🔴 A $250k business built on 60-second videos

In 2022, Imran Mumtaz left a $250k engineering job at Amazon to go full-time on his creator business. Today, he runs two brands and replaced his tech salary with a business built almost entirely on short-form video.

Here's how the numbers work.

In this episode:

Listen to the podcast | Watch on YouTube | Scroll down to read our profile.

— Natalia Pérez-Gonzalez, Assistant Editor

You've already made the hard part…the content.

But the moment it's published in one language, you've capped your audience at a fraction of the people who'd actually want it.

ElevenLabs Dubbing Studio translates your videos and podcasts into dozens of languages in a voice that still sounds like you. Not robotic subtitle-reader dubbing:

Creators are using it to spin up Spanish, Hindi, and Portuguese versions of content they've already made, picking up audiences (and ad revenue) in markets they'd never reached.

Same content. New continents. No new production time.

Try Dubbing Studio now

This is an advertisement.

You’re making $250,000 a year as an engineer at Amazon when your department gets shut down. You have two options: find another team inside the company, or take four months of severance pay at $80k. Do you play it safe? Or do you take the money and risk finding something new?

For Imran Mumtaz in 2022, this wasn’t a hard call.

He'd been at Amazon for almost five years. His wife's job provided good health insurance; he had savings; and he already had another job lined up, or at least the beginnings of one: as The Finance Engineer, his personal finance education channel, he'd accrued thousands of followers across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

So he took the severance. What's striking, in retrospect, is how little Imran mythologizes that decision, or any decision he's made since. He looks at what's working, what isn't, and adjusts accordingly. He is as willing to accept an unflattering number as an impressive one.

Any risk in this decision was well mitigated. Imran had nearly a decade of engineering experience, a healthy professional network, and confidence that if the creator bet failed, he could return to Amazon or find a good job elsewhere.

In his first year after leaving Amazon to try and make it as a creator, Imran’s revenue landed around $75k — roughly a quarter of his previous salary, and almost entirely through brand deals.

That first year’s gross was a hefty pay cut in relative terms, but still a completely positive signal for the long-term viability of Imran’s project.

In an average month, Imran estimates that sponsorships account for around 70% of revenue, with affiliate marketing and platform ad revenue splitting the remainder. He’ll promote his affiliates in specific videos, typically using ManyChat automations, and has a roster of always-on deals in his link-in-bio.

In 2025, his full-year gross was around $250k, restoring his former tech salary.

Today, Imran runs two brands:

For a while, this was Imran’s social strategy. At the start of January 2022, he had 29.6k TikTok followers. By the spring of 2023, he was at 220k, and four months later, 400k. His YouTube channel grew more gradually: his subscriber count hovered around 5k through the summer of 2023 before it began climbing that September.

Today, it's just shy of 500k subscribers, and his Instagram followed its own gradual ascent to 300k.

Eventually, Imran started noticing that a small number of videos were doing most of the work. He came to think of his growth through the Pareto principle: 20% of the posts generated something like 80% of the results. So instead of trying to come up with a new idea every time, he began naming the formats that worked and making variations on them.

Short-form video was one such format; his three biggest YouTube Shorts have 11M views each.

Long-form has been a different journey; Imran has uploaded plenty of it. His three most popular YouTube videos, each between 7 and 11 minutes, have 8.3k, 9.2k, and 10k views. On Rich Nerd, his second brand, only six of more than 50 long-form uploads have cleared 1k views.

Short-form viewers and long-form viewers behave differently, Imran says, and the formats demand different skills. Imran likes to script tightly; even filming from bullet points can be difficult. A minute gives him enough room to land the joke, make the point, and get out.

There is a limit to how big he wants the machinery around all of this to become. One editor handles about 95% of his content. Imran recently handed off brand-deal management and would happily give up YouTube thumbnails and titles next.

By 2028, he'd like the business to make around half a million dollars a year. Then, almost in the same breath, he offers another number.

“I need like $5k after taxes each month,” he says. “I'm good.”

Subscribe to The Finance Engineer and Rich Nerd.
Connect with Imran on LinkedIn.

The skills and appeal a given creator brings to short-form do not necessarily translate to long-form, and vice versa. This has, to date, applied to Imran, though he is far from alone in this challenge among creators we’ve interviewed.

An upcoming guest, Jack Settleman (creator of Snapback Sports), deleted a 600k-subscriber YouTube channel in 2023. He’d previously built a near-million-follower audience on Snapchat, and he was able to replicate that success on YouTube Shorts, but his long-form videos, even with hundreds of thousands of YouTube subscribers, would rarely even reach 1,000 views.

At the time of our mid-July interview, Imran had 499k subscribers on his primary YouTube channel. His three most popular shorts all had 11 million views — but his three most popular long-form videos (7–11 minutes long) had 8.3k, 9.2k, and 10k views, respectively.

I asked Imran why he thought he hadn’t been able to translate his short-form success (across TikTok, Shorts, and Instagram, to be clear) to long-form YouTube. He gave two reasons:

Short-form vertical video and long-form horizontal video are, of course, different media. As are newsletters, magazine articles, and X posts. The former are all video-based; the latter all text-based, but each is made by a distinct craft. And each is served to an audience looking to fulfill a different need; the same person watches a 30-minute video and scrolls through thirty one-minute videos for different reasons and in different moods.

The skill set gap is more specific, and Imran is candid about his own limits:

If you're a short-form creator eyeing long-form (or the reverse):