Hi all, I'm not sure if there's a format for these but I'll try to write about first what turned me onto this page and decide to join, and then about my current situation.
I got the book TMF based off of a YouTube video I watched about 3 years ago where they said something really obvious to me now, but which was revolutionary at the time, and that was something along the lines of "If you're serious about starting a business, then obviously you should read books by people who have done it". It's really easy to find strong opinions on anything from people with little to no information about the topic. Yet, here I was, watching this video, realizing that I was literally the guy who thought "wow it'd be so cool to be an entrepreneur", and yet I hadn't done the simplest task of opening a page from a successful entrepreneur.
In that video, he recommended reading 3 books, TMF, million dollar weekend, and 4-hour workweek. I've read all of these and find them all fantastic, but TMF is the only book of that list that I've read twice over. After my first read, I looked at this forum, but for whatever reason I just didn't think it'd be my thing. I felt like I had read the book and had all the knowledge that I needed.
I'm 20 now, so at the time I was 19, and so fast forward, a year goes by and I continued on my long treck of half-assery, having made $0 from any business and frankly not seriously trying. I re-read the book from the top, and it was good, I picked up things I hadn't before. However, once again, it was more half-assery. I didn't consider this forum and continued doing the bare minimum.
This post is getting long so I'll try to sum up my IRL situation handily here. I spent my time in high school grinding out the bass clarinet, I'd practice upwards of 4 hours a day since I liked doing the competitions. I didn't really try in school, graduated with a 3.6 GPA, and in California that just won't cut it for the University of California schools around here. I applied as a business major since I was still dumb enough to think that businessman=big money. But that led to a really good thing though, I ended up going to community college and getting a job at a Starbucks, I got accepted to UCSD for business economics. It wasn't Harvard or anything, but it was a title I could show to distant family and get cheers for. Then I get the bill, decide I don't want to blow up my financial future with these loans, along with a realization that business school was not real business. No SWOT analysis chart was going to fix my half assery.
Next school year rolls around, I go back to the same community college. I took a few courses but kept withdrawing since I tried to switch to computer engineering, and my study skills of memorizing key terms for 30 minutes wasn't cutting it for discrete mathematics. I've found myself now heading into my third year in a few weeks here. I have a plan going forward, but it's basically a backup plan for if I fail at the fastlane.
Here's where things get good though! I've always really liked YouTube, I had a minecraft channel like all young kids in middle school, and even though it never got off the ground, during COVID I got good enough at editing video and thumbnails that I could make some decent stuff. This bass clarinet thing was a dud as an extracurricular, but it was a skill I was REALLY good at by this point compared to the average joe.
And so, this led me to identify a gap in the market. For most every interest, there's likely somebody on social media or a blog talking about it. I fondly remember the big reason I got into Minecraft was just because of all the videos I'd watch. However, for the bass clarinet, there's basically just one guy who posts one 10-20 minute video 4 times a year, with no regard for a hook or good thumbnail design. The obvious answer to this would be "Well duh, who TF wants to watch videos about an instrument I've never heard of?" Well, my argument to that would be to think about somebody like Neil deGrasse Tyson. Even though I couldn't give less of a crap about astrophysics, that guy is able to make it really engaging simply by the way he talks about it. People LOOSELY know about the subject, but people also LOOSELY know about orchestra and its instruments. I don't see a good reason high-quality bass clarinet/clarinet videos can't get good views so long as they can appeal beyond their traditional orbit.
I won't link it here because I'm not here to self-promo, and I doubt ya'll gaf about bass clarinet let's be honest. But anyways, going in with that thesis, I half-assed videos in 2023. Then 2024. I was doing about 1,000 subscribers a year from half-assing videos. By half-assing, I mean I'd do it for 2 weeks then stop posting for 3 months. If I was serious I could've gotten a lot farther a lot faster but there's no point dwelling. Come to this past February, I want to give it a shot again. I have this one video where I did something different than my past ones and it got a lot more views, so I do similar format stuff daily about 30 odd times, hit a viral video that gets 2 million views. Enough annoying clarinet fellas email me about their issues, so I set up a lesson form. Made it literally $120 for an hour. I just wanted a default thing to send so I could not spend so much time giving detailed feedback/help to people for free. End up having 4 kids sign up long-term after either convincing their parents or (surprisingly) their parents wanting to get their kids lessons and me being the person they know. Either way, I hit another lazy a$$ phase of this dumpster fire level of effort youtube channel, yet this time I make $1,920/m, which for me who's living with their parents and is failing basically in every aspect of life aside from practicing, is huge! It has let me quit my Starbucks job (do not recommend working here).
