The Startup Ideas Podcast - Growth Hacks to Building a YouTube Empire
Episode Date: May 11, 2023Today Greg is joined by Austin Lieberman, an investor and content creator. In this episode, Greg and Austin talk about how to optimize YouTube content for creators at every level and why you don't nee...d a massive audience to get the most upside. ►►Subscribe to Greg's weekly newsletter for insights on community,creators and commerce.You'll also find out when new and exclusiveepisodes come out from Where it Happens. And it's totally free.https://latecheckout.substack.comFIND ME ON SOCIAL:Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@gregisenbergLINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:Production Team:https://www.bigoceanpodcasting.comAustin Lieberman:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLIFOsNlHA7ZjTrJDb2WQcwhttps://twitter.com/LiebermanAustinSHOW NOTES:0:00 - Intro3:48 - Why you should care about YouTube growth15:42 - Figure out what works (and double-down)25:04 - Subscribers: Ask who not how many32:35 - Your videos are your product
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Austin Lieberman, everyone. Welcome to the show. Greg, how are you? Thanks for not blocking me when I replied to your post with your new YouTube video.
Okay, let's maybe start with that. So I've been working really hard on growing this YouTube channel as of the last few months.
And I'm on Twitter and I'm sort of tweeting about it. And then bam, you come in. What happened? Tell the story.
Yeah. So I've been a fan of yours for a lot.
long time and learned a lot from you. And I know you've done various different things that have been
like super successful. So I saw you share this YouTube video and I go and check out your YouTube
channel. And the first thing I see is the title is everything I learned this week. I was like,
okay. So the thing about YouTube is like I've been trying to learn it as well. And I think it's a
huge change for people that have very large Twitter accounts or like a very large account somewhere
else. YouTube is is so big and has so many people viewing it that 99% of people on that
platform have never heard of you and never heard of me especially. And so I think what a lot of people
do who have huge followings on other platforms is they kind of assume that like the audience on
YouTube is going to know them and have the same kind of like trust equity that you've built up
with your followers on Twitter over so long or in your email newsletter or whatever. And so I think a
mistake that I've made and that I sort of like alluded to in my reply to your tweet was it almost
felt like you were assuming that people that watched that video know you. And so I watched the first 30
seconds or minute of the video and I still had like no idea what the video was about and what
value I was going to get out of it. And while I know you and I know the value that you bring on a
regular basis, so I was willing to watch that because I've followed you on Twitter for a long time,
99% of people that watch that video and come across that video are not going to do that.
And so they're immediately going to flip away. And so that was kind of what I called out.
Like there's a few best practices, if you will, that I've learned. And the biggest one in this
is like a Mr. Beast thing, right?
Where it's like within the first 20 to 30 seconds, you have to get people's attention
and tell them what value they're going to get out of watching the video.
And so, yeah, I mean, that was the reply.
Okay, on that piece, we're recording on YouTube right now.
What value are people going to get by watching this video?
Yes, that's great.
So this should be like what this video starts with.
By watching this video, I think people who are maybe working a job and wanting to,
be a creator or make like monetize their brand online and learn how to transition from working a
full-time job working on their like creator passion part-time to actually turning that into a
business that's kind of what my journey has been like and I think they'll learn some actual
tactics and I'm happy to share the process that I've used over time to not make millions of
dollars from my own business right now I think that's possible in the future but to make like a
livable income. And if nothing else, then you make a nice side income while you're working a
full-time job. That's, I think, what like the most value I can bring to your, to your viewers and
your audience. Love that. And maybe let's start with YouTube. If you're trying to build an audience
on YouTube, how do you think about that? Yeah. I think like in my opinion, YouTube is the best place.
for people to start building an audience outside of also having an email newsletter
or a way that they can capture people's emails and information
and be able to contact them on a regular basis.
Why do I think YouTube is the best place to do that?
