We Almost Quit YouTube. Then We Found THIS Strategy! | Markham Rollins

Jody and I started a channel with no business behind us. We made some really stupid mistakes. The last 5 years have been torture in a way, because we have tried to quit multiple times. But I'm not quitting today. When we started the channel, we hired the best, most expensive marketing firm/video strategist we could find and paid her a lot of money and her team a lot of money for really little or no Result. And it's embarrassing to stand here with all the money we spent. Our titles were directed to you. You're 60 years old and you need to do this versus I'm 60 years old and this is what I'm doing to make my life better. And it was a flip on the script and it changed everything. Everything. Here's another good idea. Make your videos longer. Look at the difference going from 12 minutes to 18 minutes. If you have the courage to be first and to talk about something really personal and really vulnerable, you're going to touch a lot of people's hearts because they're struggling with the same shit you are. So if you go first, they come in and they relate to you and they understand. Well, this is, uh, Jody and I in our fancy studio in Essex, Connecticut that we spent lots of money to build. $4,000 camera, lights, a standing desk, special chairs, teleprompter, everything that we needed to build the best channel ever. And first video took 3 hours to write the script and 1 hour to film for a 10-minute video. That's where it started. We have a huge— Crazy family. We had— when Jodi and I met 18 years ago, she had 3 daughters and I had 3 sons. We brought the families together, we blended them, and our main priority was to get the kids to love each other. And we did. I'm down one kid, so excuse me if I get a little emotional. But where is he? Right here. But he's right here right now, so I'm excited about that. I worked with my dad for 30 years in the family business. I was the 4th generation owner. He was my best friend, my mentor, and this is 2 years before he passed away. And he hit retirement at 65. He died 2 years later at the age of 80, but he's sitting in his brand new chair that has an electronic button that pushes him out of the chair. So that he doesn't have to use his arms and his legs because he didn't really take care of himself. But that was like his biggest win. He was so happy. My poor mom had dementia and she died a year after my dad. But my dad didn't really live the retirement that I think he could have. I think if he had our playbook, he might even still be alive today. On Friday, December 28th, Jody and I walked out of our careers. I had sold my business earlier. She had a corporate career with Chubb. She was very high up in the company, very successful. I was quite successful, and we were financially independent. Now, my dad, as I said, I remember the day that he died because he had retired at 65, and he did what a lot of people do. They go to Florida. He played golf 3 days a week, drinks with his buddies. And maybe have a martini or two. I do tell people that during his career, he didn't invent the 3-martini lunch, but he perfected it during his career, and he brought it into retirement. But the day he died, Jody and I were thinking about our retirement, and we both said, we are not going to do that. We're just not. But we did. This is a very unflattering picture of Jody. But she said I could put it up as long as I put up this next one. So this was Jodi's journey. This is us at one of 2 weddings that we've hosted already this year for 2 of Jodi's daughters. The 3rd one is still in November. But we worked really hard on our life, which I'll talk about in a minute. This is a journey that— it's really a lie that we've been told for decades that, you know, you're a child, 0 to 12, adolescence, young adulthood, early career, family building, if you're lucky and you choose that, midlife peak career, and then retirement is a decline. And my father said that. He said, I'm gonna work hard, and I have worked hard. I'm 65. I'm gonna walk away and I'm gonna enjoy the fruits of my labor, which is what he did. But there's a couple different paths down this mountain. That's a slow, gradual one. He was sort of more down like this. And what Jodi and I believe that people should do at this phase of life is to at least stay level, if not go up. So, this is a picture of the 7 pillars. This is the problem that people have when they get in retirement. We call it retirement drift. They lose their identity, they lose their community, they lose their will to live, they lose a reason to get up in the morning. And Jodi and I have now renamed retirement the discovery years. And these 7 pillars, let's start right here. Jodi and I lift really heavy weights and we eat blueberries. We read scripture every morning. We journal every single morning and write about how we're feeling and what's going on. We're working on our marriage every single day. And those folks that are closest to us that we love the most, these are the key relationships in our life. We're building other