Tech Over Tea - #55 Experiment With Your Content Style - feat The Digital Life

Episode Date: March 17, 2021

I feel like The Digital Life and I have both really improved since the last time we've done a podcast together and we both have a lot of thoughts on how we can continue to improve and what may have helped us in the first place. ==========Guest Links========== YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZNhwA1B5YqiY1nLzmM0ZRg LBRY: https://lbry.tv/@the-digital-life Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/thedigital_life Blog: https://www.the-digital-life.com/en/ ==========Support The Channel========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson =========Video Platforms========== 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg =========Audio Release========= 🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss 🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM 🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== 🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea ==========Social Media========== 🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/ 🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345 ==========Credits========== 🎨 Channel Art: All my art has was created by Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/ DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Welcome to episode 55 of Tech of a T. I am, as always, your host, Brody Robertson, and today we have a returning guest. Today we have Christian Lemper back on the show, otherwise known as The Digital Life. The last time he was on the show, his channel was considerably smaller than it is now, and you've kind of massively exploded it. It's still like a fairly small channel, but compared to where you were before, like three, four months ago, was it? It's a massive growth. yeah thank you yeah i'm so happy to be here again so it's awesome thanks for inviting me yeah i always enjoyed these live streams and recordings and podcasts it's really awesome yeah i didn't know i wouldn't say sorry i I wouldn't say my channel exploded, but it's it's been Yeah, then it has a consistent growth. So I'm really happy about it

Well, I have noticed that you have been doing some various The live stream is it was a live stream a live stream with some other people here and there is that the only one or? Have you done? Yeah, I usually do it weekly. So I'm currently doing two live streams weekly. So first one is like a talking live stream. I talk about a specific topic or just random stuff about IT, tech stuff and what else, right?

Do it in form of a Q&A. People can come in and ask me questions and I try to answer them. And the next day, I usually do some Code Wars live streams. So I'm doing some programming challenges because that's something I want to focus this year to become better in Python and yeah, at some point, maybe JavaScript maybe JavaScript something like this because I don't have so much experience with programming I'm not a professional developer I never was but I think a lot of people are interested in programming these days I think that's really important in IT and yeah therefore I take a look at this and hopefully this also helps other people

because they can see me struggle with some beginner challenges on CodeWars. Yeah, that's how you do it. But since I started this, like, I think three or four months ago, maybe even three, I kind of feel that I really improved a lot with these challenges. So I had some programming experience in PHP before and also in Python, but I think the Code Wars challenges are really, really good for learning. So therefore I just do it live on a stream

and people can also help me when I'm struggling with a complex challenge, right? So that makes a lot of fun. I've noticed a couple other people doing the sort of Code Wars stuff, maybe not just Code Wars specifically, but like other of those, you know, competitive programming things. I've considered doing it myself.

I just haven't gotten around to it. It would be definitely a lot of fun. But I know that I have a lot of people who would be very quick to tell me how wrong I am doing stuff and other people complaining that I'm just not writing C code because, you know, that's the sort of audience I have. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I get that.

Yeah, I'm also afraid of that. But literally, my experience is that most people are just smarter than I am. It's just the truth. But they are really helpful. So they really give me good advices. And I always learn something from these live episodes so and i also think um probably if if a beginner looks at this uh you will probably think okay maybe i should also take a look at this and i also think it's worth like not just solving the

challenges as fast as you can but do some conversation in these live streams. So that is something that I needed to figure out because that's not really easy because you need to focus on the challenge, but you also need to focus somehow on the chat and do a conversation with the guys. And it takes a long time to solve a challenge because you're always having a conversation.

But I think that's important so that people can actually not just follow you but can connect with you and you can talk about other things in the stream as well and once the challenge is over and i have found a solution or i solved the challenge we also take a closer look at some of the other solutions and talk about what is the most efficient one and that also is very interesting because you can learn a lot from other people's code and that's really cool yeah yeah that that is that is cool i i as i said i should definitely look into it um just

have not got around to it because i'm i'm trying to do stuff out with my live streams because for a while i was just sort of doing very, very much the same sort of stuff. It was just like, okay, I'm going to do a Q&A. I'm going to do a game stream. I'm going to do this. And then I just like cycled them. But now I'm sort of trying new stuff out. And you actually joined one of my really weird streams that was happening the other day.

I think I joined this one, right? Yeah, yeah. That was a bizarre stream i was like you know what i was a bit confused i don't know what's the topic for today but it was kind of interesting and i saw whoa there are a lot of concurrent viewers on this stream so i think you had a very good success with that it wasn't as as high as the one i did before but it's still higher than previous before that because the one i did before, but it's still higher than previous before that. Cause the one I did before that, I was actually going through,

um, through Vim Tutor and I guess people wanted to come along for that one. And as you were saying with the, the programming one, I'm very bad with Vim. So having people there who are like really good with something like that. And then every time you, maybe you get to a point where maybe the tutorial

isn't the best way to do it they can be like here's a much better way you can actually do it that's far more efficient yeah yeah I get that it can be frustrating sometimes so the first code was dreams I did they were really really frustrating to be honest because I felt like a complete dumb beginner and it's like ah it's horrible but i think sometimes you just need to experiment with a channel and which content you want to make i did a lot of things with live streaming i tried to make live streams on twitch with code wars that didn't work at all because you have like zero discoverability on twitch and if you're a really small channel that's not going to work right at least if you're just streaming once a

week that's just not enough for twitch you probably would need to go live every day or every weekday and i cannot just do that so i switched back to youtube and kind of experimented and there was some live streams especially the code CodeWars live streams, where I think you can easily be distracted by something, and that can hurt the viewing experience a lot.

So my experience was, when I'm just focusing on these challenges, and I try to solve them, and I think, what could be the solution? Trial and error for one or two hours. People are not going to follow it. and I try to solve them and I think, oh, what could be the solution? Trial and error for like one or two hours. People are not going to follow it. They are not going to watch it because it's just zero entertainment.

Yeah, that's not really fun to watch. I think it's a really hard part to find that balance between entertainment and educational stuff, especially with the content that we do on our channels. I think you found your perfect balance between that with the content you're doing on YouTube because it's entertainment and educational stuff. I would say it's a perfect balance for you.

You found your schedule with, I think, daily content. Too many videos. I don't really know. Way too many videos. Yeah, I don't know how you're doing this, but it's perfect. And I'm currently struggling a bit finding my own balance

with making videos and live streams. So I'm experimenting a lot. But yeah, I kind of see there is a natural progression in my channel. It's just like I probably need a few more weeks and months to decide where I actually want to go because I have also too many topics, I think, and I really need to focus on a few specific ones. And then it's I think it's OK to have an experiment phase in the beginning and try to check where your content fits in. your content fits in but yeah before we get like too deep into stuff like that for anyone who didn't see the uh the last time you're on the podcast or has never heard of your channel before

what do you actually do on your podcast i'm going to introduce you eight minutes into the show uh yeah we'll do that sure why not uh what do you actually do on your channel if anyone doesn't know because i i do like the content i don't check it out super often but there are a couple of videos here and there i do definitely watch myself. Oh, that's great. Thanks, man. Yeah, so my channel is, I would say, a channel for IT professionals.

So I really try to cover the business side of IT. And I try to share my own experience, what I did in the field. And I try to make tutorials that help people step into complex topics in IT. So for example I did a lot of videos with Docker and containerization so that's definitely a technology that I see is becoming really really important in IT. Every company, every business is using containerization. You see it everywhere. And I also try to step into some DevOps-related topics,

like how to deploy those containers. And I soon want to start with something like container orchestration and cloud content as well. So I think that fits perfectly in the trends I see in the IT industry that I think are important technologies. And my idea is that I think that traditional IT training or IT training courses probably don't have all the capabilities to educate and teach people that stuff because there are too many tools out there, right?

If you want to get started with DevOps or networking sysadmin these days, there are a lot of different tools. And there's really a huge amount of content. People don't really know what they should focus on, what they should need to learn. And I try to steer a path for people who want to become IT professionals and really take that to the next level and want to see what technologies and content they want to become it professionals and really take that to the next level and want to want to see

what technologies and content they want to focus on so that's the main purpose or the main reason why i do this channel another thing you're saying about another thing with the the core structure you normally see in a lot of uh like the it sort of courses while you can teach like the the fundamentals that don't really change too much the specific technologies because of how fast moving the tech industry is are going to change very quickly while there will be things like docker that probably will stick around for quite a while there's going to be other tools here and there which may may just become completely irrelevant within two or so years oh yeah that's true and i think that really changed

the last 10 or 15 years extremely because um if you go back in times of probably when i started my at career there were of course also training courses around youtube was also around but that was not really used for educational it content at this time and the only chance you had was like get IT certifications, usually in networking, Cisco CCNA, for example. And yeah, you need to go through these IT training courses, you sit there and watch a PowerPoint presentation for like five, six hours, a few days or so. And then you try to remember what was teached in this. And you somehow try to apply this in your day-to-day work. And I think this is really hard. And especially with the latest changes and the fast-evolving technologies and tools we currently have, I think that's just not enough to educate people.

Sometimes people just need an inspiration of, well, here's a tool you can use for this purpose. For example, let me show you how this works. And you just do a 15-minute video hands-on. I think these hands-on or project-related courses are really important because people probably can see, okay, these tools or technologies are important, but they don't know how to use them. And it's not really helping you to sit there and go through a five or six hour training course because that's a lot of time that can be wasted or spent on other projects or things as well. And sometimes it's enough to just show people how this stuff works.

So I really like to do these hands-on tutorials and sit down and share my screen and say, okay, here's a tool like Vagrant that can automate provisioning of virtual machines on your workstation. So here's how you do that. So create a configuration file, let's run the code and see how that works. And sometimes that's just enough to get people started. And because in the end, you also need to do your own research and trial and error and testing, because that's how you learn how to use that tool really and that's

what i try to focus on i think that's really important these days and yeah i try to be part of that um and try to help and educate people as much as i can and also i'm i'm learning a lot from these researches and tutorials as well because there's a lot of stuff that i never covered for example kubernetes or container orchestration. That's something I want to get started with, but it's literally hard for me to do this. And one thing that I realized when stepping into this topic was like, okay, there are a lot of getting started tutorials on the internet. So here's a tool how you can install Kubernetes. And this is also pretty complex, right? It's horrible to install this. I mean, you can easily do this And this is also pretty complex, right? It's horrible to install

this. I mean, you can easily do this on a small test machine. There are some commands, three, five, four commands you can execute, and then you have a small Kubernetes machine running. But how can you really use that in the real world? How can you build a project with two machines or with three machines? How are you going to deploy this? And then it gets really, really hard to find good tutorials that teach you this hands-on project stuff. And that's what I want to make. This is what I want to create because I think there's something that or a gap that needs to be filled by someone.

