Where Attention Goes, Revenue Flows: How James Dumoulin Turned Street Questions Into a Global Classroom

On social media, we’re used to seeing business advice delivered from polished studios and boardrooms. James Dumoulin took it to the sidewalk. You’ve probably seen him before: calm voice, hoodie, mic in hand, stopping strangers with a simple hook - “Excuse me, sir…how did you get rich?” On his platform The School of Hard Knockz, those questions turn into short, addictive conversations about money, mistakes, and the mindset behind success.

Today, Hard Knockz is a full-blown media machine. On YouTube alone, the channel “School Of Hard Knockz” counts around 1.9 million subscribers, hundreds of videos, and a niche firmly rooted in financial education and entrepreneurship. Across TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, his clips regularly hit millions of views, from billionaire interviews to an entrepreneur who went from prison to multimillionaire.

But when James sat down with us in Barcelona – a bit jet-lagged from Texas, fresh off a boxing session – he made it very clear: This didn’t happen overnight.

“Our first couple of years were trench days,” he laughed. “We were just giving away value for free.”

From three kids with an idea to a billion-view franchise

Back in 2020–2021, James wasn’t yet the guy stopping Tom Cruise or Will Smith on red carpets. He was a college kid with a camera, a brother, a childhood friend – and a feeling that the creator economy was about to explode.

They started simply: Making content about business.

“We just started to make content about business with my brother and a childhood friend,” he told us. “But most people don’t want to get business advice from three 20-something-year-olds.”

That single insight became the pivot.

Instead of trying to be the experts, they went to the experts. They started seeking out industry veterans – people with decades of experience, big exits, real scars. They interviewed millionaires, founders, and eventually billionaires. They took the conversations out of corporate offices and dropped them into scroll-stopping, 30–60 second clips anyone could understand.

“We realized we could grow way bigger and faster if we went and found the industry experts who had all the years of experience.”

From there, it was one ingredient repeated ruthlessly: Consistency. They posted constantly. James says in the early days, he’d publish up to three times a day, letting quantity breed quality. Over time, they learned what worked, what flopped, and what the audience replayed on loop:

• Personal money stories

• “Broke to successful” arcs

• Counterintuitive lessons about risk, failure, and discipline

  
  

By the time Hard Knockz hit its stride, the numbers reflected that obsession. Analytics show the YouTube channel now sits in the financial education and entrepreneurship niche, with hundreds of videos and shorts pulling in hundreds of thousands of views each month, and many individual clips climbing into the multi-million range.

But behind the scale is something more subtle: People don’t just follow for the guests.

“I’m not following you for the people you’re interviewing,” I told him during our conversation. “I’m following you for you. In the same way I listen to the Diary of a CEO, less for the lineup and more for Steven Bartlett - for his presence, his curiosity, the way he makes people open up.” And that, he quietly nodded, is the whole point.

The soft-spoken killer skill: Making people feel safe

Watching James work, it’s easy to underestimate the hardest part: Convincing strangers – and later, global celebrities – to open up about the most vulnerable parts of their story. Both of us noticed the same thing: His tone. He’s calm, respectful, unthreatening. Even when someone initially says no, he has a way of asking again that feels more like an invitation than pressure.

“You just come off very respectful,” we told him. “Even when they say no, you ask them kindly – so they want to talk to you.”

That same energy carries into the higher-stakes conversations. Today, James is no longer just chasing people on the street; he’s working with publicists for A-list names.

“Where attention goes, revenue flows”

If James has one line that should be printed on the walls of every media startup, it’s this:

“The greatest skill set anybody can have in today’s world is attention… Where attention goes, revenue flows.”

He points to legacy brands like Forbes as an example: Multi-hundred-million-dollar businesses built on eyeballs. Hard Knockz is a modern version of that idea – lean, platform-native, and powered by short-form content instead of glossy print covers.

When we asked what advice he’d give to a young media brand, he didn’t hesitate:

1. Collaborate your way up the ladder “All you need is that one big feature,” he said. Once you land one heavyweight guest, you leverage that to get the next one – “We’ve had this person, now we’re lining up a series of iconic entrepreneurs” – and cred compounds.

2. Let quantity breed quality (at first) Early on, they posted multiple times a day. “Quantity is what breeds quality,” James said. You learn fast what the audience loves, and then you double down.

3. Then raise the standard Now that Hard Knockz is known for high-caliber guests, the bar is higher. “Our standard keeps getting higher and higher,” he admitted. “I’d rather optimize for more views on a couple of videos than post a lot just to hit a quota.”

4. Outsource the low-leverage workHe was blunt about editing: it’s a minimum-wage activity once you’re running a serious brand. “Get your editor to do it 80% as well as you can – then let it go,” he said. The founder’s time is better spent on relationships, deals, and being on camera.

