How To Become A Millionaire in 2026 (Start Teaching)

We review Omar Eltakrori’s video, How To Become A Millionaire in 2026 (Start Teaching)

We review Omar Eltakrori’s “How To Become A Millionaire in 2026” — does teaching online really build wealth? Find out if his advice holds up.

Omar Eltakrori had his major career break when he joined the popular digital media company Think Media (founded by Sean Cannell) in November 2016. Starting as a content specialist and video creator, he became a primary face of the Think Media YouTube channel and an authority on tech and cameras.

His time at Think Media served as the foundational launchpad for his career in the creator economy. After building his skills and a following there, he leveraged that audience to launch his own successful business, The Video
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The Show’s Main Transcript

[00:00:27.910] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the Membership Machine Show. This is episode 175. In this episode, we’re going to discuss how to become a millionaire in 2026. Start teaching. This is a video that came from Omar, I’m going to butcher your second name, Alatokkari. He’s a well-known producer, trainer, and educator. He worked for Think Media for Sean Connery, has a big following, and made this video. So we’re gonna discuss a couple of key points from his video. So Kirk, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?.

[00:01:23.390] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. Yeah, sure thing, Jonathan. My name is Kurt von Ahnen. I own an agency called MañanaNoMás, and we work directly with the awesome team over at WP-Tonic.

[00:01:33.150] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. And like I say, Omar had some interesting points. I’m gonna be fascinated by what Kurt thinks of the video. There were parts of it I agreed with, and parts I didn’t. I think there’s one key point that needs to be pointed out, but I thought we would discuss it because I thought you, the audience, would get some value from the discussion. But before we go into it, we’ve got a message from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. 3, 2, 1, we’re coming back, folks. So Kurt, you know, you watched the video, appreciate that. What was your general feeling about the video, and a couple of the key points you got from it?

[00:02:31.210] – Kurt von Ahnen
His— well, let’s, let’s, let’s cover this, right? So obviously Omar is a communicator. He, he has good pauses, good cadence in his talk. He keeps people engaged. You know, his tone of voice is pleasant. He looks at the camera. He’s got a lot of things that are working for him, um, beyond the content. I think that’s like super important to mention, beyond the content. Sometimes we need to be super realistic, Jonathan. Like, for instance, I know what I look like. Thank goodness I got a decent sense of humor. I’d never meet anybody, right? Um, some people look the part and have an advantage from that. My daughter’s a perfect example. My daughter does figure skating coaching. She launched some social media and a podcast, instantly dwarfing my audience. I mean, just instantly, right? Yeah. She’s easier to look at than I am.

[00:03:24.450] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s facts.

[00:03:27.190] – Kurt von Ahnen
When you get into the content, I honestly thought that the content— No, I hate to say misleading, but telling people they’re going to make $1 million in 2026 and then laying out kind of the plan that he lays out, but not with details. And then in the video himself saying that he didn’t want to overwhelm people and give too much detail. Um, that was a very interesting take. It’s very telling.

[00:03:54.700] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, um, I think, I think a couple of key couple points I want to make is that obviously he built up a lot of recognition because he worked, um, with Think Media. He was one of their presenters for a number of I think for a number of years, maybe from 3, 4, 5 plus years. So he had a lot of online recognition. And Sean, a few years ago I did interview Sean and he’s a great guy and he’s built this media company based in Las Vegas and they do a lot of training, they produce a lot of content on YouTube about cameras, equipment, building a YouTube channel. So Omar had a lot of brand online recognition, um, but he’s used that to build up his own brand, um, so I think you’ve got to recognize that he took a lot of work, look, took a lot of dedication. I’m not, I’m not attacking that, I’m not attacking anything.

[00:05:17.550] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah.

[00:05:18.380] – Jonathan Denwood
But I think you do have to understand he had a lot of personal brand recognition to start off with. He’s a very good communicator, and when it comes to equipment and running a YouTube channel and producing content, he knows what he’s doing. Yeah.

[00:05:41.620] – Kurt von Ahnen
I think—

[00:05:43.960] – Jonathan Denwood
I think it’s totally possible to build a good brand on YouTube that can allow you to set up a membership website and get your membership website going and use that YouTube channel as one of the main vectors to get people into your funnel and into your membership. Because there’s been a lot of discussion lately that memberships or members websites are dying. You know, there’s been a couple well-known personalities in online marketing, branding, and running membership. I think one of the biggest one is Amy Porterfield.

