The Exchanges

Q I mean, I'm curious, you didn't, I don't think you guys had a whole lot of money, right? Did you raise any money, Samir?

A We did not raise money, and the reason that I positioned it as an internship to Colin was because we had no money, really. Um, you know, the money that we had was partially my savings account, and that went a lot quicker than I thought. I had written out a financial model and a business plan around the La Crosse Network, and, um, You know, I had this per video budget that was around 4000 dollars when we first started. Now, we never spent that money because I showed it to someone who actually worked at YouTube, and I was trying to get them to get excited about our idea, and he was like, you're gonna spend 4000 dollars a video, you're gonna go out of business. That is not what YouTube is. A YouTube video has to cost you zero dollars, and you have to be able to do it over an extremely long period of time. And there was a moment where I did try and raise money, and I got on the phone with an investor that I connected with through my brother, and he had experience. He played lacrosse. He had experience working in sports broadcast, and he was working at a, at a big venture capital company, and I got on the phone with him, and I started to pitch him what we were doing, and about 90 seconds in to my pitch, I said, we're broadcasting games, and he stopped me, and he said, I want to stop you right there. You just use the word broadcast. I've worked in broadcast. What you're doing is not …

AI assessment note: “We did not raise money, and the reason that I positioned it as an internship”

Q You, you eventually landed on An idea to actually focus on content creators themselves, to actually make a channel about people who are YouTubers and, and creators. How did you land on that idea?

A It wasn't a kind of decision that we sat together and made. What happened was during the time when we were trying to figure out what to make content about, we would have these conversations over coffee about the world of creators and this community that we were a part of. And one day we just thought, what if we just turned these conversations we're having in the morning into videos? And so we started writing scripts about our thoughts on the Creator space. Different creators. And over time, what we started to recognize was that we were doing the same thing we did in lacrosse. We were making content for the community that we were a part of. Telling stories about the people in that community. You know, as the pandemic happened, everyone's attention started to shift to online media. It's where the global conversation was happening. We had a universal experience and a universal topic that shifted everyone's focus to online creators. And a lot of people became online creators during 2020, a lot of people became more interested in online creators, and it was just this, this moment in time where that audience just expanded in 2020.

AI assessment note: “what if we just turned these conversations we're having in the morning into videos?”

Q And Samir, what was the video? I mean, was it like a story? Was it just like highlights? Was it interviews with the lacrosse players? What made it compelling?

A So the video was a trailer. It was a trailer for a show that Colin created called Club Ball, and it explored what it was like to play club lacrosse at the University of Colorado. And at the time, what I was uploading was highlights, full games, some news and analysis, but this was the first piece of storytelling I had seen in lacrosse, where it was more about The players than it was about the game. It was a story about young people coming together and, and trying to achieve something. At least that's how it was portrayed in the trailer. Uh, and it just so happened they played lacrosse and immediately I knew it was the type of content we needed to make this network work.

AI assessment note: “the video was a trailer. It was a trailer for a show that Colin created”

Q what you call the Colin and Samir Show. And already, by 2018, you're hearing a lot of people say, hey, YouTube is saturated. There's no space to get to break in. It's all, the big creators are already dominating it. And I'm sure you are hearing that Two from people who were like, who are you guys? What are you making? Was, were you, was any of that discouraging initially?

A The, the, the years between 2016 and 20 20 Would have to be some of the most discouraging of, of our careers. Um, it was not because YouTube was oversaturated. It was because we couldn't figure out what we wanted to make. There's this great quote about making movies that's, you know, talks about how making a movie isn't the hard part. It's figuring out what to make the movie about. That's the hard part. And that, that was our experience. We were making all types of different Content. We made a show called What's Good about good news. We started to make our own skateboards and made a show about making skateboards. We were just trying to find ourselves online and all the while, again, like Colin mentioned, struggling to build a business and doing odd, odd jobs to, to get enough cash to keep going. And we described this term burnout as creative output without direction. And that's what we experienced.

AI assessment note: “years between 2016 and 20 20 Would have to be some of the most discouraging”

Q Do you think there's enough space for everyone in the creator economy? I mean, do you think that anybody who wants to make a business out of this could theoretically do that?

