Derral Eves - The Real Secret To Growth On YouTube

Hey, Derral Eves. You might have seen me on YouTube. I'm on hustle and Flow podcast. You gotta check it out.

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Float Shark with your boy, my boy, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear. Hey, what's up, everyone? Welcome back. Today we've got an amazing episode. Today we're talking to Derral Eves, the author of the YouTube formula. Now, Derral has been behind the scenes on some of the biggest YouTube channels on the Internet. Mr.

Beast.

He was one of the guys behind that pooping unicorn squ squatty potty commercial. He's worked with just a ton of YouTubers. He is responsible for something like 78 billion views on YouTube and 36 billion views on Facebook with his videos. So really, really cool stuff. We're gonna break this down. We're gonna talk about how to have some success with a YouTube channel. So this is a good one. This is an old fashioned tactical episode with a lot of good marketing advice around using YouTube. If you're not in our Discord already, make sure you. Discord. Hustleandflowchart.com Discord. And also check out our web three blockchain crypto episodes that we're doing now every single Monday over on the Lad City network. Those are live at 1pm Pacific on Mondays. Just search out Lad City or search out Hustle and Flowchart. Either way, you'll find those episodes. We're going live every Monday, talking web three blockchain cryptocurrencies, all of that kind of world. So make sure you check those out. And excited to do this one. Let's go chat with Derral Eves right after a quick word from Ahrefs. Hey, I wanna tell you about something.

What's that, dude?

Ahrefs. You know, the tool we've talked about forever because we use it a lot in our business. They have a free version now?

No way. They do?

Yes, it's called Ahrefs Webmaster Tools.

Okay, hold on. Let me.

Nice fake typing.

Oh, I went to ahrefs.comawt that was. I went to ahrefs.com and you should too. Ahrefs.comawt there's an A before all that.

A H r e f s.com awt.

Yeah, so we said it about, you know, a hundred times. So now it's subconsciously in your brain. So I went there and this is blowing my mind. Matt, this is crazy. I'm looking at the page right now. It monitors the SEO health. I mean, tell me more. Matt. Why Is this important? Why should I?

Well, it monitors the SEO health. It monitors all the backlinks and all the domain and page level SEO metrics and all of your search traffic and keywords and what keywords you're showing up for. And it does it for free. And, like, we use the paid Ahrefs. But this is awesome.

You know, I was just kidding over here. I was just having fun. No, I wasn't really. Real typing, right? You don't do that. No, I don't really type.

Yeah. I can also see you.

Yeah.

Dang it.

In all reality, this is a freaking cool tool. We were nerding out about it when we heard that Ahrefs was coming back for a sponsorship. Because it's a free tool, no credit card required. You get a lot of key things that the bigger Ahrefs tool has, like all the key things that every person with a website should have.

That is you listening. So, yes, improve your website SEO performance for free. Just go to ahrefs.com awt Darrell.

Darrell, thanks for joining us on the show today.

Really excited to be here.

Thank you. Yeah, that's good.

I got some hustle and flow going on.

Are you feeling it today? Are you feeling it?

I'm feeling it, man.

We both read your book, so we know you got the hustle.

You've been hustling hard for a long time, but smart. Yeah. You're up to a lot of projects. That's. I mentioned the Chosen. That's a new project of yours. I want to give you a shout out. Cause I. I mean, you raised a ton of funds behind that. Crowdfunded, that is. Yeah. So congrats on that, man. And just YouTube in general. We dove through your book. Into your book, actually. I should have been holding it right now. I don't know why I didn't bring it in here. But it's like the Bible of YouTube growth and understanding the crazy machine of YouTube, which a lot of our folks are. We have a lot of creators, a lot of Internet marketers, entrepreneurs that are looking at the medium and still looking at, like, I don't know what to do with this thing. You know, it's like all the crazy layers of YouTube. So hopefully you can help us demystify, justify that a little bit and have a good time with us here. So let's.

Let's. That sounds good. Anytime I can talk about YouTube, I'm good to go.

You're good with that? Time to get that approval. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good man. Well, let's. I know you have A long history of video. You know, all the way back, I think what, you were about eight or so. I think it was that, right? Pretty much, yeah. Yeah, tell us about that. Because we're curious how YouTube landed on your radar.

Yeah, so I think, you know, when I was eight, there's a couple monumental moments. One was seeing Empire Strikes Back for the first time. I was just like blown away at movie production. Like, that's fine. It was really sensitive to that. And then during that time, that's when the Ridley Scott commercial came out for Apple for the Macintosh computer. And I was just like, oh, my gosh, this is the best disruptive ad of all time. And during that, that same year, Wendy's came out with where's the Beef? The ad campaign. And that was just so hilarious. I'm like, okay, that's what I want to do. I want to create super bowl commercials. I want to create ads that people talk about, you know, and so that's kind of where it all started. And, you know, it kind of evolved from there. But I. I was always curious, I was a curious kid, why certain people like the Budweisers commercials versus the other. You know, So I was just kind of do these little surveys of just understanding why people react to. And that gave me a really good foundation of that curiosity factor of, see, hey, certain type of contents resonate in certain ways with certain people. And I was able to start segmenting that out and seeing it very. At a very young age. So I guess I'm weird. I'm one of those geek. What can I say?

I mean, you obviously been in the game for a while with YouTube as well. So, I mean. Yeah, an earlier time. Well, you did a lot of viral stuff. You know, the unicorn poo commercial. I rewatched it last night and I was like, this is freaking hilarious. It's been too long since I've seen it. You had a. If I remember correctly, thinking of your story, you had some poll to go to Hollywood and do some big production stuff as well, right?

Like, yeah, so when I, when I graduated, I was going to go work for an ad firm that does production for super bowl commercials. And for me, this is a very important point because it was a very pivotal time in my life was I had to make a decision do I want to go to la, which I had a job offer, or Chicago or New York, which had job offers, and work for a big firm and just kind of grind away and then do what I want to do, which is creating super bowl commercials. Or I just Had a really young family, just had a brand new baby girl, first of five to come. And I was thinking about, okay, wait, I'm a dad first, husband and dad first. And I wanted, I wanted her to have the same experience I had. We're growing up around family, be able to go to grandma and grandpa's house, have her cousins, be her best friends. And so, like, I don't know. So it was a very hard decision, but I decided, you know what? I guess the dreams of making super bowl commercials is basically gone. And I'll just, you know, just do it on my own. Just try to, you know, do a digital agency and this is back in 99, and, you know, try to try to make things work locally. And I wouldn't say that my dream was shattered by no means, because everything that I do is for my family. I really don't care about anything else in life. It's like God and family is. That's what I do. So.

Wow. Yeah. And who needs super bowl commercials anymore, right? Yeah, you two need that super commercial every single day on you.

I mean, Most of the YouTuber. I mean, not most of the YouTubers. Most of the YouTubers you're working with are probably getting more views than super bowl commercials anyway.

Yeah, well, I came to that realization was I didn't actually want to create Super bowl bowl commercials. I mean, I had this little epiphany in my mind. It was. I just wanted to create content that people would talk about, you know, religiously, like, off, off when they're friends or whatever. You know, the water cooler talk or whatever. Like, that's. That's what I wanted to do. And I'm like, once I was like, okay, that's it. Then it was like, game over. Because, like, I could be in small town Utah and literally do whatever I want, whenever I want and have people talk about my projects all around the world, which has happened. It's been great. I've been able to generate 78 billion video views on YouTube and another 36 on Facebook, and it's been great. I've been able to build a career out of people talking about the content that I've produced, which is fun.

That's amazing. How did you get into YouTube? Was there some moment where you're like, this is going to be the next thing? I'm going to put my time here. Where did the YouTube passion come from?

Oh, my gosh, it came from Craigslist. Now let me come and explain.

So I was going like, we were kind of extending our getting new Employees. And I was too cheap to go to Staples to buy a desk, so I went to Craigslist to try to find a free one. And there's this ad that was like, hey, come to this new website. And if you can get 100 people sign up, you can get an ipod Nano. That's the new ipod that came out. At the time, it could hold a thousand songs. And so I was really, really excited about that. So I went to it, and that's kind of where it was like, very surreal. Like the earth stopped. And I just like saw video and I saw that you can embed it on websites, and I hit play. There's no buffering issue. That's back in the day where you had to wait to have it buffered before play. I'm like, this is going to go huge. And this is October 2005. I signed up and then I spammed the heck out of everybody I know just so that I could be hitting that ipod. And then after that, it was like, I can literally upsell every website that I've actually built to have a video. And so we did 865 videos over the next year and a half of getting them, you know, there. And then, you know, Google bought YouTube in 2006, about the same time, about a year prior that I was on. And all those videos magically started to outrank my website. So I'm like, okay, I know what I'm doing. And that's kind of how it started. But I didn't think big picture at all for videos until we do a lot of lead generation, you know, cost per acquisition, or we charge per acquisition, and we do these verticals. And one of the verticals that I had, and I put this in the book, was pest control. Cause I live in the desert. We have cockroaches the size of.

He can eat them.

And I always try to get a vertical, understand the audience, understand the language, and go from there. So call up. My friend says, hey, let's kind of build your business. You have a pest control company. I want to promote it. And we did. It went so well that he's hiring technicians all over the place. And then he had to go out and work instead of being in the office there. And he went into a piano store. And that was the. That's kind of where my life changed. Because the piano store owner says, hey, do you know Anybody who knows YouTube marketing? He says, yeah, you got to talk to my boy Darrell. And before you know it, I was talking to this guy. And then I saw a piece of content. I'm like, whoa, that was really good. And he was making these videos to sell pianos. And these pianos were like 40, $50,000, but they were music videos where they placed these pianos on top of hills and mountains and streams and all that other stuff. And I'm like, this so cool. And like, well, how many, how many pianos have you sold? And he's like, zero, you know, but he's putting a lot of money in production and then working with them. They had about 20, 30,000 subscribers at the time, and they were getting tens of thousands to a hundred thousand views a video over the next 18 months, I've seen them, you know, go to 1.8 million subscribers. Working with them and then also getting them to get 300 million video views. And so I'm like, this is power. Like, there's truly power in audience development. But I can honestly say that was the moment where I found my jam. Like, if there's ever when you know that you're like, okay, you know, you're hustle and flow, like when you're in your flow state, I'm like, holy freaking crap. I'm really, really good at this because I see things of how people will respond to content before they even watch it. And I know how to kind of craft that. And so after that, that was game over. And it's about the same time that YouTube decided to go to an AI driven system of predicting what people want to watch. And then they just really follow people. And so it was like everything that paid off when I was 8 years old of really trying to understand content and why cowboys, like the Budweiser commercials and all this other stuff, and that kind of compounded that. I'm like, okay, I found, I found my jam. And then I, I pretty much at that moment have worked and just brought, you know, channels to life. Started 27 channels from an idea and, and got a million subscribers each on. On that. And you know, like, we're, we're approaching 80 million video views or 70 million or billion, sorry, billion with a beat.

Big beat on that one, man. So you're basically the. You're kind of like, you have this intuition, it seems like with video then like, what's gonna hit what's not right based off of all the data and all that. I mean, that's. I want to shout out the name of your book. So the YouTube formula is actually the book. It feels like you tried to put all that stuff into in that hardcover there. I'm gonna give a shout out To Tommy Powers too, because we had him on the show and he, he, he was the one that put this on our radar. We're like, yeah, man, Tommy, traffic right there.

That's right.

I mean, what are, what are some intuitive things like when you are looking at a video or maybe a new creator, a channel that's a little stuck? I mean, this might be a little selfish, but like in general, because, you know, there's channels like ours that, you know, we actually have an audio podcast. It's popping, it has a great audience, it's big. But the YouTube side, it's a little lackluster, at least in terms of the growth. And I think there's a lot of folks. So. Yeah. Any thoughts around that?

Yeah, generally this is where I go to one on one and most people don't dig deep into their viewer avatar. Like they look at customer avatar and they're like, oh, we know our customers, but they don't really know their customers. They think they have some demographics, but they don't understand the psychographics or where they congregate offline and online and they don't understand that to the depth. And so, so generally when I take on a new client, I talk about my client or student, I talk about the way that I perceive people because it's a transaction that's occurred. We're not talking like a cold transaction. We're talking about you're providing value and you need to know who you're providing value for and what they find valuable. And so when you're able to do that, I believe any project can take it off the ground if you know the right messaging and if it's authentic and true and, and you're really trying to do something big, you know, you, you can develop this audience. And so it's not about the one off piece of content. And I think that's where a lot of content creators make big mistakes. And so let me just kind of jump into the podcast. I look at, you know, what is most valuable for this type of thing on YouTube. Right. And generally, you know, entrepreneurs make the biggest mistake by putting their podcast and then clips and then they're going to events and it's all on the same channel. That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life because I have to skip stuff I'm not interested in. But if I'm interested in the long form content, I want that long form content. And, and you know, I'll listen to, you know, listen or watch a three hour podcast and I do that with Joe Rogan, you know, a couple times a week. And I do it because I know what I'm getting. And he's really good at getting what it is. Will get interesting guests that have a certain point of view, and he will never railroad their point of view. He'll just ask questions to further clarify and have these engaging conversations. I know I can get that every single time. And I'm learning something every single time. I'm learning something about people, about situations, about things in the world I didn't even know. And that's that value proposition that he spent 15 years of his career really honing that craft. And so when we come in, it's like, what is the expectations? So like with this, so the hustle is the flow. Like what, what is that value proposition? You're free. Bringing a guest on it needs to be in line with what people want. And what they want is X, Y or Z. And you got to define that in the beginning just so that your content strategy is in line with the value proposition of where it's at. Because even if it's like audio or video, it doesn't matter. The value transaction that occurs needs to be authentic and woven into the content strategy. Where they go, oh my gosh, I can't miss an episode because it gives me X, Y or Z. Does that make sense? Totally.

It does, yeah. It's like this emotional feel and there's a specific thing, that connection to that creator that needs to be put out there into the wild. Yeah, that's good. Yeah. We've definitely learned a lot through the repurposing and doing it the lazy man's way. But now we've kind of come here. But I think that's going to help a lot of podcasters that listen to us.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. Cool. Thanks for that.

So when you mentioned digging into the demographics and figuring out who the audience is so somebody who's maybe new to YouTube and just kind of digging in.

Is it up to them to define which audience they want? Or is there some sort of metrics that they look at and decide, okay, this is who my audience is going to be. How would you recommend somebody just kind of getting into YouTube to figure out what that audience is going to be?

Yeah, I love that question. Because it's multi layered. Right. So we're actually launching a new channel. Every year we launch two channels. This one's a little late because it took a little bit more of getting the content. Usually we do it in July, but it's in November and What we went through the process is understanding who our ideal viewer would be. And we're trying to make an assumption of who they are. You know, and I'm not going to get specific channel because if you're not my demographic, I don't want you to watch that YouTube channel. Like I only want, you know, I want the algorithm to figure out, oh, this is the viewer. Let's go find those viewers for you. You know, instead of just colluding it. That's a big mistake that a lot of people make is getting the non viewer and the pat on the back where they only watch five seconds of the videos. Good job. I love your, love your podcast.

Right.

So I try to identify, you know, who that is and I'll create a, you know, a detailed report of not the demographics. Those are the easy things we say. Okay, it's like a millennial to Gen X or, you know, millennial, you know, maybe an older millennial, Gen Y, Gen X, basically from the United States, preferably Mal or whatever it is. Like I can get that fairly easy and I can make the assumption right there. And if it's off, you know, that can be adjusted fairly easy. But it's the psychographics, like it's like what, what's, what's happening in their circumstance. So like for this, for your specific case in your podcast and something like that, you know, are they, is this a side hustle and they're looking to get information to be a full time hustle or are they doing this whole time? Is a little bit of, of both. Because how you speak to the one isn't how you speak to the other. So like if someone's like de grinding staying up at night and early in the morning on their side hustle, you know, you approach them differently than someone that's doing this full time. You just do it. You do just because they're at different states and how you communicate to them and the value that they find hopeful would be there. So like if people are doing the side hustle is like I'd be talking to people that are really gone from a side hustle to full time and then to scaling that where they really are living the lifestyle. Right. So if you could get that message out, that would really hit not only the person that is doing the side hustle, but also the people that are just doing the beginning stages because you're hitting a progression of what the content could look like instead of just, you know, asking, you know, specific questions. And so I try to figure out what they're doing during the day, from the beginning of the morning till they go to sleep. And I make a hypothesis and I try to validate it. And the way that I validate it is I look at other content that I think that that audience would look at and I start reading comments, you know, I start watching videos. I try to start understanding and getting in their head of what they would buy, what they consume. And once you do that and you do it religiously for a period of time, you can almost anticipate, you know, you know, how they're going to engage with something by what people are saying and how they're actually doing it. And so that's, that's kind of how I, I go through it. Now a lot of you that's pro listening to this or watching this right now will say, well, that's too much work. And I'm here to tell you, if you ever want a secret of success, of being successful, of whatever project that you're doing is understanding who you're actually bringing value to, like that, that is one on one. And I'm here to tell you that if you do it the right way, you know, you can break and exceed any record that you want because, you know, YouTube's meant to go find people exactly like that person, and if they, if they feel trusted and you're, you're, you're bringing value. To get them to go from a viewer acquisition to a pull out their credit card and buy something is not very difficult once that trust is there, because they find it valuable, they find it like they connect.

And they roll from there. So I would say it's a travesty when people don't focus in on that avatar first and they just want to put out a product because they're like, you need this. You got a problem? Well, no, no, no, no, no. Let's just stop there. So let's really drill down what the thing is, because ultimately it's not maybe what you think it is. Maybe it's some talking points, but maybe it's only the people that are actually buying the stuff. But there's actually another avatar that could be buyers, but you're alienating them because of the way your messaging is.

This is so fascinating with YouTube and the algorithms, with an S, I think, is what the proper way to say it? Can you please talk about a little bit how that works kind of under the hood. I know there's a lot happening, but the 80 20, let's say for creators to really understand what YouTube is doing and how they're finding the right people for us.

Yeah. So basically YouTube has two goals. They want to find what the viewer wants to watch and keep them on the platform longer. Okay. That's the only two goals that they have. They don't have any other goals outside of that because if they're able to do that, they make more money because they, they can put ads. If they find what people want to watch, they're going to be satisfied and they're going to come back to the platform as much as they want. They need to. Right. And that's that long term engagement that they're looking for. And keep them on the platform longer is if they're very successful at that, you know, their, their view times are going to go way through the roof, which they can fire more ads. Okay. And so they're looking for people and their, their, you know, what they do on, on YouTube. There's no other AI except for TikTok. I'll let's hold that for another one. But that is really good at, at really profiling someone and anticipating what they want. And so once you understand who that is, every different type of traffic is very, very specific. So let me give you an example. If I'm watching a phone or watching a video on my phone, I would get results that YouTube knows that I'd watch on my phone. But when I go to my go home and I'm watching YouTube on TV, it give me totally different results. It's not the same results because my viewing patterns change. And that's how smart it is of anticipation. And as you give it more data that is watch videos or skip over videos or click on and engage with videos, it basically creates this personalized YouTube for you. And then it takes all this data that's out there that's unstructured in the sense of your patterns, my patterns, everyone's patterns, and says, oh, this group has some similarities. Well, let's test it out. Let's give them this little video right here and we'll see if we have, you know, success, what they call a hit rate. And if they click on it and they watch and engage with it, oh, we just learned something from it. And if so many people do that, that's where YouTube really promotes it into a more general audience is go out to more general audience and you can get, you know, hundreds of millions of video views that way, if not billions. It's like literally you could do it the right way if you understand those patterns. And so that's why I was saying knowing who your viewer avatar is really important because that's the essential component to have YouTube. If YouTube says, oh, this is your avatar, let's go find the right person for you. You're not paying any money for that transaction. You're not doing anything. YouTube's literally taking your content and hunting down the perfect viewer for that. And so when you collude it, and this is where the biggest mistakes that entrepreneurs make and anyone in personal development makes is they'll actually put all their stuff on their work. Not everything hits. And YouTube doesn't know what the heck the channel even is because you know, you're doing, you're even running ads and you're doing these shorts, you know, on the same thing. What the heck is this channel? And it confuses it and it's like, okay, yeah, we'll let it go until it finds one of those patterns. And so I like to try to predict that as fast as I can. And that led to the success of where I'm at. It's just really understanding people and then what they're wanting and then bringing value and then having the algorithm kick in and have it grow.

Yeah, that makes. You just said something that I never really thought about, but it makes so much sense now that you said it because I watch YouTube on my Roku on my TV and I watch YouTube at my computer. And when I'm watching at my computer, it's all, you know, business and marketing and you know, I watch a lot of stand up comedy as well, so that's the type of stuff that shows up on my computer. But when I go and watch on my Roku, I'm usually watching with my kids. And so it's like when I go and sit down with my, with my kids and watch it on Roku, it's Mr. Beast and Mark Rober and a whole bunch of Minecraft videos and that kind of stuff. Stuff. And I've never really thought about it until you just said it, but it does present different suggestions depending on where I'm watching. So.

And, and also the timing that you're watching too. It's not, it's literally. It knows your viewing patterns. Like it's literally profiled too. More than.

More than we know ourselves. Yeah.

Oh man.

Well, thank God for that because I'd have Blippi just popping up on all my channels. Got a 2 year old over here. How are you, Darrell? What would you suggest for creators? Because there's some solid scripts. I mean, listen, you obviously have Mr. Beast and his script's probably left and right, but the way that he engages with the audience to get them to subscribe. Obviously there's a lot of mechanisms and there's bribes or some monetary gain potentially. But is there a way an approach that creators should take to really engage with their audience to enhance YouTube to discover them further?

Look, I think at the end of the day, I don't look at subscriptions the same way as I look as an active person on my content. And let me kind of explain why I literally could care less about subscribers. I just care about people that are actively watching my content. And so let me make that very clear. So if I have someone that can't miss any video, they're going to subscribe. And not only that, they're going to get really mad when I'm supposed to upload at Thursday at 4pm and I miss it by two minutes. They're like, where the heck you at? Where's this video? You know, that's where it's at, right? That's what I want, you know, and you bring enough value to that where they're anticipating that they're going to subscribe. So it's kind of a byproduct of getting people actively liking your content. And so Mark Rober, for example, he doesn't really push the subscribe. Like, it's just, you know, what you get. It's like a science project that he's been working on probably for eight to nine months. I don't know how he does all these things. And he's putting together a beautiful story. He's probably one of the best storytellers on YouTube and teaching you things that you didn't know about science. And it is so cool. And, you know, it's just so, so engaging. And that's the value proposition. That's why you can get, you know, 50, 80, 100 million video views and get. That translates into subscribers too. And so I think the biggest thing is what is your value proposition and can you consistently fulfill on that value proposition? And then that's where the subscribers would come from. I wouldn't even push it. Hey, subscribe like and subscribe, whatever. Like, that's so unauthentic, you know, but if they found it valuable, you can grow, you know, they're like, hey, I just watched five videos. Where did my time go? This is so funny. This is so engaging. Binge watch this channel. Let's go ahead and subscribe.

Yeah, good point. It's like Joe Rogan's never said that. Go subscribe to my podcast and all maybe one time ever for Spotify for something contractual reasons.

I'm curious about your thoughts on going live versus Pre recorded. We're seeing a lot more people from Twitch, ditching Twitch and coming over and streaming on YouTube. And that's.

Well, you know why that is, right?

I actually don't know much about the Twitch world.

YouTube is literally pay the pulled out the bank. They're like banks open, here's money, come come stream for us. They literally are spending tons of money having them go live here. And so any type of emphasis of YouTube is there. But let's kind of address the live scenario. I'm probably, I've been bullish forever. I actually had the most concurrent live viewers on YouTube. I was a part of that project. I was also like even the Chosen. Last year we did this Christmas special, we had a million live concurrent people on the chosen. So it's like, hey, we can do this, right? And so I'm a big proponent of using it. It's a great way to get really authentic with people. It's a great way to sell too. We use that in the chosen to sell quite a bit. And then too with MrBeast, we do a lot of that as well. A lot of live interaction type stuff to sell merch or gifts or whatever's going on. So I think it's really cool. But I like, I like to think of what the experience for the viewer is if you're thinking live, you know, if the experience is, hey, we're here live, right? You're able to interact with me live. If it's more, oh, we're going to record it live and then put it out to the world. You got to understand who your audience is. And so if you don't treat it like it's live, then it feels weird for the people on live, but it feels good for the people that it's watching the replay.

Right?

And so there's just that awkwardness. And so you just have to be able to say, okay, this is the goal. This is what I'm trying to do.

Really smart people, if they want to repurpose it, they trim down the live stream where they use the live elements on the front and the tail end of it and then just trim it down to what the content is and then that you have it both ways. And so and what's great, YouTube has the editor right in and you can do that. And you don't save it as a new video, you just save it as the current and just kind of replaces all that and you get both components into it.

I like that. Okay. Yeah, we're going a little bit more of a hybrid model, so that could. Because, yeah, it's very interesting, but it seems like live is a big push right now. But of course, you want to think of the root of your audience going back to the core. Psychographics, really, everything goes back to there, is what I'm hearing.

See, now you're getting it. That's all it is.

Darrel. Huh? All right. Know the people behind the thing. Huh? Makes sense, right?

Because seriously, like, how arrogant are people? It says, you're gonna like this. I promise you're gonna like it.

Yeah.

You know, that's what you're saying to people instead of thinking, what will they like?

Yeah, yeah.

You know, it's true.

And. And just, like, I get people that come in and consult. They do a consult or a student. Like, I don't understand why this channel's getting more than me. Well, because this channel's authentic, and you. You're just telling people what they want.

Yeah.

You know, for sure.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, man.

How many channels are trying to just be a duplicate of a channel that they're seeing as successful and going, well, if they're doing it, then I'll do it. You know, you see it with Mr. Beast all the time.

Right.

You've got all those guys that literally.

Missed the whole point.

I'm sure you've had some fun times looking at YouTube, and you're like, okay, that followed my script. Or that followed, Didn't. Yep. They missed that piece. I don't know. Yeah, man. What other do you have? Any other, like, YouTube insider knowledge or anything that, like, for you.

That's a broad question.

Anything that's lightening you up that might be new on the platform that we should know about?

Yeah. Let me kind of. I want to not take over and hijack the conversation, but I think I want to explain how you can leverage it, because using tools and things that YouTube has is great, but it's more about that value proposition, where it's at and understanding that. So four years ago, I met a creator. I'm like, he can be a big YouTuber. We can do this. And he had an idea of doing a TV show about the life of Jesus Christ called the Chosen. You brought it up before, and we had zero money in the bank, zero social following, but we had a really good idea. What we did next was exactly what we talked about earlier, which was we locked ourselves in airbnb for two days, and we just figured out the avatar. That's all we did who's going to be Watching? And then two, we had lofty goals of crowdfunding, getting people behind us and crowdfunding the production of season one of the Chosen. And we wanted to break the all time crowdfunding record. We were competing with Mystery Science Theaters 3000 and Veronica Mars, who had an established audience. And we didn't have an audience, but we had an idea and we had a mission of what we were trying to do. And just to let everyone know we broke the all time crowdfunding record in film and television. And it all came from that one meeting of understanding who we're actually targeting, because they're us too. People that were just dissatisfied with the content that's being created. And you know, I've seen every Jesus show that there ever is, and it's just like, some of it's just horrible. Like, horrible. And they're so off because Hollywood is dictating what you can and can't create. So we wanted to own our own, our own path. And that was the messaging. And we did that and then two because of that. But you know, those, those original investors, we actually went and got approval with the securities Exchange Commission to do a reggae offering. And they actually became partners of ours. So we have 19,000 partners. And those people are like our army. They go out and promote because they're owners of the show too. Right. And, you know, after that, we got season one out and then it was like, okay, we need to get this out to a billion people. We don't want a billion views. That's easy. Billion people's hard. And so that's been our mission. And in the same thing is, we need to have a model of, of payment that can come back in because we made the show for free. And we did some very unique ways of getting people that feel a part of it. And not only did we raise money for season two, but we're just a couple hundred thousand dollars away raising all the money for season three.

Wow.

We already produced season two. We're getting ready to produce season three. And so this works. And so we have like 3.1 million followers on Facebook and on YouTube. We're like 1.4. And it's like, how does that work? 1.4 million. How does that work? It's like really creating content that people find valuable and that understanding people of what they're dissatisfied with, what they're satisfied with. And if you're speaking to them and you're on a mission, you can literally do anything. That just happened four years ago when we started all this. And now it's just nuts of where we're at, it's nuts of how far we've come just because we had that person identified and we knew how to communicate with them and we knew how to help them come back and support us and enlist them. And just to let you know, we did a private, we have a Christmas special with a special episode that came out and is coming out in theaters. And we once again broke records. So it was a private screening. We beat out France, you know, the TV show Friends for the most screens and we, we're not even. It comes out on December 1st 2nd until the 10th because they open up more days, but we sold out, you know, 1500 theaters all the times in like 12 hours, you know, and then it's just like, just this, the biggest behemoth that you've ever seen. And it's just, hey, we're doing a different approach and we're using the same strategies of how do we communicate with our avatar, what's the ways to engage them, how do we enlist them? And we create this feedback loop where it brings in new people and you know, expands and expands and expands and so on YouTube, on Facebook, on Instagram, on TikTok. I really don't care what platform that you use. It's not about the, and this goes back to your question. It's not about the tools that they give you. It's literally about how you're connecting to people. So the theme of the podcast is you need to do a better job at understanding who you're creating content for or who you're creating products for. And when you, you can really understand how they, they operate, you're going to get a great customer experience or a great viewer experience that they will not only buy from you, but they'll also promote you without zero advertising. And so on a good note, you know, you look at brands like Tesla, they have not spent a dollar on advertising at all, but yet they went from a non existent to the most profitable car company in the world, made, you know, Elon Musk the richest man in the world or I don't know.

Where he's right, he sold a bunch.

But yeah, you know, where is that maybe number two right now. But, and it all comes from zero advertising. But it's like, okay, you're part of something bigger. There's a bigger picture, you know, and you know, Tesla is 1,1 portion of a bigger picture of what he's trying to do on being a visionary.

Yeah. And what you're saying I feel like we're seeing more and more in the creator space with things like NFTs as well. Right. I don't know if you have much thoughts on NFTs. It's a fairly new thing. But you are seeing guys like Shonduras and Gary Vee and some of these other people using NFTs as a way to sort of tighten their community. And I'm curious about your thoughts on the whole NFT thing that's happening right now among YouTubers.

Yeah, I'm very, very interested in NFTs. I'm interested in crypto. I'm interested in anything that disrupts what we're normally. And those are huge disruptors by, by far. I like, I think we're at the stage of, hey, there's gold in California, let's go. We're just going to cross, you know, and, and, and I think the people that's going to make a lot of the money are the ones that are providing the tools for you to go mine, not necessarily going mining. I don't think that's changed at all.

Right.

Because you'll always get those stories of this or that. But there is this, this period of, oh, my gosh, craziness. And I think that's what we're in. I think we've been in that since February.

We have o of this year. Yeah, it's interesting to see the community element being built, thinking of the people behind these mechanisms like NFTs. But yeah, it'll be cool to see more of the creators hop on because I could see a lot of application there as that tech.

Yeah.

You had some really interesting creators taking on NFT projects and I think we're going to see a lot of billionaires coming out of this and a lot of them are going to have influence like, you know, YouTubers or, you know, people that have audiences that care about what they're doing.

Yeah. Yeah, man. Very cool. Yeah. Did we hit everything that. Yeah.

I mean, I want to be respectful of your time. The only other thing that I think would be kind of cool to shout out is the. There's the whole Team Trees thing that did what, over $20 million and then now they're doing Team Seas. And are they shooting for $40 million? I believe they're 30 or 40.

Yeah. Chosen got me so much involved this year. I did Team Trees, but I couldn't do Team Trees. Too many irons in the fire, but for sure.

But I just, I really feel like that shows the power of building a platform On a place like YouTube. Like, look at what these guys can manage to do. They're literally changing the world with their influence. With their influence and the platform that they created over on YouTube. And I just think that's.

That's amazing.

That just shows you where you can get with this kind of stuff if you just. If you just put in the work and, you know, follow what your audience wants you to create.

Yeah, well, and I think it's following what you want to create, but understanding your audience how to communicate that, you know, because they'll get behind a cause, like they really will. And so I think it's just more understanding, you know, what makes them tick and what's the best way to communicate what you're wanting to do. And if it, if that kind of crosses over what you're passionate about, then it's like a, you know, one of those moments that, that you have clarity and then you're just like. You have growth.

Yeah, it's like that Venn diagram where right in the middle is the sweet spot.

Exactly, exactly.

So, yeah, moral of the story here is everyone get a Airbnb for a couple days and lock yourself up and start doing some deep dive research on your avatar. You know that I.

Seriously, that. That is probably one of the most valuable business advice that you can get because then you have a lot of clarity of how to communicate, you know, and it's stuff that people normally do. Reactionary.

Yeah, totally.

Yeah. And it gets pushed aside and you never really get to the depths of what you are, what you're not, who your audience is and what they're not, and what that messaging is and what it's not. And that's where you make a lot of mistakes, spend a lot of money doing things that you shouldn't do. And you jump the shark a lot.

Definitely, man. Well, a couple other shout outs too. I know. Vidsummit. So you put that on. I think that was in October.

The end of September.

End of September. Okay. So that's an annual event though, right? Right. So that's. So definitely keep that on your radar, everyone. We'll link everything in the show notes as well. And the YouTube formula. Go get that on. Where's the best place for people to grab the book?

Ytformula.com or Amazon? YT Formula is a site that I run. And then you get extra courses and stuff like that with that if you're interested in that. If not, go to Amazon.

Right on. And check out Darrel's YouTube channel as well. I think you're at, like, over half a mil, but you're just giving out all this great advice, going deep dive on YouTube.

I haven't posted in, like.

Like.

I do live streams occasionally, and that's a way that I can give back. I just, you know, I do own other channels that make me a lot more money, but it's just like, oh, I feel like talking about YouTube. It's your outlet on YouTube. Yeah.

And I will say the YouTube formula. I got that book on Tommy Power's recommendation, and I opened it up, and I swear I read it in one sitting. I just. I couldn't put it down. I was just, like, mind blown every single chapter. I was learning something new, and it was just diving deeper and deeper and deeper, and, like, you cover the whole rabbit hole. It's amazing. I love the book.

Yeah, you covered a lot, man. So if you want the deep dive on YouTube, go get that, man. But this is a great, great starting spot. Darrell, appreciate your time, man. It's been an honor.

Thank you.

Hey, hey, hey. Thank you for listening to that episode. This is Joe Fear. I'm sure you probably already knew that, and Matt is not here right now, but I'm pretty sure he enjoyed the episode just as much as you and I did because, you know, he went into the production of kind of making that thing right along with me. So thank you very much, and I want to give a quick shout out to our buddies over at Easy Webinar. These guys have been supporting us for a while, a long time, and Casey Zieman is just a super good guy all around. He's actually been on the show before. He's the founder of EZ Webinars. So if you look up Casey Zman on any podcast platform you're listening to, go check him out. Go check out his back backstory, what he's all about. You can learn a lot about webinars as well. And right now, Easy Webinar, these guys are actually hooking you up with a great trial. It's a completely free trial to test out their software. Soup to nuts. Check it all out and see if it's a good fit for you. If you go to easywebinar.com hustle, that's H U S T L E. If you didn't know how to spell hustle, there you go. So if you go to easywebinar.com hustle, you can go grab a free trial. And Easy Webinar literally lives there up to its name. It's super simple. I mean, super easy. And it does all the stuff that you're looking for in any kind of thing with webinars, I mean, they literally cover every single type of webinar you possibly can do. So from live to automated to scheduled at specific times and all these crazy features in between, can't even list them all out. I'll be here way too long. They give you a ton of advanced analytics. What's working, what's not. During your webinar, based off all these actions, you'll see who attended, how long they stayed, if they clicked the offer or if they didn't. Basically, you're going to make more money and you're going to work less with this thing and you're going to create better relationships with the folks that are listening because it's a good experience. You want to give that good experience along with some great content, of course, and a killer offer if that's what you got for them. So go try it out yourself. Go check out easywebinar.com hustle. That's easywebinar.com hustole. Alrighty. Righty. So that is the end of this episode. Thank you so much for listening to this episode, enjoying it. Hopefully you did. I'm pretty sure you did, if you lasted this long. And go check out Easy Webinar when you get the chance. And we will talk to you next time. Bye. Bye.

Sa.