From Marine to Teaching Descript - Storytime

I've never formally introduced myself on this channel, but today I crossed 2,500 subscribers. So, hey, nice to meet you. My name is Ross, AKA the Descript Master. And this is my story on how and why I started Descript Mastery. My obsession with making video actually goes back to 2007, when I was a sophomore in high school in a small town south of Seattle, Washington. I was 15 years old and obsessed with video and cameras and all things tech. Every Sunday morning, this big roll thing, this big roll of paper called the newspaper showed up on my parents doorstep. Now, the newspaper was this thing that used to exist that was like your newsfeed but printed onto paper and paper was this material. I. Just kidding. I know, I know you know what paper is. But in this newspaper there were ads. And the first thing I'd grab was the Best Buy ads. I'd check out all the latest computers and the cameras and the Palm Pilots and all the tech, and I dream about someday owning it all. But I had no money. My dad lost his job, his business actually, during the great financial crisis and there was zero budget for toys. And believe it or not, the first iPhone came out that same year, 2007. So tech was just starting to get to the point where cell phones had cameras. I don't feel old, but as I say this, I realize that to people in their 20s and teens, I must sound like George Washington was my classmate or something. But the point is, I didn't have a camera. I didn't even have Internet at home. So what did I do? Every summer I mowed lawns and would save up money and eventually I saved up enough to buy a flip cam. The flip cams were these high def at the time cameras. And if I remember right, I bought it for $79 at Best Buy on a clearance sale. And I took that thing everywhere with me. And I mean everywhere. In fact, you know in the high school yearbooks, how they have those quotes scattered throughout where the yearbook staff will ask three random students questions like, what's your favorite quote? Where do you see yourself in 10 years? What's your best advice? Just things like that. Well, I don't remember what the question was, but I am in my high school yearbook with a quote next to my photo saying, if you don't get it on video, it didn't happen. So I tell you that because this has been my obsession for almost two decades now. But anyways, when my friends and I would get together, we would make funny videos and we were 15, 16, 17 years old. So Some of them might have involved fireworks being shot at each other. Others involved cars doing dangerous things at illegally high speeds. We were young and dumb teenagers in the middle class suburbs of America. It was such a fun time and place to grow up and I absolutely loved it. And I put those videos up ON where else? YouTube. And this was before there was even the title YouTuber. I like to think we would have been professionals with a studio and a team like Mr. Beast if we'd stuck with it. But there was no algorithm back then, so the only way one got viral was if people shared your video via email or Twitter. It was all very much word of mouth type of thing back then. So it was never a thought that this video was anything but fun. And we had so much fun. I loved high school. I loved my friend group and I'm so lucky. But I went off to college at the University of Washington in Seattle. But again, I was completely broke in high school. So how was I going to pay for college? Well, join the military of course. I got an ROTC scholarship which meant I was in military training while I was a college student. And ROTC involves waking up every day before classes, usually at 5 or 5:30am and doing some type of physical training or marching. And on top of that I was also in a fraternity. So between those two activities and being a college student going to classes, I was in a sleep deprived haze my entire four years of college. I spread myself way too thin and I wasn't good at any of my pursuits. But anyways, during my summers I would go off to military training. The summer of my junior year was what's called Officer Candidate School in Quantico, Virginia. OCS, as it's abbreviated is six weeks of boot camp for officers. And it's the weed out phase. And I got weeded out. I was a terrible candidate. I was in great shape physically. I was in the top part of my class, but I sucked at everything else. I didn't do well on the academics. I didn't do well in leadership roles because they assign leadership roles where you're responsible for your platoon or your company. And when I got into those positions, I just did terrible. I just did not handle the stress of the training well. You have Marine staff sergeants and gunnery sergeants yelling in your face while you're trying to get your guys organized. And I just sucked in that environment. I was terrible. My last name starts with Z, so my bunk bed was right next to the drill instructor's room. And I was always disorganized and Just a complete mess. So I'd often have two or three drill instructors just screaming in my face. If you've ever seen the movie Full Metal Jacket, the bootcamp part does a pretty decent job of capturing how the drill instructors act. And the hardest part of the whole thing that you can't appreciate unless you've experienced it, is that you're sleep deprived. So even simple tasks become really difficult. And people. The other candidates are acting like they're drunk just from the lack of sleep. You get hallucinations. You can't