Hey friends! I watched this reel about a woman who quit her easy and well-paying (but unfulfilling) job.
She went on to explain a reflection exercise she did for figuring out what to do for work instead.
I didn't do that exercise, but the way she framed the goal was interesting. The goal is to find the intersection of the 3 I's:
what you find Interesting
what makes an Impact
what produces Income
I've seen several versions of this framing (e.g. Ikigai), but for whatever reason, this version made me think a lot. Probably because I'm procrastinating (again) on the next step in my 90 day plan: making videos.
The reflecting I did was helpful in understanding why I'm procrastinating. It's not fear (or, at least, that's not the biggest element). I’ll elaborate more, later.
In this newsletter:
Impact + Income: some insights about what videos are profitable to make
#1: Have skills
#2: Work with people who have money
#3: People buy things for one of two reasons: business or pleasure
Interesting: some insights about what I enjoy doing
Finding meaning > creating just to create
How much of practicing is studying?
Do what comes naturally? Or face the challenge?
Impact + Income: some insights about what videos are profitable to make
At first, it was hard to understand why some people paid a lot of money for videos and some people didn't.
What's the difference between someone on Upwork who offers $100 for a video and someone who offers $1,500?
There are three things that I've noticed, in order from most obvious to me to least obvious:
#1: Have skills
I asked "What makes a video editor valuable?" on a call with one of MrBeast's content strategists.
He said that most editors edit, make cuts, add b roll, music, etc. But, that's it.
The things that set you apart are
stacking other skills on top of editing (like motion graphics, VFX)
being able to craft an intriguing story, and
doing the work to familiarize yourself with and really listen to the client
Most of the job ads I've seen on Twitter echo that sentiment.
#2: Work with people who have money
This was only obvious to me in retrospect. It it turns out that the more money someone has, the more they're willing to pay you.
There's more to it than that, though. It's about risk and evidence.
Let's say the goal of a video is to sell T shirts.
Let's also say you have two YouTubers who make their money selling T shirts. One has 10,000 subscribers. The other has a million.
They both sell the T shirts for $20. For both of them, 20% of their subscribers watch their videos on average. About 0.5% of people who watch their videos buy a T shirt.
The first YouTuber can estimate a revenue of $20 * (0.2 * 10,000) * 0.005 = $200 from a video.
The second YouTuber can estimate a revenue of $20 * (0.2 * 1,000,000) * 0.005 = $20,000 from a video.
Let's say I wanted to charge $1,000 to make a video. The first YouTuber is nowhere near close to affording that. The second YouTuber could pay me that without blinking.
The conclusion here isn't: find clients who have money.
Having money is just a proxy.
The conclusion is: find people who benefit the most from the service or product you sell. Those people almost always have money because they
have more cushion to take risks, AND
are more efficient at making money (something that is a risk to others is a sure thing to them)
YouTubers with more subscribers generally benefit more from making videos because they have a larger reach.
If a YouTuber needs 100,000 views to justify making a video, it's a lot riskier to make the video if the YouTuber only has 10k subscribers.
It's not just about views or money, though.
Let's say that YouTuber with 10,000 subscribers was selling SEO services for $5,000 a month instead of T shirts. Let's also say their average customer stays with them for 1 year, resulting in $60k in revenue.
Even at a 0.005% conversion rate, they can expect to make $60,000 * (0.2 * 10,000) * 0.00005 = $6,000 in revenue from that video.
They don't necessarily need a lot of views.
I also don't necessarily need to target people who have money. It's about people who can demonstrably provide value. I can get creative with the arrangement.
If that same YouTuber couldn't pay me up front, I could instead propose some kind of profit sharing. Give me 5% of any profit for the next 6 months.
If they made $20k in profit, that's $1,000 for me down the road.
That being said, people who can demonstrably provide value rarely don't have money. If they're broke, they're not going to be broke for long.
#3: People buy things for one of two reasons: business or pleasure
Evan Abrahms is an experienced motion graphics artist.
He has a YouTube channel where he fields questions from new motion graphics artists.
I watched this video where he (and Kyle Hamrick) addressed the following question:
What problem are we actually solving with motion?
