From Silicon Valley to all around the world, I meet with startup founders to hear their powerful stories of failure, obstacles and success. I am your host Luke Baird and this is the Cult of Startup Podcast. This episode is brought to you by Audible, which is a service I have used for years because I am not the fastest reader in the time it usually takes an average person to complete a book, I take about twice as long. This is why I prefer to listen and adjust great reads through audio and I have an audiobook recommendation for you.
One of the most eye opening audiobooks I've ever listened to is the 22 imbeddable laws of Marketing by Alrise and Jack Trout, which has left a huge impression on how I perceive marketing and what startups can do to avoid falling into the Me Too product trap, along with a variety of other rules that most businesses should at least be aware of. All you have to do to get your free audiobook and free 30 day trial is to go to audibletrial.com cultofstartup and you can choose from their selection of over 180,000 titles that range from books to magazines, you name it. Go to audibletrial.com culto startup and that's audibletrial.com cultofstartup and snag yourself a great book and listen to it on your next trip. Thank you.
Hello friends, family and foes, and welcome to another episode of the Cult of Startup podcast. Our guest today is Austin Krigg, and in this interview we discuss how YouTube completely changed his life. At the start, we learned about Austin's backstory of going through school to become a network broadcaster and how he stumbled into an opportunity to act in a YouTube video for the tongue cleaning product Orabrush, which to date has over 18 million views. Afterwards, Austin DT tells his life as a video consultant and breaks down how to distribute your content on YouTube along with strategies behind what goes into a great piece of YouTube entertainment.
This was a blasted interview and is filled with tons of takeaways for anyone looking to jump start their business by utilizing online video as the centerpiece. And as always, everyone, thank you so much for listening and enjoy. How's it going today, Austin? Good, Luke, I'm doing great.
Thanks for having me on. Excellent. I'm excited to have you as a guest. My apologies if you end up hearing any lawn noise in the background.
They are currently trimming the grass outside of my house. Oh, that's. That's just authenticity, man. People love that stuff.
It happens. All right. I know that in your history you are a broadcast journalism major at Brigham Young University. And that sort of led you to where you are today because it taught you a handful of skill sets.
Let's hear that history. Yeah. I looked at a bunch of different agencies when I was in school and chose broadcaster rules because I thought, here's a field that will be dynamic, fast paced and interesting, but also respectable and stable, and I'll wear a suit to work. And it ended up being none of those positive things.
It was not respectable or stable. I graduated in 2009, right when the recession hit and news stations across the country were laying off anchor reporters left and right. And if you wanted a job, you had to be a one man band. And you had to start out covering high school volleyball on weekends in Sheboygan and then work your way up over the next 15 years to get the anchor desk in LA.
And everybody cuts. And I just, I just knew that I would be miserable if I did that. So by the time I graduated, I was looking at other options and trying to figure out what I wanted to do. And I got a [email protected], i took on an internship just so I could learn social marketing.
And one of the guys I worked with there, he knew that I'd been on camera before doing student reporting. He said, hey, I'm doing a video for YouTube to sell a tongue cleaning product. Will you be in? I'll give you 100 bucks, maybe in my video.
I said, sure. So after work on Friday, me and my friend Jeff went and filmed this video at a local pool hall. And I didn't think anything of it. We filmed this video and went and saw Wolverine at the dollar theater.
And I thought that was gonna begin the story. But that video, weirdly enough, changed my life because Jeff is a brilliant marketer. And this was the summer of 2009, right when YouTube was opening up their paid promotions platform. So today when you go on YouTube, you search for a term.
There are a lot of paid results, just like there are on a Google search. But in the summer of 2009 is when they first started doing that, when you could as a business buy promoted space and results. And because it was so new, nobody else was doing it. There weren't major consumer packaged goods or app or development, right?
And there were no companies doing this. So my buddy Jeff just had a perfect timing on this thing and started heavily promoting our video and a b testing things like the title tag, the thumbnails, et cetera, and got our video to a point where if he spent $35 promoting this video. We did sell a tongue cleaner. He knew we would get 40, $45 back in sales and he took all the profit, rolled that back into the campaign and things snowballed.
And within a few months it became very clear this was not a one off video, this was a business. And we were going to do more videos and we're going to need to hire on some staff and get a board and some executives. So that one video that we did turned into the YouTube sensation of a few years ago. That was Orabrush.
Orabrush was, was very prominent on YouTube. If you were on YouTube for 10 minutes in 2010, you were going to see our ad because we have very good using the systems. So you guys basically had come up with a more efficient way to run that system. Yeah, I mean they were putting it out there for anybody to use, but I think we, we had the advantage of being the first ones to jump on there and to really try to leverage it for all that it was worth.
In fact, I was roommates with Jeffrey, this is right after I graduated from college. And he got a phone call from Google and they were calling to make sure this was an actual person and not a bot. Because he had been buying virtually every search term in the book, like the dictionary of search terms. So it didn't matter what you're searching for.
You could be searching for Madonna music videos, you were going to see Orabrush as a related. You might also be interested in this video. So he basically kind of rigged the game because it was cheap, it sounds like, and the ry on it was great. So if you're associated to anything, it was gonna profit of some sort of.
Yeah, I mean this is the beauty of new platforms and it was a unique time and place. YouTube was owned by Google, so you knew it wasn't going to go under anytime soon, even if it was running a huge loss. But it was still a new platform for paid promotions. And so it wasn't very crowded.
