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Scan the notes you already took, watermark them, and sell the Google Drive link to the year below you — the distribution is free tutoring traded for permission to post
YouTube channel was at roughly 600 subscribers while it was happening · her first YouTube payout, for comparison, was 680 ringgit after six months
She did not buy traffic for her notes — she offered free tutoring inside Facebook study groups in exchange for permission to promote in them, and asked her teachers to tell the students a year below.
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Faye runs a study and productivity YouTube channel, and she opens this video by attacking the category she is in: if someone tells you that you can make five figures a month for fifteen minutes of work a day they are lying, and if a creator boasts about their income but you have to buy the course to learn how, they made the money selling courses rather than doing the thing the course describes. Then she lists what actually worked for her and for people she knows. Her own number is the cleanest one in the video. Selling her notes was, in her words, how she earned her first $10,000 as a student. Not a launch, not a funnel — scanned handwritten notes, sold to students a year or two behind her, delivered as a restricted Google Drive link after payment. The context matters. This was not built on an audience: her YouTube channel had about 600 subscribers at the time, which she says helped but was small. She had already tried and failed at the more obvious student business — a phone case operation she started at 17 that did not sell out, because most of them do not, and because teenagers have neither the budget nor the space for inventory. Notes were the opposite trade: the inventory already existed, she had already paid for it with her own study time, and the only cost of a second sale was sending another link.
The distribution was borrowed, not bought. She went into Facebook study groups and offered free tutoring in exchange for being allowed to promote her notes there, after messaging the group admins to check that self-promotion was permitted.
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“Selling my notes was actually how I earned my first $10,000 as a student.”
10:27 · hear it in the videoData credibility: Creator's own account on her own channel, unverified. The $10,000 is Faye stating what she earned as a student selling her notes; it is cumulative rather than a monthly or annual rate, and no screenshots, payout dashboards or invoices are shown. The ~600-subscriber figure, the 680-ringgit first YouTube payment after six months and the failed phone case business at 17 are likewise her own recollections. Her nationality (Malaysian) and age (24) appear in the video description rather than in the transcript, so they are not used as evidence about where the note business operated. The video is monetised: it contains a disclosed affiliate relationship with the print-on-demand platform it recommends, and a lead magnet that asks viewers to subscribe, like and DM for a free guide — neither touches the notes figure, but both shape which options get airtime. Two further numbers in the same video are explicitly the creator's own arithmetic about other people's shops (34,000 Etsy sales multiplied by an assumed $20 average, and roughly 4,000 sales treated the same way); they are hypothetical by her own framing and are not treated here as reported revenue.
The mechanics are deliberately low-tech. She scanned her handwritten notes with CamScanner and paid to remove the app's watermark because it looks more professional, then added her own watermark — a precaution she learned the hard way after someone took her notes and sold them as their own.
Notes have a property that most digital products do not: the buyers renew themselves every year.
Her honest data point about slow returns is the phone case business she started at 17, which did not sell out — and her explanation is the useful part: it only looks as if everyone succeeds because the ones who fail do not post about it. Her second data point is the channel.
A set of study notes the seller already made for themselves, packaged for the students behind them. In her case: handwritten notes scanned with CamScanner, the app's watermark paid off, her own watermark added, stored in a restricted Google Drive folder and shared by email address after payment. The upgrade path she recommends is to turn the same material into a physical product — printed notes, planners or study templates through a print-on-demand service that prints and ships on order. She points at nursing students doing exactly this and law students selling templates on Etsy as evidence that the format works beyond her own subject. Our read: the reason this particular product is worth copying is that the cost of goods was already sunk. The notes existed because she had to study anyway, so every sale is pure margin on work already done, and the risk of the business is capped at the hours spent scanning. Compare that with the phone case business she abandoned at 17, where every unit required money up front and storage space she did not have. For a student with no capital, the asset is the coursework, and the only question is whether it is good enough that someone one year behind would rather buy it than make their own. One hard constraint she flags and we will repeat: check your school or university's policy before selling. Some institutions prohibit it outright.
