Chris Raroque: Using Videos for Effective Product Marketing! 🎥

Hi everybody. Effective marketing these days has to involve videos. Now what exactly does that mean? There are a lot of open questions when it comes to videos. What do you create a video about? What does success look like? Is your goal to drive more awareness for your brand or your product, or are you trying to sell a product? And once you have your video, where do you even post it? What are the pros and cons of posting on, let's say, Instagram, Twitter/X, YouTube, LinkedIn, and many other platforms that are probably relevant for the kind of video you're building?

To answer this and a whole lot more, both from a business point of view as well as from a technical point of view, I talk with Chris Raroque, one of the most prolific app builders that I know. He's back for round two, actually, to continue the great conversation we had almost a year ago. So this is going to be a great conversation. Grab a drink, sit back, relax, and let's get started. All right, Chris, it's great to chat with you again. This is round two of us chatting about all the cool things you've been up to. I'm also joined by Pixel here, who also decided to...

Join in and see how it's going, and I think Ellie is the name of your dog.

Correct, Ellie is the hamster.

Luna, Luna. Oh, Ellie is the hamster. Luna is the... Okay, gotcha. I knew there was a pet connection across all your products. And for a bit more context, the last time you were on, we were talking about some of the apps you were building, and you were starting to think about how do I market it? How do I get more people to use this thing? This is indie hacking 101. This was before indie hacking got all the mainstream attention over the past couple of months, so you were really on the cutting edge of some of the things we're talking about, a little bit, granted.

So what have you been up to?

A lot has changed, I think. The biggest thing since the last conversation, and I actually watched the last conversation to make sure, like, all right, what did we talk about last time? But a lot has changed. At the time, I was just working on two apps, Mogul and Ellie. Mogul was a personal CRM, and I think I had just really started to work on Ellie a little bit, maybe three or four months into building it, and that's a daily planning app. Now what's changed is there's a third app in the mix, so I have a budgeting app that I'm working on as well.

And then also, six months ago, I started doing video content, and that's probably the bigger update. We'll talk more about it, but that's been the most life-changing thing for me in the last few months.

Yeah, let's talk about the video content, because when you have apps that are being built and showcased, there's often a disconnect between the person building it and the app itself. That human connection is often lost. Whereas in your case, you've been providing live updates in terms of features, doing design updates like here's what it looked like before, here's what it looks like now, and being very personal with the audience in a way that gives a very human element to what you're building. And the videos have been fantastic. I've watched both your YouTube videos and your TikTok videos on it, so walk me through it.

At some point I do want to ask about your setup and what tools you use as well. But let's go through the videos. Why did you decide to do videos? Why did you choose the format you chose? Did you try different things to see what clicked and what didn't click, and all of that?

I originally started, and for people who don't know, I actually started posting on Twitter. That was the main way that I would build in public and share my journey, and I absolutely loved posting there. Originally, I did get into it just as, like, oh, this is how I'm going to do marketing. But I fell in love with it as a documentation journey, a way for me to document what I'm building and the updates. And something that I realized was there was a lot that I wanted to tweet about and say that just would not fit in a Twitter thread, or I just couldn't convey it properly.

So that's why I decided to get into video and actually started first on TikTok, because it was the least polished. It was the one where I felt like I could just talk to the camera, and it felt natural to post that kind of content. I couldn't do the same on YouTube or Instagram because I felt like the standard was a little higher, so I would need to take it a little more seriously. But for TikTok, I felt like I could just record updates, share my thoughts, kind of like I do on Twitter. So that's why I started posting there first, and that's why I started posting video in general.

It was just to cover the stuff I couldn't cover on Twitter and share my thoughts in a little more detail, and yeah, that's how it started. Then I moved from TikTok to Instagram, kind of just reposting the content. Now, after a few months, I realize I probably do need to craft specific videos just for Instagram. And then after TikTok and Instagram, I moved to YouTube, and that one was a whole different thing. But that's basically the summary of why I started posting there and why I moved to the other networks.

What's the biggest difference you've seen between the three video platforms so far?

I think the biggest difference, for sure, is the type of engagement from the audience. Something that I thought was that if I posted a video, it would be consumed in the same way across the platforms, because it was kind of the same thing. My TikTok and Instagram videos were basically shorter versions of the YouTube videos I was doing, but I was completely wrong. I realized people consume different things, or they're in different mindsets, when they're consuming content on TikTok and Instagram versus on YouTube. For TikTok and Instagram, they're just kind of scrolling, so they're not consciously looking for my content.

It just kind of appears there, and then they're like, oh okay, I'll just watch this quick update from Chris. On YouTube, they're consciously like, I'm going to sit down for 10 or 20 minutes and go watch this long video. And I've noticed that on YouTube, the comments are way more engaging and way more thoughtful. It's clear they watched through the entire thing. On TikTok and Instagram, the comments are usually a little more surface level, which is okay, because the videos are like one minute long, so there's not much for them to ask anyway. It's usually just general questions like, how did you get into development?

Why did you choose this technology? On YouTube, they're very specific questions like, what was the challenging part about implementing recurring transactions for the budgeting app? Or, you mentioned that you tracked this for retention. Why did you do it this way? Why didn't you track this thing? And I noticed the discussions were just a little more in depth. I think that's probably the biggest difference. A second thing is the connection to the audience. I noticed it was a lot stronger with YouTube, probably because they were sitting down for a longer session, so it felt more like we were having a conversation than on Instagram or TikTok.

Once I started, I noticed a huge difference in the kind of people who would reach out to me. When I started tweeting, I would get some cool DMs from people saying, hey, I love your tweets, I've been following along. Then I started posting on TikTok and Instagram, and I started noticing that the messages I was getting were a little more personal, almost like they felt like they knew me. Then it went to a whole other level when I started doing YouTube. People started reaching out in a way that felt more like my actual friends, like they knew the things I was building and the things I was going through.

I felt like they had a really good snapshot of that, and so they would reach out as if they'd known me for a long time. That's actually been a huge difference between all three platforms, just the level of connection you have with the users, and that can be a good or bad thing, but in my case... It's pretty good, because I actually love it when people reach out and feel comfortable enough to ask me questions or ask me things they probably wouldn't have if it was just them seeing me on Twitter.

Do you track conversions, and do you see any differences between which of the platforms end up driving, I'm guessing, more usage to the App Store where people try out your app?

Yeah, so I don't track conversions. I probably should. But I actually just recently started putting some trackers in, because I did my first sponsorship and they were like, oh, here's our link. And I was like, oh, I should probably start tracking my own links too and see if people are clicking them. But I do believe there is a way higher conversion rate for YouTube than the other platforms.