So we had a unique time in place to launch that campaign and that got us started in video marketing. And actually that one video kind of kicked off a number of different careers and even multi million dollar companies from that we saw now Orabrush and Orapop and the people who worked on those campaigns and at that company have gone on to start other companies. And it's really interesting to see that the weird evolution that kind of all started with that one video we shot after work on Friday in Pool hall. It all started in a Coffee shop with a napkin.
Yeah. Very fun story, right? Exactly. Yeah.
I'm curious to know what other things have these people been doing? Because those stories of, hey, this is a group of people all met at one time and now they're all maybe locations, but they're all working on very significant things in the world, isn't it? Right. Yeah.
Have you heard of Devin Supertramp on YouTube? Yes. Actually, Devin was our in house video guy. When we shot that video after work on a Friday, Devin was the one that filmed it and it went really well.
He shot and edited that video. And then after a year of working together, Devin thought, you know what, I could probably take a lot of what I've learned here and start my own channel. And I worked with him on the first video that he did for his channel and it took off. To all of our surprise, it went viral in the most true organic sense.
He wasn't paying to promote anything. It just jumps to a million views very quickly. Which a million views in the year 2016 doesn't mean all that much, but, man, it was a ton when we were first starting this. I'm sure super exciting.
Be like, it's still going up, guys. Yeah, we're placing bets. I'm like, where's it going to top out? Are we going to go to 1 million?
Are we going to go 2 million? Is going to be 5 million now. That guy's got like, what, over 4 million followers in total or something like that. He has 4 million subscribers now and I believe, gosh, 100 million views.
I don't know, I need to look, but it's up there. It's a lot. And later on, Stuart Ettington was one of our interns at Orb. She also started his own channel and also found viral gold.
Ricky Ray Butler was a roommate of Jeffrey and mine. He also was very interested in marketing and video. He started Influencer marketing company that sold to Corpus, which is a marketing group that Bill Gates started years ago. And now Ricky is working with Corpus and is very well to do.
Who else? Lindsey Sterling, the most successful YouTuber on YouTube. The most successful female YouTuber on the platform. Her work is.
She's at a whole different stratosphere now, but she started by producing videos with Devin, who was already House Video. Yeah, he produced a lot of her very early videos and got her traction, got millions of views on her channel and she now has a whole team, she has an entire staff of people to promote her, to manage her, to take care of her image. But it started with her And Devin creating those videos. Yeah, I'll actually say this.
I served my mission with Lindsay. Oh really? Yep. So we both served in the New York York mission at the same time.
She was English speaking though I was Spanish speaking. But she played the violin then, like pro. And I'm not surprised to see where she's at today. Yeah, I mean she's been great at that violin thing for a while.
I say that violin thing sounds sort of like she's a wonderful musician and a great performer. But those two things didn't create a celebrity out for her until she started producing videos on a small scale with Devin and driving viewership and audience herself. She was on America's Got Talent, but they said, oh, you kind of have a one trick pony, we're not going to continue on with you. Oh man, I'm not even sure they would have been right.
Like I'm not sure they were wrong. She does one thing extremely well and that plays, it plays very well on YouTube and online. You can be again, I don't mean to be pejorative, Clinton, but you can be a one trick pony and be extremely successful on social media with your one trick. Definitely.
So wow. So you've got this community of people you're associated with that now are have amassed some sort of fame or doing epic things. Right. So you did that video with orbrush.
What happened after that? We started building out the company and for a number of years I was working with the company as their in house spokesman, I suppose. I was in their videos, I was on their creative team. I would go to events and speak on their behalf.
Our campaigns were often used as we were poster child for how to market your business on YouTube. So Google invited me to speak at a conference in India and I spoke at marketing conferences all over the US and New York and Atlanta and San Francisco. Because YouTube, it's pretty well established that YouTube is a fantastic marketing channel now. In fact, for a lot of people it's a must.
You don't exist unless you have a YouTube channel. But when we started it was brand new and nobody was really using it. And so YouTube corporate wanted people to see that you can use this platform to grow your business in big and meaningful ways. And you don't have to have a ton of money behind you, you just have to be scrappy, you have to be smart.
You have to figure out how to use those systems. In fact, they gave us access early to some of their newer features like, oh man, I can't remember what it's called. The Fight it plays for pre roll, not pre roll shoot. I can't remember the name of TrueView.
That's it. They give us early access to TrueView videos. These are the ads that roll before your YouTube video that you can skip after five seconds. That was a very novel way of serving ads and we had access to that months before anybody else did because they were still trying to figure out how our power advertisers would use this.
And we had a lot of feedback for them on how to best build that tool. Yeah, I love hearing these stories of people who have been on the platform sort of since day one and have built their audience on it because they get special access and they have a whole other layer of understanding of how the platform actually works. And simply because a, they're testing stuff for the business but they're also, they're understanding the details of each update. Yeah, yeah.
And there are lots of updates. It's. It's as true now as ever has been. But we learned very quickly that you can't establish your strategies and then use those forever.
The platforms are evolving so quickly and change so much. You've got to constantly be retooling, you've got to constantly reinvent what your rules are because what works for you today probably will not work quite as well six months from now. It probably won't work at all a year or two years from now. If you're working in the social space.
These platforms are constantly evolving. You need to adapt to stay relevant. So let's talk a little bit about how Video4U eventually snowballed. So you started getting these gigs.