meaningful relationships because when you walk away from your career, you leave behind hundreds, if not thousands, of relationships. We live with purpose every day. And we want to leave a legacy. This is our story. This is what we're doing for folks. This is what our channel is all about. And here's our channel. And we started in May of '21, and I'll tell the story about that, but we're pretty proud of where we are now. I will tell you the last 5 years have been torture in a way, because we have tried to quit multiple times. I met Evan. He doesn't remember this. I showed him this slide. He says, I don't really remember that. But he was on the stage at Brendon Burchard event and he had the tag sleeve that he wore. And I'm listening to him about starting a YouTube channel. And I say, you know what? We're gonna do that. Now we're a little bit different than most people in the room, maybe all people. Jody and I started a channel with no business, no business behind us. No business to attach onto. We're now building a business on the back of the YouTube channel, which is a little bit different process. We've had to invest a lot of money. We, we made some really stupid mistakes, but we're here now and we're really happy with where we're going. You've all seen these graphs. Our channel started way over here and it's so low that you can't even see it. Here's a little bump. That's probably like 100 views. But over time, the thing that I'm impressed with and I look at is that it just keeps going up. This was May of last year. We put out 3 viral videos in a row and the channel had an explosion and then it had a slow death. And these moments in time for me get me very sad. It's not a real intelligent statement, but you work so hard and then it goes down. You work hard, it goes up, it goes down, it goes up, it goes down. We are having a moment right now that I'm going to talk about at the end of this, but something good is happening. I think it's happened because the changes we made after Markham passed away. So here's 7 key strategies I'm going to talk about today. I think the, the most important one on this slide is showing up every week. We never missed a week, ever. We made some Silly mistakes. This is probably the biggest one, is that when we started the channel, we hired the best, most expensive marketing firm/video strategist we could find, who happened to be in the same village as where we lived in Essex, Connecticut, and paid her a lot of money and her team a lot of money for really little or no results. And it's not all her fault, but we went about it the wrong way. This is a very embarrassing slide. So from '21 to '24, basically we put up one video a week. And from '21 to '24, there are these voices in my head, you need to put up more video, you need to put up more video. And we never did. And it's embarrassing to stand here with all the money we spent. And we were busy. I mean, we were Sounds like a big deal doing one video a week. It's really not a big deal, but we made it so hard. We were reading scripts. We, you know, the camera didn't work one day. We were uploading it. It's just constant problems. And on top of that, nobody was watching our stuff. I mean, it was so depressing and created a lot of stress for Jodi and I. And there were multiple times during this journey. That we wanted to quit, including about 17 weeks ago. We could stop here and talk about this whole slide because this really is a difference. In '25, we went to 3 videos a week. '26, we kept that going, and now we're doing 4 a week. And we switched over to Kevin the beginning of '25, who helped us really kickstart our channel because it just really wasn't going anywhere. It was like, what? Why do this? All the effort we had to put into it. So if any of you are thinking of quitting, yeah, That's kind of the easy way. You don't quit, dude. Do not quit. It's funny, Evan multiple times has said to me, try it, just try it. Yeah, you and Jody want to do this? Try it, try it. He says, I have tried everything, absolutely everything except quitting. Had we quit, 2,258 videos, median 1,800 views, 2,000 subscribers, $303 at the end of 2 years. But it's interesting because something happened in '24. We put a video out early in '21, I think it was, and nothing happened for 16 months. We were like, well, and it was an interview. And we kind of just said after that, you know, we're not going to do that anymore because that doesn't do well. Well, in December of '23, it had 128,000 views. And in January of '24, it had 310,000 views. We're like, what happened? The video happened to be about sexuality and aging, so maybe somebody caught on to that. We interviewed a sex therapist, and that's now our largest ever video at 780,000 views. Has us rethinking maybe the interview is a good idea. It wasn't a good idea back here, but it might be a good idea today. This is actually pretty funny. '22 and '23, we had 2 shows going. The videos that Jody and I wanted to do because we thought this was important. I mean, embracing forgiveness with age. Who doesn't want to do that? Me. Yeah.