I don't have the data to back it up, but I did notice that when I put out a waitlist for the budgeting app when I was first starting, and it was just in four videos, I thought maybe I would get 50 signups max over those four videos. And I was absolutely floored by how many people actually filled it out and signed up just on four videos. And again, these were developers, so they weren't really in the market for a budgeting app. I thought maybe 50 of these developers would actually care, or would just be curious enough to download it.

But over the span of 4 videos, I got around 3000 signups to the waitlist. When I saw that, I was like, I've never gotten anything like that on Twitter. When I posted the same signup form on Twitter, I think max I got, over the course of a ton of tweets, was maybe 100 signups total from that. So I definitely think the conversion is much higher on the long-form content. Again, people are in the mindset where they're fully focused on the video.

They're consciously choosing to go watch it, versus on Twitter or TikTok or Instagram where they're scrolling and you're one of like 100 videos they're about to see in the next hour. So the chance of them actually stopping, going to the profile, and converting is probably a lot lower. So again, I don't have the data to back it up, but I do believe the conversion rate is substantially higher on YouTube.

No, that tracks my own personal experience as well, because I post content on YouTube. I wrote a book on algorithms recently, which is not really my normal audience's cup of tea, so there's been a bit of an uphill battle trying to get people to view it. And I have seen the same thing, where I have a call to action to learn more about the book itself, and I get far greater engagement on YouTube than on TikTok, Instagram, and even Twitter in some cases. But unlike you, I haven't actually created new content for each of those platforms.

What I basically do is I have a split-screen setup where one half of the screen in landscape is my slides, the other half is a video of me, and then for TikTok I basically just take each half, move one to the top and one below it, and I post the exact same content, because it saves time from having to re-record. It's probably not the best way of doing things, but I definitely found that YouTube, even with that, happens to be the best place for being able to see all of this.

And in your case, is your call to action at the beginning of the video, in the middle, or toward the end?

Honestly, when I did the videos, I didn't really think about the call to action or try to insert it. But when I went back and rewatched the videos, because I finally did a video with an actual call to action, since I just did my first sponsored video, I had to consciously figure out where I was going to talk about, you know, go sign up for the sponsor. So I went back to my old videos to check whether I had subconsciously added a call to action.

And I realized that I think I did naturally add little mini calls to action where I wasn't directly saying, hey, go sign up for the waitlist. But it was almost like, hey, I have a waitlist. Here are the analytics. Look how many people signed up. So technically I didn't say, hey, there's a waitlist, go sign up. But by talking about the analytics, people were like, oh, there's a waitlist, it's probably in the description. And I think in three of the videos, I didn't even say that the link was in the description.

I just said, here's analytics for the waitlist, or here's how the app is going, waitlist signups have gone up, and I think people naturally took that as a subtle call to action and then kind of went down to the description. Now I'm a little more conscious about trying to add some calls to action, because once I did add an actual call to action on the 4th video, I think the first 3 videos got a total of 1000 signups. Then I put a direct call to action on the 4th, and that one got 2000 signups alone, so it basically doubled the combination of the first 3.

So I do think direct calls to action matter. And the way that I did it for the 4th one was probably more in the middle. So more in the middle, with lots of context, similar to how I did it for the first 3, where it's kind of subtle and maybe a little toward the middle, maybe a little toward the end too. Then I would say, by the way, if you're interested, there is a waitlist here, and it had already been built up enough that I could mention it for maybe like 2 seconds and that would probably be enough.

But that's how I've been doing the more recent calls to action for the last 3 videos.

That makes sense, because in YouTube you get to see exactly where your average visitor is highly engaged and where they drop off as time goes on. And my guess has always been that if you put it at the very beginning, people aren't really convinced yet. They're here to learn something very specific, and they don't have enough knowledge yet to trust you enough to go do all these calls to action. But by the midpoint, if they're still watching the video, it means they see some value there. It's like, okay, I'm sort of convinced here. So there's probably a high likelihood of them going and doing whatever you're asking them to do.

And if they make it all the way to the end, especially on longer videos, that means they've committed, they really like what they saw, so there's a very good chance of converting. So that tracks really well with it. And the interesting thing is also that both you and I do tend to target developers in terms of how this goes. I'd be curious to get data, from wherever I can, on how consumer apps or non-developer-facing content behave as well.

Yeah, I'm curious about that too. Honestly, even though technically my stuff is consumer, it's B2C, the audience is developers, and I'm actually not even sure of the answer anymore because I feel like I've mixed the two so closely that everything I thought would happen has basically not happened. The reverse has happened. I thought, oh, there's no audience overlap with this B2C app and developers. I'm just going to build in public and I don't even care about the conversions or anything. And then there's a ton of conversions, way more than I thought. So I actually now, with confidence, can't really answer anything anymore.

But I do want to talk to some people and see how it works for non-developer audiences.

For non-developer audiences, do you customize the content for the audience, or do you customize it more for yourself? Are you thinking, I would be interested in this kind of content if I were watching it somewhere else, so I'm going to create that same kind of content that resonates with me personally? If people like it, great. If they don't, we'll revisit at that point.

Yeah, 100%. The second one. I primarily make the content for myself, basically the stuff that I genuinely wish I had when I was starting out doing software development. Another reason that I do it is because I get a lot of the same questions in my DMs, like, hey, how do you get started? Or, hey, you integrated Slack, how did you do this? And a lot of times I just craft a message like, oh yeah, you should go to the docs, do this, and so on. But then sometimes I'm like, I should have just recorded it so I can send it to them.

And I also really wish I could go back in time and watch, you know, hey, I was integrating Outlook, that seemed really painful, was it that bad? Then I can go watch the video and kind of see it again. So I do create content primarily for myself, to play it back, to send to people, and again almost like a message to my younger self. I know that will 100% be helpful to other people, but recently I have been a little more conscious about what other people would like.

So I still keep myself, or my past self, as the primary audience, but I will deviate a little bit if I know it can help a more general audience, even if it's not as much for me. But yeah, it's the same strategy with my Twitter as well. Before, I used to create content specifically for audiences on Twitter, and I got burnt out so easily there. Once I started treating it just as a journal, I was like, I don't even care if anyone likes this stuff.

The primary purpose is for me to play back everything, which I do all the time, because sometimes I'm hard on myself and I feel like I didn't get a lot done this month, and then I can scroll back and be like, oh, I forgot, I shipped these four things. Never mind, I actually did a great job. And so I treat Twitter as a journal. The engagement doesn't matter as much to me. The follower count doesn't matter. YouTube is maybe like 80% that, and then 20% is that I do want it to be educational and help people, so I do consider the audience in aggregate.

