The Ledger
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Neistat: Apple refused to replace iPod batteries under official 2003 policy
“The other end of the phone explained to me that Apple as a policy does not replace the batteries in their iPods”
Casey Neistat: The Neistat Brothers was a YouTube vlog before vlogging existed
“I mean, it was effectively a YouTube vlog. It was a YouTube vlog before the words YouTube vlog existed. It was sort of accessing someone's life in a way that I don't think people had seen before.”
Neistat: Creative Partnerships Are Harder to Navigate After Achieving Success
“When you have a partner, you have someone to blame all of the failures on, and someone to attribute all of the successes to. And when you are, when you combine that understanding with having nothing, it works, because you're in this together. But when you comb…”
Neistat: Knowing the reality of startups would have scared me off entirely
“If I knew then what I know now about what it means to start a tech company, I wouldn't have Not only not done it, I would have run as far away from that idea as I possibly could have. It was not knowing, and this has been true my entire career, you know, my en…”
Neistat admits Snapchat Stories executed Beme's vision far better than Beme did
“To be honest with you, I was a huge fan of Snapchat stories, and the more I used it, the more I realized they did what I wanted to do, but they just did it way better.”
Neistat: Baseline Financial Security Ended My Motivation for Money
“The reality is the moment in my career that I got to a place where I didn't have to worry about paying for food or covering rent, I stopped really being motivated by money.”
Neistat: Privilege is a winning lottery ticket; hard work cashes it in
“I was born with a winning lotto ticket in my hand. All I had to do was cash it in. And that cashing it in is hard work. Like, that's what that meant. To cash it in was hard work. And I did my part. But I could have never done my part without first winning the …”
Neistat: Restaurants will always hire kids under the table for dishwashing
“Anywhere there's restaurants, there's a, somebody willing to hire a kid for eight or 10 bucks under the table to wash dishes, and I knew that would happen, and that's exactly what we did.”
Neistat: Apple iMac was the first consumer computer for video editing
“He bought an iMac computer, which was the first kind of the first consumer market computer that you could edit video on.”
Neistat's 2003 'iPod's Dirty Secret' video crashed its host site within 24 hours
“Within 24 hours, it was everywhere to the point where the site was crashing but it did millions and millions of views in the days when to go viral required actually emailing somebody the video.”
Neistat's HBO series was shot on a $200 camera and cut in iMovie
“We shot this video on a 200 dollar camera we bought at Walmart. We edited this in iMovie”
Neistat: HBO Programming Head Left Days After Acquiring Series
“The head of programming at HBO left the company in the days after she bought our show.”
Neistat: 'Bike Lanes' exploded faster than iPod video due to social media maturity
“Not since the iPod movie had I seen a kind of reaction. It was everywhere, and the difference now is that social media was just really starting to pick up and I shared it as best I could, but it, Didn't need that. I don't know who picked it up, but it just exp…”
Nike gave Neistat an $80,000 budget for the 'Make It Count' commercial
“Which I've never really disclosed this before, but This seems like a great place to say, Guy, I think our budget was around 80,000 dollars to make this commercial.”
Neistat: MIT professor Sep Kamvar offered $100k as Beme's first investor
“He goes, I'd like to be your first investor. You can put me down for a 100,000 dollars.”
Neistat: Beme raised just under $500k in initial angel funding
“And ultimately I raised just under a half a million bucks.”
Neistat started daily vlogging solely to build an audience for Beme
“I thought, you know, I need to really go hard on YouTube to get my audience engaged so when I tell them about this product that they'll, they'll be there for me. And I came up with this idea then to make a video every day, and every day share sort of a story f…”
Daily vlogging boosted Neistat's subscriber growth to 10K-20K per night
“My YouTube channel that took me, you know, six years, seven years at the time to get from zero subscribers to 400 Thousand subscribers. All of a sudden, every night I'd wake up and there'd be 10,020 thousand new subscribers.”
Neistat: Beme's marketing and idea always outshined its actual product
“I think that the idea and the marketing were always better than the product that we were able to build.”
Neistat considers himself excellent at initial project launches, not long-term execution
“I'm really good at being the second man in a bobsled team, which means I get really excited, and I can push really, really, really hard, but the second it launches out of the gates, I just sort of jump in, and I'm like, okay, what now?”