   
   

And then there’s the part creators rarely see: The financial long game. Hard Knockz started in 2021. Their first $100K month didn’t arrive until 2024. Now, he told us, every month this year has exceeded half a million in revenue. Those numbers didn’t come from hacking an algorithm – they came from three years of showing up when almost nobody was paying.

Turning the feed into a mirror for the next generation

The magic of Hard Knockz isn’t just the famous faces. It’s the emotional arc compressed into under a minute: Have you ever been broke? When? How did it feel? What did you do next? In one viral clip, he interviews an entrepreneur in Dallas who went from prison to becoming a multimillionaire. In another, he spotlights a founder who sold his company for tens of millions.

Billionaires, ex-cons, athletes, CEOs – all answer the same core question. For young people who are being told their only route is university loans and a stable corporate job, those stories hit different. During our conversation, we talked about that impact:How many kids in the US don’t have access to free education.How many believe their dreams are “unrealistic” because everyone around them thinks small.

“If you think you can, you can. If you think you can’t, you can’t,” we said to him. “Sometimes young people just need to see that it’s possible.”

James agreed. When we asked why he wants to grow so big, his answer wasn’t a yacht or a watch.

“I want to create a lot of impact,” he said. “Eventually I want to give back in a really big way.”

For now, that “giving back” looks like democratizing the conversations that used to be behind closed doors: billionaire Q&As, investment principles, hiring mistakes, mindset shifts. Instead of a $50,000 MBA, you get a 45-second reel on your phone.

And the comments sections show it’s landing. Fans thank him for “changing how I think about money” and “making me believe I can start from anywhere” – the kind of micro-shifts that quietly change life trajectories.

Life on the road, and the cost of obsession

Of course, building a global franchise out of a camera and a question comes with trade-offs.

James spends most of his time on the road – different city every week, bouncing between shoots, events and appearances. When we asked about dating, he was honest:

“I tried having a relationship, but it just didn’t work. I’m in a different city every week.”

He’d been with someone who worked a normal job – a completely different rhythm, a completely different worldview. “You have to date someone who understands the type of work you do,” he said. That piece of advice, given to him by a mentor, stuck.

For now, he’s single and fully married to the mission: boxing, travel, building, filming, repeating. His schedule is intentionally unstructured – late nights, early mornings, whatever it takes to catch the moment.

Building the “Barstool Sports of business”

When we ask “What’s next?”, James doesn’t talk about slowing down. He talks about scaling sideways.

“I want to build the Barstool Sports of business content,” he told us. Build a true media property with dozens of channels, each with its own businesses, communities and revenue streams.

The long-term vision? Eventually, an exit and the freedom to play even bigger in the impact space.

In the short term, the mission is simpler: keep the main thing the main thing.

“Content is the main thing,” he said. “Double down, triple down, 10x that – and then build everything else around it.”

Why his story matters

There’s a reason we wanted to feature James in Roe Magazine. He’s not “just another creator.” He’s part of a new wave of business media that:

• Speaks the language of Gen Z and young millennials

• Makes wealth and entrepreneurship feel human, not mysterious

• Uses short-form content not to numb people, but to wake them up

  
  

He’s also proof of the very thing he spends his life documenting: you can start as three kids with a camera and a rough idea, pivot a hundred times, live through trench years – and still end up running a multi-six-figure-a-month media company that changes how millions of people see their own potential.

In his world, “hard knocks” aren’t something to avoid. They’re the tuition you pay for the life you actually want.

And for every young person scrolling past one of his clips in a cramped bedroom or a break room, that realisation might be the first real lesson that changes everything.

Writer’s Note: Sophia

Some conversations don’t feel like interviews; they feel like a mirror being turned toward a generation.

Speaking with James felt like that. There is something disarming about him in person - soft-spoken, grounded, no rush to impress - and yet he has built one of the loudest, widest-reaching business education platforms on the internet. You can feel the discipline behind it, but also the heart. He isn’t chasing virality for ego; he is designing access. Access to stories, to examples, to possibility.

I kept thinking during our conversation about the young people who watch his clips late at night, headphones in, feeling like life is either too late or too stacked against them. Hard Knockz meets them exactly there. In 45 seconds, he gives them something most of us spent years searching for: Proof that failure is survivable, that wealth is learnable, and that where you start is not the final sentence of your story. What stayed with me most wasn’t the revenue numbers or the celebrity interviews - it was how intentional James is about impact. He thinks in communities, in ladders, in doors opened. He is building media, yes, but he’s also building self-belief at scale.

At Roe, we care deeply about creators who use influence as responsibility, not performance. James fits that lineage. He reminds us that attention is a tool, storytelling is a bridge, and discipline is still one of the most underrated forms of self-love. We left the conversation with the same feeling we hope you take from this piece: ambition can be ethical, success can be generous, and the internet - when used consciously - can become a classroom big enough for all of us.