Escape 9-to-5 and Go Full-Time on YouTube (Deep Dive)

in 2023 it grew by 300,000 and then so far this year it's grown by about another 330,000 so how are full-time YouTubers making over $100,000 per year I made a video the day chat GPT came out explaining what it was that video went and did a million views finding what worked and then continuing to double down and seeing if I can make it work again and again and again I was making these videos about these things I was excited about without ever making a penny and without any expectation of this becoming a career for me

it accidentally became a career for me in this episode of the think media podcast we're going to be talking about some of the changes that have been happening on YouTube and even the strategy and the pacing and different things that are happening with video editing and some of the advice that just doesn't work anymore we're also going to be talking about why smart creators are building websites and strategic email newsletters plus we'll get into some tactical advice around SEO the new thumbnail split testing tool how to find your Niche and I'm super excited because our

guest is really an AI expert AI Guru and he's going to be sharing some of the content creation tools that will save you time and give you an unfair Advantage as well as even just practical questions like should you change titles and thumbnails on old videos is that worth doing so this is really going to be a master class for anyone that wants to do YouTube part-time or full-time and really turn it into a profitable profitable business that's also High impact adding value to people's lives and changing lives now my guest today is Matt wolf

he is crushing it across multiple different platforms his main YouTube channel it's got 635,000 subscribers running like 1.3 million views a month but he also has a website that curates AI tools futur tools. he's the co-host of the next wave podcast and also just has a long history in content Creation in Media in podcasting so this one's going to be rich my friends lots of nutrients in the soil of this conversation Matt welcome to the show yeah thanks for having me thanks for the intro I'm excited to talk about this stuff well let's kick off

the conversation first from your perspective how is YouTube changing um that's a a good question so I've been I've been on YouTube since 2009 but I've only really started to gain some real traction over the past three-ish years um so from what I've seen on YouTube I've noticed just from my own experience that the more like raw videos seem to be doing better right like for a while you had the real like polished real you know Mr Beast and the uh casy n stats and the the like high production quality videos were were really doing

well and now I feel like it sort of shifted where you're seeing the like you know uh penguin zzer and the L wigs and the Sam suic and you know stuff like that are really what's taking off I feel like what's happened is there's been this sort of like pivot towards people wanting to relate to the creators right they want to see real people they want to feel like they're somebody they can have a beer with right somebody that they can sit down and hang out with in real life and that's what I feel I've

noticed over the last like several years playing around with YouTube is that the the higher production value stuff doesn't seem to be as valuable to people as the like this is just a real dude who I feel like I know because I watch his videos that seems to be the biggest change in my opinion and so then how has that practically shown up in your content how are you applying that well I don't know if I would say I've you know methodically applied that I would say that's kind of the style of content I've always

done for the last like 15 years but since that sort of change started to take effect and we started to see that that transition on YouTube my channel sort of uh algorithmically fell into that Loop where it started to get more attention right you know I can't give all the credit to that right AI had a a a big part of it right like I my Channel's mostly around AI I was talking about a lot of this kind of stuff before anybody else was talking about it back at the end of 2022 AI got really

really popular so good timing good luck there's a lot of that involved with my channel but I think because I've sort of always taken that approach of like I just turn on the camera and talk do a little bit of minimal editing and throw it out there that style when it started to pick up steam that was how my videos already were okay so right now when you are planning your next video what type of strategies go into your process lately I've been really focused on like just the AI news that's the sort of bread

and butter of what my channel does and so I'm pretty much working on the video that I release every Friday throughout the entire week so my process starts on Monday I get up every single day I review all the news going on in the tech world I literally spend about 50% of my day every day just researching the latest AI news reading the latest AI research papers that came out just sort of acclimating myself on a daily basis with what's going on in the world of AI and what I'm going to talk about and I'm

sort of stacking that stuff throughout the week so come Friday when it comes time to release the here's the breakdown of AI news for the week I've literally got the video all you know laid out and ready for Friday all I do is I open up all the tabs of everything I'm going to talk about and just one at a time I start going through each piece and usually I record way more news than I actually end up sharing I sort of record like a two hour video on Friday of like here's everything across the

AI world and then when I go back and review my video I kind of go nah that was boring that's not going to be interesting to people and I start chopping stuff out so my two hours ends up being you know 25 minutes that's interesting and then what do you do with the other 50% of of your day your as in your current role of uh operating your channel and everything else you're doing yeah so I've got the I'm basically doing a lot of research I'm on a lot of phone calls right I'm talking to

a lot of the developers of the AI tools that are out there um I'm going on a lot of podcasts I'm doing interviews I have the next wave podcast where we're interviewing a lot of other people in the AI world so I've that going on on a daily basis um I've got the Future tools website where I share all the AI tools that I find interesting so I'm actually looking at and experimenting with tools throughout the day to see if they make a good fit to go on the website I'm on Twitter a lot probably

a little bit too much I spend a lot of time on Twitter a lot of the AI Tech news seems to kind of drop first on Twitter so I'm kind of addicted to checking in to see if there's anything that I might be missing out on so I spend a lot of time uh browsing Twitter and having conversations there um lately I've started to experiment with a little bit more uh YouTube shorts and then also repurposing them over to Instagram reals so I'm shooting like little 50 55 second shorts U and that sort of thing

throughout the week as well so there's there's a lot that I'm doing on a daily basis um I I pretty much work uh barely like nine to five I'm putting in about eight hours a day uh but about half of that day is research and the other half is just doing the work right working on the website working on the newsletter uh making little short videos getting on Twitter interacting with the community that sort of stuff and so this next question is when did you start and I know we were just talking about I mean

the First Youtube channel I did was for my local church 2007 you started YouTube in 2009 yeah yeah like this is an OG Meetup you know been on YouTube for a while but maybe you you could touch on your your history and your background but when did you start in regards to if you will this this media business you're running right now yeah so I actually started creating online content in 2007 while I was still working in my day job right so 2007 I started a Blog in fact I think you recently chatted with Joe

fear one of my my buddies uh I used to co- a podcast with him him and I actually started a business together in 2007 where we started blogging on personal finance and health right we had two different blogs um I ran the personal finance blog he ran the health blog and we grew those blogs so that was like my entry into content marketing was 2007 I launched my YouTube channel in 2009 um initially when I started the the YouTube channel it was mostly focused around digital marketing I was learning SEO I was learning copywriting uh

how to build landing pages uh I got into Facebook ads and Google ads and I studied all of the stuff in the digital marketing world so the YouTube channel actually started out talking about that stuff I've always kind of been like this tools guy I like finding the latest tools to sort of systematize and automate things and so that's what the channel was about in the beginning was here's a cool tool to automate this thing in your marketing or in your business and then over time you know the the latest and greatest automation tools were

