 Welcome everyone to The Digital Collective. I'm your host James Hakes from Hakes New Media and you know this show, we focus on the people, platforms and tools that are making positive strides within the technology sector today. My guest today is a panel of amazing folks. My guests today are folks who are content creators who have definitely been moving the needle this past year, growing their environments, growing their communities, growing their influence and their advocacy. Each person has a long list in terms of the capabilities and actions that they've done, right? This significant milestone that they've crossed as part of their journey. Everything from reaching YouTube monetization, launching their first course, reaching 10,000 plus subscribers, et cetera. We're gonna dive into all that. We're gonna talk about what worked, what didn't work. We're gonna talk about lessons learned. We're gonna hopefully answer some of your questions and we are going to learn from each other, right? Hopefully you'll find value from this, prepare to receive some significant value from these champions within the creative community. Y'all ready, let's get it in. Ladies and gentlemen, before we even start, just take a picture of all these folks that you see on the screen right here. Oh my goodness, was able to corral folks from the present and from the future onto this live stream. Ladies, gentlemen, how you guys doing today? Good. Good, good evening, James. Fantastic. Everyone else is good evening, but Alec down there, it's good morning. So it is what it is. So, let's, definitely man, definitely. Let's go ahead and get focused. Let's not delay. I know we are streaming on multiple platforms. I thank you for, many of you for pairing this particular stream. So we're on multiple YouTube channels. We're on multiple Facebook personal and brand pages. I think we're on Twitch somewhere. I know we're on LinkedIn as well and Twitter. So that being said, we've got a lot of eyes and ears, excuse me, ears watching and listening. So hopefully there can be some great engagement. I see folks in the comments as well. Many of you know the protocol, put a Q in front of it so little me can be able to push that up to the panel as we have this discussion. Let's go ahead and get started and I'll start with the person who came in last. So we're gonna put you on blast just for showing up at the 11th and a half hour, Ms. Williams. Talk to us about who it is you are. Talk with us about who it is you serve, right? And talk to us a little bit about what was probably the biggest win that you had this particular year from a content creation perspective. Yeah, so I'm Chris Williams. I am the host of the Grow Your Side Business podcast where I help corporate professionals learn how to grow a profitable side business. I would say the biggest win that I had this year was probably honing in my message. I would say outside of like just, we just recently crossed 10,000 subs on YouTube. Congratulations. Even though that's like a milestone, here's the kicker. Just because you have so many subs doesn't mean that everybody's engaged. Well, I think there's a difference between like people get into the numbers and I think that stuff is cute, right? Like it's fun, but that doesn't mean that 10,000 people are actually fully engaged, right? And that takes time. So I think more so than anything else, we went really hard this year on content which I'm gonna probably double down on next year on creating as much content as I can. And I think it's just mainly because we are all fighting for attention of someone when they thumb flicking. And I just think that at this point in time it's like really important that if you don't have your message now, people will forget you the moment they stop watching your last video. So. I love that, yeah. Hold some of those thoughts. I wanna get into that with some of the questions that I wanna ask everyone as well. So, but again, congratulations on reaching that milestone on some of those milestones, those are incredible feats and every subscriber is obviously a soul and a person that you want to continue to cherish and nurture. Let's go on to the future now. Alec Johnson, come on now. Tell us who you are, sir, what it is that you do and again, that community that you're focusing on, that community that you're serving and why, I wanna ask you this different question, why that particular community that you're focusing on as well? Because you've had a very interesting trajectory in terms of what you're doing. So who you are, what is it you do and why the particular community that you're focusing on is the one that you're focusing on? Sure, so my name's Alec Johnson and my channel is Take One Tech and it really started out as, I suppose, a bit of an experimental platform for me to practice the process of creating content in One Take with no edits because I'm my own worst enemy when it comes to editing. So that's what all my videos are, sort of zero editing, almost all of, I guess. But in this year, yeah, it's been a good year for sort of channel growth, again, in terms of just numbers. But I've put out a number of courses this year and I am sort of making that sort of a real focus for coming into next year as well. And the challenge really aimed to help people get more done, be more productive with tech. In fact, the channel started out originally as purely about sort of the productivity tools and automation and stuff like that. Although Ecamm Live and Stream Deck being two of my core loves that I discovered through the process ended up being most of my content was related to that. But really the people that I'm helping are sort of business folks wanting to use these tools in their business, either becoming more productive and impactful with the tech that they're using. And so, yeah, pivoting more towards the courses with YouTube sort of feeding into that for next year. Love it, love it, appreciate that. Let's go over to the men on the East Coast. Well, they're both on the East Coast. You knew I'm not talking about you, that's why you giggle over there. Let's talk about the huddle. Sir, talk to us a little bit about your evolution. First of all, again, tell the community that who may not know who you are, who you are, but tell us a little bit about this evolution of the huddle and initial thoughts really at the 35,000 foot level before we go too deep of what you've changed as you've grown the huddle to now have, you've got the community tab, right, on your channel as well. So what has that done for you as you've grown and continued to mature your delivery and your messages? Great question. And again, thank you for having me a part of this great panel of content creators that are on here in the present and as you said in the future, my name is Walter Strong. I'm an online coach, live stream producer, the host of the huddle. The huddle has evolved and is still evolving and changing into a community of beginning live streamers, live streamers who are struggling with being able to find their voice through live streaming and content creation and to be able to find my niche in that area. And just to be able to do that, I've seen tremendous growth before I was just kind of doing live streaming and getting the opportunity to interview an author, getting an opportunity to interview a news report. I was just all over the place, no real focus. Then I just began to find my niche into content creation and live streaming and then watching the huddle just evolve into that direction. The huddle, the etymology for the channel basically comes from football where you see 53 men, not just on offense or defense, but 53 men getting together where there's one man just leading everyone together and encouraging one another to win their individual battles, to win their individual positions. Because if you win your individual battle, you win your individual position, the team wins. Despite what the opposition may be saying to you, despite what the media may be saying to you, you have the objective of 53 men coming together and moving that ball into the end zone and getting the W. Well, I saw that concept and I said, that's a concept that I need to be able to birth into content creation, bringing content creators together, pushing one another, helping to bring out the best of one another, the struggling one, the beginner one, even the one who has over 10,000 subscribers but yet still hasn't grasped live streaming fully, bringing everyone together. And that has been a major, major win for me in 2022. Love it, love it. Listen, coach, I could have used you today for my UCLA Bruins because they lost by three to pit in the Tony the Tiger Sun Bowl. And it was not a good day for us before it's Bruins fans. So we could have used you out there with some encouragement in any ways. I'm gonna stay focused here on the topic. I saved you last because you're the Android guy, you know, everyone else here are Mac folks. But Roy, talk to us a little bit about you, talk to us a little bit about what Tech Troublemaker is. I love the name and where that originated from. Talk to us about your goal at this particular point and at this particular time in your journey, right? Because again, you've done a lot of different stuff. You've pivoted a number of times, but talk to us about where now here at December 30th, you see Tech Troublemaker's content creation evolution. So yeah, as you said, I pivoted a lot of different directions. I started off as a tech news channel and then I bounced over to doing just tech tutorials. And then lately I've doubled down on content creation and kind of see myself as a content creator's content creator. I'm focused on people that are already out there, try to give them encouragement, show them how to get over hoops when the latest and greatest thing comes out from YouTube and from other platforms. I try to be one of the first people out there to kind of explain how it works so people can quickly jump on it, take advantage of it. And so that's been very much what my focus is and that's gonna be my focus going into the year. And then because my channel has been a little, schizophrenic, I'm gonna probably have to spend off a second channel next year because I do tutorials that are on tech, Linux and Windows and Mac OS, that type of thing. And those do really well as video on demand, but those are not what I do on Tuesday nights when I go my live stream and I'm talking about content creation and then my shorts try to stay around tech, but so I'm all over the place. I will be doing some courses next year. I've been teaching at a university and college level for 14 plus years. And so I'm way overdue to do courses and so it's time and that's another thing I plan to do this coming year. I love it, I love it. So you touched on some of this already, right? And part of the questions that I wanted to ask everyone and please feel free to interject as you see fit and folks put those questions in. I saw a question asking why we were not streaming on Rumble. Is Ecamm Live going to offer that? Maybe, you can always stream via all these different other locations through the RTMP. So it's not listed directly, but you can go to wherever you want to via RTMP Connection. So I'm not screaming to Rumble, but I think I'm swimming, Twitch, does that count? No, I don't know. Let's talk about long form versus