- My name is Ginny Di, I'm 33 years old. I live in Denver, Colorado and I basically play tabletop
games like D&D for a living. People are often really shocked that somebody can make
a living off of this, and it's not like I'm just scraping by, I actually support both
myself and my partner on my income from this job. The next question people
usually ask is how. (light upbeat music) I didn't just like wake
up one day and quit my job and decide to become a
professional D&D content creator. I got my college degree in English, I was planning to write, and after graduating I
started working in marketing. I used to make stuff online just for fun and then at one point I started to realize it was possible to make money off of it, and that basically
immediately became my goal. In 2017, I quit my job in marketing to go full-time as a cosplay
content creator actually, I was not playing tabletop
games yet at that point. In December, I resigned
from my full-time job and as of this video, I am a self-employed
full-time content creator. But by the time I made that
transition to full-time I was already making enough
money off of my side hustle that I wasn't scared to quit my job. For me, it wasn't just jumping straight from stable job to nothing. I had already been
building a business online for a long time when I quit my job. Back then, it was definitely a
struggle to make enough money and it was like that for a few years. YouTube was not really a
successful platform for me then. I would make like $15 a year. Then I started playing D&D
and I fell in love with it. So I started incorporating it
into the stuff I was making 'cause I was really excited about it and that was when YouTube
really started working for me. People sometimes ask me
if making D&D into my job has made the game less fun
for me but it really hasn't. I play in two biweekly games,
so basically play every week and I just play during my time
off work like everybody does. I mean, people are always asking
me to stream my home games and the main reason I don't do that is because that's for me and my friends. That's not for content. I never wanted those games
to start to feel like work. And definitely I take ideas for content from the games that I play in and DM but I don't have to do that. I can just show up and enjoy the game. A lot of people are confused about how I actually make
money from any of this. Like most YouTubers, my money does not mainly
come from YouTube ads. In fact, ads on YouTube only make up about 20% of my total income. Pretty much every other revenue stream is bigger than that except for music. Music is like 3%, but I
don't do that for the money. I just love it. If you watch my YouTube channel, you know that I accept
sponsorships here on my videos and that actually makes
up 25% of my total income. If you're noticing that sponsorship pays me better than YouTube does, I think that's a good
thing to keep in mind when watching creators that
you love accept sponsorships. We're just trying to fund our ability to keep making stuff for you. Merch makes up about 22% of my income. That's mostly my annual
calendar to be honest. The biggest chunk of my income comes from Patreon, 30%, actually, that's especially important to me because so many aspects of my business could just change based on things that are completely out of my control. My patrons offer me a stability that online content
creators don't usually get and that allows me to experiment and try weird things
that might not work out and it lets me say no to opportunities that I don't think are a good fit. I don't have to do stuff
just for the money. If you're thinking, gosh, taxes sure must be
complicated, that's correct. Taxes are an actual nightmare
for self-employed people and I even have a CPA now and
they're still a nightmare. The process of creating a video from start to finish begins
with the idea, obviously. I both do and don't have trouble coming up with new video ideas. I have an incredibly long
list of video concepts and I'm adding to it all the time but when it comes time to
actually start working on a video, it's like when you look in
your closet and you're like, "I have nothing to wear" even though you have a ton
of clothes, it's like that. You know, there are so many great creators in the tabletop gaming space and people have been talking
about these games for so long. It really does feel sometimes like everyone has already said everything. There are a lot of topics I've discussed that other people have already covered, but maybe the way that I talk about it is gonna be the way that
it clicks for somebody. Once I have the idea,
I move on to scripting. Most of my videos are scripted
pretty much word for word, obviously not stuff like this. Sometimes I know exactly
what I want out of a video and the script will be
done in like two hours and then other times it
is just like pulling teeth and it takes all day. On average like three to six
hours for a script I think. But because I script
everything so thoroughly, filming usually goes pretty quickly. If there's no costumes
and crazy sets and stuff, I can usually film in about an hour. But if I'm doing a
60-second sponsorship spot that has a costume and a set, it usually takes me like
three times as long to film as the rest of the video does. And editing can be pretty variable like three to eight hours
depending on the video. You might have noticed that this year I've been skipping a lot more weeks than I did in the past few years. And part of that is just that I have some
bigger ideas for videos that just take a little longer to make and I can't make 'em in one week. But it's also 'cause I'm trying
really hard not to burn out. When I first started doing weekly videos, that was kind of the
only thing I was doing and now I'm just doing so much more. My email inbox is like a never