I do.

All right, you ready? Is vulnerability the key to men's success? Be a player, not a spectator. Why is curiosity so important in retirement? Come on, 232 views. It's actually got more since then. But look what was going on over here. Different titles, same 2 people, same talent, same ability, same $4,000 camera. Now we have a $600 Osmo Pocket 6, which does just fine. And no fancy lights. But what this slide shows me is that this stuff just doesn't work. What we think is important doesn't work unless the title and the thumbnail can bring people in. So right about here, April of '23, the floor moved up. See, the floor was, well, in the beginning it was down here and then it was here, but it had a bump. And I love this because it stayed there for a long time. It went up and down, but it never went below that mark. And you can see what's happening now. I think what that does, it gives you some ability to weather some difficult storms, let's say. And we were thinking of quitting back here in April of '23, and then we kept it going, but it's— Another way to look at what happened, one video blew up, and then what YouTube did was they took all our old catalog of videos and started throwing them out. So all of a sudden, now we're getting views on videos that were dead, that never made it, that never got a view. So, keyword is patience. Luckily, we were patient and we hung in there, and are where we are today. Here's another good idea. Make your videos longer.

You think?

Look at the difference going from 12 minutes to 18 minutes. And I'll tell you, the first 4 years of shooting videos, one a week, all I'm looking at while we're recording the video is the timer. Got to go 10 minutes. You got to go 10 minutes. You got to get at least 10 minutes. Playing in the back of my head while I'm trying to record a video because they should be 10 minutes. All of a sudden you go to 18, you're more relaxed, you're not worried about it, and Jody's more relaxed, I'm more relaxed, and the quality of the video gets better. In '25, we changed to Kevin, which was really helpful. We were doing 67 videos a year, and now we're doing 175. The median views per video went from 15,000 to nearly 19,000, which is a really important number. Total views went from 2.9 million to 8 million. Really, we tripled the volume and the median went up 44%. Here's some things that we stopped doing. I don't even remember having this conversation with our first editor, but she said, hey, why don't you spend $500 a month and we'll promote your channel on YouTube and get other people to watch it? I go, okay, whatever. What's $500? Not a big deal. Well, it's a big deal when it lasts 30 months. And Evan looked at it and he goes, you're out of your mind. And the thing we found out was the people that came from the ads stayed on the video for 2 minutes on average. The people that came in organically were staying on 4 to 5 minutes. So we wasted a lot of money bringing people in that we didn't even want. Shorts, we've all heard, we stopped doing Shorts. That was kind of an easy call. And then the wrong editor. For 5 years, the biggest takeaway that I have for us is, you know, we never missed a week, ever, not once. And now we're doing 4 videos a week. Jody and I do a joint video on Monday and Friday. We alternate on Wednesdays doing a solo video. Jody talks to women, I talk to men. And then Sunday is a redo of an older video. 279 weeks. I want to talk to you about 8 of them. So my son was diagnosed with stage 4 colorectal cancer in May of '23, right after signing up and joining the Mastermind. And I remember I found a text from Nina that said, Markham, you missed Movement Makers this morning. Is everything okay? And I wrote her a long text about Markham. So the entire time I've been in this mastermind, I've had Markham really struggling to stay alive. And it was November of last year that things took a real turn for the worse. And he got into a clinical trial. He was with Sloan. Things weren't working out. You've heard the story if you watched that video. But the picture here is Markham in the marathon last November. He signed up for it in May. He committed to it. He raised funds. He raised $30,000. And I said to him, I called him up and said, dude, you cannot do the marathon. It's next week and you just can't do it. You're going to die out there. He said, Dad, stop it. I committed to do this. I raised money and I want to bring awareness. So he walked. For seven hours and twenty minutes, and finished the marathon. So he taught us how to live, not how to die; how to live fully to the end. We stopped filming during that time. Evan alluded to it this morning. We called Kevin and Ida and said, "There's some inventory in there," so do me a favor and. Do what you can and put some stuff up. And again, the channel started to rise, which was really interesting. But we didn't film one video for 2 months. After Markham passed, the first video we filmed was this one, and we just told the story. We turned the camera on for 47 minutes and talked about what Markham meant to us, what the journey was like, the 47 days and nights that we spent in New York City with all the other 5 kids. Sitting by his bed, spending 2 weeks in hospice. And that video got 40,000 views the first day, 30,000 the second day. And Jodi and I were not on the same page in this business. She always did it for me. She didn't do it for the people that watch our show. I checked with her Monday. Hey, did you see the video? It's doing great. No, I haven't looked at it yet. Tuesday, got another 30,000 views. Have you looked at it? No, I haven't looked at it. So Wednesday comes along and I'm like really stressed out. Like, this is