short form and live stream versus recorded, right? Cause you touched on that a little bit, right? How you're seeing more engagement, you're seeing more of an uptick or whatever the case may be more of a positive movement on some of your recorded videos. And maybe is that because they're shorter, right? They're the 60 second short, they're the eight minute just quick hit type of thing talking about one specific type of a subject or things of that nature. But let me just start with anyone who wants to chime in. Long form versus short form and then live stream versus recorded. Where are you seeing more value for your community? And where do you see yourself doing more of if any of those four offerings? I guess the way I look at it is short form content is like bait when I'm out deep sea diving. Come on now. Way to grab somebody's attention to my long, longer conversation. So I think I might have mentioned this to you before, James. Like I look at short form content is like the trailer to my ultimate movie, right? So whether I put it on TikTok, whether I put it on Instagram, you hear on YouTube. And matter of fact, YouTube is doubling down next year on a lot of the short form content. So in my mind, it's not that I have to make anything quote unquote separate new. It's I got to think whatever my long form content is, find the best pieces and hook somebody enough to go. I want to go see what the rest of this thing is about. I don't think it's going to go away. I honestly think that there's probably going to be something new that's going to pop up. I think there's always going to be trends around short form content. I think where we might run into some challenges and I'd be interested in hearing what you guys have on this. I think what we're going to run into challenges is that the longer short form content is the standard. How well can you actually draw people in long enough for your other thing? So, you know, my man mentioned earlier about like courses, right? Well, short form content doesn't grab the attention of somebody to say, yo, I want to come by that course as well as it could, unless you only produce it or something else. But I think we're going to have to find new ways to leverage short form content because all of us are trying to run a business here. And at some point, I need to be able to have a conversation with you in order to be able to get you to buy. So, you know, I don't know how you guys are going to be leveraging short form content in that respect, but that's an interesting statement right there and I'm going to pick somebody. I'm going to pick Alec here in a second because, again, there's something different about the five of us on the screen right now is that we are all looking at content creation as not, Chris, even though your channel talks about side hustle, we are talking about making this into a business and we are doing this as a business. Many of us are already registered LLCs and things of that nature. This is no longer just, we're locked in our house for two years and we just want to have a different option than Zoom, Teams and Webex. We are actually monetized. We are actually doing this as keeping the lights on whatever the case may be. These are business activities as opposed to just a hobby, right? So, the conversation of grabbing someone from a 60 second YouTube short or a three minute whatever the case may be and having those click funnels, having those sales funnels, having those calls to action in the content create. Chris, you're doing a phenomenal job of it. Alec, you are the masterclass. Talk to us, talk to what Chris said about how you're leveraging long form and short form to generate revenue and to build your business. Don't give away anything that's NDA, right? Don't give us all the tricks to what you're doing, but walk us through some of the lessons learned in terms of how you've been able to go from 1,000 to over 4,000 subscribers just on your YouTube channel in such a short period of time but even before then you were already monetized from the content that you were creating that you were providing your community. Yeah, I mean, so even now monetization on YouTube just to make this clear, everyone talks about this but don't hang your hat on YouTube monetization because it's miniscule, it's less than 4% of take one tech revenue at this point from this year. So it is from all the stuff you do externally. So Chris's point about that thing of being able to use short form as a hook directly into a course or something like that, I think that's spot on. It's very hard in one minute to capture somebody's attention that they're gonna be then going on to get a course from you. However, it is about this building awareness. And so the reason to sort of post on multiple different platforms and create the short form content for me, for my, obviously just to preface this by saying that there are some people who focus entirely on short form and do really well out of it but for me it's always, it's long form. The reason to post though other short form content or post on other platforms is to just build that sort of awareness. It's like extra touch points to people. That is that very, very top of funnel stuff so that when they do ultimately at some point, maybe find a long form video where I talk about a course or a download or something like that to get them into the email funnel. That is where the real value is is to build your email list up. Now I am still in two minds though about all the other things apart from YouTube. So YouTube, the long forms and all of those other platforms. And I do wonder about the amount of time spent on maintaining and curating all of that other stuff whether there is actually more payback from that versus actually just ignoring it and just focusing solely on creating more videos, more content for your email list. And so for the next six months, first half of 2023, I'm going to be focused on all of those other platforms to build some significant data in a consistent fashion as to how things run. But then I'm seriously considering just putting a dead stop on all of the other stuff except YouTube and my email and stuff like that for the other half of the year. And then I'll let you know this time next year whether I make any significant drop in stuff because I seriously wonder whether all of that other stuff does have a bigger impact than just really doubling down on the core content and the email list and so on. So we'll see about that. So all of the other content, all the other platforms could be, and I hopefully I'm paraphrasing this right, could just be noise. Could be just a distraction, could just be taking you away from, let's make another quality video from YouTube might be a hit, let's make another email to my email database that gives value, not a chain of spam emails, new course launching soon, and get you get 10 emails about the same thing, but actually delivering value to the email subscriber list. So that when they do get an email about a new course or products or something like that, it is welcome because you've been giving so much value. So yeah, it's an experimental year for me. This is really coming up. Let me pivot and ask you this, Walter, because again, I've seen you experimenting with different forms of micro content, right? You'll do your long form on the weekends and you'll have your audience there and you'll have your discussion. But then you chop that up and you'll push that out to Instagram, you'll push that out to LinkedIn. As we're having this discussion right here, we're talking about maybe some of these other platforms may be nice and sexy now, but there could be noise. Chris is saying that there may be something that we don't even know about that's probably gonna come down the pike. There always is, right? I'll be at CES next week in Vegas. There's always something new. South by Southwest is coming around. So there's always something that's coming that we as technologists, content creators, need to have a pulse on, but do we need to be involved in? Talk to us a little bit about how you're taking advantage of these other platforms to push out your message after you have your long form session on Saturday or Sunday morning. Great question. And initially you talked about the difference between short and long. And as I was listening to Chris and as I was listening to Alex, I'm a Marvel fan. I'm from Iron Man to end game to, you pick your Marvel movie. But what has hooked me from Iron Man up to, what kind of forever? Each time there is a teaser, there is a trailer, and then there is a movie. There's a teaser, there's a trailer, and there's a movie. And so what you have been seeing in the last 30 to 60 days, you're seeing me focus now more on, we do the movie on Saturday at 11 a.m., but now we're providing the teaser, which is the shorts, and then in 2023, which I got away from in 2022 and 21, was that video between one to two minutes, that's your trailer. See, the job of a good trailer, rather a teaser or a trailer, is to peak your interest. And like Chris was saying, if you're going to get someone to buy into online courses that Alex offers or email marketing lists, you have to have a good teaser or short or real that's going to peak their interest enough to say, oh, I need to see the trailer. Oh, no, better yet. I need to now attend the course to make. And so that's the approach that I'm starting to make now, because as of right now, sometimes we can become prisoners of the moment and shorts and reels and TikTok seem to be winning the game, but over time, there is a movie, there isn't long form content, your audience has to be exposed to. And so I'm focusing primarily on LinkedIn because there's more of a professional audience there, there are entrepreneurs there, there are business owners there, so you don't have to worry about the spammers, you don't have to worry about the scammers, and then Instagram from a business and marketing standpoint allows you to do reels as well. And so you have to have a balance and a mix because it's interesting, YouTube has redesigned our YouTube pages to say we want you to have some shorts, we want you to have some online videos, and we want you to have some live streams, but it's interesting, they haven't even put YouTube clips on the chart, but they gave us the feature. So the format there is there available for us, but like I said, when you go back to the Marvel days, when Marvel gets ready to put out a movie, they give you the teaser first, then they give you the trailer, and even before the movie, they then they give you some TV clips. So the format is there, I just think it's content creators, we have to take advantage of it. So that's what we're encouraging content creators, a part of the Huddle community to do. I love that. And I love the analogy there as well about the Marvel and everything that, let me ask this before I move on to the next question, and maybe where you can chime in first since I skipped you a little bit, but utilizing LinkedIn. So for me, I'm streaming this to my org page as opposed to my personal profile. And I've got creator turned on in both locations. Your thoughts in terms of reaching again, because the five of us are business owners, business minded technologists, and we are building that ecosystem. Are you seeing value in going to either? And first of all, Chris, what you