From Zero to 10 Million YouTube Subscribers - Mrwhosetheboss

but i remember just before i fell asleep i checked the view cannon was on like 3 000 views and at the time i was like well that seems high but okay i'll just sleep on it and i got it the next day and it was on 300 000. and then i checked my kind of inbox and it was filled with like uh cnn news wants to talk to you um bbc news good morning america like all these places wanted wanted a piece of me and i just i couldn't understand what was happening it was a mindset shift of like whoa this youtube thing like this potential of virality it suddenly became like quite real hey friends welcome back to the deep dive in this episode i speak to aaron maney who is europe's biggest tech youtuber also known as mr who's the boss his channel has over 9 million subscribers and he's an absolute inspiration in the episode we talk about aaron's early life and how he would have these dreams of being a youtuber when he was young and at school and we talked about his journey of going full time on making silly internet videos on youtube rather than doing a traditional prestigious consulting career at pwc we talk a bit about his life as an influencer and what it's actually like to be europe's biggest tech influencer and all the ridiculously cool things that he gets invited to do and we also talk a little bit about the idea of hedonic adaptation there is a point when you start to think like what am i chasing here like how is my life different when i'm at 10 million versus 9 million or nine million versus one million you know at a certain point you're making a living it's your business you're comfortable and so you you have to kind of separate yourself from that you can't tie yourself to a number that you have no control over i've been following aaron's channel for absolutely ages now and it was such a an honor and joy and inspiration to be able to speak to him i'm i'm really gushing like i'm a real fanboy here because i am and it was great it's also like really interesting just how he how much effort goes into the magic that is his youtube channel and you'll see for later on in the episode i'm just absolutely flabbergasted as to just the insane amount of effort he puts into it and hopefully that'll come through in the episode as well so yeah grab a cup of tea and i hope you enjoy this conversation with me and mister who's the boss let's go all right aaron welcome to the podcast how are you doing i'm very good it's good to be here yeah it's uh it's it's nice seeing you in the flesh we've spoken like twice two three times on the phone before so it's it's weird seeing you here i was actually just in in the toilet earlier today and i was watching your your pixel versus iphone camera comparison so yeah i feel like i'm getting the full real life experience satisfactory toilet video yes yeah it was it was quite it it was quite satisfying like like the b-roll you have like the little like sound sound design when you show a photo all the photos of yourself all the selfies at different angles different like focal lengths i have actually saw very well done i feel like a dj more and more every day because i'm spending more and more of my time looking at sound and how it syncs with the video yeah cause actually i'm glad you mentioned it yeah i thought the sound design was very well done i was i was going to post a message to our editor on slack and be like can we do more sound stuff because it's just like like all the little subtleties like where the beat drops yeah it's it's it's very well done um firstly happy birthday thank you you've just turned 26. yeah um um so you know you're like absolutely huge you've got like 10 million followers across across the social media platforms what would your like school high school self secondary school self have said let's say say 10 years ago if you'd known this is where you'd be at 26. so i actually i distinctly remember a little meeting i had with a friend um we were at school and we were looking at other youtubers on the platform and we were like dreaming of what it would be like to have 10 000 followers we would look at channels like that and we're like oh my god i could do that and this person has the audience that could fill a stadium that's ridiculous because when you're looking at numbers like 10 000 you can actually visualize it and when you do visualize it it seems enormous um so i don't know i think i would have cried or had a fear if you talk i don't know so one thing i i found really interesting about about your story and you talked about this a little bit in the podcast with stephen and a little bit in your draw my life video is that uh growing up you're you're a massive nerd shall we say i'm a nerd i'm still in there yeah um and and and you said that in in primary school you ended up like playing chess for england or something that's very cool and then in in secondary school things things were a little bit a little bit difficult i wonder if you can you can talk a bit more about what that experience was like yeah i think i think more and more it's easy to feel insecure in yourself um i think for me youtube was like a vehicle towards confidence and i was almost lucky that i found it and like did it properly but at school i had very little reassurance in myself and like people would constantly tell me like every touch point i had with another person was generally a negative one it's like oh you're really nerdy oh you're really lanky oh your skin is awful oh you need to shave that beard of yours or if you call it a beard um so i just didn't have a very good impression of myself and then how did how did youtube fit into this so i think i was probably at my lowest point when i started youtube and to be honest even when i started it for the first few years it wasn't a big part of my life and i was quite embarrassed about it and i wouldn't tell anyone but i think there was like an internal sense of like i am doing something that other people aren't doing and that's quite that's quite nice so was it a kind of a way of of having that that aspect having an aspect of your identity that you could kind of point to internally and say that yeah i'm doing something cool was it was that the vibe something like that yeah i mean i had no idea that it could be a career or what it would turn into but yeah it felt it felt cool i remember actually there was a point when i showed my friend that i had a channel with 5 000 subscribers and he said no way that's not you because at that point it was only in my hands but i had to convince him i had to be like look listen that's my voice now hear my voice in person it's me nice yeah wha what prompted you to start start the channel so my brother bought me my first smartphone and uh i think especially relative to my real life at the time this smartphone was like it was like a guilty pleasure like i just fell in love with that thing and so like naturally just learned as much as i could about it and then one day i just thought i've got enough info to share with people so i just made this video on like how to customize it just add themes make it faster and it just did better than i expected and then i i kept going but i literally i remember a point where my life goal was to get that phone to score a certain score in a benchmarking app okay that was just my purpose it wasn't a good phone but i wanted it to be better and that kind of created a drive to find out how to do that a lot of people have this thing where where they get super interested in something they go deep on it but then it i imagine like most people don't then go a step beyond and think i'm going to make a youtube video about this thing what what was it about you can you can you remember like that made that that leap i actually don't remember yeah i don't remember i just i'm just very very very grateful for whatever the trigger was yeah um i'm assuming it was something to do with the fact that i did watch other youtubers and i think some part of me just wanted to be like them were you were you worried at all about what people would think when you started extremely okay extremely yeah i mean like i was not a confident person and i was very aware that on camera i was not going to give a good impression um i it was strongly driven by my passion for what i was covering i'll put it that way ouch on cam on camera than if people saw your face that there yeah i didn't reveal my face for a good few years i think it was just hands um and even then people were like your voice is so irritating shut up but yeah it was good what were the kind of comments like in those because like when i started it was like i started it was like 2017 i was i was pretty old i was like 23. um and it was all educational content where the comments were just broadly like oh my god thank you so much for helping me get into uni kind of vibes but whenever i see comments on tech videos in particular it seems like it's a bit more polarizing than whenever the tech audience is quite uh the tech audience is quite hard to please um so they're very educated uh but also cynical bunch they can be amazing but they will pick apart everything you say yeah and you can never contradict yourself you have to make sure you're 100 consistent and like you fact check everything you say and so when you throw that kind of pressure on like a 15 year old who doesn't really know what they're doing completely uh you're gonna get things wrong and i think i wasn't ready for people to pounce on me in the way they did but it's good that it happened because you develop a thicker skin how do people pounce on you oh it's stuff like uh you're doing this all wrong you idiot or like i mean there was there was racist stuff there was like there was all sorts of just like nasty comments i mean technically there is truth hidden in most of them and as long as you can kind of scrape away the layers that you don't like you can find it but definitely abrasive comments or put it that way and did you start getting those from from like day one or i think especially on day one oh wow because the videos are the worst i think the better your videos get generally speaking the more the tone shifts to positivity yeah so you're so you're 15 not having a great time at school socially and you decide to start the youtube channel and on day one you start getting hate hate comments about it yeah my first video did better than i thought it was okay then i thought it would um and so it hit like fifty thousand views which is rare for a first year yeah it's also like really good back then as well yeah yeah especially good back then so i wasn't ready for it yeah there was definitely an influx of people not none of them who subscribed because the video was so bad you know there were comments yeah and so at that point again if i if i imagine myself at 15 it's you know things that think that i'm going great at school i put out a video it gets gets a bunch of hate comments it would be very easy for me to just be like okay i've tried this thing it's not working let's i don't know try and become a chess international masters i don't know whatever um like really lean into the nerd um what what was it do you think that kept you going with the youtube stuff we're gonna take a very quick break to introduce our sponsor for this episode and that is brilliant i've been using brilliant for the last two plus years they're a fantastic platform for learning maths science and computer science with engaging and interactive online courses and the great thing about brilliant is that they really teach stuff from a very first principles based approach it's almost like the way that we were taught in places like oxford and cambridge where you learn a concept and then you apply the concept to an interesting problem rather than just being spoon-fed stuff like we initially learned in school my favorite courses on brilliant are the computer science ones as some of you guys might know i was torn between applying to medicine and computer science i went for medicine in the end but i always had an affinity to computer science and taking the courses on brilliant like their introduction to algorithms and their introduction to python really helped me get more of a grasp of computer science than i've ever had before it's also great for learning how to code which is an incredibly useful skill to have especially if you want to start a business and i attribute like 98 of my business success to the fact that i learned how to code when i was in secondary school so if you want to check out the courses on math science and computer science then head over to brilliant.org forward slash deep dive and the first 200 people to sign up with that link will get 20 off the annual premium subscription so thank you brilliant for sponsoring this episode so i think this is really important actually it is said a lot you have to really love what you do so it's the fact that i had all this tech in my house because i'd been buying it anyway as i was growing up and i was so passionate about that tech that i just i was having fun doing it um so my my first two years was basically me just kind of like roaming around my house trying to find things i already had using equipment i already had and just filming it and just talking i wasn't thinking about things like you know watch time or retention or like you know consumer insights it was very much just a