. Paid for their flights, hotels. Then we were like, “Okay, we need a grand prize,” so we gave away $50,000.

All in, I don’t know how much we spent. Probably a little over $200,000. That doesn’t even count our staff’s salaries for working on the video.

We were super excited. We posted it. And it was a 10 out of 10. Worst video we posted that entire year. Still one of the worst performing videos on the channel in the past three years. I think it only has like 2 or 3 million views. Maybe made $20,000.

Big L.

But it taught me something really important. Bigger does not mean better on YouTube. Just because you spend more money, or put more time into something, or have a better camera—that doesn’t make it a better video.

I’ve never seen a YouTuber fail because they didn’t have a good enough camera. That’s not the reason people lose.

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Q: If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it, that would get a message out to millions of Creators, what would it say and why?
A:It would say: Focus on the idea before anything else.

Because if you focus on anything else first, you’re not prioritizing the idea.

And if you don’t have the idea, then you don’t actually have a video.

I learned that the hard way. I used to film videos first and then think of the idea or title later. But that’s just not how it works. The idea has to come first.

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Q: If you could bring to life any video idea with any brand what would it be and why?
A:That’s a good question.

I feel like I’d love to do something with Marvel or Transformers or superheroes. Something with crazy visual effects.

That kind of stuff really excites me, because I think it’s cool that you can build a whole universe out of nothing. I’d love to do something like that.

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Q: What’s the BEST advice you'd give to a smart, serious creator who just turned Professional?
A: Now you have something to lose.

You’re putting everything on the line, so you’ve got to take it seriously.

You need a solid schedule. You need a list. I’d make a list of what you’re going to focus on and what you’re not going to focus on. That’s super important.

Because if you're going full-time, you’ve got more time now, but you’re still doing a lot. You’re still filming and editing and managing everything.

With all the platforms out there, it’s easy to get distracted. Should I livestream? Should I do Shorts? Should I post on Facebook? Should I try Snapchat or Twitch?

When I built my YouTube channel, I focused only on YouTube. Just long-form. One channel. Eight years straight.

I didn’t do livestreams. I didn’t do Shorts. I didn’t post anywhere else.

If I had, I think I would’ve failed. I would’ve been stretched too thin.

Focus is everything.

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Q: What's the biggest challenge you’re facing in your creative journey right now? How can the Spotter Studio Community help support?

‍A: It’s a hard thing to answer because I think I’m solving a problem that not a lot of creators have.

The biggest challenge we’re facing right now is trying to scale our brand beyond just me.

Look at what Disney did. They started with Mickey Mouse, and then they developed all these other characters.

So it’s like—what’s the next version of me? What’s the future of me?

How do we scale past just me as the creator?

That’s our biggest challenge right now.

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Q: What idea are you most excited to create next?
A:
We have this idea where we’re going to build a Lego Lamborghini.

Like, a real Lamborghini—just made out of Lego.

I’m super excited about that one. I like cars, so that’s going to be fun.

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Q: If you had a million dollars to make your dream video, what would it be?
A:Not going to be a hide-and-seek video, I can tell you that.

Probably something in space. I’d go to space.

Something crazy like that.

Final Note

What makes Nathan’s story so compelling isn't just the views or the subs. It’s the relentless focus on process, reinvention, and staying locked in on the audience. Whether you're hiring your first editor or chasing your next big idea, there's something here for every creator who wants to take their channel to the next level.