 So you've been kind of like the final boss in this adventure for me. And I have a slight disagreement with you, but I'm ready. Like I'm kind of ready to lose this one. So the context for this one is that you are putting out a course. What's that? What's the course about specifically? I don't know exactly. I've just seen notes from time to time. I rebranded it a few times. I need to get back to filming it. I just saw I got the email that the domain I bought for renewed. So it's been a year since I started. Terrible feeling. Very painful to realize I have a year in that filmed one of the videos and written half of the scripts. So I need to just sit down and do it. But the course was called DevRel 2.0. Oh, OK. Yes. That's why I caught my attention. Yeah. So I have been kind of like in this like layoff series of videos that have been doing kind of like kind of veered into figuring out like what the fuck is wrong with DevRel. And this is a space that you've been on for a really long time. And I see you as, you know, one of the innovators that's like kind of like breaking like breaking out of it. And so you had said about company YouTube channels, I think, just throwing in the trash. My arch nemesis. Yes. I. The thing that people don't realize about my channel is that it's selfish in ways they don't understand my channel and my content exists because I wanted it to exist and no one else was doing it. I made my first videos and I make all my videos still to this day because there are things that I wish I saw on YouTube that I didn't. When I quit my job at Twitch, I went from having hundreds of really talented engineers I respected and looked up to, to being the best engineer on my team, to then starting a company, being the only engineer on my team. I didn't have the ability to get nerdy about these things. And when I went back to YouTube where I learned how to code, it was all how to code stuff. And I know how to code up and coding for a decade at that point. I didn't want to talk about how to code. I want to talk about the cool new things felt just ship or crazy patterns in react and how to build full stack stuff better as an experienced engineer. And to this day, my YouTube audience is, all right, it's my very party game. I'll have to guess what percentage of my audience on YouTube do you think is 25 or older at four million views a month? Okay, I'm going to leave this for anyone listening because I think, I think I guessed and I guessed wrong, very wrong. And so I'll just say I guessed wrong when I guessed it was young. I skewed young. Yes, most people do, which is fair, because when you think of YouTube and programming, you think of beginner content. I didn't do that. I explicitly didn't do that. And as a result, over 76% of my audience is 25 plus. It's usually in the 80s, but I've had a couple of videos that did a little better with the youth recently. But generally speaking, it's in the 80% range for 25 and older, which is a very old audience. Yeah. Oh, for sure. That's wild. 25, especially because at that time I was 26. Yeah. Yeah. So you're skewing above, above your age, which is pretty, pretty wild. Yeah, because I'm that those are the people I was trying to talk to. Like I missed having a lunch conversation with engineers who had been working at that company longer than I even knew what code was going in depth on crazy incidents or weird things they heard about her experience and just nerding out about the details that you would expect to where you don't have to introduce every single thing you bring up because you can either you can assume either they get it already or if they don't that they can figure it out later, go look it up or whatever. The conversation I have with an experienced engineer isn't about how this thing works or the inner details of every step. It's a general vibe check of how we feel about it and an overview of why we should care. The details are your problem to go explore on your own if you care enough to, but that's not the point of the content. That's not the point of the conversation. Like if I was having a convo with you about how cool server components are, I shouldn't have to explain what the DOM is. Yeah, yeah, you want to have that like put like let's just assume that we both understand everything that's required up to this point so we can talk like at exactly this level. Yes. Interesting. Interesting. Now how does that I mean this is a little bit of a tangent, but like how does that manifest on YouTube? Because I am sure that you get a lot of people just totally, you know, given that the bulk of material is that how to do this thing, you get a lot of people who are like super confused seeing your content and being like, you're not going to talk about what we're talking about at all. Like we're just talking, we're jumping right into the thing. This is one of the coolest features of YouTube. When people don't get something or it doesn't resonate with them, they just fucking leave. Like they don't have a reason to be there. Why would they stay? They'll just go somewhere else that fits their needs. Every time you open the YouTube homepage, there are eight options right there to click on. And once you go to a video, there's five options on the side for you to bounce to instead. So every second of your video has to be more compelling, interesting and useful to the viewer than the five options that are on the side, tempting them the whole way through. So if my video doesn't appeal to you, that's not my problem to solve. YouTube solved it as long as my video appeals to the right people, they will stay and watch in the algorithm adjust accordingly. Interesting. Interesting. It's one of those things like you can kind of easily understand, but it's kind of hard to live in, right? Because you're inevitably going to have people who tour in and are like, what the fuck is this? And then you still