Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: This entire episode was edited in one shot with Codex and DaVinci Resolve Studio. And I'm kind of amazed and kind of terrified, but I'd love to hear what you think. Drop a comment in below if you're on YouTube, what you think and if you're listening just on the podcast, hit me up on Twitter. I'm thecraiguet would just love to hear what you think. I'm simultaneously really amazed and inspired and terrified because this is a significant part of my business and to be able to do this in one shot with reasonably kind of small token allotment and to get a finished product like this is incredible. But I want to know what you have to think about this. You all are unfortunately the guinea pigs of this episode. So please let me know what you think. Okay, on with the episode.
[00:00:49] Speaker B: Hey folks and welcome to Rogue Startups where we talk about running a business in whatever today's world looks like. I'm Colin Gray and I'm joined by Craig. As always. How are you getting on this week, Craig? How's the, how's the energy? How's the morale?
[00:01:04] Speaker A: Yeah, good. Uh, so I, I, I don't know if I, you and I have talked about this. I'm training for a half marathon and it's in two weeks.
Um, so we're, I, I'm like tapering so like I've had the most, you know, running volume last week and, and I'm starting to come down now. So it's like I had to run this morning and it was super easy and so I'm like, I have a bunch of energy cuz I feel great. I'm not tired all the time. It' like coming out of rehab or something. Like I feel great.
[00:01:30] Speaker B: Nice.
[00:01:30] Speaker A: So yeah, it's the, it's the calm before the storm a little bit. Yeah.
[00:01:34] Speaker B: When's the actual race? Is it far away?
[00:01:36] Speaker A: No, it's here in newport. So like 30 minutes away. Yeah.
[00:01:40] Speaker B: And is it this coming weekend? Is that what you said?
[00:01:42] Speaker A: Two weeks? Yeah. So October 11th. Yeah.
[00:01:44] Speaker B: Cool.
So yeah, you're on the easy straight. That's good. I, Whenever I'm training for an event, the running joke is generally that I, I'm always on taper because I never quite managed to. Okay.
To the level that requires a taper afterwards. That's the trouble.
[00:02:01] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
How, yeah, how, how are things with like, I don't know, like, you know, since, since exiting. Like I want to say like how are things with business life? But like you don't, I don't want to say you don't have a business right now, but like you, I don't know, curious. I mean, like, are you spending most of your time on one thing? It seems like you're spending your time on several different things. Like, what is, what is it like for you these days?
[00:02:27] Speaker B: I'm kind of figuring it out week by week. Honestly.
This week and last week actually have been really fun because I kind of committed to giving myself a summer relatively relaxed and not do a whole lot of work and not think about money as well, not think about how to earn a living the later part of this year, which I need to start thinking about now. So the last couple of weeks I have to start to think about that and start to make plans. And there's two or three things actually. Like, one, I've been really enjoying making the. The golf content. So I've got my golf channel, Golfing golfing gray or McGray Golf, depending on the platform, if you're out there and interested.
So we do the podcast, we do a whole bunch of social. We run a YouTube channel around it. I'm trying to start a newsletter around it as well, although that's been kind of faltering so far. But it's been really good fun doing that. And that's kind of ties into hobby as well. So it's kind of.
It almost feels just when I go out and play a game, I just record a bit of content, so. And then figure it out. And I've been building a whole video system around how to repurpose that as well. So. So that's been good fun.
But the kind of. I don't know. I. Well, tell me what you think here. But I. I do think I could turn that into a business, but I'm not entirely sure one, whether I could do it in any good time frame like growing a consumer company like that into something that's worth sponsorship, that's worth partnerships, all of that kind of stuff, brand deals, takes quite a while potentially. And two, I'm not entirely sure I want to ruin it by turning it into a company.
[00:03:58] Speaker A: Yeah, this is not what we had planned to talk about today, but I think this is really, really interesting and really pertinent because I kind of have the same question for myself with my kind of YouTube stuff and potentially even like this podcast. So, yeah, what kind of level are you at in terms of like subscribers on YouTube or social or whatever?
[00:04:23] Speaker B: Early stages. So I mean like 100 or so people listening to the podcast. We get maybe a thousand or so 1500 views on YouTube shorts.
Most of my YouTube longs are getting, you know, 100, 150 views max at the moment. I had one, kind of took off and got up to about 5,000.
Social media is doing okay. We get some like Instagrams that go to hundreds, others that do hit thousands. So it's all like those kind of early stage, you know, for six months to a year numbers and haven't put a whole lot of work into promoting it beyond that at the moment.
[00:05:03] Speaker A: And like, what do you think the path to monetization is? I mean, there's things like direct on platform ads like AdSense, there's sponsor and brand deals, there's like selling your own stuff.
[00:05:16] Speaker B: I think, I think in golf it's sponsorship and partnerships, brand deals, that kind of thing. Because there's so many big brands that do throw a lot of money around that it's worth them showcasing their clubs or their rangefinder or their clothes or whatever. So I think there's a lot of opportunity for that. If I was just to start being a salesman, I think that's part of it. I would need to actually start selling sponsorship. And I think even with the numbers where they are just now, it's possible, but it's early stage. Yeah. Is that, what are you thinking with your YouTube? Is that similar? Is it sponsorship?
[00:05:51] Speaker A: So I'll pass 25,000 subscribers here pretty soon.
And arguably for the last three, four months, it's been kind of on autopilot. Like I went from my 100 days of AI back to just weekly.
A couple of them were pretty, pretty bad, but.
But now getting 5, 10,000 views a video, which I think is like pretty good. I haven't had a real outlier in a while where you get like 50, 60, 100,000.