Their answer (paraphrased):
Sometimes clients just want motion because they want it. Sometimes clients hire you because they like you or your style (or both).
But, sometimes motion can solve specific problems in business. Motion design allows you to control information better. You can deliver information quicker, clearer, and tell a better story. The business case for this is more engagement and attention.
Hence, certain products like explainer videos benefit a lot from animation.
My takeaway from this: people buy animation for one of two reasons: business or pleasure.
As an artist, it seems like those are the two paths.
Either
figure out how to use your art to drive engagement for people selling stuff, or
find the (ideally rich) people who like you and/or your art, and are willing to sponsor you
Maybe there's a hybrid of both, but I'm just starting out on this journey, looking at things from the outside in.
If I had to guess, a hybrid looks something like this.
That's a tweet by Meng-Hsueh Lin (a motion graphics artist) who posted a preview of some animation he did for a sound design course.
Did that sound design course have to have animation? Probably not. But I'm sure the instructors wanted it. And they liked his style. And maybe him.
So maybe it's half business (I'm sure it helps the course sales) and half pleasure (they wanted the course to look nice).
Derek Sivers (CD Baby founder and musician) advocates for separating them. Have a well paying job and pursue art for love on the side, not optimizing for money at all.
I've thought about what that looks like as well. What if I made some videos for money, and some for fun? What would *pure* business videos look like?
I chatted with Hunter Weiss a little bit about that on Twitter, which is what inspired reason #2. His example was videos for medical companies with long (but profitable) sales cycles. Speed up that sales cycle, increase conversion rates, make $.
In summary: do valuable things for people who do valuable things.
Interesting: some insights about what I enjoy doing
As I mentioned earlier, I've been procrastinating on following the 5th step in my 90 day plan:
MAKE VIDEOS
It also isn't the first time I've written about this. A week ago, I concluded that I needed to Just Make Videos.
There's a market. I enjoy making them. I just need to get good at them. Getting good requires putting in the reps. So JUST GET STARTED.
Yet, here I am, 7 days later. I have not gotten started. Why?
Finding meaning > creating just to create
At the beginning of the year, when I planned my roadmap for 2024, I talked about the kind of work I enjoyed. I said that, generally, I enjoy:
explaining things; making complicated or boring things simple and interesting
categorizing and measuring things; understanding what makes something "good" or "bad"
finding patterns, identifying similarities and differences, examining cause and effect
understanding what motivates people, what makes people feel things
bantering; creating scenes, jokes, vibes
making things more efficient
I also listed out 6 things that commonly made me dislike work (but it's long, so here's the link again if you're curious).
The biggest thing I'm realizing is that most of the reason I create or consume anything is to find meaning.
I got interested in math because I wanted to know what all those symbols meant
I got interested in programming because I wanted to know what all that fancy syntax meant
I got interested in accounting, statistics, finance and a lot of other boring subjects when I realized people use them to tell stories
I got interested in options trading because market prices reflect what people believe about the future
I got interested in motion design, typography, editing, and art in general because each domain has a language for communicating feelings and meaning
I love understanding
where people are coming from,
why people do things,
why things are the way they are, and
if I make a certain change, what happens?
And when I think about following my plan and making those videos, I'm so uninterested because I feel like there's so much context I'm missing.
I have a list of animation techniques to learn, but what do they communicate to the viewer? When would I use them and when wouldn't I? What do they mean? How do they fit into the whole ecosystem?
And if I did learn them, what would I do with them? Who would I make videos for? What's their story? What makes them feel things? What do they want?
Who the heck is my audience? I feel so ungrounded. It feels kind of like my past 9-5 jobs as a software engineer. Doing abstract tasks that have opaque outcomes for intangible groups of people.
If I'm making videos for a client, I want to know exactly why
they're the best fit client for me,
I'm the best fit to make videos for them,
the video I'm making for them is exactly the video they need for their goals, and
why the creative decisions I'm making about the video are the best decisions for the video and the client.
I want to have answers to all those questions. It's un-motivating for me to work without having answers to those questions.
How much of practicing is studying?
Most of the internet is filled with crap. I don't want to contribute to that. Moreover, I know I could make really good videos. I just have to figure out how.
And I guess my revealed belief about this is: I don't think that necessarily means practicing making videos.
