 Chris Doe. Chris Doe is one of the most well-known designers in the world right now because he's taken over YouTube. He's taken over the world. He's a super, super well-known, super talented designer. We can beep out the. In this video, I'm gonna talk with Chris Doe about branding yourself and running a design agency. Let's go. What you're about to hear is a clip from the Product Breakfast Club podcast with conversation between myself and Chris Doe, one of the most well-known designers on the entire planet right now. We're gonna be talking about all things personal branding, all things design agency running, and we don't hold back. Everything you're about to hear really is just a snippet from the podcast. We're trying that out. We're putting it on YouTube to see how it works. And do let us know in the comments what I should ask Chris if I have him on the podcast next time, or if you have any comments to give to it. We just sometimes love getting some comments. Have a good one. All right, talk to you later. So, hey, Chris. Thanks for coming on the podcast. It's my pleasure, Jonathan. You are right now founder and CEO of Blind, also running the Future, but how did you end up starting Blind? Where did that come from? Just give us a little context on that one. Sure. I think there is some shared DNA. I've not thought about this, but being kind of an accidental entrepreneur to both the companies I've started, I was freelancing in Los Angeles doing motion design work and just kind of barely knowing what I was doing. And it's when my uncle called me up out of the blue and said, hey, I know since you were a kid, you've always wanted to start your own company. I have an opportunity for you because my business partner and I need a design firm. So we'd be willing to invest money and partner with you to start a design firm. I put in my notice, I was done. As soon as he said that, so I met up with his business partner. I wrote up a business plan, which was terrible. Didn't know what I was doing. This is kind of the dawn of the internet here. So we're talking about 1995. Wow, okay, cool. So it's not like you can just jump online and find things. Google hadn't been invented yet. So I wrote a business plan. I met up with them for dinner. While at dinner, this is pretty bizarre. He wrote me a check for $5,000 and handed it over to me. And he said, this is a good faith gesture that we're gonna do business together. And that's what it took. And I started the design company. Long story short, it didn't work out for us as a partnership. So we dissolved the partnership and I renamed the company blind and everything else has been the same 22 years later. What didn't work out specifically? Okay, so the nitty gritty is this, is that we had initially agreed to $100,000 seed capital to run this company. I had projections that we wouldn't make a profit up until like month eight, but we were already making a profit at the beginning. So I called my uncle up and I said, where's the rest of the $95,000? Where is that? He goes, we're having some issues right now. There's some bigger issues we need to resolve because there were hotel developers. And so they ran into some problems and he said, we can't focus on this right now. So I had to write them a letter. It's kind of a cash call to say, you need to supply the rest of the funds by this date or you forfeit your partnership. Okay. And I was just waiting to see what they would do. It would have been great to have a partner up in my heart of hearts. I kind of liked this. I want to run this by myself. I don't want to ask people for permission. And since we're making money and getting clients anyways, I don't really need it. Before you started that company, did you ever want to start an agency or is that just because it happened by accident that you got into it and understood that it's something you wanted? I think as far as I can remember, even in my early teens, I've always wanted to start a business. I didn't know it was going to be a design business. But I remember in high school, I started a t-shirt printing company because I had worked at a printer and I thought, boy, if I could use my design hustle a little bit, find a client, which I did, and do the designs, I can have somebody print them and then make money in between. Now I didn't realize how to structure a business and all the costs that go into making something. So I was under the delusion that I was making profit when I was just barely covering my expenses. Right. That was a good lesson, but I've always tried to do something like a car washing business or I would go to the Crete Coyote Creek and go fishing for crayfish and then try and sell those. So that kind of entrepreneurial spirit to try to make a buck, I was very driven to do that. How old is Blind right now and how many people work there right now? Blind is in its 23rd year of continuous business under one owner operator that's myself. Wow. I think we're about 14 people on staff and a whole bunch of freelancers and some interns. Not bad. So that's actually pretty rare, a company like that. At least from the design companies that I've studied, it usually either goes two ways, it grows and has marginal profits and eventually gets bought by some bigger conglomerate and just kind of dies or it just doesn't really work out and it fades out and everyone just kind of goes their own ways. And I think that's pretty impressive. How were the first five years? I would say the first year and a half was the toughest it's ever been. And even though it was tough, we've always run a profit. I think there are two years where we actually lost money like we were in the red. Some years it was very thin. So the first five years were actually quite good. Like once we got to the first year learning hurdles and challenges that surround any first year for a company, kind of figure out what we wanted to do who our clients were, our voice, our place in the marketplace. Once we figured that out, things started to catch on. It wasn't supposed to be like this because I was told if we were successful graphic designers, which is what I studied, we would probably make $27,000 a year as an annual salary. And I remember as a teenager, I talked to my older brother who's four years older than me. How much money do you need to make to feel like you've made it in America? He says $100,000. So for some reason I was fixated on the number. If I could make $100,000, I'm