[00:06:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:06:26] Speaker A: But I'm getting. It's a, it's a different space in terms of sponsorship. I think we have quite high CPMs.
Whether it's on the programmatic or the brand deal side. I'm getting inbound from AI companies to either. Do I sell? Kind of two things. One is ad segments. So just an ad in the middle of the video.
I did one with Ahrefs a while back, I've done a couple others and I do dedicated videos where I talk. Like I do a whole video kind of wrapped around a product.
So like hosting companies, you know, are big ones there. I've done a few with Hostinger.
It's quite lucrative.
Yeah, it's quite lucrative. Yeah. I think the risk is lucrative.
[00:07:13] Speaker B: I'm curious if you can.
[00:07:16] Speaker A: I don't think I can. Like, Colin, I signed.
This is so embarrassing. I signed an influencer contract for the first time a few weeks ago.
And like, if you guys know me, like, you know, if we met in person, you know, that's just not me. But, but, but.
[00:07:36] Speaker B: Sorry to jump in there, Craig, but Well deserved, like 25,000 subscribers, you know, getting those kind of views on your videos, that is legit. That is. You're influencing significant numbers of people.
[00:07:46] Speaker A: So let's just say if a company spends a couple grand and gets. I mean, even for Kastos, our LTV is like 1200 bucks. You get one customer, it's worth it.
[00:07:58] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:08:00] Speaker A: And these, these companies probably get way more than that.
So. Yeah, so.
I am. I'm thinking the same thing, you know, like Castos, really mature kind of business, not requiring a lot of my time doing a few other things, you know, doing some coaching, working with tiny seed.
I think probably the closest path to like a solid second revenue stream is kind of going as all in as I can on YouTube. And that's like as a platform and email list growth and, you know, whatever, building my name recognition and stuff. It's actually making money from AdSense and brand deals and they the biggest, which like, for you too, maybe even more so for you, like kind of locally, is like other shit that can happen because of this, you know, so you take your channel from like kind of new to like quite established.
Especially if, like, you know, you mentioned last episode, like your dad is kind of in the industry and stuff, like what cool opportunities would come up for you to be like brand manager for a golf brand or something, you know, like some super cool job.
[00:09:20] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
Do you know something I'm thinking about a lot just now is that the whole idea of related to that of fractional roles, like it's more than just consulting for people, more than just coaching, or more than just being a freelancer, but being a part of a team. Like it's an actual job, but maybe it is only one or two days a week max. Maybe it's the only two or three days a month kind of thing.
That would be amazing. I think that would be a great life for the next five years just to have, let's say a fractional CMO job. So a chief marketing officer for a golf brand. Yeah, for sure. That's the kind of thing that could come from that type of thing. Or you could be a fractional cmo, fractional something for an AI company that's up and coming Something like that.
That's a big thing, I suppose.
[00:10:12] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And I would, I would guess that you're right in terms of like the path to monetization.
It's like not Adsense or like programmatic ads. On the, on the podcasting side of things, it's like earlier on you probably just need to reach out to a few brands, especially if they're local, you know, UK based golf brands or that have like local UK presences and just be like, hey, this is the deal. I have this piece of content planned. Would love to showcase your product, even if you just get it for free. You know, they give you a range finder or a golf bag or whatever.
I think that's, that's pretty cool. There's this guy, Justin Gracious.
His whole thing is like how to just how to. Sponsorship brand deals.
[00:10:58] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I think that's Justin Murray you're thinking of. He runs an event called the Sponsorship Games.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:11:07] Speaker A: He has some good content on like how to kind of work with your dream sponsors and a lot of it's proactive.
[00:11:13] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:14] Speaker A: Reaching out to them.
[00:11:17] Speaker B: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. It's. It's okay. Yeah, it's sales, isn't it? It's called outreach. It's, it's. I think perhaps I've been stalling on that because I keep thinking we need to get slightly better numbers. Like we're still just, you know, 3, 4, 500 followers on social media channels, still in the low, like hundreds of followers on YouTube.
But it doesn't matter, does it? If you can build a kind of package of all of it together and say this is going to go out to thousands of people over all of our channels and especially I think one of the biggest channels.
Be good to hear your thoughts on this actually, is our potential for growth is a newsletter. Actually. I think there's a lot of competition in our area on YouTube, loads of podcasts around, tons of social media, but there's a few newsletters around, but they're all quite specific and not necessarily the kind of thing I want to read.
Whereas we're doing a kind of variety show that gives you a bit of opinion, a bit of coverage, but also a wee bit of the news, but with a point of view. And I think that's what I've been trying to really get a workflow around. And it's something I think I can automate pretty well as well actually based on repurposing our podcast into that newsletter, but adding a wee bit of News as well. Is that. Where, where are you at in newsletters these days? Where do you. Do you run any. You'll run a member one for Castlos, I presume, but anything else as well.
[00:12:46] Speaker A: Yeah. So Castos has a newsletter. Our current cadence there is we email our newsletter audience, meaning like non customers, every week.
It's a combination of like, you know, podcasting tips, tricks, did you know, things about the product, you know, that kind of stuff. We email customers currently monthly about new product updates.
We've emailed them as many times as like several times a week. I think that's probably too much.
And then on the personal side, yeah, I have a, I have a small email list, like 1200 maybe on kit and actually a pretty good automation set up with Grokbot to take my latest YouTube transcript and draft an email very much in my kind of voice.
And it MCPs it into ConvertKit and I just go in and review it and then I, I ideally send that out on Fridays because my videos go out on Thursday. So I should go out here in a couple of hours.