[00:06:40.920] – Kurt von Ahnen
Mm-hmm.

[00:06:42.420] – Jonathan Denwood
I think you gotta understand some of these top people, And this is only my take on it, and I’ll be interested in yours, is that some of these big, bigger players, they have sunset their membership because they had a really big team and their methodology was to use paid advertising, to do webinars. You know, Amy has a very popular podcast, well-known name, goes is a lead presenter at all some of the major conferences. But her model was to use paid advertisement, especially Facebook, Meta, Instagram, Facebook, to drive 2,000, 3,000 people to a webinar and then to convert 10% of those people.

[00:07:43.980] – Kurt von Ahnen
Mm-hmm.

[00:07:45.590] – Jonathan Denwood
Depending, you know, if you’re selling a course for around $500, and her base course was around that, it became increasingly too expensive to use paid advertising for a price point like that. If you’re not gonna be able to sell additional services and courses and other things to those people, the lifetime value of that customer, it became uneconomic to use Meta advertising.

[00:08:26.840] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah.

[00:08:27.460] – Jonathan Denwood
‘Cause it’s gone up over the last 5 years, it’s gone up by 30 to 50%, the cost of Meta. So I think that’s the main driver of that. But also, I think the peak was 2020 to 2021, that we’re, ’cause of the COVID hopefully YouTube’s not listening to this, that was the peak for a lot of people in that area, and they hired a lot of people to help them run their courses and that. But I still think you can build a really great community on YouTube or TikTok or one of the other platforms, and then you can use that to start off your membership. But, and I think you can be highly successful at it. How do you respond to what I’ve just said, Kurt?

[00:09:30.880] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, long and short, I think a lot of the big players, you know, they all kind of play with terminology and channel selection. You know, Amy Porterfield’s one of them, right? But Russell Brunson, Tony Robbins, you know, join our exclusive member VIP club, come to our Facebook page, come to, like, they bounce people from thing to thing as their cycle of, ’cause they need to keep coming out with newer things to get newer people. They aggregate some of the existing audience to the new channels, but it’s also that, that freshness like, hey, we’ve got this new VIP, make sure you become part of the exclusive membership. Once you get to a certain level, you keep switching the game because that’s how you keep your content fresh and keep moving forward. At the end of the day, you and I are like, how does this fundamentally, at a grassroots level, change the membership ideology?

[00:10:28.120] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, it Doesn’t.

[00:10:29.390] – Kurt von Ahnen
The whole idea is you’re still capturing an audience, you’re still growing a tribe, and you’re parking them somewhere for content or connection. And so whether that be, you know, a webinar, a Facebook page, a course, a whatever, the main thing is you have to aggregate a tribe of people and you have to park them somewhere. And for us and for a lot of startups, it makes sense that it would be a membership site. But one of the things is like looking at your show notes, like the first thing we talked about was the feeling. I noticed when I was watching the video with Omar, he talked about feeling like, like people have to feel a certain way and you have to feel a certain way and all this stuff. And I did take away some gold nuggets there. And that was a lot of times we’re worried about delivering, exceeding someone’s expectations with content or information, right? We want to make sure if they’re, if they’re paying us for a course, we want to make We’re delivering. We’re going to knock it out of the park. And he was saying exactly the opposite. He was like, give them the feeling that they’re doing well or that they’re doing something great and they can’t wait to get to the next step.

[00:11:42.680] – Kurt von Ahnen
And that’s— I thought that was very important, right? It’s don’t give away everything in the first course. And you and I have said this for a long, long, long time. It’s nice to have someone back it up that has credence, right? Yeah. Come out with an MVP, come out with a mini course, give them the feeling that they’re going in the right direction, and make them available for your core product, which is coming forthwith.

[00:12:05.020] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think, I think, um, it’s great because that, that was also a key point. Um, that’s one of the key reasons why I wanted to discuss his video, that he was saying that they have the feeling, they have to gel. If they gel with you and they like how you’re communicating with that target audience and they gel with you, they will stay with you. And it’s the un— That gelling, as I call it, is the bit that can’t be measured initially. It can’t. It’s, you know, as your experience grows, you know, you can get better thumbnails, you can spend more time on the Google, the YouTube Analytics, you can refine, you can see which videos do better, which videos don’t. All the things until lately I have, I’ve not been doing, but I’ve decided I’m gonna have to up my game. Yeah. And I got more into it, but it’s also time-consuming. But you’re probably not gonna— You’re probably not going to have all that knowledge, nor should you, you know, but you also got to be able to educate You know, and I do understand what he was saying that, but I had mixed feelings about it because he, you know, all this prior exposure he had, so he had an audience, but you gotta have that you’re in teaching, you’re still in education, you know, Some of the other people out there, I think you named a few, I think it’s more about the marketing exercise and I think the teaching takes, at some stage, this is just my opinion, takes a back seat.

