today i want to show you something really cool and this is something that you can try at home as well alexa who is kevin stratford kevin stratford is a youtuber with 1 million subscribers check that out it is official i’m claire you’re a lucky little thing [Music] one million that is just a massive number and it takes one million people to click on that subscribe button to get there and for that i am just so appreciative and also thankful in all of these videos that i pull together i always get to show some really cool tech but i haven’t really shared that much about myself in this video i wanted to share a little bit about how i even came to run this youtube channel and at the end i also want to respond to some of your questions let’s go all the way back to the beginning i grew up in a small town called morristown new jersey i was really fortunate to grow up in a great family and in a great community growing up i was always very entrepreneurial here’s a picture of me in front of my lemonade stand maybe i should have been selling cookies instead it was the late 90s and the internet was all the rage and i remember buying my first book on html and i built my own website by just hand coding the entire thing and i remember then i had to find a web host to host my website and so i looked around at different hosts and i decided why not just host this website on my own so i started hosting my website and then i thought why not host other people’s websites and this led to the creation of my first tech company e-megaweb when i finished high school i went to the university of michigan and there i continued pursuing both business and tech i was really fortunate microsoft was one of the companies that recruited at my school i went in for the interview and i shared my passion for business and technology i went to microsoft for a summer internship and ultimately that went well and i returned to microsoft the following year as a full-time employee i ended up working at microsoft for almost 14 years and i worked on a lot of really amazing projects i worked on some amazing teams and best of all i worked with so many great people but when i take a moment to reflect on all of my time at the company there’s one accomplishment that stands out above the rest i met my wife while working at microsoft and we also have two kids now one of them is three and a half a little boy his name is thomas and we also have little claire a little girl and she is only four and a half months old and it’s just so much fun having kids watching them grow and develop a personality and if you ever wonder why i look tired in my videos sometimes you can thank her on why i started this youtube channel when i was working at microsoft we had customers submit feedback saying hey i wish your product would have this feature or this functionality i would take that feedback and i’d look at the product and it turned out that we already had that functionality it was just that the customer wasn’t aware of that functionality so i decided let me pull together a video and in the comments people would ask additional questions hey what about this or can you show me that and so i’d create another video that showed how to do that and then that video would get a lot of views and it was truly like a snowball as i pulled together more content more people would watch and as more people would watch i would get more ideas for content and it grew to the point where it just made sense to leave my job at microsoft and to focus on my youtube channel full time and now here i am at a million subscribers and i am just so grateful for all of you who’ve joined this journey that’s a little bit of my story of why i started a youtube channel and why i keep going and now i wanted to shift gears and let’s cover some of your questions what inspired you to start a youtube channel this one’s really simple i just wanted to help people learn more about technology what is the one thing you wish you knew when you had fewer than 1 000 subscribers the one thing that’s really blown me away is just how positive and supportive the youtube community is what advice would you give to a youtuber who is just starting out this goes for youtube but it really goes for any type of job in life or really anything you’re trying to get done just keep focusing on improving and also learning with youtube when you first start out you’re gonna learn so much about audio about lighting editing storytelling you’re not going to be amazing on day one but if you keep working on it you’ll keep getting better and better and better and the result will show over time how did you reach 1 million subscribers this one’s pretty easy just offer as much value as possible in every single video my goal is when you start a video to when you end the video you’ll be better off by the end what was your dream milestone when you first started youtube maybe i didn’t think big enough but i just wanted to help one person out there and once i helped one person well then i wanted to help two people out there how much money do you earn from youtube let’s just say my wife still works at microsoft what’s your favorite cookie to bake this one is really easy it’s chocolate chip that also happens to be our best-selling cookie at the kevin cookie company is that your real voice i am a real human being and i have emotions [Music] what was your dream job well as a kid i wanted to be a train engineer little did i know that i would become an engineer but at microsoft why did you quit your job at microsoft i pulled together an entire video on this topic and you can watch it right up there let’s just say that i didn’t want to have any regrets in life alright well thank you so much for all of these questions that was a lot of fun and thank you so much for hitting this massive milestone if you’re not already subscribed please consider subscribing i’ll see you next time [Music] you