How to grow your YouTube channel fast in the age of AI, with Sean Cannell

Hey, it's Navid here. And in this session, you'll learn how to crush it on YouTube in the age of AI. And I'm really excited to be joined by no one other than Sean Cannell of Think Media. Across all their YouTube channels, they have millions of subscribers and their videos have been viewed hundreds of millions of times.

And after growing a six figure income as a tech YouTuber, he built an eight figure online video education company that he runs today with Think Media and their podcasts and everything else. And he's also the bestselling author of YouTube secrets, which is the number one book in the world when it comes to YouTube.

So I couldn't have anyone else better than Sean to come on, to teach you about this kind of stuff. So without further ado, let's dive into the session here. Warm welcome to the session, Sean. Thank you so much for having me. I'm fired up. Yeah, I'm excited. We both have pretty decent setups here.

So looking good for a remote session. I know you guys do a lot of in person stuff as well, but I'm sure we can get into a lot of things here. People might have heard of what you guys do over at Think Media. You have quite a lot of subscribers on your YouTube. You have been doing it for quite a long time.

Maybe you can give like a brief background into that and like now with AI, how things are just kind of leveling, leveling up with the content creation and everything you can accomplish as a team and company. Yeah, well, Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, it is kind of crazy because my background, I've been doing video for 20 years.

I started in my local church, an hour north of Seattle, and it's kind of wild that we're talking about AI for content creation because I started with a Canon HV 30 camera with mini DV tapes that I would capture minute for minute to capture the footage to your computer and edit in Adobe Premiere, I used a Firewire cable.

So if you had two hours of footage, it took two hours to transfer, you'd put that in, uh, you know, your editor now 20 years later, besides new tech in terms of cameras, in terms of digital SD cards, of course, everything's going faster, processor speeds. Now you enter AI into the conversation and how much that can influence editing times, even the content prep, script writing, and all this kind of stuff and yeah, I've been doing YouTube since 2007, started a channel for our small church, made a ton of mistakes um, and then started doing video production and all kinds of things.

So I've been in the game a long time. I've been in different eras, and now AI is really revolutionizing things. I think the big aha moment there is there's definitely challenges, there's definitely maybe even concerns with AI, but. I think gratitude should be our overarching emotion, because it does help us go faster.

AI is like an assistant to content creation, and maybe hearing about the pain of the past of what it took to create content um, looking at some of these tools is pretty amazing when compared to how long and how tedious workflows were in the past. AI, used properly, can help us go further, faster.

Let's get into that first a little bit, how you're actually using it now as a company with Think Media and what kind of tools you're using and how you're using it to level up and then we can get into more how maybe someone starting out what they can do. I know you have now a bigger team, but you didn't start out that way.

You would have had all these tools available when you started, oh my God I'm sure you could have done so much more, right? As a solo creator. I'm just interested to know a little bit how, what you're using and then we can get into more what someone starting out can do. Yeah, so a few things I mean, there's a couple major tools.

If you have a multi angle podcast, we use Autopod. This, and the headline of this is pretty radical because what used to take 3 hours of editing now takes 3 minutes. And that's not an exaggeration and that would be in the past if you set up 3 camera angles for switching or just what we would do is we would set up three cameras, three different SD cards.

You'd have to ingest all that footage. And then play the edit kind of real time and switch between the wide shot, and this would usually be on an interview show, a tight shot of me, a tight shot of the guest. Autopod and now tools like it are just run all those edits for you. Now, there's always like caveats, one of which is that the audio has to be understood on each camera.

So for it to know, if you don't record your audio properly, it doesn't know how to switch to which guest is speaking or whatever. But if your workflow is dialed that's radical. It's literally, you know, was three hours, now it's three minutes and you still want to watch it back because maybe you can punch in different numbers.

I want the switching to be more aggressive. I want it to be at this cadence. I want it to be at this rhythm. But going through and of course putting on the final touches, which we have noticed uh that AI maybe gets you into the end zone range, maybe the 10 yard line, the 5 yard line, maybe the 1 yard line but usually it does not score the touchdown, at least what we can see right now.

You still need that human to do the final bits I think that in my personal workflow, I use ChatGPT um, VidIQ has an AI coach, which uses ChatGPT's, API. And the unique thing about it though, is it's programmed to have more of a YouTube mind, but it also will integrate into your channel so when you install vidIQ, you give it permissions to access your YouTube channel.

Therefore, it can see all your analytics, all your views, and this is pretty powerful because then there's prompts that it'll even help you start, which could be like what videos should I make next that will get the most views. So, It'll look at your library, it'll look at engagement signals, it'll look at everything, and then it'll spit out really quickly based on analyzing all of the data of your channel.

Some video ideas, and it will give you a title, a thumbnail, mock up idea, a little description of what angle you would take it. And it's just really helping you go faster. I could, I not only could, I do dig into my analytics to assess maybe what video I should make next. We say success leaves clues, make part twos.

What is the part two of the winning video on your channel? But it certainly is going to give you some data driven insights that, again, offloads some of the thoughts from your brain and allows you to get there faster. I have found that in the content creation prep phase, that there's never a day that goes by where I don't use AI.

And I could use vidIQ's AI Coach or I just go ChatGPT 4.And I will, a lot of times, I was trying to think mistakes recently, I was making a video on the biggest mistakes, now, I have been doing YouTube for 17 years, so I could come up with my own mistakes, but what was much faster was what are the biggest mistakes new YouTubers make, and then it spits out a big list, and then I humanize it, so, I think the power there is then thinking about, oh yeah, I wouldn't even have thought of that one.

I experienced that one, boom, it makes it to my script. I think that, um, opening up, whether it's headlines or titles, constantly using it for headlines and titles, I'll maybe come up with the raw concept of the title, and I'll say things like, under 55 characters, do titles like this, include power words, give me 10 titles under 55 characters, and that's simply because YouTube at some point cuts off, they don't show you the full title on certain screens, and a lot of times if you could be very concise in terms of how poignant your title is, it can help but then what I'll find, I'll be like, okay, give me 10 more under 60 characters, because maybe I wanted to do a little bit more.

Okay, give me, and so, whether it's script writing, all that kind of stuff, I'll use that. We also find it that, take it away from content creation, and I'll use it for communication with team members. Maybe I'll write a message, and I'll throw the whole message in ChatGPT, and I'll say, make this warmer, make the tone warmer, because then it's sometimes I'm all about business and leadership, but on the other side of even digital interactions are real people.

