​​Why I’m Becoming a YouTuber

I’ve always thought about my career and my business in 2-3 year “eras.”

The first era of Forte Labs was from 2013 to 2015, which I call “The Research Era.” I entered the wild world of self-employment and began to share my ideas publicly through my blog for the first time. I had no idea what I wanted to do long term and spent this period experimenting with many different kinds of projects, from online courses to corporate training to consulting to live workshops. 

Our second era was from 2016 to 2018, and I think of it as “The Cohort Era.” I chose productivity generally and digital notetaking in particular as my central focus, and poured all my time and energy into developing the Building a Second Brain course and getting it off the ground. I finally felt that I had found my calling, and I dedicated every resource I had to improving that course and making it grow.

The third era of Forte Labs was from 2019 to 2022, and I call it “The Book Era.” I moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to Mexico City with my wife for a fresh start, and decided to pursue a publishing deal for my first book based on the course material. I continued blogging and the online course grew faster than ever, but the focus of my attention was on developing the skills I would need to bring a book to completion.

With the publication of that book in June 2022, the third era of the company has officially come to a close. That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop doing everything in my power to promote it – the trajectory of the book has only just begun, and will play out for many years to come. And I will continue publishing my writing on the blog and teaching the course as well.

But one thing I’ve always believed is that we have a unique advantage as a small startup: we can “bet the company” on a singular, bold new direction. Unlike a huge corporation that can never fully commit itself to any one path, we can. And because we have this unique option open to us, we have to take it or risk giving away our one exclusive advantage. 

As the book has been released to the world, I’ve started to think hard about what our fourth era should be about. 

For the first time, we have many choices and many paths we could take. We could lean into online courses and build an entire curriculum of different programs. We could take a turn into ecommerce and develop a new line of physical products. We could build a B2B business and offer corporate trainings or executive coaching. We now have the privilege of being able to choose our own adventure, and I don’t take that privilege lightly.

But I’m not interested in taking just any path. I don’t want to commit to creating new products just because that seems like the next thing to do, or just because we could make some extra money. We are a profitable, self-funded business and I always try to remind our team that we don’t have to do anything new if we don’t want to. 

In light of that, what do we want to do? Life is short, and the prime years of our careers even shorter. I want to spend our precious time working on singular outcomes that no one else in the world could achieve. 

My question to the team over the last couple months has been, “What is a goal that is worth the next 2-3 years of our careers?”

This opportunity would need to fulfill the following criteria:

• It is urgently needed by people that only we are equipped to serve
• It is something we want to build because it would be fun and exciting
• It is extremely leveraged, allowing us to have a greater and greater impact with less and less effort over time
• It would allow us to learn and grow in new ways, as professionals and as humans

Taking all that into account, I’ve come to the conclusion that the next era of Forte Labs will be about YouTube. 

After 6 months of initial experiments on the platform, I’ve become convinced that YouTube’s potential as the world’s most important educational platform is only beginning to be unlocked.

17 years into its existence, YouTube has grown and matured into a classroom that can (and does) teach the entire world almost every subject under the sun. It is vastly more accessible to international audiences, young people and the elderly, and the disadvantaged and underprivileged than any other form of media. If our mission is to enable anyone in the world to build a Second Brain for themselves, then YouTube is our single biggest opportunity to accomplish that.

I asked Marc Koenig, who leads our YouTube efforts, to summarize the first 6 months of our experiments on the platform and to lay out a vision for where we want to go as a company. I’m on board with everything described below and over the next year plan on investing major resources into growing the best collection of educational videos on personal knowledge management on YouTube.

Entering the YouTube Era

Hi, I’m Marc Koenig. I’m the GM & Creative Director of Forte Labs’ YouTube channel.