THE NEXT CHAPTER. ~ 2025-09-26

Connor and I watching a developing supercell near Raymer, CO on June 2nd, 2025 (Photographed by Nicholas Isabella)

(Narrated version linked here on 2nd YT Channel)

400 days ago (exactly), I took a leap of faith to pursue something that I had worked on in my free time for the previous 6 years. In that moment, there was nothing more I wanted in the world than to put my full energy into something that I had immense passion in. Who doesn’t dream of leaving their 9 to 5 to do what they love?

Well, some 13 months later, I’m pumping the brakes on June First as a full-time commitment.

So… what gives? What led me to this point? 

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All was great in the Fall of 2024. I had a strong start with two of my favorite pieces I’ve ever made, those being the ‘10 Bullets of Chaser Safety’ and ‘Why We’ll Never See Another EF5 Tornado’. Those types of pieces are my favorite to make. The other type of video I was making, and are by far the most consistent performers, were what I call the ‘event minidocs’. After churning out a ton of videos by the end of 2024, I found that what worked the most from a business perspective were the event minidocs. I had a formula that worked fairly well and was able to make decent pieces. While experimenting and making some really good ones (Bowdle being my favorite), I realized that I was starting to just go through the motions… making just to upload to keep the money flowing in. Sure, I was trying more introspective pieces here and there like talking about the nuances of the LA Fires and even why hurricanes rapidly intensify in the Gulf, but they weren’t performing to a level that warranted the amount of time vested into making them. The financials of June First as a business were keeping me from exploring topics that I wanted to explore. This was likely for a number of reasons, including inadvertently having built a core audience that was definitely tornado-centric and probably not flushing out extremely strong video ideas that would appeal to a greater audience, but nevertheless I had to focus on self-preservation. Bills needed to be paid, thus I had to make what paid.

By the time the 2025 Chase Season rolled around, I was really excited to just get the heck out of my 82.5 sqft home office (yes, I measured) and go out on the road filming the adventures entailed in hunting severe weather. This was the first year that I wasn’t limited to chasing only two weeks on the Plains. I had initial early season success in late April, with my best stretch of chasing to date. However, working with a shoestring budget and other commitments back in the Northeast, I had to return home in early May. I would miss a number of notable tornado events (May 18th particularly stunk to miss) before I was able to return later in the month. With added pressure of needing more great storm experiences to bolster my chasing content, Connor and I chased hard with some success. The climax looked to be on the last day of our trip, June 5th. It was a coin toss between two target areas; one in Texas west of Lubbock, the other up in Southwestern Kansas. While chasing Kansas and witnessing two weak, brief tornadoes, Texas to our south would go on to have one of the greatest tornado-fests of the year.

That forecast fumble broke me mentally. While I never desired to be a full-time storm chaser, I still wanted to make really great storm chasing minidocs for the times I was out west. June First was now my livelihood and I sunk so much money into chasing this year going back and forth from the northeast and wasn’t even able to remotely break even. That really bothered me. 

“Well, why don’t you just move out west?” That is so much easier said than done. My life outside of weather is currently all here in the Northeast. I’m in a great long-term relationship with her career currently based up this way. We have multiple friends living blocks away from us, family close by too. While we’ve both expressed trying Colorado for a chunk of time, to ask her to pick up her career and our lives here now and move out west before she’s ready is irrational and completely unfair. I love storm chasing and have a strong desire to make meaningful chasing content, but is it really worth uprooting my entire life at this time? Probably not, rationally speaking.

The business* failure that was the 2025 Chase Season left a bad taste in my mouth and really began a negative snowball. As I sequestered back into my little office to work on new videos, I started getting increasingly annoyed while making. That never used to happen as I’m someone that loves the process, not the final product. While trying to continuously improve what I was making, I found that my pace was really beginning to slip. Some of it could be chalked up to trying new things in the videos (like 3D animations), but most of it was just me stewing. I was increasingly distracted and frustrated for seemingly no reason.

*I call it a ‘business failure’ because it technically was my best storm chasing season on paper from every other metric. Unfortunately, it did not work out as a content move for June First.

Thumbnail from a 2nd Channel (May Third) video titled, ‘burnt out.’

To top it all off, the Northern Plains went on a tornado tear in the late season, with some of the greatest tornadoes I’ve ever seen taking place… through my phone screen. Already with a spiraling negative mindset, this was just further gut punches that wore me down to a point of actively getting angry. This was highly unusual. Normally, I get pumped to see my friends have a successful chase, but now I was just angry. Not at them, but at myself. It makes no rational sense. I was 2000 miles away, how the heck would’ve I been able to see them, never mind make a content piece about them? On top of that, I’d watch the Project OTUS videos and get further angry at myself. It reminded me of June First’s early days, building prototype UAVs to study supercells. In the past few years, I had completely neglected those original goals. I’d abandoned the original mission in a blind push to try to make a career out of June First. I put money over passion and built a hatred towards the thing I loved.