A little bit of warmth can go a long way, and what's cool about that is right, it's so fast, so there's that one as well. Of course there's things like Opus Clip that we're using for micro content, which will again look at longer form videos, predict based on trending keywords, trending terms, so it's listening to the language, and then you can make a lot of vertical video, or square, or vertical, and you can tell the different formats.

That again is another one that I'm excited about because it continues to evolve. It's a, every, every different vertical for AI has multiple competitors and you're questioning who's going to win, you're questioning what's the burn rate of these companies, how many developers they have, how fast can they scale, Opus seems like they're going to probably be a leader and I think they already are, there's other great ones like Descript, which can also pull ums out of videos and they're adding different feature stacks and then the other question, I know I'm kind of, uh, side questing here, but it's this idea of will these bigger companies then absorb the smaller ones?

Doesn't it make sense for either Adobe to just steal Autopod essentially? Acquire them or just steal the feature and so how much and just, you know, code it into their own software. Where is it all going to go? It's an interesting question. So Opus for vertical is interesting. Those are definitely a few and we have found AI making itself into our workflow.

The other ones would be thumbnails you know, um, and seeing things, whether it's this kind of a controversial area, AI art, AI generation, MidJourney, like huge debate, right? And I guess there's ethical concerns, things like that. But I think just the fact that you could do sky replace or background replace or even like Headshot Generator, I think there's a lot of opportunity.

There's some AI Headshot Generators where you have. You could just take a bunch of selfies that are a little bit lower quality and then pump out these videos of you, or photos I should say, in somewhat of an AI generated look to it. But what's fascinating to me is if you look at like the most recent MrBeast thumbnails, even non AI images are there's a trend of having it slightly avatar ish in the way that they're edited.

So I think there's something to it. We have done some thumbnails that we're, Lensa, which is that big trend, Lensa, where you get your magic avatars of you upload some photos and then it just spits out all these weird photos of you in like cyberpunk or you in this or that. What's fascinating about that is we've used some of those as our thumbnails because they can be stark contrasting.

They could be like just interesting, fascinating there's one of me looks like I'm in a space suit and there's like a ring of light coming around me and I used it talking about trends. Now, AI happened to be one of the trends. So it was accurate to use like an AI avatar of me, but the thumbnail was fire I mean, way better than you know, something I could have just, like otherwise, I would have dressed in a spacesuit, got a ring of light, you know, I didn't have any of that stuff, so, um, I think that's interesting for, thumbnails and graphics as well across social media.

I've been playing with things like Lensa. Uh I have dark circles naturally a lot of times. And so AI for somebody who's not as sophisticated and not going to actually open up Photoshop and you know, actually use a magic healing brush and like deal with skin tones, that learning curve for the average person is pretty radical.

On our team as we think about somebody who's maybe just cutting up social media posts developing social media posts, trying to stop the scroll. For example, we'll design thumbnails, and we do have a thumbnail designer, a graphic designer on our team, but he'll make these rectangular thumbnails, well best practice on Youtube on the community tab is square, not like 16 by 9.

Sometimes it should be part of our workflow, but there's not a square version. So the other day we were talking about this video on a DJI action camera versus a GoPro, and we didn't have a square image, but we wanted to promote the video on the community tab with a square image, which is the best practice there.

That's what fits there. So then Nolan was like, Hey, what if we grab a screenshot? And then Tyler, our social media manager, was like, Okay, I can, but the screenshot doesn't really fit in square, so then I was like, Tyler, do you know Photoshop? He's like, no. So, someone on my team who doesn't have experience in Photoshop or experience, these AI tools can not only, one, make it easy, of course, Canva, they're layering on all kinds of internal AI, um, background replace you know, mask out an area and just say delete the hand and different little things.

So I do think the acceleration, I wouldn't want to say of like lower levels of skill, but perhaps, because in this case Tyler did not have the skill of Photoshop um, It empowers as you're building teams or delegating tasks. The interesting thing is the new skill needs to be, what apps are there?

How do you use those apps? But to close the loop on the thinking, I posted a, I just got up. I have dark circles, look horrible. I was out with my son and I was like, man, this is, I look like tired. So I opened up Lensa and I like opened up the photo and they had a dark circle feature and I just cranked it up and I was like and they're gone.

And I was like, okay you know, so I think that AI has come in like a freight train as you know, that's the point of the conversation. And so we're finding it. Those are some of the touch points at Think Media where we're using some things. I love that. There's a lot to unpack, especially around the tools that, a lot of tools are coming into the game, and I think a lot of them will, as you said, maybe they'll go out of business, or they're getting bought up, we already saw this happening to some extent, Descript, I think they bought Squadcast, which is a great platform for remote podcasting similar to Riverside, and so I'm like thinking what, if Descript is doing that, maybe that's gonna, because now they are building everything

into their It's actually really good. Now I'm seeing, I've been using Riverside a lot now for this one we're using Ecamm, but whatever platform you use I think some of these platforms they face severe competition, essentially, too, because they compete on price and the features are pretty similar.

In some cases, they have a lot of the same features, or now with Descript, if they're buying a platform like Riverside, what's Riverside's features, right? I don't know, like $30 a month? Descript is $30 a month. So I see this coming, a lot of tools that we have been using, like you mentioned.

I mean, Canva and tools like that, they're just going all in with AI features, like Photoshop as well, if you are, you know, a creator and have been using that. Now, you don't even need to be that skilled in Photoshop, you can use the generative AI features and you can like put sunglasses.

I don't know Photoshop that well, but I can go in there and play around. I think it's getting more accessible with the creative skills and I don't know if you've seen in terms of video uh, RunwayML as well. I don't know if you are familiar with that or if you've seen any work being created on that platform, especially for YouTube or maybe bigger productions.

I do think what's interesting for this conversation too, though, is YouTube just released new regulations for AI generated content, where that will need to be disclosed, I'm assuming like you check a box when you have a brand deal and it says this video includes paid partnership So I think that that's, It's the Wild West in regards to some of that, and I know that's also a problem, like we've worked with invidio.ai, which is a very audacious, audacious project, essentially creating whole videos for you with just prompts, entire videos like, a voiceover is 11ElevenLabs or whatever is uh, in there, the stock footage, there's like some generic stuff, and then there's, if you pay more premium, you could get into iStock and some higher end stock

footage, royalty free music script generator, and there's this whole trend on YouTube called faceless content, or automation channels that maybe are facts based or information based that don't have a talking head content creator. And so, anyways, you being able to just publish completely AI generated videos from just prompts, learning how to use it.

