In this episode of the YouTube Success Podcast, you'll be joining me, as I sit down with a remarkable guest, Jesse Davis. Together, we explore Jesse's extraordinary journey, starting from a family YouTube channel to achieving a stunning milestone of 100,000 subscribers in just two months. We discuss the critical elements that led to his success, such as content strategy, audience targeting, and the challenges of maintaining a work-life balance while managing a thriving YouTube career.

If you're an aspiring content creator or a YouTube enthusiast, this conversation is a must-listen for you, offering invaluable insights and practical advice on your path to YouTube success.

Links

• YouTube Community
• TubeFest 2024 Conference
• King of Video Cool Stuff

Matthew Hughes - King of Video: Is it possible to get to a hundred

thousand subscribers in two months?

Yes it is.

Is it possible to quit your job and go full time YouTuber?

Of course it is and in this episode, I'm interviewing Jesse

Davis, who did just that with one of the channels that he started.

He's got multiple channels now.

He had a fantastic way of testing his audience at the start that I'd

really like you to pay attention to.

So this episode is definitely worth listening to all the way through Jesse.

He's such a humble guy and he's got such a fantastic, amazing way of delivering

absolute gold throughout the episode.

So pay attention, listen up and enjoy the episode.

And don't forget, if this is the first time listening to the YouTube Success

Podcast, make sure you subscribe, follow, like, share all that kind of

jazz, wherever you're listening from and don't forget to review the episode

as well If you get a moment, all right.

Thanks so much.

Go and enjoy the episode.

My name is Jesse Davis and my family and I started a

channel for my daughter back in 2017.

We were doing family content on YouTube and that blew up in a big way, and

since then, we've started many other channels and we have big pages on

Facebook, Instagram, and even TikTok.

Matthew Hughes - King of Video: Wicked.

And you say that, you fly through that story so well, but there's so much

that I'd love to talk about and let's..

So much to unpack.

Yeah.

Firstly, when you say it's a family channel, like when I remember you

starting this, you said, and again, please correct me if I'm wrong here.

It was something like, you started the channel to pay for your daughter's

university or something like that.

Is that, am I right or is it totally off?

My daughter was eight at the time.

Yeah.

And it wasn't really about money.

My daughter was an actress in Bangkok, so we live in Thailand.

Yeah.

And we had been doing television, TV casting, acting.

Even I had been in TV series in Thailand and like I saw that all of

a sudden when kids hit eight or nine and they started losing a lot of

teeth and they started being less in demand, that all of a sudden, like

they just did ran outta work, right?

Yeah.

Kid actresses are like, oh, industry's come back when you're 16

or 17, then we'll talk to you then.

But this awkward phase, we don't want you.

And I felt like my daughter is really talented.

She did work for KFC and Disney and Oreo and Nintendo, and she'd done like 40

commercial jobs and then they're just gonna toss her away like some used rag.

And I was like, as a dad, I'm like no, this is not cool.

My daughter's super talented.

Wouldn't it be so cool if she had a way to showcase her talents and abilities?

And so we created this YouTube channel more for her to grow into as a longer

term sort of career play and we always just said money's secondary.

If we get some money, it's cool, right?

But I had a job at that time.

So money wasn't the big deal.

It was more about fame and building a platform.

Matthew Hughes - King of Video: Okay.

And I like the idea actually because it's a big point.

Money means a lot of things to a lot of people, and if you're in a very

tough situation, of course finances is something you focus on a lot.

But what I see personally, in the most successful channels are people

that start channels, based on something they're passionate about.

And of course, it's easy to be passionate about your family.

So my daughter, right?

Sure.

Yeah, exactly.

And I've got two girls, and so I know it's a great story to have

done something selflessly to help your daughter along the way.

Another thing that I really talk to people about is being strategic with

your content, strategic with how you get stuff out there and of course, going from

zero to a million subscribers in a year means you have to have been strategic.

And I sent you the questions before and I said, what was the biggest mistake?

And you said, Matt, there wasn't really a mistake, we had a perfect launch.

So can you tell us in as much detail as you want or as little as you want?

Sure.

What that, because you're working a tech job, right?

So you wasn't a YouTuber at the time.

Yep.

You wasn't, you didn't have any about YouTube, you were starting from nothing.

I remember you asked some quite basic video questions at the time.

You were just getting into to grips with the cameras and all that kind of stuff.

How did you create that strategy around that, Jesse, at the start?

I took the attitude that I know nothing about this,

about YouTube, about video.

So rather than coming and say, saying oh, I think I can do this, it was more about,

okay, I need to start at the ground level.

And the only way I was gonna figure out all this YouTube and video

stuff is if I did it over time.

Learning over time.

So on my commute, I was listening to a lot of podcasts listened to a lot

of Gary Vaynerchuk, listened to some other YouTube-specific podcasts, and I

just kinda kept inhaling information, just, good stuff just coming in, best

practices, what to do, what not to do, don't do sub for sub and all that stuff.

And rather than me trying and making a whole lot of mistakes, I just

absorbed all the best practices and then I started my channel that way.

But we did have strategy, so you're right.

And some of the strategy was that we had a few concepts and one was if we

go after attention, money will follow.

That was one of them.

Yeah.

And another one was that we are going to identify our target audience.

And even though we didn't know what that audience liked, we

basically what's the marketing term?

Like an avatar?

Like create an avatar of who your ideal target audience is.

And so we decided that we were gonna go after little Thai girls

that are aged, maybe six to 10.

And we were, we just kinda listed out 14 ideas of everything that we thought

that they might be interested in.

