Seth Alvo (Berm Peak) – Detailed Biography

Seth Alvo is a mountain biker and a popular YouTuber.

He has over 2.7M subscribers on his YouTube channel, Berm Peak.

Introduction

Seth Alvo was born in 1985. He grew up in Long Island, New York State, United States and lived there until his mid-twenties.

He has a sister.

Seth was interested in technology, computers, tinkering, videography and photography growing up. He also worked at many bike shops where he gained extensive experience repairing bikes.

It started at 3

His father, who grew up in Brooklyn, used to bike extensively.

At 3, Seth, with his father’s help, learnt to ride a 12-inch bike with training wheels. As he kept getting better at riding, his father used to lift the training wheels higher and higher every day.

Soon, Seth learnt balancing and started zipping down the street with the training wheels off the ground in Bayville.

On the day his father removed the training wheels, he fell a few times and scraped himself but fell in love with riding bikes.

Later, Seth upgraded to a 16-inch one, which at the time, was too big for him.

He has been riding bikes since then.

BMXing to mountain biking

Seth grew up on Long Island where BMXing and BMX street riding were popular. Mountain biking wasn’t popular at the time.

He got into BMXing, thanks to prop videos and aggregation videos of BMX pros. Later, he started taking BMXing seriously.

Seth grew up riding BMX bikes and did BMX street riding with his friends. He rode a lot over rails, staircases, roofs and roof gaps, dirt jumps and later rode in skateparks.

He learnt doing 180s, 360s, bunny hops, handrails and jumping gaps. All these skills later helped him while mountain biking.

The young Seth used to spend most of his time BMXing. He used to go to school in BMX clothes and shoes and the moment he came home from school, he used to go BMXing, without a helmet, in the same clothes.

He used to BMX even at night.

At 15, Seth spent a week BMXing at Camp Woodward during summer and loved the place.

He got his first mountain bike, a 20”, 6-speed Giant Commotion, at 7. He used to ride it like a BMX, without a helmet, in Stillwell Woods Park and Greenbelt Trail along with his father.

While BMXing, Seth used to occasionally do mountain biking, along with his friends and father, on mountain bike trails on Long Island. Later, he also started enjoying road biking.

Eventually, as he grew older, he chose mountain biking over BMXing as only few of his friends were into BMXing and also, he didn’t want to trespass while BMXing.

Also, unlike BMX bikes, the mountain bikes had better and interesting geometry and this excited him.

Seth started loving mountain biking over BMXing even though the former was more expensive than the latter.

Tidbit- Phil Kmetz, a popular mountain biker and YouTuber, also attended Camp Woodward for BMXing. Seth and Phil also did a video collaboration.

Dropping out

After getting an associate degree in science, Seth moved to Florida to attend school for a bachelor’s degree.

He studied liberal arts before switching to electrical engineering. As he felt the electrical engineering classes to be dry and boring, he switched to business.

Seth was interested in studying business as he wanted to be his own boss.

He paid for college by building websites for clients.

As Seth wasn’t interested in electives and wanted to start his business as soon as possible, he dropped out of college, after taking all the business classes. He was just 12 credits shy of earning his bachelor’s degree.

He felt the degree to be not important and felt spending time and money on it pointless as none of his clients asked for his degree.

Seth started a web development company in his twenties and started building and managing websites and managing IT infrastructure.

At the time, he was working from his home in Long Island but wasn’t happy as he wasn’t able to spend time outdoors due to the winters.

So, Seth moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in his late twenties and loved his time there. He lived near the beach and enjoyed swimming in the ocean.

He had a part of his family in Florida and road biking was easy there.

Seth started working from home and did a lot of road biking but eventually got into the mountain biking community and rekindled his love of mountain biking.

A varied career

Seth started working at 14 and worked at various jobs ranging from technician to salesperson to office worker.

He worked at Movin’ On Sounds, a car stereo place, in New York. He worked as an installation technician and worked with various tools on vehicle electrical systems like police lighting, remote car starters, alarms and audio systems.

Seth also did marketing for the store, learnt coding and worked on the website.

He started taking on the IT side projects and started a web development company as he gained many clients and was required to do invoicing.

In 2017, Seth exited from his company and became a full-time YouTuber.

He was interested in starting his own business from a young age. He later realized this dream by starting his web development company and YouTube channels.

Bike Hacks

While working at his web development company, Seth observed that his clients were earning well with affiliate marketing on their blogs. So, he thought to do the same but with videos.

He started his YouTube channel, Bike Hacks, on 30 January 2015, in his free time in Fort Lauderdale.

Seth bought an affordable DNM dropper post for $140. As he was excited about it, he made a review video, “DNM Cheap Dropper post unboxing and review.”

This was the first video of his channel and as people loved it, he continued posting more videos.

Seth used to film with a small Samsung camera. At the time, as he didn’t have microphones, he used to speak into his computer speaker and use pillows to prevent echo.

He was inspired by James Rolfe and his storytelling format. He was impressed by James’s Angry Video Game Nerd show on Cinemassacre YouTube channel.

At the time, being a YouTuber wasn’t heard of and YouTube wasn’t a popular career option.

Also, until then, Seth never logged into YouTube, never subscribed or followed a YouTuber.

He started learning YouTube only after becoming a YouTuber.

As a kid, Seth used to shoot videos on his father’s camcorder and edit them on a VCR. Later, while in high school, he edited videos on an iMac. These were his only video editing experiences.

After his first video, he didn’t publish many product review videos but started publishing normal bike hack videos and fell in love with video planning, editing and production.

Seth quickly gained a loyal audience who started requesting more videos. This gave him validation and he felt obligated to produce videos.

