Confronting Pokimane | Inside The Million Dollar Empire

What's up guys? It's Graham here. So, a few weeks ago, dozens of you began sending me this video. It was of a Twitch streamer who goes by the username Pokey Main, who reacted to my feature in Glamour titled "How YouTuber Graham Stefan Lives in LA and Makes 1.6 Million a Year." At first, I didn't think much of it, but after realizing that it might be funny to record a video reacting to her reacting to me, I filmed a video and posted it on my second channel, The Graham Stefan Show.

While I’m denounced to me, she actually saw that video and responded to it. Then, after that, one thing led to another, and now we’re about to meet up in person to get a behind-the-scenes look into the business of one of the most viewed Twitch streamers in the entire world. In just a few short years, she was able to turn what many people would think is simply streaming video games in front of a computer into an online empire with almost a dozen employees and a following of over 20 million across Twitch, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube.

Since I’d like to think of myself as a business person, we’re gonna be diving into the workday of Pokey Main and discover all the mechanics of running an online multi-million dollar business that no one gets to see. Right after, of course, you smash the like button. I need to validate them because if you don't, then Elon Musk is going to be sad, and we definitely don’t want that to happen. So, make sure that like button turns blue, and with that said, let's begin.

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What if I close the door? Sure. What’s going on? Let me show you; she’s literally right there. That’s my roommate.

When did you start realizing that all of a sudden this would be a business where you could actually make a living doing it?

Yeah, I remember the exact moment. I was a second year university student, and up until then, I had been streaming kind of like part-time as a hobby, and I was studying Chemical Engineering. It got to a point where one month I made like ten thousand plus dollars in just brand deals, and once that happened, I was like, “Oh, okay, like this can actually be a job.” Whereas before then, it was just something that I did kind of like part-time that kind of had some financial benefits. So instead of like getting a part-time job, I would just stream. But I really didn't see it as like a full-blown business until that month.

What would you say to people who ask what you do? How do you explain that? What do you call yourself?

Okay, obviously, whenever Uber drivers are like, “I’m a YouTuber,” because that’s what most people, like boomers, understand. Now they know what YouTube is, but Twitch and streaming—I mean, it’s definitely gotten a lot more mainstream in the last couple of years, but there's still a lot of people who don’t know what it is. So I usually just say, like an online YouTuber or influencer of sorts, or I say I just make videos—videos about video games, basically.

I have my shack here, and then my alerts here. When you’re live streaming, your alerts are like people that are subscribing or resubscribing to your channel. If anyone donates and there’s a message, it’ll show. Yeah, for some reason, my mindset has never changed from like when I was in high school to when I’m now in terms of I feel like if you make a hundred K a year, like you’re set.

So, to be super honest with you, throughout the years of creating content and streaming, although the amount that I’ve made for sure has like exponentially increased in certain years, to me, after I started making a hundred K a year, everything else was kind of the same, which I also think will sound kind of crazy to you. But for me, like there really isn't a massive difference between like even like 200 K and 300 K because at the end of the month, you have enough to splurge on yourself when you want. You have enough to pay for Starbucks.

Yeah, sometimes we could literally just sit here and chat and talk about stuff or look at videos or do whatever for like hours. It’s really up to me and my community to decide what we want to do. I always felt like I couldn’t see streaming as a full-blown job if it was always reliant on whether or not people wanted to donate to me or wanted to subscribe to me or trying to incentivize people to subscribe.

It was really once I saw the connection with brands and being able to do projects with them and stuff like that that I could see it as a business or a long-term job.

I think some cool things to see in my workstation would definitely start off with Asana. So this is basically where me and everybody that I work with communicate, more or less. Certain things we have on Asana will be like contract deliverables or specific deals, and then I respond with whether or not I want to do it, if there's anything about the deal that I want to change.

Then that gets sent back to my manager, who deals with it with my agent. Do you wake up every morning and there’s like 50 offers for you to pick and choose from? Like, “I want to make 5,000 here,” like is that how this works?

So, it’s definitely updated daily or as the deals roll in or as the opportunities roll in. At what point did you start hiring on help? Because how many people do you now have working behind the scenes?

