 Hello there and welcome to the video. Welcome to the live stream and today I'm having a little bit of a celebration because I've just hit the 10,000 subscriber milestone on YouTube and it is just a little marker along the way and it's all relative of course to wherever people are in their YouTube journeys to use a cliche. But it is always a time when I hit these milestones to just take a little bit of time to stop and reflect on things. So I thought what I'd do in this live stream is talk about some of the lessons that I've learned along the way, some of the sort of truths if you like have emerged over that time as well. Talk about some of the things that I did, I think right in the beginning and also talk about some of the things that I would do differently now if I was starting all over again. So before I do that though, I do just need to say thank you so much for everyone who has watched along the way. If you're new to the channel, thanks for being here as well. I know that there are some folks who have been watching since pretty much day one as well. So I always appreciate all of your support as well and I hope you are continuing to get value out of the content that I'm putting out on the channel. A few thanks first of all to those in the chat as well. Thanks to James Hicks. James, you've always been an advocate of my stuff since right from the beginning since I was a month in or something like that and having me on your show. So I certainly appreciate you, my friend. Jeremy, thanks so much for being here as well. A channel member and it's great to have your support and great to have you along here as well. And Dan, thanks so much for the Happy 10K. I still haven't got round to checking out that update for Unify yet, but I will get to it and add my comments into that as well. But thanks so much for being here too. So as I say, I'm going to start with talking about some things that I think I did right, some things that I did wrong potentially and just some lessons that have emerged along the way. So I'm going to start with some things that I think I did right when I set up my channel. And it's perhaps worth sort of taking a step back and thinking about or at least explaining why I set up the channel in the first place. Because it is something that started out as really a, I don't even want to say side hustle. It was kind of a side project for me. And the whole reason I started it was to practice the process of making videos in one take with no edit. So that was the whole reason it's called Take One Tech. And there are still people who don't realize that all the videos on the channel are made in one take with no edits. And I'll talk about the process and the thought process behind that a little bit later as well. Sometimes I get comments like your edits are seamless because there are none. And then there are others that saying your editing is terrible because you haven't taken out all these filler words and umbs and urns and so on. So either way, that's the reason I just do it all in one take. But that was the reason I started the channel. It was just this way for me to practice this process for me to make course content for something completely unrelated to Take One Tech. And then as it happens, this has sort of evolved over time and become a business in its own right. And so I'll be talking about that a little bit later as well. But given that it was just a sort of side project at the beginning, a couple of things that I think I did right now. So this would apply if it is something that you're just starting up as a kind of side hustle. So maybe it's like a hobby, maybe it's something that you're thinking may turn into a business. There's some that are related to YouTube in general, if you're already a business owner and you're looking to use YouTube in support of that. But to begin with, if you are just starting something up and thinking that it might turn into something, then an important thing is to just get it set up right from the beginning. And I think that that is something that I did. There are certainly some things that I could have done slightly differently, which I'll mention later. But yeah, when I started the channel, I set myself a date for my first video, my first live stream as it happens, which was the 14th of May 2021, losing track of time. So it's just under three years ago. And some people say, you know, if you're going to be creating content, just grab your phone and go live, you know, that kind of thing. I'm not really an advocate for that. I'd like to have a little bit more sort of planning and forethought going into it. So I did take basically a month where I, you know, got things set up. So I've got a website set up, got all of the different things in place. You know, I use Ecam live for my live video and live streaming or recorded video and live streaming, I should say. And so, you know, took some time to design my scenes and things like that that was going to be using. But I did set a very clear date for, you know, when I was going to go live for the first time. And that would set the ball rolling for my ongoing sort of content creation. So having a plan in place, I think is important. But one of the other things that I did over that month of getting things set up was I was sort of treating it like a business from the beginning as well. And looking for a way to basically monetize from day one. So I went through the process of setting up, you know, affiliate links, for example, for all of the products and services I use. Or the key ones at least, so that, you know, I could put those links in my YouTube descriptions and start to generate some affiliate revenue. Now, it's not like this was, you know, a major source of revenue, but at least those things were there and in place right from the get go. The same goes for ways for people to support the channel and to support me as well. So I set up my buy me a coffee, which is a way that people can go and basically make a one off donation to the to the channel to go and buy. Buy somebody a coffee or buy me a coffee. And that link is still in my my descriptions today. But one of the things that that also allowed me to do was offer subscriptions as well so that people could just give a sort of monthly support to the channel. And I was surprised by how quickly actually that did sort of pick up that people were willing to do that. And again, it's, you know, every little helps with with just covering costs associated with a YouTube channel if it is a side project. And I always wanted to aim for it to be, you know, cost neutral as as much as possible from from the outset. And so, you know, when you start thinking about subscriptions to things like, well, he came live was the platform I was using and I'm using for for creating the content. Then things like, you know, a TubeBuddy subscription, a subscription for this for that for everything else. There's always a subscription to cover. So having a way to cover those costs from the outset was something that was important. The other thing that I did right from the beginning was have a way for people to book calls with me as well, because if you are creating content on on YouTube, especially if it is more sort of educational style content, tutorial style, then then having a way if this is something that you're interested in, having a way for people to be able to book those calls and and do consultations is another thing that I did right from the beginning. And it was, you know, I guess, I guess it was within the first month of posting content that I started getting people booking those calls. And that was obviously nice from a sort of feedback point of view of the content, but it also added into being a sort of feedback loop into the content itself, because then the more I'm speaking to people that you get this from comments and things like that in the chat as well, obviously, and in the YouTube comments, you know, acts as a feedback loop. But there's nothing that beats a one on one call with somebody to understand, you know, people's challenges and things like that. And that all feeds back into the content. So that would be the first thing is like having a plan in place and setting things up right from the start and treating it as a as a business. The other thing then would be that whilst I've said, you know, some people say, oh, just go live on your phone and I'm not an advocate of that. I do think it's important to have an upgrade plan in place and starting with the, you know, the basics. And I would say that whilst you don't need all of the gear, so don't get caught into this trap of feeling like you've got to have the latest and greatest camera, lighting, stream decks, roadcasters, microphones, all of these other things before you get going. The one thing I would say is get a decent microphone. You know, something and this is a path of potentially diminishing returns after you start getting into it and thinking about continuously looking for an upgrade to your microphone, but just buy a decent microphone from the outset. This microphone here I've been using since day one and microphones can last a lifetime basically more or less. It's not something like, you know, potentially even a camera where we're getting better and better camera quality all the time. You know, going from 720, 1080, 4K, 8K, you know, it's just an incremental increase, isn't it? Whereas audio, you know, a decent microphone is going to be something that is a good investment that's going to last a long time. And people always say that people will, you know, put it with bad video quality to a point if there is good audio. But even if you've got the best video quality and your audio is crap, then they're going to be tuning out pretty quickly. So invest in a decent microphone. One of the things I can just show you is now this isn't actually my original setup. But if I just go to here over here, you can see that this is kind of like a fairly early setup. It's actually when I moved out of my basement studio into where I am now. But yeah, the microphone there is still the same microphone and I've still got the same sort of stream deck on the desk. The loop deck has kind of gone fallen by the wayside now. The loop deck is now a doorstop. But anyway, but that has gone from sort