With the radical idea that doing that alone, you could make a profitable YouTube channel. and Maybe you never learned how to edit video or do any of these skills because it's all pure AI. I think the tension against that is how regulated will that be? And there's been, it's a gray area, YouTube is not disclosed, but some creators that are using AI generated voices have not been able to get their channels monetized, and so, is it how good is the AI voice?

Could you beat those filters? Is what is going to be the limitations of AI content in terms of YouTube? It's, kind of almost impossible to predict because on the one hand, there's no doubt about it that they're, it's probably already starting, but it's going to get a lot worse, that there's going to be incredibly low value content that's just being published on mass on YouTube, hoping to get a little bit of traction, a little bit of views and a little bit of monetization, which if you expand your mind into it, it's literally endless.

If you could set up the right automations with the right AI softwares every single step could be automated. You could just have a robot publishing content on YouTube and that particular model makes sense because if you get paid a loan for views, why does it, why would it bother you to upload a million videos a month if it's all digital and all you have to do is just maintain the system and then collect your money.

But what are the long term consequences of that and how will that be regulated by YouTube? There's just some interesting AI. This is very I had this conversation with some people recently as well. How, because there's a lot of, we don't need more content. It's like same with blogging, same with any form of content.

We need like quality content. I think that's when you are a new creator taking shortcuts doesn't really work. If you have been doing it for a long time grinding you know sometimes you maybe didn't have success. Now, of course you have more, more atraction, but that wasn't always like that.

So I wanted to get into how someone could actually in 2023 and beyond get started on YouTube. You talk about this a lot, Sean, and I'm sure you have some great advice. You have a book as well, YouTube Secrets. Be sure I can link that up below for anyone that's interested, but really in the age of AI, what's some great tips for people to get started on YouTube and grow a profitable channel?

Yeah, you know, the first thing that comes to mind is. Well, the first thing that comes to mind is you really do need to just start. You got to start before you're ready. And what I mean is you should start creating content because you cannot steer a parked car. And so I think the reason to jump in before you're ready, I understand the counter argument.

I want my first video to be professional. I want, but even if you had a place, like you need a place to practice there's no athlete that gets good at the game without practicing. You don't start winning the PGA tour if you never go to the driving range and never go to the putting ring.

So I think you need to be actively creating content. Anybody listening to this and that might not even be YouTube. I think getting started with vertical video, it could be on Instagram Reels, you could start doing Instagram Stories. If you're active on it, you gotta get, you start getting used to talking to camera.

Get the, shake the dust off. Someone's maybe listening to this, they've been thinking about making their first video for the last six months, the last two years, the last five years, I get comments where people are like, I've been thinking about doing this for three years and I have not started yet.

To me, if that's you, you should make your first video today. Like, you should actually, as soon as this podcast is over, because for sure you're overthinking it. What if my first video sucks? It will. Your first videos will be your worst video, worst videos. What if I don't fully know my niche yet?

That's not the point. You might not fully understand your unique style yet. The point is to just get used to, if you're going to talk to camera, talking to camera, get used to editing a little bit and editing a little bit could be like assembling an Instagram reel. One of my other favorite apps is CapCut, a very powerful free mobile editor and desktop editor.

Lots of good ones out there. That's a great one though. So getting used to just editing a little bit, getting into the game, start before you're ready. I think number two though, if we approach it with a strategic mind, it's where is the opportunity right now? It's meta for us on this conversation, but AI is a big opportunity.

And what I mean is picking the right niche, positioning yourself right, what niche are you going to be in? What's your channel topic? Where are gaps in the market? What is experiencing massive growth? And you don't want to just build on a trend, but for example, if you started a channel about crypto before the crash, And I know it's here to stay, but it was a whole wave.

And so crypto channels, channels talking about crypto, you could maybe even call it a bubble, and you could maybe apply that to AI a little bit as well. But like, there was a lot of money to be made because there was, FTX paid a lot of people a lot of money. And now Sam Bankman Fried gonna go plus 100 years is how much time he's gotta serve.

I definitely am not saying Chase. But nobody saw that coming. You know, nobody, everything looked good on the outside and some creators that promoted FTX got some pushback. I think them ownership and apologizing, I don't know what kind of research they could have done that would have revealed that it just was a thing.

The takeaway point is if you're gonna be paddling a boat anyways, you might as be, you might as well have the current giving you even more propulsion. A little while ago, crypto, that was where the current, and it wasn't just a current, it was like a tsunami. AI is that right now.

So if it's a topic you're passionate about, It definitely is not going anywhere. It's maybe, maybe we'll just talk about SaaS in general essentially software that's now enhanced by AI, you know tools for creators. It's just that there's a lot of opportunity to be happening there.

And this would be another thing as, if someone's thinking about starting a YouTube channel, and a profitable YouTube channel, The big question at the foundational stage is, how are you going to profit? Like, what is your business plan? How are you going to make money? And that's why, if that is your ambition, it's good to be in an industry where you understand there are vehicles to do so.

So, if you were to position your channel around a company where there's a lot of startups, and there's a lot of money going into the startups, and there's a lot of affiliate programs, and there's a lot of cool stuff happening. That's gonna be a better niche to select if you want the economics to work out, than maybe something that doesn't have as much opportunity.

So I'm not trying to overemphasize that you should literally start a YouTube channel about AI, but, there is opportunity, and the bigger question is, this, similarly, with a lot of people waking up to health, and waking up to biohacking, or waking up to intermittent fasting, or waking up...

If those things were something you were passionate about, then the selection of the right market, the selection of the right niche, has a lot to do with your success on YouTube. And, I think the good news is, if the niche is big enough, competition is kind of irrelevant. Meaning, if you can find, the way I prove this is the first research question when you're auditing your niche is there other YouTube channels creating content around this, and how big are their YouTube channels, and how many views are their videos getting?

The conclusion might shock some people, because if you were to say, I looked up the thing and like, what I want to do is I want to start a YouTube channel about underwater, underwater basket weaving. What I actually discovered was that there actually is like no consistent channels that are doing content around under bass, underwater basket weaving.

And so It's like a complete blue ocean. This is a massive opportunity. Maybe, or it's just maybe proof that there's not enough interest or the niche itself is not big enough to sustain your vision. Now I believe that if you could be the big fish in a small pond of almost anything, you might be able to eke out a decent living.

But, the opposite... Let's say you want to start a tech channel. It's already too crowded. Sean already does it. MKBHD already does it. The wrong conclusion. You ask yourself, what's the largest channel? And I don't know, 15 million, 17 million subscribers. How many people are buying smartphones?