Okay, let me just break everything down. I want you to break everything down. Okay, top to bottom, yes, there’s me. Okay, and I have an agent at UTA, so like technically she’s not my employee, but she works with me, such for me still for a very long time. I had editors, so just people that I’ve commissioned, like, “Hey, can you make one video?” Over the years, that turned into a full-time editor, and then over the years, that has now become like I need someone to manage my editors because I can’t spend all that time like reviewing videos, telling people what to make videos about, reviewing thumbnails.

I still have oversight on everything, so I’m in all the conversations, but I have someone else actively giving that feedback. I try to be as hands-off as possible just so I can have any sort of personal life or time to myself. I have hired a manager in general, which is someone that I delegate tasks to and that communicates with companies, executing on things that I want their help with, but is mainly just like managing my day-to-day and my liaison for other companies so that I’m not the one responding to every email and stuff.

Business expense—that by far is what I spend most of my income on, probably like 10 and 20 K. I haven’t actually counted up, but 10 to 20 K a month, just paying other people out. I forgot to mention that I now also have a business manager, which is someone who handles all of my finances, including paying all the people I’ve mentioned.

Hell yeah! Yeah, including that, including setting up meetings with like investment firms so that I can decide who to work with, and then also that person technically working for me. Everybody that helps me is just so crucial in terms of what I do. But typically, I really trust the people that are on my team to find the right people to help me.

I love everyone that I work with; however, I do agree that it is a lot of work, kind of managing all these people. Does it ever get stressful having so many people to talk to?

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There are no, like, it’s not a nine-to-five; there’s no times for this. Sometimes you have stream or YouTube issues at 10:00 p.m.; sometimes you have them at 1:00 a.m. It’s really all over the place, and so you kind of have to be ready to respond to things as they pop up. For example, literally just yesterday, we had an issue where one of my YouTube videos was flagged, which kind of means that it stops getting recommended, and you can even see how much it did. That is painful for me; I know it was like just going up and then it just dies.

When something like that happens, I have to communicate with someone at YouTube, communicate with my YouTube manager, and be this middleman trying to make a decision of do we take the video down or do we not? I don’t—it comes to everything else; I just generally have oversight so ultimately it adds up to a lot more hours than just six hours on stream.

Yeah, it’s a lot. I feel like I’m talking a mile a minute, you know? It’s true; the entire chance is like I could literally always be working because there’s almost always things on Asana that are just like emails coming in or projects that I can take part of or don’t. In the beginning, I basically took any deal that aligned with my morals, and what I mean by that is like the things that are off-limits to me are typically just like gambling or alcohol or promoting anything that is like suggestive, which is just a personal choice of mine—all the fun stuff.

So basically, anything that wasn’t that and also that I felt like was a fine product, I was happy to promote. Then, it got to a point where I took a lot of deals, mostly to build out my resume. It’s kind of like working a job you don’t really like so that you can get a job you do really like or have the credentials to get a job you really like.

So for the first like two, three, four years, it was a lot of that. Now I’m just like if it’s not a yes, it’s a no.

Trying this again, so where are we heading to?

So we are headed to the Offline TV house, which is where I used to live, and it’s where all the other members of Offline TV live. It’s basically like a content house. We literally just do a bunch of crazy things. Our most recent videos are like haircuts for quarantine, and we’re going to take some photos for our merch drop soon.

My life-work balance is all over the place all the time, too. So except sometimes that’s kind of fun, but the other side of it is it makes it hard to like properly take care of yourself or to do much self-development at all, honestly. I feel like so many other people rely on me—all the people that I mentioned work with me—that I feel like I owe it to them to be responsive, to be punctual.

So it really is a 24/7 job, and it sounds like you don’t know when things will pop up, so it really is just like work, self, friends—picture. Even that is hard to pick. How many days would you say you wake up and just don’t feel like doing anything, but you know you have to because there are so many people counting on you?

And you just—something happens personally just behind the scenes and it just throws you off for the day. How often does that happen? What do you do?

Oh, well, so if it’s a day that I have to stream, I just forced myself to. I’d say it probably happens like 20% of the time, if not more. I mean, sometimes you’ll literally be in the middle of the stream, and something will happen that really, really ruins your mood, and you kind of just try to push yourself through it.

