Jarvis Johnson: how to get 800K subscribers and leave a day job for YouTube

if you're thinking of starting on YouTube I have an amazing guest for you Travis just quit his full-time job to go full-time on YouTube I'm gonna ask him about how he's able to create videos that make $12,000 on average per video and I'm gonna ask him about this fear of starting on YouTube so if you're interested continue watching [Music] yeah let me open up that script what if I cameras rolling this is an interview with Travis you both of you first video on YouTube back in 2007 uh yeah 2006 I think 2006 yeah one year old YouTube right yeah YouTube was one years old technically my first video was a video like from a video game and I started my YouTube account to post videos from that video game runescape for anyone curious but I never posted in another runescape video and then the next thing I posted was a high school musical dance video and that was sometime in like the end of 20 2006 if you're watching and you're like huh maybe I should start my youtube channel as well I'm giving you a magic kick on July 22nd we're starting the next 14 day use of challenge in 14 days I'm gonna tell you how to start a YouTube channel how to edit videos how to create amazing thumbnails how to come up with titles that get clicks and how to make youtube your life style so if you are thinking of YouTube but you're afraid to start I'm gonna make you start I will see you soon at my course I'm giving you an exclusive discount $20 off my next batch the link is below sign up and I will see you very very soon 14 day youtube challenge with a Silicon Valley girl what kind of plot hole was that back in 2006 do you remember yeah a lot of it was driven by the YouTube homepage because there wasn't there weren't a lot of algorithms driving like what bubbled to the top so YouTube would feature videos and that would mean like it would make career youtube careers overnight and that didn't like mean a whole lot in 2006 but there are a couple of creators who have been I remember seeing on that page that are like still around like Shane Dawson was like very early oh my god he's always on the like bottom row of the the YouTube homepage and then Hank and John Green vlogbrothers that's how I found then I think back in 2007 when they were doing like this social experiment where they didn't they stopped talking to each other via textual communication and only made vlogs back and forth it was a weird time but it was it was cool like it was cool to have accessible streaming video that was like reliable yeah how many of yous did you get back then Jeremiah you know the first video is like a couple hundred which I thought was pretty impressive but it's right in front yeah yeah and the High School Musical video it got like 50,000 views I think in 2007 yeah apparently you used to be able to see more clearly the referrals on YouTube videos so I think I got posted on some French blog and then it got posted a couple of other places back then Wow ended up getting like a bunch of views for 2007 and then I promptly stopped posting because I was afraid yeah you mentioned that you were afraid of like public failure yeah cuz I was like oh that video did really well I need something to top it and I didn't really know what I was gonna do dad I also didn't have ready access to a camera because I was using my friends we were using my a good friend of Mines camera so it wasn't like I could just like turn on hit record at home I think the next video I posted was two years later and that was actually just a collection of photos set to music but it looked like a video because it was like an internet meme from 2009 [Music] so yeah it's been a it's been a fun journey of like three or four YouTube videos like eleven years ago and and now Here I am yeah and then you just suddenly started to be serious about YouTube right right well a couple of years ago it was July of 2017 I went to VidCon for the first time for work I used to work at patreon as a software engineer and my team went we were going to a lot of the industry panels but I was like I want to also go to the creator panels and see what's up and I just went to so many kind of YouTube 101 like just getting started and thinks as I was always curious about I was always curious about posting on YouTube again it was just really inspiring I think that all of the things I had in my head about public failure and like who wants to hear what I have to say there were answers to all of those and at the end a VidCon me and my friend my yuko were like let's start our channels oh you started together together yeah cool I actually film for two days ago yeah yeah I think I saw on her story but but yeah so we we started our channels pretty much as soon as we got back from VidCon I bought a camera kind of impulse bought a camera again Canon t5i uh-huh like this basic DSLR very basic DSLR yeah yeah yeah I think I bought it on B&H cuz somebody gave me the tip about like no sales tax but other than that and I also had a rode videomic go mm-hmm yeah yeah exactly and the sound was awful because there's no like onboard manual like sound settings yeah and I just yeah I just remember filming videos out of focus by accident all the trials and tribulations but I had to make my first video back about why I was afraid to make youtube videos because I couldn't think of anything else to talk about so I'm just like I was like let's start there do you remember how many views you got on that video I got I I broke a thousand because I shared it to like every person I've ever met also Facebook and it was also just like throwing it around everywhere I was like a lot of elbow grease went into trying to get thousand views on that video but act the videos after that we're getting