Yeah, no, I entirely get that. That's sort of the same gap that i was trying to fill with um with what i'm doing because while there's a lot of people who do not obviously to the same sort of extent where it's like building projects but when with a lot of these various linux applications out there's a lot of people who just do these very high level approaches or very high level looks at it and sort of assumed that the people who are actually Watching those videos already know everything about like okay Here's how you actually configure here or where the config files are located

Here's all this stuff that's sort of fundamental to how it actually works a lot of the other content That was out there when I first started making the channel Just didn't really cover that there was a couple of little channels but none of the none of the big ones did at all now a lot of the big ones don't even really do the the same sort of content anymore they've sort of gone their own direction so now i've opened up the niche to myself um but i i think that actually does really help a lot of people the other thing is with the researching um actually helping you out a lot and that's something i've found a lot as well where i even if i did sort of need to know

about something like this it's a lot harder to sort of justify that time expenditure when i'm just learning it and i might need it in the future when i'm sort of learning it because okay i want to educate other people and i want to make this video and it sort of gives me a reason to actually push myself to go and actually work on that thing right now rather than just delaying it till later basically yeah that's true i mean i also have like um a study or learning plan created for myself but i'm kind of lazy so i mainly just focus on stuff that i need for the next one or two days yeah yeah that's how it is right and having a real video schedule that helps me because i know i need to focus on this video for the next two or three weeks sometimes i i work on a video like three weeks with all the researching

stuff because there's a lot of stuff that i need to look at and i want to make it right or three weeks sometimes i i work on a video like three weeks with all the researching stuff because there's a lot of stuff that i need to look at and i want to make it right and yeah that's that's really helping me to keep focused as well so you're asking about um my schedule before uh the way that i've got it structured right now is i do six videos a week and then a live stream that's just for the main. We ignore the fact that I do a bunch of other stuff on my second and third channel as well. Because the gaming channel is basically I want to get drunk on the weekend and play video games,

so I don't exactly consider that work. And then the podcast is kind of work, really. Not really, though. I just sit here for two hours talking to someone. I guess it's work i have to put some effort into coming up with some topics and arranging guests but really the the main meat of the channel or the main meat of my content is actually planning out the videos for the main channel and sort of even the recording doesn't take that long i i'm sort of a i'm kind of a perfectionist with it i know that

at some point i sort of have to make the video so even if the recording is kind of decent i'll still probably re-record it because it's not as good as i want it to be i will realize like a month later it was awful anyway but that sort of comes with actually like growing and getting better at making content i want it to be good yeah when i upload something i want it to be something that is good today i'm i'm fully aware that it won't be good tomorrow so i'm not going to worry about whether it's good tomorrow if it's good now it's good now and that's that's sort of what i want so yeah i've considered dropping to like five videos a week and then maybe taking a day off. But I don't know.

Maybe I'll try that out going through this year. Or maybe I'll just add another live stream or something. I don't know. I like the content every single day structure I've got going on right now. And I'm not at all running out of content. And there's nothing in my life that's really stopping me from doing this much work anyway. So I don't know i'll probably keep up with it as it goes i'm not exactly working much during my day job anyway

it's just enough there to pay my extra bills yeah that's fine i think everybody needs to find his own schedule that fits perfectly and i think you cannot just say well this works for this person this schedule works for another person that's completely depending on on the type of person you are and also on the content so for example if i would want to make daily videos that wouldn't work with uh with the schedule because i spend too much time on on production uh editing and all this stuff and that's that would be nearly impossible to do daily content because i would need to somehow reduce the quality of my videos and i think i mean i i don't know how you're doing this because you're making so great videos every

single day i don't know how how you can do this for me it definitely doesn't work because i tried to do a second video at um at a week and this put it puts me under so much stress that i couldn't make this video at all and i was completely stressed that weeks and i thought no i need to reduce it back to one video per week because i really want to focus on it and i'm doing a lot of editing maybe that's just my personal preference because i like you do much more editing than i do that does definitely take much and your videos in some cases are way longer yeah that's true i i found out my last videos were very very short and i thought well this is probably something yeah and i just wanted to experiment with that, but I recognized that's not going so well. So I need to increase the duration of the videos again and need to put in more effort into the next videos.

I kind of realized that. I just wanted to experiment which content I can make, but I found out that people are really rewarding that, But I found out that people are really rewarding that or these longer tutorials, these really deep dive hands on project content tutorials. And I think, well, I just need to put more effort into the next videos and more time. I really and I really focused too much on things like going to change a font, going to change a transition and all this stuff. And you can get really distracted by this stuff. And I think that's a bad habit you can get as a content creator that you're focusing probably on stuff that is nearly unimportant to the viewer.

I mean, the viewer will notice the difference for sure. So when you do a lot of editing, you do a lot of professional editing, the viewer will notice the difference for sure. So when you do a lot of editing, you do a lot of professional editing, the viewer will see a difference. But that's not as important as the content. The content is really the most important part. And I think if people can get value out of a video, they will watch it.

And that value can be different depending on the type of audience you have. And that's something that I probably struggled a bit the last time, finding out what my audience really wants to watch. And yeah, so that's what I need to get better at. But I think I got an idea. I have a plan for my next videos. They will be a bit more complex, a bit more researching and hands-on stuff.

And yeah, I hope that that's working better then but yeah it's it's kind of hard uh to keep up with that and finding your your balance finding your schedule that works for you i think the thing when it comes to editing is very much it's a it's an optimization. So while you could probably spend like a entire week editing a single video, at some point, are you really adding anything of value to it? For example, like I think most of what you get, most of what you would get from your video could probably be achieved by having

your intro there, having the little animated thing at the start, making like any cuts you have are cut really cleanly and that's most of what people are going to notice there might be little other things like maybe you have some like on-screen images that show up while you're talking things like that which could enhance the video to an extent but the vast majority of what's going to come from that are the very, very obvious things to get added. Yeah, that's true.

And I kind of realized that when I watched back at my earliest videos, because the best performing video on my channel is I think the second video also, and that the quality is really, really bad. And the way how I speak, how I present it is completely different from what I do now, but it's still the best performing video. So there's a reason behind it. And I think this video is a very special one because it teaches you how to set up a mail server on Linux. And this is kind of a very complex topic. So I guess a lot of discussions with people about this last live streams. If you really want to set up a mail server yourself and really want to maintain that.

And to be honest, I also switched my self-hosted mail server solution to a software as a service one. Because it's just too much work for maintenance. But I think if you're just starting, you probably don't want to afford or just want anybody else to host your mails. You can definitely use that solution. It's fairly easy to set up. And I think that video brought a lot of value to people

as they were searching for a very complex solution. And they found a very easy one they can just apply on their servers. And I think this is why this video performed very well. So it was a topic, but it also was like, it was a complex project. And I think that's what I want to focus on more in the future so showing complex or problems or projects like setting up a server or i also have other topics in mind like how to back up a server or how to protect the server they can really get like 30 minutes long or so these videos yeah we'll step into something you could take you can make like

an entire just tutorial series just on one of those topics yeah absolutely at some point you you somehow need to simplify it a little bit but that's that's a that's a hard part to find out which things you can simplify and which you should take a little bit more time to get into things and but yeah that's what i try to figure out for the next videos that's that's my plan yeah i want to start doing some um less bigger videos it's more like i want to take on bigger topics this video so for example i want to eventually look at something like bsd and i will look at emacs and these if i'm gonna do videos on topics like that i'm gonna have to put like a good amount of effort to actually have a proper understanding of i don't

want to just be like hey here's a very introductory video to emacs i might do like a like a first impressions video that's that's a video that has value in and of itself see what it's like for someone who's just a completely new user who has no idea what they're doing with it would actually experience but if I want to do like proper in-depth videos on it, that's sort of an application or the operating system

in the case of BSD that you have to put a lot of effort into and I just haven't just found the time to sit down and properly do that yet um but that's something i would absolutely love to do yeah i think there's a lot of value and potential in this because you just mentioned like you could do a video that just introduces a beginner to emacs or so or just um do a comparison video or just a first impression video of a Linux distro

But I think that's what everybody's doing That's especially what bigger youtubers are doing and I think especially for smaller channels because I would consider our channel still as smaller compared to the majority of bigger Linux youtubers, for example, I Think we have a very hard time doing videos on these topics. And I think this is really dangerous because you see that on bigger channels and see, oh, they are always doing those distro reviews.

They are always doing those beginner tutorials on how to install Emacs and how to exit Vim or so, right? I should do like a YouTube short on how to install Emacs and how to exit Vim or so, right? I should do like a YouTube short on how to install Vim. You could do this, right? Pac-Man-S is Vim. End the video. Actually, I want to get into shorts in just a bit, actually. Yeah, let's talk about this as well.

But I just want to finish this part, and then we probably can talk about this. Yeah, so you could do videos about this like the bigger channels do because you also see, oh, they are successful with this kind of content. So I try to make the same kind of videos because I also want to be successful. But then you have like you're not diversifying enough from these bigger channels and you've got a problem especially as a small channel because you usually are worse in production value in making videos because you have less

experience than these bigger youtubers because there's a reason why they are big because they are just good right that's just the truth you just need to accept this i think and um then you have a very hard time competing with them so i i found you're always doing better with videos that have more value or that can add something on top of these videos. And as you said, like to really deep dive into something like Emacs or explaining, right, you probably need to do a lot of researching before you are at this point to make a really good video. But then you have a video that is providing more value than all these other videos. And that's performing then better, I guess. And I think that's the only way how you can differentiate

from bigger channels or how you can get competitive, that you add something on top of this. Or you make content in a in a different way how the bigger channels are doing this right so oh yeah and you wanted to talk about shorts yeah i haven't really experimented with them much in a while just because i'm the same reason why you know i don't have like a tiktok it's because i'm i don't have ideas that fit into a minute um i i have some ideas recently i want to try out like one of them um i want to sort of mock the idea of a distro review uh basically because every distro review basically sounds like the same thing they'll talk about the default applications installed how great the wallpaper

looks and i'll just this is an idea i got from hex dsl but he didn't i i gave him time to make the video he didn't make it so now it's my idea i'm gonna basically show pictures of different distros for every single thing i i show and just pretend like it's the same thing ah that's nice that's something you probably can easily uh make in a short form tutorial or a short form video. I kind of experimented with that myself. And the one short video I did wasn't performing bad. So it was okay.

Surprisingly, it got a little bit of more traction the last weeks, even though it was like a few months old. I don't know why. The YouTube algorithm is sometimes strange i would say but it but it can happen and i also started to do some other short form content on other platforms like instagram and tiktok because i i just wanted to see what's going on on these platforms i i i really was never interested in these platforms i i really was never interested in these platforms before i i started a youtube channel at all because i i yeah social media that's something i i probably have completely missed the last years and now i i start looking at it i i think whoa that's really great you can

you can do a lot of things there so tikt is a very special platform. Yeah. So I think TikTok has a very bad image and that, that for a reason, I mean, if you install this and look the first videos and watch, uh, watch that, you probably will see, oh man, there's so much garbage stuff there. Why should I continue watching this? Uh, right. That's kind of really strange. Uh, but then I did a little research. I tried to search for specific hashtags, for example, DevOps, Linux, coding, something like this, and you really find good content, good videos. And that's really interesting, because you can put a lot of stuff into a 60 second video. And then TikTok starts suggesting me other videos like this. And find okay this platform is interesting because it

shows me some interesting videos okay there's still a lot of garbage but you can just scroll right you can swipe it up and then the next video starts and you can find some really interesting videos there and i started to do some tiktok videos myself of course they are not performing very well but you're not doing really dumb dances yeah but i think i mean i said this on a live stream before i said like well i see there is a problem in educational it content because i i think people don't have the time to sit on a four six hour training course they probably have time to watch a 15 30 minute video but sometimes you just need to inspire people just sometimes you need to have an idea that you can easily spread out to people and say hey here's a cool tool you might take a look at this and that's

just enough to get people started so why not make a short video of showing a simple trick or a simple tool or just doing a very simple thing that just inspires people to take a look at this and get deeper into this topic and i said like well these platforms like tiktok they have a good potential of doing this because they have a great platform to spread out content like this the problem is the bad image and the other content they have but you can either complain about this being a bad platform or you can do the second and do your best to to make this a better place and create educational valuable content yourself right and try to make it better and

that's what i want to do i just don't want to complain about something i want to do something against it yeah one of the things tiktok is really good at is recommending stuff that will make you keep watching videos because that's their entire business model so if you're not watching the if you're not watching the cringy meme videos and you're watching nothing but coding videos they will keep giving you coding videos even if there's not many on the platform they will give you every single one of them they can possibly find and that's actually yeah that i don't know i i i've considered trying it out once again it's like with the short thing if i start doing short i'll probably put them on instagram and tiktok anyway because there's no harm in doing it like it it's basically the same um the same format of content so i see like where does it perform better or anything like that

because i don't have any following on tiktok no account at all and instagram i think there's like 80 people following me i don't really same for me man oh yeah it's the same for me i mean but the strange thing about tiktok for example is i just started to do a few videos like seven eight videos and i started with zero followers and now i got 36 or so in just a week i mean that's literally nothing for social media platform but just for a start it shows me that there are people liking and watching this or following this even if they are just like those videos get like 160 views that's that's that's nothing right on tiktok for 36 followers that doesn't make any sense because that tech looks a weird platform like that yeah but yeah

but it's interesting like if you get a video or you make one video with 160 views and you got, like, 11 and 20 likes out of these views and, like, 5 or 6 followers, that's a good performance for this video, I would say. Because on YouTube, if you compare it to YouTube, it's, yeah, how many views, likes. But it's, like, 6, 10% or so. I don't really know how much i think you're right about that there's like a there's definitely people on those platforms because most people have more than one interest um oh yeah and there's there seems like there may be

some sort of like desire for extra content on there outside of you know just the dancing videos and just the the comedy videos. Maybe I'll try it out. Maybe I'll just try to spitball and see what Linux stuff maybe works over there. I don't know. It could go well. Completely flop. I don't know.