AI tools so around 2022 when a lot of the AI stuff started to Bubble Up I already had content out there around AI related marketing tools right so it's always been focused around the tool stuff but it wasn't until I started talking about AI that the channel just sort of went exponential what advice would you give to people on this question of should I pivot my Channel How big would you say the channel grew pre 2022 how you're 635,000 subscribers plus um what was it at in 2022 when you kind of went all in on

AI so I had at the beginning of 2022 I had 1,200 subscribers um at the end of 2023 I think I passed 300,000 so in 2023 1,2 1,200 so in 2023 it grew by 300,000 and then so far this year it's grown by about another 330,000 yikes that man this a cool story because so so you know what 10 years or almost a decade to get to 1,200 subscribers but then all of a sudden boom right time right place right history right intersection of your study and your passion and and the timing in the world

and it's a good that's a good lesson for listeners too it's like man you don't want to give up Before the Breakthrough and there's something about uh and that and it might be a lot longer than you think but if you're positioned if you're ready but what I'm also interested I guess in a way 1,200 subscribers isn't like a lot to Pivot from someone who's like why are you no longer digital marketing SEO but I'm curious your advice because people ask that a lot like I want to change niches I can see the connection of

the evolution from tools to tools and then go going to AI but would you what advice would you have to somebody else who's like man I'm thinking about pivoting my YouTube channel it's going in one direction should I make a drastic change and go in a different direction yeah I mean if you're not interested in the topic you were talking about I don't think there's any point in continuing to try to create content that you're not passionate about anymore um for me I've always been excited about tools and when AI came along that was just

like another level excitement and so the advice that I would give is I when the AI stuff really worked I just decided to double down right like my goal when I started making AI content wasn't to sort of pivot to be an AI Channel my goal was to keep on making videos about Cool Tools and cool workflows and cool systems that I'd come across online but the thing is I made one AI video about I think mid Journey right that video was my first video to pass like 50,000 views and I went oh people like

this AI stuff if I made another video about mid Journey that one did well chat chat GPT came out I made a video the day chat GPT came out explaining what it was that video went and did a million views right that was the first video that I ever made where I published the video at like 10 o'clock at night before going to bed one night woke up the next morning opened my phone to look at my YouTube stats and it had broken 100,000 uh views just literally overnight in the time that I was asleep

that was the first video I ever had that broke 100,000 views first video I have that ever broke seven figures in views and so I went okay people are really really liking these AI related videos I'm just going to keep doubling down on AI so when that happened I made like three videos in three days that just kept on compounding it getting bigger and bigger I went all right I'm gonna do this every single day until I run out of ideas so for about I think 38 or 40 days straight I published a new video

to YouTube every single day about some other AI tool or some other AI process that I'd come across just to see what was going to work what people were going to gravitate towards and the stuff that worked I just kept on doubling down on and making more of that content and the stuff that didn't work I just went okay that concept isn't working I'm not going to do those videos anymore so for me it was all about just finding what worked and then continuing to double down and seeing if I can make it work again

and again and again now I'm curious when did you go full-time and that's maybe kind of a weird question because you've had different businesses in evolution of being in content marketing for a while so you mentioned full-time job back in 2007 and kind of the side hustle of a Blog personal finance and health and getting into digital marketing when did you when were you able to leave your 9-to-5 job and then what would you consider you could Define it yourself full-time as Matt wolf right now what you're doing right so I actually quit my day

job back in 2009 so 2007 was when I started getting into content marketing 2009 was when I went all right I I just need to sort of burn the ships and go all in on this so I wasn't making enough money to go full-time in 2009 what I did I would not recommend to anybody I was I was making I don't know 500 bucks a month off my content marketing business with Joe and I went well if I quit my job and go full-time maybe I can really ramp this up and make a lot more

money um so that's what I did uh it took another good like six months or so right I was you know I was married at the time my wife had a decent job uh so for for about six months I was living off my wife's paycheck a little bit um but yeah it it it it didn't uh overnight Skyrocket my income that's for sure but what I did early on was I so Joe and I we had these blogs that were making a few hundred bucks a month and it was working out well and so

is that affiliate marketing affiliate offers or what yeah so we had affiliate offers we were at at the time they had what was called uh text link ads where companies would come and like pay you to put a link on on their site eventually Google stopped allowing it it was like a little SEO hack that people would do they would go buy back links on other people's sites so people would buy back links on our sites um and then we also did you know Google AdSense banners and things like that on our site um so

it was making a few hundred bucks a month and when I quit my job I went I'm going to go and teach how I was making a couple hundred bucks a month you know people would probably love to just have a little side hustle where they can make two or 300 extra bucks a month pay their car payment or whatever through having a little side blog that they spend you know a couple hours a week on so I went and created a course called the WordPress classroom which took me a good like six months or

so to build and when I launched that course that's when I actually started making money that replaced my day job money that took me about six months or so before I got to a point where that course was selling to a point where I can actually replace the day job money and then you know over over between 2019 and 2022 Joe and I were just trying everything right we had we had an agency where we built funnels for people we had an agency where we uh did video marketing for people we did a lot of

affiliate marketing we bought Google ads to landing pages that promoted affiliate offers uh you name it we tried it we tried e-commerce stores we were playing around with every you know we bought like every course that was out there about different marketing strategies we hung out on the warrior Forum to see what people were talking about on that site and we were just going all right let's let's see what business model we can make stick and it wasn't until 2022 that I really found the thing that I was like all right this is this is

sort of what I was put here to do and so 2019 to 2022 was it just kind of tight your full-time still but like kind of like a little money here a little money there trying to kind of get your Solid Ground of like what's the brand what's the future yeah it was it was definitely up and down right we had uh we had months with our agency where we were just really really crushing it and doing really well and then we had months where we had no clients and we were begging some of our

old clients to come back and work with us again we we built these affiliate sites that um we got really good at running Google ads we had a friend who's just like an expert at Google ads and he showed us how to run Google ads and so we started building these affiliate sites that promoted affiliate products and then running Google ads to these affiliate sites and we had like a two-year stretch where those just really really really like crushed it and then they fell off and stopped working I don't know if it was algorithm changes

or you know people's taste changing or what but they you know they had we had years and months where stuff was working well and then years and months where it wasn't working well luckily it sort of all averaged out me and Joe were never really super dumb with our money so when the when stuff wasn't working out we luckily had some savings and stuff was working out we were banking money we've always been pretty good about that sort of thing uh but yeah there was definitely some some rough stretches in there do you remember your