Sometimes that’s good; sometimes it’s not good because you should give yourself a break. But yeah, lately I have been trying to treat it even more so as a job in that aspect. But if I didn’t have a stream schedule and it was really that bad of a time, I just wouldn’t do it.

So right now, we have a merch shoot for Offline TV, so we have some photographers with masks, and all of us, we see each other regularly, so we’re basically just gonna be taking some photos for the merch drop that we’re gonna have soon—not product placement, by the way.

Yeah, when it comes to merch, there’s just a lot of back and forth between you and the designer or you and the manufacturer company or the company that’s gonna be getting the materials. So just a lot of little edits back and forth for months and months and months, and this is months of work to do this.

Yeah, the actual time we put in— you don’t really see the back and forth revisions with the designers. Even like sometimes I will literally draw on an iPad or draw on paint the kind of idea that I want them to put together. So all of that takes a lot of time and effort itself. So there’s always something in the works and it’s always being organized on this dashboard.

Have you ever had to fire anybody?

Yes, that’s the toughest because I mean anyone I hired, I’m generally really like—I want things to work out. There have been times where I’ve had to let someone go because not meeting deadlines, or it’s really tough, also because sometimes you become friends with people.

If you know they’re just like going through a tough time in life, you can give some leeway, but at some point you have to decide when it’s too much leeway—all those things. So I feel like I went from like a streamer to a boss of some sort, and that’s been a huge learning experience. Luckily, some of these people that maybe I had to stop working with for a while, I get to work with later on when things do improve.

All right, let’s try one of these. Which one should I get? Comment down below and let us know. Can you grab the Oreo?

Do you feel any pressure right now to make the most of it now? Like, are you ever afraid of this going away?

I feel like the way that I alleviate that feeling is just by saving the large majority of my income. So I feel like if my income went up and my spending went up, then I would be really worried about that kind of thing because it’s like how do I maintain this lifestyle? Etc. But at this point, it’s like I’ve saved up enough money to like live reasonably for a long time, so I’m not too worried about it all ending. Instead, I’m just trying to worry about really enjoying what I do for you guys.

So, waste of money? I feel like this is done on purpose now; it’s just—it’s gonna trigger all of my viewers, I know.

Oh yeah, it takes you longer to go in the app, figure out what you want, wait for it to go to the door; it takes you longer than it takes to fill up a coffee machine at home. Ninja melt?

I don’t know—oh, that’s like a soda. I’ll drink it. I’m not gonna let it go to waste; it’s free. So technically, I mean, let me talk about a few things about money that make me mad. One, rent in Los Angeles. Why is it a million dollars? And also, taxes—California taxes are tough and very much make me want to move to Vegas.

That’s what I’ve been saying. It’s crazy to think because, like, my parents—like my mom’s a teacher, and so for me to think I’m just like throwing away my mom’s salary because of where I reside long-term, I’m just like that feels so financially irresponsible. But also, there is the upside of, well, if you’re yes in LA, this opportunity is this.

So I saw it as a bit—it’s like there’s an opportunity cost of leaving Los Angeles. Yeah, everyone is here. How much do you generally say, if you give a percentage, 100% is your income?

Well, I put away about 40 percent of everything I make. It’s like a tax saving in this account, and then I would say I don’t touch another half of that, so 30% is just like in the bank, and then I would say the last 30 is either stuff I have as like business expense or spending income. I would have to try so hard to spend like 10k in a month. What do you spend $10,000 on in a month?

And I feel like to be spending like all the money that I make, what am I gonna be like leasing out cars every day, doing all this? So I feel like the amount that I spend, it’s hard for me to say frugal because it’s not in a similar sense to you, where you’re like—I mean, it’s just like I don’t purchase things that I don’t need, and anything that I do need will probably ultimately be like under 3k a month or so I’d say.

So in terms of percentage, that is within my disposable income, so I’m all good.

I once mind, yeah, that’s my favorite thing to do. It’s like a comfortable way of the hundreds of people and just like hanging out and talking to them all at once, like Smiley’s. Doesn’t it just feel good?

So I’d say my majority of my income definitely comes from Twitch, and people talk a lot about like donations and this and that, especially when you’re a female streamer, but like at this point in time, it’s under five percent of my income stream.