a success. So when my department chair told me you could expect to make $27,000 as a salary, I was a little heartbroken. I was like, okay, this is gonna be a long slog to get to $100,000. But I'm out of the gates first year. We're doing really well. We've grossed more than that. I'm not saying that's what I put in my pocket because it costs money to make money. I had to hire people, so I was fine. But here's the sad part to the story. So now five years in, it's near 2000 and my wife had been secretly investing money in Dotcoms. And you know what's going on with this story. I know what's coming. So I'm pretty sure and to this day I don't know the exact amount because it's too painful to think about really. Here's a very important lesson. First, don't do what everybody else is doing. Her excuse to me at that point in time was, everybody's doing it, it just told me to invest. And it looked good until it didn't look good. But you don't know what you're doing. Number two, making easy money is dumb money. Meaning you've contributed nothing to it and you know nothing about it. So you're at kind of whim in the marketplace and if it goes down, you're dead. That's what happened to us. I have a very old school mentality. I like my money. I don't want to invest it foolishly and I'm not really trying to get anywhere super fast in terms of money. I just want to earn it and I'm okay with that. How many people were working there when you broke that million barrier? How many people were on staff or was it like freelancers? What was the workforce like? I think it was my wife and I. Now the first year in business, I hired two or three people. I did and then the business went dead in that first year. Like it was going great until it wasn't because I didn't know anything about sales and marketing. I didn't know anything about customer service. I barely even knew how to bid jobs to be honest. I just threw numbers together. It was just a guessing game. And so of course we ran into some problems and basically we ran out of money. One year after starting, we ran out of money and I told everybody, I can't pay you anymore. You guys all gotta go. I'm sorry, they're all my friends. And so they all left. So that's when we went back to zero but the very next year as we rolled from December to January, I picked up a new gig. We started producing that, started making money. And I think we brought in some people again, freelancers this time. I was a little leery of bringing anybody on staff. And so I think we only had two or three people freelancing for us at that time. Cause I also remember, boy it'd be nice to like hire two or three people on staff. I know that the workflow was good enough to support that. But I'm a little conservative when it comes to that kind of stuff. Like I wanna make sure there's a ton of money in the bank account before I hire somebody. Sales in particular is something that took me a long time to get a hang of. If you were starting an agency today, if you were starting a design business today, and I guess this is like a really cliche question, but you don't have any contacts, I guess you do have the skills you have today. What would you do differently? I think in today's age with all the platforms for you to gain traction and awareness, I would exploit those to their fullest. I would try to build an audience as quickly as possible and to kind of figure out my social media game because I believe you can get work that way. But I would have to figure out somehow to position that work, to be appealing to clients who could afford six figures. That's part one. Part two is if I knew what I know now, I don't think I'd have a problem getting to a million dollars. That's the problem. I'm in my 40s right now, right? So there's a lot that I know that I can walk into a room and ask a client and look him right in the eye and ask them for a $100,000 logo and be okay with that, right? If I'm a 21, 22 year old kid, I would think $2,000. Okay, how would you get in the room though? How would you get in the room in the first place? Okay, so now you're stripping away all the people I know too, right? Yeah, just on your own. Well, I mean, okay, if one of your ways of doing it would have been knowing people, then I would be interested in how you would get to know the right people as well. I was talking to my digital director Ben Burns last night about this very topic. And I said that I moved from San Jose to go to Los Angeles, to go to what I perceived at that time to be the best design school in the most competitive marketplace. And when I went to school, I made it a point to prove myself in every single class and every single day to be at the top of my class. I'm super competitive, but I was like, I need to be the best. The opportunities that were created by choosing to go to Los Angeles to be around like-minded, super competitive, super talented people, open doors, and I was able to go down those doors. My first job as a professional was in advertising, something I did not want to pursue. But my friend Colleen Mathis was in advertising who'd seen me, remembered that I was just a hustler. And so when she graduated before me and got a job opportunity, she reached out to me and said, I need a partner, would you come with me? So I dropped what I was doing in school and I went to work. So that's opportunity number one. If we look at other opportunities like directors who were studying in the film program, I would help them out with their project. Now I have to guess, and I'm not sure this is true, the reason why they reached out to me was one that was free work, but that I had a little bit of a reputation like I'm a sharp designer. So I helped them out with their projects, two students helping each other out. When they got a school and they got a gig or they met people, they would recommend me all the time. So they recommended me to a large fashion and beauty company which is where we got our first six-figure job. They also recommended me to an editorial company that needed an identity design. So I did that. So I did it for these guys that were starting up a new company. And when they got commercial gigs, they also recommended me. And this story can be repeated over and over again. I got an opportunity to design what we call key art, video game packaging art, because one of the guys that I knew in the computer lab, because I was an assistant there, he wound up working for a video