like hundreds I think because I wouldn't get a thousand subscribers for like months later then something happened in 2018 right you cannot correct the algorithm I had some initial success cuz my Co found some early success with her videos yeah and the day in the life video did really well and so I started making tech videos like kind of on and off alternating about talking about software engineering and talking about my experiences and stuff and through that I had a steady a steady reasonable growth where I knew that I could if I made a tech video it would do pretty well but it otherwise every other video that was like creatively different from just talking about tech stuff would completely fail out of a gate but I scrounged up about 50,000 subscribers just by posting this done yeah mostly coming from tech stuff and other stuff was there but it wasn't the stuff that was driving the growth and then in 2018 August I want to say at Micah's wedding actually in San Diego is staying in San Diego and I changed the metadata on one of my old videos like changed the title of it because I learned that was the thing that you could do a few days later it like got a million views over like two days like a 48 hour period it just like sort of added water do you remember what was the old title it was the new - yeah the old title was um the worst life hacks I've ever seen which is a title that would like work for me now but I think that what I changed it to was five minute craft is a worse channel on YouTube I think a combination of the fact that there were some other people who had started talking about the channel that I was talking about and having that keyword and the in the title may have jumpstart the name of a youtuber the name of yeah the channel on like if I went back and looked at the analytics and you can kind of see that the impressions on that video we're starting to rise before I change the title it's unclear if the title was the thing that sort of clinched it or if it was just like happenstance it was pretty strange yeah it kind of was a good overnight success so you change the title you wake up in the morning it was a okay I changed the title and then I like went to the wedding and then I think on the way back from the wedding I started to notice like the things were all the comments I come here because I was starting to I think I'm the peak of it I got like 44 thousand subscribers in one day twenty thousand yeah yeah and then it kind of like that was that was the peak and then I think after that it was like oh now thirty thousand then eventually back to normal over the period of about four days I went from fifty thousand subscribers to two hundred thousand subscribers and so that was amazing wild I was like yeah I remember checking my um like waking up that morning being at like eighty thousand subscribers or something like that and being like wow we're gonna hit 100,000 subscribers happening so like by lunch I checked it and it was like at one hundred chaos yeah yeah Wow by being very successful now you have consuming more abuse than than the subscribers right yeah yeah things are growing things are growing um and you know just trying to balance like content strategy with like what I want to make and having fun I I've been having a lot of fun with like the actual stuff that I've been making that's a good sign and yeah I have no idea where it goes from here but that's the exciting part about it I think if I had the answers maybe I wouldn't be as interested and would be as excited about mm-hmm making stuff so we you talk to your advice for a video that will perform well on your channel mmm on my channel yeah like from your perspective mm-hmm like maybe it's the title or if them know whatever one thing that's really interesting about YouTube is that you don't really know if it's the content of the video maybe it's like not a viral video in terms of its content or maybe it just needs like a new fresh coat of paint in terms of in terms of metadata like if I were a person like looking at my youtube channel I would look at the videos that I have that are retaining really well mm-hmm and then was it a retention for you forgive me I do measure it but like I guess I I look at review duration and I usually will get like 10 to 11 average duration in minutes and minutes yeah and the average video is like 15 in the average the I would say average video is like 18 Meg that's really good it's more than that yeah right yeah no it's so it's good and you look at like the retention graph and as long as you're not saying any like sharp spikes down but um so nowadays I'll look at something and go oh this is getting like a good healthy retention but its click-through rate is really low so like let's see how we can like package it to be more appealing so you're you're more technical right yeah ii i pay a lot of attention to the analytics but in terms of the idea in general what can really work on youtube is a title is like a magazine headline ideally introducing the infer an information gap between you and the viewer that you can only resolve with like going and watching the video so can you give an example like i mean mr. beast is a great person to give examples from cuz his videos are wild are you familiar with mr. Bies no so he like will just give away $10,000 to like a homeless person or yeah yeah a lot of it's based around giving away money he got his first brand deal and then he used that he just gave that away but filmed it for a video and then basically kind of just kept that ball rolling and now he's given away like millions of dollars but also he got 13 million subscribers and last year and so if you look at each of his videos they all exhibit this really well you have a thumbnail and a title that together introduce