hi everybody effective marketing these days has to involve videos now what exactly does it mean there's a lot of opened questions here when it comes to videos what do you create a video about what does success look like is your goal for creating a video to drive more awareness for your brand or your product or trying to sell a product or once you have your video where do you even post it what are the pros and cons of posting on let's say Instagram or Twitter SLX 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 rro 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 going to be a great conversation so grab a drink sit back and relax and let's get started all right Chris it's great to chat with you again this is round two of you chatting about all the cool things you've been up to you know I'm also joined by pixel here who also decides to you know wants to join in and see how it's going and you know and I think Ellie is the name of your dog

correct Ellie is the hamster and then

Luna Luna oh Ellie is the hamster Luna is the H okay gotcha got I I knew there was like a Pet Connection all your all your products and you know and for some more context the last time you were on we were talking about some of the apps that you were building and you were starting to think about how do I Market it you know how do I get more people to build this thing this is like you know Indie hacking 101 before it became Indie hacking like you know got all the mainstream attention over the past couple of months so you were really on The Cutting Edge of some of these things that we're talking about a little bit granted so what have you been up to yeah

lot A lot has changed um I think the biggest thing um since the last conversation so I actually watched the last conversation to make sure like all right what did we talk about last time um but a lot A lot has changed so at the time I was just working on two apps so it was MOG and Ellie so Mogul was a personal CRM and then I think I just really started to work on Ellie a little bit like I think maybe it was three or four months into building Ellie and that's a daily planning app that I was building um so 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 um and then also six months ago I

started doing video content and that has been that one that one's probably the bigger update that one has we can we'll talk more about it but that's been probably the most uh lifechanging for me in the last uh in the last few months

yeah let's talk about the video content because you know when you have like apps that are being built and they're being showcased there's often a disconnect between the the person building it and the app itself that human connection it's often lost whereas in your case you've been providing live updates in terms of like features you're doing design updates on like here's what it look like before here's what it looks like right now and being very personal with the audience in some ways to kind of give giving a a very human element to what you are building and the videos have been fantastic I watched both your YouTube videos and your Tik Tok videos on it so walk me through like you know at some point I do want to also ask

about your setup and like what tools you use work but yeah like let's go through the videos like what why you decide to do videos why you choose the format you chose did you try different things to see what clicked and didn't click and and all of that yeah yeah so I

originally started um and so 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 actually like absolutely love 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 just a like a documentation Journey like a way just for me to document what I'm building 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 Tik Tok

because it was like the least polished it was the one where I 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 Tik Tok I felt like I can just record updates just 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 just uh you know share a little more detailed uh my thoughts and yeah that's

uh that's how it started then I moved from um Tik Tok to slightly Instagram but kind of just reposting the content um so I I now after a few months I realized I do need to actually probably craft specific videos just for Instagram and then after after Tik Tok and Instagram then I moved to YouTube and that one was a whole different a whole different thing but that's that's basically the summary of kind of why I started posting there and then why moved to the other the other uh networks

what's the biggest difference between the three video platforms you've seen so

far I think okay the biggest for sure is the type of Engagement from the audience so something that I thought that you know if I posted a video it would be consumed in the same way um across the platforms because it was It was kind of the same thing like my my Twitter and sorry my um Tik Tok and Instagram videos were kind of just shorter vers of the YouTube videos I was doing but I was completely wrong um and people I realize that people consume different things or they're in different mindsets when they're consuming content on like Tik Tok and Instagram versus on YouTube for Tik Tok and Instagram they're just kind of scrolling and so they're not 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 20 minutes and go watch this long video and I've noticed that on um YouTube the comments are just way more engaging and way more thoughtful it's clear they watch through the entire thing um on Tik Tok and Instagram the comments are usually a little bit more surface level which is okay because the videos are like one minute long so there's not much for them to ask anyway but it's usually just general questions like how did you get into development like you know why did you choose this technology on YouTube they're very specific questions of like what was the

