Roberto Blake: How YouTube Expertise Became a Six-Figure Business
Roberto Blake turned years of YouTube and content creation expertise into a thriving coaching business on Kajabi. Here's the full story, to six figures.
Summary
Roberto Blake spent years as a self-taught creative working in-house for companies that needed what he knew. When he left to build his own business, he didn't start with courses. He started with coaching. Through Kajabi, he launched one-on-one coaching, a group membership, and eventually digital products, earning over half a million dollars and building a YouTube audience of nearly 600,000. This is the story of how expertise becomes ownership.
Roberto Blake didn't go to school for this. He taught himself design, coding, social media, content creation. Then he spent years doing it for other people, 40 hours a week, for clients who couldn't do what he did without him.
At some point, the math stopped making sense.
He was solving six-figure problems for six-figure earners. The question became obvious: why wasn't he building something of his own?
The Before
Roberto built his skills from scratch. Illustration, coding, web design, social media, content strategy. By 22, he was working as an in-house graphic and web designer. By 2013, he left corporate life to go full-time as a freelancer and creator.
He started a blog. A YouTube channel. He answered questions on Yahoo Answers in his area of expertise. His reputation grew. So did his audience.
But growing an audience and monetizing it are two different problems. Roberto needed a platform that could hold coaching, community, and digital products under one roof without requiring him to stitch five different tools together.
"I didn't immediately go into digital products or digital downloads," he says. "I went into one-on-one coaching with Kajabi and into group membership with Awesome Creator Academy."
The Turning Point
Roberto recognized something that most creators miss: the platform you build on determines how much of your revenue you actually keep.
Other platforms take a cut. Sometimes 30%. Sometimes 50%. For someone whose entire business model depends on the value of their expertise, that math doesn't work.
"I believe in using platforms like Kajabi to build your memberships so you're getting more than 90% of your revenue rather than splitting 30% or even 50% of it with a platform," he says.
That principle drove the decision. He moved Awesome Creator Academy to Kajabi in late 2017. The coaching business launched from there.
What He Built
Roberto started with what he knew best: coaching creators one-on-one. From there he expanded into a group membership through Awesome Creator Academy, where he coaches content creators on monetization strategies and personal branding.
Once the coaching foundation was solid, he added digital products. His first was the YouTube Starter Kit, a package of over 100 Photoshop templates for $99, designed to give creators without technical skills access to professional-grade tools.
He has since expanded into AI tools for creators, launching Creator Prompts, a collection of over 200 custom ChatGPT prompts built specifically for content creation. Priced at under $10, it includes lifetime updates.
His first book, Create Something Awesome, published in 2022, became a best-seller on Amazon.
As a public speaker, he has shared his expertise at HOW DESIGN LIVE, Social Media Marketing World, and VidCon. His YouTube channel has grown to nearly 600,000 subscribers with over 38 million views.
The Results
The YouTube Starter Kit alone has generated over $140,000 in revenue as a standalone product alongside one-on-one coaching. That's one product, one platform, from a skill he already had.
His broader business, built on coaching, membership, and digital products through Kajabi, has crossed six figures and continues to grow. Looking ahead, Roberto is moving into courses and expects it to double or triple what is already a six-figure business.
He has helped thousands of creators scale their own businesses. His audience keeps growing. So does his product catalog.
What Made It Work
He started with coaching, not content. Roberto didn't launch a course on day one. He validated his expertise and his audience through one-on-one coaching first. That grounded everything that came after in what clients actually needed.
He built on a platform that let him keep his revenue. The decision to use Kajabi wasn't just logistical. It was philosophical. Platforms that take a percentage of revenue are a structural problem for creators. Roberto chose a model where his revenue stayed his.
He packaged existing skills into accessible products. The YouTube Starter Kit wasn't invented from scratch. It was expertise Roberto already had, packaged into a format his audience could use. That's the model: know something, package it, sell it.
He diversified without losing focus. Coaching, membership, digital downloads, AI tools, a book. Each product serves the same audience in a different way. Roberto didn't scatter. He stacked.
His Advice
Roberto is direct about what it takes to own your business in the creator economy.
Don't over-rely on platforms that control your distribution and take your revenue. Build an audience you own. Choose infrastructure that works for you, not against you.
And on the community that makes it possible:
"The community behind Kajabi, the course instructors, the membership leaders, the people making the digital products, and also the product team itself that builds the tools in Kajabi, all of these people play a role in my success."