How Beardbrand Got 50 Million Views on YouTube

What's going on, Kon Kon? Yeah? They stuck me in right before lunch, so I got to bring a little bit of energy for you guys. Don't be thinking about that food. All right, so what I want to teach you is how Beardbrand has built our YouTube channel. Okay? A little bit about us. Beardbrand, these are some very handsome guys, especially the guy on the left. Um, our mission is to foster confidence through grooming. So our goal out there is we think we can make the world better by giving men the tools they need to invest in themselves. When they invest in themselves, they can invest in their family, in their careers, in their communities. And it all starts with the person you're looking back in the mirror. So we wrap that up with a tagline, which is "Keep on growing," which is trying to get our audience and our customers to continue to invest in themselves, continue to grow, and of course, like, have some really cool gnarly beards. Our YouTube channel is more than just me. It actually started off with me, and then we added these other very, very handsome guys. And we have guest collaborators. And we'll talk about that a little bit more. But you'll see on the right side is our Barbershop series. And we go into a barbershop, and we'll film it. It's very kind of relaxing, like ASMR. Does anyone know ASMR? But anyways, I kind of hated putting this slide in here, like why YouTube? I feel like I go to my fair share of conferences. And people are always talking about like Facebook and how to make for Facebook. And a lot of the previous talk— presentators— presenters? Presenters were talking about how to, you know, write for Facebook. And then of course like blogging and writing for content. But no one, except for me, is talking about YouTube. Now YouTube is an incredible platform. It's an awesome platform. In fact, it is the second most popular website. It is more popular than Facebook. It is the second most popular search engine. So only Google has YouTube beat and they kind of work together anyway. So between YouTube and Google, you got to be on there. Well, you don't have to be on there. You'd be on there if you want. But it is huge. An interesting stat about YouTube is there is one 1 billion hours of videos being watched per day. All right? So just take a moment to think about that. 1 billion. So if you had a billion people, that means they were on YouTube for an hour. And chances are you guys aren't watching YouTube for an hour. So it's just the amount of people on YouTube is obscene. Facebook— has this little bait-and-switch tactic where they allow your post to show to everyone. And you're like, oh man, this Facebook thing's pretty great. I can post something organically and it gets shown to all these people. And they're like, ah, not so fast. We're gonna pull that back and now you gotta start paying us for it. Whereas YouTube is a platform that's like, hey, you're creating content for us? Sweet! Here's more audience for you. And not only that, here's some money. We're gonna give you money. So YouTube is— YouTube actually pays us to make content. So it blows my mind why people— All right, and the other good thing is anyone in here can start typing. In fact, some of y'all are typing right now. And you can put that typing stuff on a blog post, in an article, on a Facebook post, on Twitter. That's pretty easy to do. Like, it's a pretty low barrier to entry to have a blog. And subsequently, there's tons of blogs. Probably for whatever industry you're in, you're gonna have more competition on a blog or a social media platform than you're gonna have on YouTube. It is a little bit more challenging to create videos. It is not easy. But if it's something that you dedicate to, you can build systems and processes to make it easy. And you'll find that you're not running into as many competitors. All right, so let's get into Beardbrand. How did we do it? We're, as Adam said, we're a bootstrap company. We started with $30. We've got no loans. We're debt-free. No outside money, no investors, anything like that. Yeah, man. We're hustling. All right. But first, so the talk of this, if you couldn't tell, is how we got to 50 million views on YouTube. But I do have a confession. We're only at 49 million. So the thing is, we're getting 175,000 views a day. I tried to convince Sam to move this back a week so I would officially be at 50 million, but they were not having any of that. So the beauty of YouTube is it is like compounding interest. And like the Pitney Hoarder is probably going to relate, they love compound interest. I love compound interest. Who doesn't love compound interest? You do the same amount of work and you get more out of it. So let's take a look at Beardbrand's growth over the years. So in 2012 is when we started. 2012, our first video was February 8th. It was a really bad video. In fact, all those videos in 2012 were bad except for one. We were able to get a stunning, huge growth in one year of what, just under 300? 279 followers that first year. And only 40,000 or 60,000 views. But you'll see we doubled the content 2013, got a significant amount of subscribers, and that trend continues. You'll see the, the common thread of our YouTube channel is each year we're producing more and more content, and we're learning how to produce content. So that investment into YouTube comes back. Because how the user works is on YouTube, they'll watch a video, and YouTube does a great job of showing your other videos to them. So they'll go down this rabbit hole of watching 2 or 3 or 5 or 6 of your videos all in one sitting. Whereas on Facebook, it's about how the user scrolls through their feed. And you're lucky to get one in there or a couple in there, but there's no opportunity to really maximize and build that audience and that content you're producing. So let's dive deeper into our growth. I like being an open book, showing you how it is. I don't think a lot of people out there will show you their dashboards. This is our lifetime views for our channel. And I've got certain blue marks highlighted here. And you'll see there's like little bumps. So little bump, little bump, little bump. And this is over about, what, 6 years? Those little bumps are going to be the seasonality of our channel. So we're in one right now. We call it growing season, where all the dudes seem to grow their beards out in November. I love growing season. It is my favorite season of the year. If you guys aren't growing a beard out right now, I highly recommend it. It's great. So YouTube is going to have, like, a natural kind of cadence and, I guess, ebbs and flows. You know, the summer is actually pretty slow. A lot of the college kids will head home. And apparently, when they're in school, all they do is watch YouTube. And when they leave school, they don't do anything else. But I want to point out a couple other impressive marks. So going back to my previous slide where we talked about how we were creating more content on a yearly basis, these red marks indicate when we shifted from— so like the first red mark, we were doing very sporadically, like one a month, one every two months. And