Yeah, 100%, 100%. Let's talk about the design of your thumbnails and the style you have as well, because it's very polished and very deliberate. The typography you use oftentimes mimics the app typography or logo, I think, in some cases, and the captioning and so on. What things did you try out to land on the current style you're in right now?

Yeah. In terms of the style of the video and the thumbnails, just everything, I did try out a bunch of different things. And I do attribute a lot of it to the early TikTok and Instagram stuff that I was doing. That definitely had an impact on the YouTube stuff. When I did the Instagram and TikTok stuff, it was really more similar to Twitter. It was just, here's the update, here are the four things that I did in the day, like this is what it is, and I think a lot of the comments were asking questions. They were still very surface-level questions where it had nothing to do with the content.

It was more like, how did you get started? Or can you talk about integrations? The video had nothing to do with integrations, but I think when I saw the comments, it did start... It did start getting me more inspired to shift the content a little more toward not just documenting, but slightly educational, to try to help people. The early videos I did were leaning way more toward documentation, and you can see I even documented making coffee, the typical stuff you see in a vlog. And then maybe four or five videos in, you might notice there's a shift where there are no more angles of me typing and coding.

I'm not making coffee anymore. It's just me sitting in front of the camera and talking for like 12 minutes. And I think it's because I started noticing the comments really leaning more toward educational content. I genuinely wanted to answer those questions, and I think the only way for me to do it was to cut out some of the stuff I was doing in the vlog-type style and just really sit down in front of the camera and answer those questions in the most concise way possible. And so that's a huge reason why the entire aesthetic and the type of video that I do has shifted.

It's because the stuff I'm seeing from people and the kinds of questions they ask really did shape it. It made me realize I did want to lean more into the educational space and start doing this type of thing. It's still a challenge, though, because I do want to make it interesting. So sometimes I do embed some vlog content, and it's been a while. I think I've been on a streak of like four educational videos, so the next one, I'm purposely really going to try to make more like a semi-entertaining document, because I genuinely want that.

Those are probably my favorite videos to make, the vlog-style ones, just because that's the most fun when I get to look back at those types of videos. So I'm going to try to do another one of those. But yeah, that's kind of why my content has been leaning more toward educational, and why it is the way that it is. It's just because that's the kind of content I wanted to put out there.

Seeing some of the comments, that makes sense. And I think it's a good tie-in, where the people who are watching for educational content might also be interested in your call to action as well, as opposed to a random passerby who's wondering about something completely unrelated and stumbles upon what you're creating. Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%. Okay, now let's geek out on the technical details of videos themselves. What camera do you use for the recordings?

Yeah, so when I first did TikTok and Instagram, I actually set a constraint for myself and said, I'm not going to use any camera, I'm just going to use a phone and the wired Apple mic. That's the only thing I'm going to use, because I did attempt video content a long time ago in the past and when I started thinking about what software I was going to use and what camera, I got really overwhelmed and started overthinking it. So that's what I did for the Instagram and TikTok stuff.

For YouTube, though, I realized, okay, the camera quality, as good as it is, probably won't cut it, especially for the audio portion. I realized I needed a mic. So the things that I use are actually, I have it here, the DJI Pocket 3. This is what I use to shoot all of the YouTube stuff, and actually maybe like the last 10 Instagram and TikTok things have also been on here, because it can shoot in vertical and landscape, basically any of those. So this has been huge. It's also very compact.

So when I do some of the vlogging stuff, which some of my early YouTube videos and some of the upcoming ones are going to be, it's so easy to take this thing around and just shoot with it. And then I use the DJI Mic 2 that's clipped here for the audio, and I thought it would not make a big difference. I was like, oh, I'll just use the mic that comes on here and it'll pick up the sound. I was very surprised that it actually made a big difference in the audio, and then I also realized it made a big difference just holding it versus clipping it.

So clipping it has been the most consistent for audio. Those are the two things that I use, and then I edit everything in CapCut on desktop. So that's what I use for editing. Yeah, very simple for a YouTuber, but my content is pretty simple. It's just me staring at a camera. But you also add animated GIFs every now and then to highlight various parts of it. Yes. They make it really easy to just drag things in. I've had to get very creative, so I do a lot of my own screen recording and then just drag it in. And very thankfully, it does support GIFs.

It actually took me a little bit of time to find an editor that would allow that, because usually it's just static images, but yeah, it's very, very simple. I originally actually tried to use, I think, DaVinci Resolve, and then there was another one, I forgot what it was. But I noticed that I had way more control. For some reason, because I was using CapCut on the phone to edit the TikToks and Instagram videos, I noticed I was just spending so much time editing compared to shooting.

So I was like, oh, maybe I should try it on desktop and see if, yes, I'll have like 1/8 of the power, but let me see if it actually speeds up my workflow. I also don't know anything about color grading or anything, so I don't even use most of the stuff I probably should be using. So CapCut has made that super easy, and I'm surprised how far you can push it and how complicated the software actually is.

What about your captions? What tool do you use for the captioning?

So for TikTok and Instagram, for the short form, I use TikTok's built-in auto-captioner. For some reason, what I do is I export it, put it in TikTok, and then re-export it again out of TikTok sometimes, because for some reason they just have the best auto-captioner that I've found. And I think TikTok might own CapCut too. But I got better results actually just doing it off TikTok. That only works for the short-form videos, though. So that's what I do for the auto-captioning. The long form, to be honest, I haven't... I think I've just been doing some manual captions here and there, where I've been manually typing them.

It's so tedious that I rarely do it anymore, but I actually have not found a really good auto-captioner yet. Do you have recommendations?

Yeah, actually I do. I was kind of hoping you had an easier one to get to. I use Adobe Premiere for auto-captioning. So I do all my recording in Camtasia, which is similar to CapCut in many ways, because I don't want to spend time doing all the video editing and color grading. I don't even know what that means, so I'm just sliding things back and forth. It probably looks like garbage to people who know what they're talking about, so I don't bother with any of that. All my recording and exporting happens in Camtasia, so the full video is done in Camtasia. Then I import that video into Premiere.

Premiere, much like After Effects, is a complicated tool. It does everything. It's for professional filmmakers and so on. The only thing I use Premiere for is the auto-captioning, where it scans your audio, creates automatic captions, and then you have the typical Adobe level of fidelity in formatting the font placement of the captions themselves. Once I have my captions, I then export the video from there. So I don't use Premiere for anything else except the captioning. And because I export both in vertical format and in horizontal format, I create two encodings, essentially, in Premiere, using the same captions.