not what I expected. So 17 weeks ago today, I got up at 3:30 in the morning, jumped on ChatGPT and said, how do we, how do we make this channel go away? Do we turn it to a men's channel? Blah, blah, blah. I spent 3 hours and I had a plan. And when I came out of the gym, my phone buzzed with a text from Jodi. And the short story is that a friend of hers And her daughter, who was 26, watched that video Tuesday night, and her daughter said to her, Mom, this is amazing. I'm going to live my life differently. I'm going to be more grateful. I'm going to be more kind. I'm going to be more thoughtful. I'm going to live my life better. She didn't talk about cancer or death or losing a child. This is what she got from the video, and that changed Jody. And I stood here in June, told that story, and I said, "What we're going to do is we're going to spend 90 days not not changing the channel, not a pivot, just doing things a little bit differently and listening to what people on our channel are telling us." So we all read our comments, right? But you can only read one or two at a time. Maybe a pageful. We read 7,310 comments. Now I have to tell you, I didn't read them because that would have taken a long time, but I'm going to talk at the end and we're going to play a little bit. I'm going to show you what we've done with Claude just a week ago. But Claude read 7,000 comments, 92 videos. How many likes were in there? Less than 1 out of 50 was negative. Which I didn't even know. Those are the ones you remember when you look. Oh Jesus! There's not that many, but those are the ones that sting, and the ones that are positive you skip over because oh it's good, it's good, it's good. But this this is an amazing stat for us: two videos side by side. What losing our son taught us about life. Hundred and fifty seven thousand views. Thirteen hundred comments. And it's amazing because some of the comments were about them losing their own child or losing a spouse or losing a loved one, and has very few likes because who's going to like a comment that I lost my son as well or my daughter? So if you're looking at likes on this video, you're like that video sucked, and this one. Don't go to a nursing home. You know, it has pretty good results, but 200 comments. Yeah, 13 likes on 2— on every single comment on average, because it's people talking to each other, agreeing, disagreeing on a smaller number of comments. But it was the highest engaged video that we've ever had. So videos can do 2 things. They can get people to talk to each other. You could Subscribers, you can touch people's hearts, get them to write in. And I didn't even know that until, again, Claude jumped in there and found this for us. Again, 134 people talked about losing a loved one, 47 of them about losing a child as well. One of the lessons here is, you know, if you have the courage To be first and to talk about something really personal and really vulnerable, you're going to touch a lot of people's hearts because they're struggling with the same you are. So if you go first, they come in and they relate to you and they understand. So it's a good lesson that we learned on that. Here's two things we heard that we kind of knew, but now it's really slapped us in the face. Not everyone has family. There's a lot of people that say. I'm a solo retiree. Can't you do videos on that? And we've done videos on that. And the comments are all, you don't know what you're talking about. You're not a solo retiree. So maybe this is an opportunity for us to interview people to satisfy this, this portion of our audience that really are solo retirees. And what the truth is, most men die before women, and a lot of women end up just being alone. And we really should talk about that. We can't from lived experience like we can from everything else, but we can definitely talk about it. And it says, it sounds like you had money. Now we have money. We don't have as much as Evan, but we have money. And I'm not embarrassed about that. We were successful and I owned a business and I sold it, but I am who I am. And while many of our videos can help everybody, maybe we should be doing some videos on, um, Surviving on a limited budget. And again, maybe bring someone in to talk about it. I don't wanna not address it, but because we put Claude on there, there's a lot of people that love us, but we're not relatable. So how do we fix that? This is a slide on engaged views per month this year. So this is when Markham got sick. We stopped filming. I don't know if it went down because of that. I really don't. But right after that, it went way up and it's still going up. And we're 16 days into September. And if it keeps at the same rate, I'm quite confident that we'll be equal to August, if not more. We were going to quit. This was the closest we ever got to quitting because I had a plan. After I had to throw the plan out because Jodi had that text and she's, you know, like, oh my gosh, let's try it. Let's— I get it now. I get what we do. 26-year-old women listen to our channel and their life is changing because of it. Had to rewrite another plan in chat, which I did, which is really what we've, what we've been doing since then. Now we all know that a view is not a view anymore. There's the hover. So if you look at the views on our channel right now, they're skyrocketing, but I don't know what we have year to date, but we're— a million of the views in the last 28 days are hover views. So our channel is— top line is crushing it, but this line isn't so bad, regular engaged views. So we're happy with that. Every time another video comes out, it goes up and then it goes up and— The floor has risen, which is great, but I think this