of this to what I'm in now, which is, you know, a little bit more equipment. Still the same desk, still the same microphone, still the same stream deck here. I've just added in some more things around it, but I'll come to that later. But the point was, though, that my camera that I was using at the time was actually a 10 year old Canon EOS 60D, whatever it was. And that was only giving me 720 out of the sort of USB from that when I took it into the computer. But then Ecamm did a great job of upscaling that to 1080. Nobody really complained about my image quality, despite the fact that I was using, you know, decade old camera technology. So that thing of starting with where you are is fine. But you've just got to sort of think about potentially an upgrade path further down the line. And I'll come back to the upgrade path thing a little bit later. Just a few more hello's as we go through. Hey, David, great to see you here as well. And let's see. And Michael, fantastic to see you too. I'm looking forward to speaking to you next week. Thanks, Doc. I'll be talking about you later. You know, I will. A big part of my evolution on YouTube is thanks to this man, Mr. Doc Rock. The this is the things that I'm going to indeed it is. We can talk about this in more. Your best upgrade path to me was 86 in the green screen. Well, that's the thing. So I started all of my early videos were on green screen, which, by the way, is part of the reason. I mean, I still do it now really part of the reason why it's quite so motionless because movement on green screen doesn't always work well. But that was just a necessity as well. You know, I was in the I was in the back corner of my basement and it wasn't the most aesthetically pleasing place. I've got to be honest. And I could have completely, you know, upgraded the thing, done a load of decoration in there or whatever to make it look a little bit more palatable. But I thought, you know what, I'm going to be out of here at some point. So I'll just stick up a big green cloth and then that was that. So yeah, that was my my reasoning for doing that. So but it worked. It served a purpose. So there we go. We always like to get rid of the green screen at some point. No, no way. So so yeah, starting with a with what you have, though, I think is an important thing. And then just having making sure you do have that upgrade path. The next thing then. So those are those are if you're starting something kind of like as a side hustle. If you are already if you've already got a business and you're looking to add YouTube into your sort of marketing efforts and using it as an in book bound tool. Then obviously there is a sort of business costs associated. And I would recommend, you know, just get the right stuff from the outset and you can cut a lot of corners there by, you know, having some advice on what is the right setup to get because that is another sort of trap that people fall into is sort of going around this process of maybe buying gear that's not the right thing and so on. And so there's a cost associated with it with that. But yeah, just having some advice as to the setup. And I should probably say, if you are looking for some consultation, then you can book that from the link down in the description. This is the sort of stuff that I talk about with people all the time, but just getting your setup right from the beginning. But then once you are starting to create content, either as a side hustle or as part of your sort of main business and you're looking to feed people into your main business. Then I would say that in the early days, consistency is key in terms of posting. I don't necessarily think it's absolutely necessary as you go along. People will talk about this. And the reason I say that is because from the beginning, I did start this process of creating 100 videos in 100 days. So that's what I did in my first 100 days. And by the way, that was thanks to the advice of this man, Mr. Doc Rock as well. Because he just noticed your other comment there. Yes, me being completely upright was a battle against green screen rather than that. But yeah, Doc said, before you make any judgments about the way things are going on in your channel and before you start getting into analytics, then you really need to have 100 videos under your belt at least so that you've got words to this effect. I'm paraphrasing here, but to make sure that you can see the actual real results. And so I thought, well, why not just actually get those all done out of the gate so to speak. So that's why I did my first 100 videos in 100 days. I did ultimately after reaching that 100 days, decide to extend that to 365 in a year. I fell a bit short. I think I did 300 in a year. Things got in the way. Things got a bit messy in other areas of life and business towards the end. But yeah, 300 in a year. I was still pretty happy with that. And in fact, right now, I think I've got around about 450, 500 or something on the channel. So actually the majority of my videos were done in that first 365 days. So yeah, having that consistency though in the beginning, I think really helped to sort of give the channel a kickstart. And more importantly though, it got me into the process of doing it. And part of the reason to do the 100 videos in 100 days as well was for me to just get those reps in to be making the content and having that practice as well. So aside from any analytical benefit to having all of that there, it was just for me to get into the habit as well. Now, I'm not suggesting that you need to do a video a day or anything like that. I mean, it could be whatever. It could be a video a week, video every two weeks. But I think there is some benefit in having that consistency in the beginning, not just from a viewer point of view, but from your own perspective of just getting into the habit of doing it. Incidentally, the ability to create 100 videos in 100 days for me was only possible with Ecamm Live and the way that I create all my videos in one take with no edits. So my workflow for that was wake up at, I wake up about three or four anyway, and then four till six was my early morning time before the kids wake up. So it was always kind of like my, I was used to use it as my highly focused and learning time, I guess, as well. And so I just dedicated that to YouTube. So in the case of just wake up, pick a video that I had to make out of the list, make the video, upload it to YouTube and do all of my YouTube sort of uploading management and stuff like that within that two hours. So given that my videos are kind of 30 minutes, I just wouldn't have been able to do that if I was having to do any editing either. So for me, that was the whole one take philosophy was the key to doing that as well. But yeah, so having that consistency is something that's useful. The other thing that I've kind of mentioned is you're starting with what you've got. I've just skipped over something there. The other thing then would be to things that I think I've done right, rather, whether you're doing this as a side hustle or as a business is to give everything away for free. So if you've got a business, there is a potential tendency to think that I don't want to give everything away for free on the YouTube channel because then why would people come and buy anything from me? Or if you're creating courses, I can't give everything all of my information. I've got to keep some little nuggets of information back for in a course or whatever. The fact is when people come to buy your courses, as I see it, and by the way, all of this is just my own opinions, my own speculation, there are other opinions available. But for me, I think that you're basically demonstrating your expertise. That's what I'm now really using YouTube for is a way for me to demonstrate the expertise so that when people come through to want to either book calls with me or buy my courses, it's been demonstrated in public. And you might think then that, as I say, if you're giving something away for free, why would people come and buy a course, for example? Well, the people are paying for organization and structure and a very clear path over within a course. That's something kind of different than you can get on YouTube. It's not necessarily easy to sort of take people on, let's take the roadcaster masterclass, for example. I've probably covered most of the things in that course within different YouTube videos at different times. But that's the point. It's kind of scattered. It's not all in one place. There is no kind of definitive. Here's the start. Here's the finish. Here's the end sort of thing. There's two ends in there. Here's the start. Here's the middle. Here's the end. You know, taking people on a path. And so people are paying with a course for structure and organization. Then when it comes to things like my Academy, the Take One Tech Academy, that is where people get access to all of my courses. But also there is, you know, other educational resources in there. There's guidance. So in one of the tiers, we have our weekly Q&As as well. So that's a place where you can get your questions answered directly. And it's just a sort of different environment. So putting out all of your stuff there for free is something that is, I think, something that I've always done right. And I advocate everybody to do this. And that's not to say that you take your entire course and just actually put it as a sequence of videos on YouTube. I'm not talking about that necessarily. I'm just talking about, you know, when people ask questions in the comments or things like that, you know, it's not a case of all. Well, if you need the answer to that, you need to join my masterclass or Academy or something like that. Or, you know, you've got a book of course. So within reason, I always just am completely open. I don't ever keep any nuggets of information back. So that's what I'll say about that. The other thing then that I think I did right with this is, as I've said, the whole one take thing. Now, I know that it's not for everybody. And I know that it might not be something that necessarily comes easy, you know, kind of sitting down in front of a camera and just hitting the button and going live, or hitting the button and going live to tape, as it were, if you