Wil Yeung

Wil Yeung is a cook, and a popular Canadian YouTuber.

He has more than 1.2M subscribers on his YouTube channel, ‘Yeung Man Cooking.’

Wil is also an author, entrepreneur, international photographer; and was a teacher, and a violinist.

Introduction-

Wil Yeung was born in Hong Kong.

At 3, he along with his family immigrated to Canada, and he grew up in the Greater Toronto Area.

While studying at elementary school, Wil watched Jurassic Park, and decided to grow up to become a paleontologist, and later, wanted to become a martial arts teacher.

He grew up watching Food Network, and movies of Arnold Schwarzenegger, and idolised him; he also idolised Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan.

While growing up, Wil was into music, and martial arts, thanks to the influences of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan.

Love for music-

While growing up, Wil had a Super Nintendo home console, and had Final Fantasy video games.

He was captivated by the music composed by Nobuo Uematsu for Final Fantasy, and thanks to this, he fell in love with music.

Then, Wil started exploring music, and later, decided to take violin lessons.

Education-

Wil joined University of Windsor in Windsor, Ontario, Canada to study Bachelor of Music; here, he studied violin as his major instrument, and loved violin making; he minored in Visual Arts.

He graduated in 2004.

Later, Wil studied Bachelor of Education (B.Ed.) in Music and Visual Arts from University of Windsor; he graduated in 2008 with qualifications in the Intermediate and Senior divisions.

He has been an introvert, and while studying at university, he was a nerd, and didn’t have a lot of friends; at that time, he was into video games, and loved video game music, and used to spend countless hours on his old IBM computer composing video game music.

Starting a business in the dorm room-

While in his first year of university studying B.Ed., Wil observed the growing popularity of eBay.

At that time, as the cameras of mobile phones weren’t good, he observed that the sellers of violins were listing their violins with terrible pictures on eBay.

As Wil was into violins and violin making, he was able to easily ascertain the quality of violins just by looking at their pictures on eBay, even though the pictures were terrible.

He observed that as the pictures weren’t good, the violins even though they were good, weren’t fetching high prices; here, he stumbled across a business opportunity.

Wil started buying the violins from eBay for 20-80 CAD and used to receive them in his dorm room in university.

He started stockpiling the violins which he bought for cheap and would take good quality pictures of them with his little point-and-shoot camera, and would write better descriptions for them, thanks to his knowledge of violins, and then, list them on eBay for a much higher price.

Wil did this business from September 2006 to June 2007; and achieved eBay Power Seller status.

Then, he transitioned to drop shipping violins, he used to order violins from China and get them shipped directly to customers but stopped this after graduating.

Starting a music school-

After finishing his B.Ed., in September 2008, Wil started working as a Music Teacher at MacLachlan College, Oakville, Canada.

He realised that teaching wasn’t the right job for him; as he was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, he wanted to quit his job, and start his own business.

So, in March 2009, Wil quit his job.

He had $2000 from his teaching job, and took a loan of $10,000, and in January 2010, started his music school, ‘Breath Of Music’ in Windsor, Ontario.

Wil, along with his wife, ran the school for four years and three months, and in March 2014, he sold the music school as it wasn’t decently profitable.

Starting ‘Tru Mylks,’ & finding relief in cooking-

After selling the music school, Wil along with his wife took a little vacation, and travelled; then, they bought bicycles, and did a big cycling trip from Toronto to Prince Edward Island for ‘Seva Canada,’ a charity which provides cataract surgeries in low and middle-income countries.

They cycled 2000 km, and it took them a week; during this trip, thanks to his love for food, Wil got an idea to start a coconut milk business.

So, in January 2016, he started ‘Tru Mylks’ in Toronto.

Wil started overworking and wore many hats for this business; he was preparing the product by cracking coconuts, pasting labels and, distributing, marketing, etc. all by himself in order to be frugal; thanks to this, his business became profitable within the first six months.