I export the caption file from one of them and then import it when I'm doing the other version of it, just so I don't have to go back and modify it. Because I speak pretty quickly in some of my videos, the auto-captioning almost always gets stuff wrong. So for a 10-minute video, I probably spend about 10 minutes going through and making sure the captions are reasonably accurate, that they're in two lines as opposed to three lines in some cases, and doing those little tweaks. So yeah, that's been my workflow so far.

I got to check this out. I'm actually going to go check this out after that too, and then I'm going to re-check CapCut's auto-captioning, because it's been like a year since I looked, so maybe it's improved a lot. But yeah, I do need to revisit captions. For TikTok and Instagram, when I switched to doing captions, I did notice a way higher retention rate. I think it's because a lot of people watch it sometimes without volume, or they watch it with very low volume, or they're not really paying attention that well. So having the captions really improves their ability to focus on the video. I think it's very worth it.

I'll double-check. I need to re-add it to my YouTube videos for sure.

Absolutely, and I need to check out CapCut's auto-captioning as well, because both Camtasia and CapCut have auto-captioning. And I can tell you about the Camtasia auto-captioning. It does a decent job, but it doesn't make it easy for you to edit the captions after they've been generated. So if it gets it right the first time, you're golden. Everything is great. In my case, it never gets it right. Mostly it's... A lesson to me that I should probably speak more clearly and slowly. But when I get excited, I'm just blurting out stuff at lightning speed, which, I get it, is not great.

Premiere does a great job there, though, because you literally see empty text fields where the caption is and the timestamp for it, and it's just freeform text. You can go in and type exactly what it's supposed to be. It updates the visuals accordingly as well. And yeah, there's a learning curve, of course, for Premiere. But I watched a YouTube video on how to do captioning in Premiere. There are some weird steps involved. I don't know what they do, which is terrible, because I always prided myself on learning more about the tools I'm using so I can be better at them.

But this is one of those cases where I'm like a typical consumer, where I don't really need to know why all these things are being done. I'm just going to memorize the steps. I'm going to convert from caption to graphic, because if I don't do that, it doesn't actually export it as a caption when I do the video. But there's probably a better reason for that. I don't know what it is. It's actually been really fun in some ways exploring this, because for me, I don't want my tombstone to ever read, was an expert in video editing. It should be more like, created content.

So I really treat this the way typical developers probably ask you surface-level questions after spending maybe five minutes digging into documentation. That's exactly how I treat this whole captioning and video-editing story. I don't want to know more about this, because this is the last thing in my life that I want to spend time and energy on. I want the bare minimum needed to get my videos out with reasonable quality.

Yeah, that makes sense. I think I'm exactly the same way, which is probably why I haven't found the solution yet. For everything else, for development, I'll go down a rabbit hole to figure it out, but not this. I think there are a couple things in video content where people just do not want to focus time, and captions are definitely one of them. And then when you're done editing a video, it's titling it and thumbnailing it. People just don't want to do it at that point because they already spent all their energy actually making the content.

So it makes sense why this is more of an overlooked area, or something that people just don't want to get into.

Have you tried YouTube Shorts?

I did. I actually cross-posted a little bit once I realized you could just upload to YouTube Shorts and it was basically free views. So when I was doing the short-form content, I was cross-posting everything to YouTube Shorts, especially toward the end of me doing stuff on TikTok and Instagram, and I was surprised that I did get some views. What was even more surprising is that these Shorts, which I haven't posted in like 2 or 3 months because of the long-form content I'm doing now, are still getting views and getting recommended, which has been super interesting. But yeah, I haven't made anything specifically for YouTube Shorts.

Something I really wasn't a fan of was the limit. I think I thought it was maybe 90 seconds for the short. Oh, one minute? Okay, so that was even worse. I think maybe Instagram was 90 seconds. So with TikTok, I was able to go for up to, I think, 3 minutes for the short video. Then I remember exporting some of the videos to Instagram, and they got chopped off, and I was like, oh, that's not good. Then I did YouTube Shorts, and YouTube chopped it up even more. So I started treating YouTube Shorts as a funnel to Instagram and TikTok.

Toward the end I would say, full video on TikTok and Instagram. And some people got kind of mad at that. They were like, why don't you post the full thing? And I'm like, I physically cannot post the full thing. I would love to post the full thing. So that's why I also stopped doing YouTube Shorts, and I don't know if I'll make specific content for it, just because that one-minute cap is pretty hard for me to work with, especially after doing YouTube where I'm now used to at least like 10 minutes. It's a little more challenging.

And yeah, that one-minute time frame is just not enough to convey what you really want to do, especially if your goal is to repurpose the content as much as you can.

Up to 60 minutes. Oh wow, that's massive. Okay, yeah, which is huge, because my tutorial content oftentimes goes into 10, 15, sometimes 20 or 30 minutes, depending on what I'm talking about, and that just makes it so much easier to upload there. And I did try YouTube Shorts for a few videos, using introductory topics like, oh, by the way, to learn more, go here, just like you did. And I got the same exact feedback, like, why are you wasting my time with a teaser? It's not even a product, it's an educational tutorial kind of thing, which is very different as well.

The call to action is really not go check out something else, it's just watch the larger video in these other places. I think a lot of people aren't aware of that cutoff, and they think we're just trying to funnel them or get more views on the other stuff. I don't know if YouTube will ever raise it. They probably won't, because maybe it would cannibalize actual YouTube content. But when I was doing it was nice to have that other outlet, and I did get some subscribers and some initial views on the video when I was posting the short-form content. It did funnel some views to the long-form content.

And definitely, as a consumer of YouTube Shorts every now and then when I'm just scrolling through things, the one-minute limit gives you an upper bound on where the punchline is going to be very, very quickly. I love stand-up comedy, so a lot of my YouTube Shorts and TikTok watching is stand-up comedy related. With TikTok, I'm like, okay, it's going to be maybe a five-minute thing before we get to the punchline, whereas in YouTube Shorts, I know exactly where the setup is going to be and where it's going to end. It's a different kind of content.

Yeah, I think with that constraint, which goes back to the thing we were originally talking about, repurposing content or creating for the platform, that time constraint really does change the nature of the content more than people realize. That's why I had to stop really posting on Instagram too, because I realized I need to make specific content for this medium. It's not just the time constraint there, but also the tooling they put around it and where it's going to be displayed. I feel like it really does impact the type of content. And for stand-up... They almost have to rewrite the entire thing to make it work in that time constraint.

I've definitely seen cases where they chop off the middle completely, more setup or more context, and just go straight to the end of it. And if you follow some of these jokes, you're like, oh, they trimmed a large amount of it just to make it work.

Speaking of thumbnails, what was the inspiration behind the style you use right now?