ending treadmill of misery. I have meetings and calls. I'm always developing and releasing merch. I have all this marketing and
social media stuff to work on. I've been writing for games. I still sometimes sew and craft. I travel for stuff, I
make music, I collaborate. I do too much basically,
I need to do less. People often assume that I
have a team backing me up. I've even been accused of
just being like a pretty girl who reads off a
teleprompter and I am that. But I also write all the stuff that I read off the teleprompter. I do outsource some stuff. I mean, I have an agent who handles all my sponsorships and appearances. I have a CPA and a bookkeeper because just the financial
stuff is not my wheelhouse. But honestly, I'm mostly just
kind of a one-woman show. I write, I film, I edit. Usually it's just me and my tripod. Part of that is that I
am incredibly type A. I have had 100% control over every part of my
business up until now and it is really hard to
let go of that death grip. But I also don't wanna push other people the way that I push myself. Like I can say, okay, this video needs to be done so I'll stay up until 2:00 AM editing it, and I can't ask that of someone else, shouldn't ask that of
myself either, to be honest. Work-life balance is an
ongoing struggle for me. I have ADHD and I have a
tendency to overwork myself, so it's very, very helpful to have like a start point
and an endpoint for my day and to try and actually take weekends off. Obviously it's very important
to rest to avoid burnout but when your job is something that you're really passionate about and when you're the only one
who's doing any of the work, like if you don't do
it, nobody's doing it, that makes it really hard
to clock out sometimes. My toxic trade is definitely
that I'm like an '80s movie dad who misses his son's baseball
game because he's at work. That's something I am actively working on. The main reason I get burnt out is I just say yes to too many things. There's that phrase that's
like, if it's not a hell yes, it's a no. And that was helpful to me for a while but sometimes there are
still more hell yeses than there are hours in the day, especially by now, I get so many incredible opportunities that each individual one, I would've killed for a few years ago, and I just can't say yes to them all. Like I literally don't have enough time which is obviously a really
good problem to have. I am very, very lucky
to have that problem. But it does mean that setting boundaries is really, really important. It is undeniable that this kind of work can be very isolating. It's weird because you would
think that working a job where you interact with
thousands and thousands of people every single day would not feel that way. But like I don't have coworkers, most of my peers in this
industry don't live nearby so it's not like we can just
go grab a beer or something. And even though having such
a huge online community around tabletop games is incredible, being a creator in that space does kind of other you in some ways. Like I don't always get to
be a part of the community. I'm also like a product for the community. This feels like just an insane
thing to ever complain about because like my job is such a dream job and I'm so grateful to have it. But you know, like any job,
there are ups and downs, there are parts of it that suck and if I don't complete the task, nobody is standing over my shoulder making sure that I do it. I don't have a supervisor. There are definitely days when
I'm trying to write a script and I just can't write it, like it won't come out of me or everything that I write is terrible. And when your job has
so many moving parts, it's actually really easy to procrastinate because there's always
something productive that I could be working on, even if it's not the thing
I'm supposed to be working on. Like how many times have
I been in the middle of some other task that
I don't wanna be doing and I've thought, "Ooh, this
would be such a good time to update my website." No, it is not a good time for that. I've been trying lately
to just unplug on the days that I post a video because
otherwise I'll post it and then I'll just be glued to it, like checking the view
count, reading the comments. Nothing makes you wanna not write a video like reading comments about what you did wrong on the last one. If I'm too plugged in
on a video release day, it can take days afterwards
for me to get back to the point where I feel like creating again and I just don't have time for that. Like I don't have time to waste being a sensitive little baby. If I were talking to somebody who wanted to do this kind of work, I think I would just remind them that this is not the kind of
job that somebody offers you. You have to build this kind
of job from the ground up. You decide what it looks like
and then you make it happen. That can be both freeing and terrifying. You just have to start
and sometimes you start and it doesn't work for a
really, really long time. I mean, how long was I
making YouTube videos that nobody was watching? Years, I mean many years. If you wanna talk about this stuff more I have a content creation channel on my Patreon exclusive Discord where I am happy to answer in depth the most niche specific business
questions you might have. I also do live streams
for patrons every month where I will answer your
questions on stream real time. If you're not sure if Patreon is for you, you can actually do a
one-week free trial right now so you can just test it out and get all the perks
for the first seven days. And if you decide that you don't like it, you don't have to pay. Every tier starting at $2 a
month gets access to Discord and to my live streams. So let's talk about D&D, about cosplay, about whatever you want,
about the business stuff. I actually really enjoy talking
about the business stuff.