challenging part about implementing you know recurring transaction for the budgeting app or you know you mentioned here that you know you tracked this for retention why did you do it this way why didn't you track this thing and um I noticed that the discussions were just there's just a little bit more in depth I think that's probably the biggest difference um also the I guess a second thing um is that I noticed that the I think the connection um to the audience was a lot stronger with YouTube probably because they were sitting down in a longer session so it maybe felt like we were having more of a conversation than on you know Instagram or Tik Tok and so 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 people saying hey I love your tweets I've been following along then I started posting on Tik Tok and Instagram and I started noticing that the messages I would be getting were a little bit more like personal like almost like they felt like they knew me then it just went to a whole other level when I started doing YouTube and people started like they started reaching out very similarly in a way that like my friends who know know me that that I'm like they they know that the things that I'm building the things that I'm going through I felt like they actually had a really good

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

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

so I don't track conversions I probably should but I just actually recently started putting um some trackers CU I just did my first sponsorship and they were like oh here's our link and I was like oh I should probably start also tracking my own links and see like if people are clicking them but I do believe that um there is actually a way higher conversion rate for um YouTube than the other platforms and the reason I think that I I don't have the data to back it up but I did notice like I I put out a wait list for the budgeting app when I was first starting and I thought if I put this weight list out you know and it was just in four videos maybe I

would get 50 signups like Max over those four videos and I was absolutely floored by how many people actually filled out and signed up just on four videos and again these were the developers so they weren't really in the market for a budgeting app I thought I thought maybe like maybe Max 50 of these developers would actually like care or would just be curious enough to download it but out of that there were I think over the span of four videos I got around 3,000 signups to the wait list and when I saw that I was like I've never gotten anything like that on Twitter like when I posted the same um the same sign up form on Twitter I think Max I got over

the course of like a ton of tweets was made maybe like 100 signups total from that and so I think it is a I I definitely think that the conversion is much higher on the long form content again just cuz people are in the mindset they're like fully focused on the video they're consciously choosing to go watch it versus on Twitter or Tik Tok or Instagram where they're scrolling and you you're one of like 100 videos they're about to see in that next hour and so the chance of actually them stopping and going to the profile and converting is probably a lot lower um so I do 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 I wrote a book on algorithms recently which is like not my normal audience kind of you know cup of tea and so there's been a you know bit of like 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 like learn more about the book itself far greater engagement on YouTube than on Tik Tok and Instagram and even Twitter in some cases but unlike you though what I haven't done is actually create new content for each other's platforms like what I basically do is that 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 Tik Tok I basically just take each half move it to the top on one on top of each other and I post the exact same content because it just saves time from having to PR reccord it probably not the best way of doing things but I definitely found that YouTube still with that happens to be the the best plate for being able to see all of this and in your case is your call to action the beginning of the video middle of the video or towards the end so I I done it

I honestly when I did the videos I didn't even really like think of the call to action or I didn't try to insert it but so when I went back and rewatch The videos cuz I finally did a video with an actual call to action again like I just did my first sponsored video so that one I actually had to consciously figure out where am I going to talk about you know go sign up for the sponsor so I I went back to my old videos to check did I did I subconsciously add a call to action and I realized that I think subconsciously I did naturally kind of add like little mini call to actions where they weren't directly saying hey go sign up for the

weight list but it was kind of like almost like a hey this is I have a weight list it's you know this is the analytics like look how many people signed up so technically I didn't say hey there's a weight list go sign up but I kind of hinted like you know by talking about the analytics of the weight list people were like oh there's a weight list 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 actually didn't say anything I just said like here's analyst for the wait list or here's how the app's going weightless signups have gone up and I think people naturally took that as a call to action

like a subtle one and then kind of went went down to the section now I'm a little bit more conscious about trying to add some call to actions because once I did add an actual call to action on the fourth video I think the first three videos got total a th000 signups for the first three then I put a direct call to action on the fourth that one got 2,000 signups alone so it basically doubled the combination of the first three so I do think call to actions like direct ones do actually they do matter and the way that I did it for the fourth one was actually probably more in the middle so more in the middle so lots of context similar to how I did it for the first