At the time, even though he was getting decent views, he didn’t think of monetizing his channel as he felt that he couldn’t earn decently through his channel.

Seth continued working part-time on his channel while working full-time in his web development company.

Sharing mountain biking from a beginner’s perspective greatly helped in the early success of his channel as many people were able to relate and connect with him.

Thanks to his BMX experience, Seth was able to produce casual videos which resonated with people.

Renaming

Initially, Seth named his channel Bike Hacks as he intended to produce only bike hack videos.

As his channel started growing, he wanted to start an accompanying website.

But as the Bike Hacks domain was already taken, Seth renamed his channel to Seth’s Bike Hacks and started a website with this name.

Later, he renamed his channel to Berm Peak as this was an open-ended, marketable name which gave him the flexibility to produce a wide range of bike related videos, not just hacks.

Berm Creek, Berm Peak & going full-time

After crossing 10,000 subscribers in his first year on YouTube, Seth applied for YouTube Partner Program (YPP) and got accepted into it and made around $360 the first month.

He was happy with the income as it covered his Mazda’s payment. This inspired him to work harder on his channel.

Seth started an LLC within the first year and started treating his channel as a business.

He invested all his channel’s earnings in camera gear and other equipment like computer and hard drives and refined his editing. All these helped in his channel’s growth.

Seth extrapolated that if he continued working on his channel, he could earn good money and could quit working on his web development company and work full-time on his channel.

He liked following his passions of video production, riding bikes and entertaining people over staring into code and being on phone for his company.

At the time, his web development business was going great and earning him a steady monthly income. Also, he owned a house and just got married but he decided to become a full-time YouTuber.

Even when some people around him were apprehensive of his decision, he believed in his channel’s growth.

Seth, along with his family, moved from Florida to Asheville as he wasn’t able to spend time outdoors in Florida due to rampant mosquitoes. At the time, he was riding mostly street and trails.

They bought their first house in Swannanoa. He started converting his one-car garage into a bike workshop and his audience loved watching it.

Seth started building trails in his small backyard and named it Berm Creek, after Bent Creek.

He built a trailhead kiosk, trails signs and a real trail system with clever names in his backyard lawn. This became viral and inspired many people to build their own backyard trails.

Seth also built features like North Shore MTB drop and sicknic table.

He had no prior experience building trails, he learnt building them on the go.

After a couple of years working on YouTube, Seth observed that his YouTube channel was growing faster and earning a lot more than his web development business. Also, his channel was easy to scale unlike his web development business.

So, he handed over the web development business to his personal assistant and exited from the business and became a full-time YouTuber in 2017.

At the time, Seth had just moved to a new house in Asheville and his wife had quit her job as an office manager at a doctor’s office. He had over half-a-million subscribers and was constantly improving his videos.

After becoming a full-time creator, he started working long hours on his channel. As he didn’t have kids at the time, he used to dedicate almost all his time producing YouTube videos.

At the time, Seth got sponsored by Diamondback and he started featuring their bikes on his channel. This sponsorship, which lasted until 2022, gave him a steady income.

Even after that sponsorship ended, he has been able to make a full-time living with his channel, thanks to good views on his videos.

As Berm Creek became popular, many people started frequenting it. As his house was besides Berm Creek, he felt he had no privacy. Also, he needed more space to build trails.

So, in 2019, Seth moved to a house in Ashville with a three-bay garage and 5.5 acres of steep hillside. He named the mountain top Berm Peak and built a trail system there.

It took him around four years to get comfortable speaking to the camera.

Currently, Seth has over 2.7M subscribers on his channel and has over 1.2M subscribers on his second channel, Berm Peak Express.

He has over 25K subscribers on his Spanish channel, Berm Peak Español.

Seth uses Sony α7S and GoPro cameras and edits his videos, for his main channel, with Final Cut Pro. He loves video editing.

Initially, he used to work seven days a week, nearly 100 hours on his channels, prioritising work over family relationships. But later, he started working around 40 hours per week as he hired a small team and started maintaining a work-life balance.

Curtis helps him as a producer and editor and Rich also helps as an editor. Daniel is his communications manager.

Seth designs the video thumbnails and writes the scripts for his videos.

He is a shareholder of Clik Valve.

Prior to starting on YouTube, he didn’t travel much but YouTube allowed him to travel the country mountain biking.

Berm Park & book

In April 2022, Seth opened a free public bike park, Berm Park, in Chestnut Mountain Nature Park, Canton, North Carolina. The park was funded through himself, his channel, sponsors and Patreons.

He raised $200,000 and worked with trail builders and the government for building it.

In 2025, Seth published the Goodnight Bikes book.

Personal life

Seth married Amie on 5 March 2016.

They have a daughter, Rebecca, and a son.

Seth is a Jew.

He is 5′4″ and lives in Asheville, North Carolina.

Tidbits

• Markham Park and The Pacific Northwest are his favourite mountain biking spots. He was never a pro mountain biker and never raced competitively.
• Seth loves travelling and has a Long Island accent.
• There is a trail in Bentonville, Arkansas by the name Berm creek.
• As a teenager, Seth loved listening to Weezer’s Blue and Pinkerton albums.
• He loves tacos and is an introvert and a reserved person.
• Seth is into real estate and loves listening to podcasts. His favourite YouTube channels are Matt’s Off Road Recovery and Kevin Talbot.
• He likes Stevie Wonder and his favourite movie is Team America: World Police.
• Rad, a popular BMX film was released in 1986, a year before Seth was born.

So, how are you inspired by the success story of Seth Alvo?

Share with me in the comment section below.