In the wake of ALL THAT, I began to deeply reflect and think about what are the most meaningful goals that I want for June First. At this point in time, from a business POV, June First is pretty much breaking even after overhead, taxes, and what’s left to pay my bills. This whole time, I’ve had several projects in my mind that are much larger productions. One year ago, I thought I could scale up with this full-time focus unlocked to make this happen. Ultimately, I realize now how much I overestimated my ability to make that happen. Additionally, there was also the goal of getting back into the engineering projects that really were the root of the June First’s formation.

Both of these key goals of more involved video productions and engineering projects require the one thing that I do not have at the moment; strong cash flow to support the increased overhead required. As a business, that is pretty important to grow an operation. After thinking about all of these things, I realized something inherent in my nature that may have doomed things from the onset… I’m a maker.

Making things is in my DNA. From videos I’ve produced to complex mechanical designs in my professional engineering life, I’m geared to make things. What I’m not geared for is seemingly everything else that comes with being self-employed. While I can track expenses and keep things organized, I realize I struggle with marketability and prioritizing the money-making content. Heck, I spent 3 weeks on a video debunking weather conspiracy theories that has made me a whopping $68 as of the writing of this blog. It was a topic I really wanted to cover, but from a business perspective, even from the onset of writing the script, was not the smartest play. But I didn’t care, I just wanted to make it.

Being in the content game, marketing your work and even yourself is paramount to your business’s success. It has taken a lot of work (plus trial and error) to slowly figure some of these things out on the YouTube side of things, but on other platforms, I haven’t bothered, frankly. YouTube has been my primary focus for some time now since what I do best is the long-form video content and it’s what I enjoy making the most. I should be diversifying on other platforms (or even just doing more short-form vertical content) more purely from a business sense, but I have zero appeal to make that happen. In fact, I really quite loathe it. The urge to grow and expand the business doesn’t seem to register in my mind. I just want to make cool things and if others like it, that’s fantastic. If not, oh well, I had fun making it. So… maybe approaching this whole thing as a business may have just the wrong play when I went full-time. It should’ve probably just stayed a passion project that fortunately paid for itself. Maybe the world we live in nowadays full of influencers and social media hounds corrupted my mind into thinking that I just had to turn this into a for-profit business. Sure, I’d rather be doing this than my corporate engineering job, but what I was doing before was really neat work even though I detested the massive corporate machine. The romantic idea of being your own boss sounds so good, who doesn’t want that? Little do you realize in the moment it’ll cost you the passion you grew in the first place.

There’s probably some flawed logic in there at some point, but that’s how I’ve constructed this narrative in my head. The end result is that I’ve come to the difficult conclusion that I need to sacrifice my freedom as a full-time creator to achieve these flushed-out goals that really matter to me. Now with a healthy built up YouTube catalog, I can fully re-invest that revenue back into the future projects that I really care about, not having to worry and fixate about the financial outcomes upon their release. One of these more polished projects has already been in the works over the past two months, a project that I haven’t been this excited to work on in quite some time.

As for what I’ll be doing full-time next… I don’t quite know. I’d love to stay in the weather space if I can as I think I offer a unique skillset, but ultimately I’ll likely be around some engineering again in order to really bolster my personal finances. Zooming out beyond my June First goals, I also had to be honest with what I’m looking for in my personal life, my key personal goals. Homeownership and things of that nature is something I’d like to have some day and this past year has really opened my eyes to how important personal finance is. Sure, it’s one thing to pay the bills, but it is a whole other thing to get ahead and meet those eventual goals that do mean something to me. I don’t want to be the coping Millenial or Gen-Z’er that says, ‘woe is me, I’ll never own property.’ Plus, I’m 26… that may still be young to some, but the math brain in me knows I cannot miss out on the wonderful tool that is compound interest. 

I feel it is also important to point out that I do not at all regret these past 13 months. Frankly, it was the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make (leaving my engineering job, that is) thus far in my life. I’m really proud of what I’ve done in that time, growing my YouTube channel’s subscribers by over 200%, views by 350%, and making a catalog of weather content that is both educational and entertaining for weather novices and experts alike. June First rolls on into its next chapter with some new goals in mind. As I always like to say, you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet, and this was just one of the eggs that I had to crack.

Stay tuned as there are a couple more videos in the pipeline for sponsorship commitments, but I will forever appreciate the support that has existed and for what comes next. Hopefully this long drawn out blog provided some insight and shines a light on the best still being yet to come for June First (:

Cheers,

Ethan