[00:14:22.070] – Jonathan Denwood
But I think the educational element, you’re a teacher, should always be up front and you just have to learn this marketing so you can grow your audience. Am I waffling or is this making sense, Kurt?

[00:14:36.690] – Kurt von Ahnen
No, it’s making sense. And I want to give like a real-world example of what he meant with that overwhelm, because he said if you teach too much, right, because there’s, there’s the teachers and there’s the marketers, right? Uh, and I think it’s good that we kind of separate those out because there are differences. Uh, I am like more of a teacher-minded person than a marketing-minded person. So he said if you give them too much you know, when you wreck the feeling, right? Wreck the gel. He said you’re not doing them a service because you’re overwhelming them. He said, and someone that’s overwhelmed doesn’t take action. Someone that’s overwhelmed doesn’t make the next decision. And a very real-life situation is happening in my home right now that, that when I was watching the video last night, I was like, oh my God, he’s, he’s actually right about something. Um, my wife wants chickens. Like, you’ve seen my backyard, Jonathan. She wants chickens back there. I started building a chicken coop out of our shed, and like really, I’m moving forward with this whole plan. And she’s been studying about chickens, like which ones to get, which eggs, which is, you know, how big does the run need to be, all these things.

[00:15:43.090] – Kurt von Ahnen
And then I’m building this thing out, and she is getting vapor locked. You know, like that’s an automotive term, but she’s basically freezing in her tracks. Like we were literally at Tractor Supply last night and I was like, if you wanna pick up like a dozen chicks and take ’em home, we can, you know? And she stood there staring at the cage and I was like, are we gonna get these chickens or not? And she’s like, no, no. She goes, I’m not ready. She goes, I don’t know if I’m afraid of failing or what it is, but I’m not ready to get these chickens yet. And it’s, to me, I always make the comparison. It’s like trying to buy a new laptop at Best Buy. You go into Best Buy and they have, you know, 500 laptops laying out on shelves. And you go in thinking you know what laptop you want, and then 45 minutes later you leave without a laptop because you couldn’t make up your dang mind. Um, that’s what’s happening with these chickens. Like, she’s done so much studying on it, she got overwhelmed at the purchase point. And I— so when he said that in the video last night, like, overwhelmed people don’t take action, overwhelmed people don’t move to the next step.

[00:16:46.280] – Kurt von Ahnen
So if you have a membership site and you’re selling training or courses as part of that membership site and you’re not seeing people progress through your, through your catalog, you might be putting too much into each piece.

[00:17:00.630] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. And I think that’s a great point. We’re gonna go through our middle break and then we’ve got a few other things to talk about, about Owen’s video. And I want to bring in some other concepts and get Kirk’s response. So we’re going for a break, folks. We will be back in a few moments. 3, 2, 1, we’re coming back, folks. I thought that was a great point that you made at the end of the first half, Kirk, is, and we’ve discussed it a lot, is a lot of people build an enormous course. They think they’ve got to do that. You must resist it. You’ve got to do, you’ve got to get yourself out there. You’ve got to, you don’t have to build a massive YouTube audience. I think one thing you said about your daughter, I agree with something she said, but I think also, and I don’t know that you might say I’m wrong, but the podcast, it’s about ice skating, is it not?

[00:18:07.540] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah.

[00:18:07.900] – Jonathan Denwood
Uh, podcast.

[00:18:09.520] – Kurt von Ahnen
She actually, she actually did one stealing some of my content about reviewing John Maxwell material, like leadership and communication stuff. And that’s where— so when she first started, she was like reviewing John Maxwell books. So she was a teenage girl reviewing John Maxwell books, right? And, uh, instant audience. And I was like, wow, you know, I’ve been doing leadership and communication training for years. So So it was a direct comparison. Now, once she started making content about figure skating, about ice skating, Jonathan, she got an international audience. I— because I guess the demand for that kind of stuff is high. People from Australia, from Africa, from Europe, from everywhere. Um, people in the Olympics are following my daughter’s account.

[00:18:57.270] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, and the point I was making here, folks, is it, it’s a niche.

[00:19:01.790] – Kurt von Ahnen
Oh yeah, niche for sure.