And so when we started the channel, we did all of this stuff and the

only way that worked was because we produced so much content.

I think the first month we released about 52 videos, which is like a year's worth

of weekly content in the first month.

So sometimes there were like three episodes a day.

But very quickly because of that data and by building our channel to move

fast, we were able to get feedback and we were able to adjust right away.

So out of those 14 ideas, little show segments, we cut

seven of them out right away.

Like within the first month?

Yeah.

Cuz clearly like nobody was interested.

And then we focused on the stuff that was doing good and later on every year

we'd review it again and we'd drop a segment out or add a segment in.

But we had a kind of a scientific approach to it, and it was

methodical and it was blazingly fast.

And one of the last pieces of strategy that I think we started with, I'd like

to talk about was our work ethic and our attitude, knowing that we could not

keep up with that level of pace forever.

But that we were gonna work hard for a season, and that season

ended up being a very long season.

Yeah, I think we've produced probably close to 4,000 videos.

For our family in the last five years.

But yeah, we just basically built for speed and just went at it.

Boom.

Matthew Hughes - King of Video: Okay, so there's a couple of things I see

that, that are really interesting.

The first most obvious one is that initial I work with business owners, entrepreneurs

who struggle to do a video a week.

And here you are pushing out 50 videos in a month.

How did you organize that with the family?

You've got a job, you've got a family life and all that kind of stuff.

Do you think, sorry, I'm asking a couple of questions here, but do you

think the work ethic that you got from your daughter being in the shows and

that kind of thing helped you structure that and plan that amount of content?

I don't know if that helped with the speed.

But we certainly were around that.

So we saw how the crew would work, we saw how they were organized.

And I think at that point, I couldn't take too many things away.

But like right now it's really helpful because we work like that, right?

Like we have multiple crews going out daily.

And yeah all that industry experience helps.

But I think in the beginning, the thing that actually really helped is prior

to me getting into the tech industry, like the travel industry that I, the

job I had before that I was an app entrepreneur and my wife and I built

apps and games and we were building like, stuff that was quick or we would

use prebuilt code and we would re-skin the graphics to make like another game.

And we were releasing like 30 games a month.

So we had this Rapid fire, digital production mentality.

And while Apple didn't like that so much, they want one high quality game.

YouTube loves it, right?

They're like, Hey, give us content, daily content, great.

Keep at it.

So we were able to just go full throttle, but our process was, and

part of this was controlled by the fact that my kids were in school, right?

So I couldn't film during the week.

So I would be going to work during the week, and then the evenings and

weekends were that's my production time.

So I mostly, I'd edit in the evenings and then we would film

on Saturday and Sunday all day.

Pretty much.

Yeah.

So yeah, we would, we'd be doing like just eight hours, nine hours

straight filming like two days a week.

Just getting a lot of videos in and we slowed down over time but

it was just like a lot of, just anything that came to mind we did.

And they were short, fast, fun videos.

Just real freestyle shot with an iPhone and two, LED lights.

That was it.

No audio, no nothing fancy.

Yeah.

So now we are, we have a much higher focus on quality, but

back then it was just quantity.

Just get it out, get it out, get it out.

And fortunately, our target audience didn't care.

Little Thai kids are like, eh, they're not like, ooh, this megapixel

count isn't as high as it could be.

So they're like, oh, hey, is it fun?

Yeah, cool.

But it's really about the content, right?

The content is more important than all the tech stuff.

Matthew Hughes - King of Video: And I'll just find that fascinating cuz actually

as I'm hearing you and being a techie, a geeky techie myself, this view that

you've got of like quantity first,

and review the analytics and what that's telling you, and the bit where you said

like you cut half of the ideas out, like it's the opposite of what most

people do, and so that's fascinating because obviously whilst you're doing

the opposite, it allowed you to laser focus in what you're really doing.

You've got this consumer viewer first view at the start anyway.

Who are these viewers gonna be?

What are their, you said about the 14 interests like, really laser focused on,

"we're not just making content for us to grow our business" or anything like that.

It's what do people want to consume?

And I just love the idea that you've beast moded that 52 videos, but it gave

you so much data then to really hone into what was working and that kind of thing.

And now you've told me that app story, it makes total sense that actually

yes, you had that experience, the commercial experience, but actually

it was probably more your analytical experience from you and your wife doing

the app stuff that you understood how important the data was and to trust the

data and to change things as you go.

Yeah.

It was really like an app almost apples to apples, like kind of

comparison, like with the app store.

The, your app icon is super important, right?

Because that's what people see on the app store and it represents

your app, and for YouTube, the thumbnail was like that important.

So I are like, from the get-go, put a lot of emphasis on having a really

eye-catching colorful fun thumbnail and cuz that's your billboard.

That's what gets people to come in and watch your video.

And so yeah, it was, it's funny because, as entrepreneurs we look

at failure as oh my god, I suck.

At the time I was like, I'm just not cut out to be a business guy,

because my app business failed.

But really it was like all this, amazing experience.

It was setting me up for this next thing that I was gonna do,

Yeah.

Yeah.

Matthew Hughes - King of Video: Oh, totally.

I don't believe experience-wise, you're failing anyway.

It's always just more knowledge to take with you to the next thing.

Yep.

And clearly this, that, that experience that you had paid dividends

in the next part of the journey.

When you published those 52 videos, you said you were focused on thumbnails.

How much did you focus on like SEO and the other parts of YouTube that

we often think of titles and SEO and was there like a strategic promotion

kind of marketing plan at that point?

Or was it just publish and see what YouTube does with these videos?