I mean, you can experiment. I think my idea is to just start experimenting this and I see two potentials there. The first potential is I think that's a really new platform so it is not really saturated as much and i think there is there is an audience that wants to watch this content because i've seen tech youtubers or tech content on tiktok people with even 100k followers on tikt educational IT videos on YouTube. So I think there is an audience. You just need to make and provide value for that audience and take your advantage. And I think that's a fairly new platform. So of course, you're not going to

convince somebody to switch over from YouTube to TikTok. That's nothing you should do. But the other way around would probably work. So you can just find new people on TikTok, probably younger people. But younger people also want to get started in IT. They are getting older, they want to get a job and so on. So there may be a potential audience for that you can then transfer. So I always do videos like, well, here's a tool like Vagrant, you can automate your virtual machines. Here's how it looks like. Just one, two commands. If you want to learn more, just watch my YouTube video, right?

That's how I'm planning this. But if it doesn't work at all, maybe I'm wrong about TikTok. Maybe this is just garbage content, right? Dancing videos and so on. Maybe, I don't know. But even if this is the case, I can take these short videos and maybe just upload them to YouTube once YouTube finalizes their viewing experience for shorts. Because I think currently, this is just an experiment of YouTube.

They're experimenting how they can compete with Instagram, TikTok, and yeah, mainly those two platforms. Because they see, okay, there's a lot of potential there. mainly those two platforms because they see okay there's a lot of potential there you can also see that a lot of things change on these social media platforms like twitter for example is getting kind of monetization or membership program the next is actually also testing a like a twitter stories thing as well yeah you can you can upload fleets uh already so that's a story on twitter um and you see all all social media platforms are growing and experimenting with this right i think youtube has created a very good system for long form videos and monetization and live streams but they want to experiment with other form content as well with

the short form content and therefore they try to find out what people are watching how they are watching it and i think they will finalize it in this year and maybe bring out a new feature i don't know i don't have any insights it's just an assumption but that would be the natural progress i would think right because they experiment a lot before they um change something on the platform so i think there's a lot of stuff that will come on YouTube as well. But yeah, I kind of like the idea to somehow be on multiple platforms, because if something happens, right, we don't know what will happen. You still have an audience somewhere and you still can connect to your audience i mean all i think at some point all platforms will have

some opportunity or some potential for for delivering those watching experience like short form long form and live streams i think that will be the three key things that you should somehow deliver stuff to and which platform that will be that's up to you i mean on tiktok you can also do live streams i didn't know that that's kind of interesting yeah the experience is completely garbage because they are not um suggesting you good live streams they are just suggesting you live streams within your region and country that's something that i don't like about tiktok and i have a very big problem because i'm from Germany and I'm making English videos. When I upload a video to TikTok that's still just delivered to German people

because of the region where I upload this video. I found or I did some research because you probably can use a VPN. Yeah I was gonna say. To fake your country. I tried that, but that didn't work. And I think that's because I also read some information of people like it sometimes works, sometimes not. Sometimes depending on the country where you created the account, I don't like this. I think TikTok needs to really be better with this because obviously with my content that's not ideal, right? I make English videos that's been delivered to German people. I don't know. I mean in tech there are a lot of German people who watch my videos in English as well, but probably not the majority. So I don't know how this will work, but yeah.

In tech knowing English is sort of a fairly common thing. will work but yeah in tech knowing english is sort of a fairly common thing um oh yeah that's true i mean so that's probably not um it's not the worst situation you could be in yeah that's right but it's not ideal because i i decided to make english content because i thought that would be a bigger audience and i could spread my content to more people. And that's true. If I watch the YouTube statistics, I see people are watching my content from all over the world. So that's, that works out very well. And yeah, for TikTok that doesn't seem to work. That's bizarre. I didn't know TikTok was set up like that. Yeah, it's crazy. Right. I mean, but I think it's still a fairly new platform. And I think this is kind of a very special case that I do. And hopefully they are improving that at some point. I don't know. I heard about there is a special time. So when your video gets a potential of virality, like this video is really, really good good performing in your region that's tested in other

regions as well but if but that video i think you really need to have like 100k views or or likes on that video until this happens so i'm probably not going to hit that threshold with my videos actually but i still think i mean tiktok is an experiment. If this doesn't work, I can take the content and distribute it to YouTube Shorts. Maybe if they, I would really like to see YouTube doing something like Instagram, because Instagram is really differentiating their reels from their Instagram TV and stories. So they have a clear separation between that. And I think this is something youtube definitely needs to do especially for live streams because i absolutely hate when i do

shorts or live streams they're always showing up in the feed of your videos yeah and people are not going to find the the videos anymore because this is full of live streams and in short videos especially if you're just doing one video per week like i do so well it's actually kind of worse if i'm doing because if i upload a short it's going to take the spot of the video i uploaded that day so if someone didn't get the first recommendation they'll now get recommended a short and they won't see the original video i put out at least with you you can sort of like you can like move them throughout the week so you just you don't upload a short the same day that you upload a video in my case though that can't really

be done but i i agree they shouldn't all just be smashed into one box together that doesn't make any sense the problem is the problem is um especially how short videos work on other platforms i think that's going to be the same on youtube as well because if you make a tiktok video or well i i watched a few recommendation videos are i usually just go to youtube watch a few of those how to grow on instagram how to grow on tiktok videos right watch two or three of them and i kind of okay then i i unsubscribe them again because i got my value but it's like everybody who's making these videos is recommending like you should do one story per day you should do one video per day or maybe on tiktok even like the best is to put out three four videos per day this is horrible i

mean how could you do this but then so i think short form content is really really fast um and it's it's much faster than making long form videos obviously so if i would want to make short videos on youtube my my full feed would be filled up with shorts and not with the real videos and that would be really really bad so i'm not going to upload all short videos to youtube that i creating on on tiktok so i may from time to time upload one or two i don't know it's like i'm kind of experimenting god three videos a day i think that explains why there's no creativity on tiktok how do you probably be creative when you make three videos a day that's let's just assume you never take a day off 21 videos a week it's crazy i mean probably you can create those videos in advance that's how people do it

you gotta be doing the dancing videos they have to be like directly on trend right now. Yeah. Yeah. I don't really know how this is working, but maybe this is just an advice for bigger channels. I don't really know. My, my funny, the funniest thing I always find is whenever there's a channel on YouTube about how to grow a YouTube channel that only has like 10 K subs,

it's like, should I be taking your advice? Yeah, that's funny i think sometimes you can get value out of this because maybe those those people have like a social media company doing this for other channels or for that case a bit different yeah great that may be but yeah i think to be honest i don't like most of this content at all because they are just giving the same advices. It's like you can literally watch two or three videos. And the other stuff, I think you need to make your own experience anyway. Because I think especially some of the tips are very depending on the type of content you make.

And I think especially for tech channels, tech content, we have a very special audience. We have a very special form and type of content. Some advices may not work for our channels. So I think there are some things you can get out of these videos, like how to edit a video, how to set up your lighting camera, and all this stuff obviously but most of the advices i i watched is like yeah find your niche

yeah find your topic and all this stuff um be yourself thumbnail title make sure you be yourself that's very important oh yeah whatever that means right yeah i mean that is like an advice you you can um i i watch a german streamer um who is on twitch and he makes also videos about how to how to become a streamer how to grow on twitch and so on and he he said like um being yourself can really be a bad advice to somebody oh you know because i'm gonna give i'm gonna give anyone who wants to start a channel right now don't be yourself because you're boring you gotta actually you have to sort of like i don't i i know that i'm like fairly high energy in a lot of my videos and i'm talking like i'm trying to present stuff to you i

don't actually talk like this in the real world because that would be really really annoying stuff to you i don't actually talk like this in the real world because that would be really really annoying um yeah don't be yourself because you probably have no idea how to speak on camera you have to sort of yeah that doesn't mean like be a fake person or anything like that but you have to sort of make some adjustments to the way you speak and the way you actually uh the way you talk the way you speak and where you talk about those are the exact same thing the way you speak and the way you present um to actually make it so you can get your point across especially in like a concise way because i i find that in real life i'm very bad at getting straight to the point of what i'm trying to say and that doesn't exactly work if you're trying to do fairly concise videos

um so no don't don't be yourself bad idea anyway back to this german streamer who also says don't be yourself yeah maybe i like yeah but that is yeah that is exactly what he said right big that's exactly what he said it's like he he says like you probably need to be the best version of yourself exactly that is that is something that that is a real advice like you of course you don't want to be a fake person for example something that people start doing they see all those bigger youtubers or streamers and they are really extrovert people like hey here here is how to set up linux and you try to communicate like that actually i've seen tech channels doing this kind of videos right at least i just want to

see someone like sitting at the terminal like running ssh and just be like wow yes go completely enraging like that's the idea for sure i like that well we can clip it and upload it to tiktok that probably would work yeah but that is really that that wouldn't work i mean people are recognizing that this is not you right but you need to try to improve of course a few things right if i mean before being on youtube i never had any experience with being on camera. I never liked this. I'm a very introvert guy, right? And surprisingly, a lot of YouTubers are. That's kind of funny, right?

I hear that from a lot of people on YouTube or on social media as well. That's because they find it easy to talk when there's no one else around. Like I can talk for hours to a camera. That's fine. Put me in front of a group of people. I don't know

what to do oh yeah same for me and that's that's really interesting but yeah of course you need to practice this and you need to somehow watch your own videos and try to improve but yeah that is yeah that actually i don't know that's a really big one for a lot of people um actually go back and look at your videos not not just when you edit it like you don't have to go back and watch the entire thing but go back to like an older video and just see what you were doing there like because i've had some pretty bad habits with like waving my arms around way too much i still do have like a naturally arm wavy way of talking but i've seen some old videos where like every time i would start a sentence i

was doing this i'm like what what are you doing stop that that's dumb um yeah and i have to like catch myself when i'm doing that like obviously like it still does help to sort of emphasize a point but there's a there's a point where it sort of becomes really annoying when you're doing that yeah things like that i have the same by the. And I recognized it when I watched some of my videos and I thought, well, it's really distracting. What the hell am I doing there? Try to reduce it at the next video. So you always should try to become better with your next video, obviously.

You probably won't because you also need to try new things and experiment, but you need to go back, review this and adjust things and then obviously you get better at some point i don't know what the quote is there's something about like a a one percent improvement every day compounds over a year i don't remember the exact quote but if you try to improve yourself a little bit every single day while the day-to-day improvement is going to be very very minor over, over a year, over two years, you'll see that you are basically not even the same person by the end of it. Oh, yeah.

And definitely, I mean, something like running a YouTube channel is a long-term project. I mean, that's also something that you will need to take in consideration every time you do stuff, yeah? Because you think, like, probably you do stuff yeah because you think like probably you are now engaged and you're exciting about a topic and you are you have like enough content to make for next weeks or months but that may not be the same for the next year or in two years so you all also should take care of this and i think especially if you're starting a YouTube channel, you really should ask yourself, does this make fun?