But I don't, I don't have a mechanism to grow the list really. I think that's the, that's the, that's the problem at this point is like some people just randomly find it and that's great, but there's not like, there's not a funnel, there's not a funnel from my content to get on the list.
And even when you're on the list, it's really just announcements of my latest YouTube videos. There's not like I don't have anything to sell them. There's no nurture sequence.
[00:14:14] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:14:16] Speaker A: So I guess that's the other thing about like the creator business is relying on sponsors is fine. I think, think if you were to ask a, you know, a J. Clouse or something like that, like a really top end or Caitlyn Burgoyne, like they would say, like, yep, sponsors are cool. You can make good money. But then like, you need to own your own product and sell it. And that's, that's how you get from like, okay money to like really good. Predictable.
[00:14:44] Speaker B: Yeah, agreed. Yeah.
I think the, the newsletter growth side is exactly what I'm thinking about just now. Like, how to.
Honestly, this is what I've been thinking about the last two years with Alitoo and the podcast host as well towards just before we sold it was how to convert the content we had primarily into newsletter subscribers, because that was where I was pretty confident we could convert people into buyers if we had the right people joining the newsletter because suddenly you have them. I mean it's nothing fancy, is it? As soon as you have them there, you can then send them stuff once or twice a week and you can really nurture them and you can segment them and you can figure out exactly what their likes and dislikes are, what their needs are, their pains are, and you send them stuff based on exactly that. If you set up the segmenting. Well, the two, two things I want to set up for my golf channel actually over the next month or two are one, for YouTube. I want to really promote the newsletter much more from the short videos. I've been doing a bit of work around our workflow, our video workflow where adds currently an end screen that promotes the podcast, adds a little lower third then that promotes the podcast as well.
I've just started doing this with ours as well actually for rogue startups here. Craig as well.
[00:15:59] Speaker A: I love seeing the stuff you put out. Yeah, cool.
[00:16:02] Speaker B: I don't know if you've seen any of the ones that have put that kind of those typography elements in them or not, but I'll send you some over. But they're starting to go out as well and I think they work quite nicely.
But I need to figure out a way to link that to the newsletter as well. So how to. Well, with the golf channel, I mean how to link that to people subscribing the. The thing that used to work really well for the podcast host was links in the description for the long form right at the top. And it's classical lead magnets. It's good old digital marketing.
It was if it was a video that was anywhere related to monetization.
The first line in the description was grab my 7 steps to monetize your podcast guide colon link. And the link showed up in blue in the YouTube description. So as they're watching the video, it's really obvious at the top of the description bottom. And I found that worked really nicely actually that was one of the best ways and I need to just mention it more in the podcast as well. Honestly.
Have you been trying to grow from your long form videos? You're getting like thousands of people watching them. Do you try and convert them into newsletter or.
[00:17:10] Speaker A: No, I have, I have. I'm so terrible. No, the only.
So if I, if I have a dedicated, if I have a sponsor or a dedicated like video, the link goes in the top. That that's kind of what they want and that's, that's reasonable.
I have a link for like My coaching and consulting stuff below the main body of the description, just above my like, social link stuff.
[00:17:34] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:17:35] Speaker A: And that's it. Yeah, I'm super terrible. I think the, the reason is I don't, I don't have. I think most ideally what you would want is imagine there's like a few pillars that you talk about, you know, for podcasting. It's like monetization and growth and getting started and gear and whatever. So you have a thing for each of those. And so you just like when you're, when you go to, to have that CTA, it's like, okay, which of my five CTAs do I drop in? Drop in. You know, because it's like that, that's the world I don't feel like I have for my, you know, kind of AI founder stuff. I don't feel like I have those assets, like handy.
[00:18:20] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:18:22] Speaker A: I don't have like those, you know, lead magnets or other resources that would be email gated or anything that.
[00:18:28] Speaker B: That's part of my problem just now is that when we. So when we're talking on this show, when I'm talking to people about business, that kind of thing, I don't have a place to send them directly, but it's. Well, that's kind of. That's one of the. So I mentioned the Golf Channel. That's the other thing that I've been spending my time on the last two weeks is building out my site over at Corin Labs.com it's at. And it's kind of just trying to figure out what my offering is like. Yeah, like, you do tons of coaching. You've. You've got your spaces, your niches, your specialties.
I don't really know exactly what mine are yet. I've been kind of narrowing down to figure out, like, I don't want to just coach people on business in general. I mean, I'm happy to, but, you know, I'm never going to find clients like that. It's way too general.
So it's figuring out what the speciality is. So starting to build some landing pages. Maybe I'll get some feedback from you next time around. But what.
[00:19:23] Speaker A: I think this is a big challenge folks have. So I'd love to just talk, talk about like the thought process here, like in any kind of business. Right? Like, oh, I'm, I'm a CRM. Like, okay, you're gonna lose. Right? But, but like, how do you go from that to like this super narrow thing or like, I do coaching. How do you even pick out those few candidate, like ICPs or positionings that you want to test?
[00:19:49] Speaker B: Yeah, I start. The way I'm thinking about it is trying to. I spent quite a long time over a few days, not all three days in a row, but through a few weeks that coming back to this, having put a bit of thought into it, trying to lay out all the things that I think I know and I'm good at. And there's tons of stuff in there that's quite generic, that would be hard to sell.
But I think the interesting things appear when you start to combine them.
So you take two or three and you turn it into an amalgamation. That is actually a really interesting skill set because of the combination.
An example being I spent 15 years growing a business.
Fine, I could teach people how to do that, but so could you. So could many other people out there. Hard to stand out in that.