have to kind of, I guess, brace for some of that, like as people come through. But I think that's more like a community building problem than a YouTube one for me, where like making sure my Discord doesn't become a bunch of noobs asking what framework to use has been a struggle from day one. And we put a lot of work in. Like one of the things that helped there was a paywall, since our main channels on my Discord are part of like the sub only walls to be subscribed on Twitch for five bucks a month or my Patreon or something like that. The conversations in those paywall sections are much more interesting. So much so that people like Ryan Carneato, the creator of solid, when he has questions about how people think about certain patterns and solid and react and stuff, he doesn't ask in the solid Discord. He asks in mind. Oh, wow. Okay. Interesting. That is quite a quite an interesting like tactic for like curation or getting to that like second level of conversation or like third level, like just those deeper levels of conversation to a way to almost like force someone to have that intentional buy in and like continually and literally like re-up in their mind to decide if it's worth it for them to participate and have those conversations. Yeah. And that's largely how I'm thinking about these things. Like how do I facilitate the kinds of conversations that I missed when I quit my job and I've learned a lot from this. Like one of the most interesting learnings for me was that there's a lot of younger programmers who like they only make up like less than 20% of my audience, but the ones who are in that group, especially the under 18s, they showed up because they accelerated past their peers. They accelerated through all of the beginner content on YouTube. They didn't have anywhere to go after that. Like they didn't have people around them to talk about this stuff because they were so far past their peers. They didn't have a job with co-workers yet because they're high schoolers. So the only option became my content because I was what was next, so to speak, on YouTube past the beginner stuff. There's a huge gap there. There isn't really content or anything other than time that for most people gets you from, you know, how the code works to, you know, how to build software. That's just an experience thing. But some of these kids are just so desperate to not be alone in this feeling of, I know how this works. I just want to be around others who do too, that they power through all of the stuff they don't get, just so they can be part of the conversation with us. And that's one of the most rewarding parts of what I've done is seeing those people who didn't have co-workers or a space or during COVID lost the office and didn't have the ability to talk with these people anymore. My community has become a place for these people who want to go deep in the nerdy details to do that with others who do too. Yeah, this is so interesting because I'm just I'm trying to internalize some of this and that feeling of loneliness, I think is so bang on because that is when I took on React podcast, like, you know, whatever in like 2017 was I was working in a company and like, you know, the work was fine or whatever. But like, there was a point at which I accelerated in my interest past basically everybody else. And in order to, like, in order to like, keep sane, I took on the podcast so that I could actually talk with people about the problems that they were solving and the way that they thought of things. And it's interesting the things that we build, just trying to escape that feeling of loneliness as a thinker or a creator or like whatever whatever interest we have trying to build those spaces where we can just talk shop with people. And these are motivations that will beat out almost anything else, especially money. And this is the problem to wrap us to the core topic. You cannot hire somebody that will do this better than someone who's doing it out of that lonely feeling. You can't pay someone to compete with me right now. It doesn't work because I'm not doing this in a rational way. I'm I'm insane. The thing I'm doing is not worth doing much less as a company being paid like a hundred K a year. That's no, this is not worth it unless you desperately need the thing that comes out of it, which for me is the community and the ability to have these conversations. If I wasn't doing YouTube, I wouldn't be sleeping because I'd be going crazy. Because I'm doing YouTube, I sleep better than I've ever slept because I get to wake up the next day and talk about the things I love and hang out with people I trust. And all these people have looked up to my whole career are just a DM away now. And all of these things are so much cooler than any amount of money you can pay me. And you cannot build a team that competes with that. Yeah, I mean, I guess you're just right then. You know, I feel like I kind of just like played myself the whole like React podcast thing. And like, like, I get it, like I totally see it because part of that, you know, insanity as we're calling it is like not really knowing what you're after, right? Like if you knew it would be boring and you wouldn't like it wouldn't be keeping you up, right? But like it's the it's the not knowing that makes you like makes you mad and makes you do crazy things. And now I kind of know it. It's super rewarding every time I figure out a little bit about it. Like when I have a thumbnail or a video performed better than I expected and it clicks like, Oh, this is the part that resonated with people. This is why they stopped scrolling and actually looked at this video and then clicked on it. Like one silly thing is comparing certain videos having better performance on mobile than others. That means that the person who was like stopped and watched that video on average was more interested. Funny enough, I'm just