The original purpose of the videos Jared made was to help him book more photo gigs. Instead, people started coming to him for advice about how to buy camera equipment. Previously he’d always considered anyone else taking pictures as the competition. The last thing he’d consider doing was helping them so they could compete for the jobs he wanted. Now he did a one-eighty and decided he was going to give all his information away for free. “Because you know what? People don’t have what I have.”
There was another motivation as well. His mother’s death lay heavily on him. For years she had asked her son to teach her how to better use a camera, but time had gotten away from them until they didn’t have any left. “It’s one of the biggest regrets in my life. She wanted to learn photography. There’s no reason I shouldn’t have taken the time to do this. Other people need to benefit from the knowledge that I have so they can be successful and continue on.”
He maxed out a $15,000 credit card with an 18-month period of 0 percent financing, which he suspects was meant for his father but had his name on it. He bought camera equipment and merch, then started putting out content.
I found the thing that I could do, and I beat the shit out of it. I locked myself away for two years. Every day, day in and day out. I shot a video every single day. Wake up in the morning, come up with an idea, shoot a video, edit it, have lunch, come back, put it out into the world, have dinner, then stay up until one or two in the morning replying to comments. I didn’t use teleprompters or anything. If I made a mistake, I would make fun of myself and keep going, partly because I didn’t know how to edit video. All I knew how to do was put a beginning and an end on it. Sometimes good enough is good enough.
Within six months, he saw a rise in viewership: one hundred views, then two hundred. All along, he was commenting, answering questions, and interacting with viewers. He made himself available to anyone who wanted to talk.
Crush It! talks about building your business off of search.twitter.com. I also made it a point to answer every single e-mail that came in. I put up my Skype number so that anybody could call at any hour. If I was sitting there, I would take the call. Then I would get the caller’s permission to record the call, because there’s nothing like free content. They were asking me questions, and if they’re asking it, then other people probably have the same one.
He made some connections to appear on other people’s YouTube channels. As the number of viewers started to climb, so did the number of subscribers. In short order, Nikon and Canon and other photography brands started asking him to review gear. Sometimes they even offered to pay him to do it. “I’m very up front. Someone might pay me, but they can’t tell me what to say. If there’s going to be something bad about a product, I’m telling you what’s bad, whether they’re paying me or not. It’s all about building credibility.”
The free model worked so well that in the end he didn’t need to take other people’s photography jobs. Now he barters trades with bands and musicians he wants to cover. They give him access, and he gets more content to share with the world. In seven years, he’s put out 2,400 videos, all dedicated to helping other people become better photographers, and received one hundred million views on YouTube. At the end of the first two years, he’d generated about $80,000 in revenue. Today he says he can generate seven figures.
You are not going to be successful unless you put the work in. If anybody tells you otherwise, they’re full of shit. It’s all of the perseverance and all of the hard work you put in in the decades leading up to it that make you ready. Are you passionate about what you’re doing? Are you good at what you’re doing? Then fucking do it. It’s one thing to read the book; it’s another thing to take action.
I’ve watched Jared carefully for years, and what stands out to me is his inability to complain. Like me, he put out hundreds of hours of content while receiving little traction up front. But that didn’t stop him. That’s the difference between him and almost everyone else, including most of the people who will read this book—he didn’t give up too early. Persistence is everything.
11
YouTube
YouTube makes me so happy. It’s here that I believe I can possibly help change a life faster than anywhere else. Since 2009, millions of people have quit their jobs and started making a living on this platform. It’s the whole reason Crush It! and this book and the books in between and everything else in my professional world came to be.
Ironically, YouTube is also where I made one of the biggest mistakes in my career. I was a breakout star on YouTube in 2006, but by the time I started writing Crush It!, I had decided that Viddler, its competitor, had a tagging system and management team that made it a superior platform for me and my content, which was unusually long by 2007 standards. In addition, I’ll admit I was swayed by a short-term economic decision: the company gave me substantial equity in the business.* I was certain that my advocacy and ability to put the platform in context for everyone would ensure its rise to prominence, but I was wrong. But you know what? It didn’t matter, because in the end, whether I was talking Viddler, YouTube, or Google Video, my advice on how to crush it in video would have been 100 percent the same.
I suspect YouTube has created more wealth and more opportunities in the Crush It! model than any other platform to date. It’s certainly the most important platform for building a personal brand, though Instagram is closing the gap quickly. It could take the place of television. Increasing numbers of people are streaming YouTube onto their TV screens, and during prime-time hours on an average day in the United States, more eighteen-to-forty-nine-year-olds visit YouTube than any TV network, even on mobile alone.1 That’s tough news. I know that not everybody who’s reading this book is cut out for video, which is why I’m so thankful that other alternatives exist to beautifully showcase the written word, still images, and audio. However, let’s be real. With perhaps the notable exception of J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, and a handful of other writers, in general over the last thirty years, video stars have financially outperformed stars in every other medium.