A I think it's a tough question. I think right now there's a lot of people who are going to try. Uh, the barrier to entry has been significantly lowered, and a lot of that is because of TikTok or YouTube Shorts, this short-form vertical content. People are having a lot of success, and most importantly, they can take a lot of shots. It's not as hard to make a video anymore, um, with short-form vertical content, but it is hard to sustain an audience over a long period of time. I think a lot of people can, can make money right now in the creator economy, but to make a career, I think is extremely challenging. And I think it's just like any other entrepreneurial venture. And I think it's really important to recognize that the term creators, creators are a subset of entrepreneurs. It is the, it is, it follows the same trajectory of how hard it is to launch a startup. Our product just so happens to be media.

AI assessment note: “to make a career, I think is extremely challenging”

Q And I mean, this is like YouTubers and podcasters and influencers. So let's talk about how you build a business around Being a content creator. I mean, you've learned from a lot of people. You guys are doing it yourselves. Um, how do creators sort of generally start out building a sustainable business? Um, I mean, you obviously have to have viewers and advertisers, but, but where do you begin?

A You know, I think the mistake we made when we stepped out of the lacrosse network and started creating was we didn't think about the audience we wanted to create for. So I would say that a large part of starting out is thinking about an audience and a value prop and thinking, here's the people I want to make content for. What do I want them to feel? How do I want to transform them? So for us, you know, once we started to figure out what we wanted to do in our format, it was okay. We want to make Content for creators. We want them to feel educated. We want them to feel empowered. We want them to feel less alone. And that gave us a guiding light. Now, the next thing that was missing was process. And that's an extremely important part of being a creator because what was happening for us was we were having some pieces of content that would do really well. They would get millions of views, but we would try and reverse engineer and say, how do we do that again? And we couldn't figure it out. And so when we decided to turn this into a podcast, into a talk show, that's when we could actually understand and build a foundation for process. And process also enables team. We were able to bring team members on to help us with that process. And it also enables monetization because then you're able to communicate to the industry, you know, what do I do? What can you buy? What's the product th…

AI assessment note: “a large part of starting out is thinking about an audience and a value prop”

Q were talking about, of course, the lacrosse network that, that you built, Samir and Colin, that you helped to, to grow. Um, but you guys decide to leave Whistle Sports and to start your own new thing, which was making content around, uh, well, initially inspired by Casey Neistat, who was on How I Built This a couple years ago. What was the thing you guys were going to do?

A There's only a few times in your life and in your entrepreneurial journey where you're lucky enough to be as naive as we were in that moment. And the reason I say that is because we had, for some reason, no fear around the fact that we had no idea. And we stepped out, um, even my dad and my family was very confused why we left. You know, it was almost, it sounded like it should have been exactly what we wanted to do. We were getting paid really well. To make lacrosse videos and sports videos, but we just knew that we wanted more. We wanted more, a more diverse set of storytelling. We wanted to explore ourselves differently, and so we didn't really have any ideas, and we just started making whatever was interesting to us. Our first video on the channel is just an exploration of the street Fairfax in LA. The next video after that, I think, is Us going to our favorite coffee shop. But quickly, we started to recognize that the audience that we had built in La Crosse was not that interested in us talking about Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles. And we were, where we thought we were starting from a position of, we've built an audience, we've done this for four and a half years on YouTube, we were actually starting from zero. And I think that was one of the most startling experiences to go through.

AI assessment note: “we didn't really have any ideas, and we just started making whatever was interesting”

Q Tell me a little bit about your plans beyond what you're doing now. I mean, what other products and things are you working on that will help you continue to build the business, the Colin and Samir business?

A Yeah, I think, I think to start, you know, what we want to do right now, we want to focus on is delivering our value to the audience as best as possible and in as many ways as possible. And a lot of that is telling a diverse set of creator stories so we can educate people on the different roadmaps that exist. We do that right now on YouTube through our show. We do it across social platforms. Um, we do it on our podcast and we do it in our newsletter, the published press. So we get to hear a lot more about what's happening in the creator space. We get to Get to work on that project and build an audience in a completely different way and an audience that we own. And I think that's a really important distinction. When you think about all of us as creators, we're building our companies on rented land in a sense, right? Like YouTube could change tomorrow. I don't think it will, but it could, and we would lose our, our access to that audience there. So what we're doing with building this newsletter allows us to Aggregate this audience that we're passionate about, um, deliver value to them in a different way, in a way that we have more ownership over. And as we look to the future, I think it's expanding upon this concept of education, moving in that direction where we can roll out more education and more ways to deliver that value to the creator audience.

AI assessment note: “expanding upon this concept of education, moving in that direction where we can roll out more education”