one is more important. So now I'm more focused on hours watched because that's really how we get paid, right? That's what— if people are staying on our channel and watching, and the numbers at the bottom will show you that per 1,000 views, July, August, September, it looks like it crashed, but per 1,000 engaged views, the number's actually going up. And per 1,000 hours, we're at $98 an hour. It's a different metrics. I don't know if this is the one that we're gonna definitely focus on, but it's a different way to look at information that right now is a little bit scrambled. We have built an email list from 0 to 25,000 plus. We're now getting through our lead gens between 500 and 1,000 new emails a month. We got 1,700 in the last 28 days. It's a great book to read if, if you choose to. Um, the section in there about weekly emails is amazing. And we now have Claude going through our video scripts, finding the ones that are the most emotional, that will touch people's hearts, and takes that and turns it into a 300-word weekly email. email that goes out that the open rate's really high, but the most important thing is people are writing back and then we can write to them. So we're now having a one-on-one conversation with our subscribers that on YouTube you can leave a response, but they may never even see it. So this has been a huge change for us. What are we doing next? We're building a business on the back of our YouTube channel. We talked a little bit about titles. Stack 2 or more proven title elements together. There was some that you showed, Evan, that were 3. So that seems to be working for us. Republish an old video every Sunday. Claude went in and found 160 old videos that have low views, High first minute, high retention, but no one's seen it. 167. I think that's 5 years of Sundays of old content that just never got put out there. We just found that one I talked about before, the curiosity. I think it's 600 views. It's from June of '21, right when we got started. 600 views. First-minute retention is like 67%. The retention at the end is 58%. People watch it 58% to the end, but only 600 people saw it. I'll listen to it again, but odds are it's going to be a great release. So that's a big thing that we're doing, bringing in subject matter experts, interviews, Jodi's gonna write more videos or do more videos for women because they're asking for that. Whenever she has the title for women or something like that in her video, amazing retention, amazing first minute, comments are off the charts. We're using Brandlytics, launching a new website. We have a Delphi chatbot, so we have 2 years of video scripts attached to that, our masterclass material, some of our courses. All of that is attached to the chatbot. That's just been released. We're launching our second 12-week mastermind in February. We just opened up the waitlist yesterday, and we have, I think, 220 people have decided to join the waitlist, which is free, but they also get free access to the chatbot and some other things. But we expect to get 100 people in that. The first time we did it, we had 35 people paid $800. So I hope to get 100 people at Whatever the price point might be. We're doing more and more with Claude, which I'm gonna show you in a minute. And we're pushing out, we created a free retirement assessment that takes people 5 minutes that shows 'em where they are today, where their problems are, and what they need to do to work on that. And it sends 'em to some different videos based upon where they are at. My father was the inspiration to start the channel. We almost quit 3 times, but Caroline's text was the inspiration to get Jody more engaged in the channel. And I would say that my dad inspired us to start it, and Markham is inspiring us every day to keep it going. So we attached Claude to our YouTube studio last Thursday. Well, we— my son did. And I gave it a couple of prompts. I said, can you review our channel and tell me what, what's really growing this channel? This is crazy information that I, that we got. So here's that surge in spring of '25. Here's what's happening right now in August. The title is your strategy. Medium views by title framing. Negative does really well. Numbered list does really well. Personal voice does well. Here's the categories that are doing really well. We kind of knew this, but not like this. Repeatable franchise, that's the reboots. They're doing amazing. Video that had 198,000 views 2 years ago, we relaunched, it got 142,000 views and a whole bunch of new subscribers 6 months later. There are a few people that say, huh, have I seen this before? But not that many. Evan, you'll like this. Shorter holds attention, longer earns more per view. So the shorter the video, the quicker they jump off. But the longer the video, the more money we make. And it just is a— it's a good math problem to have. The algorithm is in there. We have home and suggested are most of where our videos— Who's watching? 52% women, 48% men. It showed us the 10, the top 10 uploads of the year. And you can see the titles. They're, you know, single or double or triple. There's a number in there. 8 things that are a complete waste of your money. I mean, these videos did really well. And then Claude said, again, after just one question, here's 6 things you should do. Ride the age reality wave now. Build a women's franchise. Systemize the remake, keep the negative frame, keep the number, and that comes not from guessing, that comes from Claude looking at our entire portfolio of titles. This is what our people click. The question is, can you take a look at our YouTube channel and tell us why it's doing so, what's making it work? And this is everything I got.