YouTube 101
Please, even if you don’t think you’re video material, give the platform a try. So many people don’t think of themselves as cameraworthy, but vlogging and documenting doesn’t demand that you be glamorous or beautiful or really superficially special at all. Have you looked at what’s out there? Aside from the beauty bloggers, the bodybuilders, and the rising pop idols—in other words, aside from everyone in an industry where your looks really matter—everyone on YouTube looks pretty damned ordinary. There are vloggers with disfiguring tumors, vloggers with disabilities, vloggers of all ages and shapes. Vlogging is a terrific way to document instead of create, which means that literally anyone can do it. You don’t need to be accomplished (at least not in the way 99 percent of you reading this define accomplishment) to break out on this platform because, remember, when you’re documenting and not creating, you’re allowed to learn as you go. You don’t have to be an expert (yet). You don’t have to be successful (yet). The only thing you really do have to do is make the road to getting there interesting.
Now, interesting is subjective. You know what I find super interesting to watch? Videos about hitting up garage sales. And I’m not the only one. As I write, a quick search on YouTube shows videos devoted to the topic of garage saling receiving as many as 50,000, 99,000, and 137,000 views. Don’t ever decide for yourself that videos about you or the things you like to do won’t be compelling to anyone else. Let the market decide. Trust me, it’ll be honest with you.
Vlogging is a great equalizer, and YouTube is the vlogging mother ship. It’s the platform where the person no one thought would amount to anything can make it. It’s a tool for finding your best angle, and I don’t mean camera angle. If you have a lot of interests, if you aren’t sure where your greatest skills lie, if you wonder whether you have the kind of charisma and appeal that draws audiences to YouTube personalities, or if you simply can�
��t decide whether you’d rather be the number-one American authority on pajamas or the go-to guru for kombucha, pick up your phone and start documenting your day. Put the results up daily as a YouTube vlog. See which posts get the most attention and double down on whatever it is that’s making those posts stick. But you have to put something out to know if you’ve got the goods. I didn’t mull over whether I should start Wine Library or debate whether I was good enough to deserve a YouTube audience. The second I thought filming a wine review show was a good idea, I had an employee go to Best Buy to buy the camera, filmed the first episode, and posted it. That first episode looks and sounds totally different from the ones I created even four months later because I figured out that I could be me. I’d held back, not because I was worried about the opinion of the world at large, but because I was afraid if I really let loose, I’d jeopardize all the hard-won relationships the wine store had with longtime customers who bought $10,000 of wine from me every month.
If you look at the first episode, I’m almost unrecognizable. Not because I’m over a decade younger and fifteen pounds heavier, but because my personality is so subdued. I say very wine-experty things like, “When I smell this, it reminds me of a classic Clinet or a VCC” and “I’m not going to push the Pétrus . . .” Then in episode 11, you can see on the wall behind me a framed black-and-white photo of Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier battling it out in the 1971 Fight of the Century. That may have been the first piece of the real me, the boxing-loving me, that made its way into the show.
In episode 40, I start talking about joy and passion and cut to a clip from the televised 2006 NFL draft, where I was caught on camera screaming my head off with excitement with my friends and my brother, A. J., in response to the announcement that the Jets had selected D’Brickashaw Ferguson, an offensive tackle from the University of Virginia, over quarterback Matt Leinart. I was starting to reveal other sides of me, because, as I said at the end of the episode, “You’ve got to be passionate about other things besides wine.” It’s right around this time that I started to realize that the world was changing so much that this channel could potentially get much bigger than I’d ever anticipated, and it might be worth risking a few short-term wine losses in exchange for the long-term value of allowing myself to be me.
By episode 57, I give a virtual finger to the establishment. Episode 58 gets even more real with the title, “I’m Not Pissed,” and reveals that I turned down two network opportunities, one in a travel genre, one in a food-and-wine genre, because I didn’t believe that TV was the future. Now remember, this is supposed to be a wine show! My energy is rising, my voice is going faster, and I’m being more direct. And then my confidence really kicks in with comments like, “We’re the best marketers in the wine business. We don’t need a blog to sell wine.” I start dropping colorful phrases like “bull crap” and “Taste the goddamn wine!” like bright pomegranate seeds into my monologues. By episode 61, when I start asking for people to keep e-mailing me because my mail was confirming that I was hitting a nerve and getting people excited and interested, my opening is less Masterpiece Theatre, more WWE.
