In this series, YouTube Icon, Entrepreneur speaks with the individuals behind popular YouTube channels to find out the secrets of their success.
When Deepica Mutyala’s second YouTube video went viral in 2015 — a beauty tutorial about how to hide under-eye dark circles with red lipstick — the Today Show contacted her and asked her to do an on-air segment. That day, she quit her job at Birchbox, but she didn’t tell her parents, who are Indian immigrants.
Given her background, she says always felt pressured to pursue medicine, law, engineering or business. She’d selected the latter, but gravitated toward beauty. Since she was 16, she had dreamt of one day developing and selling beauty products for South Asian women. She’d even made it a case study project in college at the University of Texas at Austin, where she studied business administration and marketing.
When Mutyala, then 25, went home to Texas for a visit shortly after her spot on national TV, her father told her he’d found out about her career decision. Instead of expressing disappointment, he handed her a check to help her get her YouTube career off the ground.
“He just wanted to show me that he supported me,” Mutyala, now 28, tells Entrepreneur. “I didn’t take the check, but that gave me a mental greenlight that I could do this.”
For the past three years, Mutyala has been building her brand as a YouTube personality and beauty expert full time. Although she never even watched beauty tutorials on YouTube before she started posting her own, her channel now has 151,987 subscribers, and the red lipstick video alone has nearly 10.5 million views. Initially, she’d thought she would be too late to the YouTube game, starting in 2015. But she found her niche as a brown-skinned woman in the beauty space.
Mutyala admits that she’s not a makeup artist by trade, and there are other girls who look like her out there doing better tutorials. In May 2017, after struggling for a while to keep up, she took a step back and reevaluated what drove her to start posting videos in the first place. She posted her first vlog that summer, in which she talked about the mental health challenges and career pressures she’d been facing, despite the taboo of these subjects in her family’s culture. She didn’t wear makeup for the video. At the end, she announced she was leaving New York after five years and moving to L.A.
Her audience responded well, and it led her to realize that speaking to her followers as friends and sharing her vulnerabilities could be a new way to set herself apart on YouTube while being more genuine.
“I go back and remind myself, what niche are you serving?” Mutyala says. “What is the message to tell the world that nobody else is?”
In February 2018, Mutyala launched Tinted, an online platform where people whose skin tones “fall into ‘all the shades in between’” can find a community and tell stories. But YouTube remains her main focus, as well as the springboard for her various projects and partnerships. Read on to discover what she’s learned about how to succeed on YouTube.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
1. How did you get your start with YouTube?
I had a college internship at L’Oreal, and during that time, I saw Michelle Phan starting off. I remember thinking, “Wow, that is so something I could do,” and I wanted to explore the idea, but I had this mental block that I, as a South Asian woman, was not supposed to go and be a YouTuber. If I wasn’t going to be a doctor, lawyer or engineer, then I had to be on the business side of the beauty industry.
I remember thinking there was nobody who looked like me on YouTube. YouTube was growing to billions and billions of views, India has more than a billion people and the beauty industry is worth billions of dollars. But there was no connect between those three different verticals.
I decided to get out of my own head and just start. In January of 2015, I picked up my phone, held it vertically instead of horizontally, which is terrible production, and shot a video using red lipstick under my eyes to hide dark circles. It got picked up by BuzzFeed. When it got to 10,000 views, I freaked. Once it hit 100,000, I had this moment of like, “Oh my God, it’s going to hit a million.” And now it has 10 million views. It’s pretty crazy.
When the video hit 4 million views on YouTube, I got an email from the Today show to come on and do a segment. I was like, “Oh my God, I’m going to be the next Hoda, this is incredible!” I quit my job that day — I kind of took it as a sign that I could do this full time. I could take that 15 minutes of fame and turn it into my dream career.
2. How much of your time do you spend on a video and what does that entail?
It definitely varies, depending on if it’s a vlog vs. a tutorial. What used to make it take up so much time was the prepping — actually getting things set up. I’m not a production person. I don’t know what I’m doing! It’s not my thing. And so, I would find myself feeling so defeated because of that. If I allocated three hours to filming, there were periods…