Do I want to make this in two years still? Because that's how it works. Because people are just or I also did the same mistake because I started the YouTube channel. I thought, OK, I'm doing this for half a year now. So now I should get some traction. This should work now. And I try to put all my energy and all my effort into making this stuff work and i then i realized okay if i continue to

do that i will burn out in like a few months so i need to settle down a bit and i need to think of the long-term goal and where i want to be with my channel in the next year or which content or topics i want to focus the next year on because it's a long run yeah and if you if you yeah if you overestimate yourself i mean i mean you you will burn out pretty fast it's it's really not not that easy so yeah you always need to think of this is a long-term project and yeah getting getting or being one percent better the next day that will help you exactly over the whole period of time you're doing this stuff yeah burnout is a problem i've definitely dealt with myself like even though i'm making i guess more videos than i was before i've now structured my schedule in a way that actually gives me days off

and even if you're making let's just say you make seven videos for just one let's just say every video or every day you upload one video it's a very different way a very different way to structure your week to bulk record a bunch of stuff at the start of the week edit it like get everything done by friday and then take then take the weekend off compared to record edit upload every single day i used to do the record edit upload every day and that felt so much more stressful because yeah you realize you never have time to just not make a video and that's that's one of the problems that a lot of people seem to make when they sort of start out they're just always thinking about youtube they're just no it's never taking a break from their channel i i had still sort of have a problem with it with like paying too much attention to my analytics but i still take those days where

i'm just like okay i am not going to make any videos today i'm not going to play any videos maybe i'll like talk to people in the community that is the extent of what i'm doing with youtube but nothing else i think that is really important so probably an advice i can give uh that worked out pretty well for me is always seeing this like a job because it is the job and and probably you are starting with a um goal that you want to make this a living at some point here maybe after three or four years of being a youtuber something like a goal you can set yourself or right um and i think i i always started to see this as a job. So I'm working on YouTube from Monday until Friday, and Saturday, Sunday is for family time.

And I don't really work on videos. Of course, I think about this. I think I have ideas in the shower about a new video or something like this. And then after finishing, you need to go and write down this idea somewhere. So that's important. You probably can't stop really thinking about it, but that's okay, I think.

That's not the issue. The issue is to become stressed by that. And I think one idea or one thing that I do that always helped me is to kind of implement a workflow. That's something that I actually also do at work, right? I have some programs or tools that I use to do that. I just recently switched to Office 365 products.

I know that's probably not what you want to hear, but that's how I usually do that at work. It's fine. Use whatever you want. It doesn't bother me in the end. Yeah, yeah. It's on my computer. I know, man.

I know, man. But that's how I do this. I have the Microsoft Planner application. This is kind of a Kanban style of working this. So setting up my videos, setting up the schedule and also planning time schedules a day. So every Monday I have a triage where I usually go through all the ideas and try to organize them and prioritize what video will come out the next two or three weeks and so on. And then I usually have some

time slots where I work on videos on thumbnails editing so i really kind of try to structuralize this as much as i can because then i can see okay this probably was a bit too much last week so i need to adjust this and take a little bit of time away from this step and and then you can easily find your balance and and i think that's really important to structuralize your your workflow and your day because uh if you're just working on a video that's especially with everything that you are self-responsible for that's really dangerous because um if you're working

at a nine to five uh job right um you can you're working like eight hours a day and then you're finished. You can go home and not think about this anymore. But if you're self-responsible, so you're making a YouTube channel, you can work 24 seven on this if you want. For the record, it's 7 p.m. right now. I started like nine.

And now here comes the dangerous part it's going to help you because or effort you put into something you can make a new video that's bringing your viewers that's generating more subscribers so it's going to help you so you try to put as much effort into this as you can and this is the really dangerous part because people burn out i think because there is no limitation there's no no limitation that's coming from outside you need to find your own limits and your own limitation so that's and that's probably the the tricky part i just recently had someone on my live stream or also um a a bigger a smaller medium youtuber i would say bigger than you are bigger than i am but but not really big as the the really big youtubers and he said like he he was really worried about uh answering comments and like he said oh he got a new

comment on this video i need to answer this immediately. And I thought, I never had a problem with this myself. I don't know why. But probably I said, maybe it is because I worked in IT support. I don't know. I usually deal a lot with queries coming in. But I usually don't answer a comment right away, immediately. I answer it one or two days after.

Because I think it's like, people shouldn't expect an immediate answer from me. Because that's a bad habit. But you can also train people to expect this the next time they comment. So that can also hurt you then, if you get bigger, right? In the beginning, you probably can answer all comments immediately. But then people are going to expect that every time, right? So I knew this. So I started, okay, I'm not going to train people that are answered immediately, but I will answer every comment just one day after or so. And that's really helping because then you can implement a schedule like every day at 9am.m or so you can read all

your comments and comment back that's fine so yeah you really need to find your own way of how to deal with this stuff and for for some people it's harder to do this other people are struggling with a complete different thing it's yeah it's really depending but it's it's important that you need to find solutions or workflows or somehow a schedule to do that. So that's my experience. I just answer all my comments on the toilet. Yeah, sometimes I also do this.

I mean, it's like if I have time to fill in something, I do that. Sometimes I read my statistics on my phone. Maybe even after lunch or so yeah why not if i have time i can do that but you just need to be careful that you don't do this too often and i i think you also said you you were looking at your analytics too much in yeah yeah i had this problem myself so i i I didn't have a problem with answering comments or scheduling or work flowing, but with analytics. So that was my bad habit, right? Because I looked at analytics every day multiple times. And there's a new like, I need to watch the analytics and

compare it. It doesn't help you at all because it's just, you think it does. You're just like, I'm going to, yeah, you think it does, but it doesn't help you. I mean,

the statistics are only relevant if you look after, after a longer period of time at this and see the average of, of watch time and so on. And you really should find a good tool that helps you with this. I can definitely say that because I played around with different tools and I just found one that really helps me to do more content, find a good title

and thumbnail and do some analytics on my channel. That's really helping you. You need to find some ways how to track this somehow yourself. Now I'm not looking at analytics every day anymore because I think that doesn't give me anything. But I still look at it.

So at least once a week, I look at this. I'm still in the stage of multiple times a day. Yeah. With the, I was saying before about how it's 7 p.m. here and I started at 9am. The way, like, that might sound bad. It's not actually. I sort of take the, you know, the way that like a doctor would work or someone in the mines would work.

We do a couple of really long shifts. So I typically do like Monday to Wednesday. I like, basically I work all day. And then Thursday friday are like light days so it might sound really bad but it's it's not as bad as it sounds that's interesting i never tried this so i like to have a schedule from monday to friday uh i usually work eight hours a day and then i i spent like one or two hours on my channel and that works for me I think the thing that sort of got me into working like this is coming out of

university where you would have classes from 9 a.m to whatever like 5 6 p.m and then in the middle of it I'd probably be working on assignments anyway so the past four years have sort of been doing this anyway oh yeah yeah then it's it's probably natural uh workflow you already implemented i mean i i never was a university or so so i don't know how that how that will work but i i have cut out basically like weekends pretty much all i do is i might do a game stream like i don't do anything else related to the channel then ah oh i really would love to do a game stream myself as well but i kind of find i i don't have time to do that that's why it's like exactly that's that's the big approach yeah i kind of i'm i would be frustrated if this gaming channel goes nowhere so i would really like to see the same progression like on my tech channel and then i i cannot split myself to

different areas so that was it was a hard decision i i made because i i i would love to do game or gaming on on twitch or on youtube as well but i i can thought well you want to be successful on youtube or um that you need to make a decision you you just can focus on one thing and yeah then if you only have so much time in the day then you sort of have to put your effort where do you think it's going to make the most sense that that's right yeah but i would really sometimes i i do like uh to to go live on twitch and play some games but just for one or two hours in a month or so so not really much so that's that's working that's good um's see. What else do we have on here? I am really shiny. Wow. That's bad.

It's not that warm today. So I don't know why I'm this shiny. But I'm also not softening my lights. That's something I should do. Actually, you know what? We're going to bore all of the people. Let's talk about cameras and stuff. Yeah, sure.

Whatever you want to talk about so so we'll say now i don't think it was in the actual the main recording i think it was just in the sound check um the the capture card you're using because your camera looks oh yeah considerably better than mine um i for anyone who doesn't know at this point, I've made it fairly obvious. I'm running this beautiful thing. This very cheap HDMI video capture stick that I paid $10 for on eBay. I've got two of them. They work. They capture video.

Not well, as we can see, as having these two next to each other. I don't know how well it comes off, actually, because obviously YouTube video is going to be compressed as well um but your video is considerably less grainy than mine i have a feeling that this thing might be compressing the video and that's sort of introducing some extra artifacts into it yeah yeah so i have seen some YouTube comparison videos about those capture cards. And I thought, okay, there are those USB sticks. But I really prefer to have something built into my PC. So I don't like another device that's lying around somewhere or a stick that is not really stable or something like this. I want to have a real card that's built into my PC.

And therefore, I bought this, what did they say, this Ava Media Live Gamer HD 2 or so. So that's working very well. Yeah, it's crazy. I don't know how they came up with this. But it's working very well because I i wanted first i wanted to get in elgado a capture card there because they are state of the art in streaming capturing whatever but i thought well they are pretty expensive so i tried to search for something like that that's still a

good quality but it's not so expensive And I watched a comparison video that compared the Elgato Captra card with the Ava Media. And they were saying like they probably even have kind of the same hardware specs. So you don't see a difference between those cards. And then I thought, okay, then I take the cheaper one if it's a good quality um because i i thought investing into the youtube channel is a good idea at as this at the right point i i need to say and so i started with um like 100 200 investment started because that's something i also don't like most people are saying you you don't need to invest any money into a youtube channel that's not true you need to have

at least something that you sure should invest in right a lot of people invest at the wrong point and invest in the wrong things yeah like yeah and that is true that you need to be careful about if you're just going to be using a webcam as a camera, use your phone. It will look better. I guarantee it. You could use things like DroidCam and actually directly plug it into your system.

It will be recognized as a webcam, and it will look better than any webcam you possibly have out there. Please don't use a laptop webcam. I've done it before. It's a bad idea. It looks horrible. Especially don't use a laptop webcam. I've done it before. It's a bad idea. It looks horrible. Especially don't use a laptop microphone. Much worse idea.

The webcam, you can tolerate, but the microphone, not so much. Exactly. And if you're going to be buying stuff, do your research. Yeah, that's true. So that is exactly what I did. So I think the most important thing on YouTube is the microphone.

So that's the first thing you should invest in. And I think this is also the first thing that people need to invest because usually you don't have a good quality microphone. So that doesn't mean you need to buy a microphone like this one here or the thing that you got is also i think a really good microphone i don't really know what that is fairly entry-level um uh xr microphone it's an akg p120 i think it's like 150 australian um and then the mixer board is 300300. And then the cable is $20. So you don't need to spend that much money.

Yeah. You don't need to start with that. So what I got is the Elgato Wave 1. And that's really a good choice for entry level. But I wouldn't say you need to start with this. I also got another microphone for like $40. And the quality was amazing. So that really is, it was really good. And I did a research on some YouTube channels,

watched some videos of audio experts who did a comparison video about cheap microphones. And they really recommended this one. I bought it and it was awesome. It was a huge difference between my my headset and this microphone this is the first investment you should do because the microphone is the most important part yes you can always ignore the like you don't need to have a face cam while the face cam is nice yeah you can you can have anything else there yeah i mean you can even start with no camera when you do tutorial videos like

just do a monitor share screen that's what i did so my first videos i i didn't show on camera my first videos um at some point you probably want to show on camera because i think that's really um doing a lot of uh people can connect with you and you can really build a better relationship with your audience and so on. So a camera is at this point important, but probably, yeah, as you said, you should invest at the right point. So for starting, I would say just get a good microphone. You can use your phone as your camera. That is what I did. And my phone even had a better resolution than my

camera now has because my phone had 4k this was really good and um the the main reason i i mean that's that's not a secret yeah that you can research that on youtube fairly easy but the main reason why a camera looks bad is the lighting so so you get good lights um it doesn't need to be an elgato uh expensive light right you can also get a cheap one you can even sometimes use um use a desk a lamp also if you just play around with how you position sometimes the positioning of the lighting is much more important. Yeah, how you position that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, so you can definitely start with that.