As you can see, the delivery, quality, and content of Wine Library TV changed over time. I gave the show time to evolve. I gave myself time to get comfortable and relax into the format. I gave myself time to get to know my audience and listen to what it was saying. It has been pointed out to me that my first video was ten times better than some people’s hundredth in terms of quality and content. Maybe, but again, quality is subjective; some people are successful despite being complete idiots because the public loves to watch them be idiots. For sure I’m coherent and you can tell I know my shit. That was definitely a good start, but remember, there is no way I could have known that I’d be good on video at the time. If I had sat on my idea of starting a wine show and worried and second-guessed myself, I could have probably found a hundred reasons not to do it. Thank God I didn’t stop to do any of that but went with my gut. YouTube isn’t going to make you charismatic and interesting, but it will expose you if you are. It can’t do that, however, if you don’t put yourself out there. Give yourself a year to adjust and try different approaches and see what kind of response you get. Listen to your audience. Ultimately, it all boils down to this: don’t let perfection be your enemy. Do not be another dreamer who puts up ten episodes, gets trolled or ignored, gets discouraged, and takes the channel down. For God’s sake, give yourself a fair chance to succeed.
Every single thing that has ever happened on television can happen on YouTube. You can break out as a pop star. You can be a filmmaker. You can become Billy Mays, the infomercial pitchman. You want to become a morning TV star? Start a morning TV show on YouTube. You want to be the next Dr. Drew? Start a Q&A show. You want to be the next Rachael Ray, Oprah, Tavis Smiley, or Chris Hardwick? Then start cooking, mentoring, interviewing, or talking pop culture on YouTube. Tomorrow.
Yes, it will be harder today than it would have been had you started doing this in 2011, when there were a lot of people watching but not as many creating, but if you are really talented, smart, funny, or creative, you will win. It might take you a few more months or even years than it would have in 2011, but it will happen.
Taking the “document, don’t create” approach means you are conceivably going to pour a shitload of boring content into the miasma of boring content already living on YouTube.
That’s OK.
You know why?
Because if in the end the rest of the world agrees that your content is boring, you’ll know that you’re not cut out for this, and you can move on to something else.
Or it might be because you’ll get an e-mail from one of the six people who watched episode 94 of your 200 yarn episodes, who happens to be the CEO of your favorite yarn company, telling you he’d love to work together one day if you’re interested. You decide you’re never going to become a PBS star, call him up, and work out a deal where you create educational videos for the company website. They’re a big company, so they get four hundred thousand views per episode, allowing you to build your brand through them. They’re also big enough to pay you very well to do something you love.
It might be because you discover that, even though the general public didn’t get caught up in your craft-beer vlog, you had more fun doing that than you’ve ever had in your career as a software developer. So you approach Yuengling about making educational training videos for their staff, and they bring you on board for a high five-figure salary. The pay isn’t that different from what you earned before, but you go to bed happy every Sunday, excited to get back to work the next day.
Did you become a millionaire? No. But only a tiny percent of the people who try this will. That’s irrelevant. The point is to dream big and then make the practical adjustments necessary once you see where your potential lies. However, you will never, ever know the extent of that potential until you try. I guarantee it’s greater than you think it is.
For a couple of years now, the tech-savvy early adopters have been watching YouTube on their television sets. Very soon, everyone is going to be doing it, and the next generation will not see any difference between the two. YouTube will be television; television will be YouTube. YouTube is a monster. Yet Facebook is making plans to add more features that will make it look a lot like YouTube. With YouTube in possession of a decade of equity as the established video platform, Facebook is going to have to work its ass off to compete. As you’re about to see, it’s gonna be a hell of a fight.
Imagine This
Let’s say your name is Sam. You’re a fifty-two-year-old insurance salesperson in Alabama. Your twins just headed off to college, leaving you alone with your partner and the two dogs who have been a part of the family since the children were tiny. As excited as you are to start this new chapter in your life, you know it’s going to be hard adjusting to a home where there are no longer any kids around to make messes, cause drama, and add sparks and unpredictability to an otherwise staid and calm life. Yo
u’ve been working for the same insurance company for twenty-two years. You think retirement is probably only about ten to fifteen years away. You’ve saved steadily and invested wisely, you have little debt, and the house is mostly paid off. Life is fine.
Just fine.
Then your best friend sends you a video called “6 Mins for the Next 60 Years of Your Life.” (Google it.)
You realize that you have potentially thirty to forty more years ahead of you, and you want them to be more than just fine. You want them to be great. And with the kids finding their independence, you now have about twice the number of hours you once did to make them that way.
You start thinking about all the fun hobbies and interests you let drop as life became busier and your responsibilities increased. You always loved to dance. Your mom forced you into ballroom dance classes when you were a child, and to your surprise you not only really enjoyed the rhythms and moves of salsa, merengue, and swing, but you were damn good at them. The skill served you well on the dating scene—it’s how you met your spouse. But you both let the hobby drop as you settled into married life. It’s also been six years since you set foot in a gym; by now your knees would probably buckle after two rock steps.
Crushing It! EPB Page 17