were just sort of recording, it's not necessarily going to come naturally to everyone. But it is something that I think that is worth persevering with. I should also say that although my channel is called Take One Tech, actually, originally I was going to call it One Take Tech. For some reason, I just thought Take One Tech had a bit of a better ring to it, whatever reason. But the point is, it isn't always actually Take One. So some of my videos might be Take Two or Three, maybe even Four or Five on occasions. And usually for me, it's the intro. The hook is the bit that kind of screws me over. This video is for you if X, Y and Z, because that is the bit that doesn't really feel natural to me. Whereas, you know, when I get into a tutorial style video, I'm just imagining that I'm speaking to you, a close personal friend, and I'm showing you how to do something. But I rarely sit down with a friend, colleague, family member, and say, today I'm going to be showing you how to do X, Y and Z. It doesn't come naturally to me. So that's the bit that I usually kind of screw up at the beginning. So just the fact that it is Take One Tech, it's not always actually the first take. It might be sometimes take two or three. But the point is, once I actually do get over that little hook part, then I'm just basically explaining something as I'm explaining it to you, a friend. And that, for me, feels a lot more natural to do. And it also, I think, makes it that when people are watching, because I feel this when I watch people who just do these kind of things that aren't really heavily edited, it feels more like a conversation and a little bit more authentic. You know, I'm often making mistakes. We will make several today, and I do it every video. You know, there's usually something that's not quite right or I click in the wrong place if I'm doing a tutorial or something. But I just say, oh, that's not the right place. It's over here. And I think it just comes across in terms of the way I've seen people doing these kind of things as more general. So that's why I wanted to do it this way. But in terms of things I've done right then, the one thing that I've done absolutely right is choosing the right tool for the job. And that is Ecamm Live. Ecamm Live, if you are unfamiliar, likely if you're a subscriber to my channel, you probably know about it. But Ecamm Live is the live production software that I use to make all of my videos in one take. It allows me to do things like press a button on my stream deck and switch to a different area of the screen. So I can show you in YouTube Studio or I could switch to a different camera angle, which is now out of focus because it's not focused on my face. I can switch between all of these things. And just as I'm having a conversation, combining that then with Stream Deck, I guess I should also add in Stream Deck to the thing that I've done right, the sharing of Ecamm Live with Stream Deck. Because that allows me to just be sitting here looking directly into the camera at you. Well, I'm looking into that camera at the moment. But then I can press a button without looking down and just go back to this one. So it allows this sort of fluidity of being able to sort of switch between different things. And then really once you have that, the tech kind of gets out of the way to a point. So that then you're just talking about, you know, whatever it is. And if I wanted to talk about my YouTube channel page, for example, I can just come up over here, press a button and it's just sort of fluid. This has had a profound impact. Now, I started using Ecamm and Stream Deck for making videos. But then this kind of like dawning realization, which, you know, it feels like I've made a discovery. Obviously, people have made this discovery far, far before me. But for me, it was like this revelation that like, oh, and now I can use Ecamm Live to take all of this power into Zoom and use it in business meetings and so on. And it kind of completely changed the way that I was approaching all of this tech and it's ultimately become like the main thing that I'm using it for. So although I make videos on YouTube about how I use all of this stuff, actually it's because I'm using this for real work as well and taking it all into my Zoom call. So Ecamm Live has just been a game changer. I should say that if you are new to Ecamm, you can get a free trial and I've even got my own page on the Ecamm website. Look mum, I've made it. But if you go over to ecamm.com. You'll find a link there to download the free trial. And also if you use the offer code TAKE1TECH then you'll get 15% off your first payment. Honestly, Ecamm has been revolutionary for me and it's like you talk about things touching people's lives and changing people's lives. This bit of software has had such a profound impact. I really can't express what an impact it's had on my life. My ability to be working from here in the remote northeast of Thailand in a little cottage with a grass roof seriously in the bottom of my garden. And it's enabled me to grow a business out of it. And I can honestly say I would not have been able to do it without Ecamm. There are other options available. You can stream with things like StreamYard and so on, which is a web-based platform, Restream as well. There's a thing you can do in the browser. There is obviously OBS, open broadcast software, which some people would say is an equivalent to Ecamm in that it allows you to create different scenes and so on. And then its cross-platform as well works for Windows and Mac. I did start out on eBay on OBS. I always say that I lost my lost hair with OBS. I think if I tried to do what I've done with OBS, I would have had many countless hours of frustration and probably would have given up, because it just doesn't work as my mind does. So yeah, all of that to say if you're not using Ecamm, you've got to give it a go. It's just next level. So that is something else that I did right from the start. And by the way, guess who is responsible for me using Ecamm? I was using OBS and was frustrated with a couple of things. I'm trying to be nice to it. I was frustrated with a lot of things. And then I just happened to watch MacBreak Weekly, one of the shows that I watch on the internet. And Doc Rock just happened to be on there and he was just mentioned Ecamm. And it was just kind of this thing that just triggered in me that I thought, oh, I wonder what that is. He didn't really even go into a huge amount of detail about it, but in his usual modest low key way. But he just mentioned it and I went and checked it out and that was it. Things were changed forever when I discovered Ecamm. I recommend, as I say, you checking out and I'm eternally grateful to Doc for turning me on to that as well. So now a few things that are kind of lessons or truths, if you like, that have emerged along the way that you only really get to see with hindsight. And it's not necessarily things that were right or wrong. These are just sort of facts that have emerged. And some of them are pretty obvious and you probably know them already. But the first one is being a part of a coaching group or a mastermind group and having that sort of support really does accelerate growth. You know, having a place where you can go and ask questions, having a place where you can learn through the experiences of others is just invaluable. You know, you can't really put a price on it at all because you may think you've got something that you're working on, that you're working towards and yes, you can go ahead and do all the research and figure out how to do this and that. But it's when you are with a group where, you know, other people are going through the exact same challenges that you are or maybe even are further ahead and they're experiencing challenges that you don't even know to watch out for and you're getting all of this information. I mean, this is priceless. And it starts with, for me, the Ecamm Live community. It is such a supportive community and that's why I'm always happy to do the workshops and things like that that I do for Ecamm on the Ecamm channel is just, you know, my little way of doing something back for Ecamm really and for the Ecamm fan because without that group, you know, I wouldn't be where I am right now in terms of what I've created on YouTube because I had the support of that group, you know, all the way through the process. Not to mention, you know, then that, you know, they became my audience as well to a large extent as I started creating content around Ecamm. But it's a really special place, the Ecamm Live Facebook group and Discord community because there is this weird thing about it which is it's just software, isn't it? And yet I've never seen a community that is quite so strong around a bit of software. I mean, it's just unbelievable. And I think that it probably comes from, because I'm always trying to analyze these things, why is it that the Ecamm fan is so the way it is? And I think that it comes from this fact that the software is so good and it is such an enabler in the same way that I've just talked about the way it's changed things for me. It has that effect on, you know, all the people who use it. You know, it's this thing that really is sort of liberating. It is facilitating of what you want to do. And it is just such a valuable tool that it feels like we're in this small minority group of people who have just discovered this secret. And so everybody in there is so enthusiastic about it. And so that's why I think that it is so powerful as a community. And so being a part of that community was, you know, really powerful for me because I got to, you know, see what other people are doing, learn from what other people are doing. And I'm still doing that. You know, people will go in there and post, you know, some new thing that they've figured out how to do with Ecamm and new way to use it. And it's just such a strong thing. So being in that community for a start. Then, as I mentioned, you know, Doc, being in Doc's coaching group when I first started. So I actually specifically didn't join Doc's group until I'd done my first live stream. So I knew that was going to sign up to it, but I didn't do until the day after my first live stream, which was the 14th of