SEO is a good question because on the App store it's usually called

ASO or App Store Optimization.

And Apple and Google work a little differently.

But still, we had a, actually, a lot of background cuz that was our big

marketing strategy was SEO basically.

So we already had a lot of good SEO best practices, wired into it, and

most of that transferred right over, like your title, the first, the titles

are weighted stronger towards the beginning of the title, so we would

put more important keywords there.

I wouldn't say it was a mistake and I think earlier on and this was like

2017 SEO played much of a bigger part in getting your videos discovered, but

now that I know how the algorithm works a little bit better and now that it's

probably changed a little bit SEO for YouTube has really fallen by the wayside.

It's nowhere near as important as what it was, and you could have an amazing video

with one word in the title and Google.

Google Brain, their AI system is smart enough to figure out what your video

is about, just based on AI recognition of the content of your video, as

well as analyzing the verbiage.

So it's like no matter what, it's gonna figure it out.

Yeah.

That's good.

And I want people to pay attention to the fact that you're talking about 2017.

This is not a your journey is not a 10 year old journey, is it?

It's a, Nope.

Your journey in business and the app store journey and all of that experience that,

that's clearly obviously had a good impact on this is longer, but five years that,

the one year to a million, is it insane?

But, beyond that is, is also incredible what you've done.

Yeah,

It didn't stop at one year like we kept growing.

So I've got two channels that are over a million subs and our main one is,

I think around 7.3 million currently.

Yeah.

So it's one of the bigger channels in Thailand.

And then, we've got several million plus follower Facebook pages, 1

million plus follower TikTok page, and I think we've amassed about 7

billion views, not including TikTok.

So yeah, like we've been

Matthew Hughes - King of Video: busy.

So and we talked, just before we started this, you talked about your transition.

So you've got this big channel it's in a kids niche.

Yep.

Things are going really well and then the COPPA thing happened, the

cop or whatever you wanna call it.

Yeah.

And you've now gotta make some kind of decision to adjust.

So can you tell us a little bit about that and then how and I suppose the

other part to that as well is were you doing a lot of stuff on the

other social networks at that time?

Yeah.

So we had some presence, but not a lot.

Yeah.

So for those of your audience who does not understand what COPPA is, or COPPA or

whatever, it was the Child Online Privacy Protection Act enacted by the FTC and

enforced by the FTC, the US FTC, and the Federal Trade Commission then sued YouTube

for about $140 million, and of course one, and people are saying like, they got

off easy because they knew that YouTube had all this child data and people are

like, oh, it's about, bad stuff for kids.

And that's not what it was about.

It was about YouTube was knowingly collecting data from children,

and part of that was their ad platform.

Their ad platform is data driven, right?

So contextual ads being served to kids was making them a lot of money.

And so what they did was now they had to make you start labeling your content

as kids or not for kids, and we were, my daughter was getting older, so it

was getting kinda like on the line of what was kids and what was not for kids.

So we made a very conscious decision after seeing our ad revenues cut by

80% to, Hey let's maybe look for a different direction to go in the future.

That was a very good call because right now, things are as bad or

if not worse than what they were a couple years ago for kids' channels.

And it's just they haven't gotten a break.

And so we started pivoting towards, seeing what older

content we could do as a family.

And one of the things we noticed, we had a lot of older relatives that would

come over to help with the channel.

We started doing skits and we started realizing that these weren't

really heavy on the kids' side.

Like it was more like a story for adults and it happened to have a kid actor in

it here or there, and we noticed that these started popping on Facebook.

And Facebook doesn't have a lot of kids on it.

It's all like older adults.

Yeah.

And so we knew that hey, this was a real genuine for adult type of content.

We started doing more and more of 'em and it was doing pretty good,

but it was just killing on Facebook and we got monetised on Facebook.

So a lot of people don't know that Facebook runs Instream Ads, which

is very similar to YouTube AdSense.

It's much more difficult to get monetised on Facebook, but once you're monetised

and you can drive views, the payouts are like three times better, or at

least in our opinion or our experience.

So we were like quadruple dipping because we were making three times more on

Facebook, plus making money on YouTube.

So then all of a sudden our business started doing really

good by focusing in on these.

And we still do the kids and family content on the weekends, but Monday

through Friday we've got multiple teams filming at least two episodes per team

per day, and we're adding a third.

Yeah that's done really well for us.

But yeah, mainly on Facebook.

Matthew Hughes - King of Video: Yeah.

And that's fascinating cuz it would be quite easy for you to stick to the

one platform and focus on that, given that you've got this huge audience.

But it's nice to see that you just made the decision.

I know you cut the COPPA thing push you down that road.

But even yeah, you could have still stuck to your guns and continued

down the road you were going, but actually it's good to spread yourself

out across the multiple platforms.

One thing I think from, because a lot of my audience, they're a smaller businesses,

maybe even a one man band, so to speak.

Like when you talk about, having two teams, maybe three teams, for those

people that are just doing it on your own, and you talked about you and your

wife and your family doing this stuff over the weekend, like what advice would

you give them if they're getting started?

I think.

For you guys, like you're in, you was already in a view of working hard and

being part of a production teams and stuff with the work that you did, but

it still must have been hard to manage all of that stuff at the same time,

especially when you were working as well.

Yeah.

What advice would you give people that where time is really

limited?

So I think the thing is that, You can't invent more time, you can't add it,

but you can be more efficient at it.

So it's really being honest with yourself about what can I give up?

That, that time where I watch Netflix at night, it should I watch Netflix

or can we use that as production time?

