Building a portfolio and growing it to $3M/yr via YouTube

When Jacky Chou realized his career path wasn't right for him, he went down the rabbit hole and learned how to make money online. After growing an audience, he created a portfolio of businesses, including Indexsy and LocalRank.so. And now, his portfolio is bringing in over $3M per year.

Here's Jacky on how he did it. 👇

A $3M/yr portfolio

I'm Jacky Chou, and I run a portfolio of online businesses out of Vancouver, BC, including an SEO agency called Indexsy and a cluster of SaaS tools: LocalRank.so, Trackings.ai, IndexChex, RankTack, and a few others.

I also operate a short-term rental in Lisbon and publicly track monthly revenue across all of it on social media. In March, revenue was $246.8k. My trailing-12-month revenue is $3M.

All this started with a wake-up call. I was studying engineering and scored dead last on a midterm in a class of 300-plus. At that moment, I realized that path probably wasn't for me. I went home, Googled "how to make money online," and fell down the rabbit hole.

That search led me into SEO and affiliate marketing, and I've been building online businesses ever since.

$20k MRR right out of the gate

I cofounded my first software product, Localrank.so, with Peter Wang. I had been publishing daily videos on my YouTube channel for over two years, and then I saw a gap in the market. Peter and I launched the MVP in a week and hit nearly $20k MRR right out of the gate.

It's a Django app with a React frontend, running on Hetzner, using Postgres, Redis, and Celery for background jobs. We use AWS and Cloudflare for infrastructure, Stripe for payments, and several AI APIs for smart features. Nothing too exotic.

A portfolio model

I use a portfolio model. I run a few different revenue lines — my SEO agency and a cluster of SaaS tools — that feed into each other. Each stands alone, but they share audience, distribution, and significant operational overlap.

Recently, the SaaS cluster has grown toward parity with the agency, which is my desired direction.

An organic flywheel

I've grown mostly through content and publicly sharing my progress. Here are a few key strategies:

• YouTube first. I consistently prioritize this channel. Videos with relatively low view counts drive significantly more product signups than posts that get tens of thousands of impressions on other platforms. YouTube's search intent differs. Viewers watching a "best local SEO tool" video are much closer to buying than those scrolling a feed.

• Public revenue tracking. I post monthly revenue breakdowns across my entire portfolio on social media. It builds trust, attracts other operators, and generates a steady stream of inbound leads for the agency and the SaaS tools.

• SEO on our own products. Most SaaS tools employ content strategies targeting their own keywords. Some content is long-form, some is programmatic; all of it compounds.

• Webinars and community. For LocalRank specifically, we run a webinar funnel that also serves as a product demo, using a Skool community (Local Rank Academy) as the conversion vehicle.

• Reddit and short-form. These are smaller channels, but they're worth maintaining. I manage an associated subreddit and produce short-form content for Instagram on the side.

I don't primarily use paid acquisition. It's almost entirely organic, and the channels reinforce each other.

How to do video content right

Here's how to create quality video content:

• Document, don't perform. The easiest authentic content is showing what you're doing. Build in public. Share the wins, the losses, the revenue, the failed experiments. I have a build-in-public playlist on YouTube where I do exactly that. No production crew, no script doctor, just me talking through what happens in the businesses week to week.

• Pick a format you can repeat. Authentic content dies the moment it becomes a chore. For me, that means casual, talking-head style videos I shoot when I have something real to say, not on a forced posting schedule that pushes me to make filler.

• Lean into specificity. People ignore "How to grow a SaaS" videos. But they'll watch "How I grew LocalRank from $0 to $X with this one webinar funnel." Real numbers, real screenshots, real businesses. The more specific, the more it stands out from generic advice content.

• Long-form on YouTube, short clips everywhere else. Record once, cut it into shorts, reels, and tweets. One 20-minute video can fuel a week of content across platforms.

• Stop optimizing for views early on. The first 50 videos are practice. You're learning to talk on camera, finding your voice, and figuring out what your audience cares about. View counts are a terrible scorecard at that stage. Just publish and keep going.

Three challenges

Here were my biggest challenges:

• Getting clapped by Google. I've been hit by algorithm updates more than once. When you're running an SEO agency and SEO-driven content businesses, Google updates aren't abstract; they hit revenue directly. The lesson I keep relearning is to take chips off the table when things are good. Don't assume the run will continue forever.

• Waiting too long on SaaS. I should have started building SaaS earlier. The agency was working, so I easily kept pouring energy there, but recurring revenue from software is a fundamentally different game. If I were starting over, I'd make that pivot way sooner.

• Sharing too much. Being public about what I'm building has been a huge growth lever, but it cuts both ways. Sometimes I share a playbook or a niche and then watch competitors flood in within months. I'm still figuring out the right balance between transparency (which builds trust and audience) and keeping the actual edge to myself.

Four advantages

Here are my greatest advantages:

• YouTube. Hands down the highest-leverage distribution channel I've found. A video with a few hundred views can drive more sign-ups than a post with tens of thousands of impressions on other platforms. Intent differs.

• Being public about revenue. Posting monthly revenue breakdowns has compounded into a powerful trust and inbound engine. People who follow that content become customers, partners, or hires.

• The portfolio model. Agency cash flow funding SaaS development is underrated. It lets me build software without taking outside money, and the audiences across the portfolio reinforce each other.

• Operator communities. Surrounding yourself with people running similar businesses is huge. We built Advise.so partly for this reason; it's a marketing community where I can drop a question and get real feedback from operators within hours. Immediate, high-signal input is hard to replicate anywhere else.

Make authentic video content

And here's my advice:

• Make authentic content and stick with it. Most people quit way too early. The first 50 videos, the first 100 posts, the first year of a newsletter, almost none of it will look like it's working. But authentic content compounds. Pick a format you can keep doing for a couple of years. Just keep showing up.

• Video beats everything. If I had to pick one channel for someone starting out today, it's video. YouTube, specifically. The intent is higher, the shelf life is longer, and one good video can carry you for years. Written content is great, short-form is great, but nothing has been as durable for me as long-form videos on YouTube.

The truth is, most of this game is just outlasting the people who give up at month three.

What's next?

My goals shifted a lot in the last year:

• Retirement, or at least the option of it. I want to build businesses that run without me as a bottleneck. This means leaning harder into SaaS and recurring revenue, and pulling back from anything that requires me to be on the tools daily.

• More time with family. I have a two-month-old son, and that reshaped how I think about everything. I built this portfolio to buy back time, and now it truly matters.

• Passion content. I want to put more energy into content I'd create for free. Food content is a major focus. I create Vancouver restaurant content on Instagram and would love to grow it into a real channel. It uses a different muscle than business content and is genuinely fun.

You can find me at jackychou.com or on YouTube, and I write a newsletter at marketingletter.com. There, I share most of my build-in-public content, revenue updates, and marketing breakdowns. You can also follow me on X and LinkedIn.