Evan Carmichael started YouTube with a flip camera and Windows Movie Maker, then upgraded through Costco purchases to a Canon. He hired editor Christina to handle post-production, and now records roughly 20 GB of footage weekly. His main bottleneck: he personally reads and replies to comments for an hour daily, which he worries won't scale.
Chapters
So I got a question from one of my YouTube viewers— love you guys— asking about how I make my videos and if I have a team of people that help me. Now, I hate spending money until I'm making money, and it's so easy to spend money. Anybody can spend money. It's hard to make money. And so when I'm trying out new projects, investing in new things, I'll always put my time, but I won't put my dollars until I see that it's making me something. So when I first started my YouTube channel, I didn't spend anything. I had my old flip camera that I just put on a shelf and I press record and I filmed it myself. I edited it myself. Sometimes you'll see the camera is kind of shaking, and I used Windows Movie Maker, which is a pretty simple, easy-to-use program. And that's how I got started, everything myself. And it's important, I think, to do these things because it helps you figure out the way to make money and also if you're gonna be committed to this or not. Because there's a lot of projects that we may start, and then once we get into it, like, "Ahh, I'm not gonna keep doing that." And I could have gone out and bought a camera, bought a tripod, bought a microphone, all of that stuff, and, and it just sits there in the corner because I gave up on the project. So I wanted to make sure I was committed to it, and you should too. From there, I moved up and I used my DSLR camera, and then I started going through various Costco cameras started getting more and more expensive as I, as I went, and I was editing everything myself. I got a tripod that I used, and I put a Sony camera on. The biggest complaint I got from my earliest videos was that there was bad sound because I was using the microphone from the camera to record me, and so the sound quality wasn't great. So there was one Costco camera that had an external microphone jack, so I got that one. I like Costco because it was a 90-day return policy. So if I didn't like it or I couldn't use it or wasn't working for me, I could always take it back and get something else, where most of the stores were 7 to 14 days, so less time. So I got this camera that had external microphone. I went to Sony store, bought a microphone that I use here. It's a clip-on mic. I think you can kind of see it here. And for a while, that was my process. Then I realized that the bottleneck was going to be the editing because it took a lot of time to edit these videos, and I I reached out and found somebody to edit my videos and since hired somebody new, and Christina now does all my video editing. Hey Christina, great job. And I found that helpful because you gotta think as an entrepreneur as you grow a project that you're working on, what's the best use of your time? For me, being in front of the camera, that's good. That's good use of my time. Editing the videos where I'm not good at editing and you don't see anything special from me, I'm not skilled at it, I don't love it, that's not a good use of my time. So it makes sense to give that to somebody who loves videos. And Christina does, and she does a great job for me. So that helped offset a lot of my, my time. It cost me some money to do it, but as I started making money with my videos, then I could afford to do that. I recently just upgraded my camera, so now I use— that Costco camera was maybe $500, $400, in that range. And Christina does a whole bunch of fun effects on these videos now where she zooms in on my face and zooms back out and pans and all this fun stuff. With the camera. And it's all from one take. I'm not setting up different angles. That's all Christina's magic. And the problem was when she zoomed in with my old camera, the quality cut. And so the next step was to get a better quality camera. So I just bought a new Canon camera. It cost about $2,000. And everything else is still— it's me. I come, I'm, you know, I set up the office. I got my tripod, microphone, camera, press record. Good to go. And then I send the videos to Christina, and she'll edit everything, put the intro, the music, all the cuts, the exit, and she'll post it to my YouTube channel. So it's a better use of our time, I guess, effectively. So I'm doing more of the stuff I should be doing. The two biggest backlogs I face now, and I'll have to figure out what I'm going to do as I go along. One is even just setting up and everything takes some time. It's convenient because I can do it at my home or at my office, but I might at some point get to having a video crew doing it, so I just have to show up and talk instead of setting it up. The setup isn't that crazy, but it still takes a little bit of time. And the bigger one is the comments. And this is actually my biggest struggle right now with my YouTube videos because I get so many comments, and I love the comments. Keep them coming in. It's, it's the best part of my day. Every response is from me. It's me personally going through the comments and responding to people, even if it's just a happy face, just to acknowledge that you left a message. That takes me 45 minutes to an hour now. This morning it took me an hour to get back to everybody's comments, and I love it, but then I look at, oh, I just lost so much time doing this. And so I don't know, I don't know what I'm gonna do. You know, if you look at the most successful people on YouTube, they're not answering every comment, so I might have to get to that. I really don't want to because I love responding to you guys, but I don't know, we'll see. I had that issue with email too. I got a ton of email, I got a ton of tweets and everything. I have a team, but the communication part, I like it to be me. Like, if I tweet you, that's me. If I respond to your comment on this video, that's me doing it, and I don't want to lose that personal touch. So that's my current struggle. But basically, you asked what my setup was, so I've got a tripod, camera, external microphone. I record everything myself. I basically load up my questions in advance on a computer or my phone, and then I record, pop it into my hard drive, and then use Google Drive to send everything to Christina. It's about 20 gigabytes of video every week that goes to her, so she's got a lot of sorting out to do. But, um, that's the process right now. It works. Thank you for the great question. For everybody watching, if you like this video, give it a thumbs up below. Please leave a comment. Even though it takes a lot of my time, I love seeing those comments come in. It really makes my day. So leave a comment below. If you have a question, leave it below too. I'll make a video response. And, uh, if you want to see more videos like this, click my face. You can subscribe to the channel. Thank you so much, and I'll see you soon.