So that's really key, and the one of the other keys is it, when it comes to

being efficient with time is batching.

Batching for content creation is so key because what tires people

out is you have to wear many hats when you're in YouTube, right?

Okay.

Now I'm, I've gotta, I've gotta be a writer, right?

And now I have to sit in front of a camera and be an actor, and now I have

to go over here and become an editor.

And then after that, I gotta be an SEO expert.

And then I gotta be a graphic designer for the thumbnail and like switching

these hats boop, tires people out, right?

Because they're not used to doing that kind of thing.

One of the things we did, and this is a very practical tip for any video creators

out there, is to batch everything.

So that means Monday is your writing day, and you just write

as many stories as you can.

Two, three stories, and then, maybe the day before that

is your research day, right?

You gotta research and come up with some good ideas, try to see what's happening,

what your audience is watching, get some input so you can create, and then maybe

Saturday you have a day off of work.

So that's, you get up early in the morning, you set up your studio,

you got all the lights going on, and then once you're in that

filming mode, it's just, episode.

Just bang bang.

And then Sunday, you get back on your computer and today is just edit.

Alls I'm gonna do is edit all day.

And if you do that, you can produce two to four clips a week, easy for most creators.

Matthew Hughes - King of Video: So what I'm hearing you say is that if you've

got excuses about doing this stuff, ask yourself how much Netflix am I watching?

Yeah.

How dedicated and committed am I to actually making this work.

Because strategy is one thing and we talk about strategy a lot, but actually

the dedication and commitment that you had and it's really funny, it's the old

fable, you get out of it what you put in.

And it sounds to me like as a family unit, you all decided like

this was something that was really worth us committing to this?

Because, during that first month, but I would imagine for a long time after that,

your family time is eaten into, right?

Like I know you had fun making a lot of the videos.

Everyone's committed to having fun, but still, there must be some like military

operations style stuff going on to try and make all of this work whilst you're

trying to still be a dad in a moment.

All that kinda stuff.

Yep.

Yeah.

I think How did that affect your dynamic as a family, I guess is the

question.

So I think it was pretty tough and I won't beat around the bush and I'll

tell you that, it definitely took some toll on the family in some way it shape

or form, my daughter is a trooper and she put up with all this and I think

she's a little getting on the burnt outside at 14, but we've listened to her

and one of the things that I think we tried, because we knew that this could

be really damaging as a family to go that hard for that long, and we would

have sit down times, at least once a month, sort of mental health checks.

And be like, Hey, is everybody okay?

How are you feeling?

What's your opinion?

Is it too much?

And it was nice because my daughter would actually gimme some honest

feedback and be like, you know what?

It's pretty good, but when you say this or whatever, I get stressed out

and so we've been able to adjust.

And probably recently, my daughter's hit 14, she's in middle school, and

she said, dad, I'm really proud of everything that we've done, but I

don't wanna work my entire childhood.

Yeah.

And so after she said that, I was like, okay, maybe it's time to like recalibrate.

So now we only maybe film, what, a couple times a month.

And she has a pretty normal childhood for the most part.

Yeah.

But we've scaled way back on her channel just for her sake mainly.

But I know it, it was tough, it's very stressful.

My wife is the one who's really the workhorse to the family.

She's the one I give all the credit to for schedule because I'm both techy and artsy.

I like cameras and I like video and settings.

Yeah, but my brain's all over the place and thank God, I have somebody

like my wife who grounds me and says okay, today is production day.

Today, we are doing this today, we are doing that.

And having somebody like that on your team, if you're not like that,

is awesome to keep you on schedule.

So much of YouTube is about discipline and really just staying

on that schedule and keep producing

Matthew Hughes - King of Video: content.

Yeah, absolutely.

Love that.

I think we're all just gonna agree that our wives are the best part of this deal

is them keeping us on track for sure.

It is so important though, whether it's your wife or your business partner

or whatever, having somebody that supports you in that way and really

playing to each other's strengths and, like you say, you're the techie

and the artsy guy in the partnership.

But it really does help to have

the different strengths and being able to lean on each other in that way.

Great to hear that, that works out really well for you.

Thanks.

We talked about, okay, it's not all just about money, but let's talk about

brand deals if you don't mind, and, okay what I'm interested in I know

you've got a lot of deals going on and stuff, and you work with loads of

huge businesses and stuff now, right?

What I'm interested in is like, when did you first get your first brand

deal and how did that come about?

Yeah let's just go down that road a little bit, just if you don't

mind.

Hey, sorry for the interruption.

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forget that we have a FREE community over at youtubecommunity.co.uk.

I'd love to see you there.

You can talk about the podcast or you can talk about anything related to YouTube.

So head over to youtubecommunity.co.uk and I'll see you there.

Back to the episode.

Okay, sure.

So I think the first brand deal, we grew so fast.

So we got a silver play button in about five months and we were so new that we

just weren't on the radar of companies, or marketing agencies and, So we had this

kind of thing of Hey guys, we're here.

And I think we eventually, we decided we just need to start somewhere.

So we reached out to, it was some like online company sales.

I'm trying to even remember what it was.

It wasn't like super famous like eBay or anything, and we just

said, Hey, we do kids review stuff.

Can you send us some toys?

Maybe we review 'em.

So they were like, okay, and they sent us a couple toys and product, just for free.

And we started there and I know some people I've heard argue

like you gotta value your time.

You gotta charge all this stuff.

And really, like we were after experience, and we wanted to have a track record.

And I wanted to know that if I was going to Nestle, that I could say,

Hey, look what we've done in the past, we know how to handle brands.