first six figure year and I guess you know if you're comfortable sharing you could share generically you know there's a difference between Top Line and bottom line so if we're saying you know how content creators and people in the creater economy are earning $100,000 a year making over $100,000 a year Well in some cases and it might be like and at the end of the year they're negative 22 because you know like you can do ad spend you can do a lot of stuff an agency like there's a totally difference between gross income of course

in net so I guess however You' want to Define it like when you really felt like whoa you know I hit six six figures uh when was that yeah so the first year that I ever did over six figures was I believe 2013 2014 something like that I don't remember the exact year but the the course that I was selling the WordPress classroom I actually rebranded it to learn to blog because you know WordPress is a trademark I got some advice that maybe you shouldn't have a trademark as part of your own brand name so

rebranded it tolearn blog.com that's a good tip by the way for listeners uh so I Rebrand branded it to learn blog.com uh had a business partner working on that with me and my business partner went and hired somebody to run Facebook ads for us he found just like a genius agency that was really good at Facebook ads and they started running Facebook ads for learnto blog.com and when he started running Facebook ads the the business jumped to where it was doing about 60,000 a month in sales um but that was on the back of about

$30,000 a month in ad spend so uh just keep that in mind but yeah the first time I ever did that was with learn to blog I actually ended up selling that business in 2015 which sort of also gave me some of that Runway I had to do some more experimenting man I love that story and so then that kind of brings us to 2022 and once once that fast growth started it became clear is that what you're saying that then it was like okay I I just hit that flywheel or that that takeoff moment

and now the kind of views you're pulling the size of your channel you grew 300,000 subscribers approximately in 2023 another 300,000 this year plus and so what is the pie chart percentag of your income streams for today's business I would say right now 50 to 60% is from sponsor ship Revenue um sponsorship is definitely the biggest chunk um I like to go after long-term sponsors so most of the time it's either six to 12 months contracts with the sponsor so I can really learn the product really understand it um and and really do right by

the sponsor but also you know I want to I want to be very consistent with the audience if I like a product and uh I talk to a sponsor about having that product I want to make sure that it's a product that I feel like is a good fit for the audience and also I know I can work with longterm the sponsorships are uh one of the biggest chunks of it um YouTube ad Revenue has gotten pretty significant as well um YouTube ad Revenue generates in the five figures a month for me every month now

um affiliate marketing would probably be the third I'm having a hard time with the percentages probably 55 60% sponsorships another 25% would be AdSense revenue and then affiliate marketing from future tools mostly I don't do any affiliate marketing on the YouTube channel really but Future tools is an affiliate play and then um I've got some equity in some companies as well but that's more like long-term exit strategy for down the road so I I have a few companies that I advis for in the AI space that basically brought me on board because they know I

keep my finger on the pulse of like the latest AI news and tools and what's out there I get on a once a month call with them and they're like all right just give us the lay of the land once a month I give them the lay of the land and and I earn Equity as as a result of that those are really the big things I do some speaking here and there um so but the speaking is you know fairly rare I'll do two or three speaking gigs a year that some of them are

paid most of them aren't um and yeah I think that that pretty much covers it all yeah I don't do any courses anymore I kind of I I sort of lost interest in making the courses not that I don't think it's a great business model it was just um more work on my plate that I was willing to take on with all of the other stuff I had going when you're powerfully positioned because of your AI brand and knowledge and imersion for this Equity advisor opportunity because if you were to kind of paint a big

picture some people are calling you know this AI Revolution as significant as the Industrial Revolution do you believe that I do yeah I absolutely do um I think uh I think a lot of people's timelines might be a little optimistic on how you know how soon we're going to get to some of the predictions they're making but yeah I definitely think you know 10 years from now is going to look completely different than what the world looks like today you found your Niche I'm actually want to kind of take it back to your story and

just maybe putting some context around the lessons of your journey because again Goldman Sachs said that the crater economy is going to be it's going to double in the next three years from about a $250 billion industry to a half a trillion dollar industry however they're measuring that that includes Creator startups I'm sure AI startups are included in there Adobe tools Opus clip you know these kinds of companies and of YouTube itself and creater economy being much bigger than YouTube but there's this massive growth in the space and um there's real opportunity it's real practical

but when we also really look at your story this is not getrich quick nor is it overnight success so in the pursuit of for that person that's like man I want to I want to you know build a six figure in I want to go fulltime whatever six figures you might be broke if you're living in Manhattan you know downtown versus that also 56k a year could be lifechanging depending on where you're at and could create Freedom so what do you think is just kind of the mindset and that is necessary when pursuing earning money

full-time from media from a YouTube channel and things like that you know for me I'm I'm probably going to sound fairly cliche here right but for me I was always just sort of chasing the thing that was exciting to me right like I never wanted to be that guy that went oh the golf Niche is making a lot of money maybe I should make videos about golf I don't even play golf but there's money there right so like I never wanted to be that so for me it was always always chasing that thing that excited

me um in the early days when I when I left my job in 2009 it was the digital marketing stuff I was obsessed with SEO and Google ads and Facebook ads and uh copywriting and all that sort of stuff like I just I was obsessed with learning it and trying to understand the human psychology to make my product sell better I was just obsessed with that stuff um you know fast forward to 2022 and AI started to Bubble Up on the scene and I started coming across more of these tools and some of these Founders

started showing me some of these tools behind the scenes that um you know weren't released to the public yet and that was just like another level of excitement for me of like this this is amazing I am nerding out over this stuff this is like my new favorite thing in the world and so for me it's always been about creating the content that I get excited about and a lot of the feedback I get in you know comments when when they're not the you know the trolly negative comments the good comments are usually like we

love your excitement we love how passionate you get about this stuff you know we can feel that you genuinely love what you're talking about and for me that's that's what it's all been about is just like I I am super excited about this and to be honest like if if I wasn't super excited about it like I I wouldn't be doing it anymore so hold on I gotta I gotta like think through how I want to say this um like I was making videos on YouTube for 10ish years with a 100 views per video and

not even being monetized on YouTube right so I was making these videos about these things I was excited about without ever making a penny and without any expectation of making a penny from it right and when I was doing that without any expectation of this becoming a career for me it accidentally became a career for me this episode is brought to you by streamyard streamyard is our go-to platform here at think media for live streaming to Facebook and YouTube and for recording our video podcast it has an incredibly easyto use interface for built-in branding transitions

text lower thirds and seamlessly bringing on guests and they just added an awesome new feature called local recording this allows you to take the quality to another level by separating out your audio and video from your guests giving you more control over your content for later use this feature is perfect for video and podcast creators and so to get a special deal on streamyard right now and to see all the features that are included just go to stream withth think.com that is stream withth think.com because people sort of discovered the videos saw how passionate I