But Also, I spent 15 years growing an audience. Again, you could teach on that. Many other people could teach on that.
Is growing a business with.
By growing an audience unique enough?
Possibly not.
So let's go further. I also spent six or seven years working in a university figuring out how to be a great educator, like, a lot. So I did a PhD in online education, and I spent five years before that running and working on courses that taught other people how to run great courses.
So suddenly I've got this credential around an experience around how to do great education, how to teach people how to put together courses that actually help people take action. That's kind of where I think my skill was there. It wasn't like you just impart information. It was, how do you help people learn something that helps them actually do something. So suddenly those three things coming together are something that I'm getting quite interested in, wondering whether I can promote that. Because it's. It's something around growing a business by growing an audience.
But you're not just growing an audience with general stuff. You're growing an audience by helping them actually achieve an action. And it's. It's kind of what we did with the podcast host. That's. It's kind of what a lot of people do, to be fair. But I think I've got a unique set of credentials that means that I could shout about, I can help you do that. Well, because I think the course stuff particularly does have a huge effect on how effective content is. So I don't know. I don't think it's quite there yet, but I think it's along the lines,
[00:22:27] Speaker A: yeah, Yeah, I mean, I think the thought process makes sense. I wonder how you go. And we always try to have our specific things we're wrestling with and kind of give answers for those, but then also for folks who are listening, how do we translate that to the stuff they're going through? Like, I think what you said makes a lot of sense. You're, you're at this place where you have kind of a, a nexus of an idea and you can test it by like, yeah, creating these landing pages, sending people to it from your content, seeing about opt in rates and responses to emails and kind of soft pitches for offers and things like that. I guess, like, is that, is that the only thing is like you put up a thing and send it out and see what happens. There's, there's an amount of work you can do up front to be like, okay, like this is probably, this is probably right. Like this is worth testing.
[00:23:19] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:23:19] Speaker A: And at some point you just have to test it. Like that seems like a reasonable path.
[00:23:24] Speaker B: I think so.
I think there's probably two things that I will do with it.
One is I need to actually talk to people directly. I need to go to more events and actually pitch this to people.
You know, just say that's what I do, that's what I am, and see how people react to it.
To start with, go to businesses too. Like actually just cold approach businesses around. Like I think I've talked before, I live in a city of, it's not a big city, maybe 50, 60, 70,000 people.
So it's plenty enough that there's tons of businesses here that I can approach. But there's not a whole lot of competition when it comes to specific coaching and stuff. So I think I actually live in a pretty good place to be able to test something like this by reaching out and saying I'm the guy that does this particular combination of things in our time.
And the other is, yes, starting to be more specific about that in the content as well.
Putting out more things on LinkedIn, on YouTube, on social media in general about this particular subject, this combination of skills. So I think those are the things I'll give it a go with. I don't know, what do you think? How would you start to approach that?
What's been your main channel for coaching over the last few years? Has it been the podcast primarily? Has it been the YouTube?
[00:24:39] Speaker A: It's been refer, like referrals by, you know, my friends in this space. Yeah.
[00:24:44] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay. And do you know then how they, what do they say you're Best at.
[00:24:51] Speaker A: I.
Well, I. The reason most people come to me for coaching is around growth, sales and marketing.
[00:25:02] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:25:03] Speaker A: And it kind of evolves, devolves into kind of just regular founder coaching. But every, every conversation is, is around, you know, business strategy and growth.
My, my coaching clients who are further along. A lot of it has to do with like finance and funding and M and A and people. The ones who are earlier is literally like, you know, run more Facebook ads and send more emails kind of stuff. Yeah. And, and that's a spectrum, you know, of how tactical to strategic it goes. But yeah, that, that's what coaching is, you know. And so like I guess like little, little promo. I do one on one coaching. We talk every other week for an hour and it really is like you bring the biggest challenge that is in your business today. And a lot of everyone's challenge is like, oh my gosh, what is AI going to do to my business?
And marketing works less good than it used to. How do I do marketing better? That. That's like almost every conversation is, is around that. And I think I'm pretty well qualified to talk about both those.
So yeah, we have, we have good conversations. I think it's just a challenging, uncertain time right now around all that stuff.
[00:26:27] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, I think you're very qualified to talk about both of those. And I think you're, I think you're spot on there around the fact that I think people come to you because of a specificity.
So. Yeah, that's what, that's what I would have said about you as well. It was your combination to me is the fact that you're great at, you know, how to run a good business, you can do marketing. But bringing in the sales part is what to me makes you more unique. Like you've talked about that quite a lot in the past on many different places. Like being like doing sales in the past about actually being happy with doing sales, enjoying that side of things which most people like us don't. They hate it. I hate it. I do not. I never calls myself a direct salesman.
So like suddenly that's a unique thing. Yeah, absolutely. Which you stand out on, which is really cool. Yeah, yeah. The, the.
What was I going to say there something around the, the audience, like the sp.
The specificity that I have got coaching clients on in the past has been actually very specific around growing a business around content. So people who start growing an audience almost just for fun and then actually want to figure out how to turn it into business.
That's, that's basically What I did with the podcast host and that is what I've worked with people on. But like you said, it totally does. It just turns into a general like conversation around business, doesn't it? But you still have to, you have to attract them in with that special combo in the first place, I think.
[00:27:58] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I follow quite a few people in the, in the kind of coaching.
Coaching coaches space and you know, it always comes back to time, money and freedom.
Everything, all roads and mostly money.
Right? Like, yeah, growing an audience to grow your business to make more money is like, that's.
