All that helps you start up does not scale. And vice versa. So what.
Use whatever you can to get customers and grow right now, then change later if you need to. Very practical.
Heath Adams is a military veteran in Albuquerque who started posting ethical hacking videos on YouTube using the handle The Cyber Mentor.
The videos created a million YouTube followers. Then consulting clients started showing up, and he launched TCM Security as a penetration testing shop.
Then he put his first pen testing course on Udemy in December, and it did six figures in its first week.
TCM Security became a training company quickly and scaled up, building its own proprietary training and certification platform.
By the time he sold TCM, it had 30-plus courses, around 10 hands-on certifications with a proprietary exam platform, and 30 employees.
Revenue was low eight figures, split roughly 33-40% education, 30% certifications, and 20-30% boutique pen testing services.
The YouTube channel passed a million subscribers, over 100,000 students bought courses, and more than 10,000 were paying subscribers. No outside funding, ever.
He sold to Educate 360 in 2024 and exited in 2025.
Before selling the company, Heath spent two to three years deliberately unwinding his personal YouTube centrality so the company could be sold without him: hiring a marketing team, handing off social media, putting other people on the videos, until customers stopped equating TCM Security with Heath Adams.
He now runs Breach Point, a defensive security startup built to scale from day one.
“We spent many years getting rid of founder dependency in our marketing, and that was a big thing to prepare for. If I ever wanted to get out of here, if I wanted to exit, I had to get rid of the founder dependency with me as the face of the company.
“So it was a two- to three-year plan way before then. We started hiring people in to be the face. Stopped posting on social media as much about the person and only about the company.
“We got to a point where they don’t say TCM Security is Heath Adams. They just say that guy maybe works at TCM Security, or they don’t even know who I am. Getting to that point was hard to achieve, but we did get there eventually.”
He leveraged his personal knowledge and his YouTube reputation to build a huge audience, which helped him build his company quickly and efficiently. But he shifted the TCM brand to the company well before selling it.
Now he’s leveraging video and social media to start his next company—using his personal brand again to get things started. Again.
Check out this amazing interview with Heath Adams on the Practical Founders Podcast.