remember things. You're slurring your words. It's a bizarre experience. But long story short, I was a terrible candidate. My evaluations were really bad, and I had to go stand before the colonel, the commanding officer of the program, and I got kicked out. In the meantime, all of my friends passed, and I was the loser who had failed. So it was embarrassing and shameful. But after I got kicked out, I stayed on the east coast that summer just to travel. And I ended up returning to the graduation ceremony to see all of my friends graduating. And my parents were even there because they had made travel arrangements thinking that I'd be in that ceremony. It was the biggest blow to my ego that you can imagine, and it still gives me imposter syndrome, like, if I can't even pass ocs, did I deserve to be an officer in the Marine Corps? Was I dumb? Am I a bad leader? All these thoughts went through my head. That fall. I returned to campus, to the University of Washington. I went into my senior year, and again, I was the guy who had failed ocs. It. It really sucked. And then I had to go in front of another board to decide if I should be allowed to go back and give it another shot. The next summer, they determined that, yes, I could go back. So I went through my entire senior year with that hanging over my head. But I went back the next summer to try again. And I wish I could tell you that I graduated with honors, but I didn't. I. I just graduated middle of the pack. But I earned the title of Marine, and that was a significant milestone, because throughout training, you call yourself candidate. There is no I or me. You always refer to yourself as this candidate, and you're treated like nothing. But then toward the end, in this culminating moment, after you've been in the field for days and you're tired and hungry and beat down, standing in the mud, they have this little ceremony where the drill instructors, these guys have been total dicks to you the whole time, give you your eagle Globe and anchor pin. And that's when you've actually made it, you're a Marine. So this time I made it. And a few days later I was back in Seattle and I got commissioned as a second lieutenant. After I commissioned, I didn't immediately go into active duty. I had to wait for the next training to start, which was several months away. So I was in this limbo state where I had about six months, as I remember it, to do whatever I wanted. So what did I do? I booked a one way ticket to Beijing. I went on a sabbatical. I think I had about $4,000 to my name and I spent 400 of it on that plane ticket. So in September 2014, I arrived in Beijing and I was immediately overwhelmed. Beijing at the time was polluted, chaotic, crazy. I remember running around the airport like a chicken with my head cut off. I didn't know how to find a bus or a taxi or anything. And I don't know if you know this, but China blocks Google and Facebook and American, all American companies. So I couldn't find information in a traditional way. Not that I had cell phone service or wi fi anyway. But I finally did get a taxi and I got charged, let's say a foreigner price to get into the city and China was overwhelming. It was my first time outside the US or Canada and normally I love the discomfort of that environment and traveling in general, but I didn't particularly love China. So after just a couple weeks I booked a one way flight from Beijing to Kathmandu, Nepal. And I loved Nepal. I was there in Nepal for three months and I spent half of that time trekking through the Himalayas, staying at little tea houses in these villages along the way. And the other half I spent sitting on rooftops of hostels meeting travelers from all over the world. It was a super adventurous time and I absolutely loved it. It was the most transformative experience in my life and I made memories that I'll never forget. And I tell everyone I learned more in those three months than I did in four years of college and five years of military. But tying this all back into video, I recorded some videos when I was in the mountains of Nepal and I posted them to YouTube for my friends and my family to see what I was up to. And I had a lot of fun doing that. At one point I was doing the Annapurna Circuit. I was trekking through the Annapurna Circuit, which is a big month long trek. And the little village that I was staying in suddenly got hit with a huge storm, just dumping rain for 48 hours, as I remember it, once it cleared, I continued my route up the mountain. And as I continued, I learned that at higher elevations, keep in mind there's no Internet or communication with the outside world, that that rainstorm that I experienced was actually a blizzard and the deadliest one that had ever happened on that particular pass. So I met people coming down who were a mess, and they're like, I started two weeks ago with my buddy, and now it's just me coming down. And there was helicopters going in and out, constantly doing recovery missions. The Nepali military and all these international aid groups were showing up. In total, 43 people died on that day. That was October 14, 2014. So I was very close to a very dangerous situation. But back to video. I made a video update that I was safe because my friends and family knew I was up there, but I had no way to communicate it with anyone. So I documented it with a video and posted it to YouTube once I was back in civilization. And that was a cool way to let everyone know that I was okay. But that wasn't my last