something like where you say I want to see what that looks like so I stayed underwater for 24 hours or I the last person to take their hands off the Lamborghini gets to keep the car yeah real fancy like actually get it's not not a scam his taxes were wild apparently this is this year but you get right over that level right I actually don't even know how it works specifically but because someone has to pay the taxes on that when he gives it away but if you look at any of those videos there's a very clear feeling of oh I'm I wonder what that looks like so that's one way to introduce the information gap another is to like take something that's a current event or something that's in the zeitgeist and that people are familiar with and like make a statement it so in the in the case of the video that I made called five minute crafts the worst channel on YouTube at the time I didn't like believe that it was a work channel in YouTube I was being like hyperbolic and there's a bit of a joke but there are tons of people who watch that Channel and I think that there is some sometimes I hate click where they're like what do you mean and the other times there are people who are like oh I've seen this around and it annoys me mm-hmm I'm gonna click this to confirm my you know view of the world so there there's like those types of ways to introduce that that something to be resolved and you want to give the person the irresistible irresistible itch to click and then once once you've clicked then it's your responsibility to like retain them and not like mislead them etc but I can't give any specific video ideas if you do a big style and you title it pretty straightforward what the big stunt was it'll probably do well but there's a lot of mr. B's copycats out there now so I don't know cool and so that video that you mentioned I think it got over 7 million views right yeah yeah and it's like still trickling like it's just like keep the gift that keeps on giving yeah it's not gonna hit 8 million or something soon yeah do you think you can make a living off just one video just one video probably not but I am like there is I think value to building series out of stuff like that like I'm gonna make the video I'm working on now is like kind of a trilogy like it's the third video that's around five minute crafts and it's they've all been dramatically different the videos that I made about them this next one is like trying out the hacks with my friends I've done that something like that before but it's like I always try to get weird with it or compelling cuz I don't want to do the same thing over and over and over even though it could work like it could get the views I want to continue to like grow and do things that are creatively interesting for me the other benefit that having a video that was really successful on my channel like that is that I can kind of reuse that packaging to appeal to to new people when that video started going viral if I had never posted any videos that were very similar to it I wouldn't have benefited as much from its growth because people would subscribe but then they would immediately bounce because they'd be like what you're not making videos like the one I subscribed for yeah but I was fortunate enough to have the time to do this when I saw the video was starting to get all these views out of nowhere I think I had like 400,000 views I made a video that was sort of at a similar genre to it just to continue this yeah so one one really in that video has like 4 million views now Wow but what was the wildest thing about it was that its first million or 2 million views were 50% from end cards like I've never seen in card conversions like that before it still haven't but people would watch one video and then go oh that's the next one and then just like keep reeling yeah and and then I think that kept sort of elongated the period under which I was like they're experiencing like a lot of growth because YouTube cares a lot about session length and if you can keep somebody on the platform for a long time like like super valuable yeah and I've benefited from the fact that a lot of my content is visible so I get I get messages on Instagram they're like I just watched like 10 of your videos and oh it speaks to the value of having a backlog that is evergreen like people can watch a video 2 year old of mine yeah it's not super topical I have you know talked about topical things here and there but I try to make sure that when I do so it's in a context that will also last for the long term can you share some numbers like in terms of what's the maximum amount of dollars you got from one video mmm I mean the five-minute crafts video is probably the one I made the most from because it just has the most views and I think it's like somewhere around 12 grand or something well grant yeah but it's like that sure that's like great but it's like doesn't really build a career right it's tricky I think monetization is a really interesting thing because CPMs and things are always changing it's very hard for creators to actually predict what their revenue is going to look like mm-hmm but you were still able to quit your day job to do music bulton yeah I mean that was that was sort of a function of sort of buying buying future stock and myself and like thinking that I you know could make it given the given the time and then also some financial planning beforehand where I had paid off my student loans and I was like prepared to be able to live without money from YouTube for a period of time and that was like my trial period and now we're like okay so I probably can keep going for a while do you do brand deals or you just rely on reveals Adsense I have a patreon which often pay for my health insurance I'm unemployed technically