case of oh this is fun were you trying to stick to like an upload schedule or anything then or just i didn't know what an upload schedule was so so you started the channel at 15 what did things look like then on on the channel kind of over the next few years very kind of like bitty um it wasn't that i wasn't trying to be consistent but it's the fact that oftentimes i just didn't have anything to show or say it wasn't like i was getting the latest samsungs or latest apples or anything like that so when i got something cool i talked about it um but it also meant that like i was doing videos at very strange times when most people wouldn't have been like the day before my a-level exams i was just sat in the garden recording some earphones that just came in and stuff like that what was the growth like in those in those early few years nothing special yeah and you just kept going but kept at it because it was fun yeah yeah pretty much okay at what point did you start kind of taking it seriously so there was one big turning point um and it happened part way through university so it's probably like 20 i think it's 2015. and it was one video i uploaded just as part of one of my you know many other videos i uploaded i didn't think much of it yeah and i fell asleep but i remember just before i fell asleep i checked the view cannon was on like 3 000 views and at the time i was like well that seems high but okay i'll just sleep on it and i got it the next day and it was on 300 000. and then i checked my kind of inbox and it was filled with like uh cnn news wants to talk to you um bbc news good morning america like all these places wanted wanted a piece of me and i just i couldn't understand what was happening um and it was getting like 80 000 views an hour i just was not accustomed to numbers like that and it was basically a video on how to turn your phone into like a hologram so it just did really well i think it was a combination of like clear tutorial released at the right time it was like a friday just before the weekend so it became like this viral diy project i guess um and even though like that one thing didn't change my overall average view count too much or didn't rocket my channel into millions it was a mindset shift of like whoa this youtube thing like this potential of virality it suddenly became like quite real so what happened then so yeah i still wasn't making enough from it to like call it a job immediately and just quit everything but it was um it was definitely a shift for me my parents my family my friends like everyone was all of a sudden like whoa like some there's something there's something here so i think i started taking it more seriously creating a rough schedule trying to actually get stuff from brands like things like that so if i had to put one thing as like a turning point it would be that interesting so it sounds like a kind of if you're if you're halfway through university you would have been sort of 19-ish 1920 when that happened yeah so you'd been doing youtube for like five years four five years at that point kind of just for fun yeah because you enjoyed the process you enjoyed reviewing the stuff because you were into tech you were passionate about the thing and then like all of that it's like i i think this is fascinating because there's always kind of this myth of the overnight success and when you see you know i love looking at channels that are huge now and looking at their older videos and seeing oh wow you know like how much has started and how you started and all these like people who are absolutely enormous um i think now speaking to a lot of people who are starting youtube channels the survivorship bias means that the only channels they really see are the big ones and it's hard to imagine that you could be doing this thing for five years before any real traction and start starting to take it seriously yeah and it's also tough to see what exactly led up to that moment so before i posted that hologram video even though in my head i'm like well what was i prating around at with those 300 videos before that why did i need to make those i should have just made this from the start i needed to make every one of those videos to learn the things i needed to know to make the hologram video did you end up going on like good morning america and things like that like i took on a few of them there were a few like local news channels that i did um yeah what was that experience like like being on the news very i felt a little out of place i'll put it that way because i didn't know how to like present still it was still like the video itself it's not something i'm proud of like from a production standpoint yeah um i still wouldn't back back how i came across in that video and so you ended up sort of being sort of i won't watch them again those interviews no fair enough okay so at that point you started taking things more seriously what what was your kind of non-youtube life looking like at the time i had a pretty good time at uni um i was very disciplined with my time because as i started to take youtube seriously it's like whoa okay so i'm at uni i've got to have a good social life i've got to go to first class honors i've got to do youtube and so those three things alone means you're quite busy and then you've got family you know you want to see them you want to be there for the big moments so i scheduled my time quite well such that i think i got everything i wanted to get done done but it just meant that i couldn't waste time so i'd find myself in lots of situations where the the the default option would be to just stay and just chat with someone but i had to be like right okay it's nine i'm gonna go script bye do you still have that kind of attitude today so what i've found is like the larger the channel has gotten the more i've started to put my time at a premium oh it's very much like that now except i think i i am more in control of my time and i'm more i understand myself better so for example i'll have situations well i'll try and i'll try and set my life up so that the minute i finish working i'm with my friends okay so for example i was scripting all the way on the way here and i literally from here i'm off to meet a friend so so it's kind of like there's no dead time which in itself sounds stressful because then you're planning every single minute but it means you really look forward to the times when you switch off because you're completely switched off what does that planning process look like for you it's all in my head it's like a little mental jigsaw okay so in the morning you decide here's what my schedule looks like for the day or do you plan out like a week in advance like what does it look like i think i've just got naturally quite good at just shuffling things around in my brain such that i kind of i have a guide in my head of what needs to be done what point i can switch off and that kind of thing okay interesting but i always have these like short-term things to look forward to as well so for example this weekend i'm really excited because i've got a party tomorrow and that party's been in my brain for the last two or three weeks as a kind of like way of making sure i get the things i want to get done done and making them more enjoyable to get done yeah yeah like a lot of people talk about how the majority of an enjoyment of an event is in looking forward to the event and then the event happens and then there is some extra enjoyment and like reflecting back on the event um so it sounds like you're kind of following i get a lot of enjoyment just from looking forward to things interesting i think because i don't maybe do as many fun things as other people i'd imagine most of my enjoyment is the looking forward part of it um what do you mean you don't do as many fun things as other people because i don't have that much time off i i think i think you must have found this as well like as your channel starts to grow because you're putting a higher premium on your time it takes more to pull you away from that and so the stuff that you make time for has to be of higher importance i guess because the opportunity cost is higher yeah do you find yourself thinking about that in terms of in terms of like social life and relationships and friends and stuff as well i try not to but it's really hard to separate yourself from it you know when you're self-employed like it your life does become one kind of like jigsaw puzzle and social life and work life do blend into one sometimes you pull all-nighters sometimes you have to just do it so i have had to cancel on people sometimes and i hate cancelling on people i have had to say no i can't come to your wedding because i've got work to do um but more often than not i do make time for the things that i think are important okay and when you say that i can't come to your wedding because i i have to i have to do work like i'm i i imagine people would find that a bit strange because they're like you're you're a big youtuber you control your time you can do what you want you're hashtag living the dream um what what does it mean to kind of like like you have to have to do work so i think one thing that i do feel and i need to get better at is almost like a sense of fomo it's a sense that at any point in time you're almost scared to say yes i can come to your thing in two months because you're not sure of what opportunity is going to present itself because so oftentimes i wake up i check my inbox and probably once every two days there is something that i think is really really cool that i really want to do and i've had loads of situations where i'm like i then check my calendar and i'm like oh my god i can't do that because i've said yes to this person for this thing and so if someone says can you book a week off my wedding in italy in a year's time i am naturally very very hesitant to do that and i will delay as much as i possibly can and probably try to confirm two weeks before what sort of emails are you getting these like every two days like do you want to forward them your way yeah i get none of these emails um i get emails from like chinese charger manufacturers being like hey can we can we send you a review yeah i ignore them oh i get those too yeah uh i got i got some makeup ones as well actually hey aaron we we love your beauty channel oh i was like well thank you you know it's all sorts of stuff but it's a lot of it is like experience based like i love the idea of like doing stuff that feels different um i feel like i'm going off on a tangent here but i am of the philosophy that i want to do something different every day right even if that means on the way out to go to work i kick the door so my like that becomes the day my foot is hurting right i want to lead a distinct life and so when companies come to me and offer experiences and they say okay let's fly you around on a helicopter in london to take footage with our new phone it's hard kind of cool yeah it's hard to say no or like you know let's hire out a theme park or let's do this video in a plane and then you jump out that plane and like all this stuff is constantly coming in because i feel like this is like the new age of influencers and every brand wants to be a part of it um obviously i have to turn down a lot of those because i'm like a tech channel and you have to like you know it's integrity first so if a company wants you to do some big you know brand promotion you have to be very selective but i want to filter out those opportunities and make sure like i consider all of them the fact that that stuff comes in makes it harder for you to say yes to things because then you don't want to be like crap i said yes to that thing like a year ago and now yeah kind of yeah and then i'll be sitting at like some baby shower thinking like i could have been in like the dubai arena right now you know crowd surfing or no not crowd who's the boss live show or something like that oh that's really cool um that you get this the these sorts of well like when when did that stuff start happening like what stage of your channel do you start getting offers to fly in helicopters and things like that pretty recently pretty recently i'm not adjusted to it by any means um it's like probably in the last year um i think what happens is like there is an element with youtube of exponential growth right providing that you use the data you're given you um respond to the comments that have been sort of left in terms of like you take their feedback on board and keep improving you will see a trajectory and so like i think in the last year my channel's gone from like three million to nearly nine million um and if you go back it's a similar kind of like jump each year proportionally so the difference in like value you're giving to a brand and nine million versus three million is enormous and it's also that kind of status shift of like okay this is a big influencer to this is the biggest tech influencer in like europe right so it's like you're the go-to person yeah so that makes a difference too and then all of a sudden your inbox gets flooded with all these all these cool things and yeah um one thing that i find on a lower scale is like we we we talked about kind of like valuing your time and you know there's a few a few people talk about you this idea of setting and setting your own personal hourly rate and then not doing things that are not making