was about them started sharing them with friends next thing I know this is what I do full-time is fully make these YouTube videos so it's you know for me it's just been that that that passion that's really kept on driving me and if I didn't have that passion I you know I would have never gotten to the point where it actually was monetizable I love that Obsession and passion and finding something that you are genuinely curious about um fueled you for 10 years getting about a hundred views of video but also your persistence and consistency

paid off because then it became right time right place and now in the last couple years your growth has been incredible you have though studied digital marketing and business and it would seem that you've had been very intentional of building a media brand and a media strategy around the growth of your YouTube channel can you break down how you think about your website your newsletter and how those all integrate together and this is a model people are doing it differently but there's success leaves Clues and in the Creator economy we see different creators doing similar

models what is that media strategy explain how you're doing that yeah so I I mean that was actually one of the more methodical things that I I sort of went into was I knew I needed to have a mailing list right if if you study anything about digital marketing at all literally the number one piece of advice any digital marketer is going to give you grow a mailing list you need to have that owned audience YouTube could shut you down anytime Facebook could shut you down anytime I knew from the very beginning I need to

focus on growing a mailing list no matter what um the other thing I want to do is I wanted to make sure I had some sort of useful tool some sort of useful resource that people can go and use that wasn't necessarily just my content and the reason for that is I needed something that in the future is potentially sellable the Matt wolf YouTube channel is never going to sell that's never a business that I can exit from someday and let somebody take over and run for me uh it's it's too tied to me personally

right so I had this sort of three-pronged approach when I started was I want my content to be the sort sort of main marketing channel that people discover me from I want the newsletter to be the way that I can send people back to my content and that I wanted a useful resource for people to be able to go and use and share with other people and uh that would they would find valuable so I created the Future tools website the Future tools newsletter and then the Matt wolf YouTube channel and all three of them

feed each other right like the YouTube channel tells people to subscribe to the newsletter and it tells people to check out future tools Future tools drives people to the YouTube channel drives people to the newsletter newsletter drives people back to both of those platforms so all three of them are like super symbiotic where they're all sort of driving traffic between each other and what ended up happening was the Future tools website became insanely well SEO optimized it was one of the first sites that was sort of organizing and filtering these AI tools to where it

got to this point where if you were to search for any AI tool maybe the tool itself would be the number one ranked thing in Google the number two ranked site would be the Future tools listing for that product so the Future tools website I launched that in December of 2022 and within three months it was getting a million visitors per month right and most of that was from SEO it I kickstarted it with the YouTube channel but once the YouTube channel started driving traffic to it the you know the Google search algorithm picked it

up and now Google is driving most of the traffic to it so now Google's driving the traffic to the Future tools website the Future tools website is capturing leads putting them on my newsletter and now my newsletter is driving people back to my YouTube channel so no matter which way you sort of find me you're finding the other things that I'm doing how did you build that website yourself did you hire a developer yeah so that that is an interesting story on it was literally a Saturday um and my son my 9-year-old son was sitting

next to me like right here in my office and I just started putting together a website I found I found this uh tool called webflow which is like a no code website builder and I had this like Google spreadsheet of all of these AI tools that I've been coming across right I started making more YouTube videos about tools so I started keeping a spreadsheet of like oh that's a cool tool maybe I'll make a video about that someday that's a cool tool maybe I'll make a video about that so I started keeping a Google sheet

spreadsheet of all of these tools that I would come across and it got to a point where this spreadsheet had 80 90 Tools in it and I was like what was that one tool I was looking at the other day I don't remember the name of it can't find it again I know it's in the spreadsheet somewhere but I don't want to click through 90 links to try to remember what that link was so that's where the sort of idea came from for Future tools was literally a tool where I can organize the tools I

came across for myself so that I can like come across them again so the idea was I need to make a YouTube video today what am I going to make it about I'll look at my website real quick and sort of remember the tools that I had come across recently and sort of resurface them that's how Future tools start started but after it was built and I listed I don't know the first hundred tools on there what I did was I went to Reddit and there was a subreddit called like I made this or something

like that and it was a site where you know Indie coders would sort of build in public and and share the tools that they made I went and shared it on that and it sort of went viral on Reddit Rose to the the top of that subreddit became the number one like most red sub uh red Post in that subreddit for like that month might have even touched like the gole or the Reddit homepage for a little bit and went really really well on Reddit and I went oh that's cool people on Reddit like it

I went over to Twitter at the time I had 300 followers on Twitter like nobody was following me on Twitter yet I went and went hey I made this tool on Twitter or I made this tool on webflow to help me organized AI tools I figured it's helpful to me maybe other people will find it helpful right so I shared it on Twitter well it got retweeted by a handful of large Ai and Tech influencers right like Robert scoble shared it and this guy Rowan Chung who has a large AI following shared it and all

of these people that had large Tech followings started sharing that and retweeting it and so it went viral on Twitter and I think to this day it's one of my most popular posts on Twitter so it got really popular on Twitter and then I went to product hunt and I posted it on product hunt and it went to the number two product of the week on product hunt when I shared it there and so it just started to explode and I went all right I should probably figure out how to turn this into a business

and that's when I started Ed doing like featured listings and letting um companies come and sort of buy the ability to pin their tool to the top of the the website for a week I started going and swapping out the original links with affiliate links if they had affiliate links available to them um and then I started you know it it it actually started to become a business from there but it was never never intended to be a business it was literally meant to to organize the tools for me and my son and I we

literally just played with webflow on a Saturday and built that site about four hours that is unreal and is it still on web flow it is still on web flow right now although I am uh working with a a developer who's shifting it off of webflow because web flow has bandwidth limits that I keep exceeding every month that makes sense so the costs have gotten a little out of control there so webflow is a paid tool but for those that might think man I could never have the skills to develop a website it makes making

your own website easy yeah it's a no code drag and drop Builder if you know what you want it to look like you just drag and drop it until the site looks the way you want it really really cool platform but uh if your site gets really popular sure uh their Enterprise plans are pretty insanely expensive well what cool is is that also you you're giving us a model though I mean you can start with something like that and and as things scale they might break but now you're had a place to like take it

to the next level for future scalability and to probably you know with the revenue being generated uh you know hire the developer and so that's a very inspiring story it is interesting about how SEO and ranking helped this website get discovered um I'm curious do you think that this um Google AI summaries are ruing Google and ruing SEO it's a good question I think I mean I think Google's kind of shooting themselves in the foot with it a little bit but Google's in a tough spot honestly right because Google's in a spot now where you've