and then merch sometimes like that's not like a big oh you have this merch option like that's built in yeah yeah I have that and then I'm working on some new merch designs and I want to try to do things that are like more reactive to things that people resonate with in videos and maybe having more limited time stuff is less less a revenue stream I'm in growth mode right now where I'm not super concerned about sort of turning on the the hose of like making all the dollars but I'm able to live and I want to just put most of my resources into like continuing to grow that's great cool and how do you deal with haters to get a lot of them I think everybody the way I like to think about it is given enough people give it a large enough sample size even if haters are like point zero zero zero zero one percent you you're gonna get them eventually yeah and so yeah I definitely I definitely have haters high percentage of haters I think it's pretty low I generally have a very healthy audience though sometimes well I don't see a lot of the hate comments because I think they get filtered out when people are like super obscene by YouTube like I don't even have like crazy filters or anything set up that just I don't tend to see a lot of stuff like that but usually hate comments that are just I would say the most common the most common comment I used to get and I just don't this is probably still happening is in my five-minute crafts video people would say you're actually the worst channel on YouTube alright cool you got me and then another thing would be like you just you're just using them for views or commenting on this for views I'm like yeah that's kind of why we're all here like on YouTube it's like yeah you're making a YouTube video for views the other thing is that people think and this is this has been like a an important topic that I care about is that sometimes people think that I am bullying these channels and most of the channels I talk about our like large production companies I tried to illustrate the line between an independent creator and like a corporation because you can't really bully coca-cola you know YouTube kind of masks sometimes is there are people mostly children who do think that like five minute crafts is instead of being a having hundreds of employees and being one piece of like a LARP you know ad may like the yeah it's a huge production come yeah it's like that's the parent parent company of yeah so it's like ad may the sole I'm not too deep on this stuff it's like admin is so publishing and then like five minute crafts and bright side yeah these things and you have hundreds of channels hundreds of plaques it's like giant operation and then some people think it's just like a person who cares a lot about crafts and like but then other than that the other the other haters I have or people who are really upset that I don't make software engineering content as much as I used to mm-hm and it's partly because I don't I I need some distance from the tech industry really laughter I realized I was pretty burnt out yeah when I was initially making tech content I really didn't want to be working my 9 to 5 tech job and then going home and like doing tech stuff for my creative outlet you didn't feel fun um and there's a lot of people who really like that stuff and want me to be doing that stuff more but it's just like now where my heart is so I feel bad sometimes but you've got to you know put yourself in your own like health and well-being first yeah I can't force myself to do something that I don't want to do I think that's the main role for like anything that you're doing life don't force yourself yeah at the end of the day I want to just make stuff with my friends and in and with a community and be a part of a community and laugh and be goofy and you know teach people things sometimes I am not hyper motivated by money or anything like that it's like a means to an end because you're motivated by aa dopamine you get a community community and then my own strive to be good at my craft I've been fortunate enough to meet so many rich people in Silicon Valley that like it's just like completely disillusioned with like having billions of dollars because like that sounds like that sounds like a chore to deal with Dustin Moskovitz you can go give away all your money and spend all your time doing that help the world because you have a moral obligation to do so I am just gonna make dumb jokes on the internet because no one expects no one expects me to be dedicating my life to philanthropy mm-hmm another question do you get recognized by people already cuz yeah I was 700,000 yeah yeah walking the streets and people taking pictures yeah I say once a week if I leave my apartment sometimes I don't it's very easy to dislike do they just come over yeah like I'd say that last time I was like on the sidewalk for a while someone tapped me on the back and it scared me cuz I was like and I was liking that copy as like oh my god I'm a big fan and I was like cool like just like immediately into fight or flight mode am I like being mugged what's happening so the tip that I wanted to give is don't approach anyone from behind it's cool to see people come up to me one time I walked out of my apartment and a little kid and his mom were walking by and his mom was like you're his favorite youtuber and I was like so we took a photo and then that sort of hit me that like oh I have kids this kid was totally under thirteen by the way so when YouTube says that you have to be 13 enough to be on the platform doesn't work can you describe your work process how does it look yeah your video it starts with ideas and like I have a long list of ideas that need vetting need some sort of vetting and by betting you mean googling them and seeing