How many people are buying iPhones, Androids? How many people are smart cars, EVs? There's another one, electronic vehicles. We're on the beginning of the whole deal. Like and it's not going to go backwards, it's only going to go forwards. If you're thinking about where to position yourself, a lot of strategy can come in, you start something related to, EVs, maybe you niche down, it's Tesla only, maybe you cover all of them.

The way I can prove that there's opportunity there is take something like, we do camera reviews, you would think that's saturated, or you'd think it was full. We do a lot of tools for creators. One of the famous cameras, a little bit older now, that we've talked a lot about, was a Canon M50.

If you were to go to YouTube and look up the Canon M50 and type in Canon M50 Think Media, you would discover that we've probably done 50 videos or more about the Canon M50. It compared to other cameras. Is it still good? Then it's the Mark II. And we've probably gotten anywhere from 30,000 views on them to over 500,000.

But what's really interesting , is go look at how many different people have made videos about the Canon M50. How many people have made a review video? Hundreds. And how many views have they gotten? 17,000, 33,000, 5,000, 500,000. What you begin to realize is that's just how big the market is.

And that's just cameras, which is actually small compared. Like so if you're in a big enough, you want to be in a market and in business, they call this the TAM, the Total Addressable Market. And you want to define your goals and What's fascinating about that particular industry, because the model is clear, affiliate marketing, talk about tech, product reviews, affiliate links, for someone to maybe replace their 75,000 a year job, now work from home and create content, it's incredibly practical.

And if it was me, there's a lot of other factors, but if it was underwater basket weaving, no competition, or tech, lots of competition and a specialty that I'm passionate about, talk about like cameras or something, I'd go cameras all day because it's just, there's enough abundance there.

Now, maybe not for me to be number one, a book for reference is the classic book called Positioning. It's who's the Coke, who's the Pepsi, how are you going to flank if you're neither of those two bigger players, and how are you going to do guerrilla warfare and carve out your little small niche.

The book is called Positioning by, I think, Al Ries, maybe, or whoever wrote it. Classic marketing book. Yeah, so I would pick something like that. And just to give some handles for starting a channel on this one, we say the channel you start should be at the intersection of your passion, proficiency, and profit.

So if you're going to do a test, it's not just pick a market that's good oh, EVs could be very lucrative, but I don't care and I'm never going to buy one. Well, then you probably shouldn't do electronic vehicles. But if you're like, oh, I am passionate about them. I bought a Tesla and I'm kind of into it.

Then you look at proficiency and you're like, I have been researching them and I, for a couple years and I, it keeps me fascinated it keeps me curious. You don't have to be an expert, but more than anything, I think under the proficiency thing is do you have a little bit of a track record into it?

Like, have you been doing it for a few years? Are you fascinated by it? But more so, are you gonna, do you think you'll still be passionate about it in three to five years? Cause you shouldn't really start a channel if you think your passion is going to burn off. Are you really into research for 5 to 10 years, 5 to 10 hours for one video without being bored to death and not really caring about the subject matter?

The answer is yes. I think you check that box. But then the final P is the profit P. Passion, proficiency, and profit. And the profit one is asking, what are the money making? Are brands going to want to pay creators? Is there a lot of money in the system? Like, If you can position yourself properly, even if you're a micro or nano influencer, there are certain brands that just for you putting a video together might want to pay you five to ten grand or something.

So there, that's the profit piece. If you're in the right market, Silico Valley, Venture Backed, lots of money in the system. I don't think there's any startups around underwater basket weaving right now. So the problem being there's less money in the system. Now, if the passion's off the charts, if you're good and you recognize there's not a huge market, in fact it's almost non existent, but no one's really gone deep in it.

Then maybe you end up picking that one. So you really do the, you assess the competition in the market and then you pick out the profit one and it's at the intersection of all three. And if you almost scored each area on a scale from one to 10, it's not a 10 passion, but it's like a seven.

The proficiency. I'm a little bit behind there, but I'm willing to learn because I'm obsessed with the industry. I'm obsessed with AI. I want to learn more about it. I want to study it all day and if I can make a living doing that, cool, and then it's like profit no that's a no brainer because AI is blowing up all kind of money in the system.

It's probably a 10 out of 10 in terms of profit. It's going to help you select your niche at the intersection of passion, proficiency and profit totally. I think that's, a lot of people they forget this when they get started how can I actually profit from this? Just creating videos for the sake of creating videos, that's great.

Some people are doing that as a passion, but I think what we are talking about here to building a real business, actually making a living doing this. I would just be interested like the I mean, you guys are making money in different ways. I think when you started, you primarily had the YouTube AdSense and the affiliate programs you're part of with cameras and stuff you recommend.

Now you have courses, you have a lot of other things as well. So maybe you can speak to that, what you recommend, especially for someone starting, because it takes some time to get things rolling with the AdSense and things like that. You're not going to probably make a full time living doing that anytime soon, right?

Yeah. I mean, it depends. So like, this is why, so we, in our course Video Ranking Academy, we teach seven R's. It's a seven R framework, a repeatable process. It's our proprietary process. The first R is reverse engineer. The second R is research, and then the third R is record.

One of the biggest mistakes people make is again, they start recording or they even start their channel before they've started with the end in mind, reverse engineer, and before they've researched. So, I think what you do is you think, what kind of business do I even want to be in, is the question And, what are even, what business model opportunities even exist and what is the best business model for this niche, this topic.

Then in doing so, it clarifies the later points. And again, where most people miss it as they just start creating content and think I heard YouTube pays people if I work hard enough and I get monetized I'll get paid for views. That is absolutely, I think, the wrong approach unless you've done your due diligence and you figured out well as an entertainer or a prank channel or something else I plan on making viral content that gets millions of views and I plan on ad revenue being my main business model.

Totally fine if you've done that due diligence, but many people haven't. The reason I bring that up is because one of our students, Jen DeVore Richter, when she had 546 subscribers. 546, that's nothing. Not eligible even to be monetized. Nothing, quote unquote, in the world where everybody wants to go viral and have a million subscribers.

But incredibly significant if you're a business owner that provides a service. Which she's essentially like a marketing agency. And so she sent us an email and said, Hey! I just had my best week ever in my business. Best week. I did $11,000 in new revenue in one week because of our program, Video Ranking Academy.

And the promise of the program is to rank videos and essentially just get your videos showing up on the other side of either direct search terms or on the other side of intent algorithm works is it suggests videos when people are showing that's what they're interested in. So regardless of where the views come from, she was getting to the, she wasn't getting thousands of views.