One transaction: a student pays, and receives access to a Drive link. There is no subscription, no upsell ladder and no platform taking a cut in her version — which is also why the total, $10,000 across her student years, is the shape of the opportunity rather than a business that scales indefinitely. The adjacent monetisation she lays out in the same video is instructive about where the ceiling sits. Tutoring, which she rates as the most convenient way for a student to earn well, runs at hourly rates — she cites a friend charging $100 an hour for ESOL, IELTS and academic writing. Selling notes converts the same knowledge into a product that does not consume an hour per sale, at a much lower price point per unit. Our read: the right way to run both is as one funnel. Notes are the low-friction first purchase that identifies which students are struggling and willing to spend; tutoring is the high-margin service you sell to the subset who need more than a PDF. She approached it from the other direction — trading free tutoring to earn the right to promote the notes — which is the correct move when you have no audience, but once buyers exist the flow should reverse.
Close to zero cost, which is the point. CamScanner with the watermark removal paid for, Google Drive for storage and delivery, Facebook groups for distribution, and her own handwriting as the raw material. The only recurring expense is the scanning app subscription, and the only capital at risk is time. The tools she names for the adjacent businesses fill out the picture of what a student stack costs in practice: Canva for design work, Procreate at $13 one-off for anything hand-drawn, ChatGPT for product descriptions, keyword ideas, brand names and captions, and Printify for print-on-demand with a premium tier at $29 a month if volume justifies it. Our read: margins on a Drive link are effectively 100% minus payment fees, but the operational weakness of the setup is delivery. Manually granting Drive access per buyer email is fine at ten sales and painful at two hundred, and restricted sharing does nothing to stop a buyer forwarding the file — she knows, because her notes were stolen and resold, which is why she watermarks. Anyone copying this past the first hundred sales should move to a platform that issues a unique, expiring download per purchase and stamps the buyer's name into the file, which turns piracy from anonymous into traceable.
Copy the distribution trade. Offering free tutoring inside a study group in exchange for permission to promote is the single most transferable move in this video, and it generalises far beyond notes: find the community where your buyers already gather, ask the moderator what they need, and pay for access with labour rather than money. Copy the teacher channel too — an institutional recommender who meets a fresh cohort every year is a renewable acquisition source that costs nothing. Copy the watermarking discipline. Her notes were stolen and resold by someone else, and the cost of preventing that was one design step. Change the delivery. Manual Drive permissions do not survive volume; use a product that issues per-buyer downloads and logs who bought what. Change the scope. A single semester of one subject is a small market by definition. The version with a real ceiling is a subject-and-syllabus franchise: recruit the top student in each module to package their notes, run the distribution and the storefront, and split revenue. You become the brand students search for rather than the person who happened to take good notes in one class. And take her disclaimer seriously rather than treating it as boilerplate: institutional policies on note selling vary, some prohibit it, and getting this wrong costs more than the business earns.
Institutional policy is the first and most underrated risk. She explicitly warns that some schools and universities do not allow note selling, and an academic misconduct finding is a disproportionate penalty for a few thousand dollars of income. Check before listing, not after. Piracy is the second, and it is not hypothetical — someone took her notes and resold them as their own. Restricted Drive links slow casual sharing and stop nothing determined. Watermarking with the buyer's identity is the practical mitigation; assuming the file stays private is not. Copyright and syllabus ownership is the quiet third. Notes are your own expression, but lecture slides, problem sets and past papers are not, and packs that bundle institutional material are the ones that attract takedowns. The ceiling is a risk of its own. $10,000 over a student career is real money and honest reporting, and it is not a business anyone should quit anything for. Demand is seasonal, bound to one syllabus, and evaporates when the module changes or the lecturer retires. On the evidence itself: the $10,000 is her own statement about her own past, with no screenshots, invoices or platform dashboards shown, and it is a cumulative figure rather than a rate. The video also contains an affiliate relationship with the print-on-demand platform it recommends, which is disclosed in the description and does not touch the notes figure, but is worth knowing when weighing the rest of the advice. Two other numbers in the same video are explicitly the creator's own arithmetic on other people's shops — 34,000 Etsy sales multiplied by an assumed $20 average price, and roughly 4,000 sales treated the same way — and those should not be read as revenue anyone reported.
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