more than that hourly rate or if you can if you don't like doing something you can outsource it for less than the hourly rate then then that's all good um and so i kind of followed this semi-religiously to eliminate things like laundry from my life i'm like well you know that even that 15 minutes i spent hanging up clothing if i just outsourced it and i spent that 15 minutes scripting a video well that's significantly more valuable to my business and my life than that 15 minutes of doing laundry but then it's very easy to start thinking hmm is it really worth you know x thousand dollars to hang out with that friend for two hours and i like you know at one point probably about a year ago i started to find myself thinking in those terms i was like okay no no like there's got to be like some sort of separation between the socials like real life and the business how did you do that recognizing that when it comes to so like so recognizing that ultimately relationships is the most important thing in life and i you know when you read these books around you know top five regrets of the dying and so on um it's always around i wish i hadn't worked so hard i wish i'd made more time for my friends um there was uh you know the other day there was a scenario in which i could have had a sleepover at a friend's place and we would have kind of chilled until the early hours of the morning and then woken up at like 11 11 a.m or i could have gone home early woken up at a reasonable hour and done three extra hours of writing on my book and i thought hmm you know a few weeks from now will i remember more the hangout with this friend or the three hours of writing for my book clearly the three i was writing for my book are going to be more roi positive but there is some intangible social value for my life and for my memories and stuff around hanging out with friends instead i think that that intangibility makes it really hard when you're trying to view the world in black and white isn't it it's like okay you can measurably see the value of doing your work but you can't measurably see the value of hanging out with your friends even though it's there it's programmed into us we need that interaction i think because we can't measure it that's probably where the disconnect happens yeah i think so and i think like when when you were describing how you managed your time at uni that was that was that was fairly similar to how i would do mine as well in that i i i had this kind of diminishing returns curve of social interaction in my mind oh god so i was like you know i could spend an hour at this party or i could spend three hours at this party and if i just go for an hour i will get 95 of the value and if i stay for the extra three hours there's really nothing more to be gained and there was a very like um liberating moment when i realized that if i'm at a party i can just leave whenever i want even without saying goodbye and no one will really notice because everyone else is like you know tipsy or drunk at this point so i can just leave and like edit a video and then all of a sudden i was like i can have my cake and eat it too as long as i keep diminishing returns in mind so i'm laughing because i think i thought the exact same thing um but also at that point are you enjoying being at the party well what's the point going at all is it to try and maintain connections with people who you don't like that much yeah i i had a weird weird attitude towards parties in that i thought i should enjoy them and i thought i should be that become the sort of person who enjoys parties because i wanted to be like confident charismatic and all that jazz and uh to break away from my massive nerd unconfident guy that i was in school um and then it was it was actually a few years into uni where i was having like a dmc with some some friends around parties and even my cool friends said that they didn't enjoy parties i was like whoa that was that was my blog i was like wait a minute if the cool kids don't enjoy parties and actually everyone seems to prefer like intimate dinners of like you know four or five people max that's like vibes then why am i forcing myself to attend these parties just for the sake of it yeah so then once i realized that kind of my attendance and parties significantly dipped okay so traversing the timeline back to you're at university you start to take the youtube channel seriously um you start to kind of split your time between aiming for a first class having some semblance of the social life and also continuing to do the youtube thing um were there well you know i'm big on like productivity hacks and time management hacks and stuff other other than the kind of curtailing social interaction to be on the point of diminishing returns did you use any other kind of strategies in hindsight that that helped you make the time for all this kind of stuff i think the big thing for me was seeing things as bonuses um it's the idea of not punishing yourself for not doing things but encouraging yourself to do things so in my head when i was sort of setting up the day i would try to tell myself okay your goal is not necessarily to finish this youtube video but it's to kind of like film a part of it and then what i tend to find is that when i pick up my camera i'm like okay i might as well do the whole thing and i would feel even better at the end of the day because i've done more than i asked of myself um but also sometimes when i just couldn't do it all i wouldn't feel bad and then sleep terribly and have nightmares about tech videos i would just be like well you know it's fine i did what i needed to do okay so like setting low expectations for yourself and then being happier when you when you sort of surpass those expectations yeah and and it's tricky to do when you're ambitious because on one hand i was trying to become like you know uk's biggest tech youtuber and it's tough to do that when you have to temper your own expectations but it was almost like a really deliberate thing i did for my own mental health one thing that came up when i was when we were kind of researching your vibes is that you seem to be quite big on goal setting um in that you tweeted at the start of the year that all right new goals for the year 10 million subscribers on on youtube a million followers on twitter and i think a million for us on instagram uh and you've now hit that milestone on twitter and instagram and basically basically i'm gonna hit it on youtube as well which is awesome um i don't think i'm going to make it this year but it's close enough close enough um it strikes me that this is in stark contrast to at the start when you're 50 and you're like i'm just going to make videos for fun at what point did your goals shift to i'm aiming to be the uk's largest tech youtuber so i've always actually been very numbers driven so even at the start when i didn't really have a schedule i still had like sheets on my wall of like how many subscribers i wanted to hit okay i've always had that in me and actually to be honest i think as the channel's grown i've sort of tried to detach myself as much as possible from those numbers because youtube is one of those things that you just you can't win so i mean there's an element there is a point when you start to think like what am i chasing here like how is my life different when i'm at 10 million versus 9 million or 9 million versus 1 million you know at a certain point you're making a living it's your business you're comfortable and so you have to kind of separate yourself from that you can't tie yourself to a number that you have no control over i i i agree wholeheartedly um but you were doing that at start yeah okay why because so at the start it was like i was very much thinking of it in terms of like that conversation i had with my friend where we're like oh my god 10 000 people that's so many people let's try and get to that goal okay um but it's it's very much after passing like a million subscribers for example which in my head was this inconceivable number that it was like oh if you pass a million you're just like you're a celebrity you know um and it's when you pass that and then you have this point of internal reflection where it's like i have just achieved everything i ever set out to and more why why am i not elated all the time that you're like okay well actually this isn't as important as i thought it was so the numbers for you it sounds like the numbers for you were motivating in the early stages with like the numbers on the wall and the subscriber counts and things like that yeah the reason i do it now like the reason i've got this pinned tweet saying we want to hit this this and this is it's partly as a kind of a bit of a challenge like a fun thing to do um but a lot of it is just to get other people on board like my followers on board with kind of where my head's at what i'm aiming for it gives them something to kind of like aim for as well with me but at the same time so you're you're setting this goal for yourself as a bit of a challenge but at the same time you are also detached like you're trying to detach your personal sense of self-worth from the hitting of the goal yes yeah i i'm not i'm not going to be upset if we don't hit 10 million this year i've been thinking a lot about goal setting um because i am writing a book themed around productivity where the core message is that really the secret to productivity is to enjoy enjoy yourself because if you're enjoying the journey and having fun then productivity takes care of itself as like the general theme and the first chapter which i've been working on a draft of like in the last two weeks is about setting goals and my personal philosophy on goal setting has always been that i've not really been a fan of goals like that you said that are outside of my control and so when i started the youtube channel the goal was one or two videos a week for the next five years and that's that's all i'm gonna that that's the goal because i actually have that fully within my control of being able to do that myself it's like an input goal whereas if i were to think like like for example in in in writing this book at some point my goal was i want to publish a book that hits the new york times best seller list and whenever i would think of that as being a goal it would be very demotivating and i would end up procrastinating and not doing anything because it would feel like ev every what i write now has to be a best-selling word and the the i really ramped up the stakes and i wasn't enjoying the process anymore and then i shifted the goal to to be honest i just want to write a book i'm proud of and i like writing i like reading and i'm probably going to keep writing books for the rest of my life so hey this is just a book norman who gets it's i just want to write something i'm proud of all of a sudden i was like damn this is just immediately makes it so much more fun to to try and go towards this goal and i've still got the new york times list in the back of my mind because you know it's like any actor wants the oscars any anymore it's a stretch goal yeah um but i try not to think about it because for me personally it like leads to sort of sadness and demotivation what what's your what's your take on that pretty similar to yours um i think to start with i was very much of the opinion that if i tell myself to make one or two videos a week then the lazy part of my brain is going to try and make two bad videos a week because it can still achieve that goal while putting in less effort but then as the channel grew it was like i almost trusted myself a bit more it's like if i tell myself i'm going to do two videos a week then i know that i'll make sure they're good videos so the goal was kind of a quality metric quality bar for you as well at what point did you decide i want to be the uk's biggest tech youtuber presumably it wasn't at the age of 15. no no it was towards the tail end of uni it actually worked out quite well because you know i was busy at uni um and to be honest it was some part of it was frustrating because it was like i had this vision but i also had finals and uh finals are not easy so it's kind of like very much like a flurry of like like a whirlwind of just running around completing various tasks and then the second uni ended i felt so so like on it i just had every hour of my waking day to just spend on youtube it was so liberating and i use them all on youtube what was your um sort of pwc saga yeah so so i say to people when they're younger try as many things as possible because if you don't you will end up down some sort of path right it's just not necessarily the path that you want to go down and i think that's where i was because i was kind of you know i was good at maths i was good at writing essays and so i was just kind of you know i picked the subjects that i was strong at and that funnels you into economics and then that funnels you into a certain job and so i was kind of sitting there in my price waterhouse internship which is quite you know it's fairly prestigious but i was not having a good time like i didn't get on that well with the people i just thought the work was mind-numbingly boring and i was like i was sat at my office sketching youtube ideas yeah price waterhouse um don't tell them but but it was definitely a realization of like oh my god i've got to change something