I don't think that's wrong or inauthentic. I think that that's like the end goal for everybody is time, money and freedom. How to do that as a business and how to grow a successful business. Like a lot of things, chief amongst which is getting clients, customers. So yeah, I don't, I don't think that's like a weird end around or anything. I think it's.
And, and probably you have. You're like 2 or 3 degrees.
You will end up being 2 or 3 degrees more specific.
[00:28:55] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:28:56] Speaker A: A certain type of client working in a certain kind of industry on a certain kind of channel to deliver some kind of value. Like, I would guess that when you get there, then it gets really easy.
Kind of like the, the, the sponsor guy, Justin, whatever. Right. Like, that's pretty niche, but sounds like he's got a really solid business.
[00:29:15] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, for sure. And. And it's just like a podcast, isn't it? We worked with so many people on the same thing. I'm sure you did too, whereby they always want to start really wide. They want to start doing a. My podcast is going to be about health, wealth and wellness, you know, and you're like, yeah, okay, yeah, pick one. In fact, how about pick a very smart and small niche of. Just start with that. But the shows that do well, they start with that for the first 10, 20 episodes and then they add in maybe another slightly niche topic beyond that. And by episode 200, they've grown an audience that goes with them into the wide world. And by that time they've got enough word of mouth that you can, you can grow a general podcast, but you can't start that way.
[00:29:56] Speaker A: It just doesn't.
Yeah, yeah,
[00:30:01] Speaker B: yeah. It's interesting. Have you ever, have you ever gone through that exercise of trying to figure out where your skills are? Like, have you ever tried to do that to profile yourself and say, what. What am I better than other people at?
[00:30:17] Speaker A: No, not not formally around this. Like, we've done a fair amount of, like, personality assessments and stuff at Castos as, like, team exercises. And I've participated in them, but not around, like, myself, outside of being a founder, you know, inside the business.
How about you?
[00:30:40] Speaker B: I actually did spend a bit of time on it. Obviously, I'm doing it a lot, a lot right now to try and figure out what to focus on next. But was it last year or the year before? I can't remember now. Maybe 24 or 25.
I spent a day or two almost in a kind of retreat mode. Like, took a couple of days away from normal work to try and figure that out, because we'd got to the point where we had a really good team. Everyone was pretty autonomous, but we were at a kind of plateau stage where we're figuring out what do we really focus on next to grow the company.
And I think one of the things that was holding us back is that I was trying to do too many different things. And so a part of it was. And I talked to my team about this, actually. They were really good about it, like, saying, I think I went to a meeting and said something like, I put in the agenda Colin's role.
So Colin's role was top of this agenda. And it turns out afterwards, people told me they thought I was going to turn up and say I was leaving.
They thought this was me retiring, but it wasn't. I went to them and just said, like, I need to narrow down a little bit what I'm doing. Can you give me some feedback? Like, what do you think I should be concentrating on? If you guys could all just give me jobs to help grow the company, what would you give me? And that was really interesting, actually. We talked about that and, like, they all gave me suggestions and said where I could help with what they were doing and took that. And that was a really good starter for it. I think that's a really valuable thing for any managing director or any CEO to do is really to. Because we're all doing too much generally, aren't we? Like, even if you do do an exercise to narrow it down, it just expands out again and you have to periodically draw it back again and really focus on. It's kind of the old cliche, like, what? Don't do anything that anyone can do. You need to do things that just. You can do great.
[00:32:32] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I will say, like, it's pretty incredible and rare to have a team both to which you can say that to and that they feel like they can give you that feedback.
So kudos, kudos to you. And like the company and the culture you built, I think, you know, potentially, you know, folks listening might not have that around them in various ways. Whether they're just a solo founder, it's just them or their team or just a bunch of, you know, contractors or something.
So yeah, that's, that's pretty incredible that you had such a strong team culture that you feel vulnerable enough to say that to them and they feel like they can be honest with you.
[00:33:23] Speaker B: Thanks. Yeah, I never thought about that way exactly, but it probably relates a bit to that conversation we had a week or two ago about co founders. Like, that was a big part of my compensation for not having a co founder was trying to nurture a team that could be as honest as possible. So.
[00:33:39] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:33:42] Speaker B: One of the things I was going to bring it back to Craig, we talked about earlier about your YouTube channel. Like, I, I, I do think the newsletter is huge for me, I think. But I believe one of the biggest growth factors for the newsletter will be YouTube and same for the podcast too, actually. You've done so well over the last couple of years. Like it's been so cool to watch actually from your, your, Was it a year of, a year of daily videos? It wasn't quite a year.
[00:34:07] Speaker A: 100 days.
[00:34:08] Speaker B: Yeah, 100 days. That was it. Yeah. So 100 days is crazy, like to do a daily video, but since then it's grown as well. Like, what do you think were the biggest, like if you were to name one, two, three things that have got you from single thousands up to multiple tens of thousands, what were the biggest levers?
[00:34:28] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I think like at the, like a base level, the most important is like operating on a platform that has an algorithm that allows you to grow.
YouTube is really good. A lot of social channels are really good. Especially now where you know, the algorithm is individual kind of post based, not like follower based. So you can have a breakout video or Instagram post or whatever without with a small following.
That doesn't happen in podcasting. There's, there's no way to go viral in podcasting. So, so I think just like YouTube as a channel makes it makes it easier.
I, I think I got lucky a few times. You know, honestly, I, you know, I had a couple of videos that just happened to, to drop on days where there was big news around something and I think I've gotten, but I was
[00:35:26] Speaker B: going to say, but that's the harder you work, the luckier you get type of Thing.