Casey Neistat: CNN shut Beme down due to lack of rapid growth
“If you look at a company like that, and this is my understanding, if you look at a company like that, they need to see real growth. They need to see a real trajectory for success, and they need to see it fast, and I think that, I don't think we were able to de…”
Neistat: Beme acquisition financially secured his family's future
“Probably. Yeah, I think that if we didn't live in New York City or Los Angeles, that, that'd probably be the case. I can tell you that in the terms that I think of, which is, can I now give my children the lifestyle that I've always wanted to give them? The an…”
Childhood friends' parents explicitly called Casey Neistat a 'loser'
“The thing that stands out the most now, when I look back on it, are the parents of my friends. I remember them, you know, calling me a loser, like literally using that word.”
Casey Neistat left his parents' home at 15 and never returned
“I was 15 years old. It was a Tuesday night. And a school night, and it was cold, and, ah, I left. I walked, I took a backpack, and I left my parents' house, and never went back.”
Neistat earned $8 an hour as a teen father without family support
“My parents didn't, you know, step in with money or anything, not that they had anything to step in with. You know, Robin didn't really have any parents, so we didn't have anyone to turn to. We were all on our own. And, you know, I was making eight dollars an h…”
Neistat bought a $12,000 trailer with an $800 down payment as a teen
“The trailer, I think, was 12,000 dollars, and I put, I think, eight or 900 dollars down, and then got a mortgage for the rest that my grandmother co-signed for, and then we had to rent a little piece of land that we parked it on, and we lived there”
Neistat financed his first editing Mac with two $400-limit credit cards
“I applied for a credit card so I could buy that machine, and I was only able to get a credit card with a 400 dollar limit. So I got another credit card that also had a 400 dollar limit up to 800 bucks for keeping track And that, in combination with my tax retu…”
Neistat's first editing computer had a 10GB drive holding 12 minutes
“Yeah, it was shooting to tape, and moreover, the machine only had a 10 gigabyte hard drive, which held about 12 minutes of video, so I would edit one video at a time, and I remember I would back up my footage to VHS tapes, because VHS tapes were pretty cheap.”
Neistat moved to NYC on a $1,500 loan to sleep on a couch
“She put up the, like, 1500 dollars for three months to be on this couch, and it was a, like, a 250 square foot studio apartment in the East Village that had been Walls had been put up to make it a two bedroom.”
The Neistat brothers charged $5,000 for their first birthday video gig
“We were like, did we charge him a hundred dollars, or 500 dollars, and ultimately we landed on 5000 dollars. Like, we're going to swing the fences here.”
Neistat's first paid filmmaking gig featured former President Bill Clinton
“And that was the first real paid gig we ever had.”
Neistat Quit His Job After Securing a $10,000 Commercial Directing Deal
“What it literally was a candy bar company wanted to test their candy bar Marketing in a very tiny market, and they had 10,000 dollars as an all-in budget, and the minute they greenlit that, and we got the money I quit my job.”
Casey Neistat: Tom Scott agreed to finance Neistat brothers' studio overhead
“And we shook hands, and he agreed to finance us, and we walked out of there. It was the hugest deal we could have ever imagined.”
Neistat used his first studio funding for overhead, not new gear
“We didn't spend it on gear. I don't know that we would have known what to buy. We're still using iMovie”
Neistat: Maintained years-long friendship with NYPD officer who ticketed him
“I maintained a friendship with that officer for years after that. Years. He loved the video.”
Neistat: Commercial directing revenue funded early independent YouTube videos
“Out of that, I built sort of what was my first business post Neistat Brothers, post working with my brother. And what that business was making videos on YouTube that would garner enough attention and enough interest from the industry that would then offer me j…”
Neistat: Make It Count Defined Every Commercial Job Through 2015
“Every job opportunity I had for the next several years was companies from all walks of life coming to me being like, hey, can you do for us what you did for Nike? And I mean it, and that defined my career until about 2014, 1015. It was the only, every job I ha…”
Casey Neistat isolates specific authentic personality facets for different videos
“I think that I'm just very comfortable with picking a part of me and making the video about that part of me.”
Neistat: Casey Neistat LLC generated hundreds of thousands of dollars annually
“I mean, I was making, you know, I was making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. This was more money than I made even post HBO. It was a legitimate business.”
Neistat: Gained early NYC stability moving into an SRO unit
“And one of those people was, you know, like a friend of a friend, and he had lived in this, something called an SRO, a single room occupancy. And it's where you sort of, you get a room, but you don't get a bathroom or a kitchen. And it wasn't much of an apartm…”