eating? This man, I am distracted by this man eating chicken fingers on the, I'm gonna have to cut this out. Yeah. At least he put us on mute. So the value of screaming to a business platform like LinkedIn or page versus your personal profile. And do you either, have you either bounced back and forth between either of those two? So I'm using LinkedIn. So I kind of pick and choose what I put on LinkedIn. If I know my video is gonna be nonsense, I don't put that out there, but if it's gonna be something where I'm teaching something, I'm showing people how to do something and I think it's gonna benefit people, that's what I put on LinkedIn. While there's a lot of personal stuff going on LinkedIn now, I still consider a business platform. I also kind of consider it's like a portfolio. In case you want to know what else I can do, this is what else I can do and I can do this for you as well. And so while LinkedIn is not a primary focus, I know that Microsoft is getting ready to ramp up to do things with LinkedIn to try to catch up with the other people and still keep it as much as they can in a professional environment. But I anticipate you're gonna see a big push from Microsoft to really have LinkedIn to kind of ramp up and start creating opportunities for short content. They're already reaching out to people and saying, hey, could you create courses on our platform for us? Right. Can you live stream to our platform for us? And so those things are big and I want to be, I'm dabbling my toes in it, it's not gonna be a focus for me, but I have to keep my finger on it because I know it's gonna get to be important in the future. And so I don't wanna miss out. Walter is definitely doing the right thing by making big strides and pushes over there and that's gonna benefit him in the long run. I think we'll all benefit from it in the long run, especially as we get more and more focused on the business side of content creation, it's gonna be very important. And so, yeah, when you have a product and you wanna sell it, LinkedIn's gonna be a good place to do it. Of course, Walter, I have seen the scammers on LinkedIn, so you're lucky if you've missed them because every time I post a video, I get five different people contact me, hey, can I help you promote your YouTube channel? Or can I help you on Instagram? So it's happening, it's happening. There's a lot of those that will tell you that they can get you X number of new subs on YouTube. I get that all the time, I just ignore that. If I had a nickel for every time someone said that. I get them, Roy, I ignore them. I did. Yeah, I don't even respond, I don't respond. But you know, one thing to mention about LinkedIn, to your point, I think consistency long-term is much better for educating a future customer. So every Monday I do something called Massive Action Monday and I go live and I ensure that that streams to my personal LinkedIn as well as my YouTube. And the reason for that is, is because I know that right now, unless, you know, and I know somebody who literally goes live every single day on LinkedIn, like her business model is built. Every day she's live on LinkedIn. And I think it's dope and I think it's a great idea. But what I realized is for me, okay, LinkedIn is not in your face as much as all these other platforms. So if somebody comes, I look at LinkedIn saying if somebody finds and discovers my profile, what is it that I want them to go? I want them to almost discover it like discovering a brand new show that you want to binge watch on Netflix. Right? Like I almost want them to run across something and go, oh my God, this is so valuable. This is so, I'm gonna watch great because yeah, I got my links to my other stuff. But if somebody comes to me from LinkedIn and purchase my course, I'm gonna tell y'all right now, they're probably a much better ideal client today for me than they probably would be on any other platform. And I'm just saying that just because I understand the way to your point, well like LinkedIn, they're not like the other platforms and they're not trying to be, I'm cool with that. But that's the reason why I post every single Monday our lives because I know that if somebody comes to me from there, that person had to do a little bit of work in order to be able to like go, oh wow, yeah, this is what I need, right? And I think that for me in the long run tends to work out a lot better. Hey, Lisa Maria, I appreciate that answer, man. But I see you just joined in, I'm gonna have to tame this bot. Pay no attention to Nightbot there putting you in time out. Oh my goodness, I got Tallboy yesterday, but listen, we love the emojis and the hand waves. I'm gonna have to put Nightbot itself on time out. So pay no attention to that. Yeah, you're right. Nightbot is tripping, it's keeping me right. Listen, when I got these champions here on the screen, I only got two hands. My moderators took, they've got the weakie and all. So let me ask you this. And it seems like from a platform of choice conversation, it seems like we're definitely leaning towards from the top two or three YouTube being probably that one. No one said anything about their own website though. No one said anything about having WordPress, Squarespace, whatever the case, Wix, just having that place on the internet that you own. And I lean into that specifically because we don't own YouTube or Facebook or Instagram or anything else, but I sure do own Jamesix.org. I sure do own HicksNewMedia.com. So is anyone, and again, I'm asking this question when I know you guys already know, I know the answer, but I wanted for the community and everyone listening and watching as well, as anyone spun up their own website, the platform online that they actually own with their name. Yeah, that was my goal this year. So I spent the second quarter of the year and rebuilt everything from the ground up. But just to be honest, I did not create a website. I use ClickFunnels because I need to segment a customer's journey. And that data to me is a lot better than just somebody clicking on the site, subscribing and getting some emails. The one thing that I will say is, I think the future of the relationship between a customer and your product of service is how well of a journey can they go on on their own to ultimately find what they're looking for and you be able to track that and know that, okay, when James went to my funnel, which looks like a site, but it's really a funnel, when James went, oh, he clicked on this, this and this. Okay, great. Well, now I know that that's what he's looking for. Well, let's just make sure we give James what he's asking for. It's like walking into a boutique, right? It's no longer about saying, oh, we're just gonna throw everything at you at once. Nope, when you click on something, you're gonna find exactly what you're looking for. And by the way, when I walk into a Louis Vuitton or somewhere else, there ain't a whole lot of options. And so I think the less options and the more journey that we provide tends to make things, it makes your conversions better. And you can get better data out of people because now there's a, everybody's got a website. Everybody's trying to sell something, but when somebody feels like they personally went and did it themselves, you get a better ROI. That's just been my personality. Alex, I don't know what you've seen from what you're providing. Have you seen some of that to be more customer segmented focused and just kind of give them everything? Yeah, for sure. I mean, the whole thing about a traditional website layout is that it's basically confusion and overwhelm because there's so many different rabbit holes that they can go down into. Now, as it happens, I do have a traditional website, but when I'm sending people to specific offers and things like that, I am sending them into a funnel. So then there is just a clear set of, you basically wanna give people yes or no options. So basically, do you want this? Move on to the next step. Do you want this, yes or no? And it will move on to the next. So yeah, what you've got up here is more of a traditional website. That's kind of the front end so that when brands are looking for me or anything like that, then that is the sort of public facing thing. But behind all of that and things that you can't actually access from just the menu bar at the top, for example, would be offers and things like that that I'm sending out to people. So that's how I deal with that. But for sure, that is the best way to get people to go through on a guided process and lead them through that customer journey of discovery and answering any questions that they may have within the funnel through to evaluating you and going on to purchase and for sure that sales funnels is the way to do. Incidentally, the platform that I use is Kajabi. I've used ClickFunnels for years as well. But this stuff, because I was building out a lot of courses, although I've done courses in ClickFunnels as well, Kajabi just I found was better for a better course hosting platform for me in this case. And it does all the other stuff all in one place. So that was the platform that I chose in this case. Love it, love it. I just wanna give an acknowledgement to everyone in the community, everyone in the chat. I see you, we see you, appreciate you for engaging and talking amongst each other. Listen, if you got a question, put a Q in front of it. I see the sensei of moderators in the chat there. And listen, Mr. Duncan, I may reach out to you one of these days in 2023. So keep everyone honest, things without nature, but ClickFunnels, I know that's you, Chris, Kajabi, I know that's you, Alec. I'm still a school word press. Listen, I grew up with Matt Mullenwick and he and I, the starter of the automatic project, right? So I'd be remiss if I didn't continue to build sites with that. I see JP in the building and I know he's a Wix man like our dude, Marshall Fox. So they use Wix and they use, what's the other one? Not Clear Space, gosh, what's the other one? Clear Space, right? So there's all these other platforms as well, but again, I like what you were saying, Chris, in terms of, yeah, you can have this environment, but if it doesn't take the prospective client on a journey, if I can't find what I'm looking for as I click through one and I see something that I don't like, oh, but I can go here and maybe get that course, master class, get that tutorial, get that ebook, whatever, then it's a waste of effort. So I like the fact that you have that offering and you're making that easily accessible to the folks that come to your site. So, and let me ask this as well, put everyone on the spot, are each four of you providing consultative services to folks who are looking to use something besides just a Facebook group, besides just a LinkedIn group or something of that nature as opposed to using a WordPress site? Are you providing consultative services for Kajabi and for ClickFunnels and for things of that nature? Put you guys on the spot here. Yeah, sure, that's been a big part of my coaching, actually, this year, like consultations has been... Come on, we're selling for you brother, come on, I'm trying to sell this one. We're doing nothing but that sort of stuff. So I talked about how YouTube monetization was less than 4% of total revenue, while the majority of the rest of it has been split