We know how to handle your business, and at that point, I didn't know how

to handle it like in the beginning.

I did start approaching companies.

Now, I would be admidst to tell you if I was a pro at brand

deals because I'm really not.

Because we became such a force in the industry, like in our little

country of Thailand, we got started getting approached by a lot of brands.

Yeah.

And so that made our job real easy, right?

Because I don't have to reach out and email people.

They're contacting us.

And so we've done many brand deals for all sorts of drink companies and vitamin syrup

and toys and, everything you can imagine.

And it was really fun, but right now, we're kinda like we're out of the toy

phase and because we're so focused on our new thing, we've almost like

completely turned down all brand deals.

Yeah, I did one, we did one this past week for a music video for a

cosmetic company, but I don't see us handling too many more of those.

They can be really time consuming.

So yeah, even aside from just, like the idea and then the production and the

editing, which that's what but what you don't see is like all the back and forth

of the marketing companies coming with ideas and proposals and pitch decks.

So really, they can drag out over a month.

And this one brand deal, I think we started at the end of last year

and we just finished shooting it.

So they can

Matthew Hughes - King of Video: take a while, make the bigger it

gets, the harder it gets, right?

There's just more people involved and they wanna make sure it's right and it's

worth the investment or that kind of jazz.

One thing I can recommend cuz I like to have some little practical

takeaways that somebody's oh, hey, I could try this is come up with a rate card.

So I have this little jpeg graphic and all it says is, it says the name of,

Brianna's Secret Club or the name of my channel, and then it says, some bullet

points like top channel in Thailand, one of the in demand, blah, blah, blah.

This many subs.

So like a couple little bullet points.

It's just you know what our value is, and then here's a rate package,

or, one or two rates and if, contact us for more information.

It looks professional.

It's simple and easy.

Somebody asked, cuz a lot of companies will just ask for your

rate card if they're serious.

Yeah.

And so it's nice to have that handy where you can just be like,

check out my rate card and if you're interested, let me know.

We can negotiate, blah, blah, blah.

But it's a good starting point and it makes you look really professional.

So you always wanna have some marketing materials ready to go for your company.

And then when you reach out to them, you can say, Hey, can I send you my rate

card?

Matthew Hughes - King of Video: Yeah.

To be honest with you, it's nice to hear what you said right at the start.

You approached a few people, they gave you some free stuff, and that was enough.

I totally agree.

I recommend people have a rate card.

I usually say imagine it's gonna take you a day to create the video.

What is a day's worth of value to you?

What would you charge somebody?

Whatever your business is, that's the cost you can demand for this thing, and you

could add production value and editing all that kind of stuff with it as well.

But actually, like for me, with some of this stuff that I've done, I've

worked with some companies where, if it was Logitech, they could just

send me some gear because I love gear and I spend the money anyway.

Yeah.

Like sometimes that's okay.

And it's just a good way to get the experience, like you say, to

understand what they want out of it,

how to talk to these.

If you're not used to talking to corporate people, it can be quite daunting at

the times, so getting that experience and just understanding how that

relationship works is really important.

And then, like you say, the bigger it gets, the more people are involved,

the more they want to get out of it.

So it becomes, yeah, it can become a bit.

It's

funny you mentioned Logitech.

The last last brand deal I did for these headphones.

Oh, there you go.

There you go.

Yeah.

I was like, yeah, let's please send us more stuff.

That's

Matthew Hughes - King of Video: great.

Yeah, absolutely.

I'd definitely be doing that as much as possible for gear

cuz I spend so much on gear.

Amazing.

Thanks for that.

It's really great advice.

You said there I'd like to give these little tips.

Honestly, Jesse, everything you've said so far, I know this, like in my, even

in my community, they will absolutely love the advice and the story that

you've given us about your experience.

There's not just little bits.

There's some great stuff there.

Good, good.

Yeah.

I can be like real high level overall arching strategy, but

sometimes it's hard to, Yeah.

You

Matthew Hughes - King of Video: dunno where people are, do, yeah.

The thing is, I think I asked the, we've got a WhatsApp group for the community

and I said what would you like me to ask?

And of course, it's always quite high level stuff, but actually for me,

when you talked about the 14 ideas and then ditching seven them of them.

Like it's those kind of things that are really key that people

often skip over because they're not prepared to do the analytical work.

Yeah.

Like I, I'll publish the videos.

I, I look at views and then I'll walk away and it's that's not the only metric

and there's so much more around it that you need to pay attention to and

actually be prepared to post a video and for it to, not work and post a

completely different one and it flies and then, okay, let's do more of them

then, cuz it's clear that one's working better or it might fly the first time

and not the second time and yeah.

And adjust as you go.

So yeah, paying attention to all of that stuff, I think is the bit that a lot of

people don't put the effort into maybe.

Yeah.

And listen to your audience, I know I mentioned we, we tested a lot of the

things, but a lot of it was because we didn't know what they wanted,

and a mistake I see a lot of YouTubers do is they're like, no, it's gotta be

quality and it's gotta be my way, and I gotta, I'm gonna do this, and the

audience is gonna have to like it.

And it's it's almost a little arrogant, yeah.

Saying that, you think you know what the audience wants,

and then they have to like you because of it.

And it's always like, how do I get more views on my videos?

It's why don't you make videos that your people wanna watch?

Yeah.

It's more about the other way around.

So it's being a little bit humble, like trying to, I understand that there's

two partners in this dance, and you have to bounce and play off of each

Matthew Hughes - King of Video: other.

Yeah, and you are taking people's time and attention.