One question.

Open a search roof, Evergreen Lane. Reserve long-form stories that earn it. So if you have a really good story that you can really stretch out and have teaching points and come back to the story, those should be the half-hour, 45-minute, hour-long videos. This was amazing. So we asked Claude to go and look at the last, I think, 12 months of Videos. People don't watch, they gather. So these are actual comments. Um, this is off the shelf. If the shoe fits, my husband and I are in early 60s and thought retirement was for 70s till we started watching you. Many, many thanks for giving us a whole new paradigm. Things will be different, so much better. So now it makes me feel so good, but these— this breaks it out. People see it as a whole new chapter. Guiding me through the transition. So we're guiding people. It moved me to actually do something. Credible proof that what Jodi and I are doing is changing the lives of other humans. Comfort in the hardest moments. Finally someone who gets it. What your comments are asking for. So we talked about likes per comment, Um, Markham's video, nursing home, my son's death, saddest story. Themes, marriage and relationships is big. Estates, wills, and legacy. I didn't even know we talked about that. So I'm gonna go— I have to go back in and ask more questions. Um, not everyone has family. It sounds like you had money. I just showed you that. Some videos that they want us to make in the comments, which is interesting to have that information. 6 content ideas your audience is looking for. We went into that a little bit, but this is the one that's kind of cool too. What makes not a title work? What makes Retirement Transform title work? Again, one question, one prompt. Can you review our titles and tell me what you think it's telling you? They looked at 169 videos in the last 12 months. The taboo swap is working. Concrete number, provocative, ownable claim, naming the topic nobody says out loud. Stop doing X as you get older. Talked about that a little bit. What's holding you back? Trailing ellipses read as vague, not intriguing. Titles ending in, like, why many retired couples divorce. So ending a title like that doesn't really work. It gave us some ideas, but this was the big thing. I went back in and asked it a question. Can you, can you go to YouTube in general and using our formula that you say works really well, can you go find some titles on channels that have low subscriber count but had very high views? And it came back With these titles, with a link to the video. We've been doing this all along manually. Jodi and I would search. We have a virtual assistant that searches. Kevin searches. It's a lot of work. And this now— where's the nursing home? It gave us a whole bunch of nursing home ideas. Ideas around sex, vulnerability stories, early retirement money, identity mindset. I mean, this is what you know. These got 400,000 views with 12,000 subscribers, 380 with 12, 81 and 3, 64. My biggest downsizing mistake in retirement. We've done downsizing before, but we haven't done this title. So why not do it? So we now are creating a machine with Claude. This is our transcript. Working folder in Google Drive. So Claude goes out and finds titles, puts them in a spreadsheet, and it takes a title and it writes a script. Now we've been using chat for 3 years to write scripts. Well, here's one of the first scripts that we got from Claude on Monday. The first thing it does, it tells us why it thinks this is a good title. Done some research. The title selection rationale: Seven Retirement Truths I Learned Too Late. There's the thumbnail. There's the opening sentence, the hook. Here's a sentence of context or a chart or a graph that backs it up. Raise the stakes. This is the formula that we have that we've always done. What the story is: This went back through our library of every single transcript. So here's a couple stories that you've told before that might work. Now Claude is just doing that for us. So we can look at this script, and here's the teaching points. This is how we do our scripts. We put this on the screen behind the camera. We don't hide the fact that we have a script because we say things like, oh, you know, this is what we wrote down yesterday when we wrote the script. So we refer to it so it's not like we're just making this stuff up. So So when we do our videos, we just go back and forth in this. It's bullet points. And sometimes we don't even mention the bullet points, but it's the teaching point. And then we do Q&A at the end. So now Claude is pulling questions that actually fit with the title. And then watch this one next. So what Jodi and I would normally do is work with Z and Kevin. We'd get 5 new titles. And Jody and I would look at it, or we'd get 10 new titles on a spreadsheet. We'd just look at it and say, I don't think we want to do that. Now, Claude can give us 20 scripts and we can look at them and delete them without feeling bad that a lot of people put time in and effort and now we're just going to throw them out. It's easier to pick what it is that we feel emotionally connected to when it's time to film. And here's another script, 5 Reasons We Couldn't Make New Friends After 60. There's reasons why Claude says this is a good title. So I think that's it. I'm humbled to be here. I'll answer any questions. One other thing. Everything that we've learned, everything that we've learned, was taught in this room. That's why I'm back again for year 4. So—

In your earlier slides, there was a page that you said the things that didn't work or you don't do anymore. One of them was you stopped saying you—

Oh, you versus I. Yeah, so our titles were directed to you. You're 60 years old and you need to do this, versus I'm 60 years old and this is what I'm doing to make my life better. And it was a flip on the script and it changed everything. Everything. Because, you know, there's, there's you, me, and us. So if you can do you, me, and us when you're talking on a script, it kind of pulls everyone together.