between courses and consulting. So both of those things and naturally, people ask me about the things that I'm doing and so yeah, certainly offer those services. See, as a freshman in this area, I've started being able to reach out to the community, those that are consistent in the chat of the live streams and so we meet every other Saturday on Zoom and being able to share and to talk and it's an intimate group of, I would say about six to seven people and we've kind of kept it intimate because it allows everyone to kind of be transparent, to be open, to share your victories, to share your struggles, but as one particular content creator said to me, offline after we ended the group, he says I feel free and I don't feel threatened because sometimes our experience of some Facebook groups and some LinkedIn groups of, and it can literally be in our head or it could be an actually someone coming at us and he said, I don't feel threatened by this community of people that you have and how you're being targeted of how you're letting people in. Certainly I would love to see it grow, but at the risk of opening it up to everyone and then having individuals feel like, okay, it's just another group. I'm slowly developing that and so I'm in the learning stage of that. So when you can be able to have a community group of members where you can start monetizing it, it's helping me to learn to start slow and to build it right. Perfect, that's actually a great segue into the next topic that I wanted to get into, but I'm going to bring this question up that came from Robert. Hey, appreciate you for being here, man. For folks that are doing consulting services, monetization aspect, how are you monetizing? Is it PayPal? Is it Venmo? Hopefully you're not using Zell. Zell gets, listen, we can go a whole hour talking about Zell and the scammers that are on there. I've been caught up in it, buy me a coffee. How are you monetizing those services? And I almost can bet that there's going to be a higher level of a discussion from the four of you as opposed to, again, just the cash apps and the buy me a coffee. But again, I don't want to speculate and I don't want to assume, but so let me start with you Alec and then we'll go around the horn in terms of how you're monetizing the services that you're providing to your customers. So primarily for consultations, it's on my website, takeonetech.io slash consultation. And there I've just got Calendly embedded and then it's a payment through that. I do also have it on buy me a coffee. Buy me a coffee was one of the first things that I set up before even starting my channel. So I do still technically have it also there as well. But it's primarily from my website. So that's where the sort of coaching stuff is processed through. And that's the link to Stripe as I say, so yeah. Again, Chris, what about you? So I had a philosophy change and it made sense. I like to buy me a coffees and some of those other things but what I realized is that I feel like there's a narrative of micro payments that somewhat cheapens what we're actually good at. Come on, don't beat around the bush because this is where I was trying to set up. I see where you're going and I see Keely and you're talking about it too. Don't beat around the bush. Yeah, we all fan. So I'm gonna just, let me kind of, so I have a business coach and my business coach, it was, we had two business coaches this year. My wife and I probably spent over 150K just this year alone in business culture. Cause I wanted to understand how is it that some people are literally like small teams? I mean, I know a guy probably does 30 million a year with 10 people on the scene. He's doing 30 a year and I was trying to figure out like how is he doing that? And what I realized is most people when we first start out with content creation, whether we start with a course, a PDF, a ebook, whatever you started with, when these smaller micro payment things started coming in, everybody rushed to the table. Well, what it does is it kind of cheapens what you actually do. Like, Alec, what you do, like I'm in my mind and I'm just saying this out loud, I'm not saying this to get you. I'm saying as a creator of somebody who literally has to put together the systems and the tools and the things that you do, I would be willing to happily to pay you $5,000 to $8,000 for what you did easily. Yes. Because what you do and the return on investment of how you teach, bar none. That's hard to duplicate, right? You're you and so the way you do your thing should be well compensated for. So I chose not to do buy me a coffee and all those other things. I actually have a payment plan because my program is a high ticket program. But that's because I'm not into just the smaller things. I'm really trying to help people have a real transformation. I can tell you what the transformation is for people who choose to go through my work. And when people get into my mastermind or they buy my course and then they want to go to the next level, those are real transformations. People go from I just worked my day job and I started wanting to build a side business to now they're two X and what they were making in their day job. That's real change, right? So what I learned from a lot of business that my business coaches is that some of us are selling ourselves short just cause we want to make a sale. Wow. We'd rather say we had 50 sales only made $20,000. I'd rather say I made a hundred sales and each of them were $15,000 a pop. Cause I got a quality person and that quality person as a client is gonna go out and get me probably five and 10 more. And in this day and age you got to learn that the real game is the referral game. Not just constantly drumming up new people and washing them out and throwing them out the door and then you're trying to grab another 50. I'm just not into that. So that that's just my personal understanding in the way that I look at things. I look at what James do, what you do, Walt. Like in my mind, I'm like, no, you're worth probably four or five times more than what we probably charged. But it's just for me, it was mindset. I had to change my mindset around like I needed to look at myself like an actual media company. Cause I am, when you see all the stuff I produce, that's done from here. That's not like, you know, I got 30 people building all this content. No, I do that. I put that stuff together. I go live 52 times every single week on top of the other videos. So I just, I had to change my mindset and realize I was worth more. And when I did that, I got a better client. When did that light bulb come on for you and Alex? At what stage when, you know, James taught, and I apologize, James, for jumping in his hose. Come on now, this is your house. Take it over. You got to tease to the front door. This is what it's all about here. At what stage of your content creation era was it freshman, was it sophomore that like clicked on for both of you to say, I'm worth more and I'm not just gonna do a buy me a coffee. I'm not just gonna do a PayPal, but I'm gonna go ahead and put something in order, in line, almost like a less brown or a Kindle Fickling. At what stage of your content creation did that light really hit the floodlight? Not just a flicker, but a floodlight hit you both. I think one for me, I'll just say this and Alex, I'd love to hear yours because you got some incredible stuff. But I think for me, the first time was when I realized how much output I was actually given. The second was when I realized the transformation that other people were having. When those two things happened, I was like, wait a second, I am grossly underestimating what I provide. And it wasn't about the other, what they did, what they were able to do on the other end. Again, me having a business coach and just realizing like there's, and there's a better client out there too. There's somebody in my case, there's somebody sitting at their job making $100,000 a year frustrated. They're successfully discontent. And if they could learn how to build a business and I could show them what they needed to do, and then all of a sudden they're no longer bound to that thing of corporate handcuffs and all of a sudden they feel free, that you can't pay for. So my business coach taught me and he used to drill it in my head like, what is your transformation? Stop selling your pieces. Nobody cares that you got a course. What they care about is, what am I gonna be able to do after I have an experience with you? That's what changed the game for me. Okay, love that. Roy, I'm gonna let you chime in because I want you to chime in as well. But we've talked about a lot of, before you do that, I wanna interject. We've talked about mindset. And again, Chris, you missed ahead of time before we went live. We were talking about, again, we're all here from a business perspective, right? So we all are in kind of that next season, right? We've all got all the gear. We've got all the lights. We got all the cameras. We got all the stuff. Now, right? So that's no longer the conversation. Let's raise the level of conversation. That's kind of why I prefer to talk about monetization and there's nothing wrong with the Buy Me a Coffee. There's nothing wrong with the, what was it, the super chats and the merchandise and all of those things are pieces of your overall ecosystem and your overall offering. But we, come on now, in 2023, let's raise this level of conversation for folks who are out here creating content who are changing lives, who are changing mindsets, who are reaching folks, having those, I tend to have on a lot of my streams those awkward conversations that makes you think. Right? So if we're touching folks and having them think about life and the way that they engage and interact with folks differently, there's value in what people pay for. I stole that from the founder of Mighty Networks. She says that people pay attention to what they pay for. So hopefully I don't get sued for taking that. But she always says that, Gina says that people pay attention to what they pay for. And us continuing to charge $10 for a post on our website from a provider, which I did up until last year. Ways to Price is quite a bit. But again, for charging those types of numbers, when the reach, the engagement, the click-through, all of the things that are provided because you're now adding the access to your community or your environment, understanding what that threshold is of charging your worth. And folks in the community that are in the comments right now, like JP Hightech, she talks this all the time, charge what you're worth. You are a high-end professional brand. Charge your worth. Look like you're doing, look like you know what you're doing. Someone actually in the comments said, let's be professional, right? That's what we're trying to do. So that's the conversation that we're trying to have folks. This panel is not necessarily about go out and buy the Roadcaster Pro, go out and buy the Stream Deck, go out and buy the FX30. Now, there's tons of videos about that. We are leveling up. And in 2023, if you're not on your game and if you don't separate yourself from that noise, you're going to get caught up and you're going to get lost. So these folks, listen to these folks as they bring all of this value to you. Hopefully you're getting that. All right, Roy, I'm sorry. I'm off the set box. No, no. So talk about it from your perspective. So, you know, I'm kind of, I've been baby stepping it because it's been for a long time, I was focused on building relationships. I have to buy me a coffee, add a Patron, a Patreon, I mean, and I have stuff like that. Hold on, you say Patron and Doc Shoa. Okay. That's my drinking buddy right there. You say Patron and Doc Shoa. Okay, let's go. Yeah, but, you know, I'm in a process of revenge. I'm a WordPress fan. I actually wrote a WordPress book about five, six years ago that was what I received. So, but anyway, I'm a huge WordPress fan. So I'm in the process of setting up a website. I have like 12 different domains registered, but I haven't, I'm going to tell you, I've been baby stepping through this process of content creation and building a YouTube channel. I very much, I like the joke. I'm a beggar that's telling another beggar where to find food. And so, I'm past that now. I have grown immensely in this last year. I finally know the direction I want to go. The whole point for Tech Troublemaker was that I could build a brand around it that wasn't me. It didn't have to be me. I didn't have to be the face of it. It didn't have to be Roy Richardson, is Tech Troublemaker. So if I want to hand off the reins to somebody else to run the business for me, I can. Or if, you know, and if I just want to focus on other things, because I'm interested in so many different things. And I've been in technology for 25 plus years at enterprise level. So, you know, I have so many things that I delve in and learn everything I possibly can about things. I am a master at research. So literally I go, I learn things, and then I go out and I share it with others. And now I have a lot of people asking me for advice on different things. I'm helping people implement different things. And so it's time for me to ramp up, build that website underneath it that I need to build. There's 12 domains over there and start moving forward. And so that's what I plan to do in 2023. But this is part of a five year plan that I put together a year ago. And I've got four more years to go to kind of realize the total dream that I'm looking for. And so that's where I'm at. And as you said, buy me a coffee. It's not going to cut it forever. I've got to move on. I've got a Stripe account now. And so I'm looking at other avenues. I'm monetized on Quora now. They're actually paying over there. So I go out and answer tech questions for people and get a little subsidy there. So I've been doing a lot of affiliate stuff. And so that's starting to pay off a little bit. And so I'm trying to formalize the whole thing and move forward like many of you have already done. And so 2023 is my year to do that. I love that. There's a method to the madness in terms of where I'm going with this. And the fact that every one of you said something different. The fact that everyone said Patreon, buy me a coffee, Stripe, PayPal, Zell, doing different things to serve your community and doing different ways of monetizing. No one specifically said just YouTube monetization. No one just said they're waiting on those checks on the 20th of the month when Google sends those checks out. That's when they come, just so y'all know. I've gotten a comment about buying me a coffee as well because we talk about knowing your own worth. I've always known my worth. And I know that when I've done work with other people outside of my Take One Tech YouTube stuff, I charge a much higher price than I was originally charging for my $150 an hour coaching calls. The fact is I knew my worth, but at the very early stages of YouTube when I set up buying me a coffee, nobody else necessarily knew other than I got a few videos out. And so I always saw the $150 coaching calls as a way to get people who were at least a little bit serious because they're gonna pay $100,000 an hour to speak to me. But that is, there is no one that I've had one call with and maybe there's about maybe two people who I've not then gone on to have a whole series more calls with and work out some other things. So that is very much a case of being a lead-in to other things. In terms of the actual coffee of buying me a coffee, a $5 here or there, that was really just the thought process behind that is that when you are starting out with YouTube, there are costs involved in it. There might be a TubeBuddy membership subscription. There is an Ecam subscription. There is this, that and the other. And all these little $10, $15 a month hits soon add up. And so like in any sort of business, I always wanna think that I can start it out as cost neutral so that it's not gonna be costing me money to do it. And that's part of the reason why I made a conscious decision to buy very little actual equipment from our studio and it's only recently that I've upgraded from my 10-year-old camera because I wanted to make sure that it is paying for itself and it's certainly doing more than that now. But in the beginning, it is quite good to have that buy me a coffee because it's a way for people to support you and the channel and feel that they are part of it. It makes them feel more invested in the community. But it does also help to keep it sort of cost neutral in those early stages until you can get your higher ticket products out. Same with the courses. Those are kind of standalone quarters, the three courses that have released so far. But my stream earlier, I sort of outlined the evolution of that next year. And that is moving to a subscription model. And that is giving a series of different tiers that people can take part in, where at the lower tier, they're only gonna get access to the online courses. At the next tier, they'll get access to the online courses plus some cohort-based courses where they get in actual time with me as well. The next tier above that is where we are doing group sessions as well, again at a higher price per month. And then there is elite coaching. I've got coaching clients at the moment who I've got one-year agreements with where it's paying up front for an entire year of one-on-one monthly coaching sessions. So I think building out all of those things will come in time, but you do have to start sort of somewhere and your rates will increase as people become more aware of, and you've demonstrated what you're able to help them with. So that was certainly my approach and ramping up my hourly rates as I've gone through as well. I love that. Asking and charging your worth, right? And having multiple streams of income. I think Roberto Blake said it one time. He said each creator should have 10, 15, maybe 20 streams of income, right? To be in this industry as a business and maybe next year I'll bring you guys back and I wanna talk about the accounting pieces of this, right? Again, you can't just have the same old Wells Fargo that you pay your mortgage with, right? Breaking that apart and actually going through those steps because again, a lot of times folks will assume of how to manage the finances from a business perspective. What it means to get that EIN. What it is to know that Dun and Brass Street number. What it is to get business credit. So again, as we start progressing through the freshmen, the sophomores, the juniors and the seniors who are involved in terms of content creation, those types of conversations need to continue to happen. I love the conversation. I love the engagement. Doc in here talking about listen, let's go and make that money and become an Ecamm affiliate. Ecamm, we all, we get them Ecamm checks too, man. So that's true and that's recurring revenue. But again, having that additional multiple stream of income coming in from affiliate relationships and things of that nature just works. A lot of you talked about community and I have specifically said the term community as well as opposed to just subscribers, as opposed to fans, as opposed to anything else. But I'm gonna start with you, Walter. And let's talk about community, what that means, how you're building community. Are you using any particular platforms of choice for your community? A lot of us have gone into a particular direction. I'm not gonna name a name until we get to that until someone says it. But again, just because I wanna understand how the four of you are taking advantage of building and nurturing and shepherding your community that you're growing. Cause I think it may be slightly different for Roy, Walter and Alec as opposed to what it is for Chris. But again, I may not be wrong, but I just wanna hear that conversation. So Walter, how are you building your community? Great question. And so I'm in the beginning stage, the freshman stage of building my community and primarily the platform I'm using, it's coming from YouTube through my live streams. But as I began to build this community, invite those that were consistently in the live stream chat, consistently showing up and engaging in the live streams. And then I made the invitation to say, hey, do you guys wanna just get together for an hour on Zoom and just talk and share? Because in your content creation journey, and I'm quite sure all of you gentlemen can attest to this, there's a time where you start to have creator fog, you have that time where you start to doubt yourself, you start to have concerns about if you can really do this and you don't have someone you can bounce that off of. So that was the groundwork of how the community was born and then just sharing with one another that think of, and again, the sports analogy because I realized not everyone in my community is a sports person, but to say, hey, look, I'm here to bring out the best in you. You're the here and the bring out the best in me. There are some individuals, excuse me, that are within our community that have over 55,000 subscribers. There are others who just got monetized and have over a thousand and there's others who are still striving to get that. So we don't look at the subscribership, we don't look at how many views each of us have, but we look at how can we pull out the best in one another. And that's how the community has been evolving. They've said to me, hey, look, don't fall into the temptation of opening it up to everyone because we have something here and they faithfully come, you know, six to seven people, they come back every other Saturday and we share. And you have one that's an editor. We have another person that has, like I said, over 55,000. They've ran with the Sean Cannells and the ThinkMedia's and they said, despite all of that, I find more value in being in your group. And so it's just starting. It's just starting. And I've had an opportunity to be a part of some communities where when you leave, you're like, man, this felt like a battle zone. It felt like a battle zone of just on how the host was conducting it and how everyone else was engaging. It felt like a war zone. And I said, if I'm gonna start a community, it can't be like this. I find it hard to believe that all these communities act like this. And so that's what we've been focused on. Love it, love it. Chris, I'm gonna come to you last because I threw you under the spot like that because I may be wrong, but so let me go to you, Roy. Community, how are you building and how are you nurturing and what are you using to grow your community? So, a lot of my communities come from Facebook masterminds that I've been a part of, as well as YouTube. I just have made a lot of friends on YouTube and just slowly building up a community that way. And I'm just meeting just a really amazing people. And so it's funny, I have way more close friends who only know me through YouTube than I do in person because I work from home. So I don't get to mingle with the real world that much. So it's just funny to me that my community is just all over the world. It's just great that I've met people just all over the world that are reaching out to me and asking questions and we interact together. And so I'm just enjoying this journey. And then every time I go live, there are people that are on every single live stream I do and I'm so thankful for them. And I'll let them know that that, hey, I really appreciate you showing up. And then you got time to be watching something else and here you are on my stream and you're hanging out with me and just you've got to appreciate your community. You've got to interact with your community. I'm emailing them back and forth with some of my community. I am, some are reaching out to me on Instagram or on Facebook and DM me there and we have communications there. And then just a lot of folks who I haven't had yet an opportunity to communicate that closely with but that show up every live stream I do and I just really appreciate it. So that's that to me is community. How can I, what can I do to benefit them? And in the long run, it benefits me because you build relationships and we all move forward together as creators. That's my goal is to help as many people as possible and let's just move together entirely as a creator community. Okay, I like that, I'm impressed you though. I'm gonna ask you from a scalability perspective, how are you reaching out to that community? And you can speak particular platforms if you want but we're all here here to learn. I'm wondering if you are going individually to each person or do you have like a mail or light or mail, something of that nature that you reach out to those folks on a newsletter because I think we all would be interested in knowing how you stay in front of that community the right way and not make the community communication like Walter was just saying to where you're overbearing or it's not focused on the community, it's focused on the creator. Well, one of the issues is I am not very good at self promotion. I have started a mailing list, I haven't promoted it very well. So most of the interaction is either through the live streams or reaching out individually. I have about 30 plus people that I reach out to individually and communicate with and from them they're people that they know that also watch my content. So I'm probably the freshman of this group to that standpoint, but I know that I have to have a mailing list because you can't depend on YouTube but it could go down at any moment. So if your basis for communication is any social platform, you're setting yourself up for failure because one day they could disappear or one day they could just go offline or they could suddenly say, you know what, you violated our policies which are now this because last week they were that and now there's something totally different. So you can't depend on them. So you have to have a mailing list and I'm in the process of creating a newsletter and I plan to do at least a monthly newsletter and probably later branch into a weekly newsletter. This is an intervention for all of us, not just for you. Yeah. Alec, okay, I kind of know what Alec is gonna say and I'm really looking forward to your breakdown of this and then Chris, I'm gonna throw you on the spot. Alec, building your community, what are you using? How are you doing it? And also in terms of maybe helping Roy in terms of automating some of that outreach, right? So how are you nurturing your particular community? Everybody get started now. So thanks to Keeley who turned me on to Discord and almost dragged me kicking and screaming, not quite, but almost. I did have some resistance to it earlier on in the year, you know, feeling like, oh, it's a gamer platform. But it was only once I got onto Discord that I realized just the real benefit of it that it's so much more than a Facebook group being able to actually follow conversations and find threads of conversations and things like that that you just sort of lose in Facebook groups in my experience. But also the thing about speaking to individuals, one of the benefits of having a community where people can see everyone's posts is you're not only building the bonds between those people who you might be contacting individually. And you know, I've had email conversations back and forth with people that have, you know, gone on. But oftentimes you're sharing a lot of value there in those threads that is basically then only serving one person. Whereas by doing it on a community thread, you're actually giving everyone else the benefit of that as well. So it's not just a purely sort of time thing. It is actually, you know, to give that extra benefit to other people as well. Obviously some things might be too sensitive to, you know, put in public or whatever there is that, of course, but in general, those sort of conversations can be really well add in a Discord server. And it also speaks to this thing of like being, not owning your platform on YouTube. Whereas I know Discord is a platform, but it's not quite the same in terms of, once you've set up your own server, they aren't gonna give you community strikes or anything like that, assuming we're all doing generally decent things. But as somebody who had a warning on my YouTube channel, because I did something that was outside of their terms of service, I posted a video telling people how to download videos from the internet, which turns out YouTube don't like. But it was about the application Downey, which is for downloading videos. Anyway, so yeah, there is still that feeling of ownership of a Discord server that you don't have with YouTube. You know, YouTube can change their algorithm and so on. Whereas you are building a community in Discord. One thing I will say about that though, is my sort of gateway into my Discord server, they do still have to go through my website and give their name and email address, and then they get the invite to the Discord. And that was so that I'm still capturing those email addresses, so it's not a little sandbox thing. And making people do that, it also allowed me to have a video on my site, which educated people about Discord. You know, telling them why I've got it there, don't worry about it, don't be fearful of it like I was. And sort of explains the sort of process and making sure you've got some sort of onboarding once they get into it as well. So there is a series of videos I've got in there as well, telling them how to find their way around. But that thing of getting their email address is crucial so that if all things do go south with Discord, then there is always the way to do that. I love that. Listen, I slept on Discord for a long time. And I'll admit it, I thought the exact same things, just for gamers, it wasn't right for me, but the evolution of the platform and the pounding on the head from Keely as well, just saying that just take a look at it, see if it fits into your ecosystem, into your work stream, into your community dynamic, where you're trying to go with your community, it just works. And the capabilities that we have, I'm not trying to sell it, I'm not in affiliate with Discord, I'm not gonna pay, but Keely, you put your link in the chat so we can have folks reach out to you. But being able to integrate audio and video and just different channels, especially doing the live stream, right? Being able to have a back at a house type of a conversation with your community while you're live, Doc's in the chat right now. He uses it extensively as well for his weekend classroom session. So don't sleep on it. If you're looking to build a community, yeah, there's Mighty, there's Circle, there's all these other platforms out there as well. Take a second look at Discord and just look at it with an open eye and a different perspective because the capabilities are there and they continue to evolve, they continue to update the platform as well. So it's something that should be considered. And so Chris, the reason why I left you last because I just think that you may be going about building your community and reaching out to them in a different way because of how you take advantage of funnels, right? Just because you did a 24 by seven live stream a few months ago that just kept running and kept going and I know you were getting emails and inquiries and just feedback from that in a positive way. How are you using your tools and your environment to build and nurture your particular community? Yeah, so I was able to build out, I worked with a PR firm and if anybody wants access to that tool, call at me, I'll make sure that you get access to it. But it's a 24 by 24 seven live stream and it streams, I choose and hand pick which videos I want in that live stream. Now, if you understand YouTube algorithm for two seconds, that's a very important thing to have on your platform. If you understand it for two seconds, you'd understand how important it is. I struggle with the community. I'm not gonna lie to you. Y'all just gave me an education on Discord which I still, I personally, it's just, maybe there's something that ain't clicked for me yet because I have it, but I'm not using it for building a community. I'm on it because other people are on it. Tom Bulu has one, so I'm on his. My podcast Mastermind had one, so I'm on theirs, right? I haven't personally built one yet, so y'all, I have to, Alex, I had to pick your brain at some point or something, but I struggle with building a community because I have been focused on other things to ensure that the community has a building block and a success path. So I'm about to give y'all an experiment that I'm gonna run in 2023. This will be the first time anybody's heard this because the video hasn't even dropped yet. The video actually drops tomorrow on my YouTube channel. Let me put you on the full screen, though. Come on now. Let me give you guys an idea, right? So I've been, I watch a lot of people on what they're building on their communities, and I think they're great and they're dope. But what I realized is that the way to get somebody to engage with your content to maybe even purchase from you, to buy from you again, and to even go tell somebody else is they gotta be invested, not just whatever they purchased, but there's gotta be something else there. So I'm running an experiment in 2023. All of us alike, we have found today Wikipedia to be your go-to, right? Most people don't mind looking at a Wikipedia page and going, yep, that's a source of truth. So I studied, how did that come to be? Because we all know when those things first came out, everybody was like, oh, people just put a bunch of crap on there and then all of a sudden it turned into like, no, these Wikipedia pages are like a source of truth that you can go to. So here's the experiment I'm running this year. I said, what if any document, PDF, free content, anything that I create, what if I create the source of it inside of my community and let the community morph it and build it into something so that when the next person joins, it's that much better? So I am experimenting with an idea of saying, I have several different things that I'm about to create, but I'm gonna create them at like 70% and then hand them to my community and say, you add the other 30. Heck, I tell you what, here's the skeleton, put the meat on it. What else do you need to know? Because here's what I figured out. In a lot of conversations that I have, somebody will say something, whether it's coaching, whether it's alive, whether it's whatever, and I'm like, I didn't think of that. And I realized there's something to be said about the collective nature of discussion. It'd be kind of like if the five of us met together in Vegas and was like, yo, we don't build something. I guarantee you by the time we leave there, it's probably gonna be much better than if one of us said we've been doing it, right? So that's kind of my approach in 2023. I've got several things that I know I'm gonna do and provide to the public at some point for a cost, but I'm gonna build it within my community and let the community like tweak it and play with it. It's like doing a Rubik's Cube, right? And then when you finally get it right, all right, now it's ready. Okay. So that's my experiment. I don't know if it could fail, it could go terrible, but that's gonna be my experiment because I think when people have a hand in it, they're more likely to go tell somebody else. They're more likely to stay longer. And those two things to me are more important than probably anything else that I do inside of my community right now. Wow. I love that. I love the fact also that you're not afraid to try, right? Regardless of if it's successful or it fails, at least you tried, that's good stuff. I wanna be cognizant. Oh, I'm so good, Alec. Just quickly, what's the platform then that you're actually having all of that engagement and interaction with? Where, how is that happening to share that stuff? So right now I have a Facebook group of 400 people. I slowed down on the growth of that early this year because to me, it felt like it was growing too fast, to Walter's point. So I kind of like slowed down. I was like, whoa, this is, then I had to kick a few people out. So what I'm thinking about right now is, I'm like, I've been looking at some platforms and I think what I'm gonna do is, I don't know where I'm gonna build the thing that people can leverage to start to tweak on yet. I think what I'm gonna use is like my lives inside of my group and show people what I'm building and then email them and say, hey, I'm doing a build session. I think I'm calling them build sessions where I'm gonna create something. They'll be able to come to a build session and then put their stamp on it. And kind of like say, hey, you know, I think you should do this. Hey, I think we should, this would be great. And the whole premise is, the next person that comes in, we want this to be good for that person. Do we just want to keep making it better? I haven't picked a platform yet. I don't know if there is a platform. You know, Discord would be perfect for that sort of stuff. And I'll tell you the reason why. First of all, for all of those different things you're creating, you could have a separate, it's called it like a channel. So where you're gonna be talking about different things. So you could have a different sort of thread in that. The other thing that they got in there though is basically a video platform. They're confusingly called voice channels, but still like my live stream, for example, what I do is my channel members, we're all in there. It's like a Zoom call effectively, just like, you know, we're on kind of now almost. But then when I hit go live, they're still there in that group area. But I'm still just streaming to YouTube. Then when I finish my live stream on YouTube, I end the stream, but I'm still just in there with those folks. And then we carry on the conversation. But what's really great about Discord is the fact that you can have these, it's almost like I liken it to a Zoom call, but just within the community space. And the reason why it's good is because anybody who sort of comes into your Discord can actually see, you know, oh, you're in there. And I liken it to being in a home or an office and they can see that there's someone in through the door and then they just come in and come and hang out. And it's great for that sort of thing. And to the point about having been in other Discord communities before, one thing to remember is the way that the Discord community is is very much a reflection on how somebody else has set it up. So it's not going to be a case of there's a framework already there and people come in. And one of the things that really put me off Discord from the start was in another area of business, I do a lot of stuff in the sort of trading communities, trading and stuff like that. And so there's a lot of stock trading communities in Discord. And a lot of them have got really, really poorly set up servers. And that can be really, you know, a turn off when you go into these servers and see that it's so badly run, you are then getting that bad sort of experience and feeling like, oh, it's Discord's not for me. Whereas if you get it set up right from the beginning and understand how to use the really simple features that there are in there, but the simplicity can actually make it really confusing. Like as I say, if someone's done it the wrong way, but definitely Keely is the person to speak to. I mean, she's helped me set up everything I'm doing is all be modeled on her method of doing stuff that she's used with all of her experience. She set up dot rocks server. She set up the ECAM server. And, you know, that those sort of framework that she can give you. Yeah, Discord for creators Keely Dunn is the one that you need to be checking out for all of this. Listen, I'll write the check, no problem. I'm with it, like, I think that the thing that to your point, here's something I also want us to all think about going into 2023. I think we got to start giving our communities credit for being smart. And when I say that, that's what, that's why I'm like really thinking this might actually work by allowing them to have a hand on what we build because I think sometimes, I've been in some communities to Walter's point, like, you know, it's all about the person who made it and it's all about whatever they were creating. And it's almost like, well, we're the top. You all are learning from us. You don't know yet. And what I realized is, you got to think about this for a second. Wikipedia is accessed by anybody. They can go in there and change whatever they want. But somehow the collective honesty and moral integrity of human nature, people don't go in there and mess those pages up. And when they do, they get corrected. And so what I want to see is, is it possible to build products with the collective, that piece of human nature and go, now this thing is better. Now we can sell it to the public. But the people who helped build it are out there also doing it too. So it's not me just talking about it. It's the 50 folks that helped me build it. So now I can build something to scale real quick, right? Because now they feel like I had ownership in that. Oh yeah, I remember when we were in 1.0 or that thing or the beta version of that in mind. Look at that class now, right? Oh, look at how they did this now because they add all these. In my mind, that's what I've seen. Again, I could be the most optimistic crazy person on the planet, but I look at Wikipedia and all these other pages and I'm going, that's just free open source stuff that nobody, people fight over the truth in that stuff. And I think we need to lean on that when it comes to our community. Yes. Listen, I love that. Doc and I both worked for Apple. We worked for an insane genius who said, go out there and try to put a dent in the universe. Only the folks that are out there making these aggressive, somewhat crazy, somewhat insane moves against the grain, take the headphone jack out of the phone when we don't even know what we did, right? But before we think we don't need anymore. Doing the kind of things that you're talking about right now, those are the folks that really helped move the continuum. And I like the fact that you're actually still talking about using the human element. As you see now, the focus is really around AI. I've written so many YouTube shorts using chat GPT in the last week that is ridiculous. I just go up, put my face in front of the camera but I'm using chat GPT to actually do the transcript. So the fact that you're still looking to have the human element involved. And I like the statement that you said about having the community help build whatever is going to be next. That right there again is thinking outside of what the current norm is by going with the artificial intelligence. And that could be that next thing that actually does work. So wish you luck on that, man. We will definitely be here riding the coattails and we just want 20%. I don't want all of the funding from it. I just want finders fee because I bought you on this panel here. Again, I was gonna say I want to be cognizant of folks' times because I know we're different time zones and I know I think Alex already new years for you. I don't know what's going on in Thailand. Let's wrap this up and let me ask you guys this. What lessons have you learned during your content creation journey for this particular year as we wrap this up? This 2022, what are you gonna do more of next year and what are you gonna do less of in 2023 as it relates to taking your content evolution to the next journey? Not your content creation, your content evolution because each of you already do interviews with top-notch folks. Each of you already know how to slice and dice and edit and do all that. You know how to do the thing. But what's that next evolution in terms of what you're gonna provide to the community in next year? And what you're gonna do less of? Who wants to go first? Roy, you laugh first, so you gotta go first. Yeah, I'm doing everything next year. I'm not cutting anything out. No, I'm gonna focus. I'm only 24 hours a day, brother. I know, I know. But I've had a period of time where I said yes to too many things outside of my content creation and so now this year I'm gonna focus on content creation, but I'm gonna pay a lot less attention to Facebook, not that I've paid much attention anyway, but I'm gonna focus on YouTube. I'm gonna focus on shorts to be the previews, to get people to watch my longer form content. I'm also gonna be forced to create a second channel and when my tutorials have nothing to do with content creation to a second channel so that I don't dilute my message on my primary channel. And so that's gonna be my focus in this new year and I'm going to get focused on the other elements of my business and really ramp up and so I can afford this really expensive hobby I've had this past two years and then gonna keep my podcast going. I've had a podcast since 2017 and strangely, I record my, I do my live stream. I then take the audio from the live stream, edit it down or release as a podcast and I've actually gotten more audience. So I really wasn't expecting that. So I'm gonna keep that going as well, but my focus is gonna be majority YouTube. Just do everything I can to make YouTube work the way that I want it to and to support my audience who is finally, has a much lighter voice than is telling me what they wanna see and because they're forbid, I just kind of through paint the wall and to see if it would stick and now I'm much more focused. I know what my audience wants to see and I wanna provide value to my audience so it's worth their time to watch it. Before I move to the next person, where is the primary location you wanna send folks to in terms of finding out who Tech TroubleMaker is? YouTube.com at Tech TroubleMaker. That's where I want them. So come see me at YouTube and then I'll tell you about the other stuff I'm doing from there. Is that right? You not gonna just drop it right here? Okay, I'm not gonna press. I'm not gonna press. That's it. I'm gonna... Dr. Strong. All right, no, it's all right. You know, I'm just moving on now. You're just gonna leave us hanging like that, you know. Okay. Oh, I thought you were challenging me to go back to college to get my PhD and I said, well, the guys put me on the spot. First of all, where can individuals find me? They can find me first on The Huddlewood, Walter Strong, the third on YouTube and then secondly, Walter Strong, the third.com. Those are the two places that we can have a conversation that's going to add value to you and to the next generation that follows you. One painful lesson that, and when I say painful, I've had to learn this lesson over and over but after having a conversation with one of the community members because I've had some opportunities to have one-on-ones and they said to me, before I joined your group, I was just the person who did YouTube and I never published any of my content but I watched you all the time and you've brought me to the point where I have the courage and the confidence to now publish my content and do live streams and they said that was not something I could do a year ago and so the person basically said to me, stop looking at your numbers because I was having one of those moments as an up and coming growing content creator on YouTube saying I haven't hit 1,000 subscribers yet and they said, if you closed your eyes, what would you value more? 1,000 people that you don't know or just one that you've played a big part and when that person said that, I said, okay, I've learned this lesson long enough and I'm good, we're just going to move it forward. And then in 2023, there's a lot of things I want to do but in listening to Chris, I want to thank you for your wisdom that you shared about the importance of a business coach and I've narrowed it down to about three individuals and that is finding a business coach and I understand the power of a coach because before your Kobe's and your Shaqs could have their championships with Phil Jackson, they had to deal with Dale Harris, remember? And before Michael could deal with Phil Jackson, he had to deal with Doug Collins and the same for my pistons in Isaiah. So in 2023, narrowing down my coaching search to say, I'm just going to pick this one coach, we're going to roll together, I'm going to invest in myself so that way it can take not only my content creation game to the next level, but the business side of it. And so those are the two things that we're moving forward in. I love that. More of a story there, investing in yourself and finding value in that, that's huge, that's huge. Chris, you were mentioned, man. What about you? What's going on? But more and more and more and less. Yeah, so everybody can find me at Grow Your Side Business. Any platform, you'll find all of my content. I'm doubling down on content creation. I am also doing more of building out my ecosystem. If you don't have a subscription model, you really don't have a business. People have to be willing, like I realized that for me, I've been grossly selling myself short. I gave away a lot and I do give away a lot. I give away the game to people all the time. Because the thing that I know is at the end of the day, all of us, and this is something just for everybody listening, whether you're listening today, tomorrow, or 10 years from now, you catch this video. There are eight billion people on this planet. There are at least 10,000 people who think like you, who will happily buy from you if they only knew you existed. So I'm doubling down on content creation because I just know that there's a tribe out there that rocks and thinks the way I do about stuff. And we go all grow together. The thing I'm gonna do less of is overthinking. I have overthought so much this year and I know people see like, somebody sent me a message that, man, Chris, your video's everywhere. Well, yeah, but there's so much I haven't put out because I'm overthinking it. There's so much that I didn't say because I'm thinking it's not ready. There's so much that I didn't do because I just, I'm analyzing, right? As opposed to putting it out. And so I'm not gonna be overthinking this year. I've already got my first quarter lined up of the stuff that's gonna get done and I'm not even gonna overthink done. That's the other thing. Don't even overthink what done means, right? Just drop it, like, who cares at the end of the day? Like, oh, you wish you did this and done this more. And, you know, don't do all of that. Like, getting your own world, it's okay to be missing for a while. 2023, a lot of people are not gonna find me mainly just because I'm working on building my ecosystem and being of value when I open my mouth, right? So that's kind of where I am for next year. I love that, man. My immediate family knows a statement that I say a lot of times. I don't know if some of them are still listening and it is, get out of your own way, right? That's kind of against a summary of what you just said, right? When you do it, do it, you know you've done a great job. Push it out and then get on to the next thing, right? Don't overanalyze or overthink and don't beat yourself up because that'll stifle, right? That'll stop you from actually pressing go, pressing record, moving to the next session, course, masterclass, whatever the case may be. So I love that, man. And again, these are light bulb moments. I'm hopefully folks are finding value in this. Mr. Johnson, what about you? I relate a lot to what Chris has just said and specifically the one about, if you have not got a subscription model, you haven't got a business. I mean, you can make sales, but there's a constant challenge there to get more people into them. There'll be spikes when you have offers on, when you launch a new course, but looking for that consistent recurring revenue is a big thing for me in next year. And what I was talking about on my stream earlier about the subscription thing for the courses and the new courses that I'm introducing. So I'm definitely sort of doing a lot more of that next year in terms of having more content there available as part of that subscription model. Now, at the beginning of this year, I was only spending around about two hours a week, I'm sorry, two hours a day, I should say, on my content creation. It was just like kind of my early morning thing before the rest of the day started. And it's through the year, now I'm spending a lot more time than that on it. And I had a sort of shift in my priorities halfway through the year where I had some other big events happen that caused some issues with some of the businesses that I was involved in and sort of had to pivot. But one of the sort of lessons that I've got out of a lot of the things this year is that noticing where your mind goes to and the things that you get distracted by. And I've been someone who's always generally fairly focused. I have a good process for task management and things like that. But in those moments where my mind would wander, it would always, always wander to content creation. So it was a case of realizing that, you know what, I love everything that I've done. So other businesses that I'm involved in or have been involved in, I feel very blessed that I always love what I do. So I have always got a passion. And so sometimes when you're doing something which you are passionate about, it's easy to not notice that there's this other thing that is actually you're far more passionate about. And that was this kind of lightball moment for me this year was thinking, yeah, that's where my mind is always going. And so I wanna devote more time for that, even though it might not be as lucrative in the short term, I believe that in the long term it will be because the phrase that I love, the icky guy thing of, you know, doing something that you love that you can get paid for that you're good at and that the world needs. And so, you know, I feel like in content creation, I've really sort of found that in the niche that I'm in this time. My goodness. Listen folks, I surround my folks with some winners here. These four gentlemen right here are laying it down right here. And hopefully you grab some value from one or two sentences because Chris Alec Walter Roy really opened up and actually gave more than I thought, right? In terms of the mechanics of what they do and what they're going to be doing, what worked and what didn't work. So for that I say, I thank you for taking the time because one of our most valuable assets in life is time. So I thank you for this hour and a half or whatever it's been to share with all of our varying communities what we've learned over the course of time and what we're going to do moving forward from a content creation perspective. Hopefully folks have taken down some contact information, have looked at some websites. Everyone's websites will be in the description at least on my YouTube channel so they can reach out to everyone. Chris, I know we all want to talk about this 24 hour by 24 by seven live stream that you're doing. So we want that too. So we can do our own journey with Telethon. But let us also bear in mind that this is not the end all to be all. Right? We are content creators, we are fathers, brothers, husbands, sons, daughters, all of that. But there's more important things going on in life. One of the members of the panel who was supposed to be here had an emergency in his family and could not make it and family is the most important thing. So bear that in mind again as we close out this year. I'm not going to preach long. My pastor said, I'm not going to be here long. But let's keep everything in perspective. Let's make sure that we are taking care of ourselves because you can't take care of anyone else if you don't take care of yourself. Oh, that's right. So with that, I will say each of you have a great, great New Year. New Year's Eve, stay safe. Don't be out there in the streets. Just stay in the house. You know, pour a little dark liquor out by yourself. Roy's gonna have some padron. That kind of thing. But listen, thank you gentlemen again for the time. Thank you to everyone that joined. If you found value in this session, please share it with someone. If you did not find value and there was an issue, please let me know. That way we can evolve and then we can grow better and we can actually start providing other things that are needed that resonate with you out there in the ecosystem. That being said, y'all gentlemen, y'all be good and everyone else take care of yourself. All right.