who's done that before and how it performed if it's talking about something or some sort of content it's like going and consuming that seeing if I have an angle seeing if I have something to say and if it's not then marinating on the topic itself and seeing if I have something to say like for more personal vlog stuff I like go to a coffee shop and like have a topic and then just like free right and see if I like come up with any thoughts that feel you know valuable to include it and see if I have a kind of juice for a video and for videos that are the commentary style that I've been doing the most recently it's going and watching a bunch of content or downloading a bunch of videos watching them at 2x trying to see like what if there's anything here and then I start to like put that into a doc and I I'm all over the spectrum in terms of tools where I'm currently using a lot of Dropbox paper but I'm also flirting with an ocean which is a cool app but usually what it looks like is I'll start a doc and Dropbox paper and start dumping my research into it oh I need to talk about this oh like what's my angle for this and then I start scripting as well but the the doct typically starts before the script is written I'm going to talk about this topic here what are some like titles and I write like 20 titles or something and then it's like what's the thumbnail gonna look like I usually like describe sometimes yeah that's before yeah because um for example I want to make sure that if there's something super appealing for a thumbnail like I would say clickbait but not click maybe cuz it's gonna be included in the video I will sometimes include content just so that it can be in the fun yeah so I'm like oh that's really visually appealing or that's a great way to encapsulate this idea in very few elements on the screen cuz you want you you look at thumbnails and you want them to like blow and be like I get it I understand and you're making that split-second decision of like does that spark your curiosity yeah so I'm always looking for like I like to think about that stuff as early as possible you know when you have those thoughts that are I like to think of him as like bread in the oven or something where you're just like going about your day and it's like oh like breads done what about this idea and they write it down so I like this sort of put those in me put those in the oven as soon as possible and I'm also trying to thinking about the three-act structure of the video because like that's kind of structure is important for retaining for attaining people you wanted to like to go somewhere and that's also like similarly to how you introduce this need for resolution when they click you also want to introduce that need for resolution throughout the video so they like don't get so you expecting something yeah it's like it's like how much is a dumb video idea but well if you were like what happens when I press this red button is like the thumbnail and it's like Oh scary red button and then the beginning of the video press the button and it's like yeah and then and then it's like you're gonna see like a fall off right yeah and you've got it it's like your job to retain that person so you want to like resolve at the button maybe it's not at the very end maybe it's in like the end of act 2 or something but you also want to make sure you earn that journey because you don't want to be strung along yeah as a viewer cuz that's gonna just like draw ire with your hair so it's a balancing act um so I'm trying to think about structure and then and making sure to change things up so it's not just like static me on us like in my room for too long a complete script I'll like right you know mm to like 4,000 words how does it take um a couple hours mm-hmm I don't do a lot of like second drafts their drafts unless it's like complete rewrites um because it just doesn't feel worth it like bang for the buck but what I'll usually do is all like nowadays my process is all schedule and meeting with my friend will like run through the script I like perform it and will like see what works what doesn't things to move around things I'm sort of creative problems I'm struggling with like with jokes you get into that a lot because there's like a there's like a formula it's like oh I want to make the joke where the punchline is this but I'm not sure how to get from point A to point B and it's like well what if you did like ABC and it's like oh yeah that could work and then you kind of just like play off of each other for that and then filming and then and then filming make my shot list if it's a video that requires one and then go about filming things like a lot of times I'll write sketches so like those require a shot list and ordering and I have to make sure that I care about continuity I don't know if anyone notices but like sometimes I'm like oh I can't shave because I haven't shot the thing pianist or or if I like see I made a video over the like a long hair and then he had his haircut continue with short hair and that went viral just because that's really stupid I I've definitely thought like ahead of time how to shoot the things in the order to wear that it works and and that's fun so then I get that and then I shoot the stuff and it's usually like if I'm at my desk then it's like me with my scripts to my right and like looking at a line and then saying like sort of memorizing that line enough to cut it because YouTube you have a lot of freedom with like a cut yeah so so I just like make sure I have like a big chunk of an idea and then I'll I could go at the camera and then when I feel good about that I can move on to the next thing and then I end up usually recording for too long recording too many takes too many lines because I'm a