time getting into a dangerous situation in Nepal. But that's a bit of foreshadowing. More about that in a moment. On my last morning in Nepal, I was going to be flying from Kathmandu to Japan and then on to Thailand and continuing my adventures for another three months or so until I needed to show up for training. But I got an email that said my training date, the beginning of my active duty time, was bumped up. That was early November 2014 that I got that email, and I was supposed to report to training in three weeks. So I enjoyed a couple weeks in Japan. I canceled my flight to Thailand and I flew straight home to Washington. I loaded up my 4Runner, I hit the road, drove 3,000 something miles from Seattle to Quantico, Virginia, and started my five years of active duty military time. While I was on active duty, I did something I'll regret forever. I deleted my YouTube channel and all of my Nepal videos with it. I didn't want my Marines or my peers to see my videos. I was stupidly worried about the judgment of others, so I deleted them. And unfortunately, I didn't have good backup. So those videos are gone forever unless I find them on some hard. Some random hard drive somewhere. But it's a real tragedy. But I went off to flight school to learn how to fly planes. I learned to fly a Cessna and then a T6 and then finally a T57 helicopter. I got about 200 hours of flight time in total. My friends thought it was so cool, and frankly, it's a lot of people's dream. It was my dream at one point, but I hated it. I thought it was what I wanted to do when I was younger, but wasn't a good flight student and I wasn't enjoying my life. I couldn't sleep, I was drinking and I don't even like alcohol. I was eating fast food. And I was in the lowest place of my life, mentally that I ever was or have been since. I was a few weeks away from graduating flight school, at which point I would have then had a six year commitment to being a Marine pilot. And I was dreading it. Every part of me wanted to not fly and more importantly, not be in the Marines anymore. But the fear of the opinions of others kept me going way longer than I should have. I was thinking, people are going to think I'm a quitter. They're going to think I'm too dumb to be a pilot. All sorts of narratives were spinning in my head. But I finally hit a breaking point and I worked up the courage to call my instructor and tell him, sir, I want to drop out. I can't do this anymore. And it was the best decision that I ever made. Now I still had to finish out my contract. Plus I got time added for the amount of time that I was in that training. So I got reassigned as an air support control officer. Air support control is kind of like air traffic control, but instead of operating out of towers at airfields, we're controlling airspace out of Humvees with tents and radios and maps. So I got stationed in Okinawa, Japan to do that. One of the coolest places on earth. I absolutely loved living there. I got super into scuba diving and cycling, but I hated my job. The rigidness and the bureaucracy of the military is a really bad fit for me. And I'll be the first to admit, I am not. I was not a good officer. My heart was not in it at all. I spent all my free time dreaming about starting a business and doing what I'm doing now. Basically, while I was on active duty, I lived extremely frugally. I saved up as much money as I could because my plan was to go travel as soon as I got out and start a business from the road. I wanted to travel for at least a year as soon as I was free, maybe several years, even a decade. I told some people that was my plan ever since I was in Nepal the first time and got the travel bug. So in November 2019, I did exactly that. I wrapped up my active duty military time and I headed to Mexico on a one way ticket in December 2019. Do you see the problem with my timing? I was in Cozumel, Mexico when I saw the first news reports of people in hazmat suits getting evacuated out of a city called Wuhan in China because there's some sort of virus going around. I didn't think much of it at the time other than okay, I guess I can't travel back to China for a while. That's too bad. But nothing was going to stop my trip. I had been dreaming about this for too long to let anything stop me. So In February of 2020, I flew from Mexico to Cambodia to be with my girlfriend at the time who I met when I was deployed to Korea. She's from Seoul, so we met up in Phnom Penh where she was working for a Korean company there. We had a really fun and interesting month together and we went to Angkor Wat and a bunch of cool places. And then she quit her job. And in March 2020, again, bad timing and still in denial that this virus thing would be disruptive. We flew from Phnom Penh, Cambodia to Thailand. We spent a few great days in Bangkok and then from Thailand went to Kathmandu, Nepal. I returned to Nepal. In Nepal, we went out and did a safari in Chitwan national park and got to see rhinos and elephants and a bunch of wildlife. We, we also spent a few days volunteering at an orphanage. And during this time, the COVID fears were ramping up and we had been there less than three weeks when COVID lockdowns started. And I don't know if you remember this period, but governments all over the world were shutting down airports and all travel in and out came to a stop. So we had no way to leave. And the Nepalese government said, okay, we'll be back open on April 5th. Well, April 5th came and they said, we're staying closed till