May, first session with Doc was the 15th. And that was because I kind of knew myself and I talked about wanting to have a plan in place. But one thing I didn't want to do is give myself a month to start, you know, going live or whatever, then go into a group and then suddenly get analysis paralysis by all these other ideas and then not ultimately start. So I thought, well, let me just get the ball rolling first and then go into the group. So that's what I did. And that was a great way to, you know, specifically with the YouTube side of stuff and the content creation. It was just, you know, you can't put a price on things like that, as I say. And to learn from all of the things that other people were doing, learn from the way that folks were doing things and the lessons along the way, as well as obviously get any of my questions answered was just priceless. Was in that group for, I guess, the best part of a year and then at the end of that year, well, from May till December, then I was still in Docs Group, but we had another little small group, the Catch-22 Group, which was, I guess, more sort of highly sort of business focused in terms of using YouTube as part of a business or building a business around YouTube. And then that then led into the Creators Pod, you know, six of us who are just really sort of hyper-focused on, as I say, the business side of things. So there again was that sort of supportive community aspect. It was also a massive motivator for me setting up the Take One Tech Academy because, you know, having been through this journey myself, I wanted to then be able to do the same for other people and help other people on their path using YouTube, not just from a content creation point of view, but also, you know, looking to build a business out of it, because that's what I realized, you know, as I grew my business was that there are lots of lessons and lots of ways that I can help people with that. And so the Take One Tech Academy, we have access to all of my courses obviously in there, but also we have weekly Q&As. I've also recently just introduced, so I've got my Discord community as well, but I've just introduced something that is specifically for Academy members. So this is called the Take One Tech Network, and this is just a way to basically bring people together and connect people, and we also do our weekly Q&As in there, and then if you go into the meet-ups, there is like replays available of all of those as well. And it's all just done in Kajabi, and then here we just got places for people to ask questions, celebrate their wins and goals and so on. So that's all part of the Academy. Now I should say, in celebration of this 10K little milestone that we've just passed and to say thank you, I'm offering a 50% discount on all of my courses and also Academy membership. So this applies to the first payment for Academy, so if you were signing up for a year, it's 50% off the year, or if signing up for a monthly subscription, then it's 50% off that first month. It also applies though to the standalone courses, so if you don't want something on an ongoing basis but are just interested in one of my courses, then you can use the Offer Code Celebrate 10K to get 50% off those as well. And also my iCompax too. So if you've ever been considering getting any of my stream deck iCompax and the price has been a barrier, then now's your time. And I'm laughing there because actually, some of my iCompax are $2, so there's now some $1 iCompax on my website. So there you go. But yet you can find the links to all of my things in the description as well. And then just go and check out there. Use the Offer Code Celebrate 10K to get 50% off everything. And that's running basically for the next week. And that's just my little way of saying thank you very much for everybody's support. But if you are interested in being part of a supportive group, then highly recommend checking out that Academy membership. I'll just have another quick check-in with the chat before it gets too far away from me. That is indeed the thing there. Buy it right or buy thrice. Indeed, yeah. Hey David, great to see you here. Thanks so much for all of your support along the way too. And Florence, great to see you here as well. I need to go back and clip that. That testimonial you did on James Hicks' show the other few weeks ago now it was, but I definitely need to go and clip that out. That is possibly the best testimonial I have ever received. Hey, Geely, great to see you here. Thanks so much for checking in from the base of Mount Cook in New Zealand. Isn't technology wonderful? Isn't it though? Isn't technology wonderful that we can be connected globally from anywhere like this? Another fan of Ecown Live here, David, great to see the way that you're growing and using it too. Yes, Doc, you are renowned for your modesty and low keenness. Let's see. Got all the Ecown folks in. Hey, Paul, great to see you here. I mentioned just now about being part of the Ecown community and learning from others and it's just such a great place. Paul, I just love all the stuff you do and it's great whenever you post stuff in Ecown. I always know that I'm going to learn something. Your design skills are just exceptional and the way that you use that with Ecown is fantastic. Great. A member of the Ecown fan. Other things that have revealed themselves along the way is again something that's always easy to say with hindsight but often it might seem obvious, is to always think about the longer term picture and maintain perspective. I did a post in the Discord community about this specifically in fact because, let me see if I can just find it. I can probably just do it again on my thing, but it was in the Discord and if you're not a member of the Discord, that is free to join. If you want to join the community, you can join in here. I did put in this post in Discord because I've been having some conversations with somebody in the Academy and they were talking about views and so on. It is important to always sort of maintain perspective on things like views specifically on YouTube of course because you don't necessarily get the big picture if you're too sort of hyper-focused and zoomed in and what these charts are showing here is basically this is my seven-day views. This is a 30-day or 90-day views. This one is a year and then this is like the all-time views on my channel. I basically just ran down and said if you were to be too zoomed in, what might you be feeling looking at these different things? If you were looking at this seven-day forecast here, not forecast, seven-day results I should say, you might easily think like, oh no, my views are dropping on YouTube. It's not good. If you were to look at your 28-day, you might think, well, it's pretty mediocre. Not much happening. I'm not seeing much growth. I mean, there was a bit of a spike, but then it's dropped back down again. It's just pretty mediocre. Then if you were to look at your 365-day views, it could be, oh well, I had this really great hit there but then I haven't really capitalised on that because now I'm getting nowhere near that many views but I didn't really make the most of that opportunity to use it as a jumpstart to accelerate channel growth or whatever. And so you could easily look at those periods of seven days a month and even a year and potentially might feel disheartened. But actually, if you take a longer view of the picture, so this is the lifetime. I mean, this was a while ago now. This was the beginning of last month, I think, or January. But yeah, if you look at the sort of trend line of that, bearing in mind that this is views per day. So the views per day are increasing and if you draw a trend line into the rate of increase, that's why it took me from May till end of December 2021 to go up to 1,000 subscribers. From end of 21 to 22, I went from 1,000 to 4,000 and then 2022 to 23, it went from that to nearly 9,000. So there is this kind of like exponential growth and that comes because the number of views per day are increasing day on day. Therefore, the rate of increase is also increasing. So if you draw a trend line through this, the trajectory of the channel is good and these sort of things which might seem big at the time end up just being sort of little blips on the chart there. And so maintaining that perspective is a useful thing to note. It's just a truth that reveals itself over time. But the other thing about that is it's all very well to say that, but when you're starting out, you don't have that benefit of that view of it. And so therefore it is even more easy to get bogged down with little things like this along the way. So I guess the lesson then is to just sort of trust in the system of creating content and putting it out there and know that the result will come over time. I very rarely have a day where subscribers, the net, is dropped. I do certainly have people unsubscribe, but the overall net is usually a net increase day on day. You have to do something extreme to get like a whole bunch of people unsubscribe. Actually, the one time when I did have a period of days of net loss would have been when I did basically four videos a day during Create Every Day in April. Not last year, but the year before. And yeah, that was just too much for people and people were just like, I'm sick of this guy. I'm unsubscribing and more people unsubscribed than subscribed. But apart from that little anomaly, yeah, basically it's kind of just going to follow this trajectory. So just trust in the system, basically. And this kind of, I suppose, comes onto this idea of what success is on YouTube because I remember telling somebody relatively close to me after I'd been doing this for a little while and I'd got up to... It might have been even when I passed 100 subscribers. Maybe I was on like 300 or something quite early on. And somebody said, how long have you been doing this for? And I was a couple of months at that point or whatever. And then how many subscribers you got? And it was like 100 or 200 or 150 or whatever. And there was this look on their face that was just like, oh, it's not work then, how's it? Because there's this view from the outside of what a successful YouTuber is. People will look at MrBeast, the biggest YouTube channel