They Built a Business Teaching Creators. Last Week They Wrote a $25,000 Check to One With 670 Subscribers.

A YouTuber with just over 670 subscribers now has $25,000 to make a five-part documentary series.

The money came from Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry — the duo whose entire business is explaining the creator economy to other creators. In partnership with Adobe, they awarded creator Jackson Hughens a $25,000 grant to work on a five-part documentary series, destined for YouTube, about a family adopting five children with Down syndrome.

Subscriber counts are not the point here. The structure is.

For roughly a decade, Colin and Samir have monetized an audience the normal way: sponsorships, a podcast, a paid summit, courses, advice. They built a large following — and a lucrative business — as creators catering to other creators. Fast Company reported in January 2024 that they had made a 30-day course for creators, built with Kajabi.

That's the model every knowledge business recognizes. You have expertise. You package it. People pay for it once.

The Big Idea Fund is the second monetization of the same audience — and it doesn't look like a product at all.

What $25,000 actually buys

The pitch on the fund's own site was blunt: give away $25k to fund a dream project, pick one to make real. Creators submitted an unlisted YouTube link, and the winner would be flown to the duo's LA studio to appear on an episode of Creator Support. The winning project had to be made with Adobe tools, and Adobe was watching the submissions too, with the option to reach out to creators it liked.

So the grant was sponsor-funded. Colin and Samir didn't write the check from their own P&L — they went to one of their brand partners and pitched them a contest.

What the duo got in return was something harder to buy: a sorted, self-selecting pile of talent, with budgets and pitch videos attached.

The Publish Press reported that hundreds of pitches came in. Most submissions were unlisted, but the community — and anyone who found the Big Idea Fund site — could watch them, and some of those videos still picked up hundreds of views. It made clear to Chaudry that the duo needed a space for people who "want to make bigger ideas."

Read that again if you sell anything to an audience. The applications became content. The audience became the judging panel. The losers got views.

Why a 670-subscriber channel won

The winning entry wasn't a vibe. It was a budget.

Documentary creators Jackson and David Hughens won for a plan to make a five-part series about the Pinkertons, a family who have adopted five children with Down syndrome. David told the Publish Press that a single documentary for the channel costs $5K, and the father-son duo laid out in their application exactly how the $25K would be spread across the five episodes.

Five episodes. Five thousand each. The math closed.

They also knew why YouTube. "Everybody has a TV that can access YouTube," Jackson told the Publish Press, explaining that a series would reach further than a film's marketing could. And they came in knowing what they didn't know — David said one thing they plan to ask Colin and Samir is how much they should be on camera themselves.

A clear deliverable, a line-item budget, a distribution thesis, and a specific question for the mentor. That's not a 670-subscriber pitch. That's a commissioning document.

This isn't the first time

The fund didn't appear from nowhere. It's the next step after the duo's 48-hour creator competition Weekend Film Fest, and a way to experiment with producing. For years they ran that contest — 48 hours to submit a short, voted on by the audience — and at first there was no prize at all, just the promise of people watching.

"The reason we came up with that was because we felt this immense sense of anxiety when we were starting out as creators and knew what it felt like to put a lot of effort into something and for nobody to watch," Chaudry told TheWrap. He added that some of the winners are incredible creators today — one early winner was filmmaker Braxton Haugen.

Years of free contests. Then a sponsor. Then a grant. Then, now, the word "producer."

"I want to mentor, produce and use the 15 years of daily analysis and practice of creating and what we've learned about the internet to support other really talented creators," Chaudry told TheWrap, calling it a natural evolution of the Colin and Samir brand and noting how often other creators ask them for guidance and production help.

The timing isn't accidental. The Hollywood Reporter's 2026 Creator A-List notes they hosted a sold-out summit on the Fox lot and are setting up their own EP business, with still-secret projects in development at Lionsgate and A24.

The part that should bother you

There's a limit, and Digiday flagged it. An observer quoted in that piece called the project a good "proof of concept" but said the pair will likely need to partner with more traditional Hollywood players to expand beyond the Adobe-backed fund and handle development, financing, production and distribution.

Teaching is a clean business. Producing is not. One has margins; the other has budgets, overruns and a chance the thing nobody watches is yours.

But for anyone selling courses, memberships or coaching, the move is the story. The audience you built to sell to is also an audience you can scout from. Every student who finishes your program and goes off to do something interesting is, in some sense, your deal flow — and almost nobody tracks them.

"The discovery of talent is one of my favorite things that we've done over the past decade of our career," Chaudry told TheWrap.

A creator with 670 subscribers and a father who knows what a documentary costs just proved the pipeline works.