She's getting like hundreds or tens. Like she'd get 36 videos on a a video, but think about it. It's almost like pre qualifying leads for something very specific. So if your business model is, I already have an agency, a product or a service that is a little bit higher ticket than getting pennies for views or selling an ebook.

Then actually, if you have that clarity, then things become really interesting fast because you don't even need that YouTube ad revenue. You don't even, the goal isn't a lot of views. The goal is the right views. But in answer to your question, I think it goes back to, okay, what business model do you want to be in?

Do you have an educational type of YouTube channel that would logically lead itself to some kind of a paid online course? Great business model. Do you want to be an author and create free content but lead to book sales? Actually can be a great business model. Especially SelfPub, you can make a lot of money, you know maybe you make $7 off a 13, $15 book on Amazon.

You make $3 off a $5 ebook. Audible can be very lucrative. There's a whole wave right now where people are doing audible exclusive series. They're essentially making like three to four hour audio books, like Mel Robbins, different people like this, that, um if you have enough of a fan base and a lot of authors will do this with Kindle as well, it's kind of like a volume play.

Fiction authors will do it, they'll write a 10 part series, it's all ebooks, they get people addicted, they're good at writing to the narrative, and they sell all 10 and they bundle them and discount them on Black Friday and all that stuff. They make a ton of money just off Kindle.

Just off the, and now people are doing it with Audible. That's a business model. Is that what you're interested in doing? Is it going to be more of like really building a strong community and then going into Patreon or channel memberships or some kind of a monthly being supported?

Different than like a monthly membership, more on fan supported, creator supported, which would be more of how Patreon is structured. BuyMeACoffee or KOFI, kofi. com. These are different crowdfunding type platforms where if you're. some type of a passion project funded by passionate supporters, and maybe they get a Q& A, maybe they get different badges, but then also different than that even would be a membership community, which is going to probably be more educational.

You get that MRR, that Monthly Reoccurring Revenue, because people, rather than a one off online course, are paying for the ongoing support in a community. , And then whether you want to do virtual events, in person events. Whether you want to sell your time and do coaching again, whether it's going to be AdSense at scale, brand sponsorships, there, there's lots of different ones to you.

Yes, new creators should be weary. You don't want to chase them all at once. One of them, number one, it won't be effective, number two, you'll be too distracted, and number three they'll all be paying you zero, if not a trickle, and you'd be much better. I think my advice would be focus on getting clarity about some of those earlier questions we've already stated and I'll restate them.

What business do you want to be in? What is the topic of your channel that you're passionate about? What will keep you curious and fascinated? And can you commit to for three to five years? And then start building and also recognize that any great, if you're building a side hustle, if you're building a business, if you're an entrepreneur and you truly, and you want to be successful, you have to master sequencing, it's never going to be perfect but sequencing is the big key, a book on this is Your Next Five Moves by Patrick Bet David.

At the end of the book, he actually lists out the 15 moves that he did leading up to what Valuetainment is today, which is absolutely blowing it up. He's blowing it. He's building a media company. He's probably a hundred employees going to be a thousand in a year really looking to like going into politics, kind of political commentary, podcast, the whole thing is insane.

Well, It's also not by accident and there's a certain sequence to it. So sequencing would again mean, okay, I may know that eventually I'm going to launch an online course, but I'm not, that's not the first thing I need to do. I need, I know that's eventually what I'm going to do, but what I'm going to do first is this.

And even what I'm going to do in my side hustles, I'm going to stay in my main career like this. This is how I'm going to survive. So sequencing could be like, what am I going to do in year one? What am I going to do in year two? What am I going to do in year three? What are the building blocks?

Once I hit this subscriber number, once I hit this, I'll give you an example. When we wrote YouTube Secrets, because I had helped other people and done a lot of book launches for people kind of have a background in marketing, mainly like pastors and authors, pastors and faith based speakers that wanted to launch books.

One of the things that I learned was what are the... If you want to sell anything, you should start an email list. and we recently just interviewed, Robuilt, who's specialist in short term rentals, Airbnb, at VidSummit. I think Omar had him on our Think Media channel. And he was like, yeah, one thing every YouTube creator needs to do is build an email list.

Now, actually, that is, I would agree with that. It never gets talked about. Nobody thinks about that, and that's... It's an interesting point to bring up. Why? Well, when you have an actual email list of people that have raised their hand for that extra level of depth, when you click send and you finally have an offer, you'll be blown away.

You'll have not even subscribers, but an email subscribers. Now your book is ranking. Now your book is, and so, and by saying an email list, it's not some shallow cash grab, the deeper meaning behind that is you've built an actual deeper community that has wanted to hear from you, that you've also nurtured and served and added value to, so that the day you launch something to sell, there's pre volunteered Seth Godin permission marketing, potential buyers that will purchase your thing, assuming you've done all the steps, right.

You know, and you've nurtured them and taken care of them and they see the value and there's trust. Well, this is also, I learned this from Chalene Johnson. She was like, I would rather have an email list than go on, good morning, America. If I want to rank my book, I'd rather have an email list than go on any kind of traditional media, because that's where the real power is.

I agree. So we set out, once Benji and I decided to write YouTube Secrets, we said, okay, cool, we're going to start writing the book. And then what we also realized was Think Media was heavily about tech, less about YouTube strategy. He had a vlog, which had nothing to do with business or strategy at all.

Even though we were like, each of us has some influence. We haven't actually pre built an audience that would want to buy this book. So we actually were like, okay, the simultaneous thing we need to do is build a platform, if you will, or build a niche community that would be positioned and interested in buying the book, YouTube Secrets, when it comes out.

We set a target. We don't want to release the book until we have 25,000 people on the email list. That would be an example of a sequence. It was like, decide you want to write book. Great. Start doing so. Start getting it ready. How are you going to market book? Oh, I'm not ready.

Okay, great. Well, let's get started now. What's the target? Now, if you don't, if you didn't hit 25,000, if you hit 12,500, still good. A lot better than zero. And when people launch their thing and they wonder why it's a ghost town, they didn't get their sequencing right. They didn't actually do the different steps in the right order.

So, then of course it was beneficial that we actually exceeded that number. Which was a cool thing to have happen, but then it was our subscribers, plus the email, plus whatever social media following, plus the book launch itself. Now it's the number one best selling YouTube strategy book in the world.

