We were lucky to catch up with Hassan Khan recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hassan, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Have you been able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen? Was it like that from day one? If not, what were some of the major steps and milestones and do you think you could have sped up the process somehow knowing what you know now?

Currently, I make a full-time income doing YouTube, but it always wasn’t that way. YouTube was a fun hobby for me, and I was trying to get a full-time job as an on-air sports personality after graduating college. After two years, no one gave me a chance, yet I was still making YouTube videos on the side. I noticed some videos were getting more and more views, which made me think to myself that I could make a living if I put all my effort into it. Now, I get to be an on-air sports personality while working for myself.

My biggest regret was going to college. I fell into the trap of what the world tells us to do. Go to school, get a degree, and work until you’re old. I often think how much further in my career I’d be if I was four years younger and $30k richer, but I’m thankful I get to do this regardless.

Hassan, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I run a YouTube channel called Time2Football. I host a podcast discussing the NFL, interview NFL players, and create short features telling players’ stories. I got into YouTube because I always wanted to be an on-air sports personality, and YouTube was the best platform for me to live out my dream.

Have you ever had to pivot?

When I made the move to do YouTube full-time, I had to make content that brought in the most views/money. The topic of those videos was fantasy football. Though I enjoy playing fantasy football and talking about it, I never wanted to be known as a fantasy guy. I would post interviews with big name NFL players, but many of my viewers never watched them and only wanted fantasy football content. I had to make a big step and quit making fantasy content if I wanted to break away from that identity, to be known as an independent journalist rather than giving fantasy advice. It was tough, since fantasy brought in so much money. But it was well worth it in the end.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

Some advice I’d give to help people build a following is to post on TikTok. It’s the best platform out there right now for building an audience from nothing, since it promotes your content to almost everyone. To put it in perspective, one of my accounts has 20k followers today, and I made the account eight months ago. Take advantage of it while you can.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/time2football
• Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/itshassankhan
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/time2football

Image Credits
David Hendricks