A few years ago I gave a lightning talk at work called “So, you want to start a new hobby?” The short version is that my hobby is starting new hobbies. I research something to death, subscribe to every YouTube channel about it, spend way too much money on gear, try to make some of it back, and then get bored and move on.
While I was putting the slides together I noticed that the “make some money back” part always looked the same. I sold coins from my collection on Etsy. I sold coral in little bags to people I met at Tim Hortons. I started a tea company. Almost every time, I was buying something in bulk, splitting it up and selling it for a markup.
That works fine until you stop wanting to pack orders. Once I got bored of the hobby, the money went away with it.
Watches have gone differently. Northern Lume Watches is the first hobby I’ve had that still makes money in the weeks I don’t touch the bench. I figured it was worth writing up how it’s set up and where the money comes from, and passing along some advice if you’re thinking about doing something similar with your own hobby.
How it started
I built my first mechanical watch about two years ago. It started the same way every other hobby of mine has. I found a YouTube video, went down a rabbit hole, and before long I was ordering parts for a Rolex Batman GMT homage.
About a year ago I started modding Casios, and that’s when I started filming. Casios are cheap enough that I could try something weird without worrying about wrecking an expensive watch, and a $30 watch turning into something nobody else has makes for a pretty good video.
Early on, the money came from selling a handful of watches and taking a few commissions. It wasn’t much, but it paid for parts, and every one of those builds taught me something. A lot of them ended up as videos too. My most watched video, Turning a $30 Casio Into a Custom Oil-Filled Watch, was actually a customer commission.
About the word “passive”
I’ll be upfront, “passive income” is a bit of a stretch. None of this was passive to set up. A build takes hours. Filming and editing it usually takes longer than the build. The website ate a lot of evenings.
The passive part comes later. A video I posted months ago still gets views and now earns ad money. The tutorial I wrote once still sends people to the parts list. With the coral, every dollar meant another trip to Tim Hortons.
So I think of it more as doing the work up front and getting paid for it slowly over time, as long as the videos and guides keep getting found.
Where the money comes from
It’s a few small streams that feed into each other, not one big one.
YouTube
Most people find me through the Northern Lume Watches YouTube channel. Most of what I post there is Shorts, like a $30 Casio turned into stained glass, a moon I sculpted by hand for a dial, or the Pokémon watch Casio made that you can’t actually buy, so I made two.
Some things I learned about YouTube money along the way:
- You have to get into the YouTube Partner Program before you see any ad revenue. Right now that means 1,000 subscribers plus either 4,000 public watch hours over the last 12 months or 10 million Shorts views over the last 90 days. There’s a lower tier at 500 subscribers that gets you memberships and tips but no ad money. YouTube changes these numbers every so often, so check the current requirements before you plan around them.
- Shorts pay a lot less than longer videos. A Short can pull in tens of thousands of views and still make less than a regular video with a fraction of that. I use Shorts to get people to the channel, and videos like I Built My Dream Watch from AliExpress are where people actually sit and watch for a while.
- Most videos do okay and every so often one takes off. Most of my Shorts get a few thousand views. My most difficult watch to date got 66k, and I honestly have no idea why that one and not the others. I just know I wouldn’t have gotten it if I’d stopped posting the ones that did a few thousand.
- Titles with a bit of a story do better. “I Talked a Customer Out of Buying My Watch” did way better than anything with a part number in it. Nobody is out there searching for an NH38 movement swap for fun.
I finally hit 1,000 subscribers and got monetized on August 1st of this year. I made $78 that first month, and it’s now averaging about $4 a day. That’s not quit-your-job money, but it’s roughly $120 a month from videos I’ve already made, and it covers a lot of parts.
The Shorts point above isn’t an exaggeration either. About 99% of that money comes from long-form videos, even though most of what I post is Shorts.
Affiliate links
Every build has a parts list, both in the video description on YouTube and on the website, and there’s a tools and parts page that has everything in one place. Some of those are Amazon and AliExpress affiliate links. If someone buys a screwdriver set or a dial through one, I get a small cut and they don’t pay anything extra.
This is about as close to actually passive as it gets. I wrote the tools page once and I update it when I find something better.
I only list things I’ve bought and used myself, and I added notes on the couple of places I wouldn’t go cheap (buy a good screwdriver set). The page also says clearly that some of the links are affiliate links. You’re legally required to disclose that in most places anyway, and I’d rather people know.