[00:35:30] Speaker A: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Like, yeah, I was going to say like I know now, now that when I publish things about agents, so Hermes, Grok Bot, all these, they always do. Well the, the balance is like you have to be genuine about your content that like, hey, these agents are actually good and helpful and useful and they don't break and they're not a security risk. And all this, all this kind of, I mean that, that's specific to me but I think everyone has that dark side of the stuff they talk about.
You know, even golf, right. Has like stuff that, you know, you could talk about and it'd get a bunch of views.
[00:36:06] Speaker B: But yeah.
[00:36:08] Speaker A: Is inauthentic in a way I think like on YouTube specifically. And it applies to all pieces of content like the title and thumbnail and like getting the click. It's email, like getting the subject line in the open. If it's social, it's like the first 10 seconds and, and the thumbnail even or the hook.
It's the thing most people miss. And if you get it right, the rest is, is easy.
You know, like in planning and editing, it's really 70% of my effort goes into the first minute of the video really.
And then from there everything else, like title and thumbnail devolves from the first minute. The editing, I try to make it pretty dynamic even though I don't really edit that much. But I basically only really edit and add graphics and transitions in the first minute and from there it's basically just taking out the ums and ahs.
[00:37:09] Speaker B: Just face the camera. Yeah. Okay, that's interesting. Yeah. So you can have like a 10 minute video.
Really? The editing is just 10% of that. Yeah.
And how long do you do you. So if that first minute is that important, do you spend, how long do you tend to spend planning a video in the first place?
[00:37:31] Speaker A: Depends if I have to like learn a new tool. Like I did a video that'll drop today on like I rented a GPU and ran like a local model. I had to learn all this stuff like what kind of GPU do I need that's kind of like similar to like a new Mac studio to learn all that shit. I have to learn how to hook that up to a harness like open code to where I can call a local model hosted in the cloud somewhere.
So that took all in all a few hours to set it up and shoot it, another hour and a half or so for me to edit it. And it was a 25 minute video.
So yeah, several hours.
[00:38:13] Speaker B: Yeah, but I suppose one of your benefits. One of the superpowers for your channel is you probably would do that anyway because you find it fun. Is that, is that accurate?
[00:38:20] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I was going to say like I'm most proud of this video because it's literally something I'm curious about and would use in my business and like it's helpful.
[00:38:30] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that's cool.
And then once it. So, so title and hook. I keep hearing that again and again. Thumbnail as well, obviously. So people planning. Do you follow that formula I've heard people talk about, which is really, if you can't set a great title, that then leads into a great kind of first two or three lines and then think of a thumbnail that actually stands out as well. Something that you think will grab views and there's no point even thinking about the script. Is that kind of the order you do it in?
[00:39:04] Speaker A: Yeah, I think.
I guess the way I think about it is like it has to have a premise first. Like it has to have on like some kind of, you know, Callaway would call it like a non obvious idea.
[00:39:18] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:39:19] Speaker A: So like the non obvious idea for this is don't go buy the Mac studio because you can rent GPU space for $2aminute or $2 an hour or whatever.
[00:39:28] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:39:29] Speaker A: So that's the premise. So the hook is like, I want to buy this $12,000 Mac Studio, but I just don't have to because I can rent it for a lot less. And then that.
Then you get the title and thumbnail from that too. So kind of that's the premise. And then can you build a hook, an intro that comes from that and then the title and thumbnail as well.
[00:39:51] Speaker B: Have you been working to get the subscribe? Do you put in particular effort into the videos to do that?
[00:39:57] Speaker A: I literally. No, I do nothing. I do nothing. I have done it at times and I mostly just forget about it. But yeah, I know, I know some, I know some channels, a lot of channels do really good. They put it in kind of contextually throughout. Like, hey, you know, like the crazy thing is like 80 of you that watch this video aren't subscribed. Like it really is cool and helps me out. Makes me feel good.
I just forget to do it.
[00:40:23] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have one video which did really well on the Golf Channel.
So normally I'm getting like tens of listeners, sometimes hundreds, but this one video got five and a half thousand out of only five long form that I've done. The channel's mostly short form at the moment.
And quite a lot. I've kind of alternated there as well between like just low hundreds up to thousands of views. But this one long form did really well. And the thing that I was really interested in was how that translated or didn't, I should say into subscribes. And I wonder if it's because I didn't put any effort into it at all. Because this video I think you can see in the. Yeah. So you can see in the stats, I got five and a half thousand views watch time of 300 hours.
So not too bad, like 300 hours and 12 people subscribed.
So I would have, I would have hoped. I know it's not massive numbers, it's not tens of thousands, it's not hundreds of thousands, but I still would have thought like five and a half thousand, you'd convert like even 1% of that would have been 500, like 50, surely.
[00:41:33] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:41:33] Speaker B: But no, 12.
[00:41:35] Speaker A: Yeah.
I don't, I don't know what the, I don't know what good is here. I, I've like worked with YouTube consultants and stuff and I think I've had a couple videos that have quite high subscriber to view rates.
I don't remember even what that number is. So anyone who's listening or watching let us know what's considered good.
I would guess we talked about this at Castus a lot. Every piece of content has a job and probably for YouTube it's the same. The job of this piece of content is just to get eyeballs. The job of this piece of content is to get subscribers. The job. This piece of content is a sponsor deal, so the other two probably aren't going to happen, but you're just going to make money.
So maybe did that piece of content, was it optimized just to get views and not if I think about getting subscribers on any kind of channel. It's like for me, just as a consumer, it's like, ooh, this is so good. And they've told me that this is what they do. I'm going to subscribe to make sure I get more of what I like.