Over 100,000 copies sold of YouTube Secrets. Not because the launch was that good, but also because of everything we've done since then. So I do think that while it may start that you sell nothing at the start, it's not about, I don't think you need to, I think the mistake though...

is not knowing where this thing is going, or at least having a faint idea. Start with the end in mind and maybe start with the end in dot include some math. Cause sometimes we're like, end in mind is I'm full time. What is what's the math on that? Like, how much money per month? Reoccurring revenue, where's that coming from?

YouTube ad revenue is also very calculicable. as Michael Scott quoted in The Office. I think... I was coaching somebody recently who has already replaced her income at her job, but is scared to jump because she doesn't know how consistent YouTube will be. So we're kind of like putting together a plan of what that could look like personalized for her, but actually ad revenue is her thing.

She does crazy outdoor survival stories, like people who got stranded on a mountain. She pulls all these clips, all these B roll, and it's more of like mini documentaries, mini essays, which is an incredible niche on YouTube. And in and of themselves, if they have good viewer retention, they're 25 minutes, 32 minutes.

These videos can make tens of thousands of dollars. They take a lot of energy to make, but eventually show up a big enough back library that it'll build the baseline of ad revenue for her. That's her, that actually is a good model for her. And when you mention me, here is my sequence for Think Media, it was actually, I know that I can rank tech videos, best lenses, best camera, how to use your camera, lighting, how to build a battle station, a video editing PC, et cetera.

I knew what affiliate marketing was, and I knew how to, if I realized, okay, if I make a video today that is watched for the next couple of years, and if there's products talked about in the video and there's links in the description. If I can get a baseline of clicks, of conversions, affiliate marketing alone could get me to full time or it could get me to my goal and ad revenue would just be a side benefit.

So my goal, Think Media was I think about, it was 16,000 subscribers, it was like 12 in October of 2015 and all my freelance clients, three of them fired me three weeks in a row, one per week for three weeks in October, 2015. Seemed very traumatizing at the moment, but it was one of the biggest blessings because it freed me up.

And so, november of 2015, after they all left, as I gathered my emotions, I was like, this is pretty sick. We're six months away from having zero in our bank account, but I have nothing to do. I actually am full time now, um, and there's maybe 300 to $500 a month coming in from YouTube, but not enough to pay our rent and cover just my wife and I.

But I was like, I, I've had a plan. I'm just grateful now, I probably was a little gun shy because I've been basically helping others doing a little bit of YouTube on the side, but I, the freelance clients, I was serving them with a little bit of editing, YouTube channel management, shooting at times.

All of a sudden, all I had to do was just work on my own stuff. And my freelance clients were paying me 2,000, 2,000, 1.000 So I was making 60K a year for my freelance clients. YouTube side hustle money was nice because it was extra on top of that, but now that was all gone, but I just worked the plan.

This is not the plan for everybody. It needs to be a customized plan, but for me, tech channel, tech passion, good proficiency, good profit, good, and small profit, by the way. I only get 4 percent on cameras, but I was like at scale. And by January of 2016, November, December, January of 2016, I made 4,500 off the Amazon Associates program.

And then YouTube ad revenue had, it was about 500, 600 bucks. So I actually had replaced that 5k a month with YouTube alone. But if somebody was like a makeup channel and it was like drugstore makeup, that plan would have worked because the price point of the product would it be high enough just for YouTube ad for the affiliates?

Whereas because I was doing cameras and people were buying a thousand dollar cameras well, I make 40 bucks off of a thousand dollar camera. It's actually pretty good. If I sell three of those a day, I just made 120. And if I can at scale rank videos. So some of those nuances, I think, come into like figuring out what your plan is and then they can adjust the sequencing.

I actually don't leave my job yet. I stay there for a year. Maybe I do go all in right now because I've done the economics and I've done the math. And so those are some things to consider. For sure, I like a lot of things you said there, especially the email list building, I think that's really interesting, a lot of creators and solopreneurs and things like that, they are not building that important email list, because I check out your channel from time to time, Sean, and I don't see you promoting a whole lot like in terms of your direct to sales.

You're promoting lead magnets sometimes, like you have a master class or workshop or you have some PDF you want to download about YouTube tips or something like that. But you don't like go direct to sales. And I see that with Ali Abdaal and other YouTubers who have actually focused on the email list growth and built very significant email lists and they actually make a lot more money, I would say, from their audience on their list.

Of course, YouTube's revenue is significant if you have an audience and you still to some extent passive income as well when you have built up that library. But I think without the email list you wouldn't make as much. So I think that's a really interesting what I see from creators.

I don't know if you see that in your audience when they come to you, Sean, that they miss that gap to build that list and start generating some real revenue from their audience. Well, yeah I think they miss it. If we're all so realistic about this is, I think, I think we are. It's funny thinking about like what I sell in terms of selling a YouTube course, because, the way we market it, we, integrity is everything to us.

So a lot of times what I'll tell people is I'll be like, a good product to sell, although oftentimes unethical and internet marketers get trouble for this is it's it's easy it's push button it's a cash machine it's get rich quick. So the way I market though, is like. It's freaking hard..

It takes forever. It's get rich slow. It's, uh, It's going to be brutal. You're going to want to quit, which is I think good, but it probably hurts sales, but I'm happy to do it because but let's add on top of that. I totally agree. Yes, build an email list. , But I think just encouraging listeners, this stuff, it might, I could, I could see why it feels overwhelming because it is.

Because what are we now asking the individual that potentially has a full time job to do? Plan videos, shoot videos, edit them, and upload them. Create a lead magnet set up your email list. Understand how a CRM works. 99% of creators that start an email list fail at this point. They never send anything to their email list.

Send something valuable to your list at least once a week. Really nurture them, stay you know, updated with them. And then do all this depending on, while it's on the side. Now here's the good news. It is possible with discipline, with systems, with planning. And it's not like you have to do it at a crazy scale.

There is a sustainable pace to do it all. So I, yeah, I would absolutely agree, but it, what just popped in my mind is just the list of skills, which is also why a company like ours will never not be in business. Cause we essentially are a company that helps people learn skills and the list of skills.

And then I don't want to make it seem impossible, but it's also, you, just cause you start an email list doesn't mean you're good at writing email subject lines. Doesn't mean that you're you know good at writing copy blah, blah, blah. Bring in, I guess, the whole conversation around.

The incredible news is AI was not even around when I was starting all of this, and it was really hard. I wouldn't want to overemphasize and say that it's easy now, but it is getting easier. You've got, of course, ChatGPT, you've got Jasper, you've got so many AI tools, which could help you if you're going to do an email list properly.

