My call with a YouTuber with 2 million subscribers | #34

what i learned, and how it informs where I'm going

Hello friends!

I’ve been feeling kind of insecure with my long term plan lately, so I took some time to write out a summary of my journey and where I’m headed.

The hope was that it’d be a forcing function to think things through, and that I’d feel more confident afterward. Which I do!

So if you’re curious why I’m doing what I’m doing, what I’ve been up to, and where I’m going, this is the blog for you!

• how it started: my consulting call with a YouTuber who runs a channel with 2 million subscribers

• how it went: me learning to make videos and learning I sucked at art and design

• how it’s going: some stuff I learned from that call and other research that’s guiding my plan

  • You make more money when you're the one selling stuff to your audience

  • The more niched down you get, the easier everything else becomes

  • Audiences vary wildly in value

• where it’s going: a rough outline of my plan to make content, serve an audience, and solve problems that I care about (but also still make money)

How it started

About a year and a half ago, I found myself on a call with Theodore. Theodore is the guy who runs the Practical Psychology YouTube channel.

He had started another channel and launched a community around it. As a special offer for joining the community, he offered an hour long call with him.

I was curious about what it's like to be a YouTuber, so I jumped at the opportunity.

I came prepared with questions and a video I made for him to critique.

The call went great. Most of his feedback was minor (e.g. my in-video text is too small). The major feedback was that my title & thumbnail sucked. The positioning should be less "what is this?" and more "check this out". Or "here's why you should click".

But over all he said it was a great first video. That I definitely had the chops to make it as a YouTuber if I were consistent.

Then he talked about how much he made from his channels and websites. Which was... a lot. I want to respect his privacy, but it was a great living.

Before that call, I was feeling kind of hopeless about my career prospects.

I've spent most of my adult life figuring out what I should do to make money. Nothing specific ever spoke to me. But, I was good at math and programming, it was kind of interesting, and it made money, so that's what I went with.

Later, when I started working as a software engineer, I found it hard to get motivated.

None of what I worked on seemed important. And even if it was important, it wasn't *my* job.

Well, it was my job, but not a job only for me. It seemed like a job anyone could do. You could swap me out with someone else and the machine would still hum beautifully.

Anything I learned was to keep that machine humming. Anything I was curious about that didn't fit that purpose, I had to indulge on my own time.

Which, to be clear, is fair! It's a business, after all. They were paying me.

Unfortunately, I'm always curious about a bunch of stuff. And because I had access to the internet, the temptation to learn things was always a click away.

So, if I had to describe my experience as a software engineer in one sentence, it would be this sentence:

I spent 8 hours a day

• making myself do things with no obvious importance,

• that any engineer could do,

• while resisting every 5 minutes the urge to do something 100 times more interesting.

But after that call, I had hope.

• I loved making that video.

• I loved learning about the topic.

• I loved figuring out the right way to present the ideas.

• I loved the satisfaction of hitting the publish button.

• I loved knowing that if I hadn't made that video, it wouldn't exist. I brought it into the world. It needed me.

And the idea that... I could get PAID for doing that?? made me foam at the mouth.

My life could never be the same after that. I couldn't work at another 9-5 job knowing that lifestyle was possible.

I had to give it a shot.

How it went

I started with a tool called VideoScribe. It's like Canva for whiteboard animations.

After making two videos, I realized that VideoScribe didn't have much templating support. For example, it was hard to re-use branding assets across videos.

There were also a ton of features missing that made life easier. For example, a grid system to line up text and images on the screen.

I figured I needed to move onto what the pros use: the Adobe suite. For the next few months I taught myself Premiere Pro, Illustrator, and After Effects.

As I got deeper into the specifics of the software, my lack of art and design background became clear. Everything I made was ugly, and I didn't know what to do to fix it.

Since art and design wasn't as formulaic, I figured it would be harder to teach myself. So I enrolled in School of Motion's Animation Bootcamp.

I finished a few months ago, learned a bunch, and made some stuff I'm proud of.

How it's going

Now, I'm at a point where I know enough animation, design, video editing, and marketing to be dangerous. I still have lots more to learn about each, but I'm ready to blaze ahead and start cranking out videos.

I'm not totally clear on my target audience, types of videos I'll make, and my business model, yet. But I know enough to get started.

Here are 3 things I've discovered that are informing those decisions:

1) You make more money when you're the one selling stuff to your audience

(As opposed to turning on ads, which is letting someone else sell stuff to them.)

At first I thought it was as easy as getting to 100k subscribers, turning on ads, and collecting 10k a month.

Nope. It's more like a million subscribers. You need A LOT of views.