[00:19:03.760] – Jonathan Denwood
And you’re gonna hear this everywhere, and it’s probably overemphasized, folks, but I do think finding a niche is really important. I think you’d be amazed of the channels that have over 100,000 subscribers about things that you wouldn’t think such a niche could get an audience of that size. But they do. I think one of my problems over the years of my own YouTube channel is the content’s been all over the place. But fundamentally, it’s either going to be about membership, or I think you can have two things, WordPress and membership. But maybe I’m wrong there, but I think if you find a niche and you stick at it And you learn your experience. I think YouTube or TikTok or Instagram, they’re still great channels for somebody to try and build audience. And you know, you only need 300 people to be on a list and you’ll probably get at least 30 of them signing up for your first course. And that at a couple hundred dollars, that, that’s a good start, folks. Just do the basic math and you’ll be— you will be moving forward, basically. Another person that’s come on my radar lately is a lady called Gillian Perkins, she runs a smaller channel and she’s based in Oregon, Salem.

[00:21:01.370] – Jonathan Denwood
She’s got 5 children, but she’s been in the membership, her main income is helping people set up and market membership websites and—

[00:21:16.770] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah.

[00:21:18.180] – Jonathan Denwood
I consumed a fair— she came on my radar, then I consumed some of her content, and I really like her. It’s really down to earth. She gives some really good advice, in my opinion, and she gives some good insights about how she built her business, and she gives some figures, and you don’t know, but I get the feeling that she’s truthful. And she’s built up a really great business in the area of, but she’s quite frank about it. Her big break was her initial courses about how to get the first 1,000 subscribers. That’s her, beginner course, but she’s quite honest, her big break was building up her YouTube channel. I think she’s got over 700 subscribers now, but also YouTube’s changing, their focus is not really about how many subscribers you’ve got, if you already built that up, that it will, it will help you. But newer channels, that you’re really going to be judged by each, each video you produce and does it get views, that, you know. But I think the main thing with Omar is there was bits of it that I really liked. And there was bits that I kind of found difficult to consume.

[00:23:04.480] – Jonathan Denwood
And I think you had a similar feeling, didn’t you?

[00:23:09.650] – Kurt von Ahnen
We use the term drifter or grifter on the show at times, and there was a lot of examples in there where, you know, he was like, you don’t even need to edit your videos, I’m not editing this video. Well, you’ve got experience, you’ve been on camera before, like Don’t be telling people that are starting up, just clip on the camera and go for it, right? Because chances are those people do need to do an edit, or they do need to brighten up the lighting, or they do need a microphone, or— like, I felt like that was very misleading, right? The quality that people expect is different in different things. The most commonly watched videos on my channel Jonathan, are when I’m walking the neighborhood, right? So for some reason, people just love like, oh crap, he’s walking around the neighborhood, let’s see what he’s saying. I don’t know why, but they love when I walk around the neighborhood. Um, now the sound isn’t perfect when I’m walking around the neighborhood, but I’m walking around the neighborhood. When I’m in the office, when I’m in here, I’m on the microphone. If I don’t use the microphone, the sound quality is horrible, and I’ve noticed people don’t hang around.

[00:24:20.710] – Kurt von Ahnen
So he was making it sound overly simple, and that bothered me because you’re leading people to failure so that you can rescue them later. That’s the way I felt. I felt like you lead them to a little bit of failure so you can rescue them later. But that’s, I don’t know, it’s a very difficult proposition, and I don’t know his heart inside, so I shouldn’t talk smack about a man I don’t know. Yeah. Um, but the messaging was off channel to me. It didn’t, it didn’t have an alignment that I was looking for.

[00:24:54.780] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, there was bits of it, and then there was bits of it that I really thought were quite insightful, um, to some degree. Um, so it was a mixed bag for me. I don’t, I don’t think he’s a drifter. I just think— but I also think the points that you’ve just made are totally fair as well. So I had very mixed feelings about it.

[00:25:17.950] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, here’s where the drifter part comes in for me. He says, teach— he said, teach, um, the what, teach the why, teach the where, but don’t teach how, right? And then you’ll notice in this video he doesn’t teach how. Like, he doesn’t say, here’s how to grow this audience and become a millionaire in 2026. He talks about some existential ideas about making something successful, but he never really said brass tacks, here’s steps 1 through 5 on becoming successful. And I struggle with that, Jonathan. If someone’s paying me for a course on how to build a learning management website, I’m going to create a course on how to build a learning management website. You and I have done that. We have the course available at WP-Tonic that people can sign up for, and it says here’s a hosting package the way WP-Tonic delivers it, you know, here’s the Kadence, here’s the LifterLMS, here’s this, and this is how we build this for you. This is how you do it, and we show you how to do it. I— people, when they pay for a course, they want to know how. They want the magic sauce. But at the same time, I also kind of agree with him that sometimes we teach too much.