It sounds like. So you're racking YouTube videos, possibly commercials. Tell me a little bit more about that story. Yeah, Orebrush got a lot of exposure because our campaigns were just, they're awarding their cash deposit and so we could pour money back into growing those and got a very large viewership.
And so I started getting attention as the phase of that campaign, five people asking me to be in videos for their products. And more often than not they were trying to mine what orbrush had done. You know what, we're doing a fast talking, kind of a fantastic video and we'll sell a million of these products. Right.
That's how it works. People weren't aware of essentially the vast machine behind what we were doing. They were seeing the video and they thought the content was what was carrying this. They weren't aware of the A B testing, the investment spending, the many pieces that went into this to make it work.
But that Worked okay for me. I did a lot of different commercials for other people. And that eventually turned into not just doing the videos as an actor, but as a writer, director and producer. Because I reached a point where people were coming to me and saying, essentially, hey, I want to do a video like Warbrush has done.
Will you be in my video? And my answer, if I was gonna be honest with them, was, yeah, I can be in your video, but me appearing in your video will not help it go viral. There are a lot of things going on that you're not aware of. Let me explain you what those are.
And so I turned into essentially a video consultant where people approach me and say, I wanna promote my product. And I say, okay, here are all the things you need to consider and figure out before we launch this campaign. Producing a video and getting a good piece of content is one piece of this. There are several other pieces that need to be considered.
They're totally behind the scenes. Yeah, I've often heard that producing content, that sometimes can be the easy part to make it happen, or producing content easy, but getting it out there in front of people is the part that you really need to focus on. Yeah, people often say that content is king, and that's absolutely true. But distribution is queen.
I like that. And you cannot forget about that piece of the equation. I wish I could claim credit for that little one liner, but that is a. That is a Jeff Harmon original, I believe.
He's the guy that I worked with there at orbrush. And what's funny is I somehow this lesson didn't totally set in with me from video marketing. I, a few years ago kickstarted a documentary film that my wife and I and a handful of other people wanted to launch. And it was about bitcoin.
This new digital currency that people keep hearing about is still very poorly understood. Our goal was to launch a documentary about bitcoin. And the hook was my wife and I, then fiance, were going to live on bitcoin for the first 90 days of our honeymoon. Married life.
And through that lens, we explore the currency strengths, weaknesses. We can talk to experts and skeptics, we can talk to regulators and anarchists. And that worked very well. We have a great documentary, but I forgot about how important distribution is.
We got this great film and I thought people would just be lining up the watches as soon as we were done. It turns out that is not the case. You need to have a distribution plan in place if you want people to see your work. So what, what would be a adequate or maybe if it was simple, what would be a great way to distribute a YouTube video?
What we were doing was buying paid advertising. We were spots. So when people would search for a term, they would see our content pop up as a related video that they might want to see. But that was one facet of what we were doing.
There were multiple different angles, multiple different techniques. One thing we did in Orobrush worked quite well was we created a web series with another character. So I played orabrish guy. I had lab coat and goggles.
And it was kind of this fast talking scientist, e pitchman who was talking about the product and how great it was. We actually had another spokesman. This was an actor that we had in a six foot tall tongue costume. He was a human tongue.
And we did web series with this guy. And if you watch this web series videos, we did a video every week. It was, it was backbreaking work. It was a tough work to get those videos out on such a regular basis.
They don't explicitly push the product at all. They are primarily content. They're just content. You come and you watch because it's funny and you enjoy it.
It's not telling you to buy an or brush. But what that allows us to do was to generate an audience who were willing and even eager to come back and see our videos. So when on occasion we did have a new product or a new feature that we wanted them to be aware of, they were more than happy to watch those because they'd spent the previous weeks and months watching our funny content videos. That is a tremendous effort to do a regular web series that's really just focused on content and not on pitching a product.
But it allowed us to pitch the product so much more effectively. It was very worth it to us. We ended up discontinuing that campaign after a year and a half because there were a lot of things going on at the company. We just had to sink our resources into the efforts that we showed the greatest return.
But I still think that that web series is one of the best things we did. Interesting. I really like how it sounds like you guys just created quality content and you weren't pushing the product on people all the time. And I think that's the biggest misconception that people get with YouTube.
They view it as like TV commercial. No, buy a brand new Lexus car, you know, this financing, yada yada. It's not. I mean, the ability for people to sort of realize, oh, that's B.S.
i'm not gonna pay attention to that is really high. What can you speak to on that? Yeah, it's easy to look at YouTube and just say, oh, it's TV on the Internet. But that's just not the case.
It's important to consider the meme and its unique strengths and weaknesses. This is something I think our orange brush company that we did at the start, I think this is something we did very well, considered the meme and what it could and could not do. If you're online, that's a different setting than if you're sitting back watching a TV show. TV show might be 30 minutes or 60 minutes interrupted by commercial breaks.
And oftentimes you'll just sit through the commercial because you know your content is gonna be back soon. Maybe it's a good time for you to step out and grab a drink. But it's a different experience than if you're sitting down watching a YouTube video. On a YouTube video, you don't channel surf quite the same way.
If something is boring, you click away a fraction of a second and you immediately find other content that is way more compelling. If you want to stay relevant, there's a pattern. I heard years ago from a friend of mine who's an actor, he said, you know, if I'm creating content, I want people to pay attention and do something. What I try to do is entertain, educate, organize and mobilize.
You begin by entertaining people by giving them something that just is going to, they're going to watch because it's fun to watch, because they like watching it, they enjoy it. Whether it's, you know, heart wrenching or funny or clever or inspiring, it has some quality about it that's valuable on its own. Even if they don't go any further. What are some strategies you recommend to get that attention right away on YouTube video?