this can't be my life i got offered the job appeared up pearly city and then at that point after really thinking about it and evaluating it i turned it down which makes the whole saga seem entirely pointless like why did you go to school to go to uni to go to you know to get this job to then quit before you started um but i think all those things needed to happen for me to realize that youtube was an option and it was a better option oh this is interesting this so so this mirror is my my my exact kind of train of thought over the last few months yeah because a year ago i took a break from medicine as as one does after two years working as a doctor it's very standard to take a gap i'm sure you've got friends who are medics um and i was intending to like travel the world and stuff and then the pandemic happened and it just happened that during the pandemic the youtube channel really started to take off uh for you know probably pandemic related reasons people are at home quite a lot everyone wants to be more productive have a side hustle all of those things that i was talking about started to do really well and it's only in the last few months that i've really been thinking because i always had in the back of my mind that youtube is my side hustle and i do medicine as my main gig and in the last probably a few weeks i kind of admitted to myself that i'm probably never going to be a doctor again and that was that was like really scary because you know there was there was the element of sunk cost uh but you know having read a lot of daniel kahneman stuff i was like okay some course fallacy like who cares yeah it doesn't matter that i've spent six years at uni and two years working um to get to this point there was also an element of fear in that um well there were two aspects of fear one was what if i what if what if i get cancelled and everything disappears then at least i'll be able to be a doctor again as like a a fullback backup option but the other element of fear which i think was stronger was that i built my brand off the back of hey i'm a doctor went to cambridge bloody blah blah blah here is a video about productivity if i now stop being a doctor will people think that am i just a youtuber yeah and did does my kind of internet career now now is is is that going to suffer as a result of losing this badge of this badge of prestige it's like what are you then yeah exactly what the hell am i like yeah how do i how do i describe myself for someone else what do you do it's like oh i make videos on the internet yeah um did you have any of those thoughts as you were leaving a fairly traditional prestigious career that you'd worked for years to get to the back up thing was definitely in my mind like having a backup option um i think youtube definitely felt like a risk more so at that point when it was like you can jump you can make this leap onto this new thing than it does looking back now i think when you look back it's always easier to be like oh yeah of course i made the right decision and it was obvious and yeah but it wasn't at the time yeah i remember having that thought process when i was in my final year of of uni where the youtube channel i think had not even hit a thousand subscribers at that point i was i was on like video number 35 i was on like 400 subscribers and i was thinking okay i've got finals coming up i could take finals seriously or i could take youtube seriously and i was like okay i'm pretty confident that based on my current medical knowledge i could pass finals just not do very well and i'm pretty confident that i'm out of the running for a distinction because of the way the numbers worked out so i was like okay every percentage point i get above a pass mark is therefore kind of wasted effort assuming there's no correlation between performance as a doctor and performance on written exams which most people said it wasn't um so i threw everything into youtube at the time so you're in a position where with very low effort you could get a pass with extremely high effort to potentially maybe probably not even be in the running for a distinction right uh so i thought let's go youtube all the way and ended up kind of just scraping a pass in written finals and then thinking okay cool so that worked out let's take it seriously for the clinical stuff which actually matters um but and in hindsight that was like uh obviously the right thing to do but at the time it felt very much like a hmm i'm not sure this youtube thing has legs but i know i'm gonna kick myself if i don't give it a go yeah you never assume that your channel is going to be like the one to hit a million yeah yeah yeah like i i i think i think at the time i was thinking oh my god if i can hit 4 000 subscribers then like that's like the best thing ever then i had that i was like 10k 10k you're just naming numbers gives you like access to the youtube space oh my god um and it just like the numbers just stop stop meaning anything after a while when you stop being able to visualize them because like 10 000 it's like well my school hall could fit a thousand people like 10 schools that's a lot of people and then but beyond that it's just really hard to take it is as soon as you get to six digits it's i don't think we have any grasp of it we can't yeah so you did the internship you decided to turn down the job offer and now you're going full time on the youtube thing can you remember what what were your stats at the time like what was your sub count what was that right i think yeah 250k subscribers okay um the revenue wasn't amazing i think it was just a bit more than the pwc job like the entrant kind of job because ad revenue wasn't as much then um there was no sponsorships at all because i think it's partly because i didn't know how to get them yeah and also the infrastructure wasn't there like you know five six seven years ago where brands were kind of hopping on and agencies were approaching you okay so you're on 250k subs uh kind of making a living but not like a baller living what did your what did your life look like then like 24 7 youtube what was that was the vibe so as soon as i left uni like i said i had this kind of like i was relieved from the pressure of having to juggle many things so i felt free but also at the same time i pushed myself really hard i think there was this thing in my head of like youtube is one of those platforms who knows how long it's going to be there for while you've got this opportunity run with it so i made a video like every single day it was just me in my back garden just getting tech investing in stuff to then cover to then try and sell and make a bit of a loss on and yeah all that kind of stuff yeah a video every single day how long do you keep that up for about six months ish yeah what did you what did your like day in the life look like then like at the time it was it sounds like because in one day you've got to do everything you've got to script your video in the morning you've got to film your video in the afternoon you then go to edit your video in the evening so it's very much a case of like complete day packed you don't have much time for other things if you take a day off to go see a friend then it's two videos the next day um yeah it was nuts and it did take me to sort of a breaking point i guess where i i was like okay this isn't sustainable i'm going to try a different strategy how did you realize that this wasn't sustainable um so there was one point it was like a really really hot day and i was kind of like i was filming with my camera but i was like kind of like straining my skin hurt i was like super tired and some reason i just started crying i'm not a crier but i just started crying because i was in so much like pain from the kind of like long-term exhaustion and the exhaustion in the moment and it was at that point that i was like i can't i can't finish this video i i just physically i just couldn't do it and then i was like okay it's fine i'm not gonna post a video tomorrow i'll i'll figure it out um even though i was horrified at the thought of like not seeing that uptick in subscribers and be like wasted opportunity but then when i found out that it was okay you know my channel was still alive then i was like okay maybe i'll do one every two days or one every three days and i think when you give yourself that space to be able to take your time with things you can do them better and that was actually a really important moment to be able to kind of like make better videos if i hadn't given myself that space i might still be doing one video a day and they'd be terrible yeah so you start off with the quantity thing because you're thinking that you know this is what the algorithm needs i need i need to feed the machine yeah and then you have a moment where you're like okay maybe quantity is now no longer serving me let's switch to quality yeah i've had to say i think also you can actually you can enjoy the process a bit more when you take time with things like doing things like just to a strict schedule all the time is really just tiring and it means you don't get any time to be creative or you know do anything fun yeah i i had this moment a couple of a couple of weeks ago where you know there was the there was there was a video we put out on the channel maybe last month which you know ended up getting like a ton of dislikes for a very clickbaity kind of title i was like all the comments were like oh my god i can't believe what your channel is turned into like this is awful sorted out i was like okay this is actually all these are all very reasonable comments um people have a point here so i deleted the video and that kind of led me on the soul-searching mission of like okay how did we get to this point where i put out something that was objectively um for the sake of i don't know what and i did like i had i had a few hours on a saturday i think it was about two or three weeks ago in in here where i was just sitting in the in the communal spot by myself for like five hours and i was intending to film a video but i thought you know what i'm just going to open up apple notes and just do some journaling and figure out why i'm feeling a bit weird about this youtube stuff and i realized that i'd been drinking the consistency kool-aid for so long that i just assumed we have to put out two videos a week and yeah we've got a sponsor every week so we just have to put out a video every tuesday and every every sunday it's just one of the laws of physics it has to be done yeah and then i started i realized that a big part of why i've been feeling a bit disconnected from the channel recently is because this drive for of a video like two videos a week on the topic of like kind of productivity personal development stuff where i've kind of said the stuff that needs to be said and now it's like we're really scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to come up with ideas meant that we were putting out videos that i wasn't happy with and then i thought okay what if i just don't stick to that schedule anymore and i did kind of tim ferriss's fear setting exercise and you know what's the worst that can happen one of the worst case scenarios and wrote them all out in in detail and realized that actually these are all these worst case scenarios are pretty unlikely and you know having done this for now for four and a half years focusing on quantity we can now shift to focusing on quality and not being wedded to an upload schedule or not being wedded to this video has to come out at this certain time to appease this particular sponsor because if we want to drop the sponsor in it like it doesn't matter who cares um and then that felt like ridiculously liberating and as i was doing one of these i think as i was doing one of these tim ferriss exercises of like what's the worst case scenario i was like tearing up a bit thinking like oh my god like all of this has gotten to this point where i can be like you know what like i can take a step back and it's not going to be the end of the world yeah um a realization that you have control yeah yeah um and it was very like the that thing you said where you're almost you know i can't go to a friend's wedding because i have work i've found myself thinking of those terms these last few months especially as our team has expanded now and we've got like 16 20 people ish depending on how you come four times and part time um but i found most of my time being spent on being a manager and sort of zoom call after zoom call meeting after meeting after meeting and no time for actually thinking about videos and filming content and stuff which is the thing that i love doing and one of my friends who was i was like i was i was living with is a doctor working in a e where his schedule was like ridiculously absurd and he was like right i've got a day off do you want to grab dinner and i was like oh god no look at my calendar sorry i'm like i've got 20 minutes of time between like 10 p.m and 10 20 p.m and then i have a call with someone from the us at 10 20 and he was like dude what are you doing it's yeah that's bad when you realize your schedule's worth and worse than theirs yeah um so now we're like okay take a step back i'm going to focus on the content angus is going to kind of manage the business side of things and trying to find more of a more of a middle ground there um but it sounds like that's similar