🔴 Building seven revenue streams as a solo creator

Nastja Mohren, or DIY Eule to her followers, is one of the most-followed DIY creators in the German-speaking world.

She started making YouTube videos almost as soon as she began sewing, just over a decade ago, and within four years, she was making enough from AdSense and brand deals to quit her day job.

In this episode:

— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor

P.S. Thank you to our sponsor for this edition, Google AdSense, for connecting us with Nastja.

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By Natalia Pérez-González

Before she became one of Germany's most popular DIY creators, Nastja Mohren, based in Berlin, worked in marketing. She did not know how to sew and had never made a YouTube video, though she wrote case studies involving the platform for clients at her day job.

Her grandmother, who’d been trying to get her to sew for years, gifted her a sewing machine for Christmas in 2014. After a single kitchen-table lesson — thread, reverse, and start — Nastja turned to YouTube to teach her the rest. At the time, there were only a few German-language sewing channels on the platform, and she saw an opportunity to fill the content gap.

Her first experiments were crochet tutorials. “It was a pain to edit,” she told us — her camera lacked a flip screen and autofocus, making it impossible to film a clean video with her hands constantly moving in, out, and around the frame. With sewing, though, the subject — the machine — stayed still, allowing her to film clear, in-focus shots.

Planning, scripting, filming, editing — Nastja fell in love with the craft. And by 2018, just a few years after posting her first video, her sewing hobby was paying more than her full-time salary.

At that point, she was working 80-hour weeks, split between a creative agency and her work as a sewing creator under the name DIY Eule (translated: DIY Owl). When the agency offered her a permanent contract, she declined. Self-employment was intimidating, but a layoff at a previous company had already shown her that stability is relative — and many of her family members were self-employed, anyway.

Over the past three years, the DIY Eule YouTube channel has amassed around 51,000 subscribers — slow, steady, and deliberate growth. Growth for growth’s sake isn’t Nastja’s goal.

YouTube introduced an autodubbing feature this year, an option creators can turn on and off, enabling viewers to immediately translate a video into any language, but Nastja took a hardline stance against it. It could grow her audience, but in doing so, could hurt her ability to sell to advertisers.

“Brands ask for demographics,” she explained. “They want at least 40% [of the audience to be] from Germany. I have 90–95%.”

For her sponsors, mostly German and Austrian craft and lifestyle brands, that audience makeup is crucial: primarily German-speaking women, aged 45+, who often sew for their grandkids or for sizes and styles they can’t find in stores.

Nastja's income shifts with the seasons. During Black Week in November, affiliate commissions from Amazon spike. December is dominated by brand partnerships as companies launch Christmas campaigns. When we interviewed her in October, she’d posted to Instagram 10 times in the preceding seven days; nine of those posts were sponsored partnerships.

Summer sees custom partnerships quiet down, with YouTube and Google AdSense revenue becoming a larger portion of the pie.

The German DIY creator community, as Nastja describes it, is tight-knit. She maintains an inner circle of 10 to 20 peers in constant communication — trading notes, collaborating on projects, and sharing what works. "I think that's very rare," she says, contrasting it with beauty and fashion creators who operate in a more competitive mode.

The ecosystem works because everyone occupies different lanes. Nastja is known for color and humor. Others specialize in hand embroidery, machine embroidery, or plotter cutting. They overlap but don't replicate.

That collaborative spirit extends to her audience, an ethos that’s shaped her brand.

Watch or listen to our full interview for more.

Subscribe to DIY Eule on YouTube or follow on Instagram.

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It’s not just eschewing YouTube autodubbing that’s made Nastja’s audience so well-engaged and easy to package for advertisers.

She receives 50 to 100 Instagram DMs every day and reads them first thing each morning. If she skips a day, she's facing 200 DMs. Skip three days, it's exponential. Over time, the actual cost is losing the real-time signal about what her audience actually needs.

Here's how Nastja systematically integrates this audience feedback into her content strategy:

When Nastja can’t decide between fabric colors or project ideas, she lets her audience make the choice. Planning a live stream? She brings them in: “Sweater or autumn dress?” They vote sweater. During the stream, she reminds them: “You voted — I’m making a sweater today.”

When Nastja wrote her first book, she used community polls to select fabric for every project. When she became pregnant in 2019, she turned that life stage into the subject of her second book. She brought her community into her pregnancy journey, and they became invested in the content and excited about the book.

It’s a small creative decision that carries a significant strategic outcome: it cuts indecision in half and gives her audience ownership of the outcome. Viewers, in effect, help direct and co-create the content.

During a recent live stream, Nastja’s community caught an error in real-time: she'd cut fabric with a cat pattern upside down. Instead of reshooting, she posted a reel of herself doing a headstand with the caption, "It's just a point of view." It’s become an inside joke with her community and a reminder that imperfection makes creators relatable.

That same feedback loop fuels her production process. When she struggled with projector pattern cutting — a method that projects sewing templates onto fabric — a viewer DMed her about a platform that solved the exact problem. She turned the suggestion into her next video and credited the follower by name.

Audience feedback becomes the process. When her audience sees their input show up in the final product, they send more ideas. The content gets sharper. The connection gets stronger.

That transparency extends beyond tutorials. When her grandmother — the person who first taught her to sew — passed away, Nastja documented the process of hand-embroidering her urn. Viewers responded with their own memorial projects and stories of loss. Her vulnerability gave others permission to grieve through making, too — the same creative impulse that had brought them all together in the first place.

Whether you're earning $100 or $100,000 as a creator this year, whether you're working solo or building a team, whether you're thriving or struggling, we’d love to hear from you.

It’ll take you 3–5 minutes to fill out our survey. We’ll publish the results in December, right here in the newsletter.