April 23rd. You probably remember that whole song and dance. Governments all over the world were doing it. Long story short, we got a longer term apartment and ended up staying in Kathmandu until late June of 2020. Every day we'd go to a little vegetable stand to shop for our food. And for me, we'd go to the butcher and he had cages of live chickens outside of his shop. And he would ask, which one do you want? And I'd pick one and he'd prepare the whole thing right there in front of you. It was a wild experience. In June of 2020, my sister announced that she was getting married. So it became clear that we needed to figure out how to get out of Nepal. We were able to get a charter evacuation flight out of Nepal, and Sophie, my girlfriend at the time, came with me back to Washington state. So there I was. I had all of my savings from five years in the military, but no job, no apartment, and no plan. All I knew was that I wanted to start a business, and I didn't know what type of business. So one morning In August of 2020, I was browsing a local Facebook business group, and someone had posted an ad to sell their business. It was a doggy daycare, boarding and grooming place that had opened in March of 2020, right before lockdowns. So there I was, desperate for something to do with my life. And I picked up the phone and the owner said, you know, we were planning to tear down the kennels and shut this whole thing down this afternoon, but if you get here in the next two hours, let's talk. We immediately jumped in the car, checked out the business, and within two hours had a handshake deal to take the whole thing over. As I remember it, that was a Friday afternoon. I wired the money, we transferred the building's lease into my name, and by Monday morning, we opened up as the owners of this business. No due diligence, no lawyers, nothing. It was an absolute disaster. But I loved it. I call it my mba. I had to learn not only how to groom dogs and manage the doggy daycare, you know, the technical skills of that business, but. But I had to learn marketing, accounting, customer service, everything. It was a crash course, and it was awesome. Well, a month later, my girlfriend, remember, she was doing all of this with me. Well, she's Korean. Her US visa was about to expire in two weeks, and we were talking about it like, I don't know what I'm going to do running this business without you until you can come back. And the topic of marriage came up. The only way that she could stay was if we were married. So we decided that would be a good thing to do. The only problem was my sister was getting married that weekend. Remember, that was why we had come back from Nepal in the first place. We were going to wait out Covid, but we came back to attend her wedding. So we didn't want to announce anything or plan a ceremony that would steal any attention from their event. So we waited until the day after her wedding, and the whole family was gathered around on a Sunday morning in our business. In the the doggy daycare and we were giving everyone the tour. It was their first time seeing it. And at the end, I had told my 96 year old grandma the marriage plan and she was the one that announced to everyone that we were getting married. This sounds so exciting. I'm getting one more. Oh, yeah. After the excitement settled down, my mom asked, when, when will this wedding be? And I said Saturday. So six days later, with just my family present. Remember, this is during COVID so we weren't supposed to be having gatherings. Anyways, we got married. It was a costume party wedding. Aladdin had just come out earlier that year, so Sophie was Princess Jasmine and I was not Aladdin. I was Jafar. It was an absolute blast. And while some people spend $50,000 on their wedding, we spent maybe $50 and that was on the costumes. Anyway, back to the business and how all of this brought me to video. In running that business, we primarily use social media to grow it. And being in the pet service, it's so easy. We would post dozens of pictures per day of before and afters of the grooming of dogs in the daycare, and people loved it. We slowly built up an audience. But it wasn't all great. The learning curve was super steep. For the first three or four months, we literally slept in the business and actually showered in the grooming tub. I'm afraid to say, until we got gym memberships, we never left. And we did everything ourselves. No employees. And we groomed a lot of dogs that I'm embarrassed to say, did not look good. And one time I was carrying a Catahoula dog, a big 80 pound dog, into the bathtub and it swung around and bit me right here. So I canceled all my appointments for the rest of that day and I had to go to the ER to get stitches right here under my eye and here under my chin. We grew that business by making cute videos for Instagram and for Facebook and YouTube. And we started having people call us who had found us online. One day I decided to try to run a Facebook ad. As I remember it, I ran a $5 per day local ad. As soon as it went live, the phone started ringing off the hook. And that was the closest thing I've ever had to virality. And it changed our business. We went from being unknown in our little town to more business than we could handle, all from a simple Facebook ad. Which, by the way, I've never been able to recreate that success with ads since. Call it beginner's luck, but that was a lot of fun and a really valuable lesson in the power of advertising and in social media