to the experience you had on the whole like quality quantity thing yes back then yeah yeah i think i still need to do work on it internally um but more and more i do want to focus on the things i'm good at and the things i'm needed for so i never want to veer away from not being the presence on my channel i don't want other hosts and things like that so if it means having less staff and having a smaller operation overall that's that's fine by me because i i love doing the core parts of it so we're at this point you've done a video every day for a whole six months and then you decide okay we can take the foot off the pedal on quantity and focus on quality what what happens next on the channel there wasn't some sudden miraculous kind of like oh this this worked this was the secret um but i think you know i did an economics degree i'm very data driven as it is so i guess it's this kind of like slow but measured level of improvement from video to video as you're kind of like looking at retention graphs and being like oh you know loads of people dropped off there i'm not going to do that again and kind of like from video to video when you're still doing content regularly there's so much information available about what works and what doesn't you know i don't i don't think any other company or creator gets what you do as a substantially sized youtuber in terms of like metrics to evaluate yourself with yeah um companies would pay ridiculous amounts of money for data that like that yeah so if you know how to use it it's extremely powerful how how how do you use it i don't look at my metrics at all so i would love to learn from you about like what can i be doing how much time do you spend in the youtube analytics i look at it for every single video that i post so two days after it's gone live i'll kind of i'll spend a good half an hour just going through it being like what countries did this hit how long did those people stay on for when did the majority drop off was there a significant spike or a significant dip did certain parts make people go back things like that because you can see all of it it's like why wouldn't you well you don't but i think you should yeah i really think i should as well like yeah so i found things like for example if i asked people to subscribe really early in the video it was detrimental because you'd get a drop of like 20 percent of viewers potentially but they wouldn't be subscribing they'd just be irritated by the fact you've asked them to subscribe without showing them why um because at the start of a video in the first like 15 seconds people are very very easy to lose it's at that point that they decide whether they're going to you know full screen you and kind of invest in this video or whether they're gonna you know click on one of the 30 that are kind of grabbing their attention from the side how should i start if i if i if you're like if you were like kind of my youtube mentor or whatever like how would you advise me to start looking at retention graphs and analytics a bit more what's what's like a good a good starting point um i would look for troughs so look at kind of points where you've got viewers that are stable and then when they go down and try to identify why they've gone down at that point so for example one of the other things i found was like i would do a round off at the end of a video and at the point where you start rounding off a video anyone who feels like they've got it yeah they're like okay i'm done this is the end of the video and so instead what i've started doing is the the second i finish the key content i'm talking about the next video so it's literally like and that's what happened to samsung okay for the video on this that's there for the video on this that's there and i found immediately that like the amount of clicks i was getting on my end cards to lead to the next video where like they tripled and so my outro now has my face in it it didn't used to have my face in it it just used to be this kind of blaring music but now it feels like a continuation of the main content yeah and i'm kind of being like look over there look over there and they can see me pointing to videos um and i think actually i think you said this once uh not that long ago actually that the people who watch till the end are the most valuable audience members because they're more likely to follow through right yeah yeah so the the the end card thing is something that we started doing as well uh about about a year ago and it and it worked really nicely but kind of beyond that i didn't really i don't really look at the numbers because it's scary it's yeah it's scary it also feels like and i don't know if this is a relic of my kind of olden days of like just i think i have to drunk the consistency kool-aid way too much where it's like once you made a video then forget about the video on to the next one and the kind of one percent improvements over time i think i've been doing from my own gut of like oh it would be cool if the next video had this thing and especially when i was editing my own videos that was a lot easier to do now that there's like a layer between me and the video being edited it's actually harder especially because our editor question is in romania it's it's it's a lot harder to affect change even with the whole remote thingy and even with like frame i o and all this all this other stuff that i'm now even thinking to the point of like let's get christian to switch to final cut pro so he can send me the project file and i can i can do the final cut myself um so that i can then have more finely tuned control over what's going on in the video i can understand that like i've not still fully handed off stuff that i probably should have handed off because it's your baby right it's your face it's your voice it's your it's your name um so i understand that um but to be honest i've actually benefited a lot from having two people it's not a big team but two people who are specialists in their area and who like i can hand things to and i know they'll do them better than i would okay well what does your team look like right now so it's editor camera guy okay it's very very basic but it's my camera garm editor they're very very good at their jobs to the point where i'm like if i've got any piece of graphics i want doing i will consult them because i know that they'll know better than me oh how long have you had those guys for uh editor for about three years camera guy for about a year do you do any of the editing yourself now i do it as a last resort if there's like something really urgent which there does tend to be with tech like you know if apple does an event you want to react to it you're editing that video um because you can't ask your employees to stay up all night although they do that actually voluntarily but i don't ask them um but yeah so i'll do it if i have to and like well one thing that really strikes me about your videos is that basically every second there is something going on and i can't help but continuing to watch it and then the meta part of me is thinking ah i love like all of these different things that are going on to make me encourage and encourage me to keep watching this and the content itself is very valuable and so i think one thing that we do well on this on on my channel is that the content is broadly valuable but we do basically nothing when it comes to the visual side of things and it may as well be a podcast yes and i think like that anytime i see one of your videos i feel like ridiculously inspired like oh my god like the amount of post production that's gone into this it's insane it's a kind of the the way i describe it is a an aggregation of micro refinements so it's like all that stuff hasn't happened overnight if you kind of go back through the channel and watch one video every year you'd see a few new things each time so like the day that i decided okay i'm gonna spend more time on music and try to create moods with what i'm saying the day i decided to put my face in a circle so i'm visible at all times and we've tried these experiments looked at those graphs seen that they've worked and then realized okay these are mainstays data is is it like you have a gut feeling that when i put my face on the thing while showing overlay it will work and then you actually and then you look at the data or yeah yeah exactly that so you have a gut feeling you try it it works or it doesn't work and then you action it and how can you how can you tell like you adding your face versus not adding a face it's not like you're releasing the same video face no face so you have a control it's tough but like i think when you spend that much time with the data you have a gauge on how well a certain video will keep people okay so for example i know that if i make a camera comparison they don't have good retention like an average camera comparison might have 45 50 retention okay right and so if you do a camera comparison and it gets 55 percent you're like that is an outlier oh okay or if i do an unboxing or a top ten if i do a top ten that's going to get really good retention and so you'll know what to expect and in your top tens you start out or you start from number 10 rather than number one always and you go so something like you know and it starts off it starts off a and then becomes b and then becomes positively c and it's like it's all so it's just so clever i spend a lot of time on the scripts um and the other thing i do actually is when i'm scripting i'm thinking of three different people okay so there's three people i know in my life of different levels of i guess tech enthusiasm and so with every line i've almost reached the stage where i'm scanning it being like is this interesting to all these three people would they watch this would they watch this would they watch this would they understand this is this funny to them all that kind of stuff and i think when you do that you end up with a script that is a little more broadly appealing than it would otherwise be how much time do you spend on scripting that's that's most of what i do okay so like for a standalone let's say for a kind of google pixel versus iphone 13 pro camera comparison 22 minute long video so that would is it 20 minutes 22 minutes yeah oh yeah that was your toilet break that was my toilet break yeah i'm watching that double speed obviously um i think that was probably three and a half days of scripting three and a half days yeah of like are we talking eight hour days no we're talking like 14 hour days we're talking like for 42 hours spent on scripting a single video ages and eight minutes ages because i do the initial kind of like what i think is going to happen yeah then i test the phones and kind of like because remember like what i'm saying i am having to create my own findings i'm not taking things and like doing you know passing them on yeah so you have to make sure for every single thing you say it is correct and that that is one thing that i almost wouldn't i wouldn't trust anyone else with because it's my name and my yeah as well yeah yeah yeah so i know how to test these products but it takes time bloody hell what about for like a stand like you see so you did a video that was um ways in which tech is bad uh or so i'm worried about humans yes yeah that was a bit of a departure from your phones it was vibe yeah um you're not gonna like this it took about eight days of scripting i think so about 100 hours of scripting something like that yeah i wasn't i wasn't keeping track but it was a long time it's the kind of time that like the practical part of me is thinking like is this time well spent um but sometimes i kind of like i get carried away thinking about how viewers are gonna think you know i'm thinking about these three different categories of viewers and um and then sometimes scripts get away away from you it's like okay this should be a 12 minute video and then you actually try and do it and you're like oh my god that's 25 26 minutes so sometimes things add up out of your control and i don't tamper them because sometimes i'm like it's okay this is going to be a big project this is going to do really well over time it's going to hit the youtube criteria it's fine we'll spend more time on it i was once watching an interview with penn and teller you know the magicians yeah um where they were it was it was at some kind of magic convention of some of some sort um because i was super cool into close-up magic back in the day i left close up match i should exchange some tricks sometimes uh i actually have a few decks of cards in here that someone gifted anyway um some someone asked like they did some like ridiculous special on like uh david letterman or something and pen was describing how the how they did it and they were like i mean we we literally hired a cockroach firm to put 10 000 cockroaches in this tank shipped it across i don't know the atlantic to the david letterman show like three months before our appearance built some stuff into the thing and it's just like in a really elaborate process and he said and there and they said something like um often magic is spending more time than anyone thinks is reasonable on doing a thing and that was kind of what i was thinking when you're like bringing 50 hours of scripting for a 20 minute camera comparison 100 hours of scripting for a a listicle about ways in which you're