got tools out there like perplexity and Claud and chat GPT and all these other AI platforms and people are going to get their questions answered on those platforms more than they're going to Google Now I mean you know people that are more like Tech early adopters are going to those places instead of Google but it's only a matter of time before more mass Market starts to shift to that sort of behavioral pattern as well so Google right now is trying to figure out what to do they're they're sort of scrambling figuring out all right how

do we stay relevant when everybody wants to go use AI now to get their questions answered um so I think they're doing it out of necessity but I also think there's going to be some negative implications on SEO but at the end of the day I think SEO people are just going to shift they're going to figure out how do I make my website be the site that they're referencing in the AI response how do I get it to be my answer because when it does give an answer it usually gives a reference of where

they got that answer from so in the future that will probably be the most clicked on link as opposed to the number one ranking article on Google it'll be the one that Google summarized for you that you can click on to get to the site so I think seos are going to just figure out how to optimize for that instead over time I've heard it said that SEO standing for search engine optimization is now search everywhere optimization and that for any brand this idea of SEO is still alive and well and so strong on YouTube

of course the power of ranking videos it's still alive and well on Google but things are rapidly changing but also Tik Tok is one of the largest if not the largest search engine for Gen Z and these other platforms seem to struggle meta seems to struggle a little bit in regards to search but nevertheless people are searching and looking for local businesses and they are looking for content in the different explore pages and search tabs and so for any modern uh media minded Creator business owner I think the search everywhere optimization is a interesting mindset

speak into that a little bit what would be sort of maybe the way you're thinking about the landscape of search and getting discovered and maybe isolate that down for Content creators you know that want to um you know be building a media brand like yours yeah I mean to be honest I don't really put a ton of thought into like the the search discoverability on Google it's sort of it was sort of an accident that my site started to rank well again it was never really designed that way from the beginning um but I think

I think at the end of the day just creating stuff that people find valuable that they want to share with others is still going to always win out no matter what um I know it it sounds kind of cliche but SEO you know a very very oversimplified um explanation of how SEO works is if somebody searches something on Google and they they get a response and they click into that response and they stay on that website Google goes okay good had ourselves on the back we did a good job we'll rank that article better if

somebody does a search they click on the thing they go to the site bounce back to Google really quickly Google goes okay that's not what they were looking for next time somebody searches for that exact topic let's show them something else so what works there is making really really good content that if somebody searches for your topic they click the link they stay on your website because it's exactly what they were looking for I still think that is the way to get noticed you know maybe it'll be more social signals in the future as opposed

to like algorithmic ranking signals about the search um I think in the future we're going to see a lot more well if this article is being shared on Reddit a lot if it's being shared on Twitter a lot if it's being shared on Facebook a lot that might become more and more of a signal for for these search engines to like use you as the you know the automated AI response but at the end of the day if you create good quality content that people actually want to read that they find valuable that they find

helpful that's a always going to be the winning strategy genius advice um I'm excited because coming up we're going to talk about AI tools I am want to talk a little bit about video podcasting as you are co-hosting the next wave podcast um and even maybe some advice for Creator scaling but getting kind of tactical here uh YouTube has a new thumbnail split testing tool how does that work and have you been using it and what have you discovered yeah I use it every single video I put up so basically what it does is it

uh it allows you to upload three thumbnails and then it will optimize based on watch time right I think most people think you would want optimize based on the clickthrough rate but it's actually looking at the amount of watch time which I guess theoretically also factors in click-through rate because they wouldn't have watched if they didn't click in the first place right um but I use it for every video and I think the one thing that I learned about that is to um never assume that I know what's going to work for a thumbnail right

it's almost I I make three thumbnails for every single video which has gotten a lot easier because AI makes it a lot easier for me to create thumbnails most of my thumbnails I leverage AI to to create them um and I will use three thumbnails and in my mind I always sort of like make a theory of like I bet this is the one that's gonna win I'm pretty much wrong 90% of the time like the thumbnail I expect to win is almost never the one that wins which is why I think everybody should be

split testing because what you think people are going to click on is often not going to be the case one of the things I noticed about your thumbnails and it seems aligned because you're this AI expert and a lot of times you're an AI version of your face versus like a photo or um you know real version of your face however I'm seeing this across channels I'm seeing a lot of creators who in their thumbnail they kind of have their AI Avatar uh what have you learned about that and then what are the tools in

workflow that goes into you said AI makes it easier to make thumbnails faster um what are some of the tools that go into your thumbnail process yeah so I mean you know I've done a lot of split tests and if I don't put my face on the image I get less views right the the ones without my face almost are the ones with my face always outperform the ones without my face and I just think that's because you know I've I've got a subscriber base now I think people have been looking for that um the

very early days where I was using AI to make to make my or the early days when I was making YouTube videos about AI I was doing that strategy where I was using AI to make my thumbnail at the time I hadn't really seen anybody else doing that I mean I'm sure there were people but they I they weren't on my radar yet so I think I was one of the early people to use AI train my face into the AI and then make thumbnails with my own face in the AI and now I think

people are actually looking for that like when they see that with my AI face in it they're clicking on it because if they're fans or followers or whatever they recognize them I've gotten a lot of comments if if I don't put my face in the image of like oh I saw that video it was recommended to me I didn't click on it because I didn't realize it was you right so I've gotten that kind of feedback so now I try to always work my face in every once while I'll go in and split test one

of the thumbnails without my face to see if you know maybe my assumptions are wrong again or the algorithms changing or you know something that used to work you know things change right it's a it's a moving Target on YouTube in my opinion but uh yeah I found that the the faces just tend to work for my channel I like to do very very uh bright vibrant colors uh the very early thumbnails I did I would go on like mid journey and I would tell it to create like a vibrant brilliant RGB colorful paint splash

on the wall right so that the background would just be rainbows of colors that are like high contrast and popping off the screen and then I would overlay an AI image of my face over it so that the colors just popped off the screen and stood out and to this day that's still kind of what works for me is just really really colorful and include my face right like those are the two things that I sort of shoot for um and what are the exact tools do you still use mid Journey um yeah so I

use a lot of different AI image tools like right now today I'm split testing three thumbnails one I made in mid Journey one I made in a tool called Leonardo and one I made in a tool called idiogram right so there's so many AI image generation tools out there now and they're all kind of good at different things but bad at other things so now you might see three thumbnails and I made them with three totally different processes because I'm playing with all these tools all the time I would say like my main go-to process

is I use a tool called uh Leonardo AI to generate my images I think the the colors and the sort of Aesthetics of the images that Leonardo generates are are really good um full disclosure Leonardo is one of the companies I'm adviser for but uh it's I'm an adviser for them because I actually think they're one of the best out there uh but that's the one that I use the most to generate the uh the sort of background colorful images that pop and then to train my face in the AI I used to use stable