game company. So when they asked, do you know anybody, he put me up, I got the gig, so I wound up doing video game packaging. So you see how this works? Like being ultra competitive, striving to be the best person I can be, and trying to be decent to human beings while I'm doing it, I'm not perfect, open to all kinds of opportunities. So these friends or colleagues or classmates wound up becoming sales agents for me. That's really interesting. There's a couple of things, the geography as well. Like you mentioned that you moved to LA, geography for me, that's something that people don't think about too often. There's a lot of books out there that say it doesn't really matter where you are. You can do everything from your home. You can do everything from like middle of the countryside. And it's true, but it makes it more difficult. If I think about how AJ and Smart, how we got our first clients, it was definitely related to geography. It was definitely related to physically being in a space where people might want the work that we're doing. I didn't learn a lot at college, but what I did learn is how to make connections and how to do good work for people who then recommended me further. So if anything for you, college was probably just like a really great place to learn your work ethic and build your network as well. But being extremely reliable, not just skilled, because I think today as well, there's a lot of people who are very good at their jobs, but I think maybe if there was like 10 people in your class who are equally as skilled as you, they might still not have been as successful as you. Maybe it's because you're also, we're extremely reliable as well. And I think it's harder than you would think to find reliable, enthusiastic people to do work, at least from my experience, they're few and far between, but people think they're everywhere. I want to probably the most competitive market for creative services in the world, Los Angeles, entertainment capital of the world to try to make a name for myself. When I was in school, I didn't know how to network because I was very awkward in kind of just anti-social. I had some friends and I was coming into who I was as an adult and finding my own confidence, but I really built my whole identity around being a graphic designer. And I remember talking to somebody, I was like, what makes you so special? He asked me and I said, well, I work really hard, man. And he says, everybody here works really hard. You can't just work hard, you have to be great. And it resonated with me. And one of my teachers who I really, really looked up to and still do to this day. And he says, so here's the thing, I just want to destroy this myth for you guys right now. This is first semester, first class at Art Center. And he said to us, you guys think you're competing against your classmates. Look around you right now. You're not competing against them. I mean, in school you are, but when you graduate from school, you are competing against me. Good luck trying to do that. And so that was like a slap in the face. It was like, oh my God, this man that I was learning from, that I revered and everybody else did too, was telling me, this is where the bar is at, so wake up. So my way of networking was to out hustle and out produce and out design everybody in the room. That way I would let the work help me where I was deficient. So these people that I met along the way came from a byproduct of two things. One is my genuine desire to help people. People would then ask me, hey, do you know how to do this thing? And so I became like an unpaid tutor for lots of people. And those are the relationships that I formed and people that I still know to this day. So I'm gonna say that the first five major gigs that I got out of school came from these relationships, all the significant ones. There was even this guy, his name is Jovo, and he was an industrial designer, kind of an Eastern European guy from the former Yugoslavia, right? So I was trying to help him. Later on, this guy winds up inventing a product and starting a company, a multimillion dollar company, and he hired us to help him. In general in the design industry, if I would talk to like 10 people about doing work for free, I think eight of them would quote Mike Monterio and say, fuck you, pay me. And would definitely go down the route of like, don't devalue yourself. I definitely have a different opinion on that. What do you think about, at least early in your career, doing unpaid work? To be honest, I don't like doing unpaid work at all, period. I start to question the person's motives. Like why are you asking me to do this? So you don't value my time. I think there was a time and place for that and that was in school. So I was helping out friends and friends helping each other out. Sometimes I'm gonna be honest, it felt very one way. Like I was helping them, but they weren't helping me. But that wasn't true either because there were friends later on who graduated school who recommend me to other people on open doors. It's not a linear relationship where you do somebody a solid and tomorrow that's repaid. The way I look at it is like this, is there's a karma bank and it's better to just have more karma in that bank than to have less so that there's not a ledger out with a negative sign in front of it. Some people do wind up just using you and you just have to accept that and that's okay. At the time in which you're doing it, you have to say, this may never go anywhere and that's okay. I've lived most of my life with that mantra and that's why at the beginning stages of our career, some young students would find out about our design company and there was a little bit of buzz about us. They'd come by and hang out and talk and chat and my girlfriend, latest be my wife, would say like, why are you spending so much time talking to these guys? You have so much work to do. And it was true. I just felt like they had something that they need help with and if I could do something to help them, I would. And these relationships have blossomed over time. Not all, but most have. It was a really great feeling. So when you're out of school and real businesses come and ask you for free work, that's where I'm like, no, you can afford the work. You're just trying to low ball me or you just don't respect the work enough that you wanna pay for it. And that's okay. I'm not gonna try and convince you. I just have