three where it's kind of subtle and then kind of towards the middle maybe a little bit towards the end is too then I would say by the way like if you're interested there is a weight list here and and it's already been built up so hard so I could just mention it for maybe like 2 seconds and that that would probably be enough but that's how I do the that's how I've been doing the recent call to actions for the last like

three 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 at the very beginning people AR really convinced about why should I care like you know here I am here to learn something very specific and I don't have access to like you know the knowledge that makes me trust you enough to go do all these call to action but 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

they made it all the way to the end especially like longer videos that means they've committed they really like what they saw so there's a very good chance of converting so that 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 at some point you know be curious get data from like you know wherever I can on how to consumer apps or non-developer facing content do a behavior change for some of that as well

yeah I'm also curious about that too um I'm honestly like I think since even though technically my stuff is consumer it's B Toc but then the audience is developers I'm actually not even sure the answer because I feel like I've mixed the two so closely that everything that I thought would happen has basically not happened like the revers has happened I thought oh there's no audience overlap with this BTC app and the 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 like like way more than I thought and so I I I actually now with confidence can't really answer anything anymore but I I also do want to talk to some people and

see if uh you know what how it works for like non-developer

audiences do you customize the content for the audience or do you customize it more for yourself you know you're thinking that I would be interested in this kind of content if I were to watch it from somewhere else so I'm going to create that same kind of content that resonates to me personally if people like it great if they don't well we'll revisit at that point yeah 100% the

second one um so I I primarily make the content for myself like basically here's the stuff that I genuinely wish I had when I was starting out doing software development um another reason that I do it is because I get a lot of the same questions like in my DMs of hey how do you get started or hey how you know you integrated this you integrated slack how did you do this I'm kind of curious and a lot of the times I just kind of craft a message to oh yeah you should go to the docs do this and but then sometimes I'm like I should have just recorded it and then so I can send it to them um and then sometimes I also do I do really

wish I can go back in time and kind of watch you know hey I was integrating Outlook that was that seemed really painful was it that bad and then I can go watch the video and kind of see it again um so I do create content primarily for myself to just play it back to be able to send to people and again just almost like a message to my younger self to be able to have CU I know that that will 100% be helpful to other people but I do recently though I have been a little bit more conscious about what would what would other people like so I still do keep myself as the primary audience or like my past self as the primary audience but I do have a

hint of like okay but I 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 I think with my Twitter as well um before I used to create content specifically just for audiences on Twitter and I got burnt out so easily there once I started treating it just as a journal and I was like I don't even care if anyone likes this stuff like this is for my the primary purpose is for me to just play back everything which I do all the time because sometimes I'm like sometimes I'm hard on myself and I'm like I feel like I didn't get a lot done this month and then I can

just 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 so the engagement doesn't really matter as much to me the follower count doesn't matter YouTube maybe like 80% of that and then 20% is like I do want it to be educational and help people so I do consider the audience in aggregate you're still in the open people can see you and I think that moves the needle forward in whatever Direction it's going maybe the angle might be off a little bit here and there but as long as you're creating content and creating this mind share amongst all the audiences that you're targeting that probably goes a long way

yeah 100% 100% let's talk about your design of the thumbnails and the style you have as well because it's very polished and very deliberate in how you the typo typography use which often times mimics the the typography logo I think in see some cases the captioning and and so on so what what got you interested in like the what not what interest you already told me that what things do you try out to land on the current style that you're in right now yeah in terms of uh so I

guess in terms of the style of like the video and the thumbnails just like everything um I did try out a bunch of different things so and I I do attribute it a lot to to uh the early Tik Tok and the Instagram stuff that I was doing that definitely had an impact on the YouTube stuff um when I did the Instagram and Tik Tok stuff it was really more just similar to the Twitter it was just here's the update here's 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 super like very very superficial I guess like surface level questions where it's like it has nothing

to do with the content it's more like how did you get started or like you know can you talk about integration the video had nothing to do with Integrations but um I think when I saw the comments it did start it did start getting me more inspired to shift the content a little bit more towards not just documenting but slightly educational to try to help people and so um the early videos I did were actually leaning way more towards document like yeah documentation and so you can see I even documented like making coffee like the typical you stuff you see in like a vlog and then I started shifting maybe like four or five videos in you might notice there's a shift of there's no more there's really