perfectionist but also there's no one there to stop me from my worst my worst inclinations and then I drag like my two hours of footage of me saying doing line takes for a 15 minute video and then I chop that up it's the worst like III well it's like editing takes a while but it's more like I wish I I didn't need that much footage for that and I'm pretty proud of my like editing workflow like a keyboard shortcut savvy so how long does it take to produce one video I like 20 to 30 hours but I am really great I would say that I want to be once a week right now I'm more like once every one and a half to two weeks mhm it's just fine it's fine and I think that like I don't feel a lot of pressure to have a regular schedule one cuz I haven't promised that in two because I personally experienced that life I can go you know I it had been two weeks since I had posted my last video and then I posted my new video and it's like my fastest growing video of oh yeah one of your recent videos that 1.3 million that's amazing well like and then the video that I just put out is like sort of I mean fingers crossed but I'd like might break my like sort of million view record which is you know there are so many people who are so much more populated me on YouTube but I'm like keeping my like little PR my personal PRS so we'll see yeah I have my last question short in two years how do you see yourself I think that like my youtube channel as it is today we'll exist in a similar capacity I will probably be doing things in addition to YouTube with at least half of my energy I think like when my podcast comes back I'm really excited about that see it was a podcast I'll have my podcast going hoping to like work on bigger projects like video stuff I don't know like it I'm kind of following my curiosity right now so I can't really say I know I will I have at least two years in me of doing YouTube full-time so I'll be doing something creative yeah hopefully making stuff still do you see yourself like owning a media company or like a production company I can see it there's a lot of problems that I've run into just in the short time that I've been doing YouTube or being in in any sort of creative space where I'm like wow like we really need some more people working on on these things and people who are closer to those problems like you know patreon I just wanna patreon but like it was founded by a creator he would like experienced all these problems and wanted to at least start solving one of them I don't truly have any interest in starting a company for the sake of it or starting a production company or starting any sort of big organization for any reason other than to like solve a problem I'm passionate about and which boils down to making stuff with friends so I can see it and I have a unique sort of set of skills I like to think in terms of like having worked in industry and like kind of seeing how the sausage is made but also like doing the other side but I'm like maybe maybe in 10 years maybe you know much later sort of bookmark that yeah right now I kind of just want to have Angela and iterative process and anything kind of make a name for myself in this community because I'm still so new to the scene yeah but you already have great results oh well thank you I appreciate that could you give yeah last advice to people who are starting on YouTube in 2019 oh yeah don't believe anybody who says that it's too late to start on YouTube in 2019 it is absolutely not too late make stuff that's fun for you make it however frequently you want to make get or however frequently is like sustainable for you to make it pay attention to your analytics and try to learn why what the numbers mean and why you're seeing what you're seeing in experiment I'll never be afraid to experiment I think there's nothing more is kind of a Mark Zuckerberg quote actually so I got to be careful no but but there's nothing more certain like you're you're certain to fail if you never change like that's kind of the the point and I think there are a lot of people who are like clinging to their jewels sometimes with YouTube where it's like but I need to do everything the way I've always been doing it and that's natural because we exist in this on this platform where so many things are constantly changing that you just don't know the answer so you're like I I guess I'll just go with the information that I have but sometimes he just got it completely like blow all up blow up all the best practices and stuff like I don't post out a dedicated time I don't have consistent branding or any of the things that I'm supposed to have what is my channel about I don't know it's like it's about different things at different times it's like did I niche down a little bit there's so all these like BET best practices things they are supposed to do and I feel like I like half-assed almost all of them slash didn't do any of them and things were fine so take all that advice with a grain of salt just make sure you're having fun yeah I really like the last line like make sure you're having fun and enjoying whatever you do in life yeah thank you so much yeah for sure fingers crossed for your success yeah yeah okay guys help me okay

Channel: Silicon Valley Girl

Views: 24,849

Keywords: silicon valley girl, marina mogilko, linguamarina, jarvis johnson, jarvis, youtuber, jarvis johnson 5-munite crafts, how to start on youtube, how to make money on youtube, how to get paid on youtube, how do youtubers make money, make money on youtube, how much youtube pays per view, how much youtube pays, jarvis johson interview, Jarvis Johnson, 5-minute crafts, black youtubers, troom troom, think media, derral eves

Id: VIsLMX2X9RI

Length: 33min 27sec (2007 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 25 2019