I don't know how explicit that is.
[00:42:56] Speaker B: Yeah, well, so in this one particularly, and this kind of leads me to the next thing I was going to ask you about, which is repurposing, because this video, and in fact all but one of the long form on my channel just now is repurposed from the podcast.
So this one as an example I'm just looking at. So I'm just going to try and make sure it doesn't get all loud. There we go. So it's like it's just a segment from a longer form podcast and it's me and Ross, my co host, talking for 13 minutes about the data on par threes, like playing par 3s in a golf course, and why a lot of people expect.
Some people expect par threes to be quite easy because they're nice and short, but actually they're by far the hardest holes in the golf course for most people.
So we talk through that whole concept and how you can improve your scores by playing them better. But it is just an unedited 30 minute segment from an hour long show.
So just cut straight from the start. And we have been trying to record our episodes, our podcast episodes, in this way whereby we break them into topics.
It's a variety show anyway, so it kind of works that way in any sense.
But I've been trying to think about how to introduce segments in a way that makes them easy to cut.
I almost treat them like completely separate things. And I try and do an introduction and a hook for every segment in a way that makes them easy to cut, which is actually surprisingly more difficult. So often in a podcast, when you do three or four different topics, you just kind of roll into the next one gradually. It doesn't have proper intro, but I've been thinking that a lot. So this actually held people's attention pretty well.
But a lot of the other ones like that are not holding print people necessarily very well because I'm not doing exactly what you talked about earlier, which is spend 30 seconds or a minute actually creating a great first minute to, you know, to hook people in. That's not what these have at all. So do you feel like these are a bit pointless to do clips like this should I be doing?
Because the other idea was then to actually start recording specific 30 second intros for these, which would be a lot quicker than filming whole 30 minute segments. What do you think of that?
[00:45:15] Speaker A: It's obviously more work to know you have this segment and to record a 30 second intro to it. I think it would be the most valuable thing if you can pull off the effort. And if you're seeing that these, like we call these segments at Castus, because you have shorts, you have segments and you have full, full length videos. Segments are exactly. We're talking about 5, usually 5 to 10 minutes, 13.
Cool thing is they can be very search optimized because they're on a specific topic. So I think you might see that you get more people from search than you do from browser, which is usually not the case. Like in my videos, 95% of the people come from browse or suggest it and very few people come from search.
You probably will see a higher, higher percentage come from search with these segments. But I probably would spend and not even 30 seconds, like 15 seconds saying exactly what you said.
A lot of people think part threes are the easiest holes in the course because they're short, but data shows that they're hard because a bunch of shit happens all at once.
And then you break into the. And you break into the segment. Um, yeah, because like if you're ret. Is this is YouTube specific. Like, and this is not a dynamic in podcasting because like people listen to this podcast, they listen to the whole thing, right? And it. And it doesn't matter, right? They're already subscribed so they're getting, they're getting every episode anyhow. But on YouTube, like if somebody clicks and leaves, that's a bad signal to YouTube and they'll just stop showing your video.
So you are very incentivized to get them to stay as long as possible. And a good hook, especially in this case, sets the stage for the rest of the 13 minutes.
So, yeah, either what I would do is either do a really quick custom intro to it or in how you're organizing the episode, just build that in.
So like at the beginning of this one you said, oh, one of the things I wanted to ask you about is repurposing your podcast.
That's cool.
Or you could have said, we've seen a 28x outlier on our podcast by repurposing content. How are you doing it?
You know.
[00:47:42] Speaker B: Yeah, it's something I've been thinking about trying to build into the workflow that I'm using. I think it'd be quite easy actually to. Currently I've got a tool that basically I upload my hour long episodes.
It breaks them into two streams. One is I click through to segments and it shows me the seven or eight segments we could cut. And it automatically cuts. It adds typography, helps me publish them. I could really easily.
I put in a step there whereby it says, here's what a good intro might be for this one. Here's the segment, here's where we might cut off the start of where you introduced it on the show. And here's what we'd introduced instead. And I could probably. I could either. I'm sure I could build in a recording in the browser right there so that it could just Happen right in the browser or equally I could just record in. Filmora is what I usually use for recording that kind of stuff.
Just drop it into the folder and then Claude could easily piece them together from there. So I think the editing part would actually not be that hard.
If I got into the routine of every week, my Tuesday morning, let's say a couple hours, it's segment day for both sides of par and therefore I just spend two hours going through the segments, looking at the scripts, maybe doing a wee bit of editing and then just record them and then it puts it all together for me.
Yeah, yeah, I think I'll try that.
Yeah, put it all together.
[00:49:07] Speaker A: I mean I know you have a lot of this automated with like a cloud code project or whatever. I would just say like additionally, I think I saw a video from Brian Castle. Like I was chatting with him yesterday. Like Codex is incredibly good at just doing this on your computer, which is terrifying. But if you're using DaVinci Resolve or Pro Tools or whatever, it can just do all this stuff.
It just runs it. You just be like, hey, here's the raw stuff, here's the tool, just go make a video.
It's like a lot of things, it's 90% good, but that's a lot less time.
I think that's probably the next step is.
And you could do both. You could do like the full edit and then you would want to give it like a skill or something like, hey, this is what a good segment looks like.
Find, you know, in a 30 minute video, find two segments that are five to 10 minutes and pull them out and give me a script for what the intro looks like and let me know when you're ready and I'll shoot to camera the 15 second hook.
