🌟 The Golden Overlap

The Sunday Night Review

Hey everyone,

For the last few months, I’ve been back on the YouTube train. From October 2021 to November 2022 I posted around 75 videos, making over 1 video a week for a year, but for a few reasons I then took a 6 month break.

Now, I’m back posting once a week again and I’m taking a much more efficient approach.

The main thing I’ve changed is that I’m focused on iterating my content and my system to find the golden overlap. Let me draw a stunning diagram to illustrate what I mean.

On the left, we have videos that you can sustainably make. This means videos you want to make, can afford to make, have the time to make, and will continue to have the energy to make.

When you put it like that, it’s a seriously high bar.

On the right, we have videos the audience wants to watch. That’s revealed to you by the most important metric on YouTube: views.

This venn diagram is the YouTube formula. Simple in theory, immensely challenging in practice.

If you go too far towards videos you want to make and nobody wants to watch, you risk putting time into things that never get any views. That’s fine if you don’t care about that, but if you’re investing time and money in the hope of blowing up your channel, you have to consider what the audience wants to watch as well.

And if you only make videos that the audience wants, then you risk creating another job for yourself that you hate and quickly burning out.

It’s a fine line. So what’s the answer?

Well, my process this time is based in constant experimentation and iteration. I experiment with how I make the videos, in terms of when I make them, how much time I put into making them and which part of the process I put time into. And I also experiment with the videos themselves in terms of the topics, the editing style, the vibe and things like that.

I then analyse the results, which include things like how much fun I’m having, how taxing it is on my life, and how many views the videos are getting.

And then I iterate.

I’m trying to make decisions over time that take me closer to the golden overlap. At the moment I’m probably a long way to the left, mostly making videos I can sustainably make, and I guess we’ll see if I can find an overlap with things that more people want to watch as well.

Anyway, this is the formula for creators. And it becomes even more important if things go well and you can turn it into a business, especially being able to sustainably make videos.

Have an epic week!

Tintin 👨‍💻

🔗 Creatorworthy

• Podcast - Great conversation between Chris Williamson and David Goggins.

• YouTuber - Good YouTube channel about making thumbnails.

• Video - My latest video, bit of a life update.

• Tweet - Good thread about YouTube platform dynamics.

• Podcast - Learned loads about personal finance from this episode with Ramit Sethi and Steven Bartlett.

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