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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.
Fewer bars = easier, cheaper, or faster for an AI-assisted solo builder. Editorial judgments based on the case details.
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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Data 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.
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