I got an email a couple of weeks ago, asking: how do you get started making stuff online? If youâre starting from scratch, if you have zero followers, zero subscribers, zero anything, how do you get an audience? How do you get popular on the internet? The first time I tried to answer that question, it was more than ten years ago. YouTube didnât even exist back then, and I thought I knew it all. I didnât, and I probably still donât. But with another decade and a million subscribers
under my belt since then, I can at least tell you the rules that
Iâve worked by for the last 15 years or so, not just for YouTube, but for anywhere online. The short answer is: you just make stuff. The long answer⌠well, the best way to tell that does not start
on an incredibly rainy Scottish island. It starts down in London. Right. Iâve been making stuff for the internet
pretty much all my adult life. I had a few decent hits when I was younger, viral web pages and games and short videos that were forwarded on through email in the
days before social media. But those were one-off bolts from the blue, they were nothing you could base
any sort of career on. When I was 19, the British government mailed
a leaflet out to every home in the country. It was called Preparing for Emergencies, and it gave some pretty obvious advice on
what to do in the event of a disaster. There was a lot of cynicism about that leaflet, and while the intentions were good, it was mostly seen as a waste
of the taxpayers' money. The government also put up preparingforemergencies.gov.uk. They forgot to register preparingforemergencies.co.uk, so I bought the domain, copied their web site, changed all the text to be really sarcastic, sent it off to a few friends,
and went to bed. That sort of joke was still
new and exciting in 2004. Iâll be honest,
it hasnât aged well since then. This was before social media,
way before smartphones. Facebook had only just got its first round
of investment, and it was only open to a few US colleges. That joke was being forwarded by email from
person to person to person, because thatâs how it worked back then. And the feedback that I was getting
was by email. Anyway, when I woke up the morning after, okay, I was a student, so it was
probably the afternoon after, but, I had some emails from friends saying
âthatâs quite funnyâ. And so I had some messages from people
I didnât know saying âthatâs quite funnyâ. And then there were some messages from
people whose email addresses ended in .gov.uk, saying, âthatâs quite funny,
itâs doing the rounds of the civil servantsâ. And then there was a message from someone in the government department responsible
for the original leaflet, saying âtake it downâ. And I said no. And it turns out that while mocking
the government is a reasonably good gag, mocking the government and then
having the government not find it funny, that is a really good gag. At least in countries where
you can get away with it. That takedown request meant that
the news got interested, and this went all over the country, as in, national newspapers and local television coverage. And it was just a quick joke that Iâd put
together in an hour or so because⌠well, because the alternative was not doing it. Preparing for Emergencies was the first
demonstration I had of a principle I now know and
have worked with for years: that the chances of a project succeeding
arenât really coupled to how much time, effort and money
youâve spent on it. And it can often seem like the opposite
is true. Youâll see people complain that the thing theyâve poured all their
heart and soul and effort and time into, that thing sank, but something quick and dirty that they
slapped together has become popular. And maybe thatâs true,
maybe that is how it works sometimes. But I would bet that, like me,
anyone with that complaint has made loads and loads of
quick and dirty things. And most of those will have failed. Itâs just that they didnât care as much
about those quick and dirty things, they just donât remember them as much, compared to that One Big Project. If you spent ten dollars and one hour
on an idea, it is likely to fail. But if you spend a million dollars and a year
on an idea, it is still likely to fail. Thereâs an old adage called Sturgeonâs Law:
â90% of everything is crapâ. I realise that isnât what Theodore Sturgeon
actually said, itâs been cut down a bit over the years,
but the idea holds. Sturgeon was a science fiction author, and his reply to the idea that â90% of science
fiction is crapâ, was yes, it is, but only because
90% of everything is crap. Most things fail. And sure, something thatâs spent
months being polished might have a slightly better
chance of survival: but the odds are still against you.
Instead of polishing, you could spend those months shoving out ten
or twenty or a hundred ideas, and each one of those projects is
a new roll of the dice. And each one of those projects is
something you learn from, something that helps make the next roll of
the dice just a little more likely to succeed. Of course, this is all assuming that your
definition of success involves being popular or getting paid for it. These days, I know that I could
probably make a lot more money and save a lot of effort if I just
stood in front of a green screen and monologued about âIncredible Facts
About Cartoon Series You Wonât Believeâ or âAncient Mysteries
âTheyâ Donât Want You To Know Aboutâ. But then, I wouldnât be travelling so much, I wouldnât be having so much fun and maybe I wouldnât have kept going through
rough times. There are other definitions of success that
arenât just about the numbers. More than a decade ago,
I came up with this graph. Across the bottom is effort,
and across the side is awesome. This is still the guiding principle
that I use to determine whether Iâm going to do a project or not. And sure,what I consider âeffortâ and
âawesomeâ have changed over the years, both in definition and in scale. Awesome doesnât have to mean money,
or viewcount, it can mean getting to do something really cool
or working with someone you admire. You define your own success. Anyway. Naive me, at 19, thought
there was a chance of going right from Preparing for Emergencies
to a full-time job making weird stuff for a living. There wasnât any chance of that. Obviously, in hindsight. Because the people looking at the site werenât
going âoh, heâs goodâ, they were going âoh, thatâs goodâ. There was no reason to stick around, no reason to do the 2004 equivalent to clicking
the subscribe button, which was clicking a subscribe button,
it just added an RSS feed to your reader. I miss RSS. Anyway, I got lots of lovely emails about
Preparing for Emergencies, I made a couple of contacts from it,
but that was all. Iâd taken only the first step up the ladder, and I had no idea how long
that ladder would be. So I kept making stuff. But back then, I was missing a piece of the puzzle, and it's a really important piece. But to explain that,
I need to start heading north.
I don't know why but I'm pissed that this video is "to be continued".
I haven't finished my meal yet.
I miss RSS too, Tom. Still mad at google for shutting down Reader and Winamp stopped support for its RSS feed manager addon around the same time too. Just having all my podcasts automatically downloaded and show up on my phone whenever I connected it to charge with those was great. I know iTunes can do that too, but I'll be damned before I put that on my pc.
He looks like a young man wearing old man makeup. That red isnt helping.