broadly. And along the way, my wife found her passion for animals. She really loved being with the dogs and caring for the dogs. She, she would manage the daycare while I was doing the marketing and hiring and customer service. And she decided a few months into this adventure that she wanted to become a veterinarian. So as soon as that decision was made, it became clear that we needed to get out of this business as soon as possible. So I started to market it the same way that I had found it. I posted it on Craigslist and local Facebook groups, and within 10 months of buying the business, we sold it. We transferred the lease for the facility and all of the equipment to the next owner and that was it. My accountant told me afterwards, you know, business isn't supposed to be this easy. It never works out like that. But again, beginner's luck or something, it somehow did. Anyway, my wife started doing prerequisite vet classes online because she didn't have a science degree. So during this time, we moved to Austin, Texas, and I did the thing I thought I would never do again. I got a job. I got a consulting job for a company called Deloitte. While we were in Texas, I was working on my public speaking skills and I joined a group called Toastmasters. In Toastmasters, a big emphasis is on speaking well and speaking clearly. And part of that involves speaking without filler words, ums, uhs, words that don't add anything to your message. Well, one night at a Toastmasters meeting, a member told me about a video editing tool he had found called Descript. He had filmed an entire two hour training video, and at the end, this tool had found all of his Filler words, some 600 of them, and deleted them all with the click of a button. That sounded pretty cool. At this point, I was already planning to jump ship from Deloitte and start my next business, which was going to be business brokering. I wanted to help other people buy and sell businesses the way that I had. And I wanted to use YouTube to be discovered by clients. So I downloaded this Descript app, I turned on my webcam, and I made my very first videos. My business plan was to make educational videos on YouTube about buying and selling businesses. And then people would gain a level of trust with me, like, okay, this guy knows what he's talking about. How do I work with him? And then people would book consulting calls with me or hire me to broker their business transactions once that kind of got underway. And underway is a generous Term, I still had zero clients when a couple months later I quit my job at Deloitte and moved to Mexico City. I went from making $130,000 per year to zero overnight on paper. Extremely stupid decision. But so is buying a business with zero due diligence and getting married on a whim. Do you see the pattern in my life? I don't overthink things. I just go all in. But I did that for about a year. I'd make videos about business brokering and people would then book calls with me. Basically the same business model I have now with Descript. And it was slowly picking up steam, much slower than I would have liked. But I was having more fun making the videos than actually being a business broker. So I set up a gig on Fiverr to do freelance video editing. I was making far less than minimum wage doing that. It was like $10 an hour sometimes for a project that would take me hours to complete. But one day, I'll never forget it. I consider it the founding date. July 7, 2023. A client on Fiverr reached out and asked Ross, could you give me a tutoring session so you could just. I could just learn this myself. I agreed. We hopped on a call and. And that was when everything clicked for me. I really love teaching and I always say in another life I'd love to be a high school teacher. So I set up tutoring as a service and within months I was doing two to three calls per day. Shortly thereafter, I set up my own website. I got off of Fiverr and actually they froze my account without any explanation, which was a blessing in disguise because it forced me to then focus on my own platform. But within a couple months of having my own website, I completely walked away from business brokering and went all in on this whole teaching Descript thing that I'm still doing now. So there you have it. That's my origin story. It's been a long road. It was slower than I would have liked and until recently I was actually burning my savings getting this business off the ground. But as this YouTube channel grows, the flywheel spins faster and faster and faster. It took 351 days, almost a full year to get the first thousand subscribers, 190 days to get to 2,000 subscribers, and just 70 days to get from 2,000 to 2,500. And I plan to do this for a very long time. I'm having a lot of fun. When I'm lying in bed at night, I think, how can I teach better? What things can I add to the course to make it more clear and even the script for this video I was writing at midnight last night. This is the greatest time ever to be alive. I don't think there is any other point in history where I could have made a business like this happen. Video is the new best form of leverage. It's not fast and it's not easy, but you with your camera and a microphone can reach the entire world and help people at a scale of unimaginable A few years ago and the reason I made this whole video is because you should too tell your story. What's the story behind your business and your channel? Make that video and post it in the comments below. I want to see it.