Because they've got a massive audience,
hundreds of millions of people, if not over a billion people on YouTube over the course
of a month and there's nothing stopping you from getting started. They have amazing analytics so
you can see the results of what you're doing. And it's automatic monetization. So once you reach the
YouTube partner program, which is, I think it's a thousand subscribers and 4,000 watch hours,
which feels like a lot, you automatically start getting paid for your videos. You don't have to have
any relationships with getting your own advertising or finding your own brands and sponsors,
you can do that in addition to the automatic ad sense that you get paid from YouTube.
And then in addition to that, every single video you can in the description and on your channel,
you can link to the digital product that you're selling, the course that you might sell,
your email newsletter, which is what I do, and affiliate links in the description.
So yeah, I think YouTube is an incredible place to start.
And this is what I did.
I started in 2022, I guess it was.
I think it was March of 2022, started actually creating on YouTube and have gotten to a point like between August and October of 2022.
I'm happy to like screen share.
And we can go over the analytics.
I got monetized on YouTube and am now making anywhere between $300 to $800 a month just from AdSense on.
YouTube that they automatically place.
So I'll show mine if you show yours.
Let's do it.
Let's play that game.
Yeah, let's do it.
So I have YouTube earn or AdSense enabled.
I recently did it.
I'm making about $100 a month.
Yep.
And I actually, you can even see, like I, if I go to the Earn tab over here, I literally haven't
even put in my banking information.
that's how little I care about the $100 a month.
Yep.
Because to me, I don't care about the actual ad sense.
Like to me, the value is in like I have a bunch of businesses that I run.
And if I sort of plug it in the YouTube video, like that's going to be worth a hundred times more than, you know, the hundred bucks a month.
Yep.
So the way I see it, and I think, you know, the reason I bring this up is a lot of
creators actually are not going to even care about the ad center or earn part of it and the ad part
of it, but just really care about plugging their products within the YouTube videos.
Yeah. So a couple things, though, is like that AdSense is just a reflection. It's a reflection
of a couple things, right? The amount of viewers that you get on your videos, the amount of time
that they're engaged with your videos. It's also based on kind of.
of like the quality of the viewer. And it sounds horrible to say this. I'm not labeling people here.
I'm labeling people in terms of how valuable advertisers view them. And so that comes down to what
country are they viewing from? What's their age group? And so even though that $100 for you isn't
meaningful, I think it's still like whether we're talking about revenue or we're talking about
views or view duration or the geography or demographics of the audience, I still think
it's like a valuable metric because if that number is going up, it means that you are getting
a wider reach and a higher quality audience. That's going to be ideal for, you know, your brands or
other people that you partner with. Totally. Oh, don't get me wrong. I wish that number was, you know,
50x, you know, and that's why I brought you on the pod to try to, you know, help me, you know. I just
want to let people know, though, that like it's a metric to keep an eye on, but it's for me, not my
core metric.
Yep.
Do you mind go into analytics and then go to audience?
So here, like this is where I think, and you may not even know this because, again,
like your focus is on your businesses and not 100% on like YouTube analytics, right?
But how I think about this is for you or any business owner.
Maybe it's a startup that has a YouTube channel and they're trying to use it for top funnel
demand generation or whatever.
The amazing thing about YouTube is they have like some of the highest quality analytics in the
world. And so for everybody who's not looking at this on their screen, I have 6,400 subscribers,
and I've never paid a dollar for any type of paid marketing or anything like that. I do all the
editing myself. This is entirely, you know, self, self-driven stuff. And then I think the most important
point is if we go to analytics and we go to audience, you can see where people come from.
So I have 50,000 followers on Twitter.
And one of the things I did early on when I was starting this channel, which I'm still early, is I would link to every video on Twitter.
And you would think that that would mean that most of my views would come from Twitter.
But actually, so if we go to lifetime, so we're going to lifetime analytics.
So the views coming from external is 2.6%.
even though like the vast majority of my following anywhere online is on Twitter.