worried about tech like yeah that's just insane i don't maybe i don't there's a lot of classes because like like you're doing your factual pass yeah or you go through and you're like okay i said that the pixel's camera was better than the iphones in this so when you're checking that you've then got to go take these phones out and just like take loads and loads of photos to make sure it's right yeah and then you're doing like a a fun pass are there enough fun bits and are they scattered in the right places like we plan a lot of the jokes we're gonna make and like the things that are gonna be thrown at me during the video and stuff like that like because we want to make sure that there are points of respite because obviously it's a tech video right it's going to be very heavy on information and no one wants to sit through 25 minutes of pure like this isn't uni yeah so you have to kind of think about those things and you end up doing all these passes and that adds so much time to it and you're still making like sometimes three videos a week sometimes more than that like it's not three it's probably a video a week right now the goal is two videos a week two really good videos a week but i think i need more people to be able to do that bloody hell okay and then when you're testing the cameras for example you've got your camera guy who's like filming you testing the cameras and and stuff yeah our processes are efficient given that we only have two people but they could be more efficient if we had five yeah um i think i want to be in a position where i'm only doing the things that i want to do and the things that i need to do okay and so right now there are still a few situations where i'm not doing that but i'm getting there what what i don't what i wouldn't want is like a huge corporate structure and twenty people yeah like people would like middle management so that would be horrible we've got a few of them in this video absolutely tell me more about your about your process for videos like i'm gonna i'm going full selfish murder i just wanna i just wanna learn from you here so before i think most youtubers when you reach a certain size you start planning videos backwards so when you think about a video you're thinking about thumbnail title would people click on it um and then from there you're like okay what's the content going to be like is it engaging is it delivering value will people finish that video thinking whoa i like this guy and then at that point then you're thinking you take a step further back it's like okay what's the storyline what's the subplot how are you keeping people throughout that video engaged and then you work all the way back and then that's the point where you've got your content you know what your next step is but the way the normal the trigger point is either an idea i've had embedded or some past video that did really well that people really enjoyed and they're like can we have a part two yeah or something someone else has done that i think that's a really interesting idea what if i applied it to phones or you know gadgets or whatever i really got a sense that there was a story line because you were like i'm going to tell you about this product but there's like but but there's a question here like who's it for and it was like you were you kept on that was like a thread going through going through the content and all that stuff is the stuff that you do in your kind of multiple passes of figuring out it's almost like writing a book it is in my head like i never thought i'd write as much as i do like when i was a kid i thought i'll be doing something where i'm working on an excel spreadsheet or something it didn't occur to me that my job is basically video essays video essays it's an interesting way but that is what it is i think i've almost like i've moved into my own like this tech youtube and i do that yeah but i think i'm moving more towards like the analytical side of things yeah where i'm trying to break down things from an economics perspective yeah like you did a kind of journey versus someone some samsung video which was very interesting you did like uh things you didn't know about tesla video which was very interesting and this like kind of why why why i hate humanity or that why tech is destroying the world type and i as seeing those i was just like really surprised i was like oh i wonder what this video is going to be like that's like bloody hell this is a really good video were you concerned moving away from the niche inverted commas of phones into this more like analytical type stuff yeah i actually so at the start of my channel the tech was very broad and actually so the focus was gaming consoles because that's what i was interested in at the time and then there was a point when i decided to focus on phones because i didn't want to have a fragmented audience but what i was found finding even early on is that because i was making videos on so many different things i had 20 percent of my audience who wanted to see gaming consoles 20 want to see headphones wants to pc phones and that meant that every single time i posted a video only 20 of people would like want to see that and so i decided actually okay phones i'm interested in phones there is you know reliable big recurring market i'm gonna focus on that but then when you get to a certain size being niche caps you yeah so i'm now starting to think about things like i would like to cover laptops i am interested in those two i'll bring those in or cars or other things like that do you use a teleprompter i've started using a teleprompter two months ago okay what's that what's that been like it helps so i'm obsessive with my videos right i script them to the word yeah and so if you're going to have that kind of production a teleprompter makes so much sense it reduces the kind of the stress on the day of filming and it means you can get through it faster and we've had scripts where for like for some videos i've sat there for four and a half hours straight like just filming before the teleprompter and that video you could do in like half the time with a teleprompter wait a minute you're filming for four and a half hours on a video that's fully scripted yeah yeah why does it take so long because i i start thinking about like how i should be pronouncing certain things and what emphasis i need to put on what words and all of a sudden you start retaking your sentences again and again and again and again and apologizing to your cameraman for having to kind of like redo the movement and then also it's like for these fun bits so for example i've got a video coming up where we're trying to make a phone levitate to just because i'm saying that the phone feels alive and so at that point we're like okay let's tie it to fishing wire and let's lift it while i'm doing that but that takes so much time to get right because you've got to get your inflection right and at the same time you've got to make sure that that's lifted it doesn't fall on you the screen is facing the right way and it adds so much variables and then we're trying to bring in like the cats every now and again for like in like little breaks and you can't control the cats very easily so normally one once per video i'm like going downstairs shouting milo like several times until he comes and like i take him up feed him it just adds up it just bloody hell okay so you put uh an unreasonable amount of time in scripting and also it seems an unreasonable amount of time in filming to get all the things right yeah yeah and it's like how i i don't think anyone anyone watching your videos would would think that your 20 minute video took four hours to film yeah yeah sometimes people like they leave comments like uh so sometimes i make a battery test video where i've got like eight phones on the table and like you can see their batteries run down and people leave a comment like this man spent eight hours giving us this um you know amazing video or something useful video and what they don't realize is that eight hours was just the start of it uh to take to set up that table for that video was a four-hour job in itself because you have to do things like have you ever seen these videos so the camera is like locked above yeah the battery ones yeah yeah where it's like a time-lapse of like traffic right now so every single phone is taped to the table multiple times so that it doesn't budge the camera every hinge of the camera is taped together so that the camera doesn't budge um there's so many things that happen like we're using like laser pointers to make sure it's perfectly vertical yeah um like you have to do image corrections to make sure there's no distortion like there's more there's more to it if you want it because i'm quite perfectionist like i want it to be a certain way and when you're like that you're your own worst nightmare presumably you weren't like this when you were making one video every day no okay when did this like kind of perfectionism develop well i always want i always want to get better yeah and so like when you see an opportunity to get better you take it yeah and that's what leads you to having like a lot of things to think about so like at the point where you decide okay my face is going to be in a circle throughout the video yeah then when you're filming you're aware of that and then you have to film in a different way yeah you can't just like avoid your script yeah um but if it makes the videos better you do it yeah yeah it's got to be done yeah i mean i've i've had the same philosophy on like i will i will basically do whatever it takes to make the video better but i now i am now seeing just how much more there is to go in terms of making videos better because if i if i script for like two hours i think oh my god this is like a ridiculously cryptic scripted video two hours yeah genuinely like my the the the videos uh the most scripted video i've done was my first video that went viral um viral uh which is on how to study for exams and that was probably about six hours of scripting because it was like a literature review going over the going on pubmed finding the studies finding the graphs and then maybe an extra like 20 hours in the edit to animate the graphs and stuff for the first time and i've never put so much effort into a video since then um unbelievable those hours just aren't comprehensible to me yeah i mean your 100 scripting is like i'm just thinking oh my god like i thought i was doing a good job in terms of trying to trying to make the videos kind of i don't take this as me doing a good job i take this as me not maybe using my time as efficiently as i should be i i don't think it's good you know when you're trying to like build a brand and stuff yeah and do other things i think you have to let go a bit i think you said something to me actually about if someone else can do the job 80 as well you should let them um yeah it's tough for me to get to that but i can see why yeah i think i've i've i've been thinking about that phrase a lot like so when i first made uh well when i did my first kind of successful business at uni helping people get into med school i made the mistake of not delegating enough and the advice i then came across a few years later was this thing of if someone can do the job 80 as well as you can you should delegate it to them because your time is worth more you can do more things and i think when it comes to growing a business like that that makes a lot of sense and i took that advice when it came to youtube as well because my my philosophy on this in the past was again optimizing for quantity and recognizing that there is an algorithm to feed there is a beast to feed i i kind of felt that the value for my videos was not in the edit it was not in a matt davella style cinematography or peter mckinnon stuff cinematography or mr who's the boss 2021 style like something happening every one second it was in providing somewhat valuable information and doing it with some kind of like friendly friendly kind of vibes yeah um and so that led to the that uh those axioms led to i think of okay cool i can then therefore outsource editing because the editing it's not that important background music doesn't really matter we'll just slap whatever from epidemic sound i've got a list of kind of songs that i like i don't like drums cool that could that creates a vibe and a few like tweaks here and there where it meant that i can turn around a video with like a lot of our best videos have had 20 minutes of bullet point scripting and then me just spieling because i'm usually talking about stuff that i know sufficiently well if someone asks me about time management or about productivity or about personal finance or money or whatever i can i can just like talk about it um and that has gotten us to this point but there is that thing of what's gotten you here won't necessarily get you there and i think when you're when you're competing in like world-class leagues the whole 80 delegation thing i wonder if that stops being effective i think there's also an element of i think the reason i don't personally adopt it is because some part of me thinks what's the goal there yeah it's obviously created with this idea of like earn the most money um but that's not really me like i don't do things to earn money i have enough if if you enjoy certain parts of the job and you think you'll have a better