Simone Giertz: From Useless Robots to 2.9M Subscribers

Channel: Simone Giertz   Who: Simone Giertz, a Swedish inventor and YouTuber based in Los Angeles   Subscribers: 2.86M (as of 3 November 2026)   Niche: Maker videos, robots and product design

Simone Giertz became famous for robots that didn't work: a helmet that brushed her teeth badly, an alarm clock that slapped her awake, a machine that poured cereal and then held up an empty spoon. She had no engineering degree. She dropped out of a physics course after a year and taught herself electronics with cheap, open-source Arduino boards. Within a few months of her first robot video, making videos was her full-time job. As of 3 November 2026 her YouTube channel has 2.86 million subscribers, 257 videos and nearly 250 million views.

A dropout who learned hardware on her own

Simone was born in Stockholm on 1 November 1990 and grew up near the city. As a child she loved woodworking, and she has named the Disney inventor Gyro Gearloose as one of her earliest inspirations. She has also said she was obsessed with her grades and developed a real fear of failure. At 16 she spent a year as an exchange student in China, then finished school at a Swedish boarding school in Nairobi. She studied physics at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm but left after a year, and in 2012 she took a job editing the Chinese-language version of Sweden's official website. She lived on a 1940s ship she had converted into a houseboat.

In 2013 she enrolled at Hyper Island, an advertising school in Stockholm, and went to a talk by a woman about hacking hardware. That talk got her into electronics. A product design internship in San Francisco followed, where she worked with Arduino microcontrollers. She created her YouTube channel in March 2013, but her first upload, a popcorn catapult filmed in front of a wall in 2014, got little attention.

A seven-second video that went viral

In August 2015 she posted a robot she had built for a children's TV pilot about electronics that was never picked up: a helmet with a toothbrush arm that moved across her face and couldn't reach her back teeth. The seven-second clip went viral. She kept going with robots for everyday tasks. "The Breakfast Machine" and "The Wake-up Machine", both posted in November 2015, each passed a million views, and she later called the slapping alarm clock "the first one that really took off". Reddit's Sh*tty Robots community gave her the nickname Queen of Sh*tty Robots, and she adopted it. By March 2016 creating content was her full-time job and her channel had over 100,000 subscribers.

A six-second video of a robot smearing lipstick across her chin caught the eye of former MythBusters host Adam Savage, who invited her to work with him on Tested.com in California. She went on to show her robots on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and gave a TED talk about the value of building useless things, in which she explained how the robots had helped her get over her performance anxiety.

When the sponsors walked, the fans paid

In late 2016 a profane video she made with fellow maker Laura Kampf upset her sponsors. She deleted five videos and then posted one called "Why My Sponsors are Leaving." That December she opened a Patreon page so viewers could pay her directly, and she still posted there regularly as of 2019, with both videos and written updates. Bigger sponsors came later, including Ericsson, Google and Audible, but the lesson stuck: money that comes straight from fans doesn't disappear when a brand gets nervous.

A brain tumor, a Tesla pickup and a $593,000 Kickstarter

In April 2018 she was diagnosed with a noncancerous brain tumor, which she named Brian. Her video "I have a brain tumor" mixed tears and jokes and passed three million views within a few months. She later told The Washington Post that being ill "kind of pushed me to think of YouTube differently," and her videos widened beyond robots. While recovering she built a habit tracker for herself, the Every Day Calendar, and turned it into a product. Its Kickstarter in October 2018 aimed for $35,000 and raised $593,352 from more than two thousand backers. In June 2019 she and her friends cut the back off a new Tesla Model 3 and turned it into a pickup truck called Truckla. The build video passed eight million views within ten days and is still pinned to the top of her channel.

In a 2019 Patreon post she said she was done with the useless-robot joke, which she felt had played out. She told Fast Company in 2022 that she was "a recovering self-deprecator" and was trying to stop talking down her skills, and she wanted a career that didn't depend on YouTube. In May 2022 she launched Yetch, a product design company and online store named after the way her surname is pronounced. Its first product was a completely white jigsaw puzzle with one piece that appears to be missing.

What other creators can take from it

Simone's channel never followed a schedule, and her videos are sometimes months apart. What kept her going was a direct line to the people who liked her work: a membership page when sponsors pulled out, a Kickstarter for her first product, and then a store of her own. You don't need millions of subscribers for that. A few hundred fans who pay for build logs, early looks at projects and behind-the-scenes posts can fund the next thing you make.

You can set that up in minutes. On Yaff you can post build logs, photo dumps and extra videos behind monthly membership tiers, sell ebooks and guides, take tips, and talk to supporters in group chats and DMs. Starter is free with a 5% platform fee, and payouts go to your bank daily via Stripe. Start your free Yaff page and publish your first post, see pricing, or read how to fund your expedition or project with memberships and add Yaff to your YouTube channel.

More origin stories: From Plumber to 13M Subscribers: The Colin Furze Story, From NASA to 84M Subscribers: The Mark Rober Story, From Mowing Lawns to 11M Subscribers: Primitive Technology and From Food Blogger to 12M Subscribers: Mark Wiens.

Watch Simone Giertz on YouTube