to say you need to go somewhere else and that's totally okay with me. Right. Have you ever done work for free that you wanted to do for a company or for a person that wasn't interested in you doing that work in the first place but maybe you just said, I really wanna do this thing and I'm gonna do it? More like self-motivated free work. I know what you're saying because you're so excited about working on it and you wanna just close the deal so you offer it up to do for free. I'm searching my memory banks. I could be incorrect about this but I don't think I've ever done that. I never come to the table more desperate to close the deal than the other player. It erodes all my leverage, right? I've worked on some of the biggest brands in the world. I've worked on Nike. I've worked on Xbox projects, PlayStation, just the things that you dream about working on. I've worked on UFC projects which I'm a big mixed martial arts fan. I don't go into like, oh, please hire me. You know what, I'll just discount it in half. This is counterintuitive. The more you charge, the more the clients respect you. I agree. And we're all looking for just a little respect and they all think some of the designers out there, they think, oh, you know, I gotta be a good price. This is what's gonna close it. They run around with that scarcity mindset and they're always worried that the next gig is not coming. So all you have to do is blink a little bit and they'll drop their price, cough and they'll drop it again. And so they wind up getting exploited. So where did the sales come from? How does that work? Do you guys have a team? Just go wild, tell me everything. We get commercial leads when I say commercial, like TV commercials from my sales rep in New York, her name's Carolyn. So she represents us now, not just for the East Coast but all of the United States. So if there's a new commercial gig, chances are it's gonna come from her. But we've been in the business for a really long time. I know most of the art directors, executive creative directors, very high level people. And so as long as we're kind of on their radar, some of them will reach out to us from time to time. We're working right now with the Eisenberg Group. They're a smallish advertising agency. There are over 500 employees, smallish, right? And they have a lot of big accounts. The owner, Mr. Eisenberg himself, is somebody I knew back when they were 15 person agency and it was a relationship that we built from a long time ago. And there was a period, probably an over 10 year period where we didn't work together, but now we're reconnected. They're much bigger, much more successful and we're still doing what we're doing. So now we do a lot of Xbox work for them. So cool. We did the launch for the Xbox One X. You saw that. That's amazing. And these relationships are gold. Typically when they call us for a gig, they said it's a one dog race, it's you. As long as you do something that we feel is good about, we're not gonna bid you against anybody else. And that's a wonderful relationship to have, kind of trust and shorthand. So we're not jumping through that hoop, do the dog and pony show all the time. So that's great. So that's another relationship that we have that we built. We do a lot of work for Dunkin Donuts. We have for over 10 years. We used to do a lot of work for Angie's List and there's a handful of other clients that we do work for. Believe it or not, we do these animated things for Swiffer, the floor cleaning product. Oh yeah. Yeah. The dust mop thing. Yeah, we've been doing animated work for them for years now. And so it's nice to have a few clients or accounts where they continue to just come back to you and say, we need more of this, we need more of this. Most of the leads come from relationships we've built. Did you guys ever have any cash flow issues like after the first five years? No, no. And I'll tell you why. Even though we lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in the stock market, we never did because I'm a super conservative guy. I like to spend money on things that can make me money. So I'll buy a nice lens. I'll buy a $2,700 lens because I think I can shoot something and make something with that. And so some people have guilt around buying things. I do not. When I buy something, that object reminds me, why did you buy this? You need to put that piece of kit into use so that you can go make more. How does this help you? Like this mic that I have, it forced me to record more podcast interviews. Just to get into the future now, the future is at least from what I can see from an outside perspective, it's a separate company. It's a different business focused on education. It's an education company teaching people basically everything from the business of design, tools and skills of design. And you guys are completely destroying it on YouTube. It's ridiculous. It's absolutely without a doubt the most impressive. And I think the largest, at least from what I can see, design YouTube channel, you guys are just starting to kick ass on Instagram, just in general, you're building a media company. It's its own thing, but I'm assuming the benefits of that are going to start feeding back into blind as well. At some point, I'm assuming, but I'd love to know where did that idea come from? How did you decide to make it into its own company? And like, when did you know that this was going to be something like more than a site project? Because most companies, what you're doing there is a little marketing department or someone in the corner making stuff that no one cares about, but no one's taking it seriously. How did that happen? Okay, so at the very beginning of our conversation, I said, sometimes we have these accidental businesses that there's something inside of us and then the right opportunity, the moment happens and it crystallizes. I'm gonna rewind the tape a little bit. Boop, boop, boop, boop. Five years out of school, I started to teach. And I taught at Art Center, I taught at Otis and I've been lecturing here and there for about 10 to 15 years now. I love working with students. They're not jaded. They want to learn and there's this potential cliche where you will learn more from your students and you ever teach them. And if you've never taught, you won't understand that at all because that doesn't make any sense. But when you teach somebody something, it forces you to go inside of your own brain