no more angles of me typing and coding there's 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 shift in comments like really like kind of lean more towards educational and to be able to I actually genuinely wanted to answer those questions and I think the only way for me to do it was to kind of cut out some of the stuff I was doing in the Vlog type Style and then just really sit down the camera and go answer those questions in the most concise way as possible and so that's I think a huge reason why the entire aesthetic and the and the type of

video that I do has shifted it's because the the stuff I'm seeing from people and the kind of questions really did shape you know this is I do want to be helpful it made me realize I did want to do more like lean more in the educational space and start doing this type of thing um it's still a challenge though because I do want to make it interesting so some times I do embed like some Vlog content and it's been a while I think I've been on a streak of like four educational content and so the next one I'm purposely really going to try to make this one more like semi- entertaining document because I I genuinely want that like those are probably my favorite

videos to make is the like the the Vlog style one just because that's the most fun when I get to look back at those type of videos so I'm going to try to do another one of those and but yeah that's that's kind of why my my content has been leaning more towards educational and it is the way that it is it's just because that's the kind of content that um I wanted to put out there after

seeing some of the comments 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 wellos to a random passer by who's wondering about something completely unrelated it stumbles upon what you're creating yeah yeah yeah 100% okay now let's geek out on technical details about videos itself what camera do you use for the recordings

yeah so one when first did the Tik Tok 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 like the wired Apple mic that's the only thing I'm going to use because I I did attempt video content a long time ago in the past and when I started thinking about what software am I going to use what camera I got really overwhelmed and started overthinking it so that's that's what I did for the Instagram Tik Tok stuff for the YouTube though I realized okay the camera quality as good as it is it probably won't cut it especially for the audio portion like I I realized I needed a mic so the things that I use are

actually I have it here so this is the the DJI pocket 3 so this is what I use to shoot all of the YouTube stuff and and actually a lot of the maybe like the last 10 Instagram Tik Tok stuff has also been on here where I kind of uh because it can shoot in vertical and uh landscape and portrait yeah horizontal it can shoot in like 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 um it's so easy to take this thing around and just shoot with it and then I use the DJI mic 2

that's just clipped here for the audio and I thought it would not make a big difference I was like oh I can just use the I'll just use the uh the mic that comes on here and and and just um it'll just pick up the sound I was very surprised that it actually made a big difference in the audio um and then I also realized it made a big difference just holding it versus clipping it so clipping it has been like the the most consistent for audio so those are the two things that I use and then I shoot I edit everything in uh cap cut on desktop so that's what I use for editing um yeah very very simple for for a YouTuber um

but my content is pretty simple it's like just me staring at a camera so that's uh that's what I use but you also add animated gifts every now and then to highlight various parts of it I can see screenshots of your app as well does cap cut do all of those things also yes yeah so they make it really easy to just drag things in um I've had to get very creative so like I do a lot of my own screen recording and then just drag it in and then very thankfully it does support gifts so it actually did take me a little bit of time to find an editor that would allow that CU usually just the static like an image but yeah the

the it it's very very simple um I originally actually tried to use I think D viny resolve and then I tried there was another one I forgot what it is Temptation no uh no no it's um I don't think it I don't think it was after effects I don't think but there was something else I was using and I noticed that I had way more control but for some reason um because I was using cap cut on the phone to edit the Tik toks and Instagram I noticed like I was just spending so much time editing compared to shooting when I was doing my my uh Tik Tok and Instagram videos so I was like oh maybe I should try it on desktop and let me just see if yes I'll have

like 1/8 of the power but let me see if if this actually like 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 that I probably should be using so cap Cut's made that like super easy and it's uh yeah it's been um I'm like surprised how far you can push it and how how like complicated the software actually