going to do a thumbnail tangent for a minute. People seem to think phones are the hardest screens to target for thumbnails and they should make things like bigger so you can see it on your phone. Sure. When you're looking at a thumbnail on your phone, you're looking at it as you scroll down the main feed, which means I have the whole width of my phone. I'm actually looking at almost like an Instagram post. I can see every detail. I can count my pores when I scroll by one of my thumbnails on my phone. Yeah. On my desktop. And there's less competition too, right? Because you see maybe two or like at most or maybe three. But the behavior is different too, because the thumbnail has to make them stop scrolling. So this is how I think of these things. This is this is stuff I should be selling. If you want more of this, keep an eye out for DevRel.FYI whenever I finish it. This type of stuff. When you're scrolling, the thumbnail makes you stop. The title makes you click. The video makes you watch. OK, one more time. Thumbnail makes you stop scrolling title makes you click. Video makes you watch. OK. Yep. Yep. I noticed too that this stuck in my mind because I was kind of thinking about it. And then I saw you tweet about it like you're like, I think I'm done with intros. Yeah. Like the idea of like just we're in it. Like at this point, you know what I'm about. Like you read the title. Like you don't want to hear me talk about who I am and why I do this. Like we're just in. Yeah. None of that matters. Every one of those details is another reason to stop watching. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's super, super interesting and kind of changes the bar of like what we think of is quality too. I think a lot of people talk about like, oh, like just make the best videos that you can. But that can be interpreted in so many different ways. Like some people may interpret that as like, oh, OK, well, I need to have like a nice bumper and a snappy intro and all that kind of stuff. But really like quality is on the platform is really more these like, you know, getting people through that process like stop, you know, read the title, click, start watching. And then it is about like, you know, the camera that you have or, you know, how you're, I don't know, processing things or whatnot. I actually was just talking with Ryan Carniata because he's live streaming right now. And I was giving him crap because I think he had like 300 plus viewers across YouTube and Twitch, which made him the biggest stream yard streamer I've ever seen. And I just like made a quick joke about that. And he was like, yeah, you're right. I should probably switch tack like, and I immediately jumped into like all caps. No, not what I'm saying. I'm specifically saying that you are your content is so good that it doesn't matter. And I think that is awesome about you. Yeah, yeah. Yes. I happen to be nerdy about cameras and gear. So I'm going to spend way too much money on cameras and gear and get really deep in those details. But like my OBS layout, which is where I record all my videos, by the way, if you're not using OBS recording your videos, you're putting four times more work and then you need to at least my OBS setup is hilariously simple, like comically. So if you don't believe it, I don't even have a chat overlay because that's just clutter. I don't need that stuff. And there's streamers that are a lot smaller that have way prettier cooler setups for their OBS. And if you're a lot bigger that are using a Logitech C920 $40 webcam and just put that poorly in the corner, not even cropped over their crappy gameplay because the content is what matters. We love to nerd out about the gear and stuff. But if that's the route you're going down to make your videos better because you're no new camera purchase will make you a more successful creator unless it motivates you to create more and better content. But that's not the camera that's your motivation. Yeah. Interesting. 100% 100% agree. After having spent a decade kind of like obsessing about the wrong things that just like from personal experience on the other side. So is there any case then that you would see for the like company YouTube channel because surely there are some bright spots like people doing it right where they're using it in a way that actually kind of like engages their audience helps promote, I don't know promotes the one that won't work. It will work. But it's like if you took an engine out of a car, could you push it around? Absolutely you could like you can get that car place you even fill it up with groceries and push it back home is just stupid to do that. Like you could spend one fifth the money paying someone like me to do the content, reach a way better audience, make way better content and communicate the message better than you even can. And you'll learn things throughout it. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Like I'm expensive to sponsor for content, but I'm way cheaper than three full time people making content. No one's watching for sure, for sure. So something that I've been kind of curious about is like, does this then kind of roll into on the company side of it? Like a like a content coordinator to like work with these types of people? Is that kind of like the future of like internal dev rail? Or like, what is that? Like, what does that look like? I'm going to spoil the thesis of my course, but I think that's okay. Because I think the details are interesting enough that you should still buy it. Oh, for sure. The core point I'm trying to make is that companies can't have reach by themselves almost ever. And you cannot hire for reach. You cannot pay somebody to reach an audience for you. An individual can absolutely reach people. But the number that they can reach as a person working at a company is inherently limited. I have a thing that I call now the