I’ve Been in Marketing Since I Was 10

I’ve been in marketing since I was 10 years old.

I just didn’t know it yet.

The Channel Nobody Watched

When I was a kid, I started a gaming YouTube channel. Zero subscribers. Big dreams. I was making Minecraft videos, screen recording on my parents’ computer, and uploading them with the genuine belief that this was going to be my thing.

It wasn’t. Not even close.

But something happened during that period that I didn’t appreciate until much later. I got stuck on one question: why is nobody clicking my videos?

I didn’t phrase it that way at the time. I was 10. What I actually thought was more like “why does this guy with the same game get 50,000 views and I get 12?” Eleven of those views were me, by the way.

Accidentally Learning the Fundamentals

So I started doing what any obsessive kid would do. I studied.

I looked at what the big creators were doing differently. Their titles were specific. Mine were generic. Their thumbnails had contrast and faces. Mine were blurry screenshots. Their videos hooked you in the first 10 seconds. Mine started with 30 seconds of silence while I figured out the screen recorder.

My dad was so supportive in this. I remember we spent an entire day at the mall trying to find the best microphone for me to use, and I would get so excited to share all of the analytics with him.

I started changing things. New titles. Better thumbnails. Different intros. I’d upload a video, watch the view count for a day, then tweak something and try again.

And as you can see… it actually worked. Not millions of views. But enough to prove something important: small changes in how you present the same content can dramatically change how people respond to it.

I didn’t know the word “optimization.” I just knew my video with 12 views needed help.

I didn’t know what “click-through rate” meant. I just knew that some thumbnails made me want to click and others didn’t.

I didn’t know I was doing A/B testing. I just kept changing things until something performed better.

Turns out I was teaching myself SEO, CTR, and content strategy before I ever heard those words.

The Part Nobody Talks About

Here’s the honest part: I didn’t have the discipline to keep going. I was 10. I got distracted. The channel died. I moved on to the next thing the way every kid does.

But the instinct stayed.

That impulse to look at something that isn’t performing and ask “why?” and then actually do something about it — that never left me. It just went dormant for a while.

When I eventually got into marketing properly, first with small projects, then with e-commerce clients during COVID, then with building Olunix, it didn’t feel like learning something new. It felt like returning to something I’d already been doing. The vocabulary was different. The stakes were higher. But the core question was the same: why isn’t this working, and what can I change?

Why This Matters More Than You’d Think

I think a lot of people believe marketing is something you learn in a classroom or pick up from a course. And sure, formal education matters. Systems thinking and structured frameworks are valuable.

But the foundation of marketing isn’t technical knowledge. It’s curiosity. It’s the willingness to look at something that isn’t working and be bothered enough to fix it. It’s pattern recognition. It’s empathy — understanding what makes someone click, watch, stay, or leave.

That kid on his parents’ computer had all of that. He just didn’t have the vocabulary or the discipline.

The vocabulary came later. The discipline came later. But the instinct? That was always there.

What I’d Tell My 10-Year-Old Self

Keep going.

Not because the YouTube channel was going to blow up. It wasn’t. But because the thing you’re doing right now, the obsessive tinkering, the refusal to accept bad results, the hunger to understand why some things work and others don’t — that’s not a hobby. That’s a career.

You just don’t know it yet.

I didn’t start my marketing career when I launched my company. I started it on my parents’ computer, trying to outsmart the YouTube algorithm with a Minecraft video and zero subscribers.

And honestly? I’m still doing the same thing. The algorithm is just bigger now.

- MM