And I used to share a link to every video on Twitter.
It just to me goes to show you how independent, you know, these platforms are.
And so the reason YouTube is so beautiful is these two right here,
browse, which is anytime somebody's on the homepage of YouTube and you just are looking at what comes up on your dashboard,
that's what those are.
51.6% of all of my views have come from browse. That's why YouTube is like such an important
top of funnel lead generation in my opinion. And then YouTube search is at 30.6%. And so when you create
videos, you sort of have to think about what are you prioritizing for? Are you prioritizing for
browse, the videos that people will see in their timeline and click on? Or are you prioritizing for
YouTube search. You're going to find what are the topics trending on YouTube. What are the topics
trending on Google Analytics? And you could just see it out there in the wild, right? Like right now,
AI and anything AI related is getting a ton of search volume. And so if I wanted to orient towards
search, then right now, one of the most popular search topics in the world is AI. And so I would
start making videos about AI. But those are the two important things.
And so then what decisions does that drive if you're going for browse or you're going for search?
Talked about search a little bit.
It all comes down to kind of like keywords.
And you would want the title of your video and the things you're talking about in the video to be very SEO friendly topics.
Right.
And I'll talk about how I've worked on that in the past on YouTube.
With browse, by far the most important thing is the thumbnail.
and then the first like 60 characters in your title.
Those two things have to grab people's attention immediately and get them to click on it.
If we go to, I'm going to go to revenue here and get into why I think for people who are like long form video creators and by long form, I mean anywhere from eight to 12 minute videos is what I would consider long form.
I think shorts are actually a complete waste of time and actually hurt your channel long term.
And so right now we've got my revenue chart up.
And if we go to Lifetime, I've made $2,959 from YouTube.
And again, starting basically August 8th of 2022, I made $3.62.
And the cool thing about YouTube is every video you,
make. I heard Ali Abdal talk about this. Every video you make is like its own little business,
right? And it can generate revenue for you forever, for however long YouTube stays relevant and
people keep watching. But one thing you notice is in August, I was making $4 a day. I jumped to
$32 a day on October 14th. And I jumped to $86.58 on October 23rd. And then,
then it's like slowly gone down $54, November 2nd, November 9th, $22.
And so what happened there?
I had one video that was super popular.
134,000 views on one video made $949.
There is a difference in the amount of revenue you get paid per thousand views.
It all comes down to how valuable your viewers are to advertisers.
The way that you can see the kind of the value of your viewer comes down to RPM, which is revenue for every 1,000 views.
So I got paid $7.6 on this video for every thousand views, 134,000 views.
So 134 times seven is how we get to that $900 that it made.
And then, you know, YouTube right here in CPM, which is the playback cost.
for every thousand views, that tells you how much YouTube is charging advertisers to advertise on your
video. So that is $19.56 for this video. I keep $7.6, which in my opinion is very fair for the
creator. The crazy thing is it's the growth, right? Like the growth in it, I mean, you've been
going from $100 bucks. You have, you know, some months that were 900, but, you know,
If you continue doing this, like, it's not crazy that you 10x the amount of revenue you get.
You just have to, like, stay the course.
And then then all of a sudden you're making, you know, thousands of dollars a month.
And that's when you hear about like creators, you know, quitting their job and going full time on YouTube.
Yep.
And the other thing that comes with this too, and you have to like balance this is I haven't done any brand deals where all, everything we're looking at right here on this chart, which if you're listening to this, I'm just showing the chart.
of revenue over time. It started 112 bucks in August, has slowly gone up. And then I had a few
breakout months, December, November, and October was 300, 740 and then 922. The average is still
kind of trending up over time. The thing about that is like as that gets bigger and as you get
more views, it attracts things like brands reaching out wanting you to feature their product
in their video as part of the video. That's additional revenue. But the other thing, too,
is like startups reaching out that need consulting and they need, they're trying to grow. There's a
number of different things that you can do from YouTube. And so I guess just what I want to share
with people is like, you can do this. I have zero video training. Everything I learned was through
watching people do it on YouTube and just like learning from other channels. The place I got the idea
for this video, this is the crazy thing about YouTube is like,
people have created the blueprint for you.