That's going to work. You just need to experiment a bit how you position the lights. And then you can get really good image. You can get good audio. And that's all you need to start. Because your first videos will suck anyway. If you don't have any experience at all. If you are looking for cheap lights, though,

I'm not going to say this is like a be-all and end-all, but for anyone who is curious, these are the newer 176s, and this stand I have. Okay, here's the thing. Buying expensive light stands when you're just starting out is you're just getting scammed don't do it bad idea uh this is yeah fifteen dollars it holds the light and it doesn't fall over that's i think all you really need from a light stand yeah you can get like fancy ones you

can move around and stuff but if you're just doing like seated stuff like this you you don't need it you don't you really don't um you can start with that i think there is a point there is a point where you um get bigger so your first probably should see that your content is working the way how you present the content how you're making the content is working and you see a little bit of traction you see people are following you people are subscribing you they are commenting your videos liking your videos then probably just continue doing what you do until you hit that 1k threshold i would say like then then you can apply for the youtube app program and when you first get a paycheck you you probably can think about how you invest this money

and then you can think of okay so what is the most important part that's a microphone so you're going to invest into that first then the light then the camera and then other stuff like maybe um so so an investment i really don't regret is getting some templates and images and stock videos, stock photos for stuff. And that's also sometimes important, always depending on the content you do. But I really like to have overlays and some things that really make your videos look a bit better You can invest into that or making thumbnails invest into a graphic software if you want to do that I mean there there are free open source software is also available that are pretty good. I do everything in game. It's just a pain Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's probably I I don't like

The workflow of game because I just started with Photoshop and then I took a look at GIMP. Yeah, and if you get used to a program, it's like, it completely depends. So which software works best for you, just use it. But I, for example, I to use adobe software like photoshop and i just recently also got premiere pro for editing and i just can say premiere pro made so many things easier for me because i had a kind of a low budget editing software before that's working yeah if you don't know how to use that editing software you can use any any cheap software that's working but especially if you have background music so i have a lot of background

music in my videos because i just like that um i enjoy the the flow and i kind of like to do this audio ducking so when i'm speaking the music is it's not too loud But when I play the intro, the music should become louder. So in my low-budget software, of course, I needed to adjust the audio levels every time. On Premiere Pro, there's an automatic feature that does everything for you, right? That is with Audition. I watched a YouTube video about editing,

and they kind of recommended this. So there are a few buttons you can click in Premiere Pro and it's automatically ducking and adjusting all the audio levels to whatever you need. So if your microphone is too loud or not loud enough, Premiere Pro can automatically do this for you and all this stuff like color grading. And there's a lot of things like transitions and things that are so much easier for me right now. So that's really helping me and helping me to edit the videos. But yeah, you need to find the right point. So I saw that.

So when I hit the 1k subs, I thought about, okay, this is working, right? This is a proof that it works somehow. And I thought, okay, so then I need to take this and I need to somehow invest a little bit of money and probably making these videos better. So that's what I did. And I think this is not a bad idea. If you get something back, you can always take that money or even then you can probably also take a little bit more and invest in advance if you see it's working, if you have a plan. But it's like it always should fit your audience. It also always should fit the size of the channel, because if you are a small YouTuber,

a small channel, people are probably not expecting you to have that real big and fancy equipment but at some point people will right so i think especially when i will hit the 10k that probably should happen in i think you've already like outpaced most 10k channels with what you've got going on right now i have yeah i see that in the statistics um i don't know why no i mean like in um in your production quality like i obviously haven't seen your statistics but like production quality wise yeah even it's some channels even in in growth i see that in the statistic because i sometimes compare it because i want to i'm researching a lot of other channels and see, OK, how many subs do they get in a month? And sometimes I even see 10K channels that gain less subscribers than I do.

So I'm getting more subscribers per month. But it's like at some point, people are expecting this production value. And I think that's because youtube is around for such a long time it's really saturated a lot of people are producing really good quality videos and that's what people are going to expect and i think like i i still think i'm i'm not really good at this i don't know why you say i'm outpacing most channels i don't know quality wise like you're definitely beating me with the way your setup looks right now but that's also partially because i'm running a $10 capture stick um but as i said it's not the most important part right i mean yeah of course it doesn't make

your content better so it's like you still need to do good content. But I think I always thought about this because when I, for example, I watch YouTube videos a lot. I'm expecting a good camera. I'm expecting a good microphone. Because if I watch a video and somebody doesn't have a good microphone, I close this video immediately. And I thought, okay, if I'm doing this, other people are doing this as well. So that's why I thought I need to take care of this and this should be really good so i try to make it as good as i can and yeah but that that's i think people are really expecting this from from youtube content nowadays yeah that's um I've noticed there's definitely a lot of people

in the Linux world who don't really care about production quality. Wisely, there's a few of them, but it seems to very much be few and far between. And let's have a look at your channel over on Social Blade. Jesus,

that is going well right now. You're actually getting more subs than i am a month but you're also in a much bigger niche than i am so that does sort of help as well but wow your views and stuff are actually going up really quickly yeah i think i'm not very satisfied with the last uh I did, but I think I definitely saw a difference since I implemented the new workflow for SEO and how I'm planning videos with some researching and analysis and also thumbnails that are changed.

So I definitely see there is something changed. And I think last time when i was here we talked also about thumbnails yes and i definitely changed a lot since then yeah i experimented a lot the thing that i i think last time i said something like, I wasn't really sure with how should I present myself? Should I put my face on these thumbnails or not? And my idea really finalized, I think, because I thought like,

if I put my face on a video, it should have some impression or it should do something. It shouldn't be just a face because that's, that's telling nothing, nothing right it's probably presenting yourself but that doesn't add any value it doesn't create an emotion it doesn't create any expectation or something like this so it always should generate an expectation um and i think you also you're doing very well with your thumbnails because you're experimenting a lot with how you present yourself with some, I think you're doing some memes or some.

Yeah, I'm sort of trying out the like more meme-y thumbnails now. Not going as far as some other people, but. I think that works very, very well for your stuff and for the channel. I think people are liking this. Here's one. And that's, yeah. Yeah, that is cool, yeah. You're very creative.

You're probably more creative than I am. This just happens when I get very sleepy. I'm like, when I'm wide awake, I have like part of my brain it's like no that's really dumb when i get sleepy i'm like no that that don't ignore that part of your brain just keep doing dumb things and that's where the weirdest come from yeah but this is also the reason why i said at the beginning your channel is both educational and entertainment this entertainment part comes exactly from these things and that's what people are liking i think you you probably have a lot of people in your audience watching your youtube channel and watching this every day and hey what is this new thumbnail going to look like i definitely do

people that have been mentioning that uh yeah and you you can see there's definitely a lot of value in producing this because i think that's a the most important part because you're exactly delivering what those people want to see and that's that's how you can how you can satisfy your audience that's very important on youtube and i think i i kind of try to do the same with my thumbnails as trying to give an impression or an expectation of easy tutorials, for example. There's something that I like to do because people are liking those tutorials. And yeah, I thought I also have another idea or had other ideas for thumbnails.

That's yeah, I'm not going to tease it because they're going out in the next weeks or so. But you will definitely see what I try to achieve with the thumbnails because I want to have like a consistent way of designing them. But they shouldn't look all the same. Yeah. Right. And I mean, you have a template, right? a consistent way of designing them but they shouldn't look all the same yeah right and i mean you have a template right yeah that's one of my problems a lot of my thumbnails do end up while i am doing different things in all of them i feel like a lot of them do end up looking very similar maybe that's right because i make so many of them but i i don't know if this is necessarily a bad thing i mean it also could be

an advantage i don't really know how people would react if you change them a little bit that is probably the thing that i would say well it's worth experimenting maybe just change one thumbnail completely and see how people are reacting to that. If they say, oh, I liked your other thumbnails more, then you can switch it back. That's not a problem. But I kind of like to try out new things. That's what I do. I don't want to say you should do it.

I mean, you probably know better than I do. I try stuff out as well. I tend to do it at a much slower pace than you do, where you will just completely uproot your existing thumbnail style and go with something completely different. That is me, yeah. You went from... Okay, I'm just going to show them on the screen right now.

You can take a look, yeah. It's crazy. I also didn't change a single thumbnail afterwards, so I just leave them like they are. So we have the ones with the blue background. Then after that... It's the with the blue background, then after that It's the first one. Then after that you just had basically making the exact same face in every single thumbnail and maybe pointing at something sometimes. Then we went to the other the colored

border ones. I actually did like those ones, those actually were pretty cool. Yeah. And now it's the very uh the very poppy blue and i do like the blue and purple so that that is one thing you do have going for you where you actually do have like a consistent color scheme so even though you don't really have a template it still sort of i guess fits in with the general theme of your channel yeah i think that is very important because that is how i want to look my background so you have the colors in the background as well and i thought well if people are watching a video so let's let's do an experiment you you're making a very professional thumbnail like most tutorial videos do on youtube like you have these um Sometimes I do tutorials about Docker

or whatever. Professional software IT business is used for example. I do a tutorial video. We have these professional thumbnails that look like a presentation. If I make the same thumbnail like a presentation professional look,

the people are clicking on this video and see this. A gaming background background they see what what is that there is there's a difference in what people are expecting and getting and i thought my thumb is should always um provide the same expectation that the video is going to be right so i don't want to be the professional it guy who is wearing a suit or and presenting something right that's not who i am now i am this guy right now right with sometimes i play computer games i i like this rgb background wearing hoodies and this stuff right and i'm doing it stuff that's what i who i am and I want to represent this in the

thumbnails as well. And this is what I tried. Having a consistent color scheme and giving the people what they what they expect when they click on this video. I don't know if this is a good idea. As always, it may change in two months. My thumbnails are looking completely different. I don't know. Because I really I get very fast excited about something but um i also get bored of something very fast so that may change right i'm i'm always changing and that's just who i am so but i i think i i'm i like the idea i like the way how the thumbnails look like and i think i'm finalizing my design, especially also with my logo and new changes of backgrounds and graphics, because I like that.

I'm also a creative person, right? I like to do things in Photoshop and I'm probably not good at this, but I like to become better. So I like to always try to improve there so that's why I made those thumbnails or how I came up with this idea to change the thumbnails again but I think now I have a very good consistent way of creating these and I just want to get better with this I haven't had a uh I've had a couple of people recently be like what's up with the colored backgrounds i it's a very simple answer i think it looks cool that's the only reason there's no deep meaning behind it looks cool look if i if i turn these lights off you have a bed behind me like you at least have some cool things going on there because you have like a

yeah yeah you need that that's a bed You at least have some cool things going on there. Cause you have like a, yeah. Yeah. You need to make the best of it. That's a bed. But yeah, I mean, that's, that's, uh, that all fits in together somehow.

I mean, it always should fit with the content you're doing, the person who, who you are. And I think that's working well. That's why people liking you I just recently had a discussion with someone reviewing a bigger tech channel it's also a German tech channel and he said like well these guys are doing great content out there but I don't like these guys

they're pretty arrogant so I think you could do it better and I thought like I watched these videos and I thought oh man they have so high production value. They have so good videos. They're very professional. Over 50K subs. But this guy still likes the way how I present it more. That's not because my videos look better. Because they just don't look better.

They are just worse. Like you say, you can have bad behind you. But that doesn't make a difference because people like you because of your personality. And if it fits all in together and people are getting the feeling, that relationship, I think that's so much more important than having a good audio setup, having a good camera, production value, whatever. And it always should fit, right? This is probably the thing that is the most important.