diffusion and there was this long process called dream Booth where you can train your face into an AI model and then prompt anything you want and it would generate your face on whatever the character was doing that you asked for now there's an easier model to do it it's called flux flx um I actually made a a pretty quick tutorial on it on my YouTube channel that shows you how to train your face into flux now and ever since I made that video I've been seeing a lot more thumbnails of people putting their face in

there because it's it's a free process to do and you can do the whole process in 20 minutes the old process that I used took like a half a day to do to train your face into the model um but yeah that's pretty much the process you you you train your face into flux you generate it going uh Matt wolf with a shocked look on his face pointing to the right or whatever it'll generate that image and then I'll overlay it with like a really colorful background image that I made in either Leonardo mid Journey

idog luux uh like Dolly there's all these tools that I mess with and I'm constantly testing different tools to try to get the thumbnail that I'm looking for and if I wanted to if somebody's listening has a video podcast or something and they wanted to perhaps use flux to make two faces themselves and then the guest if they could pull some images of the guest they could do the same there and then maybe spit out that look of both being kind of an AI avatar version of an interview or some a collab video you could

but you'd have to do it as like two images and then sort of work them together and like Photoshop right one one issue that AI image generators have right now is when you ask it to generate two characters in the same scene it wants to merge those two characters right so if if I tell it to generate an image of Elon Musk uh doing uh you know boxing against Mark Zuckerberg it'll make both of the people look like a sort of um a blend between elong musk and Mark Zuckerberg right it'll it'll look like the

the love child of the two on both faces yeah got you okay those are some powerful tools um right there as we go a little bit deeper here have you had any experience changing old titles and thumbnails and boosting video performance a huge question creators ask is like should I go back in my library and update any titles and thumbnails what has been your experience yeah absolutely I mean I think for me that's been a pretty big game Cher for me was going back and updating some thumbnails I actually had one video it was the

early video that I made about changing um or injecting your face into the AI I put that video up before my channel got popular it had like a thousand views or something like that the thumbnail wasn't very good I didn't know what I was doing at the time I just made the video when the channel started to do well I started going back through and and analyzing some of my old titles and thumbnails I made a new thumbnail for that video and then I changed the title I don't remember what the original title was but

the new title was how to inject your face into AI or something like that and you can go and look at the chart and it was just like a straight line the day that I changed the title you know up and to the right and so i' I've that that's become like a habit of mine now a lot of my videos are like timely like I make a lot of AI News videos of like this is what just happened this week so a lot of those videos I don't really bother going back and changing them

because they have a very short lifespan but anything that I think has evergreen value like tutorials or um I make a lot of videos of like listicle type videos that're like here's the 10 best free AI tools things like that I'll go back and try new thumbnails and try new titles and you know try to try to beat the current winner on those all the time and usually I'm really happy that I did and do you usually just go with your gut or do you use any tools for split testing when you do that for

the most part I go with my gut I you know I've started to kind of get get a handle on what sort of titles work well and which ones don't um you know I'm constantly trying to tow that line of I know this is going to grab attention but also it feels a little clickbaity so like how do I how do I find that balance that's something that I struggle with I know almost everybody I talked to on who has YouTube channels struggles with that as well of like I know this is going to get

the clicks but I also know I'm GNA get some comments about that title so I'm constantly trying to balance that but I will go back and look at old titles and go okay I can see why that didn't do well that's just not an intriguing title and I I feel like it's a more of an intuition thing that that builds up over time once you've been doing it for a while but there are a few tools that I do really like to use I I do use uh vid IQ and Tube buddy and I just

got onboarded onto spotter spotter is pretty cool for for helping with titles and thumbnails so I'm constantly using some of those kinds of tools to try to come up with new ideas but to be honest AI is still pretty bad at coming up with YouTube titles like like us who make a lot of YouTube videos probably have a better intuition at what's going to work than the AIS do honestly let's go a little bit deeper On Tools um one of the things question number one is I went to uh your website Future tools and I

clicked or I I typed in YouTube like what would be related I think to YouTube or video and the amount of results that came up was like 2345 or something like that so I am curious about this idea of like one AI overwhelm like tools overwhelm for your average Creator or your busy Creator that's trying to figure out okay if I spend time you know I don't even have time to like figure weed through all of those I want to like focus on the best of the best 90% of AI tools you can probably ignore

um if you go to like the Future tools website for instance I did put a little checkbox on there for Matt's picks right and I put that there because of that right like people go to the site they might filter it down to like what's going to help me with YouTube see 2,000 results on there or whatever and go all right that's not helpful to me well if you check that box okay now there's only three that Matt says he actually uses himself right so there's a lot of tools out there that honestly probably shouldn't

be products and and I think part of the problem is that you know AI makes creating these tools so much easier AI can help you write code so now like anybody in their basement could go and create a tool that leverages AI that they claim is helpful and try to charge you 20s a month for most of them are junk um a lot of them I still will list on Future tools but I list literally 10% of the tools that people submit I get about a between 50 and 100 submissions a day on Future tools

depending on the day weekends are a little bit less and out of the hundred I might pick five to 10 of those tools to actually list on the site because most of them now just look like clones of other tools things like that so it's definitely an an issue but as far as and people can also upvote it looks like so if I check the box Matt's picks on your website and I search YouTube it actually Narrows out of 2,97 total tools it shows 11 yeah yeah yeah and then there's also up votes so the

community is also able to kind of give you feedback on this stuff yep um okay so 90% AI tools you can ignore I kind of cut you off there so we can um go in then to what are some of the tools that are maybe truly helpful to that individual wants to save time creating content and make better content yeah so for me Claude is the number one right uh you know Claude is if you're not familiar with Claude it's it's basically a competitor to chat GPT if you're on the Pro Plan it costs the

same amount it's 20 bucks a month just like chat GPT um I find it to be a little bit better uh at you know being creative than chat GPT is but one thing you can do inside of Claude And this is like a a fairly recent feature they rolled out is they've got this feature called projects and in projects it's like a folder for like chats that you're going to have but inside of that folder you can give it custom instructions and you can give it additional information you can upload PDFs and text files uh

things like that so that it's got this additional context in it so what I did in CLA is I created a project uh for a news summarizer for instance right and what I can do with my news summarizer that I built inside of Claude is I can take a news article that's you know 5,000 words long a giant news article select all the text copy that text into my Claud project and it will give me like five bullet points of like here's the summary of what this news is and if you're explaining it on a

news video here's how I would explain it and then it gives me a single paragraph of like the highlevel executive notes of like here's what this tool is here's what it does and then I have it give me an analogy as well so if I need to figure out a way to better explain it always gives me an analogy and the way I did that was inside of that project I just gave it custom instructions and the custom instructions say something to the effect of I'm going to copy and paste a news article into the

site when you get that news article give me a list of five bullets about what that news article is about give me a one paragraph summary explaining it in simple terms so anybody can understand and give me a one paragraph analogy so that I could better lock in what this is talking about so now when I go and like a news video on on Fridays almost every single piece of news that I come across I'll just copy that news article put it into Claud and then Claude will give me a good way to explain it

so that people can understand it so when it comes to like news type content that's been super super helpful because sometimes I understand it logically because I've been playing around with AI for a while but I'm thinking to myself how do I explain this so a viewer is going to understand it and some of the feedback I get is people watched the channel because they like the way I explain things they think I I do a good job at simplifying I mean I think I am a little bit naturally good at simplifying complex topics but

