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Product Management2018–2020

Building a YouTube Content Business from Zero

Rahnema

Over 18 months, I built a YouTube content business from zero to eight channels, more than 300K subscribers, and nine million monthly views, generating tens of thousands of dollars per month in a steady stream of revenue. As the project lead, I owned strategy, content operations, and cross-functional coordination to move forward and deliver.

Phase 1: Identifying the Opportunity

For years, Rahnema had established itself as the dominant music distributor across Iran's domestic online platforms. Around 2018, escalating tensions between Iran and the United States triggered a rapid devaluation of the Rial, putting financial pressure on the entire music industry. Rahnema faced a strategic choice: find new ways to generate revenue for music publishers and defend its market position, or protect short-term margins and accept a gradual decline. Two questions framed the decision:

In this context, I took the initiative to explore whether YouTube could become a viable global distribution channel for Persian music content.

I studied YouTube's revenue-sharing program, assessed the platform's growth potential, mapped the niche market for Persian music, and analyzed existing players, areas of high user interest, and where engagement was strongest. My conclusion: although we would not be the first to enter, and many of our domestic advantages would not transfer directly, the market was large enough to justify investment. Our established relationships with music publishers gave us a meaningful leverage point, and the remaining capabilities, content creation, marketing, metadata optimization, were ones we could build quickly. I packaged this analysis into a business case and received approval to launch a trial project.

Target Market

Living in Iran, where the internet is heavily censored and YouTube is blocked, we recognized that the audience for Persian content on the platform fell into two distinct segments:

Phase 2: Exploring a Solution

To validate the opportunity with minimal risk, I scoped a lean MVP: a single channel using existing content from our library, with no investment in new acquisitions. The goal was to test whether our catalog could generate meaningful engagement and revenue on YouTube. Within four months, the data told a clear story: engagement was growing at roughly 40% week over week, traffic was flowing steadily toward the channel, and our hit content was gaining real traction. I used those results to build an internal business case that secured investment in content acquisition and cross-functional resources dedicated to the project.

During this phase, I benchmarked video production best practices, studied publishing techniques, and closely analyzed competitors to sharpen our picture of the market. The exploration also revealed which types of music content resonated most with our target audience. I translated these learnings into a content acquisition strategy that I presented to the leadership team and business development leaders, and together we defined acquisition priorities and targets.

Navigating the Content Acquisition Challenge

Defining those targets was not straightforward. The new strategy represented a shift in content priorities that directly conflicted with the business development team's existing goals. Content that drove the highest engagement on YouTube, and therefore the highest competitive value, was harder for the BD team to acquire. Meanwhile, much of the archive content that made up a large share of their historical targets, I had assessed as low-potential and not economically viable for video production. The new direction also risked straining some of their long-standing relationships with music publishers.

What began as strategic tension could have stalled the entire project. Rather than pushing through, I worked to understand the BD team's concerns. I adjusted the content strategy by developing a lower-cost approach to video creation that expanded the range of economically viable content. We landed on a compromise: a revised content plan that preserved the project's strategic direction while respecting the BD team's existing relationships and operational realities.

Phase 3: Building a Commercial Success

With validated demand and cross-functional support in place, my focus shifted to building a commercially successful operation. The strategy needed to satisfy three stakeholders simultaneously: YouTube's growth guidelines, our target viewers, and our content owners. I structured the business around two channels, each serving a distinct purpose:

I monitored YouTube Analytics continuously to identify the optimal publishing times, the right interval between uploads, view trends for each video, and engagement patterns. I used traffic source data to spot gaps and find opportunities to increase organic reach.

Building the Business Infrastructure

Behind the scenes, I organized the background activities that formed the operational foundation of the business:

The results were strong. In less than eight months, we reached nine million monthly views, sustained an engagement growth rate of 80%, and achieved an income growth rate exceeding 200% for three consecutive months. This traction fueled the engine we needed to expand the scope of the business.

Phase 4: Scaling the Business

With a proven playbook and operational infrastructure in place, we shifted toward rapid expansion. I updated the content strategy and business model to scale both the breadth and depth of the business across several directions:

Expanding Within Music

Our first expansion targeted a completely different genre: Iranian classical music, anchored by the catalog of Shajarian, whose work is considered a national treasure. Unlike pop music, classical content has an exceptionally long tail of engagement, many of Shajarian's recordings continue to draw listeners decades after release. The core fan base for this genre is distinct from the general public, so I created a dedicated channel to serve them.