Eventually, Tru Mylks got into 36 retail stores including Goodness Me, Organic Garage, McEwan Foods, etc; and in addition to coconut milk, he also started selling almond and cashew milk.

At that time, Wil developed physical anxiety due to overworking; so, in February 2017, he paused his business.

At that time, even though he was earning money from doing photography and video, pausing his business put a great stress on his finances and he grew depressed.

At that time, cooking food helped Wil to feel better.

From January 2016 to November 2018, he owned ‘Pink Salt Wholesale Co.’, and supplied Himalayan pink salt for food services across Canada.

Since September 2010, Wil has been working as a photographer, and later, also started doing videography, he worked on commercial projects, and did weddings.

His film, ‘A day in the life of a Japanese Green Tea Farmer in Shizuoka Japan!’ won Gold in an international film festival.

An inconsistent YouTuber-

Wil’s desire to eat unprocessed food bought him into cooking.

Once, while sitting in the car, he wanted to have his own cooking show; so, on 24 August 2014, he started his YouTube channel, ‘Yeung Man Cooking.’

At that time, his channel was just a hobby for him.

On 24 August 2014, Wil published his first video, ‘Vegan rev Cooking Tips – How to prep Mangos for drying! – EP2.’

After publishing a handful of videos, he paused working on his channel; at the time, he was working as a photographer, doing weddings, and transitioned to commercial photography.

Initially, as Wil wasn’t getting any traction on his YouTube channel, he stopped working on it for around a year.

Then, he resumed working on his channel, and made a commitment to publish a hundred videos.

Later, when Wil started his coconut milk business, he started promoting his coconut milk through his cooking videos.

But as he discontinued his coconut milk business, he also stopped working on YouTube.

Becoming a successful YouTuber-

In 2019, Wil made a commitment to publish one video per week onto his YouTube channel; at that time, he was also working as a photographer and videographer.

Later, as his finances got stressed from buying a second house, he started working as a waiter.

But in 2020, Wil got laid off from his waiter job, and all his photography and video gigs got cancelled due to COVID-19; as he had nothing to do at that time, he started seriously working on his YouTube channel.

He committed to publish two videos per week, and thanks to this, his channel started gaining momentum; after he published 200 videos, he was inspired by his channel’s rapid growth.

Wil was chosen by YouTube for ‘Creator on the Rise,’ and thanks to this, he got on the ‘Trending’ page of YouTube for 24 hours, and this too helped his channel.

As of December 2023, he has 1.22M subscribers on his YouTube channel; he earns from advertisements, ‘Super Thanks,’ and sponsorships on his channel.

Currently, he is a full-time YouTuber.

Wil also sells ‘Sushi Masterclass,’ and merchandise on his website.

His cookbooks-

Wil authored three cookbooks namely-

• ‘Yeung Man Cooking’
• ‘Cook With Confidence’
• ‘Vegan Ramen.’

Personal life-

Wil met his wife while studying at University of Windsor; they took the same orchestra class, and at that time, he was in the second year, and she was in the first year.

They got married in Las Vegas.

Once, Wil suffered from depression but recovered from it.

He lives in Windsor, Ontario, Canada.

Some interesting facts about Wil-

• Even though he loves cooking plant-based, vegan food, he isn’t a perfect vegan.
• Wil’s favourite snack is Kettle Sea Salt Chips; he loves spicy food, and potato dishes.
• His favourite colour is black, and he is not good at math.
• Wil loves video games, hiking, traveling, audiobooks, and movies; he loves the movies of Christopher Nolan, and his favourite movies are The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, The Terminator, and Terminator 2.
• He is a polyglot, as he knows Cantonese, and English.
• Wil is the first entrepreneur from his family.
• He is a perfectionist; and his favourite spice is peppercorn.

So, how are you inspired by the success story of Wil Yeung?

Share with me in the comment section below.