Because I imagine the amount of time you've got probably less than 10 seconds before somebody exits the video. Oh, absolutely. We mentioned TrueView videos earlier. You've got five seconds in TrueView video.
And I remember when that ad platform was new and TrueView videos first came online, movie studios started uploading their trailers just like they would normally do in a movie video. Here's the trailer and it starts with that green screen that says, this preview has been approved for all audiences. This film is rated PG13, whatever it may be. Well, that green slate takes up the whole five seconds.
I remember multiple times when I could click away before I even had the chance to see what the movie was. So you need to start with a hook. It needs to be the very first thing this is Something that broadcast news has known for a long time. You start with your most compelling stuff that gets people interested enough to stick around and learn a little bit more.
And that can be a short clip. It can be a question that you ask the audience. It can be, we did one video where I was impersonating all of the Apple executives that you see in an Apple product launch. So that sounds great.
Yeah, it was silly and dumb, but it was fun and it got people's attention. And it was at the time, very topical because Apple had just released, I think it was the iPhone4s or the iPad2 or something like that. So we did this carry video and we turned it out in less than a week after their date announcement video. And the first thing you see on the screen is all people you're about to see are played by the same actor.
And so you want to stick around and see, okay, what is this one actor going to do? What different roles, are they going to play some kind of hook like that where you capture their attention and somehow they're anticipating future things enough to stick around for it? That makes complete sense because that's just good storytelling, Right? Exactly.
How many movies have you seen that technically start at the end where the person is holed up and somebody's beating down the door and they say, gosh, how did I get here? Well, let me tell you the story. And then we roll back five days earlier and we lead into that. They're starting with that because it's a hook.
It grabs your attention quickly. And now you're asking yourself the question, like, how did we get here? There are a lot of different ways you can do that, but that's one good one. I really like that and I appreciate that point.
It'll transform some of the stuff that I personally do in my storytelling, because I think it's easy to kind of, okay, I'm just gonna push content out there and not think twice about how you should be providing an entertainment value as well. Yeah, that pattern that I mentioned, entertain, educate, organize, mobilize. It's a good one. It's one that I, you know, as soon as my friend said that in a conversation, we were talking about starting our own YouTube channel, which I never did, which is kind of ridiculous because everybody works.
And I never started my own channel. I just working for other folks and doing videos for a lot of people. But he mentioned that when we were in this discussion. And it's a.
It's a pattern that makes such good sense to me. I've always remembered it And I always try to apply it in my work when I'm doing videos, whether it be for fun or for selling a product, whatever it may be. Kickstarter entertained, orgasm applies. All right, so we covered this sort of experience you have.
What are you doing these days? Well, today I'm doing. Today I'm doing a couple things, really. I'm doing one thing that led from another project.
After I left Tourbrush, I worked on the documentary film that I mentioned. And after that was produced, I started another thing. I started a film festival. This was the Pocket Film Festival, Festival of mobile made films.
With the smartphone in your pocket, you can film and edit and distribute feature film. If you're ambitious enough, you have all the tools that normally, decades past would have taken an entire studio and millions of dollars, and now we carry them around our pockets and we don't think about it. And this was a setup for our little film festival. I ran that for a couple years and hope to continue to run it.
But a couple years in, it was very hard because I've never done event planning before. This is just an event I wanted to exist and so I decided to do it. Having no experience of how to actually put together a large scale event. It was really just kicking my butt.
It was so tough. And the long term value is definitely there and could definitely be a profitable venture. But I was having a hard time getting the finances to align. It was really just kind of from my living room operation trying to launch this scrappy startup film festival.
But from that effort, I got the attention of a local. Not local. I got the attention of a broadcasting network. By broadcasting.
They're associated with byu, where I went to school, so I knew some of the people there, and they're looking for additional content appeals to a young adult millennial audience. I use that word with air finger quotes. Millennials. Such a lucid, fine term in so many ways.
Oh. But apparently I'm one, so. Yeah, me too. So they wanted content that kills a millennial audience.
And they knew that I'd done a lot of YouTube videos, they knew that I'd done, this afternoon film that utilized ways to feature this film festival. And they said, we want content that will appeal to a young millennial audience. Can you create a show for us? And so that's what I've been working on for the better part of the last year is creating a television show.
And it's about creativity and the creative process. We feature individual creative people who are using new media, new tools, new platforms to express themselves in ways that weren't impossible 10 years ago because the tools did not exist. That could be a YouTube star, it could be an Instagram musician, it could be a Kickstarter inventor. Last week in Los Angeles, we were filming with a sculptor who does traditional sculpture.
But it's all technologically. He's microcontrollers and sensors and even incorporates ferrofluid magnetic oil into his sculpture so that when you walk up to it, it start the most counterintuitive, captivating ways. Wow. So this show hopefully will begin airing in fall, and that's consuming a lot of my time right now.
It was a big surprise that came to me, though, because I was in the midst of organizing that film festival and I thought they were gonna approach me and ask about sponsoring the festival. And they said, actually, we just wanna talk about you creating a show for us. And I have super caught off guard. Yeah, it sounds like it.
And I love seeing scenarios where you're putting in the hard work and you figure that you're going towards this one goal of, okay, you're pocket thumbnails, big hit, yada yada yada. But that actually leads you to your true destination. Yeah, in. In my short career, and I don't.