Where I got this idea and made it my own was another channel called Decade Investor.
And this is how I like come up with ideas for videos, right?
Like I'm not, I'm not saying I'm the most creative person in the world and all these ideas are my own.
But I find similar channels to me.
So if you're creating a channel, what I think you should do is find people that are not the biggest channels in the world.
like, I'm not looking at Ali Abdel right now and trying to make videos like his because he's got
three million subscribers on YouTube. And his videos will be popular. If he literally just posts a video
with him as the in the thumbnail, it doesn't matter what his video is about. He's going to get
100,000 plus views. That's not to take anything away from him, but he's got the subscriber base to do that.
So if you're looking for ideas, start with channels that are like mildly more successful than
you. And so I was looking at this channel. He's a friend of mine, actually, decade investor, 33,000
subscribers. I just went to most popular. And he has a video that's called I'm retiring off just
VOO, which is an index fund. I saw it had 211,000 views. He made it a year ago. So it's still like
relatively new or it hasn't been that long ago. And then I went and made a video that's called I'm
retiring off just SCHD, which is another ETF. And,
Like, here's the thing.
Here's a secret is like, is it a little clickbaity?
Yes.
But you have to make the connection in the video to where the thing in the title and the thing
in the thumbnail is related to your video.
It doesn't have to be like 100% what the video is.
But it has to be like related and believable for people to actually watch the video.
Right.
And so like you don't have to come out and have all of your own ideas.
You can look at what other people have done that has worked.
And there's a tool.
I don't know if you use this, Greg, but it's called Tube Buddy.
It's like 50 bucks a year.
I pay for it.
You can go to Launch Keyword Explorer now.
And so I make finance stuff, but let's say we want to make a video about how to use ChatGPT.
Anyways, you can just put kind of like the title in here and use this tool to get an idea.
And again, like a business owner could use this to think about marketing their products or
whatever. So it doesn't have to just be for, you know, YouTube nerds like me. What this tool does is this
side of the tool tells you how your channel ranks compared to other people that are making these
videos. So we can see the search volume on YouTube for chat. GPT is excellent. That's good. But there's a ton of
competition. So if I go right now and make a video about chat GPT after never talking about on my
channel before, I'm probably not going to like have that much success because you,
you don't have that following and that kind of like brand equity on YouTube to be popular.
And then the optimization strength tells you how well are the videos that are out there optimized?
Are the people optimizing for keywords and titles?
Do they have a good thumbnail?
That's kind of what that score is.
But what I do and the way that I use this is I'll come up with the title and figure out what
my video is going to be about. And then here, this tool gives you all of the keywords and the tags
that people have used. And so kind of an immediate thing people can do to improve their YouTube is to
just start using a tool like this and start to improve the topics that you're doing and make sure
there are topics that at least have, you know, somewhat of search volume. And then use keywords,
which there's a back and forth about like whether or not you even need keywords, but
if you're a small channel, I think you need to be doing everything, you know, to put the odds in your favor.
You just copy all of these to the video tag limit.
You can copy all of these.
But that's immediately.
The other thing I do is I look at the results here and I see what do these thumbnails look like?
And I just use this for me to get an idea of like, which one would I click on?
And then are they popular or not?
And so the basics of thumbnails, though, is like you should never have, again, unless you're like some massively popular creator already, you should never have more than like five words on on your thumbnail.
You should even try for under four because if you're browsing YouTube, you're just like scrolling across your screen.
Right. And so if it's more than four or five words, like people aren't going to take the time to read that.
And so that's what I'll do is I'll just look at some of the.
the titles and see kind of what they look like.
