Q&A with the entrepreneur who failed for a decade before hitting 1.5 million subscribers
Plant-based chef Wil Yeung spent a decade “failing” at businesses before YouTube success—and he’d do it all again.
In our monthly Q&A series, we go deep with entrepreneurs to get inside their big breaks, “uh-oh” moments, and the unexpected turns that shaped their empires.
The founder: Wil Yeung
The business: Yeung Man Cooking, a plant-based cooking empire and popular YouTube channel
Résumé: His first businesses included a music school, a coconut milk brand, and a freelance photography career
Dayna: Before your cooking videos blew up on YouTube, you were hustling through a bunch of different businesses. Looking back, do you file those away as failures or something else?
Wil: I’ve started to understand it’s about rewiring how you perceive failure—changing the definition of what failure actually means. I think of Batman where Bruce Wayne falls into the well and Alfred asks, “Why do we fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves back up.”
My previous businesses were stepping stones. All those past skill sets—photography, video, ecommerce—were transferable to what I’m doing now. Thank God I had those businesses.
Dayna: That’s a pretty evolved take. But I’m betting it didn’t feel like that at the time, did it?
Wil: Yeah, for more than a decade, it was just like, “What am I doing? This makes no money.” All my friends were getting to the fourth tax bracket. I would have made more money flipping burgers at McDonald’s, probably.
When running my music school, I took out a loan, had no savings, and had just graduated from teacher’s college. I’m the type where everyone gets paid first. All the teachers were paid, rent was paid, utilities paid. At the end of the day, I was always negative money.
Dayna: Wait. You were literally paying to go to work?
Wil: I was. I remember sitting in my office thinking, “I cannot believe I put myself in this position. I’m paying money to go into work so other people can get paid.” I’d never felt that before.
Dayna: OK, so you’re bleeding money all those years while everyone else is getting paid. Why keep going?
Wil: I’m just very curious. I treat life and business like an ongoing experiment. Like a scientist who gets excited thinking, “I wonder if this would work, let’s try it out.”
I felt compelled—if I truly believe in this project, I need to be patient. Keep plugging away, keep trying to build it, keep learning how to innovate it.
Dayna: Well obviously it worked—you built up a Yeung Man Cooking into a channel with more than 1.5 million subscribers. What came next?
Wil: The growth of the channel translated into the growth of the sales for the cookbook and e-books, because we were just naturally getting more exposure.
Dayna: Who’s “we”?
Wil: It’s literally just me. Now that we have a baby, that’s 80% of my wife’s time right now. But she works on the Instagram content that we do.
Having a kid on top of a business really does change everything. It really requires a lot of what was once personal free time. I haven’t gone on vacation since before the pandemic.
Dayna: Even though you’re mostly solo, you upload to YouTube every week. But even armed with all your insights and experience, the algorithm is still unpredictable. How do you deal with that?
Wil: It’s up to the YouTube gods whether a video does well or bombs. I remember this gingerbread cookie recipe I spent two days filming—great recipe, perfect timing before Christmas, we threw everything behind it. It was probably one of our worst-performing videos. It just died.
But that’s the reality of the experiment. If I thought of that as failure every time, we’d literally be failing every single week. It’s not a failure unless you don’t do anything with it—take away something you can learn for the next modified experiment.
Dayna: It seems to be working for you. All those “failed” experiments were basically training for what you’re doing now, right?
Wil: Yeah, it’s because of those struggles that I’m able to put those skillsets to use. It really meant a lot for me to work on the books myself because I had the photography skills. I even had YouTube experience—the cooking show technically started when I was doing the coconut milk business.
Dayna: I hear from so many would-be entrepreneurs who are stuck in fear. How do you cut through that when people come to you for advice?
Wil: You have to choose which option scares you more. One option is fear of starting and fear of failure. The other is you’re 70 years old looking back thinking, “Man, I really wish I tried.” But you can’t take that back.
I’d rather try. The fear of unfulfilled potential—getting to the end of your lifetime thinking, “I wish I tried that”—that scares me more than temporary setbacks.
Dayna: I love that framing. The short-term embarrassment of failure versus a lifetime of regret. Is that why you’re always quick to tell people that most of your days aren’t Instagram-worthy but actually just regular work?
Wil: Everything starts with a side hustle. I’m just a regular guy—I’m not famous. What successful entrepreneurs do every day is actually really mundane. They’re plugging away, trying to build something no one sees until it becomes successful and mainstream media covers it.
That misconception where people think entrepreneurship is overnight success? That’s just not reality.
Wil is the creator behind Yeung Man Cooking. He sells plant-based cookbooks and cooking classes on his online store and hosts a popular YouTube channel. Read his full story on Shopify Newsroom. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.