The Problem With Always Wanting More

I was out of work.

I was out of a job.

And I was kind of thinking about I needed some way to kind of invigorate my brain.

I was feeling pretty down.

I was still dealing with the passing of my father.

And I was kind of struggling for motivation.

I was feeling a bit lost after the job and what my life was going to look like post-career.

And it took me quite a bit of effort to really find some momentum to want to actually start the channel.

I'd been thinking about it for so long.

I just couldn't quite get myself the motivation to go and make a video I was in my own head I was living in my own head about video topics and how I'd present it and what if I got it wrong what if I said something stupid what if you know nobody came and watched and all those questions that if anybody here that's thought about starting a channel or has a channel might recognize and so you know my dad's passed away i'm dealing with that i've lost this job i was in a bit of a legal battle with the company that i was working with there was a lot of uncertainty and then i started youtube And talked about this in recent episodes, but I really had no idea what I was doing.

I just knew I was going to talk as the only way that I could, which was open and honest and share kind of those experiences.

And I wasn't really expecting the reaction to the first video.

way that it actually played out, which was around 4,000 subscribers, around 4,000 subscribers and about 100,000 views on that first video.

And I've been open and honest about this.

I didn't really know what to do next, where to take the channel, the direction.

I didn't really have a plan for all of that.

I just started kind of making videos about topics that I thought might be relevant and discovering the reaction of people and kind of seeing how the views adjusted from that first video.

and you know that when you when you have a video that gets like a hundred thousand views suddenly you've got a lot of opinions I looked back at that first video a couple of days ago and it had over a thousand comments and I think I mean I've tried to respond to as many of those as I possibly could and I've tried to maintain that within the channel going forward which is a If somebody sends me a comment, I'll try and engage and build a community.

And I've mentioned that word a number of times across videos, community, engaging with like-minded people that are maybe sharing ideas about life post-redundancy, life after grief, life after big life changes, right? And, you know, connecting with people as best I could with them.

and so with that kind of came growth right and subscribers came along and suddenly you find yourself in this position where it's like well Now you've got to keep making the content, right, and see if people come along the journey with you.

And that's where I really went on this kind of roller coaster, this very early journey of seeing the ups and downs, right? 100,000 views, then the next video is like a few thousand, and then it dropped all the way down to like 500.

And for me at that point, like growth, if I was being – if I was being totally honest, right, I had this little bit of a plan in my mind where I'd said to Yvonne, well, if we're going to leave the country later this year, 2025, it would be great if I could get this channel up and running, right? So I'm thinking in my head, a few hundred subscribers, if I could get it towards the thousand where the monetized level kicks in, that would be awesome and I've got plenty of time, but I've found myself in that position from video one and then thinking, well, where do you go from here? Like, Does it go up? Does it go down? Like what happens, right? And that's where I was at.

But I wasn't really thinking about growth.

And that wasn't like a kind of, ego perspective growth to me on that viewpoint of the year was about survival was about giving myself something to do that I could really dive into I could really passion project and care about and also if I could earn from it if I could build a way to give myself some kind of income that would help maintain or lengthen your runway of budget that was the real goal behind all that was the kind of important distinction at the beginning wasn't about ego it was absolutely about survival right so that was the kind of setting of all of this that was the kind of intro to this channel starting so you have this explosive phase at the beginning right big numbers come in and and look i have no idea where all that came from I've mentioned before that if there was anything that my dad gave me out of all of that might just have been a little bit of a grease in the wheels, a little bit of a touch of luck and some kind of way to get going with all of that.

motivation, momentum that came from that first video and then as I started to dive into other topics I didn't really know what to talk about and I was finding myself covering a little bit of political topics.