I think that's part of the reason why I put so much effort into community interaction. I know there's a lot of people out there who run Discord servers who are just never in their Discord and people who just never interact in their comment section but i i that's not the sort of person i am i like i've just been using youtube normally for the past like what 10 15 years like that's i i enjoy talking to people online that's just that's just what i do so sort of yeah i guess putting that energy out there i think does really help sort of drive that similar vibe with the channel

and i've noticed that there's a lot of people when you do put out as like a a certain type of energy a lot of the people who end up getting like attracted to the content you make end up being very similar sort of people obviously there's other people as well but the ones who are usually the most like active in the community are those ones who at least in some respects have like a similar sort of worldview you do yeah that that's true i i can agree with that definitely i see the same in my community as well. As you said, yeah, community interaction is very important. I also, I'm showing on my Discord often, I'm very active there. I answer questions on my Discord as well or just having a discussion with the guys because I think that's really important and I

just enjoy this, right? It's not like I'm making this because it helps my channel grow because this is just because i enjoy talking to people and i think that's really important people are going to notice it and that's that personal relationship i that's also the reason why i enjoy doing live streams because i think live streams really give the people something back because you can provide um a value you can do some entertaining stuff or educational stuff on the live streams but also have that interaction the direct interaction with the community you usually don't have when you're making videos so i think that's really important discord and live streams um yeah that that's i think the nice thing about a live stream is it's a bit more

a bit more down to earth because i don't know about you but I don't plan out My live streams because that's way too much effort I have topics And maybe some talking points if things get very stale But I don't plan out like two hours That's insane Some people do that I don't know how they do it That's mental

It's really weird So they're scripting while structuring the live streams? They're structuring and they'll have like They'll make it more like a tv show sort of format i don't understand okay yeah um but i i don't know if i could do this because it's just too much time and effort i tried to structurize the live streams the first time and i thought well oh man this is just too much work so i'm and then i did something very crazy because i i didn't select a topic i didn't select anything i just did like okay here's a q and a just talk about random it stuff and i i went live yeah those and then i've done a couple of

fun yeah they're fun they work very well because people Because if you have an audience and you get at least like 10, 15 viewers, people are going to write something in the chat. You can react to that and you have that natural progression, that natural flow in a live stream that works very well. But that's something I struggled on Twitch, especially because when you have less than 10 viewers, that's hard to do. But if you have like 10, 15 viewers, you can definitely do this

because people are going and chatting with you about things and you can just react and just talk about this specific topic. That worked very, very well. And this also makes the most fun, I think. Because sometimes people come up with very funny and crazy ideas

and you want to step into this then. What I was saying was that one of the nice things about a live stream, because as I was saying, I don't plan it, is that you get a bit more like a down-to-earth way of how the person actually really acts. Because sure, you can come off as like a likable person during a video, yeah sure you can come off as like a a likable person during a video but obviously i don't act entirely like i do in a video all the time and i don't know exactly what i'm going to say all the time and it's it's a bit more a bit more like uh an actual conversation

you're having with your audience rather than just i'm explaining this topic to them um and i i do really enjoy that. And then you get extra things. Like once you've been live streamed for a while, then your audience starts to know a bit about you. For example, like I'm learning Japanese right now. And there are people in my comment section who will frequently try to troll me and get me to read things out

because they know I'm not very good at it. And I'll catch them like halfway through it. Like, no, I'm not saying that. It's not happening, mate. Don't try that again yeah that's funny but yeah fun things like that happening which just couldn't really happen in just a regular video yeah that's true absolutely so i i i'm also liking these uh live streams and what would you say but you are still a youtuber or a streamer oh i i stream three times a week at most so i i guess if i didn't make any videos that would technically be enough to be a streamer but i don't i don't know i i think my main focus is still doing the

the regular videos i don't know if i'd call myself a youtuber because i don't really like being tied to the specific platform um because i think my channel is actually bigger over on odyssey anyway but oh yeah that's interesting yeah it's it's for me it's completely the other way around well i was also one of them probably sorry just oh sorry i was saying that um i also joined like basically just before it took off. So I sort of rode the wave up. Yeah, that's probably the thing that is hard, especially when you're starting on Odyssey or Library.

Because that was the first thing I or the the first complaint I always have about library, Odyssey, whatever you call it, that there is like zero organic growth on this platform. It's better than it was before, but it still needs a lot of work. It's not as bad as Twitch. Twitch is much worse where it orders by number of viewers. Yeah, that's true. That's true then that's that's true yeah so it's better than twitch but compared to a platform like youtube yeah or or tiktok even crazy yeah exactly and that's just because of the algorithm for sure

i mean that's true uh so odyssey has this support um thing right if you're supporting a channel that's that's pushing the video up but i think with this system it's nearly impossible for new guys that are not part of a community to show up in the in the feed and so that's not really rewarding new creators and i think this is something they need to fix i'm saying this for since the last year probably since i started with this platform because i i had no community and then i started to um yeah show in in what was it library nomics community also german library community but they're not very active there because i i i see my channel is actually growing more on YouTube. So I probably focus there more. I like the idea of Odyssey and library.

And I think like where I started before Odyssey was released. Yeah. So Odyssey is basically just like another interface for library. Yeah, exactly. I think Odyssey made things a lot better. So that's really good improvement overall. But I think it's still lacking some very important features of other social media platforms so i know they are working on this and i kind of like this but i think i i don't really know maybe i don't that the problem i

have is really because they don't have an algorithm and this support system, this is really the part that I completely don't like. Because it's really hard for new people to get up to speed to get watched in the feed. And it's really, I don't even understand how the system works. Yeah, because if I make videos on Library Odyssey I was gonna say

they've made it a bit more transparent now. It's just that we still do have the exact same problem where the support system is broken it's just like now you actually know how much your support is actually affecting a video which is definitely an improvement okay yeah that is good yeah because i think that transparency is very important if you have this open open platform yeah uh because it was already a thing that i criticized because it's like it's not really easy to get started with that odyssey brought a lot of improvements to that obviously but yeah i still think it's it's hard for new people to get started with that i even

don't know how it works uh to create videos that are showing off in the in the categories on the left side because when i i upload a video or I make a video on the left side and I click on tag, none of my videos is showing up there. No, there are no video. And I don't know why, right? And I also think, for me personally, it's not really a platform that I enjoy watching because I click on these

categories like tech and there's content all over the place but it is not really a clear structure there's not really a clear topic that i'm interested in right and i cannot even show it to the platform somehow right like we discussed about tiktok and youtube when you're watching a few videos the algorithm is going to recognize what you like to watch and they are recommending the right videos this is not happening on odyssey and this is for me personally yeah a bit like i need to scroll through pages and pages to find videos that i enjoy watching so i can better it sort of feels more like the like early days of youtube where there was technically a recommended but it's more like we'll recommend like what was uploaded recently

or anything like that or we'll recommend based on our regex of the name um and that's sort of what it feels like to be on uh what it feels like to be on odyssey right now i i definitely understand those complaints i've had a lot lot of similar ones to those as well, but I don't know what's really going to be done in the algorithm front because there is a lot of people who use the platform specifically for the reason that it doesn't do that. Yeah, exactly.

That is also a thing that I wanted to mention. And I think they already have a really I found something like I don't really how can I say this it's actually easy to talk about this but I would say they really need to be very very careful to find the right balance between decentralized and centralized content. And I think they already have done a lot of, how can I say this? I'm searching for the right words. Compromise between decentralized and centralized content. Because, of course, they want to offer some features that people are going to expect from a platform like this. Like a like, a dislike button, a comment section,

and all this stuff. But most of this stuff is running, I think, on their centralized servers because they need to offer these features, right? So they really need to be careful what they centralized and what they not centralized because most of the people who are watching or using this platform are using this platform for the reason that it's decentralized. And it also gives the people the wrong impression if you create a platform that says we are a decentralized platform. But like 80, 90% is centralized. It wouldn't make any sense at all.

So I think with an algorithm, they would need to store the data somewhere of the people. What they watched, how long they watched, what they enjoy watching. And as you said, most people are using Odyssey or Library for the reason that they don't do this. So it's really hard to find a good compromise between making this platform enjoyable to watch, but still respect the people's privacy. So I think this is really a hard challenge i i don't i don't even think that they are that they can find the perfect solution because there probably is no perfect solution to this so i i don't know well where this platform will go so that that's

really but it's interesting to to see what will happen the next years so the way they're sort of approaching it right now is that odyssey is where they're doing a lot more of the centralized stuff and then library is more decentralized that's at least the direction they're going right now so that's why we have things like the categories on odyssey that's why we have things like other a bunch of they're actually working on transcoding for odyssey as, which is something that really needs to be introduced very soon. Livestreaming is also being worked on, things like that. Oh, yeah.

I would really like to contribute or do some livestreams on Odyssey just to try it out and see how it works. And I think it would be nice if they would implement something like a switch so make this a user choice so the user can select hey i i want to store my data on this platform because i want to get recommended videos so like an opt-in so that people already have a system like that but obviously they're not doing for an algorithm right now but they already do have a thing where you can opt in to share data to like improve the platform things like that so it would just be based on extra box yeah if that would be like an opt-in for an algorithm i probably would

use it so i would opt in because i i don't i think that they can have the data videos that i watch so i i don't care about a platform having this data. I really like the benefit of the recommended feed, right? So that would be a feature that I would really like to see. And then I probably would use the platform more than I do right now. And I think having this in opt-in would probably be the perfect solution because then it's easy and transparent for everybody but yeah i don't know i'm not part of yeah uh steam or so but i think they are probably working on this or kind of um analyzing these ideas because it's they are they're improving

pretty well and pretty fast so they are introducing new features pretty fast. If I compare this to other platforms or even companies I work on when they are introducing new features, this can take years and years. Usually if YouTube implements something like YouTube Shorts, this is not like a YouTube engineer thought, oh, we could maybe try this. And then the next week it gets uploaded, right? This is usually a progress that takes months and years sometimes to finalize and go through this development process and business decisions.

And I think Odyssey Library is evolving pretty fast. So they are, that's probably the advantage they have that they are not really a billion dollars company with a lot of hierarchy structure. So they are, I think they are still developers and and doing these things so that that's a good good idea and yeah i hope this platform will be improved um and i i would really love to see live streaming so that would be really really interesting well i need to get um like i i do know the one of the main devs

from library and also i'm uh follow i'm being followed by the ceo of library as well i should get them both on the podcast i think that would be a lot of fun because i know awesome i know jeremy is very very happy to go on podcast so I have a feeling he'll be more than happy to come on mine. But yeah, I have a lot of the same sort of concerns about the way it's going. But yeah, I think we're still waiting for the roadmap for 2021, which is a bit late this year. Usually it's out by the end of the first quarter.

I don't know what the deal with that one is. But there were some pretty big improvements to the platform last year. Looking back, I kind of forget how much has changed, but at the start of last year, we didn't have comment. We didn't have Odyssey. That didn't exist at all. We didn't have likes. We didn't even really have video't exist at all we didn't have likes we didn't even

really have video embedding that barely worked there was a bunch of these basic features that just weren't there also the platform was so much smaller I think at this time last year my channel had maybe 2,000 subscribers and I think the biggest channel on the platform maybe had like 10 or 15. Oh, that's crazy. Yeah. So there's already a lot of improvement. You just need to compare this to bigger content platforms.