I don't feel like I have a long career, I've been working in video for maybe 10 years and YouTube video for seven of that. I've never encountered or met somebody who has had great success and knew exactly what the charted course was when they started. Everybody that I've talked to or worked with or seen or collaborated with who's had a lot of success has found that success by taking their first steps, not knowing exactly where it was going to lead them. So when we were organizing this film festival, it was not at all clear that it was going to work out.
And in fact, there were multiple occasions when, gosh, we partnered with another group to market our film festival. Because I was so overcome with the actual organizing of the event itself, I left marketing in somebody else's hands. And it was a. It was a very simple mistake.
But there was one big part of our event that just got overlooked and it didn't get marketed at all. And this was a workshop. Let's see. This was the screening of a feature film with a guest from Australia that I'd flown in for the event and literally nobody showed.
I know I'd flown this guy in from Australia. I had paid to screen a feature film at my documentary. I paid the filmmakers not insignificant amount of money and nobody came. And I kid you not, I was on the verge of.
I don't know if I've ever been that close to a nervous breakdown, but I imagine it feels a little bit like what I was experiencing that day. I had just an excruciating headache, one of the worst of my life, brought on by nothing more than the stress of me thinking about, like, what am I doing? I'm blowing so much money trying to do this. Can I even afford to do this financially, let alone emotionally and mentally?
And that was. That was definitely a low point. That film festival was a week long event and there were high points as well. We screened my feature documentary that I worked on and had a large turnout, went really well.
But in the midst of that crisis, I would not have thought, it's okay, Austin. You're going to get the best career opportunity of your life from this effort. That was not at all evident. It was.
It was only a little while later that this network approached me and said, hey, we think what you do is really interesting and that you're really dialed into to your generation. Can you create a show for us? And so now the TV show host and producer and show creator. And that was nowhere on the radar when I was in the midst of that film festival.
Low point. I'm always super intrigued by this just fact of putting yourself out there and it leads to other things. I myself had two or three failed startups, didn't work out, but during that time I developed a relatively decent network. That was one thing I was good at.
Well, I led it into doing podcasting and meeting with these people. So I put myself in the right place, the right time, and it gave me an opportunity to go somewhere else. Yeah, I read Jeff Bezos biography. The Everything Store is an unofficial biography of Jeff Bezos in Amazon.
The one thing that he's noted for saying that was repeated several times in that book was that he frequently expresses a bias toward action. If you have a choice between doing something and not doing something because you think you're being conservative and you're being careful, Jeff Bezos frequently will tell people, do something, do something rather than don't do something. You always want to take a step, even if you're not totally sure it's the right one or you're not totally sure it's the right direction, keep moving and good things will happen. Definitely.
So I'm going to put a shameless plug here, but a future episode coming up is going to be with the eighth employee of Amazon, Todd Nelson. So look forward to that one, everyone. That sounds rad. I will Totally tune into that.
I love Amazon. I know they sometimes get some hate in the press, but man, I think that company is incredible. So he's eighth employee there and he went through all the phases of Amazon, the ups and the big downs that he had no people who were millionaires to nothing overnight kind of stuff. So it should be a very interesting interview to tune into.
Awesome. But aside from that, let's keep on your story. So you're working for byu currently doing this, the show, and it's all about creative people. Yeah, it's about creating the creative process.
We create something original with them in each episode and that's a big fun part of this. I've done some creative stuff in my life, but I've never considered myself an artist. As much as I love art and self expression, I always found myself gravitating toward the business side of things. Let's make a video that sells a product or video that launches a Kickstarter.
But I'm fascinated with people who are just doing their own expressive creative work because it's meaningful to them. And so those are the folks that we're trying to find for this show. People who are expressing themselves in totally unique, interesting, novel ways, using new media, new tools, new platforms. So who's somebody that you can possibly mention that's been really interesting to you that you might have not thought would be interesting beforehand?
Possibly. We have a guest on Sean McBride on YouTube and on Snapchat. He is Sean Duras. I don't know if you know this guy or not.
He's a big time Snapchat celebrity. He's a huge Snapchat celebrity. He was one of the very first people to establish himself as a Snapchat celebrity. I think before Sean, that may have been a thing that existed, but it wasn't something that was widely publicized.
Sean was one of the first people to say, this is a new platform with new opportunities and I'm going to use this to launch myself as a media personality. What surprised me about Sean is in his videos, he very much presented like a young, fun, hip dude who's just having a good time rolling camera while he's doing it. And while those qualities are true, it is far from the whole picture. Sean is a very smart guy who knows exactly what he's doing.
And his success looks casual, but is absolutely calculated. And I love that about what he's doing. I love that this was not an accident he stumbled into. This is something that he said, no, I'm gonna figure this thing out.
I'm Gonna figure out Snapchat. Cause nobody's gonna head start on me. And so he's done that and he leveraged it into celebrity on other platforms. He now has a rapidly growing YouTube presence.
He speaks at different events. I've heard him speak and he'll tell you that like, no, this is not an accident. And you know, he's a guy in his 20s who has a wife and a child and a mortgage. He's a very responsible life and he's very good at figuring out the nuts and bolts of the systems that he works with.
But when you watch his videos, it looks like he's just skateboarding, having fun. So I love that he can, he can do both of those. He can have a good time, but also knows there's incredible opportunity here. If I, if I get my ducks in a row, I really take it seriously, which he totally does.