is your captions what tool do you use for the captioning so I use um okay so

for for Tik Tok and Instagram I actually I actually use the um for the short form I use Tik toks builtin autoc captioner for some reason so yeah I what I do is I export it put it in Tik Tok and then reexport it again out of Tik Tok sometimes because for some reason they just have the best autoc captioner that I have found and and I think Tik Tok might own cap cut too but um I got better results actually just doing it off Tik Tok that only works for the short form videos though so that's what I do for the autoc 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 it so tedious that I rarely do it anymore but I actually have not found a really good autoc captioner yet do you

have recommendations please let me yeah actually I do I kind of curious because I was hoping you had an easier one which is get to I use Adobe Premiere for auto captioning so I do all my recording in campasia which is similar to cap cut in many ways because I don't want to spend time doing all the video editing color grading like hey I don't even know what that even means so I just I'll just be sliding you know things back and forth like this looks good it probably looks like garbage to people who know what they're talking about here so I don't bother with any of that and so all my recording and exporting happens in Camtasia so the full video 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 like professional filmmakers and so on the only thing I use premiere for is the Auto caption where it actually scans your audio creates automatic captions and then you have the typical Adobe style level of Fidelity in formatting the font placement of the captions themselves and once I have my caption I then export the video from there so I don't use premiere for anything else except the captioning and because I record both in uh I mean I export both in vertical format and in horizontal format I create two encodings essentially in Premiere and the same captions I export the caption file from one of them and then I import it when

I'm doing the the other version of it just so I have to REO back and modify it because I speak pretty quickly in some of my videos and so the autoc captioning almost always gets stuff wrong so I have I spent about probably for a 10minute video probably about about 10 minutes actually going and like make sure the captions are reasonably accurate they're in two lines as opposed to three lines in some cases and those kind of little tweaks and so so yeah that's been my

workflow so far I got to check this out let me let me go I'm actually going to go check this out after after that too and then I'm going to recheck cap Cut's Auto too because it's been like a year since I looked so maybe it's actually improved like a lot so but that's uh yeah that I do need to read cap captions have been I remember for Tik Tok and Instagram when I switched doing captions I did notice just a way higher retention rate I think because a lot of people do watch it sometimes without volume or they do watch it like like with very low volume or they're not really paying attention that well so then having the captions really improves that you know

just the the their ability to focus on the video so I think it's very worth it I'll I'll double check I need to re add it to my YouTube videos for sure yeah

absolutely and I need to try check out cap Cut's autoc captioning as well because both Camtasia and cap cut they have autoc captioning and I can tell you about the Camtasia autoc captioning it does a decent job but it doesn't make it easy for you to edit the captions after it's 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 it's a lesson to me that I should probably speak more clearly and slowly but when I get excited I'm just like lurting out stuff you know at like lightning speed which you know I get it it's not great and so but after I mean Premiere does a great job in that though because you

literally see empty text Fields where the caption is and the Tim stamp for it and it's a free from text you can go and just like type in 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 and but I watched a video on YouTube actually on how do I do captioning in premere premere there's some R steps involved I don't know what they do and which is terrible because I always prided myself on learning more about the tools I'm using so I can be better at it but this is one of those cases where I'm like a typical consumer where I don't really need to know why it's being done all these things I'm going to memorize

these steps I'm going to convert from caption to graphic because if I don't do that it doesn't actually export it you know as a caption when I do the video but there probably a better reason for that I don't know what that is and so it's actually been really fun in some ways like exploring this because for me I don't my Tombstone to ever read was an expert in video editing be like created content my reads so for me I really treat this as a way typical developers probably ask you questions about your like surface level questions on you know they spent maybe five minutes digging into documentation to understand it that's exactly how I treat this whole captioning and video editing story is that 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 Di into I think a bare minimum needed to get my videos out with reasonable

quality yeah that makes I think I'm exactly the same way so which is probably why I haven't like found the solution yet cuz for everything else for development I'll just I'll go down a rabbit hole to figure it out but not this like I just uh I think that and um I think there's like a couple things in video content where people just do not want to focus time on and for sure captions and then I think it's like when you're done editing a video it's like titling it and thumbnail like people just don't want to do it at the time because they just spent all their energy actually making the content so it makes sense why this is is like a more like overlooked area or something that people