output from it and you'll get better comments and better engagement yep i would rather do that even if it earns me less yeah yeah that makes a lot of sense um what is your goal for for youtube these days i think recently i have started thinking about things like legacy and like what i want my brand to mean and things like that um which is a very luxurious position to be in um i think i'm not worried about numbers or getting more subscribers it would be great to do that and i'm sure the day that i hit 10 million is going to be amazing and i'm going to celebrate and yeah i'm really looking forward to it but um it's a bit bigger than that like i am thinking about things like books apps other things that i want to just try why i guess i never would have thought i had the opportunity to and now that i do it's it'll be fun it'd be different i might be good at it i might really enjoy it it'll be a new experience if nothing else so i was gonna ask you this like how do you think about your brand career it's like let's say over the next five to ten years it's tough you know because like i think a lot of the growth has happened recently so i'm still taking in the fact that i have a large youtube channel now it's it's new to me so i haven't had much time to think about these things but um i like to think of myself as a teacher i think if i had to identify myself as one thing it would be someone who educates people and so i would like my brand to mean or be associated with teacher okay and so whether that means through books apps i'm not too sure what the mechanism is yet but i have that kind of vision of like being i guess synonymous with technology or education once you realize that that's what you wanted to do very recently okay how did you come to the realization i have like a so i've got this new management team and i think while i'm kind of stuck in the nitty-gritty they're very good at sort of seeing the bigger picture and we have these kind of weekly calls where they're used to seeing the journey and the trajectory of youtubers becoming businesses and so they can kind of like impart a bit of that wisdom or like this is what has worked for this person this person found this thing really fun consider it okay and so i have considered it so how did that land on teacher um they asked me at one point like what what do you see yourself as and it was then kind of a moment of self-reflection where i was like okay if you boiled it down that is what i do i'm trying to like make tech fun and you see that as being like a t-shirt type role yeah interesting yeah i think like if i had if i was put into a school and someone said you have a class to teach of like 20 kids i think i do a really good job um not saying that that is the job that i want to do like you know i can obviously through my camera i can teach millions um but that that is actually what i like so i had a similar a similar realization about probably in the last year where i was trying to answer this question of what the hell do i want to do with my life and one of the strategies i came across was um the idea of asking yourself what do you want written on your gravestone no and i thought i thought about this i was like okay let's actually take this seriously what do i want right now written on my gravestone and i came very quickly i was like okay some combination of good father good husband and inspirational teacher and i was like oh that's interesting i hadn't quite realized that because at the time i was really thinking do i want to do medicine do i want to do medicine and then realizing that if that's what i want written on my gravestone and we were to work back from that like do i care about practicing medicine or do i care more about teaching it and i realized that all of the times where i've had the most fun in hospitals and at uni has been when i was teaching other medical students rather than when i was doing the job and i was like oh that's interesting and then reflecting back on my life again i was doing like math tutoring when i was like 14 onwards and private tutoring and like a bunch of teaching in med school and a bunch of teaching as a doctor and youtubers teaching has you figured out um i was like oh this actually you know that's the thing that gives me fulfillment therefore let's try and do more of this stuff and that's actually changed your whole like approach yeah because now i'm like great given that that's like the end goal to be dead to be dead yeah to be dead having been a good father good husband and a good teacher and then that actually simplifies my life a bit because now i don't need to be wedded to uh for example practicing medicine i don't need to be wedded to for example um you know we we've been working with this business coach which has actually been been been really helpful trying to figure out what's what's the core focus of the business and um landed on the phrase that sounds kind of cringe um to help people live their best life by creating inspiring educational content okay and yeah and the more times i say it the more comfortable i become with saying it but that that focus kind of goes with the teaching thing that ultimately that's what we're trying to do and it means that like yes it would be cool to you know we're launching a stationary line it would be cool to make my own keyboard it would be cool to have my own everyday carry bag but that so those are all side quests and i can recognize them as being side quests and it's just it's just a little bit of spice whereas the core focus the main thing is is related to teaching i like the ideology but i find it hard to like make my end goal something that will only happen when i'm not here anymore if you see what i mean this idea of aiming for what's going to be on your gravestone yeah it won't matter to you you won't be able to experience it i think i prefer the idea of aiming for what do you want your life to be those kinds of things in 10 years because that is an end goal that i can experience ah got it so i i i agree gravestone stuff you know what are people gonna say at your funeral that kind of vibes is all very very very like long-term thinking there's another another thing that i've been using recently more kind of short to medium term which is uh what does my ideal ordinary week look like one year from now five years from now 10 years from now and that's a lot more about like actually i would go on on my calendar fast forward to you're like 20 26 i'll be like all right like let's block out the sorts of things i'd like to be doing um and through that i realized oh cool i i like the idea of having one day where all of my kind of in-person collaboration with the team is i was like oh in person great let's build an in-person team rather than a remote team i realized that oh i want to be doing like squash and tennis and badminton like you know once a week cool let's block that in blocks of deep work deep work deep work deep work where the thing that i enjoy doing is reading writing and teaching cool let's block that in deep work oh just like for focus blocks of work for um where where i'm not interrupted by calls and things like that okay um yeah the book feels high pressure high pressure yeah like telling myself that certain amounts of time are going to be deep work oh it's like yeah there's a book by cal newport called deep work which is what what that reference is where it's basically like look if you want to do something well you need to have uninterrupted blocks of time to do it um it sounds like your calendar is fairly deep working by default if you can have a hundred i think it is i would say i feel intimidated yeah but if i sat down and feel like right now to do something deep work yeah um how do you think of what you want your kind of week to look like i'd say a year from now the main thing for me is i'd like to have a little more control over my time you know this whole fear of like blocking off days and things i think that's my one current barrier which i'm trying to kind of get over because i have enough as it is i am happy i'm content like i'm living a good life and i think that kind of fomo i get from like missing out on potential things that could be happening it won't really matter in terms of my end goal so i just need to get better at kind of like separating that and then i'm good being more okay being okay with like signing up to a friend's wedding yeah yeah even if it means saying no to a helicopter trip yeah yeah how do you think about money mostly i use it just for convenience so like it might mean that i could take an uber instead of walking or it just allows you to live your life in the way that you want to live your life um you could order in food one time instead of like needing to cook yourself those kinds of things um i don't buy a lot of possessions i get sent a lot because of my work but i personally like very irregularly because i mean the things that i enjoy and things that i look forward to are basically just all experiences like this weekend is worth more to me than any like macbook yeah you know this is this whole idea of hit on adaptation that once you hit like whatever whatever you gain you become accustomed to that thing and then you are then it you need more of that thing to to to satisfy yourself um i find that for me the more money i make the more the goal post shifts the more the bar for how much money i need to be comfortable starts to suddenly rack up and it's like oh you know i thought i was actually pretty happy in a thousand pound a month rental place but four thousand a month gets you a really nice rental place and so i'm not even gonna really look at what ten thousand about gets you like that level of stuff yeah do you do you find yourself doing that at all um yeah it's actually like i think about hedonic adaptation a lot and i actively try not to do it because i think it leads you to a life of like living in a huge house with a enormous suite of cars on your own um feeling like you can't even hang out with normal people because your life is so far removed from theirs that you're different so i don't think it's a good path to go down but it's really hard to separate yourself from it it's like if you could afford a lamborghini why would you not buy a lamborghini um those are internal conversations that i'm sure like most top youtubers will have with themselves um but i mean the way i like look at cars is like okay i'll get a crummy car and then two years later i'll get a medium car and then i'll get a slightly nicer one it's like a nice one like there's no rush to get to that end goal and so even if you could theoretically afford a lamborghini you're like working up to the buying of a lamborghini potentially if that's what you're into yeah rather than just going straight for it because you can yeah and i also like the way i see houses is like a big house you can only be in one room at any one time right like i don't like i don't see the point yeah i quite like the idea of less time spent hoovering flaws on you know like three different stories and more time just doing things i want to do i mean the value of a big house is in being able to host people i think yeah but then it's very easy to like get an airbnb and just do the same that's what's what i'm doing tomorrow oh yeah and actually that way you can have different locations every time you have a party and have more different experiences do you think about the like other than the car thing do you think about the hedonic adaptation in other aspects of yeah yeah um i think about it a lot when it comes to tech um so i made this video right i'm worried about humanity and the underlying theme is that we are choosing ways of life that are higher stimulation right yeah everything around us is becoming higher stimulation um did you see the meta facebook rebranding as meta because they're trying to build a metaverse okay okay yeah facebook has changed names to meta right and the idea is they're trying to build a world where everyone has almost a real life experience with people from their homes where you can put on glasses for example connect with people in a way that you've never connected before to the point where it's indistinguishable from actually being with these people and the point is we're moving towards higher and higher levels of stimulation but hedonic adaptation means that we will adapt to those levels of stimulation and so we won't be happier because of it but the only thing we will feel is let down by other people so the more the stimulation level rises the more that relative to that the people around us fall is it kind of like when you're used to listening to things at 2x speed and you realize people don't talk it to experience yes and there's a part of you that feels like a bit slowly yeah yeah 100 um i force myself with my friends well with some of the friends i really care about to listen at one time speed for that reason why didn't you move to london uh i was born in nottingham i've grown up in nottingham it's like my hometown um one day i want to move to london but i want to do it for the right reasons not because i'm like tied to my friends because they've got jobs they're busy it's not like i'm gonna come here and then all of a sudden my social life's gonna like rock it forward i'll do it when it feels right i think there was something you said in a video you said uh youtube is a privilege of a job