The most interesting thing I’ve ever done in my life was have a Youtube channel with Jesse. I never thought I would put myself out there online, in videos, on one of the biggest social media platforms in the world. It was a period of time where I felt my most creative, but it was also challenging and a big investment.
Jesse is really into Youtube videos and naturally I became into Youtube as well. I was so used to watching traditional TV, I didn’t realize how much content was on Youtube on any topic that I cared about. It’s a platform for entertainment, for learning, and for teaching. So, I was definitely intrigued when Jesse came up with the idea of starting a Youtube channel. We’ve been talking about having our own business and Youtube felt like the best option. The thought of putting myself out there freaked me out, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to try something different.
We laid in bed thinking about what our channel would be and what our name would be. We both love food and knew that had to be incorporated into our channel. When Jesse came up with the name BELLJIN WAFFLE (combining our last names to sound like belgium waffle), I was hooked! Knowing we had a channel name and some sort of direction got me excited.
We invested in a year long Youtube course that taught us how to think about our niche idea, how to generate ideas, how to do research on our market, how to find inspiration, how to set up our channel and how to market our channel. We learned a lot throughout the Youtube course, but the best way we learned anything was to just start!
Here’s a few things I learned throughout our one year Youtube career:
Time management + commitment
I, generally, have been good at time management for work, but I’ve never been good about it in my personal life (until VERY recently). Jesse and I have full time jobs, so we had to take our weekends to plan when we were going to film and what we were going to film. We would sometimes film two videos in a day, then Jesse would have to edit those two videos. We posted weekly so we had to churn out content and edit in a very short amount of time. There were days we had to film after work because we had plans over the weekend. This would generally take HOURS to do between setting up, making sure we knew what we were going to say, and multiple takes of repeating the same things over and over again just to get it right. To say for a FULL YEAR we had this schedule – posting videos weekly – is pretty amazing. If we had to do it again, I would recommend not posting weekly to spend more time creating better videos and taking the time to edit them. But, I learned that if I really put my mind to it, I can carve out the time to produce creative work.
The importance of chemistry
I knew we had good chemistry to begin with, I don’t think we would be together if we didn’t. But, working together in a way where we had to treat our channel like a business and be entertaining on camera was eye opening; to be able to SEE our chemistry come to life in something both of us really cared about was awesome. Also, if it wasn’t for our chemistry, it would have probably taken us double the amount of time to do everything and we would have had an even shorter Youtube career. Even if some of our content wasn’t the best, people liked watching the both of us together in a way that people would never see otherwise.
Social media is hard
Marketing ourselves was so challenging to the point where I don’t think we ever did this well. We had an Instagram account and had to post at specific times when our video was going up. I learned about Reddit, which is a bizarre platform to be honest. It was cool at the time to try to promote our videos, but it’s based off of a weird points system that you get by commenting or creating posts and I just didn’t understand it well enough to leverage. As for Facebook, you had to build trust within the community in order for people to get to your page and watch your videos. We’re no marketing experts, so this was an area we could have done better in.
Investing in yourself – without any return
This was definitely a harder pill to swallow as more time went on. We were buying a bunch of products online and not making any money on our channel, which is normal. But, for me it felt like the money we were spending became more of a burden and it’s hard to be motivated when you’re not feeling or seeing some sort of return. Getting subscribers of course is a return on investment itself; the more people that subscribe to your channel and watch your videos, the more money you can make. But, that is an extremely slow process. It is rare for a first time Youtuber to get a viral hit right away – it’s very similar to the music industry. There was one time where I thought “okay, this is 100% worth it” when we received free products from Hamilton Beach. They liked our review from a Hamilton Beach product review we did so they sent us a pizza maker and a dual sandwich maker! We never heard from them again 🙁 It’s hard when you’re dishing out a lot of money, and not receiving anything. The real lesson learned here though, is that if it makes you happy, you should invest in yourself. That’s the biggest investment you can make that will have returns through your happiness and mental health, and who knows maybe that business you are launching could generate real income.
Even though having a Youtube career was time consuming and a money vacuum, which are the main reasons why we stopped, it brought Jesse and I closer together. It gave me confidence that we could have a business together without stepping on each other’s toes. It also showed me that online isn’t that scary of a place; since no one knows you, you can put whatever content out you want, whenever you want. It definitely gave me a boost to confidently start this website (investing in myself) without any hesitations.
And, who knows, maybe we’ll revive our channel one day 😉 In the meantime, enjoy our first Youtube video!