Yeah, I think right now, the style is basically me sitting in front, and then usually some text that shows what the video is going to be about. Then I started posting the icon and maybe a screenshot or something in the top right of the thumbnail. To be honest, when I did it the first time, it was just because I didn't really make a thumbnail specifically for it, so I just wanted to screen-capture something from the video. But the only thing that made sense was me sitting in front of the camera, because I think it was a video of me just sitting in front of the camera for like 12 minutes.

Once I did that, I was kind of surprised that no one complained about it, and it actually did get views. So I was like, okay, maybe this isn't too bad. I started to continue and build off that, because I feel like the audience gets familiar with it. So when they see a thumbnail, kind of like a MrBeast thumbnail or something, there's a specific style and aesthetic where if it even remotely looks like one of his, face and something in the background, you'll know, oh, that's one of his videos, I should go click it.

And I think I accidentally kind of picked that up a little bit where, because I did two or three videos in that format, I kind of stuck with it and just made minor modifications. I used to wonder why some YouTubers keep repeating the same thumbnails. I now understand, because I've accidentally kind of done that. But I do still like the aesthetic and the thumbnail style where it's kind of just me, so they know, okay, this is going to be a talking video. I also don't want to bait anyone into thinking, oh, this is going to be a day-in-the-life type of video.

No, this is going to be me sitting in front of a camera for 12 minutes straight, so please be prepared and don't click this video if that's not going to be interesting to you. So I did want to keep it realistic for what it is. And I wanted the focus to be more on the text and whatever graphic is accompanying it. That's what I really wanted the focus to be.

So that's kind of why I laid it out like that, and then I put the icon of whatever app I'm talking about in the corner, so that way when people are going back and looking, they know which app I'm talking about, because my content is a little different. For most people, they have one topic that they're covering, or if they're building an app, they have one app that they're building. There's another YouTuber, I think his name is Jacob Sucks at Coding, and he talks about his product. Every video is going to be about that product.

Mine is a little different, because some people came and watched because of Ellie, some because of Luna, and then some watched generic content that I make. Most of the time they're focused on one or the other, so I needed that app icon so that when you're scrolling through my channel, you can quickly be like, oh, this is a Luna video, or oh, this is an Ellie video. Hopefully that came across when you look at the icons and get familiar with the logo. That was the intention for sure.

Oh, that's very clever. That's right, it's almost like a Venn diagram. You have one for app A, another one for app B, and the intersection might be more of your general vlog content, just building in public. So how do you make sure that people who are watching one or the other don't get baited into seeing the wrong content? That's actually a really good idea, right?

So that was the intention, and hopefully it came across that way. I know YouTube does have playlists, so I have playlists for the specific things, and I used to put it in the title as well. But I realized no one goes that far into the title when it's right at the end, because it gets cut off on YouTube. Since people wouldn't have seen that, I thought the best place for me to do it was probably in the thumbnail.

Speaking of titles, do you do any optimization of the titles, like what words work and what don't?

Originally, I didn't, but now I'm starting to be a little more conscious of it. Right now what I'm doing is I test a couple of different titles, throw them into ChatGPT or Claude or something, and ask, hey, what do you think of this title? I've actually been surprised that it'll tell me, oh, I'm not sure what this is, or it's not clear enough, or it'll give me suggestions and say, here's another variation. And sometimes I see a variation it spits out and I'm like, oh, I would actually click that one more. Or, oh, as someone who has no context, you're right, this one does make more sense to me.

So I don't really A/B test like that, but I do test out a bunch of titles, and I use tools like Claude or GPT just to go back and forth. When you're the one coming up with the titles, it's kind of hard to put yourself in the shoes of someone who has no context. But if Claude is spitting out options to you, it's much easier to look at them with fresh eyes, because you're not the one who thought about them. So that's kind of my process right now with the titles. And speaking of A/B testing for thumbnails, YouTube now gives you the option to try different ones.

Being able to choose two thumbnails and let it dynamically pick the one that ends up giving the best results. Have you tried that?

Yes, I do it now for every single video, just out of curiosity to see whether something is happening. Most of the time they perform very similarly, that's what I've noticed. But sometimes there's at least one loser. Not really a winner, but one that's like, oh, this one isn't performing as well, so at least I know which one isn't. That has also been great for helping me get out of the comfort zone and test slightly different thumbnails, because a lot of them are the same format. One of the things I wanted to test was, what if I put a graphic in there? Will that mess things up?

Will it make things better? And it actually did perform a little bit better than the ones without the graphic. So then I started adding some sort of accompanying graphic, like a chart or a dollar sign or something that helps with the title of the video. If the A/B test wasn't there, I probably wouldn't have had the courage to go do that myself and deviate. So I'm really glad they launched that.

Yeah, I'd be curious if they extend it to other fields as well, like your title and maybe even description, just to see what gives better results. I also noticed that you use hashtags that show up like the three gray boxes next to it. Have you seen that matter much?

To be honest, I don't know if it's mattered, but I saw a bunch of other YouTubers do it. So I was like, okay, they probably thought through this more than I did. If they're doing it, there's probably something there. I heard that it doesn't matter a lot, but anecdotally people are like, no, it is good though, because if someone scans it, that sometimes helps a little bit if they're in that mindset.

And something I realized too is that I'm really big on trying to give people as much context as possible early on in the video, or even before it, so they don't waste their time and they don't even start the video unless this is something they're interested in. So that's why I also don't like to bait anyone in the thumbnail or the title or do anything clickbaity, because I know retention will take a nosedive if that happens. And I'm hoping maybe those hashtags will also help YouTube identify which audience actually wants to view this type of content, but I'm honestly not sure if it actually does anything.

Yeah, I really like how you do it, and I'm going to steal some of that for my videos. You start off by explaining the exact topic the video is going to be about, and then maybe around the 30- or 45-second mark, you introduce yourself, talk about who you are, why you're doing this, and the app in question as well. It kind of puts it into context and brings people in. You pull them back a bit to explain why you are doing what you're doing and what you're getting out of this, and then it goes back into the topic as well, and I really like that.

And another thing, a lot of your thumbnails have your picture with text that goes behind your head. How do you do that? Because I thought that was actually very clever.

Yeah, for the thumbnails I actually use Canva to do the thumbnail editing. On the Pro plan, they have some AI features, which most of the time aren't that useful for me, but for this one they do have a really good background removal tool. All I have to do is take the thumbnail, right-click, remove background, and it's smart enough that it somehow keeps me in the frame and removes everything in the background. Sometimes it also keeps elements that I didn't intend to keep in, like a cup or something else, but it works out perfectly.

Then if I duplicate the layer, remove the background, and put the text in between the duplicated layer and the background, it gives the illusion that the text is behind me. And because of Canva Pro, it takes like 4 seconds. It's basically one click, and it's done. That's how I do it. Originally I was doing it in Figma and removing the background with another tool, but Canva just made it so much easier for me.

I haven't tried that, because the approach I use right now is the Apple Photos app, basically the same one on the iPhone. You press and hold on the primary subject, yourself in this case, and it separates you out from the background. Then I use Figma. I have the first shot, then I copy and paste just the version of myself from Photos into Figma as well. Now I have a different layer, and I add the text behind it. Very similar to what you're doing, but definitely more manual. I should try the Canva approach on this one.

Yeah, you should definitely check out Canva. I've been very surprised by how powerful some of that stuff is. I think it's also one of those things, kind of like auto-captioning, where maybe a few years ago I would have been like, oh, I really want to learn Photoshop or really get into Figma to make these and craft them in a specific way. But now I'm like, no, I want to use their templates, I want to use their fonts, let me get this out of the way, because they actually have really good templates and graphics right out of the box for you to make thumbnails.

A lot of people do use it for thumbnails. So it's been nice to offload some of that stuff, which I would usually just piece together with Figma and something else.

Yeah, I should give it a shot. I've also been trying Adobe Express. I have an Adobe subscription, so I've just been trying out all the tools they have there, and they have similar tools too. But I haven't tried it in the last, let's say, six months. I should see if it also has it, because right now I realize I'm paying a lot in subscriptions to a lot of different things for one-off activities.

Yeah, I'm doing the exact same thing right now. Canva is probably one, and then I think maybe CapCut. Technically I only use it like twice a month, but these are very one-off things that just make my life a little easier, where I'm like, okay, I can pay like $10 for this. I think that'll be worth the time.

Absolutely. One of the things I've also been hearing is that posting long-form videos directly on Twitter or X has been really popular for a lot of developers and individuals. I noticed in your case you have your tweet, then you put a screenshot of the video itself. In the first tweet you don't have a link going outside because the algorithm probably penalizes you, and in the default response you have the link to the actual source itself. Have you tried putting the videos directly on Twitter and seeing if that gives you more views or better results?

No, I haven't, but I think I probably should. I think what I might do is post it first on YouTube, so I know people who really want to watch it will go watch it there. The reason I care more that people watch it on YouTube than on Twitter is that I really want the algorithm to have more data points about the type of audience that's watching this. If they watch it on Twitter and they don't watch it on YouTube, then YouTube won't be able to pick up that audience characteristic.

The people who are willing to move to YouTube and watch it there are 100% the type of audience that I want YouTube to learn about. So that's why I care more about that. But I think what I will do is probably post it on YouTube and then repost it on Twitter a few days later or something. That way I know, okay, people have probably already seen it, and I'm not going to tweet about it anymore, so this is probably a good time for me to just post it here. I am really curious, because I do think they bias toward video and boost it a little bit in the algorithm.

Every time I post a screenshot tweet, I notice a huge difference versus if it's just a plain text tweet. But I've never done a long-form video tweet, so I think I might do that on the next one, to be honest.

Yeah, definitely give it a shot. Because when I've done experiments on it and posted the full 20-minute or 30-minute video on Twitter, both in the vertical form as well as the long-form form, the videos got like 10 times or 20 times more views on YouTube. It's very surprising, but I don't do it enough. Same as you, mostly, though I have a different reason in many ways, because I don't want my content to live in any one location where, if it ever goes away, it's just gone forever. So I like to keep a central source of truth. In my case, I also embed the videos on my blog itself.

So for me, people actually using YouTube is less interesting than people who visit the blog and have the video as part of the text-based content below it. And the way I embed the videos means the tracking on YouTube doesn't happen as well. So if you view my video on kirupa. Com, that view count does not count toward YouTube because I use a no-cookies, light version of YouTube. If you just use a native YouTube embed, it's like 800 kilobytes to one megabyte of stuff that gets downloaded.

As part of it, I use a Lite YouTube script created by, I think, one of the developers at Google who optimizes web performance things, and it's like 10K. I'm like, I would rather have it be 10K and the views aren't being tracked than add one megabyte and have the views count for it. At some point it might be that the YouTube algorithm penalizes me because the view count is low, because I'm not sending people to YouTube directly.

I'm sending people to my blog where I'm viewing it there, and that's the tension I always have, how much of my content do I have living permanently in some other source where it's always being funneled through to my own blog or my own area that I own, essentially?

That's actually a really good point. It's not something I've thought about too heavily, to be honest, but it's probably something I should, because I do want to spin up a landing page. A lot of people have been asking, hey, do you have a newsletter? Do you have a central blog or something that I can follow? That's something I've been interested in. And if I do that, one of the things I wanted was a place where people could see all the videos and I could categorize them a little more easily. So I might run into the same problem in a few weeks.

Yeah, one thing to try out would be having a small blog post for each video itself, where you actually, in text form, describe what's happening, just so you get more of the indexing from Google Search and the SEO that comes along with it.

Yeah, that's actually pretty good, especially for my type of content, where it's really educational and long. It would honestly be very useful for people to be able to see it in that written format, and then for indexing purposes that would probably do well SEO-wise too. But the challenge, of course, is that the deeper we go into it, the more it becomes a full-time job in its own right.

Like you create content for half the time and spend the other half on marketing, which is probably the right balance for it. But I'm guessing you're a one-person shop, so it's not like you can spend time on one thing and then flip a switch and suddenly have all the energy and creative capability to go into marketing mode and creative mode.

It's a little harder to do that here as a one-person team. What I've been trying to do right now, especially since I have to swap between development, customer success, being able to answer emails, marketing, and then specific marketing that's not really the content, and then the content marketing... I've been having to train myself to turn off part of the brain and swap into that mode and then try to focus, because I realized I was having a hard time doing a little bit of both each time. I realize I have to dedicate chunks of time, which is also why my video frequency decreased.

It's still pretty good, because it's like every two weeks, but my goal was actually one YouTube video a week, which in hindsight, I'm like, why did I think that was possible? But that was what I wanted to do. I realized I did have to compromise a little and start putting more focus into each thing to be able to do it correctly. That's something I'm still trying to figure out too, just how to balance all of this in the most effective way. I don't think I'll ever completely figure it out. I think it's just going to be a constant evolution.

So for, let's say, a 10-minute video, end to end, how long does it take for you to come up with the concept, the script, record it, and then hit publish?

It's definitely different per video, but in general what I've seen, and I've been getting a lot faster at this, is that a typical video takes probably 6 to 7 hours total for an entire video, and this is like a 9- to 10-minute video by the end of it. But now I've gotten it down to where it's an hour, or an hour or less, of actually shooting the content. Before it was like 3 hours of footage. Take so long. Editing takes the longest time. So it's like an hour of shooting, and then editing and chopping really takes me probably six hours in total.

The reason it takes so long is because I just keep rewatching it over and over again. All I do is rewatch it, throw things out, rewatch it, throw things out, rewatch it, throw things out. Then when I'm really happy with it, I can go ahead and add the graphics, the text, the accompanying stuff, and that takes me about 1 to 2 hours. So maybe like 4 hours of just raw stripping away until I'm like, okay, I think I've got literally the exact things that I wanted to convey in here and nothing more. Then I can go ahead and do the overlays and everything like that.

So yeah, probably 8 hours on average to make a full video.

When the camera is facing the screen and showing parts of your app UI itself, are the voiceovers done in real time, or do you do the voiceovers afterward, after you've done all the edits?

Oh, they're done in real time. So when I'm pointing the camera, those ones, I'm actually talking, and I think I'm still using the same mic because I wanted to keep the volume level around the same. Maybe there were one or two times where I did an actual voiceover, probably when I was editing and I was like, oh, that actually didn't make any sense. I have some leeway here, maybe I can re-record this and no one will notice.

So maybe there were one or two times where I was able to re-record things, but most of the time I treat it almost like, if it's facing me, I have no choice but to keep it in there. So I do the voiceover while I'm actually pointing it at the camera. But it does make editing more tricky because you're speaking and then the visuals might be different than what you're currently saying, which means if you cut it in the middle, you're mid-sentence on your previous point but the visuals have already shifted over. Yeah, and that's happened so many times.

I think I've had to throw out entire things, because I'm like, yeah, it doesn't make any sense, this is not going to work, the visuals are so off. There was also one time where I was able to swap the visuals with something else. I think it might have been this hackathon video I did where I was building the Ellie attachments feature. I could not get the overlay to work at all, so I had to re-record a whole new thing the next day and swap it in and be like, yeah, it turns out this didn't work. It looked like a whole other thing, but it actually worked out very well.

So I had to study some other YouTubers and see how they do it, especially ones where they're just talking at a camera or doing multi-day-long things. How do they do it? In a way where I didn't even notice this was happening over multiple days. So I learned some techniques on how to swap in things that don't make any sense, or things from completely different time segments, and then go back to the current time period and make it seem natural. That was something I did have to do in one of the videos.

Was it a deliberate decision by you to actually have the camera point toward the screen, as opposed to just doing a screen capture from the main machine?

Yeah, that was deliberate, because I did try a bunch of things. It was interesting because one of my first TikTok videos, I wanted to share something on the screen and I actually recorded the screen and then put it in the TikTok video. For some reason, when I played it back, I was like, this just doesn't feel natural. On TikTok, you don't really typically see that. Usually people just point their phone at something, like at the screen, and it feels more natural. And I realized there is actually a huge difference between the two.

The bias, I think for me, and probably for most developers too, is yeah, do the screen recording because people can see it clearly. But for some reason, recording the screen versus pointing your camera at it conveys completely different things. The screen recording feels much more polished and clear, and that's great if I'm going to record a here's how I use my app video, because I do actually want it to feel a little more polished. I do want them to see every element.

But if it's just me recording the screen with the camera, I think it conveys to the viewer, hey, this is supposed to be very casual, or we're actually in the moment of me building this. This is a very raw look into how he's coding. I think both of those do convey different things, even if the content is exactly the same in theory. So yeah, it was a deliberate decision to record the screen with the camera instead of doing a screen recording.

Wow, that's very cool. I feel like we've touched almost every topic about your video recording setup. Is there anything about the videos or anything you want to highlight that I may not have covered?

Just the impact that video content has had for me too. I've been trying to get everyone I know to start making video content. You're the exception, because you already do it, so I don't even have to try to convince you. But I've been so surprised by how positively the videos have been received and the kind of connection that I've built with the audience I have through video, which I don't think you can get through any other medium. I've done Twitter, I've written a couple blog posts in the past, but there's just something different about especially a long-form video that you cannot get in any other kind of content.

So the only thing I would say is, if anyone's thinking about doing it, 100%, go do it. And if you want to start, definitely start small, maybe something on TikTok where the risk is low. I loved TikTok because I didn't have an audience there, so I felt less self-conscious posting there. But even on Twitter, I was self-conscious posting video because I'm like, I kind of know some of these people now, this is kind of awkward. So that would be the piece of advice I would share: start really small.

Actually try to post in a place where you don't really know anyone, so you kind of get out of your own head, and then you can gradually ramp it up to something like YouTube where you share it with people that you actually know. That's one thing I wanted to touch on.

Very cool. And then shifting a little bit to your Twitter content itself, where I see a lot of the content you post, I love the before-and-after screenshots you often post of, here's a small tweak I'm making. I think I saw one recently where the menu was expanding with an animation and without an animation. These are nice because they touch on several audiences. One is usability, where people are like, oh, this is much better because it guides your eye appropriately. And then you have people like me who just love animation in general, so I'm curious to see how it was actually done.

And then in some of your comments, there's a technical audience that's like, how did you make the expanding behavior work, where it expands but the checkboxes also animate in at the right time so it feels natural? Because animating expansions is always tricky, because you're redrawing the entire screen. So when do you do the redraw? When do you paste your new content in? I love those discussions that I often end up seeing on your threads.

I think that's also why I love posting this kind of content, because I can tell it genuinely does spark some interest or discussion. One of the things I'm hoping people do when they see this kind of stuff is think, I need this in my app, or I need to figure out how he did this and bring it over here. Which is great, because then when they ask questions like that, like how did you do it, I think they really are asking because they want to do something similar. And that's really good. That's what I want.

It's been really fun posting those before-and-afters, and a lot of them are also for me, because I already know one thing I'm going to do in a few months is go back to that and be like, man, I can't believe it didn't animate like that in the past. Remember when it was so static? I love being able to go back and see that before and after just for myself.

It's a common hook as well. If you look at some of these marketing articles, people like to track the progression of something, even if they aren't directly using it, so it's a great way of doing it. But then the other angle is just the genuineness of it. You mentioned that video as a form is getting a lot of traffic and gets people to talk to you more about it. It's because in many ways they are, at a moment in time, seeing a snapshot into your own life. And I think the camera pointing at the screen adds that realism.

The way I describe it to someone else who has the same question, like why do you do the camera facing the screen versus an actual screen record, is imagine doing a nature documentary in your backyard. If you want to show something that's happening there, it's probably better to just take your camera and point it at what you're trying to show, as opposed to going to really high-res 4K footage outside the context of what you're trying to do here. There's a moment in time for those kinds of activities, but probably not for what you're trying to do here if you're trying to show something that's very genuine.

I love watching the Apple keynotes because they're really well done. Half the products there I don't really relate to, but I love the transitions between, here's a real-world example of someone walking by on the screen, and then going to actual live content from the slides or whatever they're trying to show. I think that's also a really good touch, because you take the viewer from a world where they're seeing the person talking, then the camera zooms all the way out. You're seeing basically wherever they're recording it, like California, almost as a bird's-eye view of the whole geography.

It zooms back in, you see the person, and then suddenly you're into a higher-res version of the PowerPoint presentation, or in their case, the Keynote presentation. I always like that transition too. It's in the back of my mind that if I had more time and skills, maybe I should learn Premiere or After Effects.

I would totally consider doing that. I need to go back and watch more closely, because you're right, I didn't realize that was happening, but they do it so seamlessly that it's not jarring at all, and now that I've been doing some video stuff, being able to go from that to a whole other point of view is very challenging. So I bet a lot of thought went into how they were going to do that and not make it feel jarring. That's an interesting point you brought up as well.

Now that you're doing more video editing and seeing some of these things, do you ever watch TV shows or movies and go like, wow, that was a great shot, that was done really well, I don't know how they did it, but that was really cool?

Yeah, I do now. I've been doing that all the time. When I see things, I'm like, I don't even want to imagine the work that went into doing this. Something I've been noticing a ton is just how many cuts there are in things. I was watching, I don't know what it was, maybe Breaking Bad or something, and I was like, I think the camera just cut like 40 times in this one minute. That's so crazy, and the different angles they have.

I'm just so surprised now by something I didn't notice before, which again, if you don't notice it, that means they did such a good job that it felt so natural. I've definitely been subconsciously picking up on this stuff now and then trying to apply some of it to my own videos too, like how can I do something similar here where the transition doesn't feel as weird, or I can take something from the movie?

Yeah, I think that naturally just happens. In my videos, I talked about this the last time we spoke as well, that my goal is to do everything in one take, so I do not do multiple takes. So if there's any mistake, it's staying in the video. If you look at the camera shots that I'm doing, it's just one continuous take, which is easy because I'm really just sitting here and I don't memorize my lines, I just ad-lib it as it goes on, which you can kind of tell. It's like, okay, this guy is just winging it at this point.

And whenever I watch some of the movies, especially some of the East Asian action films, I think I watched The Raid recently. It's a great film, and there's this massive fighting sequence in an apartment complex that's maybe 5 or 6 minutes long. The camera never cuts anywhere. One gigantic live-action shot. You're going like, how in the world did they pull that off? Because it was seamless. If they had any transitions, I did not notice them.

I don't know how. I haven't seen anything that does that, so I might go check that out too, because I'm so impressed by it. I think there was another movie too, I forgot what it was, where they did most of the things in one shot, or maybe I'm misunderstanding what it was, because that doesn't seem possible at all. But they did a lot of things either in one take or one shot, or the scenes were all in one go, which now, knowing what I know, makes it even more impressive that people can pull that off.

Yep. And also, when you know there were multiple shots taken, like let's say it's a rain sequence in an action movie or something like that, you're like, okay, for every shot they basically had to refill that water tower with the grid of fake rain above it and probably get everyone from wet clothes back into dry clothes. You start having an appreciation for how much time it takes. You often read about actors going, yeah, shooting started at 400 a. M. And we didn't end until midnight and we got maybe 5 minutes of content.

I'm like, yep, I can totally see why it was almost 20, you know, 18 hours of recording and only 5 minutes of content came out. Resetting the context to where it needs to be, especially if it's not trivial, takes a lot of time.

A lot. And then other things too, like lighting. I didn't realize that time of day matters. So now I also understand why some directors are like, no, we must shoot this right now. I used to think, oh, they could just use lights, or go film it on a green screen or backdrop. No, the natural light makes a huge difference, and you only have a finite amount of that each day, and you've got to pay a whole crew. So yeah, I think we have it easier than a lot of people.

But I have way more appreciation now for film and a lot of other things now that I started doing this, especially when you have multiple actors who have to coordinate their lines and make everything work. If one person forgets their lines or makes some mistake while they're walking and doing something, for example, the whole thing has to be done over again, whereas in our case it's just you and me on the screen once. If anything happens, it's just me. But in that case, I always look at probabilities.

If everything has like a 50% chance of working correctly, with each thing you add that's another point of focus, whether it's a prop or an actor or something like that, you're multiplying it by smaller and smaller numbers to the point where there's like a 1% chance that end to end this is all going to work well if everything lines up. Those are literally the odds you're working with.

Yeah, this is why directors are so stressed all the time. This is why they get so frustrated whenever something doesn't happen or one person messes up a line or something like that. I think this makes a lot of sense now. So last question: there's a lot of content you see, especially on TikTok, where it's AI-generated. There actually is no person. It's the, I think they call them faceless videos or something like that, where you just have a script, an AI-generated thing creates the background, creates the voiceover, and everything like that. Some of those have been very, very popular.

I follow a handful of historical videos, like ancient Rome history and things like that, and almost all of them follow a very similar format, which is just a panoramic view of some classic photo from that era, a voiceover, captions flying in and out, interesting battle-sequence music, and that's it. Have you considered that for some of your videos, to just have some autogenerated things, maybe some of the backgrounds and some of the B-roll? To be honest, it's a little harder, I think, to match the aesthetic that I go for.

But 100%, if there is a tool or something that can get really good B-roll footage or something autogenerated, I will 100% do it. If it adds to the story or helps keep the viewer engaged, especially since I'm talking for 12 minutes straight, anything to make this interesting, I will 100% do it. I probably wouldn't do the faceless part or the autogenerated talking, but the background, yeah, I would love that. I'm honestly looking forward to the day when we can get a lot of that stuff autogenerated, even graphics. I think some of the graphics I've had done in CapCut are AI-generated in CapCut, because they do have some of those features.

So yeah, I'm very open to doing it. I think when it's done well, it adds to it. When it's done poorly, you can also tell.

Cool, Chris, this has been fantastic, chatting with you about all these things. Links to your apps will be in the description in whatever format you're currently watching or listening on. Is there any parting word you want to share in general about app building and all that?

Yeah, definitely follow along if you're interested. I'm filming myself building productivity apps on my YouTube channel and everywhere else on Twitter. And if you ever have questions, feel free to reach out to me. I'm pretty open about responding to people. If you comment on my videos, I will respond to the comments, so definitely feel free to reach out anytime if anyone's listening.

Perfect. Chris, thank you so much.

Cool. Thanks so much, Kirupa. Thanks for having me.