[00:50:18] Speaker B: Yeah, I do wonder actually. I I've spent probably like nine months or so now I've been tinkering around with this workflow, using it the whole time. So I've been using it since like week two, but improving it, adding to it, all that kind of stuff. But there's so much of it. I think now I could probably just do directly in cloud code or codecs and it makes me wonder. I think one of the benefits of having the tool actually is that it's, it's organization more than more than anything else. I've got a list of projects in there. I've got a list, I've got stages that they're at. So I can see what's complete, I can see what's still to do that kind of Thing, but, I mean, yesterday I just took all of the clips that we've. That you've sent me. So your production team have sent me for this show. I just said, here's a folder with 25 odd clips in it.
Write me some copy using my right, like, calling skill and schedule these using upload, post. And all of that's all linked up already. And it did it in 20 minutes. Yeah. And I went through and reviewed it. I've got. I've got a little workflow set up where I can review the text and it learns from the edits. I make, that kind of stuff. And it just. Yeah, was just so simple.
[00:51:24] Speaker A: It's pretty terrifying, isn't it? Like, it's. I mean, I'm watching the video from DHH, from RailsConf.
I haven't gotten to the end yet, but I saw on Twitter yesterday, like, his closing remark is basically, software development is over.
Don't be a loser. I think is funny, which is like, it's so dhh. But, like, I think we all need to, like, admit that, right? Like, the world we lived in three years ago is gone.
[00:51:59] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:52:00] Speaker A: And we need to.
Exactly to your point of, like, I run a freaking video and podcast production company and to say that, like, Codex does it 95 as good as our team of professionals is, is scary.
[00:52:15] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:52:16] Speaker A: But true. And don't, like, I'm saying to myself, don't. Don't be like a Luddite and like, hold on to the past because especially this. You can't. You can't fight.
[00:52:27] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, that's it, isn't it? Many a business has gone under because they've refused to believe what's actually happening right in front of their eyes, even though it's. It's horrible to admit. It's horrible to say. I mean, there's still. This is the stage, though, where there's still so much opportunity to pivot a little bit, even just change tack a little bit, like your team.
Maybe it's about moving up market, maybe it's about moving sideways a little bit. Maybe it's about moving somewhere, like just having a little bit of a different service, which actually does still add something compared to what Codex and Claude can do that at this stage.
[00:53:03] Speaker A: Cool.
[00:53:05] Speaker B: I think. Sorry, I was going to say that the last thing there was just.
I think it's even just, you know, there was a point where it was, SaaS is dead because anyone can build software. And now it's just we don't even need to build SaaS. Like, what's the point in building SaaS, because like we just said a minute ago, you just get on Codex or, or Claude and say, I don't even need to build a bit of software for this. Just go and do these things. Here's my goal. You figure out how to do it. I don't need software. Just go and do it.
[00:53:32] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's, you know, as we're, as we're chatting with tiny seed folks and like companies that, that I coach, it's the biggest concern is like, oh, somebody's just going to vibe code this thing. I said, I don't think that's the case. I think the bigger concern is like the fundamental need for this thing in your customer's eyes is changing.
They don't need a CRM, they need sales. There's a lot of ways to get sales without using a CRM. Yeah, that's, that's my. Like go to example.
Yeah, I think, you know, you have a GROK bot that has just a SQLite database and connects to your Gmail and calendar.
[00:54:12] Speaker B: Yeah, it just works.
[00:54:15] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. It's crazy.
It's crazy.
All right, Colin.
[00:54:21] Speaker B: All right.
[00:54:21] Speaker A: It's good.
[00:54:22] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. It's good fun.
[00:54:24] Speaker A: So, folks, listening, we're going to put pressure on ourselves here.
Link in the description below to sign up for our newsletter. We're going to have a newsletter, it's going to go out every week automatically written by Claude, but based on what we're saying here, with some resources and takeaways for you all to take the shit we talk about and implement it in your business. So there'll be a link in the description below to sign up for that and I hope you enjoy it and please give us feedback when we send that out if it's good or bad or you want stuff different and I hope you enjoy it.
[00:54:51] Speaker B: Well done.
Can I ask as well we follow on from that is.
I have been finding myself. I don't know if you do, Craig, but a lot of the things I kind of want to talk about on here is just a new thing that I've found I can do for my business with AI. I'm just not sure. I'm not. I'm not 100% sure that that's interesting to everyone. More generally, I'd love some feedback on that. Like do people. Because I do. I like hearing use cases of how people are using these new tools in their business. As long as it's applied to the business, it's not just geeking out on the tech. We like to do a little bit of that, but it's more about like, what the goal is, what the purpose is, what the benefit is.
So like, there was three things I had on my list here to talk about today that I figured out in the last week that saved me literal hours doing things in the business that I used to spend those hours doing manually. Is it worth like walking through those case studies? Does that make sense? Like, I'm just not entirely sure the specifics like that are that interesting or whether they are. What do you think?
[00:55:49] Speaker A: Yeah, I think probably like, let's, let's save just a, you know, five or ten minute segment from, from the episodes going forward when we have those to. To talk about them because, yeah, I do too. And like, I think some of them are just throwaways for a lot of folks, but some of them could be quite important for other folks. So, yeah, I think it probably is worth like a small segment. Yeah.
[00:56:12] Speaker B: Yeah, perfect. Well, feedback please. You are TheCraghewitt on Twitter. Is that your main channel?
[00:56:17] Speaker A: I am. And you?
[00:56:18] Speaker B: I am Colin McGray. Colin McGray. Think of the Scottish Colin Gray. Colin McGray.
And that's on Twitter and a few other places.
[00:56:28] Speaker A: Awesome. Okay, thanks, Colin. We'll chat soon. Bye, everyone.
[00:56:31] Speaker B: Cheers.