As the last major entrant to YouTube with this content, we competed on credibility and consistency rather than first-mover advantage. Through deeper study of the audience, I discovered that the most engaged segment cared deeply about lyrical accuracy and would debate details in the comments. I doubled down on this insight by adding meticulously reviewed lyrics to every video. Viewers noticed, and lyrical precision became one of our key differentiators and a driver of engagement.

The channel was a quick success. Monetized in less than a month, reached 50K subscribers and 180K views in 5 months, then continued with a steady flow of traffic and engagement.

Expanding Into a New Vertical

We then moved into a different content category entirely: Iranian movies and series. This addressed the same two audience segments, Iranians abroad without access to local platforms, and users inside Iran with the tools to reach YouTube, but the use case was fundamentally different. Session durations were longer, and viewers engaged more actively compared to music.

Despite tough competition, the channel attracted significant traffic. However, it surfaced a challenge we had not seen in music: subscriber re-engagement was very low. Unlike music channels, where subscribers returned organically for new uploads, every new movie had to earn its own audience almost from scratch. I addressed this by optimizing metadata for YouTube search and building cross-content and cross-channel promotion strategies to drive discovery.

Artist Channels and Killed Ideas

We also launched official channels for several of Iran's most popular artists, including Mohsen Chavoshi, Reza Malekzadeh, and Benyamin Bahadori. These channels attracted dedicated fan bases and opened the door to new content formats: backstage footage, teasers, and promotional videos.

Not every expansion idea survived. We explored kids' content, funny viral videos, and corporate branding channels, and chose to discontinue all three. Each failed to meet at least one of the three criteria I used to evaluate new directions:

The Publisher Dashboard

As we expanded our content partnerships, we learned from our artists that they wanted live visibility into how their content was performing. YouTube did not offer customized analytics access for individual publishers, so I set out to build a solution.

I engaged directly with content partners to understand their needs and expectations, then worked with Rahnema's IT team to explore YouTube's API capabilities and define what was feasible. I authored the product requirements document, and we aligned on an MVP scope. Over three iterations, the dashboard grew to include authentication, daily view trends (per-content and aggregate), and monthly revenue tables broken down by individual content and totals. The dashboard was adopted by 3 of the publishers with 16 artists.

The dashboard was not designed to be a competitive weapon for acquiring new publishers, it would not tip the balance in a bidding war for content. Its value was subtler and more durable: it built satisfaction with our service and strengthened retention. Over time, we found that this kind of transparency created a loyalty buffer. When competitors offered upfront payments to lure away our artists or publishers, the trust and visibility we had built made those offers less compelling. The dashboard, along with the artist channels, reinforced a broader lesson: investing in closer relationships with content partners made the entire business more resilient and attracted higher-quality content to our growth engine.

Revenue Optimization

Through continuous monitoring of YouTube Analytics, I identified that several factors influencing revenue per piece of content were within our control. I ran a detailed RPM (revenue per mille) analysis and uncovered two actionable insights:

I researched longer-form music video formats, then shared both the data and my findings with the design team to brainstorm production approaches. This led to three new content types, prioritized by ease of execution:

The revenue optimization efforts increased revenue from our 3 main music channels by 20% in 4 months.

Reflection

By the time I left the company, the YouTube business had become a smoothly running operation with a clear picture of its target users, a consistent content pipeline, and documented processes for the team to continue executing independently.

The deepest lesson from this experience was about the nature of building a product through collaborative effort. What started as a one-person exploration grew into a live business in which 22 people across design, IT, business development, marketing, legal, finance, operations, and customer support each played an active role. At the center of that team, my job was to bring market insights, surface opportunities, draw on expert input, move decisions forward, analyze results, and share progress. What began as an "I" project became a "we" business, and I am grateful for that experience.

If I could go back, I would have engaged more deeply with our publishers and artists from the very beginning. They carried hard-won insights from years of interacting with their fans and general audiences, and many were willing to share that knowledge to help us build a business that served them well. Some had their own promotional goals we could have collaborated on. Deepening those relationships earlier would have shifted the dynamic from a transactional arrangement to a genuine partnership, keeping content owners more invested in the platform's success. The publisher dashboard and the artist channels both showed me how closer connections with creators strengthened the business and fed higher-quality content into our growth engine. It is a lesson I carry forward: the partners closest to the end user are often the richest source of product insight, and investing in those relationships pays compounding returns.