in the world and then think that, yeah, you've got to have sort of millions or whatever or hundreds of thousands for it to be a success. But really, if your only goal is YouTube itself, then maybe that is the thing. Maybe you're just looking at metrics and looking at purely subscriber numbers as the key to success. But actually, if you're using this as a tool in your business or you're making a business out of the channel, then you really don't need that many subscribers for it to be a viable business for you. I mean, this is now effectively my main gig, as it were. Take one tech with the courses and the consultations and all of that kind of thing. And here I am at 10,000, but it's been my main gig since I was before at 5,000 or whatever. So yeah, that is the thing about this. It's just a case of putting the work in and the success level is not necessarily a number. I mean, it's ironic to say that when we're... I'm doing a stream celebrating 10K, but it's just a milestone. And whenever I'm setting goals for myself as well, by the way, I never put a goal as something like this. This is just a milestone along the way that you could look at it as a metric, but I'm not really in control of this. I'm not in control of who subscribes and who doesn't. What I am in control of is, let's put 100 videos out in 100 days or something like that. It's just that you have to go through that process. Another thing then, kind of somewhat linked to that is when you're talking about creating content on YouTube, is thinking about who your audience is. And it might be something where if you've got an existing business, you already know that, and so you can talk to those people kind of with that in mind. But actually, sometimes over time, the audience will reveal itself to you, or themselves to you. And that's kind of what happened with me when I started the channel, as I say, as this test bed and this almost like a hobby or a side project, and then it turned into something. And that was when I had this realization over time of, oh, actually there's a certain type of person who is booking calls with me. These are the sort of core audience members. These are the people that have ultimately ended up being academy members. It is people who are business folks who are using these tools in their business, wanting to level up their online, on-screen presence, but also maybe also want to make more of a business out of YouTube and so on. And these are the people that are, as I say, my core audience that are going on to book calls with me and to join the academy. And that's why I'm not really as hyper-focused as I could be. I was talking to Rich in the backstage area but just before this. If I wanted to really accelerate my YouTube channel growth, if YouTube was my only priority, I would just make Stream Deck content because my Stream Deck content outperforms everything. And month on month, the Stream Deck videos are the most popular. And yet I haven't made a Stream Deck video for about a year. I've made plenty of other stuff, but the Stream Deck stuff continually outperforms that. So if I was only focused on YouTube growth being the thing, then that's what I'd focus on. But I always just feel that I'm speaking to a particular audience. And so all of the things that I include on here are relevant to that core demographic, even though there are overlaps with, you know, general Stream Deck users or roadcaster users and so on. So another thing is, whilst people say you should always niche down, I think that they are talking about specifically if you're trying to ultimately just grow the channel for YouTube's sake. But I think that there is something to be said for thinking about your core audience and maybe not being quite so hyper-niche. That said, you know, I like Thai food as well. I don't think I should be doing, you know, a tech tutorial one day and then, you know, cooking the next dish. So there is a limit to that as well though. But yeah, the other thing then is, as I say, the audience will reveal themselves to you and kind of link to that then is some people say, you know, there's somebody else already doing this or somebody else already making the content. But another thing that is just, should be blindingly obvious but often isn't, is it doesn't matter if somebody's already made the video, you know, you can make the same video as somebody else. You could literally go and look at somebody else's playlist and make all of their videos yourself. But you're going to do them in your own way with your own spin, with your own opinions and in your own voice. And there are certain people who will watch my video, they'll see a thumbnail, they'll open it up and they'll immediately switch off because for whatever reason, they see me and hear me starting to speak and just think, no, this guy is not for me, I'm not interested. And then they'll watch the next video about the same thing and that will resonate with them and then they'll watch it. So your content may not be for everyone but equally other people's may not be as well and therefore there will be an audience for your stuff. So as I say, maybe, maybe, maybe obvious but it's worth just reiterating that yes, you will have your own sort of voice about these things. One other thing that I'll say, I talked about having an upgrade path and where I started with literally just this microphone and a 10-year-old camera and my stream deck was the things that I actually bought and acquired to start the channel and then all of this other stuff has just kind of grown up around that. We've got a focus issue with my back to the thing there, there we go, that's a bit better. So all of this other stuff has grown around it and there is this thing we talk about, gear acquisition syndrome, this idea that you've got to have this thing or that thing or the latest and greatest and it can be a problem when people feel like they need to have all of this stuff before they make content. So if ever this thing becomes a barrier where I can't make it because I haven't got my lighting, I haven't got my camera or whatever, you can totally just use your iPhone with camera or whatever to use it as a webcam. I mean iPhone cameras are excellent and there's nothing wrong with doing that and as I say, just have a decent mic. Don't let the tech be a barrier. But then there is this question of oh it seems like it's never ending and I had this conversation quite recently with somebody in I had this conversation with somebody in the academy where they were talking about, it just feels like they're buying one thing after another. Now I will say that if you are investing in a tech setup not necessarily going to extremes but having something that you're going to use with maybe you are investing in a roadcaster you've got a teleprompter, a camera and so on, what tends to happen is you have this idea of things that you want to add into the mix and then there are certain things that you think well actually that might be a nice to have or then you get all of these things and you think oh now I've got to go and buy a dock because I can't plug everything in or a hub or whatever. Then oh now I need to go and get this mounting thing because I've realized that I can't actually mount it with the particular setup that I've got. And so it can feel like this whole gas attack or gas trap where you're feeling like you need this constant thing of more and more gear. I will say that there is a point at which it plateaus like there is a certain thing that I would say that would be a minimal setup a mic and a stream deck but then if you want to get into something a little bit more complex and start adding in a teleprompter maybe another stream deck, let me just face it and see if it will focus on my face rather than ignoring my bright bold head maybe not. But yeah when you start adding in these things there is like a sort of plateau where I reached I would say about 18 months ago something like that where I felt like you know what I've actually got all of the setup that I need now. Now did that stop me adding new things in? No. But there was a distinct plateau of where I felt like now I've got everything that I need and now what I'm doing is I'm adding things in that are kind of nice to have. I'm sort of in the process of starting out and feeling like you are constantly having to buy a new cable a new accessory, a new dock, a new stand a new this, a new that, a new clamp a new mounting thing or whatever it is and it feels like oh when is this ever going to end it does actually end and there is like the ultimate level of thing to have as a setup and then after that it's just you deciding whether you're a tech head and a gear head and just like to go and buy these things. I just thought it was worth saying that because I know that folks are do get caught in this trap. Hey Darren, great to see you. Yes indeed. You did a free consulting call with my podcast co-host on our studio set last week. I want to stop by and say thank you. I've since signed up for your course and have switched to Ecamm. There we go. That's all it takes isn't it? One little look at Ecamm on a consulting call and there you go. I'll be in touch in fact actually with you shortly Darren I'll have another call and catch up and see how you're getting on with the course stuff. Thanks for saying that. I do appreciate it. By the way my consultation calls there is paid consultation but if you just want to have a quick chat to find out if I might even be able to help you then once again you can book that call at takeonetech.io there is a free 20 minute discovery call that you can book in there and we can have a bit of a chat by the way I'm not a clock watcher either so if things run over a little bit and I have to go in as much depth as we need to then that's fine too. Thanks thanks for popping in more cricket content you know I've just laughed because yes cricket is traditionally English or typically English but I'm not at all a cricket fan or a football fan. My son who is five said to me the other day who do you think is best and then he gave me the name of two football players and I said I have no idea. I don't even know who those people are and neither did he really I think he just heard somebody talking about him on YouTube but yeah I'm