Eva Gutowski, known to almost 9 million YouTube subscribers as MyLifeAsEva, published her first music video in 2015 -- and hasn't looked back since. At time of writing, Gutowski’s first public foray into music has been viewed upwards of 41 million times. She’s now nearing 9 million subscribers on YouTube and plans to focus more on music this year. How did you get your start with YouTube? I started making videos to post just for my friends to see, and people really liked them. At the time, I was also writing a blog, and the readers wanted to see more videos, so I started doing more and more video content. So many people ask me what the best day is to post on YouTube, but I’ve never personally tried to target the “best day” because there’s so many elements of my life besides YouTube -- acting, music, writing -- and I don’t want the pressure of having to make that day every single week. Someone gave me really good YouTube advice a few years ago: “You can’t be a YouTuber unless you’re a fan of YouTube first.” It’s so true. When I started on YouTube with my friends six years ago, we all fell in love with it. Watch a lot of YouTube before you even start posting videos.
Eva Gutowski, known to almost 9 million YouTube subscribers as MyLifeAsEva, published her first music video in 2015 — and hasn’t looked back since.
In this series, YouTube Icon, Entrepreneur speaks with the individuals behind popular YouTube channels to find out the secrets of their success.
On April 15, 2015, Eva Gutowski sat in her California apartment battling serious nerves. The fashion, lifestyle and comedy vlogger already had a significant following on YouTube as MyLifeAsEva, but she was about to post her first music video and had no idea how her subscribers would react.
To make matters worse, she’d spent weeks editing her passion project — and after sending it out to a professional color corrector, she received the file back in a bizarre wash of yellows and greens. The music video was supposed to go live the following morning. Gutowski was distraught. She opened FinalCut Pro, chopped the file into about 5,000 individual clips and color-corrected each one until 5 in the morning.
Gutowski had never publicly discussed her interest in music with her followers, so she was sure people would think the video was strange and that her song, “Literally My Life,” would flop. “I wanted to poop myself,” she says, remembering her fear that people wouldn’t even want to watch it. “I just had to tell myself no matter what happens it’s a fun process. … [I] have to press play and see what people say.”
She decided she wouldn’t consider the video a failure if it got a million views, but by the following day, it had 8 million and counting. Gutowski’s friends sent her clips of her song playing in malls, and she saw videos of celebrities singing along in their cars.
At time of writing, Gutowski’s first public foray into music has been viewed upwards of 41 million times. She’s now nearing 9 million subscribers on YouTube and plans to focus more on music this year. And although the vlogging starlet has a social media empire, fashion line and limited-edition beauty collection, she still dreams of living in a one-bedroom house in Hawaii and owning a papaya stand.
Read on for how Gutowski got her start, why she spends an average 15 hours on each video and her top advice for aspiring vloggers.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
1. How did you get your start with YouTube?
I got started on YouTube when I was a freshman in college. I was a broadcast journalism major, and I already had a lot of experience with video editing and photography. My dad grew up as a computer programmer, so he always had random computer software, and I started opening up editing software at age 12 and figuring out how to build websites.
In college, most people I knew were living in the dorms and I wasn’t, so I didn’t have many friends. I was also in broadcast classes, and I wanted to get good at talking on camera for my job — I wanted to be a television host. I started making videos to post just for my friends to see, and people really liked them. One day, I realized they…
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