Right now affiliate commissions bring in roughly $120 a month. That’s about the same as what YouTube pays, and it comes from lists I only had to put together once.
Selling the builds
Some of the watches end up for sale. The Blastoise F-91W, a clear Casio with a holographic Blastoise card behind the screen, is up on Etsy. Once a watch is built and filmed, selling it pays for the next one. It also keeps my desk drawer from filling up with watches.
Etsy has only been a small part of it though. I’ve had 6 sales there for a total of $350 before taxes. Selling locally, mostly on Facebook Marketplace, has worked out a lot better. I’ve sold another 15+ watches that way for over $2,000. If you’re making something physical, don’t assume the big online marketplace is the best place to sell it. Try selling locally too.
Custom work
I also take commissions, where someone sends me a watch they own or I build one from scratch. There’s nothing passive about this one. I charge for labour and pass the parts through at cost, and any hour I spend on a customer’s watch is an hour I’m not filming.
I still do it, just not much of it. I only take a few at a time and there are jobs I say no to. Customer builds also make for good videos. Someone else is paying for the parts, and it’s usually something I wouldn’t have thought to build myself. The oil-filled Casio I mentioned earlier has close to 90k views, and I only built it because a customer asked.
How one build turns into all of that
This is the part I’d copy if I were starting over. Every watch I build gets used a bunch of different ways:
- I build the watch, which I’d be doing anyway.
- I post a Short or two while I’m working on it.
- I put together a longer video of the whole build.
- I write a tutorial for the site with the same steps, a parts list, and timestamps that jump to that part of the video. The Explorer homage tutorial is the one I’ve set up this way so far.
- The parts list, in the video description and on the site, has affiliate links for anyone who wants to build along.
- When I’m done, I wear the watch, sell it, or use it to show people what a commission could look like.
They all link to each other. The Short points to the video, the video description points to the tutorial, and the tutorial points to the parts. Any one of those on its own wouldn’t make much. It’s having all of them for the same build that adds up.
Why bother with a website
When I started modding, most of what I learned came from forum threads that were ten years old, and half the images in them were broken. Once a forum stops hosting something, it’s just gone.
YouTube can do the same thing to you, just on a bigger scale. You don’t own your channel in any real sense. The algorithm changes, a video gets buried and you never find out why. The website is the one piece I actually control. Google sends people to it, and when a video flops, the tutorial for that build still gets read.
I’m a developer so building the site was the fun part for me. If you’re not, any of the off-the-shelf site builders will do the job. You just want somewhere that’s yours.
If you want to try this with your own hobby
A few things I’d tell someone starting today.
Pick a hobby you’d keep doing even if it never made you a dime. It’s going to take a long time before any money shows up, and the only reason I kept posting through the slow months was because I was building watches anyway.
It helps a lot if there’s a before and after. Watch mods work on camera because you start with a $30 Casio and end up with something nobody else has. Woodworking, restoring old stuff, 3D printing and painting miniatures all have that too.
Film everything, even at the very beginning. I really wish I’d filmed that first Batman GMT build. People like watching the mistakes, and you can’t go back and film them later. Your phone is fine.
Figure out a schedule you can actually stick to. For about six months I built and posted a watch every single week. It was great for the channel and I wouldn’t want to keep that pace forever. Pick something you can still do in a busy month.
Get a domain and a basic site early. Put your guides on it and link to it from every video. It costs almost nothing to run once it’s up, and nobody can change the rules on you.
Only link to stuff you actually use. Amazon Associates is the easiest affiliate program to start with. Say clearly that the links are affiliate links. People can tell when you’re just pushing products.
Take commissions early, but don’t let them take over. When you’re starting out they pay for parts and give you practice on builds you wouldn’t have picked yourself. Once the channel is going, keep them small, because they eat into the time you’d otherwise spend on videos and guides that keep making money after you’re done with them.
And try to keep it fun. I’ve lost a lot of hobbies the moment they started feeling like work. I say no to jobs I don’t want, skip a week when I need to, and build something just because I want to wear it.
Still here
The lightning talk ended with “get bored, move on to the next thing, rinse and repeat every six months.” Two years later I’m still building watches, which might be a personal record.
I think it stuck because I never really turned it into a job. I just started filming and writing down what I was already doing, and over time that pile of videos and guides started paying for itself.
If you’ve got a hobby you keep coming back to, start filming it and see where it goes.
If you want to try modding a watch yourself, the Explorer homage tutorial is a good first build, and new builds show up on the Northern Lume Watches YouTube channel.