Maybe it's not just a weekly newsletter. It's maybe like a follow up sequence so even taking the time to write a seven day follow up sequence one a week or whatever, 21 day or all types of things. AI is a game changer for all of the above, but for the listener, this is kind of like a masterclass in one sense, this conversation.

But I do think identifying you know, the skills and then by the way, to that point, that's also why sequencing matters because I first was like, okay, get enough revenue, baseline, rank videos, affiliate marketing to not die. That was like phase one, plan one. That's actually, it's all startup plan one.

Phase one, don't die. Like phase one, don't, just ramen profitable would be a way to put it. Cool, keep it simple and then evolve. And here's what's actually fascinating was I actually built an email list before I needed it. Because at least I understood that thing, so I would throw, I created a gear guide, for Think Media , which is a PDF, where I put images in it, and all that kind of stuff.

Images of the guide, lighting section, video section, microphone section, try to make it valuable because I knew, okay, I don't know when, but I am eventually going to create an online course and that ended up coming, I think about six months later, but that's a great one. You know, you're sequencing, you start thinking, okay, so what are the essentials that I need to do at phase one?

Then how will that better set me up for phase two? And then what essentials do I need to do in phase two to better set me up for phase three? And really looking ahead okay, cool. I just did a little launch and some money came in. One of the smart moves a lot of creators miss is then starting to staff a little bit, get some customer service support or a VA or some people to help you because next thing you know, it's delegate or die.

And so you could die in the startup phase because of you're not ramen profitable and you run out of money. You can also die in the scale phase because you didn't delegate things or set up the right systems. And now you're kind of stuck and being, breaking under the weight of it all.

So, uh, some challenges for sure. Yeah, I know, in the age of AI you can also do a lot more, get a lot more done, I think like just a few years ago you needed maybe 10 team members and now you can do this maybe on your own or with like maybe a VA or something like that to do all this editing and stuff like that, it would take a lot of time, right?

The writing pieces, everything you need to get done. But I would be interested to know what you would recommend someone to do when they are starting on their channel as we start to wrap this one up, what would they start posting? Like, I mean, how do you decide? I mean, on Think Media, you have a lot of ideas because you have been doing it for a long time but what are the, like when you launch a channel, what are the pieces of videos you should post there to actually start maybe gaining some traction after a while?

Yeah I think I think that, back to starting before you're ready, because here's, let me just go through the list of opport of your opportunities. So, even YouTube features now. So one of the things to absolutely consider is YouTube Shorts. YouTube Shorts, vertical video, less than 60 seconds.

Now you have Video Podcasts. That's interesting, and there's a whole podcast tab. And then it'll go to YouTube Music, and YouTube is putting some juice behind that. Do you have a good idea for a podcast? Do you have any kind of leverage, your relationships, interviews, what you could do solo round.

You could do essentially video podcasting, we don't need to define the term, but it does confuse some people. What's the difference? Well it's, I don't know, YouTube is the number one source of listening to podcasts. Okay, so you have long form, and you have a range of long form.

Am I doing then you have live streams even going through that list, that's kind of overwhelming it's like four major categories. And so the reason I bring that up first is back to a few thoughts. One, start messy. I think an approach would be test all the forms. Like If you've never posted a YouTube short, try it.

If you've never uploaded, you don't even have to. A big myth and blocker that happens for our students. is they think about starting a quote unquote show, I think that's a great idea, a show could be, Lewis Howes has the School of Greatness, it's like a show, it's a video podcast and a audio podcast.

Sean, just one thing, would you recommend people start a podcast, is that a good strategy now on YouTube? I see a lot of people doing it, they're having, now with the podcast tab and all this, you can do it on your main channel, or would you recommend a separate channel for the podcast?

I think everything is a good strategy. It's not, that's not a black or white answer. It's does it, does it, do your current subscribers, would it be on brand for them to consume the podcast there? What's your vision for it? Will they, are you trying to build up something different?

Is it slightly different? For us, it was, we started a second channel, Think Media Podcast, because I knew, by the way, I was going to talk about like the behind the scenes of building a creator business. So if I did an episode on email marketing, it doesn't really fit as much on our tech camera channel.

YouTube tips does, but if we go really deep and even get into let's say online course building and some other stuff. So I saw the need of starting a new conversation. So I started on a separate channel. It doesn't mean it's the right way to do it, but there was intentionality behind it.

I think that's the key. What I would say is back to the show idea. People always think, okay, if I start a show, I start a video podcast, man, if I start it. I need to commit to it, probably for the next 100 years. So I need to start like, teaching my kids right now to take over for me and like, man, if I, cause, and I'm like, what are you talking about?

Why not just do a beta episode or a pilot? In television, before a season gets funded, they do a pilot. I don't think enough creators do pilots. Meaning, they think if I do one video podcast, I have to commit to podcasting for the rest of my life. No, you don't. Like, get a mic, interview somebody.

You don't even have to name it at first. What I'm asking people to do is test and experiment more so you actually have tasted different content formats and then decide where you want to go from there. It's not going to hurt you. So to upload an interview like this with Ecamm, it's not going to hurt the channel if it's on brand for the promise of the channel.

It's the early days. So I actually think one approach could be almost like make a checklist and be like, okay, I uploaded two shorts. I uploaded two regular YouTube videos I uploaded two interviews. That are like a podcast, but I haven't started a podcast yet. I just was testing.

I did it. I did two live streams. How do I feel now? What did I learn after doing that? Not enough people do that. So I think that's thing one. I think thing two is as a solo creator. As a side hustle creator, if you try to do it all, you're doing too much when you're just starting out.

So there's shorts channels that are blowing up, to your point. There's great podcasts, video podcasts and maybe you're like, what is it? One a week, twice a month. My question is what is going to be sustainable? And the, uh, entrepreneur term is the, uh, MVP, the Minimal Viable Product.

That's what , you're looking for. And that's why I think being in research and development. There's no reason why you shouldn't post 30 shorts and 10 long form videos and then make a decision. That's actually a lot smarter than the person who didn't research because that is R& D.

That is like, okay, I'm kind of figuring out my style. I'm figuring out my voice. I'm experimenting. So why I'm so passionate about people eventually kind of nailing their niche and getting clear, people feel like I'm contradicting myself by also saying like, test and experiment with things that actually that testing experimentation is so that you could refine your process.

It'd be like they're testing different chips as they're building out the Xbox. Eventually, it's ready to go to market. You have an R& D department. So like, , um, I think that would be the thing to do. So as far as what content to go on the channel you know, on Think Media Podcast right now, which is my new channel it's three years old, 140,000 subscribers.