For example, compared to Twitch. That's crazy. Twitch takes like one year to implement a simple checkbox button. Twitch still doesn't have basic things to do with like copyright. And there's just. Yeah. It's crazy,

but I, I kind of, I kind of understand the problem or I see this problem at other companies as well. Sometimes I don't know if, if you know what I'm working, but my main job is being a technical account manager in a cyber security company so I'm working with enterprise businesses a lot I'm somewhat involved in the development

process because they are integrating our security products within their own services and I sometimes see that in bigger companies as well the problem with like creating a new features or that that usually takes a long time and i kind of understand this because sometimes it's depending on different teams they are all all over the world and some stakeholders are probably just they don't care about this it's always the same problems especially in big enterprise companies you see that a lot and i kind of can understand um the situation twitch is in because i see that from other companies as well most people just think they hey why do they take so long to implement a simple checkbox button i can do this in five minutes right the problem i have

with twitch with um especially with the dmca thing is they knew this was coming that the other problems sure i can understand that but the dmca problem that was inexcusable because they've known this was coming for the past five years since youtube last got hit with it and they didn't do anything to help people out it's just like well delete your clips it's fine yeah i think it's just an assumption as i said i don't have any insights but my assumption is that this is always a business and a money decision. They say, okay, it would cost so much dollars

to implement a new feature. And if you watch some of the Twitch streams, their CEO was like, we don't like automating stuff. We all want to make it by real person. There was a quote somewhere uh somewhere there was one problem that um that really should have been dealt with with twitch though that actually is inexcusable um that deleted videos were still being stored on a public aws server so even if you deleted all your clips anyway it didn't matter yeah that's funny right i mean there of course there

are a lot of problems that's that's um people are seeing this and i i think the main problem probably with the dmca was like this is just my assumption but probably they were aware of it that it would be an issue at some time but they were saying like well it costs us so much money to implement this and we uh we don't have the budget yeah they're also owned by amazon and amazon isn't exactly seen which is much of a money maker no of course not they are just very small right and then and you have a company that that makes like i don't really know how much revenue they make but maybe a few percentage of revenue of amazon and they they just they want to have a few billion million dollars for implementing a dmca feature which is not really a problem at this point and amazon is

going to say do we really need this and yeah they probably were aware of this but they say okay we probably can deal with that if it becomes a problem and maybe even paying something back is not as much money as or trouble as implementing something. There's always, you need to compare this. And I think in those companies, those decisions are made by those people who were just trying to figure out which is the cheapest way of doing this. Probably they can get away with this or they can say like, okay, well, we already have bought a third party application solution that does something like a Content ID system.

Probably it's not great, but we can somehow argue that it's working or whatever. I don't really know the decisions behind that. But I think if you've gone back to the topic with Library and Odyssey, if you compare this, like how long a company like Twitch take to implement something compared to Library and Odyssey, I think Library and Odyssey is still in very good shape evolving. So that was my whole point to this, right? Yeah, that makes sense. That was a very long tangent to get to that point

yeah yeah exactly but it's it's interesting uh to think about what could go on behind the scenes right even if you probably don't have any insights but you can make an assumption and yeah i we will never know who made this decision or if this is true or not but it's funny to think about it i i would say i don't know i don't know how much you've sort of experimented with this but i'm right now kind of completely shifting my schedule because i've i've found that if i the way i've been doing stuff up until this point was recording videos at the start of the week planning stuff towards the end and then you then going to the weekend after that. I found that when I plan most of my videos towards the end of the week,

I end up, because I don't really have much else to do, the time it takes sort of expands into as much space as available. So I'm sort of shifting around my schedule right now. How much have you sort of played around with that? Or do you want to get yourself into like a schedule, you know, works and then just kind of stick with that? Yeah, that's a good question because I'm, I'm always adjusting that. So the, um, it's based on the day where I published the content that it's different

for you because you're publishing every day but i'm publishing the video on monday and so that means i need to finish this video on friday right because on the weekend i don't want to work sure so i could do but i don't want so that's like i need to finish it till friday so i usually just start making the video but i also produce videos in advance so sometimes i think of like i want to take one week off making videos so i'm going to produce just two videos in a week and so i can so i mean kind of always adjusting this based on stuff that i need to do at work for example if i have a stressed week and i need to jump on a lot of meetings also. I'm not really researching too much for video also. I just, yeah, I'm doing or producing videos in advance,

like two weeks, that works very well. Because then I feel comfortable with just skipping one week of producing videos and I'm still in schedule. So that's how it works for me. And yeah, that's what I try. But I don't have like fixed days in the week where I produce videos. Ah, okay.

That's always adjusted. The problem I have is, and I recently adjusted this a lot in my workflow, is that the problem I have is I can get very excited about something, but really fast bored about something as well. get very excited about something but really fast bored about something as well so um and i i just heard an advice from um somebody on a youtube channel who's doing these business videos and how to manage your time and all this stuff right and he said like there are different types of

people so there are three different types one the one type is you can sit for eight hours and focus on a very specific topic. And for these people, it works out very well to have a long scheduled workflow, like really focused sessions. But there are also other people who are just like me, who can get very excited and very bored pretty fast. And it just doesn't work to focus on a topic for more than one hour or two hours maybe and since i realized that it took me years to realize it because i always thought there's something wrong with me that i can can sit on a task for a longer time and focus on a on a topic i thought it something is wrong with me right but then i heard this advice and it's just like people are different right and then i thought okay i probably need to break it up into smaller sections so i plan my day like i have one hour i do research on a video then i do something

completely different yeah sometimes i um i did then i work on a on a complete different topic then i'm designing a thumbnail for one hour and then i go back to video editing or so i i always switch around because that is the only thing that that keeps me motivated and keeps me focused on something and that would drive me insane i i'm the sort of person like some days i like i i'll like forget to eat lunch like oh wait it's two o'clock now i should go do that um because i'm i'm very much the sort of person who i'm like okay i have for example i when i record videos i record four videos in a row um i just do it in a block like that yeah that. Probably, I don't know, but you said you were in university.

That's probably, isn't that the same system? Like you're really focused for hours and hours on a single topic? Well, you usually obviously have different classes, but whenever I do assignments, i'm the sort of person like if i'm like say for example i have uh maybe an essay due and a i don't know programming assignment i will in some cases just work on one of the assignments until it is done and that's i don't i don't feel like i'm if i do something for like an hour block i feel like i'm not getting anything done on anything because it always feels like for me like the that extra minute of setup time is something i could have been spending on just like an extra minute in my eight hour block of

even though like i i get the benefit of breaking it up into chunks because even with like doing these massive blocks you will hit a point where you sort of i guess end up wasting more time but i don't know i i that's something i do need to work on actually keeping myself on task i've tried doing things here and there it's just i sort of give up with the things i'm trying very quickly um but i i tend to find that if i can stay on focus or stay on task and not let myself get distracted by something that's usually the times that i end up getting just the most work done like with my my thumbnails for example like i make all of my thumbnails usually in a day so i will take all of the pictures. I will edit all of them. That's what six or seven thumbnails just done in a row.

I usually don't get them all done, but I try to work on nothing but that one task until I think usually the point when I end up swapping something is I find that like when I have to eat something, that's like a good time to reset. It's like, okay, I do something from say like breakfast to lunch and

then lunch to you i sometimes it may i make it to dinner but maybe i'll have like a walk i'll go for a walk in the middle of it and that's usually a a good point to break off as well but the hour chunks just i i doesn't make any sense to me but hey if it's working for you that's awesome but i couldn't do it yeah that yeah that's very depending on on the type of person you are and that's very interesting because um first when i i was in school it was a really big problem for me to focus on things because our system is not made for people like me or for this type of working or focusing, right? And that's a big problem.

Usually, you have problems in school or so or focus on a thing for longer than one or two hours. But when I realized, okay, I can make use of this way, I just need to change the way how I work. Yeah, that really made a big improvement. And I'm also happier with this, right? Because otherwise it's frustrating to work, like, say, two or three hours and you can't focus.

You're always getting distracted by something. And you think, like, I don't want to do this. But I should focus on this because I've set the schedule. So because I read something on social media or on forums that is, hey, this is how you should organize your time. Right. There are a lot of different systems how you could do this. But it's like I don't like getting a general advice because I think you need to find the system that works for you and that fits to your personality

and your personal way of focus and engagement. And that's different for people. And that's really interesting. So it works very well with the schedule for me. But yeah, it may not work for you or for any other people. That's fine. The thing that I found is that when I... Because I record those four videos in a row.

A lot of days I will wake up and I'm like, I don't want to record any videos today. But what I've found is that if I do it for five or ten minutes, then I'm usually ready to just keep working through the rest of it. Like it's usually that first bit of motivation at the start where it's kind of difficult to do. If you force yourself over that step, this is really true for anything else,

like going to the gym, anything like that. If you make yourself do it for a couple of minutes, you'll usually just push your, all the way through to the end of it. Yeah. Okay. I got got that and that's that's different for me because i i also have that so the first five ten minutes i need to force myself to do something and then it works for like an hour or two yeah but after two hours definitely i can say then then it's enough for me it's the same for uh computer games

surprisingly this changed because like I was 16, 20, I could play for eight, nine hours World of Warcraft. I can't do that anymore either. Yeah, me too. So that doesn't work. I can play computer games for one and a half hour, and then it's enough. I need to close the game because because it's i'm just i am finished it's really and that that

changed i i don't really know it's probably the age i'm getting older also or maybe this is something changed like how i can focus myself i don't really know but that's that's really different yeah i if i'm playing by myself i find I can maybe do two hours at most. It's a bit different with a stream because usually I have like, there's people chatting with me there. So it's not exactly like solid. I think I did the other day,

like a four hour game stream, but it wasn't exactly a solid four hours of gaming because halfway through it, like turns into like a half Q&A sort of thing. Oh, okay. While I am, the games there sort of like as background music or like distracting my hands but i'm not exactly paying full attention to it i'm also paying attention to chat as well yeah yeah that's true i i also tried that to do on twitch uh like a random game stream and that was also the case so I try to play Warcraft

free because that's a game I really enjoy but it's like when doing a stream you need to take care of the chat you need to take care of the game that's nothing that works it's a really stressful game yeah because it's an RTS game and then if you have a conversation ah that's not going to work so I'm definitely not a good game streamer that's no i think the sort of games that work on twitch are ones where you can actually take your focus away from it so right now i'm playing um doom 2016 and that not exactly a game where you can take your focus away from because you will die instantly um but i i sort of get why like minecraft streams work for example because minecraft is a game where you can turn your brain off.

You don't have to pay attention to much that's going on. That's interesting, yeah. I'm kind of having the same idea with Diablo 4 when it comes out. Or Diablo Immortal, even. I don't really know. But maybe this would be a time for me to just start expanding. Maybe not in the highest difficulty. That probably wouldn't go well for Diablo. No, at the highest difficulty but just go slay some monsters and

just brain off and having a discussion with the chat so that probably would work i don't know so i i'm waiting uh looking forward to this release so i hope but yeah it's blizzard so it will take a few years but yeah so i can prepare to become a professional streamer before i'm doing this get yourself to the point where you can actually like even if there is no chat just keep the the imaginary chat entertained i think that that actually is a problem that a lot of streamers do sort of have where they will start streaming before they make content like we sort of have a bit of an advantage there where we have an existing audience from our videos if you start with like a completely blank chat a lot of people don't really know what to do to

actually keep the stream entertaining because they'll see a lot of these big streamers who a lot of their content is very much generated from the chat being there so they're not really sure how to actually approach it without a chat yeah that's that's really difficult and i i don't know how you should do this the only idea i have is when i would do a game stream so i played through this because i really thought about making a game stream right and then i decided to not do it but my idea was like okay if i want to be competitive with other game streamers i don't have an audience who plays a specific game i don't have anything i need to start from zero well whether it's a game or any other kind of stream i think people still sort of suffer with the way they structure a stream

yeah that that's probably right i mean so there are i think the only way how you can do this is do something on top of the stream. So create something, do some videos. And it doesn't really matter if these are YouTube videos or TikTok videos. I think that I somehow heard from a lot of people that clips from a game don't work anymore because they are too saturated. So like just people had this idea and that probably worked like a few years ago, like doing streams and then clip some interesting sections and just do a video around this. I think that doesn't work anymore. So you need to do some on top of this.

And the best idea that i think would really work well is creating tutorial videos for a specific game you want to play and really focus on this on youtube like and it's like i heard that from some game streamers on on podcasts and so on that that worked like they pick a game that is not highly saturated but they's still an audience that plays it and just do a tutorial for example if this is an rpg there is a quest that you don't don't know where to go or something like this create a short youtube video this probably can just take a few like two or three minutes but you have some kind of content that is discoverable by somebody and you can also do something like hey i also do this game streaming.