So Yeah.

You need to give them something that they really want to watch

because otherwise they're just gonna be annoyed more than anything.

And may maybe that leads to leads nicely to my question about comments

as what did with your kids channel.

Did you have comments on

Yes, we did.

We've always had comments on unless YouTube turns it off Yeah.

Or there's a distinct problem, which occasionally has happened.

Yeah.

Matthew Hughes - King of Video: But, So how so did, and

did you get any negativity?

Was it all positive stuff?

What's the, tell me about that side of the story and what I'm really interested

in, obviously being a dad as well is like, how did that work for your daughter and,

yeah, did you like collectively read them or did you just not bother reading them?

What was the deal

there?

Fortunately at the time my, my daughter could speak Thai okay.

And her, my mom, my wife, her mom would help her out with a lot of Thai say it

like, no, say it like this, and so she would do a lot of parroting, but when it

came to reading, she couldn't really read.

So it was never an issue because she just couldn't read the

comments and I couldn't read.

I would translate the comments and then be like, how dare are they?

It's eight year olds, they're trying out every bad word

they know, to see what it was.

But my daughter was never affected by it.

But what we learned was to get a bit of a thick skin.

So even when somebody leaves a bad comment they're taking time outta

their day to write something about your video that they took the time to watch.

And that still eventually helps you more or less, like you're

getting attention, right?

Whether it's good or bad attention, and I look at it as take the

most famous leaders in the world, Churchill, or Abraham Lincoln, right?

Half the country hated their guts.

Yeah, these are like the most, most famous guys, right?

And still so many people hated them.

But you look at any famous figure in history and they all

had people hate their guts.

And so I just always remember that no matter what you do, no

matter how good you are, there's gonna be somebody that hates you.

And for me, it's always come back to one thing.

Validation.

It's validation that I'm here, it's validation that I'm

going in a strong direction.

And I don't care if I upset your feelings.

I don't care if you think I look like an idiot.

That's cool.

That's your opinion, but, I'm gonna keep doing my thing and if you like it, cool.

If not, oh and it doesn't bother me anymore.

And I think all of us are just eh, whatever, it's delete, block, move on.

Matthew Hughes - King of Video: Yeah.

I like the idea of thick skin because definitely when you get

started, we've got experience, right?

We've been doing videos and stuff for a long time, so you know, it's coming.

I don't get it obviously anywhere near what you would get comments wise

anyway, so I expect there's lots more to filter through, but you just I,

I like the idea of, somebody's gonna hate it anyway, so you may as well

just do it and see what happens.

And, The majority of the time, you've got a great fan base

that loves what you're doing.

That's right.

And I've seen when you've, created new channels they've rallied around

to support you in the new channels and, all that kind of good stuff.

So obviously you're doing something right, even if there's people

that are not that happy about it.

But that's right.

And the funny thing is when you mentioned the fans that support you.

A lot of times, like I, somebody writes something really nasty and I almost

felt like stepping in, and blocking or banning and the fans just eat 'em alive.

Yeah.

They will take 'em to task.

And it's a funny how really riled up your fans get defending you.

So I would say in most cases it's fine.

And if it's it, I would say this to anybody.

If it ever starts getting in your head where it's affecting

you mentally, you can't sleep.

You just think about it all night or you're having a great day, and then

you see that negative comment and then your day just goes downhill from

there and you just can't handle it.

Turn the comments off.

That's it.

Just turn 'em off.

It's better to not have any comments at all than to have something ruin your day.

And yeah.

Nobody wants

Matthew Hughes - King of Video: that, right?

Yeah, totally.

But, and I get that, But just know it's coming, just know

it's gonna come and expect it.

Exactly.

And and if you've got that thick skin it certainly, the first

couple of times it feels personal.

But for me I just feel like there's some, now I feel like what's

going on in that person's life?

Something's going on in their life and this video that I've created, or this

piece of content I've created is where they need to get it off their chest.

It's not a, it's never about me.

It's all about what's going on in their life.

Yeah, that's true.

When I look at it through that lens, I, I feel like, okay, a lot of the

time I'm always like, how can I help?

What, what's going on?

Do you know?

Do you wanna have a conversation?

And I actually seen this quite a bit on Instagram reels.

There's a few times where I've seen people leave really terrible, horrible comments

and the person that's posted has just been really kind and nice to them, and you

see the conversation completely change.

It just flips because they don't expect to be treated with kindness with this.

Yeah.

, nasty comment that might be, and they feel bad, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's totally, that's great.

Okay, so you mentioned a couple of people.

I've got a question here just about who do you look up to?

Who do you admire on YouTube?

You men mentioned Gary V and a couple of others not so much just when you

were getting started, but also now, like who do you see and you think,

oh, they're doing a great job.

I really like what they're doing.

Anyone that comes to mind.

Yeah.

I don't like being a broken record, but I was fortunate

enough to get to meet Jimmy, Mr.

Beast at Yep.

VidSummit last year and man, what an awesome guy.

He's doing so he makes me look like a lazy sloth that's doing nothing.

He's oh yeah, I'm doing this charity and this channel.

We're doing gaming videos over here, and then I'm surviving in a

crashed luxury liner like luxury jet.

This guy is like doing so much insane stuff.

And I know he's built an incredible team around him and I got to have Have lunch

with Chandler and some of those guys.

But really, I think across the board, the entire industry has just

nothing but respect for this guy.

He's as legit and as nice as they come, and it's so awesome to see good

things happen to a really great guy.

And so I like that.