I also use AI to help me with that too so Claude is the number one for me I've also got it generating short scripts for me now too so some of my favorite shorts creators are um Cleo Abram I I love her shorts that she puts out um there's a guy uh Kane Callaway he makes really really good shorts um Roberto Nixon makes really really good shorts on AI so what I've done is I've taken a handful of the the transcripts from their shorts you can go on YouTube and look at the transcripts from their

shorts I've taken transcripts from you know let's say six different videos that I really really like the flow of those shorts and I'd put them into CLA and I'd say I like these six scripts can you find a consistent formula that I can follow that will model some of these Scripts and so what it would do is it would break down a step-by-step like sort of script formula that I can follow to make similar videos and then what I did was I took that script formula moved it into a custom CLA project and said anytime

I post news in here make me a one minute or less short script based on this formula and so now all of my shorts I'm literally grabbing a news article pulling it into this shorts formula generator and it's writing a script for me it's not always exactly in the wording I would use used but it does a good job at writing that sort of first rough draft right giving me like a nice flow for the script then I'll go and reword it my own words a little bit but it's doing 90% of the work of

writing the scripts for me for the shorts Now Matt you're dropping bombs that whole breakdown is definitely something worth rewinding and listening uh to again and thinking about how you could uh set up Claud with systems to make um content creation more streamlined and um be like a powerful starter for you in regards to short script news summaries some of your other favorite tools like that come up when I did your website Runway gen-3 why do you like that so that one is a video generator uh that one you can either type in a text

prompt and it will generate a 10c video based on that text prompt that you use um or what I actually like to use it for even more is you can upload an image and then it will actually animate that image so for example I made a video about some drama that was happening over at open Ai and I made a comment about how like it kind of feels like there's a dumpster fire going on over there so I had mid Journey generate an image of a dumpster fire I took that mid-journey image pulled it into

Runway gen 3 and it animated the fire that was happening in the dumpster on the image so as I make that comment I can throw that b-roll up on the screen that gen 3 generated for me another good one is Luma dream machine they both kind of do that same thing um Luma dream machine it lets you set a start frame and an in frame so for example if I wanted to make a little video animation of me morphing into a wolf or something like that right I can take a start image of just me

on camera take an image that I generated with like mid Journey or Leonardo of a wolf and put both those images in and it will actually make a little video that figures out how to transition between the two images right so you can do stuff like that and it's really great for making like little five 10 second b-roll I mean when I make videos I never have b-roll on the screen for more than three seconds right so like when you get 10 seconds you just pick the best like three seconds of it and it makes

perfect b-roll to overlay on your videos how long does something like that take if you wanted to use those tools to come up with a few clips for a section of one of your videos just the time of rendering and processing and in most cases are are you gon to have to step into the paid version of these tools to really get the benefit uh a lot of them have free trials most of the free trials either give you a certain amount of credits per day uh some of them are certain about of credits per

month you could get away with the free trials I I use the paid plans cuz I use it a lot I'm often demoing the tools in some cases some of these companies have just given me access because they know if they give me access I'll talk about them on videos um I always disclose that by the way if if somebody gave me access I'm gonna say they gave me access um but I think the paid plan is probably your best bet if you're going to use them often but if you're going to just test it

here and there the free trials are usually going to be just good enough and how long how long to spit out a clip if if uh you animate a photo when's it done less than a minute less than a minute you upload the image and I would say 45 seconds later or so you've got a video animated so you can roll it if you don't like it you press the button again 45 seconds later it's going to give you an alternate version and if you've got the paid plan you can do that five or six

times until you have the perfect little animation that you're looking explore AI is another one AI powered search for YouTube videos why is that powerful compared to other tools so I'm trying to remember what explore AI was honestly um that was one I probably came across went this is really cool and then haven't used it a whole lot since uh but I believe that's one where you can do a search and it will help you find YouTube videos on the topic if I remember correctly but yeah that's that might be one that I haven't actually

played with super recently so I don't I don't really uh remember what I was using that one for when I added it it's a free and easy to ous tool that Ena users to quickly search for answers inside thousands of YouTube videos filter results timestamp buttons okay so that's a that's a research tool and you yeah yeah research yeah got is one of your um uh to um Matt's picks of course we will be linking to everything in the show notes and whatnot so people can check out Future tools and everything else is there any

other top of mind you mentioned Claud that you're a content creator you want to save time um maybe speak to this this one you have list listener which is text to speech I know 11 Labs is is very probably the most leading brand as far as what I could turn I could create an AI clone of my own voice right we we've worked with invid and talked about that they're pulling in different tools allowing you to do your own clone voice over of yourself or somebody else's great sounding voice what would uh high quality speech

how's a listener different from some of those things and what are your thoughts on 11 Labs or alter or Alternatives 11 labs is the best I think 11 Labs is the industry leader as far as text to voice um listener is probably pretty close but I still honestly would probably go to 11 Labs myself most of the time um what's really cool about 11 Labs is that it's like really realistic right if you just need to like if you make a mistake in one of your videos and you don't want to go back and record

like an audio clip you can go and have 11 Labs say that for you get the audio splice it in and maybe put b-roll over that clip so that you know you can take your face off camera um but 11 Labs is really good 11 Labs will actually do sound effects now so if you're like oh I need a sound of like somebody knocking on a door I need the sound of a car crashing I need the sound of horn honking it will do any of that stuff you just give it a text prompt it

will actually make sound effects it will make uh the audio of your own voice um you can go and and make you know voices that don't exist so if you ever want to make you know the the whole like faceless YouTube channel seems to be like a really popular topic right now you want to do a faceless YouTube channel 11 Labs is what everybody's using for that they go and create a brand new voice that doesn't exist elsewhere and then plug in their script get the audio out and then just go and overlay b-roll over