five person rule, which is I don't believe at a company that you can meaningfully convince and sell more than five people a month on a thing. As such, it's important that you pick those people very strategically. So could you make content that convinces three to five random people to try out your product? Sure. But what if you steered that product towards people like me, like Primogen, like Casadu, like other influencers who have reach so that we can use that content both to notice you and be interested in working with you but also to make our own content from it. So if you have like a DevRel whose job is writing blog posts, maybe targeting the theoretical audience you're trying to reach with those blog posts isn't the right call anymore. Maybe making a blog post that you know primer me would immediately see want to use for a video and then read live on stream, grab the title, throw it in, scaffolding out a concept for us in a way that's compelling to us can get you targeting the right five people and then we can target the tens or hundreds of thousands for you. But the the angle here is to micro target the people who have the audience you're looking for, not the audience directly because we have a better control of that audience because we're all insane doing that full time and our motivations, our interests, our reasons for doing it are not rational. You cannot rationalize your way around that. You cannot beat an irrational person at this game. You know, it hurts, but I'm convinced. I did it. Didn't take too long. I can show numbers to like the most popular video on the next J.S. Or sorry, the Vercel YouTube channel up until very, very recently was my talk at NextConf two years ago, the most recent NextConf conference that they streamed live on YouTube and I co-streamed at the event with them on Twitch and YouTube because I convinced them that it was a good idea. My stream with Prime engine and Madison got three times the viewership of the actual paid big keynote event was just Prime and me making dick jokes. I mean, you know, people love the intersection of literally anything in a good dick joke. So yeah, it's how it's human nature and we're leaning really deep into that. And you you just you can't compete. There's a bunch of subtle details here. Again, check out the course when I finish it. One that I think is really important is audience saturation. One of the things I've done recently has caused my channel like I always getting around a million views a month or so end of last year. I don't go below three anymore. I like more than three X my reach over the last couple months. And most of that was not even changing the variety of what I talk about, but spacing it out a little bit better because I would have times where I do like three react videos in a week, like react JS videos and then do a database video, then do one more react video. And then next week just talk about database stuff because that was like what was happening, what I was interested in. Now I I have a pretty strict rule of no more than two videos about react JS a week. I still have the same number overall, but the pacing is better. So you get a better variety of content. If I literally just did videos about react, I wouldn't have any reach really anymore because even react devs are going to get bored of that at a point. If I keep shilling Vercel constantly, that's not going to work either because let's be real, if you're in my audience and you would have used Vercel, you probably already are. And if you won't, you're not going to me trying to convince you to use Vercel serves neither side because once I was already using it, one side isn't going to use it. There's nothing I can do to change that more Vercel content in a lot of ways is just causing these people to bounce and not watch that video, which makes them less likely to watch the next one, even if it's a different topic they would have liked. So if your job is literally just making videos about that one thing, you can't build an audience because once they've converted, they're going to stop caring about that content at some point. And if they don't convert, it didn't care in the first place. So if you're making videos just about this one thing, you are not going to be able to compete with someone making more interesting videos about a lot more things. Yeah. And that's I mean, I've very much done that, right? Where it's like, you know, I got obsessed with microphones find them right right microphones, right? And you like find three channels of people who are like talking about that stuff all the time. And you're like, you dive in deep and then you get the one that makes you happy and then you just bounce like you like never to be seen again. And it's a really interesting kind of take on like finding the right lever for like variety, but thoroughness so that people like actually trust that you're an expert in these things that you're talking about. It's I have a fascinating problem on that topic. I have a crazy question for you. Yeah. If you searched for what's the best mic for me to use on YouTube, the first video was somebody who specialized in audio stuff. And the second video is like Linus Tech Tips who might not be a specialist in audio, but you're already familiar with and know you can trust. Yeah. You're going to click the name you don't know that's a specialist in microphones. You're going to click the name you do know that isn't a specialist, but knows enough for you to care about their opinion. I mean, yeah, I mean, I'm probably going to click on the familiar face, you know. Yeah. Yeah. So why are you trying to compete as the niche? It makes no sense. You cannot build an audience like that. And that's the biggest issue with company YouTube channels. You cannot build an audience with them. Yeah. Yep. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. I broke him again, guys. I know. I'm usually I'm usually so good at coming up with a counter argument. But I mean, I kind of anticipated that this is going to be pretty tricky. Yeah, no, I guess that's that's it. Yeah, I guess we're I guess we're done here. I'm a believer. Good. Yeah. Delete your company YouTube channel. OK, don't don't literally delete it. There are places where it makes sense for companies to make video content. A lot of people like learning through video content now, something that I think makes a lot of sense is doing video tutorials. Maybe you list them publicly. Maybe you don't. Maybe they just stay unlisted on your channel, but you embed them in your docs. That I think is awesome using YouTube, not as a method for reach, but a method for delivering specific value to your existing audience. When you have an audience or you've found a way to get the audience elsewhere, video content can be a way to engage with that audience. But YouTube strength and the point of having a YouTube channel is to grow an audience. And that is a thing a company cannot do on YouTube. It just does not work. You can reach an audience that you already have on YouTube and you can use YouTube as a distribution method to give useful things to that audience once you have them. But that is fundamentally different from content trying to convince them to be part of your audience in the first place. I think that that that distinction right there was so beautifully stated and exactly what I think I was after the grow versus reach, because that makes a ton of sense. I think something that I have seen kind of increasingly come up is companies may engage under a contract with, you know, an influencer to talk about the product, they sponsor a video, et cetera, et cetera. But then if they don't have some amount of tutorial or training or something like that in that same format, a lot of people bounce like out of the funnel at that point because they're like, oh, I saw this really cool video on this thing. And now I'm like reading docs that I don't really care about. I don't know how many bounce and I also don't necessarily know how valuable the people who bounce are. There's like, I have categorized I'm giving out way too much free info. That's fine, though. Hopefully it's proofs to y'all how valuable this course is going to be. I've broken out roughly three categories of sponsored video where in the difference in these types is one side of the spectrum is really good for getting signups really quickly. So if your goal is to just get as many people hitting the sign up button and trying your platform, one side of the spectrum is good for that. The other side of the spectrum is less so, but it's much better for mind share for getting people to think of your product in association with certain things. Gotcha. Interesting. The first side of the spectrum here is tutorials. If I make a tutorial and I feature your product in it, whatever the view count is of that video divided by four, you got that many signups because people are going to follow through with the tutorial. They're going to do the thing I said in the tutorial and you're going to have a crazy spike in your signups like you've never seen before. They're all going to be free tier users. Disproportionate number of them are going to be from countries that don't have the money to really spend on your product, but they're going to use it. They're going to sign up and they might even end up loving it, especially if it's a good product and it resonates with the audience that I have. The far other side of the spectrum is talking about a general topic and pointing out how these specific solutions are relevant to that topic space. That's like going to convert at all really in the traditional sense, at least where nobody's going to watch a video where I'm talking about analytics tools and bring up how much I like post talk and immediately go to post.com and sign up and go to the YouTube channel looking for more. There is no conversion there in the direct sense, but what does happen, I would argue, is way more valuable. I think the important piece here is the thing my channel does that I haven't seen many others do certainly not company channels, which is the people who watch my videos are experienced developers who are nerdy about new solutions and technologies. If you're missing either of those two characteristics, you're not going to watch my content because it's not very entertaining. But if you are experienced dev and I'm speaking to you on your level and you like these new tools and solutions enough to watch videos about them in your free time when you're not at work, you're now the perfect demographic like that Venn diagram overlap is my audience. More importantly, those are the advocates you're actually looking for. The real dev advocates aren't people you hire. They're the people who work at the company you want to have buy your thing. And you have to turn that person into an advocate for you. And my channel is the fastest way to do that. Oh, shit, Theo, you broke my brain, dude. Broke my brain. That's what I'm here for. I love it. OK, so do you have like a sign up page for this thing? I know you got somewhere to be. I thank you for your time. Devrel.fyi. OK, cool. We're going to send people that very excited for it. The future of developer advocacy is giving the resources needed for influencers like myself to reach an audience and for the individuals in my audience to advocate at the companies and the places you're trying to target in the easier you can make it for me to do that. And for the individuals who I'm discussing here to do the follow up from there, the more success you'll find. I love it. That's such a great way to wrap up. Brian Douglas in an interview with you called you the Michael Jordan of YouTube. And I'm I'm seeing it right in front of my eyes. So thanks for your time today. Thank you so much.