And he's just an interesting person and people follow interesting things. Yeah, absolutely. So you don't have to have a narrow niche brand or something like that. He's a cool skater.
He's a family man. Yeah. I've seen plenty of people try to launch themselves as media personalities. You know, I've got a YouTube channel and you watch their channel, it's like, yeah, but you're not doing anything.
You're just not that interesting. I can't bring myself to watch even a five minute video, much less the 20 minute uncut home video that you posted. Yeah, right. That may have worked for some very early youtubers.
It doesn't work today. And so I think anybody who's trying to make a splash, make a name for themselves on these social platforms today, they have to find a way to stand out, a way to be unique, a way to have their own voice, a way to be compelling in the content. And it sounds like Sean sort of saw, hey, this is an opportunity to do a land grab. You know, I'm going to grab land on this platform and get as far ahead as I possibly can on my ship.
Yep. And it wasn't accidental. He, he, you know, it's interesting, Snapchat has such a different platform. And I mentioned before, you have to consider the strengths and weaknesses of your unique platform that you're using.
Snapchat does not have good discovery mechanisms. So if I'm on Snapchat, I love Snapchat. That's great. But it's not easy to find out about other people who are snapping their lives.
It's not built into the platform. And so Sean took his success there and started Seeding stories to major press outlets, Business Insider or Forbes or others, where he would contact the reporters there and say, hey, this is what I've accomplished on Snapchat. I know this is an area of interest for you because you've written about Snapchat in the past. Here's a potential story in the one run.
And the way he got discovered by such a wide audience is by figuring out discovery mechanisms outside the platform. It's that kind of creative thinking, I think is propelled him to the place where he is now. And that's the kind of creative thinking that we were doing earlier on in Warburg. So it propelled us from this place of obscurity to being poster child for YouTube video promotion.
Yeah, I love how in today's world anybody could technically become a celebrity almost overnight. Push a lot, maybe release 50 days before you have your big success, but that it's totally possible by your own means. Yeah, there's a wealth, a world of tools available to somebody if they're ready to put in the time, the critical thinking to figure out how to use them effectively. A lot of people stumble into Internet celebrity.
They have a video that goes viral and they have a flash in the pan Internet career where they are a hot item for a very short time if people want to. If people have a lasting career on social platforms, it takes a kind of methodical thinking that Sean does very well, that Devin Supertra Gram does very well, that other social stars do very well. It doesn't happen on accident that you have staying power. Yeah, no, that's 100% true.
And I think the double rainbow guy is evidence of that. Right? Yeah, I saw, I met him at VidCon, the video conference in LA a little while after his video came out. It was such a thrill to meet him because he's such a funny, interesting, quirky guy.
But there was no more content in the pipeline. He didn't start an ongoing web series that I'm aware of. He didn't start any other campaigns, any more ongoing efforts. And so now that's a historical artifact.
Oh, you guys remember the double rainbow video? Man, that was hysterical. It would never happen. Right.
Like there's not more to the story. I think it's interesting how so much of this world is actually kind of the same as maybe the music industry and a little bit just the general film industry is that you can't or you can't have one hit wonders that occur. Yeah, totally. And I get the same kind of strategy, same kind of thought process or same sort of, I say Nature of beast, maybe.
Yeah, yep. It happens a lot. And I've met, I've met a lot of people who've gone both ways, who've been flashing pan success or who have seen that as a launch point, a place where they can begin their long term career and they put in the effort to make it last. Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure.
And it's, I think a lot of times down to people who are willing to put themselves out there in the situations that would allow them to. I'm using the word a lot to level up, let's say. Yep, yep. And you kind of have to constantly be leveling up if you're going to stay relevant.
It's, it's not, it's not optional to continue to do the same kind of thing. It's, it's something you have to keep reinventing and refiguring how to go along. Definitely. And this thought is just passing my mind, I kind of want to say it, but our ability to produce something of relatively high quality today at next to no cost is unbelievable.
Yep. Especially for video. The video, you know, I started fellow is entirely centered around this idea that you have all the tools you need in your pocket right now to create high quality, compelling, interesting, great pieces of content, whether it be short videos, whether it be 6 second vines, 15 second Instagrams, short web videos, or feature length films. In 2015 at Sundance, there was a feature film called Tangerine that was shot entirely on an iPhone.
And it, it's, it's cinema, it is great film. It's, it's high quality filmmaking in, in, in the most real sense. Like you watch this on a theater screen and it deserves to be there because it's good content. But most people don't think about that with the simple and common tools they have.
It's really just in how you use them, how willing you are to, to put in the effort and to refine your techniques, et cetera. Definitely. I think actually when I was in high school and I took two or three years of film class and the teacher would check out a camera test go, hey, here's your camera that you're using for the semester. Yada yada yada.
How's that high school again right now, why would you ever do that? Like, yeah, you guys all have brand new iPhones anyways, go make film like that. Reality now is that you have the exact same power, if not more on your cell phone device than I had with a new camera and a brand new imac in high school. Yeah.
And it's crazy to think about how rapidly these tools are getting better. You know, in a few years the camera that you carry on in your pocket will be inarguably better than the first digital cinema cameras. The first award winning film that was using digital was Slumdog Millionaire. Where it was a commercial success, it was a critical success.
And when that film was in production, people were very skeptical about it because it was digital. They're like, ah, can you really make a feature film and have it look cinematic if you're using digital? It's kind of crazy. You don't think that now.