that right so it's really really good for that if you are going to be on camera one of my favorite tools that I've been playing with a lot lately is haen I'm not I'm not sure if you played around with haen yet but haen is one where it will translate you into any language you want it'll still use your voice but then it will also lip sync it to that so I can go and reskin my entire video in Spanish and it will actually make it look like my lips are speaking in Spanish with my

voice and so that one's really really good for the localization the translation as well so you say okay basically make this video Spanish exactly it's gonna translate what you said and it's GNA translate the visual you don't need close captions or captions or anything because you know the the English is more quiet and there's a voiceover or something like it just the whole thing and it's pretty clean do it have airs like what's the yeah so one of the problems I run into with a lot of these like tools is if you have a beard

sometimes it messes up right you might see like the lips sort of overlap the beard a little bit um people that don't have beards it works perfect for I have to sometimes do it a couple times until it looks good that's one of the little issues it has but it works pretty good in fact there's um somebody I recommend checking out named Von Maya he's another YouTuber and you know instagrammer and Tik tocker who makes videos about Ai and he actually trained himself into haen so it's you know he made a bunch of video clips

of him talking to the camera and then trained it into haen and it will also do it in English you don't have to do translation he'll go and get a script written about some sort of new AI advancement plug that whole script into haen and it will spit out an entire talking head video of him reading that script in his voice he takes that video pulls it into you know to Vinci Premiere whatever he uses to edit and then starts off with his you know AI avatar on screen talking but then overlays the rest of

the video with broll so anytime it starts to look a little uncanny or the lip sync doesn't match up perfectly he just uses those opportunities to throw b-roll on the screen so you're not seeing him anymore and his channel has absolutely exploded and 90% of his videos aren't even him on camera it's his Avatar that he created of him speaking on camera and he's just copying and pasting the script into haen so is also the use case here would be like if I wanted to do a think media Spanish Channel absolutely and and I already

have the content a tool like this now makes it possible what previously would have maybe been a staff a a voice over dub person Etc and the complexity of all that AI is now you said some things are five to 10 years out you think this is right now I mean people are obviously doing it but like this it's good enough to do this right now yeah yeah absolutely this is good enough to do right now are you doing it um I've experimented with a little bit i' I've put some videos on my channel where

it starts off with me you know as the fake video and then it jumps to the real me and I'm like did you notice that wasn't me you know so I've done some stuff like that but I'm not doing it as like a sort of I mean are you gonna start a Spanish Channel or something like that oh uh you know it's something i' I've thought about doing but I I haven't done it yet with all the stuff that's on my plate I need to put some other systems in place first yep absolutely sequencing having

the the steps well we we we got to do a part two or maybe uh if if you're willing uh I could see we man we could talk quarterly you're talking to a lot of people like because this such an emerging uh industry and there's a lot of cool stuff that you're doing in terms of the AI stuff but also just create our economy and uh the tool space and so if people want to I have one final question for you but if people want to check out what you're doing just as a recap so

people could follow you YouTube channel resources newsletter just break that down and give call out so people can uh stay connected with you yeah there's there's really three places um so Future tools is the website we've been talking about where you can find the tools my YouTube channel is just youtube.com wolf and then I'm I'm fairly active on Twitter as well my Twitter handle is Mr eow M RF l w um those are really the three places I spend all my time so uh th that's really one of the go those those places you'll find

me well Matt I appreciate you I got one final question for you and um but I do want to acknowledge just you know thank you for sharing your wisdom we're so grateful um this has been a very rich really Master Class of insights in not just how to go full-time scale our creator businesses the right mindset to have but then very tactical tools that are present right now that can help us create uh better content I kind of just want to land the plane with just a brief combo around advice for more advanced creators that

are scaling your scale now um you I mean you have been but like channels blown up like you said getting the right team and systems and processes uh in place um and in the words of the uh propit and Scholar Notorious BIG you know Mo Money Mo Problems more traffic more views more challenges more opportunities coming your way more you know and so what is kind of have you learned about pacing yourself not burning out maybe dealing with negative comments or the stress and stress and pressure of trying to get it all done in a

week when it comes to this media career that you're building yeah I mean when it comes to like the the negative comments that was one of the harder things for me to you know come to grips with right like I'd been doing this for 10 years and it was always you know my mom and friends who were commenting on my videos right and then out of nowhere my videos started doing well and that's when the trolls and uh negative comments started popping up and like the first month I mentioned I was doing I did like

38 videos like every day 38 days straight and after that I almost wanted to quit from all the negative comments I was just like oh why do people hate me um but sort of what I realized over time is like the comments are pretty much the vocal minority for the most part uh when I go to conferences and I meet people in person I get on phone calls the general consensus from people is not what I see in the comments right comments are like um you know when somebody goes to a restaurant and they have

a bad experience they're probably going to leave negative review if you go to a restaurant and have a good experience probably not going to go leave a review at all so the comments are the people that like that small minority of people that might have had a problem with like one of the things you said in your video right I've gotten to the point now where I actually don't even really read the comments I have a team member who reads them and says hey here's some good ones that you should probably go comment on um

here's like the overall sentiment of the video but I don't go through and read all the comments anymore a lot of my videos will get like a thousand comments now too so it's like it's just too too hard in the first place but the the comment thing I think you know you build up that that sort of callous where you you kind of don't care anymore after some time at least I have uh so that's that's sort of P me now I'm not too concerned about that every once in a while there's one that stings

but for the most part I I don't really deal with that anymore um hiring a team has been really really helpful I brought in an agency who helps with all of my sponsors now so any sort of BISD in my business I don't deal with anymore um if I'm doing doing speaking I have another team negotiating it for me if there's sponsors I send them to this other team um I always undervalued myself I would have sponsors coming to me and my videos were getting 200,000 views a couple years ago and I would say sure

you can sponsor me for 1,500 bucks right and I went to this agency and the agency's like no you need to be like anxing that price for your sponsorships with the views you're getting so the agency now gets to be the bad guy when it comes to the negotiation and the pricing of the sponsorships so bringing on that was one of the biggest game changers for me in my business it you know 10x my Revenue overnight and also took the I'm not the guy that has to go and you know give the news that this

is how much it's going to cost they go and handle all that for me um bringing on editors has helped just putting good team members around me has been absolutely crucial to my sanity because there was a stretch there when I was doing a video every day where I was putting in 12 15 hour days going to bed waking up and just doing it over and over and over again and I'm just like I'm going to keep doubling down until I can't do it anymore and when I couldn't do it anymore I started building that

team and that's made all the difference well Matt I thank you for all your wisdom today and thank media podcast this has been a banger episode like rate review share you know wherever you watch or listen and my name is Sean Kell you're guide to building a profitable YouTube channel we look forward to connecting with you in a future episode