The big issue for me is REALLY just half-assing everything. I have the skills to make this channel successful, I just need to commit over the long-haul and not in short sprints. This channel also has two giant glaring big red alarm bells, first being that YouTube could, for whatever reason, ban my channel off the platform. Realistically it'd probably be for copyright stuff, but if that happened this would be super toast. Second is that it's not like I can teach in my sleep. Moreover, teaching/coaching isn't what my channel is particularly built for. I think the appeal of my videos is that I'm a young guy who's into this old-person thing and doesn't have the craziest equipment, and so kids can look up and see somebody like them rather than an old man yapping about how he has played bass clarinet for 60 years with his $30,000 instrument. I also have editing and chops built for YouTube, I'm not just putting 0 effort into those really important things. All this to say that my appeal is not as a teacher, it's more as a peer. I think this means my channel would do better having a sponsor by one of the many companies that make equipment for clarinet/bass clarinet, that or relying on ad revenue. Both are honestly not ideal. I've looked into building a product, but realistically it'd be some white-label crap chinese product at best, and especially when I'm promoting it as a public figure, reputation can be burned very quickly, and if I'm white-labeling some chinese crap, then I'd be a hater of myself too!
So those are my current big hurdles. Overcoming this half-assed approach to life and finding a vertical that works for fastlaning. TBH, I don't think it's unrealistic that I do this YouTube channel for 2 or 3 years, really commit hard during that time, and then once I've made a good amount of $$$ or run out of ideas or whatever it may be, use that capital to support doing an actual fastlane business. At the end of the day, I don't think a YouTube channel can ever be fastlane, since once you stop posting on it, it's like a faucet turns off. Maybe if you create systems for it you can make it turnkey, but this channel is way too dependent on me as the face and talent to ever realistically pull that off.
Just realized I never wrote about why I joined. Today I decided to join after reading the post about why the forum was locked behind a paywall. It did a really good job of convincing me that the page was high quality, and also I need to supplement my chronic social media use that's probably numbing my brain. Would much rather read about motivated people making their way in the world than a Minecraft marathon. I will try to contribute where I can. I read the post about not being a lurker, and will try to not do so. Excited to meet you lot.
I got the book TMF based off of a YouTube video I watched about 3 years ago where they said something really obvious to me now, but which was revolutionary at the time, and that was something along the lines of "If you're serious about starting a business, then obviously you should read books by people who have done it". It's really easy to find strong opinions on anything from people with little to no information about the topic. Yet, here I was, watching this video, realizing that I was literally the guy who thought "wow it'd be so cool to be an entrepreneur", and yet I hadn't done the simplest task of opening a page from a successful entrepreneur.
In that video, he recommended reading 3 books, TMF, million dollar weekend, and 4-hour workweek. I've read all of these and find them all fantastic, but TMF is the only book of that list that I've read twice over. After my first read, I looked at this forum, but for whatever reason I just didn't think it'd be my thing. I felt like I had read the book and had all the knowledge that I needed.
I'm 20 now, so at the time I was 19, and so fast forward, a year goes by and I continued on my long treck of half-assery, having made $0 from any business and frankly not seriously trying. I re-read the book from the top, and it was good, I picked up things I hadn't before. However, once again, it was more half-assery. I didn't consider this forum and continued doing the bare minimum.
This post is getting long so I'll try to sum up my IRL situation handily here. I spent my time in high school grinding out the bass clarinet, I'd practice upwards of 4 hours a day since I liked doing the competitions. I didn't really try in school, graduated with a 3.6 GPA, and in California that just won't cut it for the University of California schools around here. I applied as a business major since I was still dumb enough to think that businessman=big money. But that led to a really good thing though, I ended up going to community college and getting a job at a Starbucks, I got accepted to UCSD for business economics. It wasn't Harvard or anything, but it was a title I could show to distant family and get cheers for. Then I get the bill, decide I don't want to blow up my financial future with these loans, along with a realization that business school was not real business. No SWOT analysis chart was going to fix my half assery.
Next school year rolls around, I go back to the same community college. I took a few courses but kept withdrawing since I tried to switch to computer engineering, and my study skills of memorizing key terms for 30 minutes wasn't cutting it for discrete mathematics. I've found myself now heading into my third year in a few weeks here. I have a plan going forward, but it's basically a backup plan for if I fail at the fastlane.
