Peter McKinnon: 6M Subscribers, 16 Products, $0 Recurring

Key Takeaways:

Peter McKinnon has just over 6 million YouTube subscribers and 847 videos teaching photography and filmmaking
His storefront lists 16 products. Buying every one of them at its listed starting price costs $910, once
His camera bag with Nomatic raised over $1,110,000 from more than 3,200 backers in its first Kickstarter week
His merch brand runs on limited drops, and the site currently reads "DROP IS SOLD OUT"
Every product he sells is used before the shutter or after it. Nothing he sells is open while a photographer is actually shooting

Peter McKinnon is better at shipping products than most venture-backed hardware startups. He put a camera bag on Kickstarter and pulled in more than a million dollars in a week. He co-engineered a variable ND filter with PolarPro that reviewers still rank at the top of the category. He sells presets, LUTs, motion graphics, sound effects, a machined camera tool, and fine art prints out of his own store. Sixteen products. Not one of them charges twice.

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Who Is Peter McKinnon?

Peter McKinnon is a Toronto photographer and filmmaker whose YouTube channel teaches photography, cinematography, and editing to just over 6 million subscribers across 847 videos. He shot weddings and portraits before the channel, worked at a camera shop, and started publishing tutorials that turned the technical parts of the craft into something a beginner could follow on a Saturday. The channel is the audience. The business sits next to it, at petermckinnon.shop, which he runs as McKinnon Digital Studios. His own site lists photography and directorial work alongside it, and a project called "A Year On Film" is listed as coming in 2026.

What Does Peter McKinnon Actually Sell?

He sells sixteen products: five versions of his Lightroom presets plus a master bundle, two LUT packs, four motion graphics packs, a sound effects pack, a lens ID pack, a machined camera tool, and a print. Here is the store, with the prices it lists.

Product	Listed price
PM Lightroom Preset Master Bundle	$115.00
PM Lightroom V5 Presets	$40.00
PM Lightroom V4 Presets	$35.00
PM Lightroom V3 and V2 Presets	$30.00 each
PM Lightroom V1 Presets	$20.00
PM Cine LUTS V2	$20.00
PM CINE LUTS V1	$15.00
MGFX packs (Film Scratch, Glitch, Light Leak, Matte)	From $20.00 each
PM Sound Pack V1	$15.00
Signature Lens IDs	$15.00
PM Camera Tool	$95.00
Lago di Como (print)	$400.00

Add every listed starting price together and the entire storefront comes to $910. That is the ceiling. A customer who wants to give Peter McKinnon more money than that has nothing left to buy, which is a strange sentence to write about a business with 6 million people watching it. The physical side is bigger and it is also finite. The McKinnon x Nomatic Camera Pack launched on Kickstarter at $99 for the camera cube against a $125 retail price, with a $510 early bundle, and it raised over $1,110,000 from more than 3,200 backers in week one. The Peter McKinnon variable ND filter with PolarPro has been through two editions. His merch brand, Pete's Pirate Life, sells knives, pins, coins, and hats in limited drops, and the front page right now says "DROP IS SOLD OUT" above a form asking for your email so you can be told about the next one.

Read that model again, because it is the whole thing in miniature. Build demand. Open. Sell out. Close. Collect emails. Wait. Every drop starts the customer relationship over from zero, and every drop has to be earned again with new attention.

Why Does a $1.1M Launch Week Produce Nothing in Month Two?

Because a bag, a filter, a preset pack, and a limited drop are all one-time transactions, and the arithmetic of a one-time transaction resets to zero the day after it clears. This is not a criticism of the products. It is a description of what they are. Run it as arithmetic rather than a claim about his books, which he has not published. Take the 3,200 backers from that first Kickstarter week and hold everything else constant.

Model	3,200 customers, month 1	Month 12	Month 36
$99 once	$316,800	$0	$0
$9.99/month	$31,968	$31,968	$31,968
$99/year	$316,800	Renews	Renews

The one-time row wins the first month and loses every month after it. We work the general case through in the app versus course revenue math, and the same shape is why creators keep moving off merch: a physical drop is a great month and a bad business model.

The Middle of the Day Nobody Sells

Sort his catalog by when a photographer touches it and something obvious falls out. The bag, the filter, the camera tool: those are used before you leave the house. The presets, the LUTs, the motion graphics, the sound pack: those are used after the card comes out of the camera. Every product he sells sits at one end of the day or the other. The middle is missing. The middle is the part where you actually go out and shoot, which is the part photographers are worst at and the only part that could happen daily. A preset does not get anybody out of the house. It waits for photos that already exist.

