How to become a self-made millionaire as a teenager by making videos

Mai Pham is a 20-year-old influencer with 2.8 million subscribers on her YouTube channel

How she started

Mai Pham has been doing YouTube for 12 years. In 2008, Mai was 7 years old when she started uploading videos of herself singing covers on YouTube, and then progressed to Minecraft and PC gaming streams, then high school vlogs. She loved creating videos so much she was posting every 3 or 4 months consistently unpaid for 8 years. She is doing 3 videos a week now. She grew up in a very strict Asian household where she was not allowed to go outside much so she spent most of her time on her laptop talking to people online instead. She is more comfortable in front of the camera than a group of friends that is why she don’t go to Coachella, group events or brand trips. One of her biggest insecurities is being awkward with other people triggering her social anxiety.

At 15, she was making $400 a month from her YouTube channel making vlogs on how to clean your room. She was struggling with her mental health while living on her friend’s house for 2 months, then moved 2 hours way with her sister and spilt rent for $400. She also switched to a high school which has 4000 students which was very different from the small town in the countryside she came from with only 300 students.