Here's where things get good though! I've always really liked YouTube, I had a minecraft channel like all young kids in middle school, and even though it never got off the ground, during COVID I got good enough at editing video and thumbnails that I could make some decent stuff. This bass clarinet thing was a dud as an extracurricular, but it was a skill I was REALLY good at by this point compared to the average joe.
And so, this led me to identify a gap in the market. For most every interest, there's likely somebody on social media or a blog talking about it. I fondly remember the big reason I got into Minecraft was just because of all the videos I'd watch. However, for the bass clarinet, there's basically just one guy who posts one 10-20 minute video 4 times a year, with no regard for a hook or good thumbnail design. The obvious answer to this would be "Well duh, who TF wants to watch videos about an instrument I've never heard of?" Well, my argument to that would be to think about somebody like Neil deGrasse Tyson. Even though I couldn't give less of a crap about astrophysics, that guy is able to make it really engaging simply by the way he talks about it. People LOOSELY know about the subject, but people also LOOSELY know about orchestra and its instruments. I don't see a good reason high-quality bass clarinet/clarinet videos can't get good views so long as they can appeal beyond their traditional orbit.
I won't link it here because I'm not here to self-promo, and I doubt ya'll gaf about bass clarinet let's be honest. But anyways, going in with that thesis, I half-assed videos in 2023. Then 2024. I was doing about 1,000 subscribers a year from half-assing videos. By half-assing, I mean I'd do it for 2 weeks then stop posting for 3 months. If I was serious I could've gotten a lot farther a lot faster but there's no point dwelling. Come to this past February, I want to give it a shot again. I have this one video where I did something different than my past ones and it got a lot more views, so I do similar format stuff daily about 30 odd times, hit a viral video that gets 2 million views. Enough annoying clarinet fellas email me about their issues, so I set up a lesson form. Made it literally $120 for an hour. I just wanted a default thing to send so I could not spend so much time giving detailed feedback/help to people for free. End up having 4 kids sign up long-term after either convincing their parents or (surprisingly) their parents wanting to get their kids lessons and me being the person they know. Either way, I hit another lazy a$$ phase of this dumpster fire level of effort youtube channel, yet this time I make $1,920/m, which for me who's living with their parents and is failing basically in every aspect of life aside from practicing, is huge! It has let me quit my Starbucks job (do not recommend working here).
The big issue for me is REALLY just half-assing everything. I have the skills to make this channel successful, I just need to commit over the long-haul and not in short sprints. This channel also has two giant glaring big red alarm bells, first being that YouTube could, for whatever reason, ban my channel off the platform. Realistically it'd probably be for copyright stuff, but if that happened this would be super toast. Second is that it's not like I can teach in my sleep. Moreover, teaching/coaching isn't what my channel is particularly built for. I think the appeal of my videos is that I'm a young guy who's into this old-person thing and doesn't have the craziest equipment, and so kids can look up and see somebody like them rather than an old man yapping about how he has played bass clarinet for 60 years with his $30,000 instrument. I also have editing and chops built for YouTube, I'm not just putting 0 effort into those really important things. All this to say that my appeal is not as a teacher, it's more as a peer. I think this means my channel would do better having a sponsor by one of the many companies that make equipment for clarinet/bass clarinet, that or relying on ad revenue. Both are honestly not ideal. I've looked into building a product, but realistically it'd be some white-label crap chinese product at best, and especially when I'm promoting it as a public figure, reputation can be burned very quickly, and if I'm white-labeling some chinese crap, then I'd be a hater of myself too!
So those are my current big hurdles. Overcoming this half-assed approach to life and finding a vertical that works for fastlaning. TBH, I don't think it's unrealistic that I do this YouTube channel for 2 or 3 years, really commit hard during that time, and then once I've made a good amount of $$$ or run out of ideas or whatever it may be, use that capital to support doing an actual fastlane business. At the end of the day, I don't think a YouTube channel can ever be fastlane, since once you stop posting on it, it's like a faucet turns off. Maybe if you create systems for it you can make it turnkey, but this channel is way too dependent on me as the face and talent to ever realistically pull that off.
Just realized I never wrote about why I joined. Today I decided to join after reading the post about why the forum was locked behind a paywall. It did a really good job of convincing me that the page was high quality, and also I need to supplement my chronic social media use that's probably numbing my brain. Would much rather read about motivated people making their way in the world than a Minecraft marathon. I will try to contribute where I can. I read the post about not being a lurker, and will try to not do so. Excited to meet you lot.
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