And then sponsor deals are kind of tough because it’s not just Twitch, but it’s also YouTube, and it’s also a lot of stuff. So we have all that YouTube ad deals, also sponsorships—Instagram, you don’t really make money off of unless you do sponsorships, which I don’t really like to. Sometimes merch hats really don’t do well, but mainly in our industry because you know we’re in the gaming industry, and merch in general does really well—shirts, hoodies, especially in sweatpants—but hats, I think it’s just good movie gamers don’t go out as much.

But yeah, for sure, you just test out different things that you think, “Oh, this will be really cool,” like it looks good, the quality is good, the fabric is good, but if it doesn’t suit your demo or your community doesn’t really like it, it doesn’t work.

What are you investing in? This is what I’m really curious about. Sometimes I find startups that I think are really interesting. Okay, and I will look into it and see whether it’s a good investment, so that’s one thing.

Have you get access to those startups?

I literally just reach out to. Do you really? I mean, I think they also see that like I have a certain amount of followers like, “Oh, like this is influence and money,” and typically they’re pretty interested in that. But then I always have to run it by my financial advisor, and he can like—I usually put him in touch with the company so he can actually look through their plans or their records, and he basically lets me know whether it’s a decent investment to make or not.

He also sometimes runs investment ideas by me, and he has also entered—like there was a period of time where he introduced me to many investment firms and not to choose one; it’s like your Goldman Sachs of the world. Sure.

So, yeah, and then I have that, and I literally just set aside a certain amount of money and just give that to them. For the last six or seven years, I’ve just been grinding as like Pokey Main that I haven’t really allowed, ahman, just the person, to experience much of her life as a regular 20-something or even just as a regular teen because I’ve been doing this since I was 17 in university.

I think I mean in college, my two years, I probably went to one party, maybe. So I don’t want to sound like it’s worth pitying me or anything like that; it’s just I really love working. I think you can relate.

Yeah, I had a really, really good time, but I also just like grind day in and day out and realize that I could just allow myself to do this forever or have to be very adamant about setting time aside for myself. I usually either watch TV or read to wind down.

Ultimately, long-term, I really really find great interest in business. I love helping people—I wish I could be a consultant for like every eSports company, any company that wants to get into like influencers or gaming or this whole internet space.

Yeah, I feel like right now, all I want to do is provide as much value as I can, and I feel like this thing that I know and understand the best is truly social media platforms, online influencing, and I really just want to help and teach that and create businesses down the line.

Guys, make sure you not destroy, annihilate the like button for the YouTube algorithm or else— or else Graham will come to your house every single time you order Starbucks and give you a lecture!

You gotta do it; you gotta do it. Came all the way here; you gotta make it turn blue! If you just do that, that’s it, and with that said, we got the rest of the video.

Thanks for watching! It’s really quick; I just finished editing, and I want to throw myself in here too to say that now I have like 72 hours of cumulative work thrown into this video to make this happen.

So if you guys appreciate that, just please make the like button turn blue, subscribe if you haven’t subscribed already, and if you enjoy content like this where I actually leave my house—because I never leave my house—and go and meet new people.

If you guys like that, just let me know down below in the comments section. And if enough people say they like it, then I will make more content like this with maybe some other YouTubers and other business people out there.

So with that said, you guys, thank you so much for watching; I really appreciate it. As always, make sure you subscribe, hit the notification bell, feel free to add me on Instagram—I post here pretty much daily. So if you want to be a part of it there, feel free to add me there, as on my second channel, The Graham Stefan Show, I post there every single day.

I’m not posting here, so if you want to see a brand new video from me every single day, make sure to add yourself to that. And lastly, if you’re watching this and you have not yet gotten your two free stocks, use the link down below in the description, and WeBull is going to be giving you two free stocks when you deposit $100 on the platform, with one of the stocks potentially worth all the way up to $1400.

So if you want these two free stocks, it’s totally free! I love free! Use the link down below in the description. Let me know what you two free stocks you get. Thank you so much for watching, and until next time.

What’s up you guys? It’s Graham here. Did you mean you guys? I’m just one person! Also, how did you get in my house?

I don’t know. [Laughter] I’m out here with like a PowerPoint, so this is the amount that I’ve made.