Name: How I Got Started on YouTube... and almost Quit!
Uploaded: 2025-08-10T18:07:25.000Z
Duration: 7 min 13 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hey dudes, I'm Hilah, and hey, long time no see.

It's been about three months since I posted a video on here.

I thought that I would catch up to old subscribers on what's been happening in my world and then also kind of fill in a little back story for anyone who's new or even people that are old.

On what I'm doing, what the f**k is going on.

So we took off a few months after that for maternity, paternity, leave of absence.

And I thought a lot about what we wanted to do with the channel during that time off.

So I actually started on YouTube, not through cooking, spraying minuscule fecal particles all over the fruit in 2008, I think, with this show channel called Project Rant.

I haven't caught you red-handed, no pun intended, but I will soon, you stupid b**ch.

Which I know some of y'all have seen because I still get comments like, I saw you on Project

Oh my god, you're that girl that did that farting video.

So Project Rant was a couple friends of mine, Cliff and Luis, produced this vlog, I mean they had like a couple hundred videos, I think, where they would go to Craigslist and find in the rants and raves section just these crazy ass people f**king ranting about s**t and then give the text to actors to reenact.

And I kind of want to see if they'll let me start doing them again on my channel.

Right around that same time, too, I started, and this is how I met Chris, actually, in this sketch comedy group called Big Ol' Tire Fire.

Are you tired of filling up bags with spray paint the old-fashioned way when you'd rather just be getting high?

Punch and Huff is the revolutionary new way to get high.

Excuse me, do you know where corner four is?

We're all going to school and we're learning things at Gazebo.

We would produce, like write, produce little sketch comedies, put them up on YouTube.

We made a short movie about a Jerry Maguire tribute band, which actually was pretty awesome.

I don't need to sleep with you, not necessarily.

Then, in 2009, Chris and I worked on an indie movie together that I was acting in and he was directing, had written and directed, and it just all imploded because of a lot of different things.

Adrian and I from Yoga with Adrian were both in that together.

Then we started making Hilah Cooking in 2010.

Chris was staying with me because he was homeless and jobless and penniless after the movie exploded or imploded or whatever.

We headed to the porch and we started drinking.

He was staying with me and I was cooking dinner for us and stuff.

So he was like, why don't we make a cooking show on YouTube?

Because I have this camera that I downed in a trash can.

And there's a light that I found in your garage.

We didn't know what the f*** we were doing.

We didn't know how to produce a cooking show.

We were just kind of like trying to do what you see on TV.

Like, here's a shot of this and then let's stop and get a close-up.

But we only had one camera so we had to literally cut, move the camera in, get the close-up, cut, move the camera out, and then continue.

For like a year we made 100 episodes in that style.

And then he would edit it like at Monday while he was at his day job cubicle, all secretly like hiding from his boss.

That's how I imagine him with like blinders on.

And then we won the YouTube Next Chef thing and then like the YouTube Creator Accelerator a couple years after that.

And both of those were super great because we got to like get inside YouTube and like see how all the YouTube gears work and also meet a lot of other YouTubers, some of whom are like doing it full-time.

Most of the people that we met during those things are doing it full-time now.

But we also got like super bogged down with like the nuts and bolts of YouTube and it started to feel a little overwhelming.

And like sometimes I would just feel like I was like working for the man.

It kind of sucked all the fun out of it to like think too much about tagging and all this shit.

After this little break, we've had this little three-month paternity, maternity leave break, and it's been super fun just chilling with the baby, like talking about like maybe we should quit making YouTube videos.

We're going to keep making YouTube videos, but we're just going to do what we want.

So from here on out, you won't see all cooking videos on here.

But what you can expect to see is still some cooking videos of only like delicious, awesome things that I really want to eat and make and also field trips and some kind of crafty stuff sometimes.

And I'm also super excited about this new party series that we're working on that kind of will show every little step that goes into hosting a themed party or dinner party kind of thing.

So we're just going to basically break our whole YouTube channel and then put it back together.

We'll find out what we like, everything that comes together in the middle in a little Venn diagram, stuff that will stick around.

I also want to focus on doing a scripted web series because that's something Chris and I have been talking about for years, and that's what we started doing basically, except it wasn't a series.

But it was scripted, and it was funny, and it was fun.

I also want to produce a couple more books.

I've got a kid's book that I wrote while I was pregnant.

I'm like reinvigorated to make some more stuff on YouTube.

Starting now, every Saturday around 8 a.m. Central Standard Time, there will be a new video on The Hilah Cooking Channel forever and ever.