and figure out, well, why do you think that? How did you come up with that solution? Or why do you believe that to be true? So you start to get really introspective and you start to think about the things you think about. You learn to process and you learn to understand your own process and so that you become this whole other person. The problem with teaching is the pay sucks. You drive an hour to school to teach a three hour class, you get back in your car, your day is pretty much shot and you got paid for three hours worth of work. They don't pay you for anything that happens outside of that. And not in terms of developing your class, the syllabus, not to pay you for faculty meetings and things that you need to do unless you're on staff and I'm not. So as much as I love teaching, I thought that this is not sustainable because it will affect my quality of life if I became a full-time teacher, this doesn't make sense. And it wasn't until my wife said to me, she challenged me one day because she would go to my classes, she would sit in there, even though she's a graphic designer too, that's how we would spend some time together and she would see me teach and see who I've evolved into while watching me work with students. She said, you're great at this. You have a real talent to teach. You're so passionate and you're so fast and you figure out problems so fast. I believe you're wasting your time here. So I thought it was all a compliment until that part came. I was like, what do you mean I'm wasting my time? And you have the normal reaction. I think that most people have. I'd like to think I'm better than this, but I'm not. And first like, oh, what are you saying? Like, here's my wife trying to tell me what to do, telling me this isn't good enough for me and just like riding me on this thing. I wasn't yet ready to admit that she was right. But I was like, you know, I need to do this. How can I do this? How can I teach and make it into something? So I started to develop a program. It was called Blind U, short BU. And I love that just as an acronym for be yourself, right? BU. Oh, I like that. I didn't get that immediately, but now I'm like, I love it. Yeah, right? It's pretty cool. This is about four years ago. I run into my friend Jose Caballer and he offered very generously to help me with a client I already had to do UX design with me for me. And that became the Trojan case study and also is part of the core coursework that we sell. It was that very first experience of him coming over. He says, Chris, let's do something together. I need to produce content. If I can camp out here, we'll explore some things. And so it was very organic. It was a little slippery and undefined and amorphous. And those things make me very uncomfortable because I'm like, when does this guy leave? What does he want? How long does he park here? And that initial kind of like, okay, he made a gesture of generosity. He wound up staying there for years. And we formed a company together. It was called the school. He dragged me very reluctantly to be on camera with him to produce content for YouTube. He was kind of like my training wills for being an on-air personality. And eventually we make some content that catches on with people. It's the Oli's branding case study. It felt exciting. And I had this dialogue because this is the first time I really put together a deck to teach online to a virtual audience that isn't there. I love working with students. I'm very dynamic around my students, but how do you play off nothing? Like right now I'm looking at a piece of glass, right? I'm looking right into the barrel of the lens. There's no emotion, no micro expressions, no body language, no shifting, no nothing. And I need to draw energy from something. Otherwise I just feel like I'm insane just talking to myself. Piece of emotionless glass. Yeah, it pretty much is. And if you've ever stood there in front of a piece of glass with nobody in the room and tried to just say whatever it is you think, it's a weird experience. It is weird. This leads us to the future. Jose and I have different visions for how to run the company. So ultimately we separate very amicably. We still work together. There's still parts of what Jose does that's part of our course. And we still have him as an author. So we send him a check for every product that he sells. The business continues on. So we rebrand it as the future and we're charging ahead. Now there are bigger channels out there that talk about design. There are. There aren't too many. I think in terms of what we do, there are none. So the market is wide open and it's been a very interesting experience for me. We try to provide really high value content to the viewers out there. That's how I found you guys. That's how I found Blind. That's how I found out about you. It was because I was just seeing your content constantly popping up on YouTube. The first thing I watched was like how to sell design or something. It was like you standing in a classroom with a whiteboard or something talking about sales. That's one of most popular videos. Yeah, it's a great video. I subscribed and then I just started watching more. We were also building our YouTube channel and you guys are definitely an inspiration. We're doing something a little bit different for sure but you guys are just like dominating in every possible way. So it's just like, it's crazy. So how did you guys grow your YouTube channel in the first place? How did you get that so big? When I joined the YouTube channel and Jose and his company, we had 1300 subscribers. There's a theme here. I'm a super competitive, enically driven person. So I would watch the numbers every single day and he's like, Chris, you are so obsessed. And I'm like, yeah, you are what you think about the most, right? So okay, I'm thinking about our subscribers right now and I'm seeing this. And my wife again, she'll say, honey, I cannot watch your show. You guys ramble on from this to that. It's all over the place. And I'm just like, this is stupid. I'm like, wow, thanks, honey. Let me see what I can do about that. So that's when I told Jose, I'd like to write a deck and produce our show because it's too free form. I'm not sure it's valuable to anybody and I don't wanna sell anything. The videos that we had done before were really geared towards talking about the products in one way or the other. So if you watched the video, you'd go and