And then I just make all of my titles in Canva.
I've got like a couple templates in here that I use.
And I see the ones that are most popular.
And when I say most popular,
I mean I have the best click through rate.
And going back on those templates,
are those templates that you created?
Yes.
These are ones that I created.
And I just kept it simple though.
And different things are going to work for different channels, right?
for people listening, I've just got like a black background here.
I make finance stuff.
So I've got the name of the company I'm talking about on the thumbnail, which in this
case, it's Amazon.
And then something big and shocking, right?
The title here is just bought $90,000, which is another thing.
Like, this is not investment advice.
I don't recommend anybody go out and do that.
It was true.
I did that.
And it's kind of a shocking thing, right?
So that drove a decent amount of views.
but the way that you can judge that is impression click through rate.
And so the thing is, like, you can't see anybody else's click through rate.
So that's the tough thing.
And then I always wonder like, well, how is my click through rate versus everybody else?
And the truth is, I don't know.
But what I can see is that that title that I just talked about, the title of the video is why I just bought $90,000 of Amazon stock.
The thumbnail has two words on it and a company name.
name, the click through rate is 14.4%, which is extremely high. In my own numbers and a little bit of
research I've done, if you can get over 7% over a 7% click through rate, then that's great. And so
that's what I'll do is I'll look at my videos that I've performed the best, anything over a 10%
click through rate, then I'm going to keep testing, you know, those style videos and those style
titles and topics. So the other thing, Greg, that I'll share is like,
When you find something that works, double down on it.
I started my channel off talking about kind of like my investment journey and individual stocks.
Well, then I made this video about SCHD, which is an ETF, exchange traded fund.
And it got 134,000 views.
Well, then I tried to make more videos about SCHD and ETFs.
And like all of my most popular videos now are basically about SCHT.
and about ETFs.
And so we're kind of getting off topic, Greg,
from kind of like what your point was,
you know,
you use YouTube for your brands and stuff like that.
If you're using it for a business for yourself
and monetization yourself and to make an income yourself,
if you find something that works and you enjoy talking about it,
double down on that because that S-C-H-D video that I made,
the original one I made,
has one million impressions.
most people who watch your videos are not your subscribers.
They are just random people on YouTube.
And so if people subscribe to your channel,
they need to kind of like get what they came for to stay subscribed.
But don't limit yourself by thinking if you make this video,
your subscribers aren't going to like it or it's different or whatever.
The vast majority of people out there that are watching your videos.
And again, on YouTube, I've like never heard of you and never seen you.
And so that's what I think about.
And I'm just like willing to test new things.
Quick interruption from me.
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Thank you.
Enjoy the rest of the show.
Let me show you just showed me a hundred things and my jaw is dropped literally.
Like I'm trying to pick it up from the floor and I'm going to show you one thing.
So go to go to your dog.
dashboard, YouTube studio dashboard.
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, we run a bunch of agencies. And sometimes I drop on YouTube,
hey, like, we have this innovation agency. We have this design agency. We have this, you know,
organic SEO agency that's AI enhanced. So like drop that. And if you scroll down,
yeah, recent subscribers. Got it. This to me is like so valuable that I think people don't talk about.
So you can actually see who subscribed to your channel and also sort them by, you know, date
subscribe, but also a subscriber count.
So I was noticing, like, I had like some pretty big people.
Yeah.
Who started subscribing to the Where It Happens YouTube channel.
And I just reached out to them, some of them.
So for example, one of them was a senior leader at a Fortune 500 company.
I reached out to him.
And he was like stoked that I reached out.
He was like, whoa, like I subscribed to your channel yesterday.
You reach out.
All of a sudden, like, we're closing a six-figure deal on one of like a really cool
company doing like innovation work and design work and prototyping all from YouTube.
That's awesome.
And thank you for sharing that because I had literally never looked at that part.
