Twenty years ago, Chris Sharpe thought he was on a traditional Hollywood path—well, almost traditional. He and a group of collaborators were making straight-to-DVD horror films, chasing the long-established wisdom that if you kept budgets low enough, you could turn a tidy profit selling DVDs through distributors like Best Buy. It was a system that had worked for a generation of scrappy filmmakers, from Roger Corman to the 1990s festival-circuit auteurs Sharpe idolized.
But the timing couldn’t have been worse.
“We were making stuff and had relationships with distributors that would get our movies into Best Buy,” Sharpe recalled. “I directed one, was in the process of directing a second one… and that kind of fell apart along with the DVD industry right around the same time.”
As the Great Recession hit and the DVD market collapsed, so too did Sharpe’s filmmaking momentum. “I didn’t know where else to go,” he admitted. “I felt like the independent movie thing was not panning out, and I felt like I was unemployable.”
What followed was an unexpected career pivot that would eventually lead Sharpe to launch not one but two massively influential YouTube channels—first the beloved food channel Hilah Cooking, and later the global phenomenon Yoga With Adriene, which today boasts more than 13 million subscribers and a thriving subscription streaming app.
This is the story of how a failed indie film project—starring, coincidentally, two women who would go on to become his creative partners—pushed Sharpe into the earliest days of YouTube, and how he helped turn personality-driven evergreen content into a multimillion-dollar digital media empire.
The End of DVDs and the Start of Something New
Sharpe’s last film project was a post-rapture horror comedy about a punk rock band traversing Texas after Judgment Day. But the project never made it to the finish line.
“The money got cut off while we were in the middle of production,” Sharpe said. “That was late 2008… I was completely unaware of what was going on in the world because I was out in the middle of nowhere making a movie.”
He returned home directionless. But around that time, he started hearing about YouTube. Hardly anyone was making money on it yet, but he sensed potential. “We decided to give it a shot,” he said. “We didn’t have any money. We just had a camera left over from behind the scenes of the last movie.”
One of the actresses from the abandoned film, Hilah Johnson, was also an excellent cook with natural on-camera charisma. Sharpe floated a simple idea: a comedic cooking show that lived somewhere between R-rated humor and approachable home recipes.
“We were like, what if we take a weird, PG-13, almost R-rated comedy bent to this cooking show?” Sharpe recalled. “People will come for the recipe, but they’ll stay for the personality.”
Hilah Cooking launched in 2010—back when YouTube was small enough that 25,000 views felt like hitting the jackpot.
At first, the series was a way to experiment. The pair leaned heavily on SEO, identifying recipes people searched for—corn dogs, Texas staples, comfort food—and building episodes around them. “I generated a list of 100 recipe ideas we felt we could get traffic for,” Sharpe said. Paid promotion wasn’t an option; organic search had to carry the channel.
To their surprise, it worked. The audience grew. They got accepted into YouTube’s early partner programs. They built a website and published digital cookbooks. They even started producing series for legacy media companies that were trying to understand YouTube.
By its peak, Hilah Cooking had over 450,000 subscribers. But the channel’s success brought unexpected pressure—especially once Sharpe and Johnson became a couple, had a child, and saw how frequently they were recognized in public. “That was a part she didn’t really like,” Sharpe said. By 2017, they decided to end the channel.
Yet even today, the website remains a steady source of programmatic ad revenue, and its cookbooks continue selling—passive income generated from a project they haven’t touched in years.
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