think about buying the product. I said, I'm not that kind of guy. I don't wanna produce it for that. So I sat down, I made a deck. I spent hours writing the deck and putting it together and assembling all these images. And that was the only case study on branding identity design. We did that video and the video started to get a lot more views than everything else we had done. That video now has probably three or 400,000 views. And it was like, wow, things that I take for granted that I know people actually want to know. And it also taught me if you put in the work to write a deck and you have a point, people will watch it. And so we produced that and it was very invigorating. It was like, okay, I need to write more decks. We need to have more structure. And so we kept working on that. We also have internet friends, Roberto Blake. He reached out and said, guys, I can help you with your SEO and how you can find stuff. So he was on our show and he taught us how to title things and how the YouTube algorithm works. So I have to credit him too for giving us what were just no-nonsense, straightforward tips, and there's an episode on that. So if you search Roberto Blake, that video will come up. And it's that episode that are like, okay. And I just wrote notes fiercely. I'm like, boom, boom. And I told the team, we need to do this consistently all the time. Thumbnails, meta tagging, the descriptions, annotations, all the kind of stuff. And we would work on that. And that's how we eventually grew the channel. You do need one or two kind of viral-ish hits to really spur growth. And that really came, and I'll tell you how it happened for us. So there's no secret here. I had a freelancer who's joined us and he was really good with Google stuff. And I said, I want to run an ad campaign. I want to pick a video to promote. I will pay people, literally, to help them make more money because I want to get more views. So I tried to find one video that was the least offensive video that we had because every video had a problem. Christian Tukaki, audio was bad. Somebody was too distracting or the camera worker was out of focus or something stupid, right? And I tried to find the one video. So I said, I think this pricing logo design will be that video. I said, go put an ad campaign on it. So we wound up, I think, spending a couple thousand bucks promoting that one video. And then I turned the campaign off. So it went from getting 30,000 views, maybe to 50 or 60,000 views. It wasn't a gigantic jump. And I was thinking, oh my gosh, I'm paying a dollar per view right now and this is killing me. I can't financially support that because this has no backend. There's no commercial, there's nothing here. But what happened, I think, is it got in front of a couple of people that were really critical to the channel's growth. One, it got on the radar of Jonathan Rudolph who runs logo inspirations. It also got on to design taxi and creative block and it started to get shared all over the place. And so that video started to take off, right? So even though we had turned off the ad campaign, it started to take off. And I have all the numbers and metrics because that's the beautiful thing about this kind of stuff. We saw the organic shares and all that kind of stuff. And so it's quite wonderful. So let's say I spent up to $4,000. I can't remember how much we spent promoting that video. Just on that one video. I was like, I think this is the least offensive video. Let's go with this one. And it started to take off and then it got more eyes. And then all of a sudden when we posted and shared little clips of that video on our Facebook page, we grew from 3,000 likes to almost 30,000 likes within a week or two. That also told me we're on to something here. Now I need to think about why this content was relevant to people. And what happened was we started to hear from hairdressers, plumbers, general contractors commenting. It's like, this applies to me too. So when you have a piece of content that goes beyond a very small niche, there's a good chance that it will be shared and then people will become aware of what you do. That's really great. How much time do you spend on the future compared to blind these days? I spend, I would say almost 99% of my time on the future. I try to spend as little time as possible on blind. And if you're looking towards the next few years, if you're looking towards the next five years of growing the future, where do you want it to be in five years? I know exactly where it'll be. It'll be a $100 million company within a couple of years. It really will be. Yeah, I talked to my financial advisor, right? And I tell him about this new business model. He's like, wow, tell me more about it. First of all, education is very hot. A lot of education companies out there trying to figure it out. Costs of private school education is very expensive. There's concerns that you'll never be able to pay off your loan and the job market isn't there. So everybody's looking for an alternative. So we've essentially built up a catalog, a library of content. If I wanted to, I'm not going to do it, but if I wanted to, I can just turn off all 400 videos and say to some university, would you like to license our catalog? You're gonna pay us $100,000 a year or $200,000 a year and go and sell it to every community college, state college, university that's out there and just onboard them one at a time. The good news about this is this, is it has a very predictable income model. We do on average about $1,500 of sales every single day and we're growing every single year about 300% year over year. So we're having that kind of crazy hockey stick kind of growth where it's like flat line and just spikes, right? I told him what I want to do is once we hit a million dollars in revenue, I'm gonna come back to him and talk to him and say I'd like to raise a million dollars in capital. We have a proven business model. I want to raise a million dollars in capital model because I need the money, but I want to sell 1% of the company for $1 million. That gets us to our $100 million valuation. I use that money to hire more writers, producers and editors, even different hosts. And we just keep producing more and more content and keep building out the curriculum. Okay, now I just want to put some context because there are probably some young people listening to this are gonna fall out of their chair. They're thinking, what