Making a fully animated video takes weeks. I think I could learn quicker by studying other videos and documenting my observations.
Of course, getting good will involve making videos at some point. It's not clear to me that making videos to practice is the most efficient learning path, yet.
And I guess I have some credibility here because it's not like I've never made a video before. I have 11 listed on my YouTube channel. I have a Twitter Thread of 39 animations I've done.
I know, from past experience, I can be consistent if my goal, plan, and belief are clear. Otherwise, I will fall off the boat.
Right now, my plan to make videos for clients is not clear. I vaguely know that I want to make animated videos for people who have money. But, that's it.
I'm kind of scared to publish all this because it goes against a lot of conventional advice.
I think most people would say something like: dude, you're just scared. Push through, put in the reps, learn. This is just an excuse, you're doing this to let yourself fall off the boat.
And maybe, in retrospect, they'll turn out to be right. That would suck.
Do what comes naturally? Or face the challenge?
All I know is that I'm encountering a ton of resistance trying to make videos. Yet, doing research on how to grow on YouTube and publishing my findings comes naturally.
So I'm thinking.. maybe I should just Do That?
Maybe after a few months of writing, learning, and talking to people, a plan to make videos will emerge?
If I did do that, what would I do to make money instead of making videos for people?
Maybe it'd be some kind of consulting. I can see a scenario like,
The client has a business and wants views for their product or service
I identify
what marketing currently works in their niche
what the client’s edge is in the market (if they have one)
and then I help them plan or create content that hits their goals (e.g. views, engagements, conversions)
Part of me wants to shoot this idea down. Maybe it's a bad idea because maybe people don't need more ideas. Maybe what they want is what I originally set out to do: Done-For-You content.
At the same time, I know this market exists. People obviously hire consultants to help them grow their channel. Like Paddy Galloway.
But then again, people hire Paddy Galloway because he has credibility. People like MrBeast have hired him.
So, how could I get credibility? Will doing some version of what I already do naturally get me there?
I think so. If I did 5-10 more posts like my YouTube deep dive, I'd probably know enough to be useful.
Then, if I
did a few deep dives on specific YouTubers,
came up with evidence-based suggestions for them to grow, and
wrote them all up,
I'm sure I have a decent chance of getting some YouTubers to follow my suggestions.
For example,
are there scripting mistakes they're consistently making that lose them retention?
is there something that the creator wants to make a video about but can't find the right packaging or framing for?
is there an under-performing video that I can adjust the title and thumbnail to make it more appealing to a wider audience?
Once I can get some case studies and testimonials, I think it's smooth sailing from there.
I don't know! I feel more called to do that. It seems more meaningful to me. More... productive, I guess?
As opposed to just making videos. Like, I make a few videos. Then, what? That's just what I do from that point on?
I know that's not a charitable point of view, but it's how I feel.
I think what I'm going to do now is write a few survey pieces. I'm interested in:
standup comedy: what's funny? what's popular? what're the trends here?
skits, crowd work, improv: what're the techniques for creating funny scenes with the audience?
technical tutorials: what makes them good? how does one convey complexity, simply?
virality: what makes something go MEGA viral? is it just controversy? or is there more to it
selling without selling: what're the best accidental marketing campaigns?
paid marketing: it seems like most ads I see SUCK. am I not seeing the good ones? or is there something I'm not understanding?
capitalizing on memes and trends: how does one remix trending content well vs not well?
parody and caricature: what makes a great parody?
bringing niche ideas to the masses: how does one take specific, technical ideas and make them generally appealing?
storytelling: the best stories are when a character we care about goes on a meaningful journey. what makes us care about that character? what makes a story meaningful?
communicating meaning quickly: how do different colors, fonts, shapes, camera angles, etc work together to create feelings and vibes?
I imagine if I knew a fair amount about each of those subjects, I could be useful to someone.
Anyway, I’m going to start working on the standup comedy one. Gonna aim to finish one a week.
Or maybe I should start another newsletter analyzing content? Or add a section like that to this newsletter? UGH I DON’T KNOW. I’ll think about it more.
For now: survey piece on standup comedy. Let me know if any of those bullets are particularly interesting to you!