But that was a serious question that was asked. And when it won Academy Awards, the question was answered, yes, clearly you can. And every year that passes that is increasingly true that the tools to do great content are totally democratized and widely available. The question comes down to how willing and ready and able are you to put in the time and the effort and the critical thinking to do the research to figure out the techniques to make great stuff?
Because you can do it. The tools are there and they're cheap or free, but it's still going to take time. It's still going to take effort. It's still going to take putting yourself into work.
Yeah, you gotta be out there to do it and make it happen. If you think, oh, I posted three blog posts or three videos, you gotta put some effort in after that. It's not like overnight success unless you're that one in a million that happens to get picked up and hits the right algorithm on YouTube or something like that. Yep.
And even like we said, there's one in a million blow up viral videos, they don't really mean a whole lot unless you sustain the effort. Yeah. Possibly puts you in a worse position. Oh yeah, yeah.
There are people. In fact, I was, I was looking at a trailer for a documentary film. I was talking about a documentary filmmaker not long ago. He showed me a trailer for his film which was about that.
It was about Chris Crocker. Who. He was the Leave Britney alone guy. You remember that video?
Yes. Leave Britney alone. Yes, I totally remember that video. Right.
That video blew up and a lot of people thought it was really funny and maybe, maybe it's ultimately proved to be for his benefit. Maybe he has great life and career and lifestyle as a product of that video. I think for a while his life was probably really unhappy because of that video. Hey, you're a guy.
Oh yeah, yeah. Because it blew up and probably wasn't able to talk about anything else with people because that was all that they could think about. So it can be a blessing of a curse. It's really just how you use it, what it means to you, and what you're gonna do with it.
Yeah. So everybody's listening. Know two things. A, be cautious with what you put out there, but B, go out there and put lots of stuff out there.
So that's a mixed message. Yeah. I find that so much of life and business and success really is a paradox. Exactly.
Like what you're saying, where you do need to be careful, but you also need to be proactive and go do things. And, you know, you want your content to be excellent, you want to be as good as it humanly can be, but it's never going to be perfect. And so you need to put it out readily. There's a lot of dichotomies like this where it's like, well, it's just going to be really hard and you're going to have to navigate that pretty much on your own.
I wish you the best of luck. Yeah, good luck on that one. Have some fun. There's not a clear silver bullet answer to a lot of stuff.
It's just a lot hard work. Yeah. And I once again go back to the point of how it's like maybe a TV series or something like that. It's like, oh, this great new TV series is gonna be this and this, and it flops.
Yep. It's the same kind of nature of the beast. Yep. Yeah.
This show, the show that I'm working on, is a tremendous opportunity for me. I'm very excited about it, and I'm very happy to be working on it. When people ask me how it's going, it's like, oh, man, it's so hard. There are a thousand things moving right now, and I have to keep track of all of them, make sure they're moving the right direction at the right speed and that.
You know, we have guests who suddenly can't do the episode that we're filming with them. I gotta find somebody else. And the network has certain constraints and we have scheduling constraints all over the place, and there are logistical concerns with. Okay, when we filming this location, do we have full crew that's available on that day?
It's incredibly challenging, and there's no way I can do this on my own. I think we have a very talented team, but I was just talking to somebody earlier today and they're like, oh, man, it's a ton of work. And he would say, it's like, it sounds like a ton of work to do everything you're doing. It is.
But it's work that I want to be doing. Yeah, it's, you know, you're not going to find success that doesn't entail a fair amount of work and a fair amount of effort. But if I'm picking this is the one I want to do. Oh, for sure.
And I completely agree with the whole entire doing what you're passionate about or doing something that you feel like isn't work and having a solid team. Which leads into my next question. We talked about this before, but you've had some experiences in selecting both a good and a bad team. What would you recommend possibly to a startup in selecting the right co founders or team members?
Oh man, that's such a critical consideration. Maybe just because we're having this conversation for podcast, I feel like I'm stealing out a lot of advice. I don't know if that's really exactly what, like platitude from somebody who's supposedly been there and done that. I'm gonna give one more piece of advice.
It's incredibly critical and important to think about and be very careful about who your partners are in your ventures. There are people out there who can probably start a new venture on their own. They have the myriad skills necessary to do that. I am not one of those people.
I have a handful of skills in a few select areas that I feel very confident in. But as soon as you get outside of those areas, I'm not capable enough to pull it off. I am not cameraman. I make films.
I'm filmmaker. But if you handed me a nice camera and said, go ahead and film this, I said, oh man, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know how to use this thing. I hire other people to do that.
I work with other people, do this. So if you're one of those entrepreneurs that do everything on your own, I'm incredibly jealous of you. More power to you. That's fantastic.
Good job. And if you can develop those skills and be that person, great. If you're like me, and I suspect that you are like most people, you have to work with other people. You have to work with people who have complementary skill sets and abilities.
And it's like, this is a trite cliche, but it's like a marriage. And I don't know if you guys have been in good or bad relationships. I have done both. And when you're in a bad relationship, life is miserable.
And when you're in a good relationship, it's hard to. It's hard to get you down. It's hard to keep anyone down who's got a really supportive, wonderful partner in life and business is exactly the same way. On the Skill Festival, I have a fantastic partner right now, and he's the same guy that I'm co creating the show with.
And I just found that we have very complimentary skill sets. But when I started that film festival with another guy, he worked at a company that had outdoor inflatable screens for viewing films outside. And he was a marketing guy. And I wanted to do this film festival about mobility and freedom.