[00:26:32.360] – Kurt von Ahnen
Sometimes we do overwhelm people. So I think there’s— I think there’s a great— there’s a very gray area here. This is not black and white. Yeah, but, but I really struggle with the idea that you’re gonna promote a course, you’re gonna sell a course, telling— and even said you can tell people how to in the name of the course, but in the course don’t really tell them how, just make sure they have the feeling that they want to get to the next step and buy the next thing from you. And that’s, that’s not cool to me. I, I want to make sure that I am delivering what I told someone I’m going to deliver.

[00:27:04.230] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, it’s, um, It’s really quite interesting, really, because it is interesting what you’re saying. There’s another lady, she was actually interviewed, Alex Kattoni. She’s got a very large audience and she’s got a very large community. And she’s a copywriter and she built a community based on training people to become copywriters. And I watched it and it’s the Copy Posse. I love the name, the Copy Posse. But I don’t know what copywriting— she also ran an agency. And she was interviewed, she’s been on my radar, she’s got a channel that’s got about 400,000 subscribers, it’s got a, she’s got a podcast, it’s got a very, you know, got a professional team behind her.

[00:28:21.630] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah.

[00:28:22.770] – Jonathan Denwood
It doesn’t gel with me, but I also noticed that our— on my YouTube channel, it’s dominated by males watching it. That’s one of the problems with, with my YouTube channel. I really would like more females to be watching it, but her analytics, it’s really dominated by females, totally. And her videos and some of the content that I’ve watched doesn’t really gel with me, but, and I think that’s what Omar was saying, this business, there’s certain audiences that gel with a certain content and it doesn’t gel with other, and that’s hard. It’s not like you do A, B, C, and you get an end result. It’s not. It’s more out there, if you know what I mean.

[00:29:21.800] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah.

[00:29:22.240] – Jonathan Denwood
You know, because there’s certain content that doesn’t really gel with me, but it’s really quite successful. Alex is really— she’s a great communicator. If you go to her channel, it’s all very professionally done. I just found a lot of the content to be a bit shallow, where other people, I kind of, I find it— Get that all set up, but at the end of— I apologize about that. I just find other people’s content; it’s a bit linked, they’ve got to provide some of the how, like what you were saying. That’s what I like about Gillian Perkins, because she does provide more of the how. So I’m more attracted to that, that they provide a bit more of the how, rather than these rather vague concepts. Yeah. Right, I think, I think that’s the end of the show. I just wanted to discuss— he is extremely popular, and I just watched the video, and I had such mixed feelings about it, so I thought we’d just do— see what your feelings were about it as well.

[00:30:51.730] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, I mean, I don’t think he’s an out-and-out criminal, right? So I’m not, I’m not, I’m not here to judge people, right? But it was like, just looking at the content, I, I was really struck that I run into this in my day-to-day life, Jonathan. You know, I’m a fairly direct communicator. I’m more of a black-and-white person. For instance, I’m in a leadership cohort that the county is hosting right now. So there are 25 of us in this training class. And a lot of people in there are focused on feelings, and how do you feel about this? And how does this make you feel? And I’m not, I’m really into that. Like, I want to know what we’re doing, why are we doing this? And, um, and it just seems to be stuck more in an idea of not doing things. I’m not— I’m really being specific there, I guess, but it’s— there’s feelings, and then there’s actions, and I tend to be more of an action person.

[00:31:48.750] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. So how can people find more about you, what you’re up to, Kurt?

[00:31:54.330] – Kurt von Ahnen
Uh, you can reach me at LinkedIn. I’m the only Curt Van Ahnen on LinkedIn, and you can reach me at Manana No Mas or WP-Tonic.

[00:32:02.300] – Jonathan Denwood
Yep, and if you go over to WP-Tonic, we’re a great hosting partner. We provide fantastic hosting and packages with all the leading WordPress technology, combined in one package, plus great support. You’d be more than happy. You get all the freedom and control with WordPress over your course design and your content, and you also get fantastic support from us. We will be back next week with another great episode. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye. Bye.

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