not a sports fan at all yeah there's the NORAD BTS shot Ah Tonka I tech yes that's the way forward I'm impressed that you got so early to do these live streams I find it hard enough being coherent at eight in the morning yeah I mean it's all relevant relative some people say to me that oh you must do not get any sleep the fact is I go to bed at like eight or nine o'clock so getting up at three o'clock I've still had a good night's sleep and I get up that early for my benefit really as well I should say I drag myself out of bed every morning to do these just for you the public but actually I get up at that time because it's my time before the kids wake up because with three kids yeah it becomes a bit of a madhouse when they get up so it's my focused time in the morning no interruptions from anything hey George great to see you here thanks for stopping by I love seeing your shot by the way because it's the shot that was taken at Creator Camp and so it always reminds me of Creator Camp when I see you anyway but yeah it's great to great to see you here by the way there's going to be another Creator Camp this year so Creator Camp was the event that was put on by Ecamm last October and there's going to be another one this year so you've definitely got to look out for that I will certainly be there I just hope they don't make them monthly because I would feel compelled to go and it's quite a long way so yeah I thought I'd just end with a couple of things I think that I probably would have done differently or I know I would have done differently if I was starting out again and this is kind of linked to the fact that you know when I started out I didn't really realise or appreciate just where I would be taking take one tech like over the past just coming up for two years and I think that knowing now like what I could create out of this as a business I would have started being a lot more intentional about that and it's funny really because I talked at the very beginning about one of the things that I think I did right was treating it as a business but that was in the sense of setting it up, having ways for people to book calls with me and so on but it was very much treating it as treating YouTube as a business what I think I would have done differently or what I should have done differently is actually treated YouTube as in support of the business as opposed to treating YouTube as a business and the two are very similar but there is a subtle difference what I mean by that is if you were to go and have a look at my old website when I started it was a YouTube website it was you know the front page was even I think right at the very top was even my latest live stream or my latest video and I had set my website up to be a clearly a website in support of a YouTube channel and everything on there was about the channel now yes I did have a few resources I had Iconpacks for example that I made really quite early on I guess and so I was selling those through the website but still the website was a YouTube website what I would have done differently is actually done what I've now got which is the business is the business and YouTube is an inbound marketing tool to bring people into that so if you go to my website now by the way which you can find a link in the description then you will see something that looks like this and in fact until relatively recently and by relatively recently I mean actually yesterday right down at the bottom I just added in Kajabi I've added this new widgets function in so I've added in the widget here to bring in my latest YouTube videos but actually after I did this update to my website almost two years ago when I started on Kajabi it didn't really mention YouTube a whole lot on here and even now it's right down at the bottom but what the website is is the website is about the business and YouTube is sending people to that when I mention my consulting when I mention my icon packs or my courses and so on that's all on here and that's something that I would have done differently is actually treating the business as the business and YouTube being in support of that and kind of linked to that then is bearing in mind that if you've got a product and you've got something that you want to be able to promote then you want to be able to promote it to presumably people that you can contact other than just on YouTube and so I would have been a lot more proactive right from the get go about having lead magnets ways for people to connect with me but then also for me to capture email addresses so that I can promote things to them when I've got stuff to come up but also to continue to offer value over email now I'll come back to that part in a moment because this is something that I've still got to work on so if you go over to like my thing over here where is it up here and go to my resources page and I'll drop a link to that in the description as well or in the chat so if you go over to my resources then some of these resources are actually quite early that I created them but I've got things here like download on AI powered course creation my setup guide for the Sony ZV-1 the zoom audio and video settings so these things here are what we call lead magnets one of my most recent ones is my animated lower third so if you're wondering by the way how I was doing that thing here where that little thing just popped up on the screen somebody asked about that in the discord and so I made a video about it and also made the template available so that's what that is excuse me while I cough that is what that is there you can download the whole template for that and there's also a video that goes along to explain how I made it but these things here in the technical term it's a lead magnet it's something you're giving as value for free and in exchange for an email address so then that allows you to ideally continue to provide value through your email communication but then also it's a way to build your database to be able to promote things too as well so that's something that I would have been a lot more proactive about right from the beginning so what you'll notice about my live streams for the past year and a half I guess or more two years and also the videos is there's generally some sort of call to action in there's been several calls to action throughout this video for example I've already mentioned my academy I've already mentioned my stream deck icon packs I've already mentioned the free resources so there's some sort of call to action throughout this and every live stream now that is intended to offer something of value and then basically build my database in the in the back end as well and that's something that I could have done a lot more of in the beginning so that's something that I would do just slightly differently from now let me just come back to the chat I've got to say hello to Lala here great to see you another fellow distant traveler for CreativeCamp I think you actually got the record on that you came the furthest from the Philippines so yeah we were kind of neck and neck in the sky at some point I'm sure great to see you here though as always oh thanks Rich thanks for the super chat the 669 thank you very much I appreciate that and yeah so that's where we are at the moment in terms of in terms of the channel and I mentioned the whole thing about being more proactive in terms of the lead magnets one of the things that I'm working on at the moment so this quarter for me in case people were wondering well maybe you've been wondering why I haven't been posting as much over the past year last year was all about building out the foundations of the academy and so on and putting all of those plans in place this quarter right now has been about really sort of tightening the systems down a little bit more and in the process of for my email management I'm actually switching from Kajabi to ConvertKit so all of my email management apart from fulfillment emails will ultimately be now going through ConvertKit I still love Kajabi Kajabi is what I've built my business on and it's where all my courses are it's where all my products are it's my website it's everything and I absolutely love Kajabi however there was a little bit of a sticking point with me which was and it was largely due to the fact that I neglected it for so long I think but which was this thing of having so many different entry points into my system if you like into the website for this lead magnet or that lead magnet or maybe downloading an icon pack maybe downloading a course or signing up to a course or whatever the onboarding process after somebody is downloaded I didn't really put it in place and that's come from a couple of things first of all because it started out as not a business and so I wasn't necessarily as on top of things in terms of setting up a follow-up email sequence and things like that and also getting into sending out a weekly newsletter full of useful information related to various different topics and giving people the option to be able to choose what they wanted to hear about when they wanted to hear about it and I didn't have those systems in place and it's been a kind of a sticking point with me for the past six to eight months I guess and part of that is down to friction I am the worst person when it comes to like if there is some element of friction that I feel is stopping me from doing something then I'll tend to find it easy to turn my attention to something different and that has been the case with setting up all the email stuff in a more efficient way so all the fulfillment emails and everything like that, that's all no problem but this sort of follow-on sequence is something that I've honestly struggled with and it came to the point where I was looking for a tool to kind of plan out all of the and the friction by the way has been two fold first of all understanding what a sort of complex web of entry points, exit points you know segmenting and all that kind of stuff that needed to be done but then also just the implementation of that in Kajabi where I had been editing in sort of like the different tags and forms for audience segmentation that have not been consistent over the past two years and so I really needed to just sort of refine that all down and I was actually