When you said you attached Claude to your YouTube channel? Like, did you do something in the backend too, or was it just—

There's a long wire that comes from one laptop to another. I believe there's an API. I mean, basically you can go into Claude and say, hey, I'd like to have you read my YouTube Studio account. What do I need to do? And it just tells you what to do. It tells you where to find it, how to— it's amazing.

And why do you use cloud versus the other?

So we used ChatGPT for 3 and a half years and it's been okay. But my son just joined the team. My son was with Jody and I when we first started the business and we brought him back because he has a little more experience with that and he's kind of excited about— well, one other thing I'll tell you. Jody and I decided last year, I believe this can be a $10 or a $20 or a $30 million business. I really do. I have dreams and aspirations to really make it something special. So we have 6 kids. We gave each of the 6 kids 10% ownership, not because we don't need any more money, but it's like, well, maybe they'll have a vested interest in it. And it's kind of a transfer of wealth if it does become really big. Then they got it cheap, and then they— So they're They have a little bit of vested interest in it as well, but he's been great, Jonathan. He works 5 hours a week for us and he's just doing everything with Claude. But Jody and I own 40% and all of the voting shares, so they can't tell.

Markham, real quick, your evergreen things that you're now publishing again, are you publishing them as a brand new title, thumbnail, everything? Are you making it look new? Because we've done that once and it worked. really well, and it wasn't that far evergreen. It was like 6 months prior, but how do you pick—

Title, thumbnail, and then Kevin has to change the length of the video a little bit. Otherwise, YouTube gets a little annoyed.

But you basically republish it.

Same thing.

Whoever didn't see it the first time won't know we did it before. Okay.

I have one specific question. You said that in order to get new titles, you were— you're asking Claude to go to YouTube and find titles on channels with high views and low subscriber count. Why were you adding the low subscriber count? Why can't it be—

So if you have a channel that has a million subscribers and they do a video that gets 200,000 views, that video sucked on that channel, right? But if you can find a title I'm 91 years old. If you're afraid to live alone, don't go to a nursing home. So that could be another nursing home video, but that got 1.6 million views with 45,000 subscribers, and it came out in February of this year.

I guess my question is sometimes that doesn't exist in ours, so we still use the videos that aren't growth videos and they still do really well. So, I mean, I just—

Well, this is a growth video. It's not—

I wouldn't say it's viral, but I guess my point is, I guess that's just a question I wondered about because we do follow that model most of the time, but sometimes there isn't one with low subscriber views. And to me, it's still a growth video even if the channel is larger than ours. It's still, it becomes a growth video for us.

Right.

So I don't know if you follow that model.

You know, it's individual to every channel. Honestly, I think that's the best answer.

And before that, How are you coming up with your titles? Because we do a little bit of both.

We go on YouTube and we search.

And so you create them and sort of long tail them and add keywords to—

So we'll go in and search, um, because some of yours are really long. 5 reasons not to go, uh, 5 ways to keep yourself from ending up in a nursing home. We search YouTube and then we get these videos with titles that are near that. And then you'll— we always pick the ones where there's a lot of views, low subscribers.

Yeah. Okay. So the growth model.

But now we don't have to do that anymore. I mean, I guess we still can if we're bored at night, but we don't have to.

I mean, why?

This is so amazing to me. It's the first time since AI has come out that I see the value of AI as a business partner to do things in your business. Not to get rid of people, but to just do things smarter and quicker and faster. Thank you all. And listen, it's so good to be here with all you guys. Appreciate you. To learn how an Army vet built a $13 million YouTube empire, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and we'll see you there.

One of the things I'll talk about is that $13 million deal with one of our partners, Vetcom.

You want to turn your YouTube into an asset that can leverage your brand.