But there's so many creators that I just think are really making great

stuff and I, I know my son and I always love a lot of engineering

channels we love like Mark Robber and the Hack Smith and some of these guys.

We just love seeing them build stuff.

Yeah.

And it gives us ideas to, to build stuff.

So those are some of our favorite YouTubers.

But I don't know what's your favorite YouTuber?

Which ones,

Matthew Hughes - King of Video: i, I'm the same, Mr Beast is

on upon the list, of course.

Actually when I first went to VidSummit, I wasn't really into YouTube, I'd had

the video company for seven years, traveling, doing corporate videos.

But I wasn't really into YouTube.

And when I went VidSummit, I showed my daughter the list of speakers and I was

like can you tell me who these people are?

Cause I don't know.

She was like, oh daddy, you've gotta meet Rebecca Zamolo.

So I met her and she gave me this lovely video for Willow.

It was her birthday.

And I said, could you do a little video and say happy birthday to her?

And so I got this and I kept hold of it for six months cuz it was, way before.

So obviously I consume some of her content, but then just for me, what I

like about consuming content is more like the, and you being a techie and an

editor would appreciate this, but like a cool ways a video is put together, like I

look for nice transitions or little cool things where, you know, even sat next to

a woman, I completely forget her name now, she's huge on Facebook for recipe videos.

She did a session at VidSummit.

This is why I love, love VidSummit.

She did a session, I watched the session, she taught Taughts loads of

stuff, and then I happened to just be sitting next to her on the next session.

She, she came and sat in the audience and sat next to him.

I got talk, talking about it.

But she built her whole business around these quick recipe videos, and

there were quick edits and everybody does them now, but I just think I,

I just look for that all the time.

If I see someone and they've got a really cool edit, I'm like, I know

what effort that took to create it.

So I'm like, yes, I'll follow you.

So I think the editors of the world are probably ones that are

rather than the personalities.

But I, it's funny, like when you're in it you, there's certain things

that you look for that you appreciated wow, that shot took a lot of planning

or I wouldn't have done it like that.

And yeah that's always

Matthew Hughes - King of Video: impressive.

Oh, I, I do, I think Jesse like, The, you talked about Mr.

Beast and the stuff that they're doing.

I think a lot of people watch that for entertainment value and all

that kind of stuff, but definitely me and you are watching it going.

How did they do that bit?

Yeah, but what was it?

There must, the team must have been amazing to do this thing, see,

there's definitely a different lens you look at once you become a creator

and you're thinking like, okay, I need to make some cool videos.

You I don't think you ever watch videos the same again.

Yeah.

I remember going, I went to Film studies at college, and I remember

when we first watched it, we analyzed Psycho and the teacher said to me

at the time, he said, you'll never watch, you'll never appreciate videos

just for entertainment anymore.

You're always gonna be breaking them down.

And it's true.

It's true.

Never stopped.

Yeah.

It's like such a curse.

So lately I've been less amazed by like quick edits and YouTube and things like

that for entertainment purposes and more of now I'm doing this professional

team that's, close to TV quality.

Yeah.

Drama videos.

And so I'm always looking at Hey, how can we, push the quality level more?

What lenses can we get?

What shots, how does this team film that?

I'm like watching other, like my wife's watching Thai tv and I'm like,

Ooh, this is a really good shot.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Look

Matthew Hughes - King of Video: at that.

Totally.

I, we watched a ambulance, I watched it on the plane.

We went to New York recently.

And again, I'm looking and I'm seeing all the drone shots and I'm like, oh, when we

had a drone, when we first got a drone, there's no way we could get that shot.

And then I was watching them and I was like, Oh my God,

it must have been amazing.

And then I saw a video with the director, Michael Bay, was it?

I can't remember who it was the director.

But he was talking about the drone pilots and saying there's no way we

could have done this film in that way, without these amazing pilots.

So yeah it is a curse.

I'm glad you used that word.

Cause that's what I say.

It's a curse once you get into it, cuz you just can't sit and

enjoy films in the same room.

You can't turn it off.

You can't

turn it off.

Matthew Hughes - King of Video: No video production mind.

Last thing I'll ask you then, just because we're talking about teching, geeky stuff.

You've talked about filming on an iPhone at the start and

you've moved around equipment.

What do you thinks the piece of equipment that made the most difference?

After the iPhone?

Cause the obvious one is the iPhone.

You had the iPhone, everything you had was in your hand, available

to you, then you could film.

But when you started to move from that, like what's the, what did

you notice as the best investments?

I've, being a tech geek, I've got a lot of equipment.

When we moved from an iPhone, we moved to the Cannon M Series.

So I had an M6, which is similar to the M 50, and what I liked about it was

more microphone options, more modular.

It wasn't about the video quality so much, but I liked how you fix the settings

the way I wanted, and I liked how, I could have a removable microphone or I

could switch to a wireless if I wanted to and I could mount it to a tripod.

It was just like, and remove them from memory cards.

So that's a huge thing.

I hate phones trying to like connect cables and get the videos off the phone.

Yeah, it's horrible.

Being able to just pop that little memory card out and just stick

it into the computer and then bam, all my videos are there.

That was a game changer for production.

And then from there we've gone through many, many cameras.

Probably the biggest maybe camera that made like a big impact on us was the

Canon EOSR going up to a full frame.

Yeah.

Newer camera mirrorless.

That camera still to this day produces just amazing quality video.

We love the colors and I've got three of 'em now and I have three R

sixes, and still, I think the EOSR have the best color, it's such a

good camera for the money right now.

They're all discounted, but if you're a budding filmmaker that is a good

camera to pick up for the money.

