Just Start
Videos, travel, technology and stories — long before any of it became a profession.
MÖWE MEDIA · ABOUT TOBIAS
It didn't start as a
media company.
Möwe Media wasn't created on a drawing board. It started with more than 15 years of making content: lots of videos, very few views, and the decision to keep going anyway.
A story about General Möwe, detours and the courage to start doing things before you know where they will lead.
The person behind General Möwe and MÖWE MEDIA
01 / THE EARLY YEARS
Long before General Möwe
I spent years making videos that hardly anyone watched.
My old channel was called German Travel Time. It was about travel, hotel reviews, all-inclusive resorts and the things I encountered along the way. Through my wife's family, I kept returning to South Africa. So I filmed vlogs there, experimented, edited and published.
Some hotel reviews reached a few thousand views. Many other videos were barely watched. The work was still there. I had to learn cameras, editing, storytelling and YouTube — long before reach was even a consideration.
02 / THE SECOND CHANNEL
The second channel that suddenly worked
General Möwe was actually just the second channel.
I created General Möwe as a second channel in 2018. At first, it was about inexpensive smartphones, travel, ordinary products and whatever else seemed interesting. There was no elaborate business plan. It was simply a channel where I could try things out.
In March 2023, I bought a Tesla Model Y Standard Range. Very few German YouTubers were talking about it at the time. In April, I removed the old videos, repositioned the channel and published my first Tesla video.
The first videos reached several thousand views. Soon after, the channel passed 1,000 subscribers, and roughly two months later it was monetised. For the first time, YouTube started paying something back.
03 / COMMUNITY
First collaborations & community
Suddenly, the numbers had faces.
Through Teslabs, I connected with Moritz early on. What began with a first product — a Tesla accessory worth around €200 — grew into a long-term partnership involving joint projects, formats and ideas around Tesla.
Over time, more brands and topics followed: e-mobility, consumer electronics, technology, product reviews, road trips, travel and ordinary everyday experiences. At my first electric community event in Hamm, the channel had around 3,000 subscribers. People recognised me, came over to talk and told me about videos they had watched. That was the moment the numbers became a community.
04 / THE DETOUR
A detour through the railway
“Come on, you can learn this job.”
Before the railway became part of my life, I spent several years working in emergency medical services. I had no particular connection to railways. Then I saw an SWR report about staff shortages and the search for train drivers. My reaction was pragmatic: come on, you can learn this job.
After a nine-month training programme, I worked as a train driver for around six months. In March 2020, I got the opportunity to move into operations control. After another six months of training, I became a dispatcher, a role I still work in today.
Later, I started publishing railway videos on General Möwe. They became unexpectedly successful, brought in many new subscribers and turned into an important driver of the channel's growth. With official filming permission from my employer, I was able to make this part of my creator work. Today, General Möwe is economically significant enough for me to work my main job part-time — but the control centre is still part of my everyday life.
05 / WHAT GREW FROM IT
When one channel becomes more
Not a CV.
A journey.
General Möwe
A second channel becomes its own perspective on e-mobility, technology and everyday life.
Community
Collaborations, events and encounters give the numbers faces.
Möwe Media
A professional structure for creator work, productions and digital projects.
Monetisation, the long-standing Teslabs partnership, my first encounters with the electric community, press coverage, SWR, speaking engagements, railway videos and IFA Berlin 2026 were never milestones I had planned from the beginning. They emerged along the way.
My book, einfach machen – der Alltag im Tesla und der Mut, es einfach zu tun, is part of that story too. Not as an advertising block, but as a pretty accurate description of the mindset behind this journey.
06 / TODAY
Why Möwe Media?
General Möwe is my alter ego. Möwe Media is the structure behind it.
General Möwe remains my alter ego. Many partners simply call me “the General”. A large part of what I do today grew out of that channel: brand collaborations, commissioned productions, trade show and event production, social content, speaking and media appearances, as well as digital projects and products.
Möwe Media is the professional umbrella structure around that work. It is not a conventional full-service marketing agency, nor do I want it to become yet another generic social media agency. I have no interest in selling packages that have nothing to do with the way I work. If a company genuinely wants to make use of my perspective, style and experience, we can create something that fits.
The structure is there to make the work more professional — not to turn me into a traditional agency.
07 / PRINCIPLES
A small manifesto
What should remain.
No scripted
opinions.
No pre-written statements, no endless approval loops until an opinion no longer sounds like an opinion.
No life lived
for the camera.
I'm not always travelling, I don't constantly drive a new car, and I don't live a staged creator lifestyle. I'm interested in technology, mobility, travel and new things — but I'm still a normal person.
einfach machen.
You don't always need perfect conditions. Sometimes you have to start with what you have and find out where it leads.
MÖWE MEDIA
Enough about
me.
If you have a project where this perspective feels like the right fit, tell me about it. Or take a look at where it all began.