And I think that goes to show like why YouTube can be so valuable for so many different
reasons depending on what you're using it for.
like that is like the perfect use case, I think, for like you to be using YouTube for.
And so then then it comes down to different things, right?
It's like, what is your purpose for using YouTube or whatever platform?
And you, you do kind of have to optimize for that, right?
So back to like this whole conversation.
So for you like, yeah, it totally makes sense, I think, to optimize for your most valuable viewer.
optimize for that, which means, yes, you may give up views because you're not going to have the most
viral titles in the world because that's not going to attract the person that is the most
valuable to you and your business and your life.
But I still think like there's definitely opportunities to increase that pool as much as
possible, making sure in the first 30 seconds of your video, the people know what you're talking about,
basic thumbnail stuff.
Like, you know, things like that, I think, like, can still be super valuable.
But that's a great point where in that, that's kind of why I think like YouTube shorts for most people, at least right now, is a total waste of time.
Because like, if you think about the audience for shorts and I'll just talk about me specifically, my goal with YouTube is like a couple things.
The primary way I make money online right now is through people subscribing to my paid email newsletter.
And so everything else I do, Twitter, YouTube, whatever, is all, in my opinion, top of funnel
to try to funnel more people into my email newsletter eventually.
I try to provide a lot of free value on these different channels.
I think that's like how you grow an audience.
But what that means is that it's tempting on Twitter or on YouTube even to try to make shorts
or on Twitter to do like these memes that go viral and get millions of views and stuff like that.
But if you do that and you have some meme that goes viral on Twitter,
like how valuable is that really to me getting somebody to trust me enough to then sign up for
my newsletter and do it and start a paid subscription?
I don't think that's really valuable.
And every time I think I do that and I go down that route, I think I'm like losing a little
bit of brand equity, if you will, with the people who are most valuable. So with shorts,
I shared my long form videos, get about a $7 RPM, $7 per thousand views. Shorts for me right now,
and I've looked, and this is kind of what other people are getting as well, six cents per
thousand views is what I get from shorts. That is 100 times less than what I get for my long
long form videos. And so what that means is like we talked about how your growth can kind of be like
exponential over time. Right. And so if I'm at a $7 RPM, $7 per thousand views, well, if I get a million
views on YouTube, that would be $7,000 a month that I'm getting paid just from YouTube.
Everybody's different, but I'll just share my own stuff. I do finance related stuff. I don't have a lot of
editing. I literally just like film it, make some cuts where I sound like an idiot. And then I still
sound like an idiot a lot, but I sound less like an idiot. And then post it, right? And so I can
realistically do 90 videos a month. I'm bad at math. So we'll just call it 100 videos a month. Right.
And so 100 videos a month to get to a million views would be 10,000 views per video. I've seen
it in my numbers that I can have a video that pops to 130,000. On average right now, I'm getting
over time like five to six thousand views per video. It is a very realistic goal for me to get to that
number over time if I keep working at it. In my opinion, what is not realistic for me is to get
enough views on shorts to make that six cents per short actually work out economically for me.
but then beyond that, what happens is you may grow your subscriber base from doing shorts,
but are those people who subscribe to your channel to watch a less than one minute video?
A, are they the type of person who, if you're on it to market something,
that would be valuable for you to market to?
And then B, are they the type of person that's also going to watch your seven or eight or nine minute video?
And if they're not, and if you now all of a sudden have 500,000 subscribers on YouTube,
but none of them care about your long form videos,
YouTube's algorithm starts to think like, well, this person's subscribers are seeing these videos and not even clicking on them.
They must not be very good.
Or if they click on them and watch and click off quick, and so your view time is low,
you start to get penalized from YouTube's algorithm.
And so I guess that's just like a word of caution.
Like I've been very tempted and I've actually started working with an agency and paying them to like work on some short form videos.
And I just decided that like when I really thought about it and after seeing kind of this RPM stuff and then thinking through it that it's really not worth my time or the money to pay somebody to edit them because that's a whole other thing.