People are watching this video saying, oh, this guy looks nice. I probably step into his livestream. And then it probably gets some traction. Because otherwise, if you have zero viewers on Twitch, it's really hard to grow. It didn't work for me. And probably because I didn't focus too much on it

and I was not streaming enough on Twitch, maybe this will be the reason and I probably would need to invest more time into this. But I decided to not do this because it doesn't make sense for me. But if you really would want to do this, I think you really need to commit these days to be competitive. I mean, if you just watch the statistics,

how many streamers on Twitch have more than like 40 or 50 viewers? I think if you're above 50 viewers consecutive, you're like a big streamer on Twitch. Yeah. And these are just like under 1% of

streamers. Just imagine this, right? It's crazy to stand out it's really difficult it's it's nearly impossible yeah and of course the problem with that is you only hear success stories from people like right if you're watching youtube videos about this you only hear from people that have done it right who are successful hey i made this made this. I blew up on YouTube, on Twitch. You only hear those success stories, but you don't hear all the people that fail, who failed, right? And that gives you the wrong impression, the wrong expectation that you could also do that

pretty easily because these guys have done it before, right? I mean, that's pretty dangerous. So I think it's really... It's not that easy. It's very difficult. Especially on Twitch. The way that I've seen a lot of streamers handling it now, rather than making separate content for their channel, what they'll basically do is just make their video live.

So people like Ludwig, for example, he's done a couple of poker streams and other things like that he he's a very variety stream who do like basically anything um he basically just makes a youtube video but live stream is making it so so structures the live stream in a way where that would actually function and then then obviously you'd have to cut out bits where it doesn't make sense for the YouTube video. And then at the end of it, you basically just have a YouTube video. Yeah, that probably could work. It also gives you like a constant, I guess,

moving topic of what the stream is rather than just being like, hey, I am a boring streamer. I'm going gonna play a video game and not say anything for 20 minutes that's right yeah probably can do this i saw that from other streamers as well they are clipping some interesting parts of their live streams and and uploading this to youtube so this probably would work if you have a specific topic and you are have very good and interesting parts in your live stream. I also did that for one. For example, with that tutorial idea you were saying, you could sort of make a tutorial

while you're actually like live streaming. Oh yeah, that would be really cool. That would be nice because it also gives somebody the idea how a live stream would look like. And then they want to see it. I did something similar for the IT trends video 2021. I did because I had three IT trends that I kind of wanted to

tell people that I see will become very important in IT industry and one section was a clip of a co-stream where I interviewed somebody who is a developer advocate and DevOps engineer and there I just said okay DevOps will be a big IT trend in 2021. We need to focus and learn this. And then I played some parts of that live stream because then I thought, okay, that would be interesting for people to see how those co-stream and live stream work. So they probably see that and, oh, maybe I could jump into the next live stream or so. That was my idea, right? And I think that would also work for other live streams as well,

like game streaming or whatever. One of the things I have noticed with the making videos live thing is when people sort of start to anticipate the video being made. So when, say, Ludwig, for example, does his intro for a YouTube video during the live stream, you see the chat just going absolutely insane. Like, how's it going everyone um oh yeah they know what's coming get the people who are watching the channel actually sort of involved in making the video as well yeah that's cool that's a nice idea i need to write this down because that's really cool because then then everybody knows, okay, he's now making a video.

And to be honest, I'm really looking forward to the new clipping feature YouTube will introduce. So I'm really waiting for this. Because this would be awesome. Do you know that? No. So I think, yeah, they have some kind of like a preview. So there's one specific video that has enabled clipping. So you can, and they will release it soon.

I had a chat with YouTube support about this because I thought, well, maybe they could enable this for my channel, but they didn't. So they're waiting for the public release, of course. But I thought, well, just try. And, but when it will be publicly released, I don't know when, but it should be pretty soon.

You can just go to YouTube video and clip it. And everybody can do that. Not just you as a creator. Everybody who is watching the video. Similar to what Twitch does then. Oh, yeah. It's similar to Twitch, but it's better because it's not lagging. So it's working pretty smooth and fast.

And I thought this will be a perfect feature for me and for my live streams because I do a lot of live streaming where i also talk about some interesting topics and i just want to have a feature that clips something and creates a video out of this so you can actually create this clip and share this clip and people can also then get the direct link to the video when they want to watch the full recording and when you unlist the video, I think the clip is also unlisted, so you can still access this link. So that's really cool. So I'm really waiting for this feature,

because that would give us more opportunities to make live streams more interesting and engaging. It's just like the YouTube Shorts. So you can see there are a lot of interesting features. to make live streams more interesting and engaging. It's just like the YouTube Shorts. So you can see there are a lot of interesting features. And yeah, I'm really waiting for this clipping feature. It will be really cool. I think you can even try it out.

So when you just Google for YouTube clipping feature, you probably can get to this preview video where you can try it out yourself. That's very interesting. Awesome. While YouTube does certainly have a much bigger audience than twitch does they have very much been lacking in like the the live stream features because twitch has like twitch bits and all of these other like that twitch raids and hosting and things like this which just don't really exist on youtube at this point they have

sort of caught up with like super chats and having like um customer motes but they're still very much behind where twitch is in like specifically just the live streaming sense um so adding things like that would actually be really really cool yeah and i think that is definitely coming because I think they see the potential in live streaming. And I also think that people will enjoy watching live streams more. That's a thing that will probably improve in the future. I think it's definitely worth looking at this. And I thought my idea was like, first first i probably go to twitch because they have

the better features yeah yeah that was the reason behind this but then i also thought about hmm it's hard to convince a tech or a youtube viewer who's interested in tech content to switch to a platform like twitch where there's a lot of gaming on. And every Twitch streamer is recommending this, like create YouTube videos and move them over to Twitch. And that's working for them because they're doing gaming, right? I mean, there's a natural flow that someone who's watching a gaming YouTube video is coming to a gaming streaming platform like Twitch. But for tech content, I think this is very different.

So it's really hard to convince somebody who's watching YouTube for tech tutorials, moving to a game streaming platform like Twitch. So I think this is a reason why it didn't work for me. And this is why I decided, okay, my audience is on YouTube. So I should also stream on YouTube, because on Twitch, I'm not able to reach my audience. And that decision was definitely a good decision, I think. And I see that YouTube is coming with a lot of interesting features. So I'm also working on a membership program on my YouTube channel. There you can create some cool emojis and loyalty badges. People can also see in the live stream and they can use the emojis in the live stream and in the comments so that's pretty cool and i see that that they are creating a good ecosystem for live

streaming content i think that's going to improve and twitch is i i think twitch is already there where they want to be i don't know if they are still growing i think they are still growing a bit but i see more potential in other platforms to grow uh than twitch so it probably for us as a tech streamer or tech youtuber i would definitely choose youtube over twitch as a streaming platform that's just my decision now i think it makes more sense the way i go I go about it is I restream, so I'm in both places anyway. Okay, yeah, that will work. But on Twitch, there's also the problem. If you're doing restreaming,

you can't become a Twitch affiliate. Oh, yeah, affiliate, yeah, sorry. Affiliate as well. Yeah, yeah. So that's a problem because I'm already a Twitch affiliate. Ah, okay. I can't do restreaming anymore.

I didn't know that before applying to this program but as twitch twitch doesn't have any discoverability at all i think there's really just a very small group of people that would discover you on twitch and then go over to youtube that's yeah not going to work well i think this is as good a time as any to end the podcast because it's what is it oh yeah you have a long time right i want to have some dinner oh yeah me too but it was a lot of fun so i really enjoy oh yeah i had a lot of fun as well so as with last time do you have a channel that you think deserves a bit of attention oh man i completely forgot about this give me one minute perfect that makes it better my uh my uh following channels and then i

will go over some so what are the channels that i i'm featuring i'm gonna oh yeah i don't have enough i don't actually plan my answer yeah so i definitely want to feature one channel on youtube um that deserves a bit more audience that is um michael levan and the channel is called... Oh, he changed his channel name from DevOps... Cloud Dev Engineering was his old channel, and he changed it to Michael Levan.

So you can find it with the username Cloud Dev Engineering. I put it in... I put it in the Discord chat. I have a good understanding of, a good idea of why he changed that name, because that is a very difficult name to search for. Yeah, exactly. Okay.

So this guy is really awesome. He makes a lot of great videos and tutorials around DevOps topics. Really advanced stuff. Last video was about machine learning in Microsoft Azure. He also does a lot of Kubernetes and Terraform videos. For anyone who wants to get started with DevOps, this is the guy you should be watching because he's really knowledgeable. He also creates a lot of courses on a platform.

And yeah, he's making great videos. Also, all project hands-on based, so you can really get an idea of what it looks like to develop stuff or deploy something on a cloud environment and do DevOps processes processes so that's really really awesome definitely he needs to hit the one case wound definitely so yeah that would be awesome oh yeah let's see i should have looked at mine before uh what was his uh give me a second i'll see if i can find it i can't remember what his actual youtube account is i can't remember what his twitter is though uh there it is yeah twitter

should also be in the about about section yeah in the about section there's a link to his twitter and he doesn't have a link to his main account oh does he have a link there we go there's a link to his Twitter And he doesn't have a link to his main account Oh does he have a link? There we go He has a link to his main account Oh god that was loud This is a channel here Called The Real Geek He does

You know general sort of Linuxy videos So he's got one in here called Is Windows really that slow and badly optimized? And it's a lot of the, a lot more of the, I guess, discussiony videos.

He's got one about like his favorite Windows releases. Should Linux be political? Is Linux difficult to learn? And he just does, rather than like what I do, where it's very much getting down and dirty with like the software, it's more like a lot more opinion sort of content oh yeah this guy is also awesome really nice yeah i think he hit 1k in the last weeks or so yeah he's he's also active on my discord community so this

guy's really awesome i I enjoy watching his channel. I tried to get in contact with him over email. He never responded. So I'm going to message him. I want to get him on the podcast. Or I could do that. Oh, that would be awesome. Because he's following me on Twitter.

So I'll DM him. Yeah, DM him. I'll ping him in Discord and say, you should jump on read your emails I'll send a message on Twitter, see if he responds and if not, I'll bother him in your Discord that'll work

nice cool that was a fun episode, yeah yeah, I enjoyed it, it was a lot of fun as well we had too many topics right it was all over the place i didn't hit on half the topics that i have i got so much more in here right now okay so there is an opportunity for next podcast with me absolutely maybe in uh no september or something that that would work out it was september last time september next time sure i hope i will be at 10k then i have something to tell well you're growing quite quickly so hey

i i my only goal right now is i hope to be at 15k by my birthday which is uh april 9th so that would be pretty cool but i think um yeah but yeah you definitely will make it right i'm on track right now i think it might be a couple days early awesome cool uh where can the people find you yeah obviously on youtube twitter instagram and tiktok so i don't know if you have... And is it all just the digital life? On Twitter, Instagram and TikTok, it is Christian underscore TDL. Okay, cool. I'll have links to all of that down below anyway.

So, yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. Before I go, before we go, I would like to thank my supporters. so a special thank you to Chris Yoakim Donald Michael

Andrew Nathan David Monaster Will Brennan Chico Bento Jamie Joseph Mitchell Peter Stephen Tony Tushar

and all of the $2 supporters if you'd like to go support my work there'll be some links down below to all of that sort of stuff

I've got this podcast being released on Library and Odyssey if you want to watch the video version. And if you want to watch the audio version, it's available basically anywhere.

If you can search the words tech over tea in a search engine, you'll probably find it. It's pretty easy to find. There is a blog called Tech Over Tea. They're not me. That's a different Tech Over Tea. Yeah, I think that's pretty much everything I've got a main channel, I do Linux-y stuff

and you probably know that because that's where most of my audience comes from, cool got anything else to say? not really thanks for inviting me no worries man thanks for watching everybody

thank you guys for watching i i enjoy this episode uh i i'll bring it back on the show again it'll be another fun episode great awesome thanks man talk to you guys later