looking for a bit of software that I could use to map it all out and I thought this is crazy that I'm looking for a bit of software to allow me to create all of these flow diagrams and maps and so on of how I want things to all work from an automation point of view when I should just use a system that allows me to do that and that's what ConvertKit did I'll be doing some videos about ConvertKit on the channel no doubt but it's just allowed me to create these different flows which from a visual point of view I'm a very visual person it essentially replicates the software that I wanted to get anyway to be able to show different entry points this is the flow this is how people get tagged this is the email sequences they go into and so on there's some other great features in ConvertKit as well where you can send out one email but if somebody is tagged with something they get shown one bit of content or if they're also tagged with something else they don't get another bit so for example if I was sending an email out and I wanted to kind of just drop into the email about the stream deck masterclass for example I don't need to show that to people who have already got the course ConvertKit you can just sort of say okay don't show this to anybody with this tag this particular block and that means it's a much more effective email system so all of this is to say that one of the things that I wish I'd done differently was to be more proactive about getting people in with lead magnets but one of the things I've got to do better going forward is actually nurturing that email list and making sure that I'm delivering more value rather than here's a special offer or here's a new course or whatever so that's something that I'm going to do differently going forward that's where I'm going to leave it for the main thing here though if anybody's got any questions though do feel free to drop in your questions if you have got any and let me just check in with the chat so Darren switch from Riverside to Ecamm because of Alec oh thank you very much it's such a game changer way more control and flexibility really excited now we're part of the Ecamm community it is yes well it's it's it's the journey we've all been on everybody in the Ecamm group has come from some other platform generally often OBS often other ones but yeah there is this just a real revelation I'm sure you've been finding this you know once you get into it it's just like oh my god this is amazing so yes welcome to the Ecamm fam as well as my channel so let's see where we are any thoughts Darren again any thoughts on school I am a member of a school community actually I'll forget who it is now so my community is let's talk about this because I did a live stream a couple of weeks ago which was about should I quit discord was the question so currently my take one tech community is in discord now I've come to the understanding that over the past I guess two years I've had this just over two years I love discord for its organization I love that it's hyper customizable in terms of what you see what you don't see the search function on it is great it's great and it really is you know fantastic as a resource what I found though is that a lot of other people don't agree with me a lot of people don't like it if they're just a casual member of a discord community the feedback that I've got is that yes there's a whole series of things with it that can be for a casual visitor off-putting and whilst it is hyper customizable and you can control all this stuff if you're coming in as a new user it's not immediately obvious there are so many things that like the answer might be oh did you know that there is a way you can fix that or you can change that it's like well actually a lot of people don't know that and it's not immediately obvious so I love discord I'm keeping the discord community as my sort of free community space but I understand that that it is not necessarily for everybody when it came to wanting to have a place where for take one take academy members and wanting to have a place to bring them all together that's when I looked at kajabi communities because I am on kajabi I'm using kajabi I had sort of not use the kajabi communities feature because I got discord but it was when I got to this realization that yeah well I've got people that are academy members who maybe want a way to reach out and get help but they're not using discord because of all the points of friction that they've expressed to me that they've got with it whereas with a kajabi community it allows me to just grant access to that there's no friction involved in joining it because when someone joins the take one take academy they automatically get access to the network and so that looks like looks like this and it looks kind of similar to I mean it was actually the platform was called vibly and then kajabi bought them they are being really proactive in updating the community and the community platform I should say and making changes to it and they're really responsive to feature requests as well it looks similar to I mean they're even called circles these little sort of groups these little categories if you want it looks similar to circle so I've tried I've been in circle communities I've been in here mighty networks is another one that I've been in somebody's community I wasn't a fan of that one but yeah and school was the one specifically you asked about and I have been in a school community one of the things about school and what's the other one I just mentioned circle is that you can you know potentially host course content in those as well and do meet-ups in there you can do meet-ups in the kajabi one too so yeah I feel like I'm rumbling here the answer is I have tried school and I kind of class like school circle even kajabi communities as very similar to each other they've got this kind of similar look in my view which is you know sort of things down the side here a place you know you've got an overall feed you've got these different channels that you can basically go into you can group these and categorize them and then there's a place for meet-ups you can do challenges in here as well so they're all very similar to me and whilst my the way that my brain works is yeah I like all the super customization that comes with discord I do think that the reason why these are so you know widely used things like circle and and so on is because they are more appealing to to the masses so um so yeah that's that's part of the reason why I switch now it may be that some point down the line I look to add in you know my my main community side to something like this but actually what I want to do is make sure that I don't make this too bloated so that then it becomes overwhelming because one of the things that is off putting with discord in discord communities is sometimes when you go into something that I've just got like a massive long list I'm not going to name and shame there's one in particular that I always show people as an example but I'm not going to publicly do it but it's just got like about 300 different channels and I think that okay as an information repository that's one thing but as a community space it's just unworkable so um yeah I don't know that I quite answered your your question um I school to me is similar to circle I'm using kajabi because it's the platform that I'm using for my courses so that's what I'll say about that um oh thanks I'm glad that I decided to correct it on tech it's been such an awesome resource when it comes to tech stuff and biz integration which I need to focus more on this year well yes it's it's a constant thing with me as well is you know the focusing on the business growth and trying to sort of manage that and it is a a constant thing I've I am going to be getting more into creating more the the recorded content having talked about the fact that I did the you know 100 videos in 100 days and 300 in the first year or whatever um this last year um I think that I did I think it was 11 recorded videos I did a live stream every week most weeks um but I only did 11 uh recorded videos um and so the live streams became my main focus actually talking about things that I would have done slightly differently um I one of the things that I changed with my my videos is I changed my approach to my live streams uh first of all I dropped the countdown uh the only reason I had a countdown at the beginning of my live stream was because everyone else had a countdown and so I thought well you see it seems that uh that's what you do on a live stream so then I would sit there like a lemon for for three minutes waiting for this countdown to get to zero so I could start and I tell you what it was it was Eileen Smith uh another long-term channel member um and much appreciation to Eileen for she's often sent me little nuggets of information or little ideas or things like that that have just really resonated then she mentioned it wasn't directly to me but it was on Twitter she said why do live streamers punish the punctual because people who turn up on time they've got to sit and wait for three minutes through some sort of countdown um and so for me that was my kind of impetus to say right well let me just drop the countdown because that's a very valid point there and so I just started you know right on the dot sort of thing um the other thing that I changed up was and it was largely driven by the fact that whereas when I started out initially I did a six videos a week on one live stream that was my kind of seven videos a week um the videos were always sort of you know very concise and on a particular topic because the live streams were often more of a sort of check in with how I was going in the week with the you know the target progress and that kind of thing and more of a sort of check in with the community and with the chat um what I actually started doing though was as I've kind of done it in here I've been checking with the chat as well but what you'll notice about most of my recent live streams as you know over the past year is I generally sort of come in and do the content bit before I check in with the chat now whilst that might mean that um there's not as much interaction going during the live it has a profound effect on replay value um