Maven Reveals the Secret to His YouTube Success

If you’ve ever watched wrestling on YouTube, odds are the algorithm has recommended a video by Maven Huffman to you. Probably more than once. Because once you watch one, they keep coming. Maven seems like a natural on camera, just casually answering questions about the business. Yet it was never his idea, and the videos are more planned than they seem. (Not unlike wrestling itself.)

On a recent episode of Mic Check with Mr. Anderson, Maven discussed the initial concept and pitch, stating that he never imagined it would get as far as it did. “It’s the craziest thing,” he recalled. “I answered a LinkedIn message from a kid [Zach Werre]. Once we get out of wrestling, we get a lot of people that hit us up, and 99 per cent of it’s BS, people that want you to do stuff you don’t wanna do, or is gonna have absolutely no return.”

“This kid told me, ‘Have a Zoom call with me, let me sell you on what my idea is.’ So I did, and the fact that he had another successful channel – he runs Tap Out Corner – I looked into that channel, and after our call I could tell he knew what he was talking about.”

Maven figured he had little to lose, saying, “What’s the harm? If I do it and it fails, okay, it’s just something I’m not good at. But if I do it and it succeeds, it can only help my life. That said, no part of me thought it was gonna become as successful as it’s become.”

The secret, he says, is to adapt to the medium. “Wrestlers do it wrong. Wrestlers don’t utilize YouTube for the way YouTube is meant. His pitch was, ‘I want us to tell wrestling stories, but do it in a way that YouTubers do it.’ ..There’s just certain things that make YouTube videos more desirable. And he told me ‘We’re gonna tell your stories – you can tell your stories all day long – but if we do it in a way that’s bite-sized, for people to take in, I think we could have something.'”

“And man, I don’t know anything about that world. But I put 100 per cent of my trust in him, and that was three years ago.”