Yeah.

Depends on what you're using it for.

There, there's never a perfect camera.

But that one was probably a real, that one with the road video

mic pro plus and a wide lens.

That's like our go-to YouTube setup up, we're always running

around with that thing.

Matthew Hughes - King of Video: Yeah, and it's a, I think the transition you've

just said from iPhone to compact camera.

Mirrorless, you probably missed the digital slr stage cuz mirrorless

would've been a natural, I think the compact camera was mirrorless, right?

So that's fine.

No, the

compact camera, the M6 is, yeah, the M6 is mirrorless.

It's one of the small mirrorless.

Yeah.

But not full frame.

It's

not the full size.

We had a 60D Canon 60 D, which was like the first generation

of cannons to do video.

Yeah.

And so I originally, before we did my daughter's channel.

We tried to do like a Lego show and it just, that camera didn't work for it.

There was no auto focus I had to like, set the focus manually and then okay,

everybody stay right here on this plane.

Do not move.

Yeah.

Keep everything in focus.

So I like that.

I like I can't deal with this, so let me, we just use the iPhones.

But yeah, after that, like the new newer auto focus systems are like so

much better with the face tracking.

So almost anything you get now is like pretty good.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Filmmakers have it so easy.

Like the amount of storage space you get for 20 bucks, the

shoot all day on two batteries.

It's ridiculous.

Like filmmakers from, even 10 years ago would be seriously jealous of the

stuff you have on the shelf right now.

Matthew Hughes - King of Video: Yeah, totally.

The, we, I had a couple of Lumix GH5's s and the auto focus

on that was always shocking.

And I love that camera, but it's the exact same issue that you talked about, yeah.

And then when I got my latest Sony and everything just, works as quick as it

did on an iPhone or a compact camera.

And that's the thing that annoyed me the most is the more expensive they

got, the more manual they became.

Whereas now I've got a Sony A 7 C that I'm doing this on.

It's just, you just turn it on and everything, works, so away you go.

But yeah, I feel that pain and you added 2017, I think we started 2013 with some of

the, we started with the Canons as well.

7D or something like that.

Oh yeah.

7D (actually 6D) seventies is not bad.

Yeah.

I could you not best video with all this Yeah.

Camera talk for sure.

But yeah I just, I was just interested.

It's nice to see that you went through that through that

transition through the cameras and a great message for anybody that.

Where camera and gear is an excuse because you got started and

presumably in that first 12 months, you were still on the iPhone Yeah.

Until you started to move to something else.

So

gear is never an excuse.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Matthew Hughes - King of Video: That, that stop.

You get into the first

million because I've seen some amazing filmmakers shoot

entire commercials on an iPhone or like a high-end Android phone and

it's just jaw droppingly amazing.

Yeah.

Like really.

To be honest, a lot of it's lighting, A lot of it's good audio.

A lot of it's knowing where to stand and you know where to position.

Things like taking a filmmaker course might make better video,

make you have better videos than upgrading to a better camera.

Eventually my, my attitude for towards gear is if you have a company and

you're making money, On video you almost owe it to your fans to make sure

that you know their support is going towards a better experience for them.

Yes.

So that's how I've always treated gear is that Hey, I'm gonna give

back to the fans if it's within my power to make this video look better

for you guys, I'm gonna do that.

Matthew Hughes - King of Video: Yeah.

A actually, it's a thing that I talk to about a lot of

entrepreneurs in the online space.

There's a lot of business owners where they sell in digital courses,

and I get on the digital course and it's a Zoom call and it's on this,

terrible device and I'm like, yeah, but I've spent $2,000 for this course.

Use the money that I gave you to upgrade your gear.

Yeah.

Just gimme some level of expected quality level, but when you're starting

using your phone and Zoom is fine.

There's no issue there.

But the more you level up and like you say, if you're a business owner,

you're making money outta this stuff, then upgrade where you can, you

know?

Yeah.

If you're pulling in six figures a year on a course or seven figures, yeah.

Get an okay camera, get a couple lights there's like a definite decrease

in quality or what do they call it?

Diminishing returns, right?

So there's a certain point where you get diminishing returns.

Like things will look a little bit better if you spend a lot more money.

But, just get the basics.

Get, have a decent microphone, have at least a couple lights, an okay camera

at least a modern, higher end smartphone is good and you can make awesome stuff.

Yeah.

Matthew Hughes - King of Video: Yeah.

Totally agree.

Wicked.

Jesse, thank you so much.

This is eight months.

This has took us to finally get here.

I paused it back in January, but I'm so delighted to have spent this time

with you, and I really appreciate you taking the time out to do this.

I know it's late for you as well.

Thank you so much.

Where can people find out more about you and your channels and all of your YouTube

stuff?

Okay.

If you want to check out my daughter's channel, it's in Thai, but you can

see us at Brianna's Secret Club.

Th and if you want to find out more about me, I do also do YouTube channel reviews.

If you want me to check out your channel, you can head on over to

prochannelreview.com or you can reach me at jesse@prochannelreview.com and

I'm happy to answer your questions.

My policy is if I can always take out 15 minutes of my day to help somebody,

I'm gonna always do that for free.

So if you have a quick question, shoot me a email and if you want me to do

an in-depth review, I can do that too.

Matthew Hughes - King of Video: Wicked amazing.

If you send me those links, I'll stick 'em on the episode when we put it out as well.

Jesse, thank you so much.

Really appreciate your time.

Have a wonderful rest of your evening and I'll speak to you very soon.

Okay,

thanks.

See ya.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye.