Revealing our $100,000 production studio

Boom. Welcome back to another episode of the Espresso Hour where the running joke is this going to be much shorter than an hour? Because we are once again hyped up on way too much caffeine and we are officially way too much in the shipyard. For our very first episode of the Espresso Hour. Coming at you live from the shipyard.

It took us long enough.

Took us long enough. Three and a half months.

I feel like every week I've gotten five questions from different people.

When's it coming?

When are you gonna make the first video? Well, how's the shipyard? When are you gonna do it?

We had to keep it under wraps.

We did, actually.

Turns out it just takes twice as long and costs twice as much, which we're going to dive into all that today. But it just feels good to be in here actually recording, actually filming. And we're going to look back on this video in a while. Is the start of our YouTube.

This is a special one.

Empire Journey.

This is the beginning. Yeah. Very excited about this. So we're going to cover all sorts of things today. We're going to talk about why we built the shipyard. We're going to talk about how much it cost us, how, how long it took. Things that we've loved about the process, things that we haven't loved about the process. So where do you want to start?

I think we should start with the three year anniversary of the shipyard being completed.

Yeah, that was kind of weird.

Very serendipitous, very. I don't know, eerie is not the right word, but for anyone who's unfamiliar, we finished the shipyard on October 11th. So October 11th, 2023. We're filming this on. Today is the 25th, and that was three years ago to the exact day that Cole and I were cold introduced via email. So we can throw that email up on the screen. Legendary email from. From Craig, a mentor for both of us that just said, not sure why, but I think you two should know each other. I'll let you take it from here.

So weird. I think that that's gotta be like, I don't know, some universe.

Universe, something.

I don't know if I believe in fate or destiny, but I think that that's so weird that that's how that happened.

And for it to be three years from the moment we were introduced to each other, existing, to finishing this dream, $100,000 production studio in Miami, I think it's just.

It's wild.

I woke up that morning as we were coming to build it and just pulled that up and was blown away by what can happen in three years.

And you know, what comes to mind, too, is to two. Two specific things. And, like, why I think the studio is so cool. One, the fact that we would do live sessions and you were in your childhood bedroom with your bed, and there's. There's footage on the Internet of that.

And some of my, like, most popular, you know, shorts and things like that have my bed just sitting in the background. I love that we did 19 cohorts without this studio. And I think that's an important thing to.

That's a really important lesson. And the second one, which is. I think my version of that was. Do you remember one of the first live sessions we did? Or it was an early cohort and I was doing, like, I guess on.

Office hours and office hours, and I.

Was sitting at my table in my West Hollywood apartment in la. I had the pandemic hair.

Oh, the hair.

And I was. And I didn't have a nice camera yet, so I was taking it off of my MacBook camera. And the lighting was terrible. I. I look like I'm in a hostage situation.

We were. We were still sending that one to people who joined is like, hey, check out this great office hours. And so everything is going to take a big level up in terms of production, quality, content, everything, just sitting here and talking to this.

But I think the important lesson with that is we took a long time and to get the content right, like, we really put the emphasis on what are we saying, what are we teaching, what are we sharing? And the production quality was, hey, you'll tolerate the horrible lighting and the MacBook camera and whatever, because the content was getting better and better and better. And now when you put production quality on top of really great content, that's totally different than if someone goes and sets up an amazing studio. But day one, they're like, well, I haven't done any of that work. I don't know what to talk about.

Right. We spent three years validating every single thing that we're about to say to this camera over the next year and a half, two years, where we have far more video ideas than we have time to film. So way more, really. We just need to sit down, lock ourselves to this desk, and film as many things as we possibly can, because that's how we get the most out of it. So, okay, so the first thing we want to dive into, into is why we built this space, specifically where we chose to build it, everything that went into it. And I think the first place to start is we've both kind of had this vision of our own office production studio, eventually, gym space separately and to see it all come together. I remember it was 2020 when I first started to see a little bit of success on the Internet. I was big into fitness youtubers. I'd watch a lot of them and I was tracking their journey of. You know, they started out filming themselves at the local LA Fitness and then they got kicked out of there and they still wanted to make videos, so they had to go build their own gym. And they built their own gym and continue to build a little bit of a following. And I remember seeing that for like Max Tuning, Christian Guzman, a lot of that OG YouTube era. And I remember being so inspired by it. Watching that is like a high school or college kid thinking, one day I want to build a space like this. So we don't have a squat yet. Squat rack yet.

Not yet.

We don't have dumbbells yet. But that was definitely something that. To feel it all come together was like an emotional moment for me as I walked in here when it was all completed, like, damn, we just actually built this thing.

And it. I mean, a lot went into this, but I think it's both. You know, it's like this was really hard and it also wasn't as hard as we thought. And so that's a cool takeaway. My version of that was. I mean, still to this day, I wanted a gaming studio.

Yes.

And I just. I wanted this set up and I wanted to live stream, you know, 12 hours a day. And there's still a part of me that's like, maybe when I have kids, I'll just start the.

It's right there. We're looking at this desk that we have tucked away into the corners here that they have like these cubbies and we'll show some B roll and things of that. But it is a time chamber. Time chamber gaming layer. Every time I sit down there, the.

Dream is still alive.

It's not over.

It's not over.

I say all the time. I think everything that we've been doing on the Internet is to eventually one day return to playing Runescape for 12 hours a day. And I've just been like, how do I build everything? I need to go back and do that. And I think we're kind of close, so.

And we've, we've talked about this in other episodes, but the importance of being able to reskin skills, you know, like how many times whenever we're thinking about marketing the two places we go back to are fitness and gaming. Because fitness and gaming are two industries that really dominate the Internet in terms of cutting edge marketing. And if you go back, you know, a lot of the fitness YouTubers and the, and the gaming YouTubers, like they were the first ones to go, I'm gonna start a YouTube channel or I'm gonna, I'm gonna brand myself or I'm gonna, you know, like they, they really pioneered a lot of this stuff. And so I, it's cool that we both still study.

We have the same influences. And then I guess another reason we chose this space was we decided, okay, let's. Well, you really need to trace back to our first office, which is about a year ago. I moved from Brickell, which is like 15 minutes south of midtown where I live now, where this studio is. And we signed a six month lease without looking at, we really looked at it for about five minutes. We're like, let's do it.

Yeah.

And it was like a corner with no windows, like eerily cold chairs.

It was a cave.

It was kind of a cave. And we sat in there and three days in realized that we weren't going to be able to film ship 30 live sessions there together because we didn't have the mike set up to be able to do zooms. Were like, well, this was dumb. So we went there for, you know.

Couple of weeks we got, and then.

We just ate the lease for the next six months and went back to we work where we spent the first three months.

Yeah, I think the funniest part about that story was that was right when we both had moved to Miami and we were still acclimating to working together in person. Everything before that had been all digital and we went through these like different phases. Remember we tried the. We work downtown.

I like, we built some of our best stuff during that month of July last year.

Yeah, I agree. And I liked, you know, getting out of the house and going to this thing. But it was this like every three weeks we would change the destination. And then when we got that studio, I remember going in, we were sitting in the chairs and you were like, I like this. Like, not bad, not bad. I think we were wishful thinking. And I like, didn't want to be the negative Nancy. So I was like, yeah, you know.

We could do this.

Yeah, this works. And then two weeks later we're like, there's no way.

And then really for the last year, we've probably been together in person like two days a week where we'd meet up on Monday, have Coffee, sit across this long table in WeWork and unnecessarily rent out the biggest room. Just because you could only have big picture conversations when you have the biggest room at the WeWork.

Yeah.

And then we'd go and build on our own. And it has been nice already being back to like three to four days per week in person, because we've just moved faster. You can feel how much faster we make decisions, our iteration loops, and why we picked this place. We decided we wanted to get back together in person because to be honest, what we were spending on that WeWork room was like half of what we're spending here for like three days a week. And so this came on the market and it's so perfect. I mean, you can. I'm looking at my apartment building right now out this window.

Yeah.

So I walk downstairs and I'm here and Cole, you're a six minute drive away most days. And you can come right here where now we've pretty much engineered our entire life where our gym is here, apartments, living situation, every potential restaurant you could want to go to. Socially, this is easier to get to, I think, for a lot of people than like Brickell or South Beach. So we can have people come to the shipyard. And it went on. And I realized when we saw it, because actually before this place, it's the place next door that we initially saw. So there's another similar building here or unit. And it went on the market. And we're like, oh, let's do it, let's do it. And they didn't respond to us. And then there was a. It was funny cause I used to walk by this place all the time. There were shoes through this entire place.

Sneaker store, sneaker store.

And they went out of business. And so our landlord was like, yeah, I don't want to rent to someone who could potentially be going out of business. And she's like, what do you guys do?

What do we do?

What do. Great question, great question. But we're like, look, we here, we have social profiles. Go check us out. Like, we're going to build a legitimate space and business in here. And so luckily she went with us over two other people who are actually bidding like slightly more or same amount. But it would have been like a sketchy potential business versus us just being in here. So that was another big reason of signing this one. And if we didn't sign it, I don't think we would have done it. No, we wouldn't have put this place elsewhere because of its convenience. Yeah, that's the number one thing, right. Is the fact that we're right here. Can go to the gym after everything.

Yeah. I think that's just something I've noticed over the years because I've worked remote for a long time. And when you work remote, you can pick where you work from, you know? And I used to work out of coffee shops. I would work out a Soho house when I lived in Chicago. I did the same thing in la. And something that I've really learned about that sort of managing that lifestyle, because you have to be really disciplined and accountable to yourself. Like, I gotta wake up and I gotta go to work. If I don't do it, I'm not putting food on the family, you know, so it's. Yeah, shout out George Bush for that quote. You ever see that clip?

No.

Where he's like, giving a public speech and he's like, all about putting food on the family. And he. He means to say food on the table. It's awesome. And so I've really learned, like, working remote, you have to. It's all about convenience. It's actually not about the space. Great example is there's a. So house here in Miami, but it's in South Beach. And I tried. Yeah, I tried working there. You know, the first. They opened a new one nearby, but the main ones in South Beach. And I tried going there, you know, once or twice a week. And it was. It's like it would take me an hour and a half.

Takes an hour to park.

Yeah, it was. And so I think sort of the biggest thing with a space in general is starting with the convenience factor and then building everything inside of that.

Exactly. And this is about as efficient as it gets. Aside from picking this place in general, why we are deciding to build a YouTube studio, I think tons of reasons. One, we've spent three years validating all of our ideas so we know what our first 50 videos are going to be. Yeah, most people don't have that. It's like, I want to be a YouTuber and I got to go figure out what I want to say. We actually recommend just validating your ideas with writing first because it's lower barrier to entry. But now that we have all that validation, we talk a lot about our two missions for ship 30 and PGA. The mission for ship 30 is to help 1 million people start writing on the Internet. And the mission for PGA, our premium ghostwriting academy, is help 1 million people make a living riding on the Internet. By definition, to reach that many people, we actually need to expand who we're talking to where we've spent the last three years only writing and sharing our ideas on Twitter and LinkedIn, where anyone on those platforms, it's a text platform. So they are very close to writing. They're already. They're either already writing and creating on there, or they're looking at other people who are with YouTube and Instagram, which we're able to reach with this studio where we are expanding the total number of potential writers we can reach because most people on those platforms are not yet writing.

Mm. And there's millions and millions and millions who want to. Or. Or are thinking about it or don't even know that they should.

Completely unaware.

Yeah, Completely unaware of the problem. And so it is really interesting. And writing is such a great example of this. But sometimes the thing that you dig into, it's not always linear. Like, I think the linear thing was us writing on Twitter and LinkedIn. You know, the nonlinear thing is us going to other platforms that aren't really writing platforms, but using it in a way that. And doing it natively. Like us embracing video to bring people to a different medium.

Right.

And the thing that you said, you said this a couple days ago and I can't get it out of my brain, which is. I think a lot of people perceive YouTube specifically and also Instagram because you just cross post there as. It's like video platforms, like YouTubers succeed at video. And I love your insight about. Like, YouTube is not a game of video. YouTube is a game of writing. Because all the YouTube videos that go well are in some way scripted. The think about the title, think about the hook, think about the structure and format. And so it's fascinating approaching this, this game and going into video through the lens of. Well, we've been refining our writing for a really long time now. All we got to do is read our writing.

Yes.

You know, like, I think that's a nuance a lot of people in the video world don't understand.

I think there are two types of content that succeed on YouTube. It's zero scripting, pure raw vlog, like day in the life filming. All I'm going to do is do exactly what I would normally do when people build affinity that way. Or the other side of the barbell is tightly scripted, straight scripting, straight up, highly produced, well edited. And if you try to operate in the middle there, I think you run into problems or you just don't see the success that you otherwise could have.

Yeah. And it's. Once you see that or understand that it makes A lot of sense when you compare someone who's riffing to someone who has scripted every word of the first five minutes of the video or every word of the whole video, you know, and when you put them side by side, you're like, why is that second one so much cleaner? And what's crazy, this just shows you know when you step into a game, you don't know what you don't know. Right. And for years I would look at YouTubers like that and be like, they are incredible speakers. I don't understand. I thought they were just off the top of the dome.

No.

Just ripping. And now like, oh, you're just reading. You're reading.

You're literally reading. And you have a high quality video editor who makes it engaging.

Yeah. And now we know that now.

And now we know. Right. We've spent three years not understanding that where a fun exercise for anyone who's interested in writing but also creating videos. Take a Mr. Beast video or an Ali Abdaal video or anyone who's seeing a ton of success script out their hook and you will see some of the best copywriting.

Yep.

That you possibly have ever seen.

Yep.

Because they are the best attention grabbers. And retainers are just creating the most engaging and retain. Retainment. Focused scripts.

Yep. Yeah.

Retainment.

We're in the middle of a ship 30 cohort. And it makes me think of the. The six single sentence openers. We talk about those all day. It's like, did you know that weird insight. Right. Or you can't have X without Y. Right. Controversial opinion. So you see all. Or vulnerable statement. You know, when I was 22 years old, I. Right. Moment in time. Like all these openers that we talk about through a writing perspective are really just. That's the engine behind all these viral YouTube videos and shorts. Now, like shorts are the. All the shorts going viral are scripted.

Are scripted. Rather than just take taking from podcasts and clipping it out. So a lot to do in the studio now that we have it. But that's a little bit of why we picked this place in particular, the entire vision for our general YouTube strategy. But we're going to talk a little bit more about content cadence. Why don't we dive now into this space in general. Everything that went into what you're seeing here, what you don't see behind here. I think that's the most interesting part of you look at this.

Setup.

And I mean just look around like what we're looking at right here, what this thing is. We don't know Any of it. So why don't we dive into how we built this, our process for using an agency, why we chose to use an agency, what most of this stuff does, but also why we went with that table there. The general. The vibe of this, which is still like I'd say 80% done. We still have a little bit more to do to make this more like a office style space. But where do you want to start?

I mean, I think just lay of the land. This is not as big as you might think it is. I mean, the camera, it looks far away, but you know, if I just stood up, I could probably touch it. We have couch and two chairs over here we have a co working table. Has about six chairs around it. Right behind this camera we have a huge light that's. Is this a light or a fractor? I don't know what this thing is.

We have lights here, there's lights there. And then this table.

Yeah. And then we've got. And there's a. There's a bathroom back there. And then we got two little cubbies for two desks. One is a producer's table where the camera is hooked up to a desktop. So it all just gets funneled into that computer. And then another one where Dickie has his. I'm going to sit and disconnect from the real world and grind for eight hours in a row.

That's been a lot of fun to sit there, but I have to make sure I lock the door because I am so in a different time chamber right there. But we wanted to make sure that we weren't just building a place that had a setup. We wanted to make this a place where we could hang out. I'm excited to say, like once or twice a week. Just invite any Miami entrepreneur to come hang out with us.

Once we have the espresso bar.

Exactly. That's the last vision. And then maybe we'll just buy the place next door and build out a gym and a based grass fed steak bowl.

There you go.

We'll have everything we need. I won't have to go anywhere. I could actually sit there for 16 hours a day.

Yeah, it's not that big of a space and it's. It is nice having somewhere. Like even just having that table. Because that's why we used to go to WeWork is we just, just. We literally just wanted a space to sit down in person and talk through what are our priorities for the week and things like that.

So on opposite ends of a very light table.

No, you need some space to Let the thoughts breathe, you know? But yeah, this was a. This was a journey. And I think the reason why we went with an agency, if you haven't picked up on it by now, is that this is not either of our skill sets. And I think something that you always. It goes back. It's like an entrepreneurship adage, which is buy it or build it. You know, when you're running a company, if you want to, if you want some sort of new vertical, you have two options. Either go build it from scratch, or you go find someone else who already built it and just buy and acquire what they've done. Right. And you can take that same idea and apply it in a micro sense in your own life or in your own business. Creator, business, solopreneurship, whatever it is that you're building, which is, we want to build a studio. Okay. Build it or buy it, you know, and for us to go and learn what all of these things do and how to set it up, first of all, it would have taken significantly longer.

Years. Yeah, Legitimately, probably years.

Yeah, we probably would have worked on it for two years. Second is opportunity cost. Like, what are all the things that we wouldn't be able to make progress on because we're spending the time learning that. And then third is risk mitigation. You know, okay, we go teach ourselves all these things. What's the likelihood that we get 50% of it wrong? Very high. Right? We buy the wrong camera, or we buy a camera, we get the wrong cord, or we buy the wrong light, or we set it all up and then we realize, you know, like, there's so much risk in. In that. And so when you kind of do the math on, okay, how much do we value our time at how many hours is this going to take? What. What's the cost of getting things wrong and having to redo it? Right. When you do the math on that, all of a sudden this becomes a very, very, very, very, very expensive thing, like 5, 10, 10x what we spent. And instead we can just go to an agency and go, please solve all of this for us.

Please take care of it.

You know, And I think the. It's important to acknowledge if the reaction to that is, well, yeah, you can do that because, you know, you have a thriving business. If I'm just starting out, I don't have the funds to do that. To which our answer would be, yeah, neither did we.

Exactly.

Right. Like, we point. Dickie was doing it in his home bedroom and I was doing it from my kitchen table, you know, like, it. It isn't something where you look at, you look at stuff like this. You go, I need all of this in the beginning. I actually think people, people that have this in the beginning almost do that, do themselves a disservice because you mask the problem.

You don't get the signal right. You don't get the signal of validating your ideas because call a spade a spade. We look smarter and sound smarter because of this.

I look way smarter.

But we're actually going to put high quality ideas out there versus other people who start with a studio like this but then haven't validated all the ideas that they're going to talk about are. You know that. I think that's why you see some people with really nice studios who don't see the success because they don't know what they're saying.

Yeah. And they don't. And they. That's exactly. That's a great point. And it masks the signal. And so they don't understand what's going wrong. They're like, what are you talking about? I just spent, you know, a quarter million dollars on this amazing studio. How come I'm not seeing the same result? A mental model that I really love. And I do this in, in everything that I do. I love the ankle weight analogy where whatever you're doing, I like asking the question, like, what would it look like to do this with ankle weights on? You know, instead of doing like, most people are like, what's the easy way of doing this? I always wanted, okay, well, what's the hard way of doing this? And I think if you default to the hard way of doing it in the beginning, you end up lapping everybody in the long term. Right, Right. Because then you take the ankle weights off and you're like, oh, I'm so much faster than everybody else.

That's very smart.

I think we did it. We joke. We were playing this game on hard mode, right. You know, we were doing calls where I was looking at the camera trying to riff off the top for an hour, 90 minutes in a row.

I made an entire YouTube video where I didn't blink for seven minutes because I'm like staring at the camera thinking, how the hell do they look at the camera and read so perfectly? I'm like trying to remember and realizing that I got absolutely roasted on a couple videos.

That was funny.

But that's the thing. I played it on hard mode, realized, oh, wow, okay, I'm just playing this game wrong. I literally have ankle weights on, trying to run a marathon, take Those off, I'm like, oh, I can just look at this thing now and I sound smarter and look better. Great. Easy choice.

So I think you should start with the whole thing.

High level framework. Why we went with an agency is the same reason I have someone clean my apartment once a week. Because I don't really enjoy it. They're way better at it than me and the opportunity cost is high of what I could spend that same two or three hours doing. So not only on top of all those three things, if I were to do it myself, it would end up way worse. So I don't enjoy it. It's costing me money doing it. There's someone who's way better at it than me and the result is going to be much better. So you could picture the reverse of us trying to do this. It would be more expensive and it would end up way worse. We wouldn't enjoy doing it. So why wouldn't we pay the $20,000 that we paid to the agency to help us build this entire place where now I say one command to our. I'm not going to say it because it's going to set everything off, but to our Jeff Bezos device. And the entire studio turns on perfectly and we sit down, hit two buttons on record and then upload it to the Internet and the rest takes care of itself.

Yeah, it's awesome. Shout out to dream studio for helping us build this. To be honest, I'm extremely impressed with how it turned out.

Oh yeah.

I had an idea of what this was going to end up as. And this I can pretty confidently say this is 10 times cooler than what I thought it was.

Especially, you can see that. I think we probably have some B roll or some reaction footage that we can throw in there. Like at this moment of us seeing ourselves on that screen for the first.

Time, it was like I was mind blown.

Oh yeah, that is different. And hearing ourselves, the recordings, everything, we sound better. It's awesome.

It is, it is really cool. But again, you know, I feel, I don't know why I feel the need to reiterate it, but all of these things are not things that you typically have in the beginning. And that's okay, you know, like the whole point is to start with it grungy, you know. Another metaphor I think about all the time is the Eminem 8 mile thing. You know, it's like, I think the harder the beginning is sometimes by necessity and environment and life, circumstance, but other times you can, it can be self inflicted, like self imposed constraint because you want to train the right thing. You could say the same metaphor about organic traffic and paid traffic. Like a lot of people go straight to paid. And really, if you take the time to learn the organic side, by the time you get into paid, a paid is a lot easier. So there's all these interesting parts of business that I think if you just slow down in the beginning, then, you know, it's wild to me that we've done all this in three years.

Yeah.

Like, it feels like a day has gone by, like time has just flown and. And to some people, three years is a really long time. But experiencing it, three years is a very short amount of time.

Seriously, another decision we made as we were building this, when they asked about budget, we basically said give us the absolute best of the best. Camera setup, lighting, teleprompter, everything. Because the marginal cost at that point, we'll do a full gear breakdown. But roughly everything in here costs about 40, 45,000 in terms of gear. And not excluding agency fees, excluding rent, excluding all that. Like all of this stuff, the gear, the teleprompter, the lights, the computer, the chairs, the desks, couches, all of that.

Yeah.

Came out to around 40 to 45,000, maybe a little more. And we made the intentional choice where, hey, this camera is 4,000, this one's 2,000. Which, which one would you like? Well, we said, what if you didn't have a budget, which one would you pick? And they picked that one.

Yeah.

Now, again, we're fortunate to run multiple high free cash flow Internet businesses that allow us to invest in a studio like this where we wouldn't have made that same decision a year ago. And that's kind of why we waited.

Right.

We done a lot to grow the business to a sustainable perspective where it made sense to make this investment.

Yeah.

But full breakdown of everything, camera, all that came out to around 45 grand, which when we started probably was on the high way on the higher end than what we actually thought we'd end up spending on this.

Oh, yeah, I thought all in. We were going to spend like 40 or 50k for everything.

Yeah. Including the agency, including the first four months of rent that we weren't able to use the space but we had to have so we could map it out and build the entire thing.

Yep. Yeah, but good, good rule of thumb, everything always takes twice as long as you think and cost twice as much. And that almost to the data point, is how this went. You know, it took twice as long as we thought and it cost about twice as much. I think all in ended up being a lot closer to about 100K.

Right. If you include the four months of rent plus the first and second month, plus the agency fee, plus all this about 100 grand furniture.

Yeah, all, all the stuff.

Which is awesome because we've put ourselves in a position where that is the tangibility of the return on that is immediate. We're a couple YouTube videos away from seeing that return itself in multiple spades.

And I think the important thing to take away. Right. Is most people who do this, you have to have a business. Right. The business is what pays for this. It's not like Dicky and I were like, yeah, this would be really fun to spend. I mean, I guess it's our money because it is the company's money though, which doesn't exist. Yeah, pre tax money is just free money. That's how I always think of it. And also too is like we, we made this whole decision through the lens of this thing is going to help our business. No different than any other part of the business would help our business. You know, And I think the other thing is if you think about just the cost of the gear, you know, 40 or 50 grand, it might seem like a lot in a vacuum, but if you think about it, even a creator that's do it, that has a quarter million dollars a year business right at the end of the year, maybe they end up profiting somewhere around after they pay themselves.

Right.

They have another 50k left over. Something like that. You reinvest that for one year and all of a sudden you have a setup that makes it look like you're in a multimillion dollar studio and then the next year on YouTube or the next thing that you do is 10x higher quality. So if you really think about it in the context of a cash flowing business, these things aren't that expensive. And I think for me that was a big reason why I didn't do this until now. I always looked at people on YouTube and I was like, if they have that set up, I bet that costs millions of dollars. No, it doesn't.

There is a parallel here to the video we made about investing 6 to $8,000 to join a mastermind, where for most, I'd say 99.9% of businesses investing 68k for a mastermind or investing 100k into a studio would be a horrible investment because the return would not be there. If you took someone who didn't have a business and you put them in that 68k mastermind, they had to take a loan to get in there, they wouldn't see the return that we've seen. Yeah, if you had to take a loan out to build this 100k studio before you had a business that would instantly see a return because of the videos and the content that you could create from it, it wouldn't be worth it. But for us, we see immediate return on investment. And there's something to be said about making stretch investments. We talked about this on the last one, where when you invest in an apartment that is a little bit out of your reach, or you invest in an office that's a little bit out of your reach, or you hire a team member and you pay them a little bit more than is comfortable, you naturally raise your level of effort and intensity to get the most out of that new investment. So we're sitting down today and we're going to film for four hours because we want to get the most out of the studio. We feel the urge to say, we put all this money into it, let's go get our money back on this. And so that naturally there's something to be said about when you place a uncomfortable investment in yourself, that that raises your level of effort and intensity to go recoup that and then some. So that's another reason we went with creme de la creme of everything, because now we're going to put in creme de la creme efforts.

Yep. Yeah, that's a great point. It's actually kind of cool to look back on when we signed the lease for this place. Like, in hindsight, I don't think either one of us really felt ready.

No.

Like there was a big part of me that was sort of like, I don't really know why we're doing this. Like, it seemed, it seemed very forward looking, you know, and now looking at it, you know, now it's what, four months later. It's so funny to look back on that because I'm like, we timed this perfectly. Perfect.

This is exactly, exactly when we needed it. Yeah.

And I think that that's interesting. Right? Like, that's sort of the nature of doing anything entrepreneur is you have to find that the efficient frontier, right. We were talking about this is like you have to find that sweet spot where you're reaching just enough where you can grow into the next thing. But you're not reaching so much where all of a sudden you're taking on this burden or this risk. And so, and I mean, there's some element of risk. But yeah, we, in hindsight, we Timed this pretty perfectly.

Definitely. And now we're sitting down. It's October 25th. We have a hundred videos that we want to go film. We have tons of things we can upgrade. And so why don't we dive into what we're thinking on the content side with this new studio so high level, we're going to continue to film our espresso hour on a once a week basis where the most fruitful way and I think what people find the most value in is just us talking about what we're doing in the business. So we have a lot heading into Black Friday. We have a couple new products we're launching, we have a couple new team members we've brought on that are doing different things that I think we want to just expand on and riff probably next week as we maybe do like a game plan for the rest of the year or something like that. We want to accelerate all of our YouTube content. We want to. I don't know. What are you thinking?

Yeah, I mean, the short answer is more. We're just going to do more. I was just talking with you, Dickie, before this about how I just feel like there's such a need for really actionable writing content on the Internet. I think so much of that content is aspirational. We talk about the four A's in chip 30. So much of writing is written. Writing is talked about through an aspirational lens in like, you have to listen to yourself and you have to trust your heart and it's all about being authentic and you have to do it. And it makes me want to just bash my face into a window. Like, I can't because that's not what's actually helpful. Right. And I'm really, really excited to just have an onslaught of educational, entertaining videos and long form and short form that is exceedingly actionable. You know, like, I want to get into the sentences, I want to get into the nuances of why certain words elicit different feelings than other words. And I've never seen anybody do that. And I'm really excited to create that content and then c be how it fuels our businesses.

And at the same time, we now have validation from your two videos with Ali where there is a need for high quality writing based education just based on the fact that your video interview on his Deep Dive podcast has 300,000 views and then his new video Breaking down how to make $10,000 a month as a writer also has 300,000 views in two weeks. And there's no other content out there that competes with it.

Yeah.

And so we're excited to dive into those exact, literally those exact titles and thumbnails because there's clearly a massive amount of people on YouTube that want to live this life that don't have access to it.

Yeah, I hate, I mean, it, it. Nothing gets me more fired up than the whole, you know, nobody makes a living as a writer. Like, if there's one thing I hope to achieve in my lifetime and in all the things that we build together, it's to help more people realize that, yes, you absolutely can. You just got to stop listening to this whole narrative that's been passed down for the past however many generations, you know, so. And I hope that we talk a lot more about Internet businesses specifically. Like, I think we've really realized that of all the different types of businesses you can build, obviously that is our niche. And I think we are also really good at coming up with new and unique ways of doing things in that niche. And so I'm really excited to share more like as we talk about what we're doing in our businesses, also sharing like how we're thinking about it and how you can adopt similar things. And we'll share templates of how we're executing campaigns.

You know, we sat down when we talked about Espresso Hour after we kind of made a couple videos this summer where we were doing more teaching and more education. And I think we sat down and realized that as much as we want to share those frameworks, we need to stay focused on sharing them through the lens of here's what we are doing with our business. And so I look at this content raiser we've been talking about of creating content that only we can create, that we'd also want to consume. And so we could sit down and talk about general digital marketing frameworks that anyone could talk about. But through the lens of, hey, here's how we've done it. To build a six figure SaaS business, to six figure newsletters and to seven figure plus multi seven figure group coaching, co op based court, cohort based course and eventually digital products that will be so much more contextual than other people are able to. And when we updated our LinkedIn's and put all five of those businesses on there, I was like, okay, these are five different types of businesses. The only ones we have not done our physical product consumables, which we drink a lot of water, drink a lot of coffee. Something's in the works there. Just stay tuned on that one. But yeah, you're right.

Each that is another cool thing is we've built not the same business, but each one has a different business model.

Right.

And so that means there's totally different frameworks and learnings. And I think the coolest part about the, you know, we'll share what we're building and sort of how we're thinking about it. But the coolest part isn't like, here's what we're doing. I think the coolest part is here's what we're doing and then we'll tell you the result of that. You know, hey, we did this. It worked really well. Hey, we did this. It didn't work so well.

Yeah.

You know, like, I wish more people were doing that.

Right. Imagine all the other people that we look up to on the business side if they were filming, hey, here's what we're doing in our business this week, documenting the entire thing. So imagine us two years ago, getting to listen to us two years now.

Mm.

Just talk about what it is we're up to and then potentially share the high level frameworks that emerge from that. And it's gonna be off the cuff. We, I think we understand what kind of writing based content we want to create and can script that out and can talk very specifically about all of that because we validated all those ideas. But talking business frameworks, those are gonna be emergent as we just talk about it in general. So we're gonna use this podcast as a little bit of here's what we're doing, here's what we think's interesting, but listening back to the audience saying, hey, could you go deeper on this thing? Hey, could you do a breakdown of the way you're thinking about this topic? Rather than us thinking, here's exactly what the people want, we want to break it down to here's what we're doing. Could you tell us what could be interesting for you?

It's all the same POV that we've been preaching in CHIP 30 for three years. You know, it's just applied to a different medium. So on that note, if you have any questions or anything in specific that you want us to dig into as we start to think about the content we're going to create for the rest of the year, drop in the comments, would love to get some signal as to what would be most helpful.

All right, I think we pretty much covered everything we wanted to cover there. I just, I just want to sit down and film.

I know that it's like, let's get.

This video out so we can go make 50 more videos that we want to go and create because there was a little bit like, oh, we can't make new videos. Do we unveil this studio and this video? So that's it for this one. We're so excited to have this studio. We're so excited for everything. We're going to share for you all. So we appreciate each and every one of you listening, validating our ideas where we felt it was time to double down on this medium as we started to test it like we did with all of our writing now we tested video got some resonance. We're excited to reinvest and double down on all of that. Anything else before we get out of here?

No. I mean, maybe we'll if, if there's enough questions, you know, if anyone's curious on anything, maybe we'll do a second video. Happy to answer anything else about the studio if you're thinking about building one yourself, but no, otherwise I'm just ready for the, the onslaught to begin.

Yes. So we're going to look back on this video. I'm not going to set a subscriber goal, but it's simply way more than we currently have.

More.

Just more, more, more. That's kind of the MO of our video season right now. So thanks for watching this video. Hope you found it useful. If you're thinking about building a studio, if you're following along, if you're listening on Spotify, Apple podcasts, drop a five star review, leave some kind of favorite. Throw it on Instagram, tag us, we'll repost it. Throw it on Twitter, tag us, we'll repost it. If you're on YouTube, hit Subscribe. Hit like leave a comment. And as promised, if you're sticking around to the very end of the video, here we are giving away one spot to our January ship. 30 for 30 cohort to one lucky winner who leaves a comment with the word Caribbean. Caribbean, Caribbean, Caribbean spelled correctly, could be in a comment. Just let us know that that's the secret word and that you would like to be entered into the giveaway and we will be in touch with that lucky winner at the end of this week. Thanks for watching and we'll see you in the next one.