because it used to be that my live streams might get you know uh 10 or 20 people watch live and then they might get 100 200 views on replay now the biggest view video on my channel is a live stream it's what I did all about stream deck stream deck beginners guide I just did a start to finish beginners guide on stream deck for 50 minutes or whatever um and then I checked in with the chat for 50 minutes but that video has now got over 50 000 views I think it is or 45 or something um and it just simply wouldn't have that replay value if there'd been all of that back and forth with the chat throughout it because people feel like they've missed out on it so there's a balance to be had there and if you're doing regular content and live streams then maybe the sort of chatting thing throughout it is a is is a better way to do it um but if that becomes like your only source of content as it was with me for the past year then that's why I uh I kind of switched up that format a little bit and so that's why there's more of a content first rather than uh uh coming in and like the way I used to start my live stream was hi guys hi this person hi that person and it would be like a long long sort of 10 minute start after a three minute countdown as well so basically people coming into that on the replay who maybe are new to the channel I don't know you um it's kind of like I've missed I've missed the boat on this so that was another thing I yeah I changed um so let's have a look and Jeremy thank you very much I'm glad you've uh you've found things useful too um yeah so this is the thing I think that you are I mean we are so alike in many respects doc and I think that it's the same as keely as well um you know our our brains maybe work a little bit differently so so yeah I love discord and these are the ones I'm not such a big fan of but um yeah the feedback I got was um yeah sometimes sometimes less is more I mean what I did do in my discord server by the way is I did go through and strip out a load of the channels so in my this is the bit that if you are um uh just come in as you know it's free to join the discord um then you'll see these channels here so I've got one on ecum one on stream deck one about studio gear software and productivity content creation and so on so there's basically what is there 10 different sort of categories of channels that you can go in and ask questions about or chat about um uh whereas before there was I think about 20 and I've kind of figured my my approach to this is because what I noticed my own behavior is if you get to the point where like the actual main content so let's just take out these things but this main content here basically you can come into the server now and if you're watching on a desktop or even on a phone you can kind of see like the channels and see what they're doing and check up it's when you get it to a situation where it just dropped right off the bottom of the screen and you feel like you're scrolling then it feels like you can't even see where where to where to look and I think that that is part of the the overwhelm with it to use the old world word your favorite word doc I think that that is part of it when it gets too long people feel like well I don't even know where to go to catch up um again not so much me but uh but doc as well but I think that there is that sense among people which is probably you know symbolic of why you know there is still you know far more people in the facebook ecamm group than the discord ecamm group um because it's yeah it's just it's not for everyone I don't know why facebook is still the thing though but anyway there you go uh hey Mary Lou great to see you here it was great to meet you at creator camp 2 as your comment is popping up clicked on the wrong one there and mouse is all over the place what we're doing there we go thanks so much for stopping by I really appreciate you hey marine x as well great to see you too um I think the notion that discord is for gamers and uh uh and kids is anchored in people's brains so they're mentally blocked before they start um yeah they are but there is also a thing that when people get into discord I think even the people that have got past that and they've come into discord um there is just a thing about it with uh the um things like the um uh there's there's loads of examples here but there are things where when people come into it um then they still get overwhelmed by it because of just the way that it's set out there are certain things that it's not immediately obvious there are settings that you can use to adjust everything um but it just doesn't like the way it worked the way that a lot of people's um people's things or even when they get out of the you know get past the whole gamer thing which by the way I was stuck in for ages I thought that that's what discord was and then I like got into it but I've noticed with myself you know when I when I'm starting to get um notifications about things and it's not immediately obvious like let's let's just give an example of this uh you may be in my discord um and you might think that I'm not interested in kajabi stuff and then what happens is I go in yesterday and then you feature which might be helpful for kajabi people but other people might think well that's just not for me and yet they've potentially got a notification about it um and so then they might think like oh if they continually getting notifications about my server but it's not relevant to them then they might think oh it's just probably another thing that I'm not interested in what people don't necessarily know is yeah if you are in my server and you don't aren't interested in kajabi you can click the wrong one sorry you can right click on it here and you can change the notification settings so you could say I don't want to be notified about this at all you can also go up to the top um and go to this browse channels uh and you can actually completely deactivate uh the kajabi stuff so if you are not using kajabi and you're only using roadcaster you're only interested in my roadcaster stuff in my channel you could actually deactivate every channel except the roadcaster one that's great isn't it if you know about it but the fact is most people don't don't know about it and that is the the problem with discord it's so full featured um but it requires a course to understand how to do it now guess what I made the discord beginners guide for exactly this reason I made it so that when people come into my academy um they get access to the discord beginners guide it's 50% off right now as well I even reduced in fact let's just take a look at this whilst I am doing a little bit of self-promotion here because if you are using discord having me just done this best advert for it ever if you are using discord I have got an entire discord beginners guide on my site so if you go here click on discord beginners guide I actually reduced the price of this also in an effort to help people get the most out of it um of discord and so you can come here and just click on this and then it is 47 dollars and if you use the uh the offer code so just put the coupon code in here uh which is celebrate uh 10k if I spell it right if I spelled it right it's celebrate no I can never talk untouched I mean you can do the maths what it is but there you go it's 23 dollars so if you want to actually master discord um then I've got a course that is 23 dollars until next Friday uh 2350 um that you can go in there and it tells you all about how to use discord as a user um in one half and then it's also got another half which is all about how to to use it if you're going to set up your server uh and whatever um but I mean this is the this is kind of the the joy of discord is that it's so customizable but it's also the problem with it because if people don't know how to customize it um then it it's a problem um but uh but anyway so that's just my little side note um so uh uh thanks so much Axel life great to see you and thank you so much for the super chat no why is that not coming up in the account oh there it is there it is uh thank you so much I really appreciate the uh the support and I'm glad you are finding the uh the content uh all helpful as well um there let's have a look also like how people think iPhone and galaxies can't be good main cameras when they're probably much better now than the old 6a 60d well of course they are yeah uh the I mean they are just on another level uh really aren't they so uh so yeah totally um uh discord is a once every two week interaction for me and I have my own discord with hundreds of people right right that's that's kind of said something as well oh thanks Eric thanks uh for stopping by I appreciate you uh you being here and uh yes had to make the uh discord uh thing cool stuff so if anybody has any questions about their youtube uh journey or their youtube content strategy or anything like that or looking at how you can leverage youtube in your business then definitely feel free to go ahead and book a consultation call with me if you want any support with this on an ongoing basis maybe you're building your own business and if you have any questions or if you have any questions or if you have any questions or if you want any support with this on an ongoing basis maybe you're building out your studio looking at how to integrate all this tech into your uh into your business use case as well um then maybe you might be interested in the academy and I've just got to say once again uh 50 off all courses icon packs and even your first payment of academy membership and that is available all through until next friday as well so uh just use the coupon code celebrate 10k if you want a one dollar icon pack I've got a two dollars so you can save a dollar if you snap those up before next friday uh it's funny two dollars but it all it all counts doesn't it uh so there we go thanks so much for watching and I will see you all next time I've also got to say thank you to my channel members I'll leave some other youtube content over here on the right but thanks so much to my channel members and all of the super chats and things like that that I've had along the way as well I appreciate all of your support have a great day everyone and I will see you next time