don't want to get into have you tried YouTube

shorts I did I actually did cross post a little bit um once I CU I think I I didn't realize that you could just like upload to Youtube shorts and I had realize that it was just a basically like free views um so when I was doing the short form I was crossposting everything to YouTube shorts I think towards the end of me doing stuff on Tik Tok and Instagram um I was surprised that I did get I did get some views what was actually 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 the short forms are actually getting views and getting recommended which has been super interesting um but yeah I haven't uh I

haven't made anything specifically for YouTube shorts I something I really wasn't a fan of to was um I think the limit is maybe 90 seconds for the short I think it's one minute oh one minute okay so okay that that was even wor I think maybe Instagram was 90 seconds so Tik Tok I was bble to go for up to I think 3 minutes for the short for the video and then I remember exporting some of the videos to Instagram then they got chopped off and I was like oh that's that's not good and then I did YouTube and then YouTube shorts chopped it up even more so I I just started treating YouTube shorts as a funnel to the Instagram and Tik Tok so I just started

saying towards the end full video in Tik Tok 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 that's why I would love to post the full thing um so that's why I I also stopped kind of doing the 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 um it's a little more challenging exactly my reason as well because that one minute time frame is just not enough to convey what you really want to do and if

your goal is repurpose the content as much as you can you have to do a whole new thing only for one particular platform I think Tik Tok now let you go

up to 60 minutes in oh wow that's massive okay yeah which is huge because you know my tutorial content often times goes into 10 15 some 20 30 minutes depending on what I'm talking about and that just makes it so much easier to just be able to upload there and I did try YouTube shorts for a few videos being like introductory topics like oh by the way to learn more go just like you did and and same exact feedback is like you know why are you wasting my time with a teaser for you know it's not even a product it's like it's an educational kind of tutorial thing which is very different as well like the call to action is really not go check out anything else it's really just

watch the larger video in these other places yeah I think some people don't I think a lot of people aren't aware of that cut off and they think we're just trying to like kind of just funnel it or try to get more views to the other stuff but yeah it's uh I don't know if they'll ever raise it they probably won't because maybe it'll cannibalize like actual YouTube content potentially but it it when I was doing it though it was nice to just 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 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 like scrolling through things the YouTube shorts being one minute definitely gets you an upper bound on like where the punch Line's going to be very very quickly I love standup comedy and so a lot of my things on my YouTube shorts and on Tik Tok are standup comedy related and with Tik Tok I'm like okay it's going to be like a five minute thing before we get to the get the punchline whereas in YouTube shorts it's like I know exactly the setup's going to be here and it's going to end right here which is a different kind of content as well in terms of it it is it is yeah

yeah I think with with that constraint which I think goes back to the thing we were originally talking about too was you know repurposing content or creating for the platform I feel like that time constraint it really does change the type the nature of the content More Than People realize and which is why I I had to stop really posting on Instagram too because and I realized I need to make specific content for this like even for the medium not just time constraint there but just uh the tooling that they put around it and like where it's going to be displayed I feel like really does impact just the type of content and so for standup they they have to like maybe even rewrite the entire thing to make it

work in that in that time constraint yeah I've definitely seen cases where they chopped off the middle completely like more setup or more context and just went straight to the straight to the end of it and if you follow some of these jokes you're like oh they trim a large amount of it just to make it make it

work so thumbnails your thumbnail design what was the inspiration behind the style you use right now yeah I think

right now the style is just kind of me sitting in front and then um usually some text that kind of shows like what the video is going to be up be about and then um I started posting the icon and maybe like a screenshot or something on like the top I think top right of the of the yeah this of the thumbnail um to be honest I think when I did it the first time it was just because I didn't really like make a thumbnail specifically for it and so I just wanted to screen capture something from the video but the only thing that made sense was just me sitting in front of the camera cuz I think it was a video of me just sitting

in front of the camera for like 12 minutes and once I did that um I was kind of surprised that no one complained about it or like and it actually did get views so I was like okay maybe this isn't too bad I started to continue and build off of that just because I I don't know if this is correct but I feel like the audience is kind of familiar with so when they see a thumbnail I guess almost like you can think of like a Mr Beast thumbnail or something um there's like a specific style and aesthetic where it if it looks like even remotely you know you have his face and something in the background you'll know oh that 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 like two or three videos in that format then I kind of like stuck with it and just made like minor modifications and I used to kind of be like oh why does some YouTubers keep repeating the same thumbnails I Now understand like I think like cuz I've accidentally kind of done that but um I do still like the aesthetic and I do still like the thumbnail style where it's kind of just me so that they know okay this is going to be a talking video like I also don't want to like really bait anyone into thinking oh this is going to be a day in the life type

content 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 like that's not going to be interesting to you so I did want to keep it realistic for what it is and then I did want to I did want the focus to be more like about the text and maybe like whatever you know whatever um 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 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 where I for most most people they they have one topic that they're covering or if they're building an app they one app that they're building so when you go to um there's another YouTuber I think his name is Jacob sucks at coding and he talks about his product but you know every video is going to be about that product mine's a little different because some people came and watched it because of Ellie and then some watched it because of Luna and then some watched it just uh there's like some generic content that I write but most of the time they're focused on one or the other and so I needed that app icon so that way when you're scrolling through my my

channel you can quickly be like oh this is a Luna video or oh this is an Ellie video um hopefully that came across like when you look at the icons so people get familiar with the logo but that was the intention for sure oh that's very clever

because that's right it's almost like a vend diagram you have one for app a another one for app B and the intersection might be more of your general Vlog content of just like building public and so how do you make sure that people who are watching one or the other don't get you know like baited into seeing the wrong content that's actually a really good idea right yeah

so that that was the intention so hopefully it it it came across that way I know YouTube does have playlists and 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 like when it's right at the end because it gets cut off like on YouTube and people like since people wouldn't have seen that I was like I think the best place for me to do it is probably in the

thumbnail speaking of titles do you do any optimization of the titles like what words work and don't work um originally

I didn't but now I'm starting to be a little bit more conscious of it so right now what I'm doing honestly is kind of like I I test like a couple of different titles and so I throw it into Chachi PT or Claud or something and I just kind of ask hey what do you think of this title and I've actually been surprised that it's told me like oh I'm not sure what this is or it's not clear enough or it gives me suggestions and says here's another variation and it's been like sometimes I see a variation it spits out and I'm like oh I would actually click that one probably more or oh as someone who has no context this one actually you're right this one does make more

sense to me so I don't really um I I guess I don't really AB test like like that but I do test out a bunch of thumbnail or a bunch of titles and I use tools like Claude or or GPT just to like go back and forth and try to kind of cuz once you're when you're the one that's coming up with the titles it's kind of hard to put yourself in you know uh someone's shoes that does not have any context but if Claude is spitting out thumbnails to you so much easier for you to look at it with fresh eyes cuz you're not the one who thought about it so that's kind of my process right now with the titles in YouTube they also have the

actual speaking of AB testing for thumbnails you have the option now like

being able to choose two thumbnails and it'll dynamically pick the one that ends up giving the best results have you

tried that yes I do it now for every single video um just just out of like curiosity to see like is something happening most of the time they perform very very similarly um that's what I've noticed but some sometimes there are like maybe a there's there's at least like one I guess not a winner but there's always one that's like a loser basically that's like oh this one's not performing as well so at least I know which one isn't and so this has also been great for me to kind of get out of the comfort zone and test slightly different thumbnails because a lot of them are the same format and then one of one of the things I wanted to test was what if I put a graphic in there will

that mess things up will that make things better and it turns out it it did actually perform a little bit better better than the ones without the graphic so then I started adding you know some sort of accompanying graphic like a chart or like a dollar sign or something that kind of helps with the title of the video but if the ab test was not there I probably wouldn't have had the courage to go and do that myself and kind of deviate so I'm really glad that 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 result I also noticed that you use hashtags to show like the three gray boxes next to it have you seen that