then we finally got up to one video a month. And we did that for about a year. And then you'll see a little bit of boost in that. And then we moved up to 2 a week, excuse me, somewhere in between the first and the second post. And then at the middle red one, this one, that was when we moved up to 4 posts a week. And then this one right here before the huge spike, We've gone up to daily content. So every single day, there's going to be a new video on our Beardbrand channel. So how did we do that? It's easy to say, "Just create a video every single day." But how many videos do you think you can make talking about growing a beard out? We have over 500 videos. And to answer your question, to grow a beard out, you just wait. So it's been a little bit of a challenge. So our strategy is a lot of pretty good videos over less really good videos. And there's no right or wrong strategy with anything. So our blueprint works for us. It works for our preferences and techniques and our workflows. But for some people, they may prefer really investing a lot of time and energy. I know some YouTube channels that have just absolutely blown up and grown to millions of subscribers and viewers and views. Almost overnight, just posting one video a month. Primitive Technology— how many of you guys watch Primitive Technology? Okay, y'all should put a note because that's like my favorite channel. It's just some dude in the woods and he's like hammering around in bare feet. I don't get it, but it's like, it's very relaxing and it's— he has this like a little story he's telling. So there is opportunity to create content inconsistently, I would say, and still see success. But the thing with that guy from Primitive Technology is he's like literally living in the woods a month at a time, and I think it takes him probably like months to find an outlet to charge up his camera. So our strategy is like, all right, we don't really have that good of ideas to be able to create like these really incredible stories or videos. So what we're going to do is figure out how can we create a lot of content. And the way that we've done that is multiple hosts. So you saw earlier we had 3 guests that are pretty much regulars. We're trying to get that up to 7 regulars, and then that way we'll have like 7 different people's take on how to grow a beard. And, you know, some guys have curlier beards, some guys have gray beards, some guys have long beards, short beards, just give that diversity of information. But it also goes like your hairstyle, your grooming. So we've branched out beyond the beard. It's more than just the beard. It's the hair. It's grooming. And it's also self-improvement, going back to the keep on growing. All right. Collaborations with other creators are a big opportunity. I think as marketers, we kind of get into this trap of just wanting to push our product and just living in our own little bubble and just thinking of ourselves and also seeing competitors as a fixed pie mentality. So if someone gets a view on their channel, that was one less view that I could have gotten on our channel. Now maybe it's slightly true. That's true for some instances. We have this one YouTuber who we will not name who has copied a lot of our content and come up with a competing company where I got really, really frustrated with that, I guess, for lack of better words. But there are other guys out there who also talk about beards, but beards aren't their thing. They're not selling the similar products that we're selling. We sell men's grooming products. So being able to have them come onto our channels is one way to do a collaboration. Going onto the other channel is also— so what I'll do is a beard growing tutorial. And I'll give that content to, let's say, another big channel out there is called Alpha M. And he does lifestyle stuff and style stuff. So I'll do a collaboration with him. He'll post it on our channel. Or his channel, and then we'll get a lot of new subscribers who come over from there. And not only that, the reality is the people on YouTube, it is a community. There are the comments out there. And these viewers are watching multiple channels. And what happens is when you do a collaboration, they become all part of the community. So it's all this special club. They're like, oh no! My favorite beard guy just got with my favorite style guy. Oh snap! That is literally what they're doing on their computer when they watch our videos. Or at least that's how I imagine it. An interesting take though is don't let like your similar channels be your only opportunity for collaborations. Think about opportunities beyond that. For instance, we did a collaboration with a YouTuber who has a DIY channel. Like, they're making— he makes like concrete tables and benches and stuff, and that has like nothing to do with our channel. And really, like, his audience has nothing to do with our channel. But what he did is he drove into Austin and we made a bench for our Beardbrand office. So It was good content for him, and then I got to make a little guest appearance on his channel and get a little bit of exposure there. So just kind of spread your tentacles creatively as you can. So we've done them with comedians. We've done them with, like I said, the DIYers. And I'm actually working on one now with a car channel and a guy who fixes up cars. And of course, you've got to use your creativity to find new opportunities to build those collaborations. OK. There was a third one, which is watch time. Now watch time is a big thing for YouTube. Watch time is really the metric that they're hammering home on. And it's really like how they're beating Facebook, right? Because Google and Facebook, they're not the best of friends. They're competing. Facebook's touting they now get more views on videos And then Google's like, hey, yeah, but a view is like 3 seconds of someone scrolling by it. That's like— no one's not really watching that. So Google has made this strategic decision probably about 2 years ago to get people to spend more time on YouTube and really focus on watch time. Now watch time is a kind of vague metric at YouTube. And what it is, it's not simply the amount of views you have divided by how long you watch a video. It takes into consideration when the person comes to YouTube, what video brought them to YouTube, what they did while on YouTube, and then what video did they last watch before they left. So what you want to do is encourage people to get onto YouTube, watch a whole bunch of videos, spend more than an hour, right, and then leave. When they watch someone else's videos, not your video. So you don't want to be having in all your videos content that's driving people back to your website. If at the end of it you're like, "Hey, go to my website, buy this, buy this, buy this," then what you're going to do is you're going to hammer your watch time. And by hammering your watch time, Google's going to be like, "Ah, I don't want to throw any bones this way because he's kicking everyone off YouTube." So you want to be able to think about building that community on YouTube, understanding that it's okay for them to get connected on YouTube, and