And I was like, oh, this is a partnership. We'll team up and we'll start this festival. And that was a great idea, but it just didn't work out because for a variety of reasons, one of which was it wasn't a priority for him. In the time that I met him and we got started on this film festival, he met somebody, started dating them, got engaged, got married, and that took up all of his time.
So we had said, we're gonna start this film festival. Yay. Great. He immediately meets somebody.
He gets totally busy in his personal life, and then the film festival date is upon us. And it's like, oh, man, I've done most of this by myself and I'm about to die from over exhaustion. I gotta. I gotta find another partner.
This is not working out. And that kind of thing has happened a couple times in my career where the wrong partnerships can totally scale your efforts. You can't afford to be carrying somebody. You need as much help as you can get.
And so this new partner that I have at the film festival is an old friend of mine who showed up like a week before we were doing our first festival. And he said, hey, man, I'm not doing anything right now. I need some help. I was like, oh my gosh, you might need help.
Absolutely. I need so much help. How much time do you have? And he pretty much worked with me every waking hour for the next week so we could pull together this film festival.
And at the end of it all, I said like, okay, the only reason that worked is because you showed up and helped me. Do you want to be partners moving forward on this? And it's worked out very well since then, but you got to be partners with people who are going to be down there in the trenches with you. I've had partners in the past who they view our partnership as.
They tell me what to do. They have recommendations for how I should do things differently. That is not a partnership. I've had partnerships in the past where, you know, somebody else is out selling accounts and then I have to, I have to deliver on a lot of promises.
That's not really a great partnership. You need somebody who's willing to work very closely with you, to communicate with you very regularly, to get very clearly on the same page with the same goals, and to divide and conquer from there. Man, partnerships can totally make or break your venture. Oh, I completely agree.
And I've had one startup in Pacific that I was part of, where part of was just poor. Team dynamic wasn't set up correctly and things fell apart rather rapidly. So having that person at your side, that's both your support, your sidekick, your friend, all that matters a lot. Yeah.
You know, I mentioned the Sacma film we did with something like we were living on bitcoin. What an insane decision that was. And we knew it was a crazy stunt, but that was the whole idea. We'll get attention for the stunt, and when people come to see a young couple of Internet funny money, they'll walk away understanding this fascinating new technology that's probably going to touch all our lives.
Not distant future. But we quickly learned, my wife and I, because this is right after we got married, we quickly learned that we were pretty good to work together as a team because when I was feeling totally overwhelmed with this, she stepped up to the plate and was very much my strength and was like, no, it's okay. We can figure this out. We can do this.
And then the, the inverse happened as well. When she was feeling totally down the dumps and totally overcome, I was like, it's okay. We can do this. We can handle it.
We can figure it out. Let's just, you know, take it one step at a time. That's the kind of partnership, at least for me, that's also I need in a business partnership. I need somebody who can.
Who can be the end of my Yang. There you go. Young couples. Start a YouTube channel together and you'll be closer.
Start a YouTube channel together and you'll know quickly whether you will survive as a couple. Yes. Because it's. It's overcoming problems, it's figuring out challenges, it's figuring out how to deal with each other when you.
When you don't want to deal with the stuff in front of you. Honestly, doing that project, I think strengthened our relationship just as a married couple, let alone the business side of it. Awesome. Awesome.
Well, Austin, I want to move into some rapid fire questions here. I have for you. Okay. Kidding me.
I have one from A Snapchat follower. Their name is Bucky. And the question is, how do you come up with ideas for your YouTube content? Ooh, good question, Bucky.
Keep up with trends. I don't know what kind of content you might be doing, but trends are very relevant. If you can catch the wave on a certain trend, then that can do a lot to propel you into a wider viewership. Collaborative projects on YouTube are really valuable.
If you find somebody with an audience that's similar to yours but distinct, then you can collaborate with that person. You lend value to them, they lend value to you, and you cross pollinate your audiences. And also, I just keep your eyes open. If you're somebody who's creating content for YouTube, hopefully you consider yourself a creative person.
If you find an idea fun or funny or interesting, play with that idea, test it out. There's a very, very good chance that you're not the only one. Do you think something's hysterical or compelling or interesting or mind blowing or, you know, heart wrenching, Whatever it may be, very, very good chance that other people feel the same way if you do a good job producing the content around that idea. Wow, what a high quality answer.
Hope you heard that, Bucky. I'll make sure I send a message saying it's in this episode. Awesome. Next question.
What is your favorite movie? Ooh, that's a good question. You gotta have one that you've maybe watched more often. Okay, this.
I could give a dozen answers to this, which is not what you're looking for me as your favorite movie, but the answer that we go with right now is Exit through the Gift Shop. Have you ever heard this movie? I honestly think another guest might have said it at one point. Really?
I've heard it before. Honestly, I don't remember that in my head, like, what exactly it is, but let's hear it. Okay. It's so good.
It is a documentary about Banksy, the street artist. But it's kind of this Trojan horse because you go into it thinking like, oh, it's a documentary about Banksy. That sounds great. I'll watch it and learn about Banksy.
It ends up being not at all about Banksy. It ends up being about a friend of his who is arguably a more fascinating character. And at the end of the movie, you're left with all of these questions about what is art and creativity? Is it still art if it is commercial?
Can commercial work be artistic? If we commercialize art, is it no longer artistic? And then all of those questions that you have are also reflected in the film itself. You're watching a documentary, but actually at the end of the documentary, you start questioning the nature of that film.