And I would be much better off just focusing on long form content and kind of a lot of.
like sticking to what has worked already.
Right.
So it's like really tempting to go with shorts and it's exciting that there's monetization
there.
But like six cents per thousand views to me is just not like worth it and not livable.
Okay.
I had a few game changing insights that you said.
So one is the Ali Abdal each YouTube video is a business.
And I think the framework for thinking about that is just really smart because it
all the insights that we have to building startups and businesses, i.e. build a minimal viable
product, test, optimize, like all the, basically all the learnings that you have from
building startups, you can apply that to YouTube. So I think that that was a huge light bulb for me.
My only edit to that quote is it's not that each YouTube video is a business. It's each
YouTube video is a product. Yeah. And you optimize the product. The other thing I learned here is
I've actually been spending a lot of time thinking about shorts,
but not enough time thinking about long form,
which makes no sense because I was like,
oh, if I need to grow my subscriber base,
I need to go to shorts.
Spending a lot of time and money on these shorts
when I should be really thinking about
what is the process for coming up with titles, thumbnails,
optimizing that flow,
using tools like 2Buddy or Vid IQ
to basically help me there.
Even though, to be honest, I kind of hate that.
And I hate it because,
I love art, not science.
Yep.
And to me, this feels like more of a science.
I'm just going to be straight with you.
I am not going to do everything to optimize my YouTube.
I'm going to do the minimum amount.
I want to optimize me having fun with this channel too.
As soon as I do that sort of stuff and I'm optimizing, optimizing, optimizing, I lose that fun bit.
So I think it's important for folks to don't over-optimize is sort of another insight I have.
what else what else do you want to leave people with before we wrap yeah yeah exactly so that's a really
good point great is like i talked a lot about optimization don't be intimidated by thinking everything
has to be optimized and then like not start right like the most important thing that anybody can do
if they're thinking about starting is just get started and your thumbnails are going to be bad
your videos are going to be bad you're going to ramble your editing is going to be bad you're
have a good mic because like your audio matters far more than video quality.
But aside from that and by good mic, 60 bucks, you can get a good mic.
Aside from that, if you're thinking about doing this, get started and then just it's like so
common, like improve 1% every, every time or whatever.
Just get started and then work on one thing at a time that you want to kind of like fix and
improve and improve it.
And so I felt the exact same thing as you, Greg, not just about like YouTube.
but about social media in general, right?
Like I started on social media when I was active duty in the military.
And like literally, especially in my career field, everybody made fun of me for like being on social media.
And then I was like, oh, okay, social media is dumb.
I'm not going to do that.
Well, now social media has turned out to be like the most important and most valuable thing I've ever done for my personal income and personal life.
It allowed me to get a job after leaving them like so many things.
And I would say the same thing about like optimizing at least a little bit and not even.
optimizing, but just don't create barriers to your stuff being found that you could easily
avoid is, I guess, the way I'll put it. And then the reason for that is like, yes, it needs to be
fun for you keep doing it. So it certainly don't over optimize. But if we think what we're doing
is valuable, we have an obligation to help as many people find that as possible while not being
tacky. And so I just try to at least do some things to like not get in my own way and, you know,
some simple things to help more people find it.
So that's, yes, don't optimize to where you don't make it fun,
but you have important stuff to say that's valuable to a lot of people.
So just like help more people find it, basically.
Appreciate you for coming on, Austin.
Where could folks find you on YouTube?
If you search Austin Lieberman, you'll find me on YouTube.
On Twitter, I'm Lieberman, Austin.
And then my substack is austin.com.
Thanks for having me.
And I've been a huge fan of yours for a long time.
So this is really cool.
I love it.
And I appreciate you.
I know you don't give financial advice, but I definitely watch your S Ph.D.
video and I definitely bought some Ph.P.H.D. after that.
Cool.
All right.
Cool, man.
This is fun.
Later.