We have full length pre recorded podcasts on Tuesday and Thursday. We have two clips from those podcasts a week, which are long form videos. Every day we don't upload a video. We upload a short roughly three to four a week. I also have a show called Coffee with Cannell, which is a live show that happens two to four times a month.

So I post shorts, live streams, video podcasts, and proper YouTube videos, aka clips, all on one channel. I use all content formats and we expand, of course, onto YouTube Music via YouTube's integration there, and then strip the audio or export the audio separately and distribute it across Apple and Spotify and all of the above.

Now, here's a huge key. If I was to isolate that team, it's all one big team, but if I was to isolate the team, at least for the way we do it, I would say, It's at least an assistant, a VA assistant, that helps us manage the details of it. Schedule guests, I interview guests on Riverside or StreamYard or whatever.

And, um, I also will fly in person and do stuff at events. A videographer, since we do film in person with multi angle, if you did it my style. I guess the point is call it like five or less team members to do a at scale proper, people I'm sure it can do it more efficiently, but at least the quality of content and one of those team members chops two vertical videos, which end up on TikTok and YouTube Reel.

So there's a whole thing and then it all maps, of course, to a profitable business model as well. That right there is not starting. That is pretty advanced. That is much more sophisticated. So minimum viable product is what I would be after. As a solo creator, I made two, one to two normal videos a week back in 2015.

Ranked videos, LinkedIn to tech. I did the description. I did the thumbnails. I did the titles. I posted the videos. I emailed brands. but I, the volume of content was nowhere near the volume. It was the minimum viable product. And I knew what it was. I think it's defining that for where you are.

Eventually, everybody listening to this, if they aspire, why not quote unquote, do it all? If you do it smart with team and systems and AI and scalable things that help you do it. But be wary of starting too complex. Try to start, that's why it's called the minimum viable product.

Actually try to start with the least amount of activities you could do, but don't also mistake just to close the loop, maybe having some chaotic action at the start, because the purpose of just the create, hit record, don't overthink it, is to get data, is to get some feedback loops, is to test some things, is to try some things to then define what your minimum viable product is, and then focus on that, and get your money right, prove that it works, get money in the bank, get money that exceeds your expenses, so that you have bought back your time a little bit in terms of sanity, and then that you could invest those dollars in scaling up, should you want to, into maybe, you were editing, now you can hire an editor,

you were, you know, posting across ,distributing the content, optimizing it. Now you can hire somebody to help you do that et cetera. Yeah to bring this full circle, what would you say to inject AI into all of this? What would be your number one piece of advice for creators to actually do that when it comes to creating really valuable?

YouTube channels and building a business where AI can play a role similar to what you guys are doing with Think Media now. Yeah, I mean in full transparency, I would say what I know from a high level is that AI has changed everything. AI is... has now lowered the barrier to entry, if you will, because everything I just described, back in October 2015, I was doing it by brute force, hard manual labor as a solo creator.

I think that AI has lowered that. I will say personally, because my hat is CEO and running the team, one of the biggest things that I'm focusing on is getting my team using AI and less than me using AI. For example, I don't really edit videos anymore. We created like a guide, like so, this was created by our team that includes, I'm just reading off some of the tools, you have Munch, Gling, Adobe Sensei, Adobe Firefly, Adobe Podcast, LaLaLay, Music Remover and Noise Remover, Autopod, Descript, those are all short form to long form, Opus Clip, Video, Autopod, Cockatoo, these are just different ones.

And so, what's my point? I guess, I haven't, I have not been in that phase. So I wouldn't be the best person to talk to as like how one solo creator in, in less than 10 hours a week after work created his YouTube empire. Cause I had to do it without AI. I think AI is going to help you go faster.

What I can say with my intimate use of AI, and you might agree, is that I do also think less is more. I think that chasing down different AI tools. In and of themselves, from all the time I've spent inside of Opus, I've been like, man, this still takes intelligence, time, mastery, learning, and for some people that are posting graphics with 567 AI tools on them, I'm like, that in and of itself is a landmine for people just getting too mixed up in the wheat so many different things you could hit that'll slow you down.

Minimum effective, what is my suite of tools? What are the essential tools I need for my workflow? So that's kinda a long answer. I mean, yes, I think AI is gonna, it gives an unfair advantage. You gotta lean in, you gotta learn how to use it. I'm always being thoughtful though of also asking, okay, am I trying to, am I the bottleneck?

Am I the constraint? Or now that I've got team, I'm actually trying to empower them to say, how can you be? How can I also be more efficient? Which tools are relevant for me based on my role responsibilities? We're a total team of 30, so this is how different I. Have to think now, but also I asked them, we went through a whole, and we're still in it.

I said, listen AI, it, it wasn't, not that anyone was being like threatened of being fired, but kind of, I was sort of like, you know, with Autopod, I was like, Steph, you're gonna, I just bought you three, but three hours, and I don't know it's not probably three hours or three minutes, but it's at least 50 percent of your time, at least in that activity.

So is there more outputs or what other tools? So I asked every single person and not everybody was in direct content creation, customer service. How are we support tickets, follow up tickets, automation for tickets you know, et cetera. So yeah, no, I have, I think you have to embrace AI and whether you're a solo creator, whether you're In a company, and you want to be more efficient, and you want to be a linchpin, and you want to raise in promotion, and you want to take over, I think that deeply understanding, learning, and finding AI tools that legitimately save time and that you get to a mastery level with, will make you an assassin, save you time, and it's an exciting time to be living in.

Yeah, I think the tools that you might already be using or tools that you need, kind of reverse engineering the process, what do you actually need to get the job done, not just using a tool for the sake of using a tool. I think that makes you actually less productive. This has been pretty valuable and like a masterclass, basically.

Sean's spitting knowledge here left and right. This has been really good. I suggest you go check out Think Media. Of course they're on YouTube. They're everywhere. Is there anywhere else you want to direct people, Sean? Yeah, I think that's, if you look at Think Media on YouTube and then Think Media Podcast that's where and Think Media, to make it all sustainable, to even run two channels, we have, I'm on there, but we have Nolan and Omar, that's also like a team brand, becoming more of a team brand, and then in a way, the podcast is kind of like my personal podcast, so that's where I'm creating two episodes a week.

and so I would recommend that as well. It's called the Think Media Podcast. It's a separate YouTube channel. Awesome. I will link up everything we talked about below. Be sure to subscribe to the channel if you enjoyed this, like the video, and I'll see you in the next one. Ciao for now.