an ambitious bastard. I can't even believe he's saying those kinds of things. And I'll tell you something. It's a relatively modest amount of money, relatively speaking, because Linda.com at the time I was looking into it was sold to LinkedIn for $1.7 billion with a billion, 1.7 billion. She became a billionaire teaching people. What she taught were hard skills, how to use Premiere, how to use Photoshop, how to color correct, how to use your camera. What we're teaching are soft skills, how to communicate, how to think, how to search, how to research, how to brainstorm. Those are much harder topics in my humble opinion to teach. I believe our catalog and the way that we produce content is a lot more exciting than most online tutorials. We make it exciting to learn. We make it fun so that you don't fall asleep. We're relevant. We have practical business experience. This is not some theoretical academic person telling you, I think this is how you market. This is how we personally market and how we've grown our businesses, how we run our ad campaigns. You're learning from us in real time with real stuff because we're actually practicing designers in the most competitive marketplace. Right. There are no has-beens here. We are current, right? And that's a very unique selling proposition. YouTube, for the most part, is made up of amateurs shooting their show in their bedroom. It's a one person operation. And they're famous mostly for their personality. Not necessarily for their skill nor their experience. Right. I'm out there winning and losing million dollar jobs and I share those experiences. So there are very successful designers that are professionals, but they're not making any content. They have no desire to make content. Yes. For a number of reasons because they're camera shy because they don't see the importance of this. It won't always be like this, but we're here. Why do you think you're going to be able to beat companies like IDO and Udacity? I don't know. I don't focus on the competition. I just focus on us. Simon Sinek talks about this. He talks about there's the finite game and the infinite game. Companies like Apple play the infinite game. The game never ends. We just compete against ourselves. We don't care what Microsoft is doing. We don't care what Sony is doing or Samsung. We just focus on ourselves. We try to get better every day. Some days we lose, some days we win, but we will never lose because we will never quit. There's the big difference. So I don't really pay attention to what IDO is doing. I don't pay attention to master class really. I'm sure they're all doing really well. Well, the first thing is that it's not a zero sum game. There's like many billions of people on the planet. So it doesn't even matter if you have IDO, Udacity, Demi, whatever. But I think at least from my perspective, one of the reasons why you guys are going to stand out, especially on the design side and especially for the topics that you have, I think it's more the attitude of being willing to take the risk to put out all that free, extremely valuable content in the first place. I think there's a reason why you're pretty much the only company doing that. If I would talk about IDO and Udacity and Udemy and all of these things, they're obviously like these big business machines that will spend a lot of money on advertising and that's probably how they'll get most of their people in. I think people are probably going to fall in love with your brand. You'll have to spend less money on advertising because people are just going to talk about it and spread it. And even if you don't capture the entire market, which is not necessary anyway, I just think you guys have an approach that's going to be a lot more lean in the short term. And then by the time you've already captured so much of the market, it's already too late for the other ones anyway. You do bring up some very interesting points that I'm not really thinking about. Most people have a very traditional marketing business model, right? We're going to produce a course. We're going to create false scarcity, like enrollment opens at this point, even though it's all video based, come on, right? They're using all the traps and the triggers to pull people in. They give you a taste of it. They might run a webinar that really asks more questions than they answer. And that's a really good business model. But I'm just a punk and I don't want to do things the way other people do it. I want to do it my way. In my ways, I'm just going to give you guys free stuff. Sometimes I feel like, okay, I need to make some money. So I'll put some stuff behind a paywall. But for the most part, 99% of our content out there is 100% free, ad free, sponsor free, no nothing, no sale at the end of it because I want to help people. And that's why I'm genuinely just touched that strangers from all over the planet just sign up to give us five bucks every single month for the price of a cup of coffee or whatever it is wherever you live. And for a lot of people, they live in developing countries. So even five bucks a month is a lot of money for them. And I just, I genuinely appreciate it. And people give us hundreds of dollars too just to support the network. So I believe the sharing economy, like I'm going to give you something and then people volunteer. They volunteer to write annotations for us. They volunteer to do translations. They do battle for us. They really try to go up the chain from wherever that and say, we need to subscribe to this. We need to support them. If you say something critical of us, they go to battle. I'm like, you guys don't have to do that because whereas I'm trying a little bit more surgical with how I respond to some of these comments, they just drop grenades. It's like, whoa. I've seen that on YouTube. The force of the response exceeds what it warrants in terms of the original comment. They just go to war. And that is in a way it's touching that people care that much. Yeah, it's really cool. And we're going to continue doing this. So right now we're scaling, I think we're at 217,000 subs. We're trying to get to a million dollars. So we're doing lots of different things this year from different guests to different types of content. And we'll probably be running another ad campaign just to get people to watch the video. That sounds crazy to me that you're not building that audience just using ads all the time. Is it something that you guys have? It was just one time and now everything else was organic. It was just one time. That's insanity. We only run one ad campaign for that one video and that was it. But I think I have another video I'd like to promote. So I was like, let me think about that. And as you know, you watch our channel, right? My son who's 11 years old, he comes and sits in my lap. He's like, dad, how come you don't run ads? Cause it shows you right there how much money you can make because ads are terrible. I don't want to run ads because I'm annoyed by them personally. And I know I can make a few more thousand bucks a month. Yeah, but I'd rather just have people watch the video. And if watching it ad is deterrent to watching the content, then I'm going to take it off. I'm not saying this is going to be forever. But right now I want to just grow the channel. I want nothing to get in the way of you learning and wanting to watch and consume the content. I heard that if you take ads off of your channel, so if you like don't monetize your videos that YouTube kind of like punishes you, your rankings get hurt. Yeah. That does make sense though, doesn't it? They have no incentive. So actually that's the only reason we have ads on our channel because obviously we're not going to make any money. We have like 3,500 subscribers. We're going to make like 3 cent a month. Yeah, Matt, we're going crazy. We're going crazy here. I think we can make $18 a month with that. This is one of those moments when it's like the Alfred Hitchcock where the camera zooms in and the camera dollies out. My world is so warping right now. And what you say makes total sense. They would be incentivized to feature you if you had ads on. Exactly, 100%, 100%. It was literally a conversation I had today. Oh my goodness, because we're not making any money for them. You're not helping YouTube. You know what I also heard? I don't know if you know this. Apparently if you have links in your description, you get punished as well and you should only have them in there if you're really, really needing to monetize something. Okay, I didn't know that. So if you like just have your website, like we had like Instagram, Facebook and all that crap. We're getting like D ranked for having those in there because YouTube wants you to stay on YouTube as long as possible. Yeah, but sometimes the links are to other YouTube shows or episodes because we do a lot of cut-downs now. That's fine, I think. Your Instagram today anyway, I saw like the future Instagram posts, but it came up in my feed because it was after getting a lot of attention. It was like five, swipe, one, whatever you had like a couple of images in a row. Do you guys have like, and are you guys kicking off on Instagram right now? Now we have multiple channels, multiple pages and it is a lot to manage. So I don't manage the Instagram account for the future. What they're doing is they're mining the content we've already made and figuring out how best to tell those stories on Instagram. I think some people, and I hate to say it this way, are a little bit lazy. They have one piece of content and they just shoot it everywhere. It's like a shatter shot approach and I don't believe in that. So somebody else handles the Instagram and that's not me. So I don't know exactly what they're doing. And we want to post content native to the platform and to that specific audience. Yeah, the Instagram, it's interesting. I did actually see an ad for the future. I guess it was linking to a course. Somehow it seems like you guys are pretty much nailing it on there as well. I mean, even the most recent post has 772 likes. That's quite a lot because it seems like I'm just starting to see this stuff right now. For me, super impressed. Happy that you took the time out. I really appreciate it. And I think it's like also something very different for our audience. The show is mostly about the product world, what a lot of people have been asking about growing agencies and actually a lot of people specifically asked me to interview you. So you have an influence outside of your own future world as well. So Chris, I mean, I got so much information out of it. I feel super selfish. It was really amazing talking to you. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. It was real blast and I enjoyed the dialogue. And I hope to come to see you in Berlin one day. Yeah, you should definitely drop over and you guys are down in LA, right? And anytime you're in town or something, you want to do a piece of content, jump on your show, let me know and we'll get you on the show, okay? Definitely. I would love to do it. Then I'd be super famous. And you can rock an Irish flag and a German flag if you want. 100%. No, I'm going to dress as a leprechaun. I'll be 100% leprechaun. How's it going, lads? Today I'm going to show you how to design a product. Oh, sure, Jesus. There's a bottle of whiskey on the screen here. I'll do full on Conor McGregor, don't worry. Chris, where can people find you on the lovely internet? You can find us everywhere. If you go to thefuture.com, you can find us there. And feature is not spelled with an E at the end. If you go into YouTube, youtube.com slash the future is here. That's the future is here on Instagram. The future is here on Twitter. And you can also follow me personally at the Chris Doe. That's D-O for Doe. And we post lots of content. So if you just search on Facebook for either myself or the future, you're going to find all kinds of weird pockets of information. Great stuff, Chris. All right, hope you like that little snippet of myself and Chris chatting away. There's a lot more of that on the podcast itself. You can find it on any podcast app for free. We have daily blogs on Instagram, on our AJ and SMART channel. We also have a newsletter you can check out down below, which is a bi-weekly product innovation newsletter where you can get the most up-to-date product design news, all the kind of industry stuff that you might want to know that comes to your email every two weeks. No spam, no bull. Finally, we also have a super popular Facebook group called Innovation Hackers, where designers all around the world and innovation specialists all around the world come to share their links, come to ask questions, and come to share their stories about their work in product design. So definitely check that out. Thanks so much for watching and have a great one.