Ask any of his 6 million subscribers what they did with the gear they bought after watching him. A large share bought a camera, shot for two months, and stopped. That is the actual problem in photography, and there is nothing in the store addressed to it, because the store was built out of things he already made rather than out of what his audience keeps failing at. Stan Prokopenko hit the same wall from the other direction: Proko built four real drawing tools, and the two that sit inside daily practice are the free ones. Thomas Frank sold Notion templates rather than the system people open every morning. The pattern repeats across every craft, and it is always the same shape. Creators price the artifact and give away the habit.

A purchase clears. A practice repeats.

Built by Foundry builds the subscription product your audience opens on a Tuesday morning, prices it with you, and runs it forever. $0 upfront, revenue share, three weeks to the App Store.

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If You Teach a Craft People Have to Practice

Photography, guitar, drawing, chess, cooking, climbing, a language. If your subject is a skill people get better at by doing it repeatedly, and you sell them a course, a preset, a template, or a pack, you are selling the souvenir and giving away the sport. The test takes ten seconds. What does your student open on a Wednesday evening with forty minutes free and no idea what to shoot, play, draw, or cook? If the honest answer is "nothing, they scroll your feed instead," that gap is the product. It is where the daily use lives, and daily use is the rarest and most valuable thing in software. There are seven ways creator apps turn followers into daily users, and each one assumes you built something for the middle of the day. For photography specifically, the shape is not mysterious. A daily or weekly assignment with a constraint. A place to post the result. Feedback from someone whose eye you trust. A record that shows you improving over a year. That product would be opened more often than every other thing in his store combined, and it is the one thing not in it.

What Creators Can Learn From Peter McKinnon

He proved his audience will buy, at scale, repeatedly. A million dollars in a Kickstarter week is not a hypothesis about willingness to pay. Most creators never get one number that clean. He built real products, not merch with his face on it. A filter co-engineered with a manufacturer over a year. A bag people still recommend six years later. That is operator work. He sells the two ends and skips the middle. Gear before the shot, presets after it, nothing during. That gap is not a small missed upsell. It is the entire recurring-revenue business. Scarcity is not a business model. "DROP IS SOLD OUT" means a great launch and a dead month. A subscription means the quiet months pay too, which is the difference between income and an asset you own. Turning a body of teaching into that asset is a known path, and we walk through it in how to turn a course into a subscription app. Peter McKinnon has done the hard parts. He built the audience, earned the trust, and shipped physical and digital products that hold up against companies with real balance sheets. What he has not built is the one product that would still be charging next February whether or not he posts. That is the product Built by Foundry builds, ships, and keeps running for creators, at $0 upfront.

Your audience already owns the gear. Sell them the practice. Built by Foundry builds the app, ships it to the App Store in three weeks, and runs it forever. $0 upfront. You own the business.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How many YouTube subscribers does Peter McKinnon have?

Peter McKinnon's YouTube channel has just over 6 million subscribers across 847 published videos, covering photography, cinematography, editing, and gear.

What does Peter McKinnon sell?

Peter McKinnon sells sixteen products through his own store at petermckinnon.shop: Lightroom preset packs V1 through V5 plus a $115 master bundle, two LUT packs, four motion graphics packs, a sound effects pack, a lens ID pack, a $95 machined camera tool, and a $400 print. Separately he has a camera bag line with Nomatic, a variable ND filter with PolarPro, and a limited-drop merch brand called Pete's Pirate Life.

How much do Peter McKinnon's presets cost?

The PM Lightroom Preset Master Bundle is $115. Individually, V5 is $40, V4 is $35, V3 and V2 are $30 each, and V1 is $20. His LUT packs are $15 and $20. All are one-time purchases with no subscription.

How much did the Peter McKinnon camera bag raise on Kickstarter?

The McKinnon x Nomatic Camera Pack raised over $1,110,000 from more than 3,200 backers in its first week on Kickstarter, with the camera cube priced at $99 for early backers against a $125 retail price.

Does Peter McKinnon have an app or a membership?

No. His store sells one-time digital and physical products, and his merch brand sells limited drops. There is no subscription, membership tier, or app in the catalog.