Hello creator friend,

Thanks again to everyone who co-hosted the last creators chat with me or watched the live on YouTube🙌 We had fun playing would you rather and discuss what we’d do again on YouTube to survive our first 100 days🧟

What we’ve shared during the live (and all creators chats) is driven from our unique experience, at a point in time, and while I hope it will inspire you to create more and help you improve your creative process, there’s no magic formula.

That being said😏 here’s the sump up of the things we would rather do (in the first 3 months of our YouTube journey):

• Use fancy equipment, rather than a phone -> to hold us accountable and improve our skills right from the bat. But you don’t actually need that to grow your channel (Aamir mentioned Spawn Poiint who’s grown his tech review channel to 260K subs only with a phone).
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• Research, rather than figuring out on the fly -> at least a few weeks to research content strategy, understand the platform and build some confidence.
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• Upload monthly, rather than weekly -> to take the time to make good content & improve on your creative skills instead of pushing out more content of low quality. Some contents are easier to make weekly, and if it’s a manageable pace for you, go for it. But whichever pace you choose, don’t feel guilty about posting less than other creators.
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• Copy content, rather than making original content ->to make less friction and resistance for yourself. It will ease your creative process from idea to execution as you get started & experiment. This idea is to replicate things that already work on YouTube with your own voice.
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• Use free tools, rather than paid tools -> there’re enough good free tools to get you started. You can edit free with Davinci Resolve or use Pixabay to find videos, photos, sound effects, and music.
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• Learn with free content, rather than paid course -> a paid course will get you a head start if you can afford it, but you don’t need it. Later on, you’ll invest more into learning and joining communities of creators.

And the last one (and by far my favorite), was a tie! Would you rather make one more video each month or make one more creator friend? What would you pick?💬

We could do an entire chat on this one! And if you want to know our answers, you’ll have to watch the replay🙂

I want to quote Juan who shared this during the chat:

The artisan doesn’t stop working just because you don’t see him working.

I hope you find this useful, and I’ll see you in the next chat.

Cheers,
Aurelie

P.S This is the official first Create Daily Club newsletter, hope you like it🎉 You’ll get Creators Chats recaps like this one and learn from other creators. You can opt-out just below if you want to. But know that I’ll be sad to see you go🤭

Hello creator friends,

Thanks again to everyone who made it today🙌 it was so great to hear what you’ve been testing to increase retention on your videos and brainstorm ideas on what we can do next.

“Nailing” video retention is tricky especially if we don’t know what to aim for. It would be so helpful to have a sneak peek at our favorite creators’ analytics and see how “well” they do😏

Overall, having high retention increase watch time, which helps us get more distribution from YouTube in suggested & search. You know the drill… The trick is to find a good balance to tell an interesting story with a good amount of dopamine hits for the viewers.

That balance is different for each audience; you can have a pattern interrupt every 3 seconds in fast-paced videos, or you can have a more relaxed vibe and slower delivery. Both work well on YouTube! Have you seen videos of people cooking in the wild for hours without talking? Yeah, it’s a thing🙄 millions of views!

Both types know how to engage the viewers for as long as possible. Their video delivery and editing are done with retention in mind.

Sometimes we tend to forget most people are not returning subscribers, they don’t know us at all, they’ve randomly found the video and without 3 seconds they have to decide if they’ll stay.

Also bear in mind that not all videos will interest your subscribers anyway. Retention is not necessarily correlated to how good the video is. Sometimes it’s just not a hit for many people, so they will drop off and YouTube will literally kill the video (stop sharing it with anybody, even your subscribers).

A few things you can try to increase video retention:

• study and copy what works (watch again videos you absolutely love and analyze the structure),
• have an editor mindset to improve your video making skills,
• have a good balance of pattern interruptions that fits your audience (text, music, adding humor, speech variation)

And finally, do what you can with the time you have. Most of us don’t have the time to vlog and have cool drone shots🤭

Experiment and see what works well for your audience. If things are not working well or are boring to you, change them. Your videos will evolve with your skills and interests. They will grow with you, so give it time and practice as much as you can to learn faster.

I hope this helps you and motivates you to create more! And I hope to see you next week.

Hello creator friends,

The first Creators Chat was a great success today thanks to you all!🎉

Thanks again to everyone who made it today and shared precious ideas with the group.

We reflected on whether we were using big ideas on our channel yet and how it was working out for us.

We talked about the importance of finding a good balance between “big ideas” that will help grow our channel faster and content we really enjoy making. Big ideas also mean different things to different audiences, and it takes practice and time to nail it.

Making a video based on a big idea doesn’t necessarily have to take longer to make, or be of higher quality, or be based on current trends. It’s often a simple video that is relatable to many people.

Remember to be patient. When you don’t yet have a steady growth on YouTube, big ideas might not do well just yet. But when you try for long enough, things will start to shape up. Also, as suggested in the group, trying other platforms to see how those videos perform can be very insightful.

A few tips for finding big ideas:

• use the YouTube homepage (try incognito mode) & pay attention to what picks your interest, and how it’s packaged with a great thumbnail & title
• experiment with different topics/styles until you find what works for you
• give it time, a video can do fairly well after a few months

I hope you’ll have a great weekend and I’ll see you next week.