- Rob Kennedy has gained more than a million subscribers to his YouTube channel "Dad, How Do I?" since its launch in April.
- Kennedy, a 56-year-old salesman living in Seattle, grew up in a broken home and says he wanted to help others learn to do things around the house.
- His biggest hits to date include "How to fix most running toilets" and "How to shave your face", which have close to a million views combined.
- Kennedy told Business Insider: "I know that I would have appreciated having someone around to teach me this stuff."
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Stuck in lockdown in Seattle, sales pro Rob Kennedy decided to start a YouTube channel to teach viewers everything from shaving to ironing a dress shirt.
Kennedy, a 56-year-old old sales veteran, wanted to impart share some of the everyday life lessons he never learnt from his own father, who walked out when he was a teenager.
"He checked out by the time I was 14 or so," Kennedy told Business Insider, after his channel "Dad, How Do I?" gained more than a million subscribers in a matter of weeks.
"Being a dad is obviously about more than running around doing chores," said Kennedy, the seventh of eight siblings growing up in a single-parent household. "But I know that I would have appreciated having someone around to teach me this stuff."
Some of his biggest hits to date include "How to fix most running toilets" (470,000 views) and "How to shave your face" (250,000 views), both uploaded in the past six weeks.
Reflecting on why his channel has become so popular so quickly, Kennedy says he tried to keep his videos simple and to the point.
"I would go to YouTube all the time to learn stuff," he said. "But a lot of the time, there's an introduction, some spiel about the person doing the video...You spend 20 minutes on a video that could've been done in two.
"You've got this situation today where boomers criticize millennials for not being able do anything around the house, but millennials are mad at their elders for never showing them how."
He added: "So far as I can tell, people just appreciate not having someboday yelling at them."
Despite his surge in popularity, Kennedy has yet to monetize his channel: "People in the comments have asked, like, 'Why aren't you earning money off this?'"
He said: "That's very kind, and while I'm not against getting paid for the work I'm doing, I want to figure out the best thing to do with the channel moving forward."
You can watch Kennedy's "Dad, How Do I?" videos on YouTube here.
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