You'll make somewhere around $1 to $30 per 1,000 views. So if you make $10 per 1,000 views, you need a million views a month to make $10k a month (or $120k a year).

But, if you think about it... seems like 12 million views should be a lot more valuable than $120k, no?

For perspective, imagine you're selling a course or T-shirt or something for $20.

And you have a 0.1% conversion rate. So for every 1,000 views of your video, 1 person buys the T-shirt.

To make $120k, you need is 120,000 / (20 * 0.001) = 6,000,000 views. Which is still half of 12 million.

So if you can get 1 out of 1,000 people who see your videos to buy a T-shirt, you're doing twice as good as turning on ads!

And whose to say you can't sell something more expensive? Or improve your conversion rate?

Turns out you leave a lot of money on the table by only monetizing with ads. It turns out that a lot of really big creators do this. I’d like to not be one of them.

2) The more niched down you get, the easier everything else becomes

Theodore mentioned that on the surface, Practical Psychology had 2 million subscribers. But in reality, because his channel was so diversified, he had less engagement.

Most subscribers didn't come for most of the content. Some people only watched the dating videos. Some people only watched the book summaries.

This made the algorithm's job harder and made it less likely to push videos.

There's a tradeoff: the tighter your niche, the easier it is to market and position videos. But, the more bored you will be as a creator, and the more likely it'll turn into a job to keep making videos.

You can teach the algorithm to find the audience that watches your videos for you, but it takes forever. And it also assumes you don't change much as a person. Which might not be safe to assume.

So, you have to find the balance. The more you understand yourself, your interests, and why you have them, the tighter you can niche down without burning out later.

3) Audiences vary wildly in value

CPM means cost per 1,000 impressions, and it's how much an advertiser pays to advertise on your video. It's a measurement of how valuable a video's audience is.

Those CPMs vary wildly because audience values vary wildly.

For example, teenagers are broke. Finance professionals are not. That means advertising to teenagers is not as lucrative. Potentially 30 times less lucrative (if we're looking at CPMs).

If I were debating serving teenagers vs finance professionals, it's worth asking:

Am I willing to take a 97% paycut? Grimace.

Honestly, maybe! I'm in this for the long haul.

Where it's going

I know from experience that the more confidence in my plan I have, the more motivated I am, and the easier it is to stick to it.

Other things that make it easier to stick to the plan:

1. making content I care about,

2. serving an audience I empathize with,

3. whose problems I want to solve, and

4. minimizing business operations I find tedious.

But, I also need to make sure I can pay my bills. That means I should

1. make the most valuable content I can,

2. serve the most valuable audience I can,

3. solve the most valuable problems I can, and

4. conduct business operations in a way that makes 1, 2, and 3 possible.

I know that there is often tension between doing what I want and doing what makes me money. Which means, I will be eating some flavor of shit sandwich to some extent.

I'm shooting for 80/20: 80% of the time I'm enjoying myself, 20% of the time I'm eating a shit sandwich. At least, in the long term.

In the short term I can go lower (up to maybe 60% shit sandwich), but for a few months, max.

So the question is: how much can I line up "doing what I want to do" with business value?

(Ah yes, basically everyone's dilemma, ever.)

Well, regarding 1) content, I enjoy doing a good job. I love a great explanation. I love when what I make is entertaining, engaging, and useful. That is also valuable, so that lines up.

I love learning about most things, including lucrative things like finance. Seems reasonable to assume that content about finance would attract finance people. That's a 2) valuable audience, so that lines up.

I also love 4) systematizing and automating things, especially if they're tedious. That's valuable, assuming I do it correctly.

The wild card is lining up 3) problems I want to solve with problems that are valuable.

Granted, I'm not familiar enough with finance (and its branches) to know what the problems are yet.

But, from past experience, I usually at least don't mind problem-solving if I understand

1. what the problem is

2. why it's important, and

3. how to solve it.

Kind of like brushing my teeth, or helping a friend move into a new apartment. I don't necessarily enjoy those things, but I don't mind them. I don't have to make myself do them, and that's the key.

I think that, if I dedicate enough time to understanding the players, incentives, and issues in the game, I at least won't mind solving the problems.

Plus, there are a lot of different vehicles YouTubers use for problem-solving. I'm bound to like one of them, right? To name a few:

• sponsorships

• affiliate links

• gated communities

• consulting/coaching

• info products

Or maybe I end up not wanting to do any of that, and I just turn on ads and call it a day. As long as I have a valuable audience (e.g. finance folks) maybe I can get away with it.

Anyhow, what's next is to make videos and improve each time. So I'll uh.. be doing that!

Let me know if you have any finance things you're interested in learning about!