to have but can also breed an attitude that creates relentless unhappiness what do you what do you mean by that equating me to myself holding it to yourself yeah it's a privilege of a job to have in that you can work from anywhere and you can pretty much do anything and how many people can say that but but at the same time it's almost like that whole stimulation thing the dopamine hit the hedonic adaptation in that like you very quickly adjust to that and then you start thinking about what's next so you become comfortable with the fact that you have such a great lifestyle and flexibility that you do and you start aiming for higher and higher numbers because it's so metric driven it's that idea and it's a trap that i think most youtubers at some point fall into and i think it leads us to making content that we're not proud of like your clickbait video um because you're not even thinking at that point about viewers you're just thinking oh i've got to get more subscribers and the way to get more subscribers is this this works this is a data driven yeah i'm just gonna do it how do you feel when you get a video that's like tanking relative to your stuff that's like 10 out of 10 on that on the stats like what what goes through your mind when if that ever happens to be honest recently i've been pretty good at like knowing when a video is not going to do that well um i haven't been surprised for a while actually um i used to be very tied to it i used to be like it would ruin my day and i felt only as good as the last video i'd uploaded that's a youtuber thing um but more and more now i'm pretty much like i'll post a video and i'm like this will get a million in the first day this will get two million in the first i'll know like roughly there's another thing i want to quote to you which i thought was interesting um you said as as the channel was getting bigger it felt like this continuous race to remain relevant among some of the most creative hardworking people on the planet and that that really struck home with me because i i feel this continuous uh pressure to remain relevant when i was starting out on youtube it's like you know i felt like that scrappy startup you know just just kind of having fun oh my god oh my god things are working now that i'm of a reasonable size i am now the incumbent like the old school boomer guy who is like struggling i feel struggling to remain relevant but do you feel like you're at the top i don't feel i'm at the top top but i feel i'm sort of in the in the major leagues with people who are in this sort of personal development type space other than tech there are very few youtubers who are big today who were big 10 years ago and all these thoughts of you know what if my videos stopped becoming relevant to people what if no one stopped people stopped caring what if my whole kind of this internet career falls down because of the fact that people stopped watching my stuff because they no longer identify with what i say do you worry about that kind of stuff at all i think i'm really lucky in the genre i picked because i think with tech like by its very nature providing you're covering the latest tech you are relevant um so as long as your videos are interesting and informative and people trust your opinion you will continue to remain relevant not that i'm taking it for granted but like i still want to make every video better than the last but if the next iphone comes out and i cover it i think it's it's safe to assume that people will watch it yeah like i i sympathize with gamers you know like gamers can build up like millions of subscribers for one game like minecraft and then when interest with minecraft falls their entire channel just falls apart yeah and they have to switch game and pretty much like start audience from scratch that that's horrific yeah yeah that's really tricky um yeah i guess tech is one of those nice things where as i i think you also tech age as well in that in that as a as a creator marquez is like more of an authority on tech than he was 10 years ago whereas in other things like i started out in the student market as a student you are less of an authority 10 years after graduation than you were at the point of graduation where you had all this like wisdom about what it's like being a student i never thought of that no you're right you're right the the ceiling the age ceiling is very high yeah i often get messages from wannabe youtubers like new youtubers starting out people instagram people take talk asking for kind of how how to become more confident on camera uh you come across as very confident on camera and this is sort of like four hours of filming if we ignore that side of things you do seem pretty confident on camera which strikes me as probably not how you were when you first started out um what would be your kind of top tips for someone looking to become more more camera confident i think like it's the scariest thing but you have to just try it and i think try it almost ready to receive criticism and then unmask that criticism into some useful feedback so it's like to to start with like when i first put my face on i knew that there was going to be some comments there that i wasn't excited to read yeah and it was horrifying that that thought but i was like well they'll be usefulness so there were people like you idiot sit further away from the camera and if you take away you idiot that's actually a really useful piece of feedback um and then i did that and then it's like get your microphone out the frame and i'm like okay and then i research where do you put microphones oh underneath okay great i'll do that and slowly but surely you start to move towards a quality that you're actually proud of but you've got to accept the fact that to start with it won't be yeah because you're watching people who've been doing it for 10 years for example yeah a lot of artists talk about this about how if you're starting out with drawing it feels very motivating because you know what good looks like and you know that that's not what you're doing and um oh the there was this book i was reading a couple of days ago called uh the gain and the gap and how essentially if you're if you focus on measuring the gap between where you are and where you want to be that can be very demotivating whereas if you focus on measuring the gain like where have where are you compared to where you were you can still keep where you want to be in mind but you don't fixate on you don't fixate on the gap i guess like the the advice i usually give to people is is also you will suck at the start and that's okay a like no one really cares like it's it's not the end of the world and you have to you do have to kind of put in your reps to get better at the thing yeah and you put in your rep through your kind of 300 videos before or kind of like a video every single day for six months and once you've put in the reps and if you're thinking about marginal improvement over time you just naturally get very good at doing the thing when you've been doing it for long enough yeah and if you feel like you're still not sure all you need to do is to look at big creators at the start providing they haven't deleted their old videos yeah everyone will have been bad i think yeah i think that's oh that's often quite i s one of the videos we show in our youtuber course is uh marquez's like 100th video where he's like right video number 100 yeah yeah i want to want to give a good shout out to my 74 subscribers yeah that keeps showing up and i recommend it yeah it occasionally comes up yeah that's quite quite interesting to see um this has been fantastic i'd i'd love to um end with some like a quick fiery type questions okay so quickfire um what advice would you give to your younger self it'll be okay um who would you say has had the biggest influence on your career probably marquez oh how so marquez so mkbhd he was one of the tech channels i watched when i was younger and when i was kind of with my friends and we were talking about being a youtuber and getting 10 000 subscribers and things like that so from a very early age i kind of he provided a framework for what how it could work what's one tip for someone who's looking for success start with something you enjoy and that you're passionate about and that you'd want to be the best at what does the first and last hour of your day look like so both of them more recently are without phones so my entire waking day is with phones and the first two are like get out of bed first start your day and then turn off airplane mode and the last hour of my day is normally like just lying in a dark room somewhere oh interesting okay it's a thing about sleep like i've had a lot of problems in the past with sleep yeah and one of the piece of advice that's really helped is trying to sync your life with the real life cycle of the sun and that involves the brightness of the rooms you're in so i look like a bit of a freak but if someone calls me for example like when i'm about to sleep i will just be sitting in darkness and does that helped your sleep nice what material item item under 100 pounds could you not live without slash has added disproportionate value to your life it would be under 100 on ebay okay uh the ember mug oh really so i drink a lot of tea yup and when i drink my tea i like the reassurance that it's not going to go cold i enjoy it at 62 degrees 52 yeah yeah so um my ember mug allows me to kind of drink it at that temperature oh fair play i had an ember mug for a few weeks and i never found myself using it it would always like go cold and there's a wire and like heating up and well i like i like having one mug because then it saves washing up yeah so like every time after i've used this mug i'll just rinse it there and then put it to the side so that means that there's no loads of mugs piling up for example so it's a two in one nice yeah they've recently released a white one which i was thinking of getting because it i prefer white vibes than doctors as well yes um what book would you recommend to anyone i actually really enjoyed steve bartlett's book um yeah yeah it's good yeah it's very good if you lost everything let's say youtube channel's gone um fame has gone money's gone but you still got all the skills how would you start from scratch what would you be doing i think what i do is like jump straight back in after my morning period yeah um i would probably i mean algorithms now are very favorable to people who know how to make good content so even if you like start a brand new channel if you make a great video you'll very quickly be categorized into this channel makes good videos and so you have lots of situations where like big creators will start second channels and those cycle channels will very quickly catch up or get a surge in subscribers because of that so even though i feel like i've got loads of capital that i built up it wouldn't be lost because the main asset is the skill set what quote or mantra do you live by i actually don't love quotes i feel like they sacrifice practicality for sounding cool a lot of the time and finally in journey or destination journey nice all right aaron thank you so much for for coming on this has been an absolute joy it's been amazing i've learned so much about youtube and stuff and i feel like i'm now going to go into a hall and be like oh my god like i need to reassess if i thought two hours of scripting was a long time to spend on a video needs to reassess either reassess because 100 is not okay that's how magic happens you spend an unreasonable amount of time on on something that other people wouldn't wouldn't do and yeah i'd say that's a big part of why you're why why you've gone here but yeah thank you for being so honest thank you for being so transparent with everything it's it's been really great thank you and we'll put links to all of our stuff in the video description for whatever that's worth at your scale but hopefully a little trickle a little a trickle of people can confide your channel right that's it for this week's episode of deep dive thank you so much for watching i hope you enjoyed this episode as much as i did links to all the things we talked about including aaron's youtube channel and all the all that jazz will be in the show notes or in the video description if you're watching this on youtube and wherever you're watching this please be pleased we'd love for you to leave a review on apple podcasts that's where the reviews matter even if you don't use an apple device even if you're not listening on apple podcasts you will find a review link in the show notes and we'd love for you to give the show give the episode give the the podcast preferably a five star review and some comments as well because it helps more people discover the podcast anyway thanks so much for listening have a great evening and i'll see you hopefully in the next episode bye

Channel: Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal

Views: 1,725,784

Keywords: Ali Abdaal, mrwhosetheboss, Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal, podcast, ali abdaal podcast, How To Build A 10 Million Following, How To Build A 10 Million Following - Mrwhosetheboss, Managing your time, Life as an influencer, Creating YouTube videos, How MrWhoseTheBoss Grew on YouTube

Id: TQqKOi8UGG4

Length: 96min 59sec (5819 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 06 2021