mattering much to be honest I don't know if it's mattered but I just saw a bunch of other YouTubers do it so I was like okay they they probably thought through this more than I did if they're doing it there's probably something there um I heard that it doesn't matter a lot but like anecdotally people are like no it is good though cuz then if someone even if someone like scans it that sometimes helps a little bit where they're in that mindset and something I realized too is um I'm really really big on trying to give people as much context as POS possible like early on in the video or before so that they you know don't waste their time and or they don't even start

the video unless you know this is something I'm interested in so that's why I also don't like to bait anyone in the thumbnail or the title or do anything clickbait because I know that'll just retention will take a nose dive if that happens and I'm hoping that maybe you know maybe some stuff in the maybe those hashtags will also help YouTube identify which audience actually like 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 this actually I'm going to steal some of my videos you start off by explaining the exact topic that this video is going to be about and towards like maybe let's say the 30 or 45 second Mark you introduce yourself you talk about you know who you are why you're doing this and the app in question as well it it kind of puts into context it kind of like brings people in and if you're like Tak them back up a bit to kind of explain why you are doing and 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 so good to hear yeah please take that please take that nice in one a lot of

your video thumbnails you have your picture then you have text that kind of goes behind your behind your head how do you do that because I thought was

actually very clever yeah so I use uh for the thumbnails I actually use canva to do the thumbnail editing and canva has like a bunch of on the Pro Plan they have some like AI features which for me most of the time the AI features are like not that useful but for this one they do have a really good background removal tool and so all I have to do is just like take the thumbnail like right click background remove and it's just so smart that it somehow like just keeps me in the frame and then removes everything in the background sometimes it keeps also elements that I didn't intend to keep in but it works out perfectly like a cup or a like something else and it's

been great because then if I just duplicate it like duplicate the layer remove the background then I just put the text in between you know the duplicated layer in the background it gives the illusion of the text is behind me and it's like because of the canva pro takes 4 seconds there just like one click and it's just kind of done and um so that's how I would do it originally I was like I was doing it in figma and I was like removing the background with another tool but yeah canva just made it so much easier for me to do that I

haven't tried that because the approach I use right now is like I use the Apple photos app the same with the iPhone basically so you you know press and hold on like let's say the primary character yourself in this it separates you out from the the background basically and I use figma I have the first shot then I copy and paste just the version of myself from photos B it into figma as well now I have a different layer and now I add the text behind it very simil what you're doing but definitely more manual I should try the the canva approach on

this one yeah you should definitely check out canva I've been very surprised by how um just like how powerful some of the stuff is and I I think it's also one of those things kind of like autoc captioning where um maybe a few years ago I would have been like oh I I really want want to like learn Photoshop or really get into figma to make these and craft it in a specific way but now I'm like no I I I want to use their templates I want to use their fonts like let me get this out of the way because they actually have really good um like they have really good templates and Graphics just off uh just out of the box for you to make thumbnails because a lot

of people do use it for thumbnails so that's been uh it's been so nice to just kind of offload some of that stuff which I would usually just piece together with the figma something else yeah I should

give it a shot I've been actually I've also been trying Adobe Express I have an adobe subscription and so I've just been like trying out all the tools they have there and they also have similar tools there but I haven't tried out in the last like let's say six months I should see if that also has it because right now I realize like I'm paying a lot in subscriptions to a lot of different things for oneoff activities yeah yeah

yeah I I'm doing the exact same thing right now canva is probably like that one and then I think maybe uh cap cut I think technically I I mean I do it like twice a month but these are very like one-off things that um which it just makes my life a little bit easier where I'm like okay I can pay like $10 for this like I think that'll be worth the worth the time I know absolutely one of

the things I've also been hearing is that posting longterm videos directly on Twitter or X has been really popular for a lot of developers and individuals I notic in your case you know you have your Tweet and then you put a screenshot of the video itself in the first video you don't have a link going outside because the algorithm probably penalizes you and theault 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 more results no I I

haven't but I I think I probably should I think what I might do is post it First on YouTube so I know people that really want to watch it go watch it there and the reason that I care more that people watch it on YouTube than on Twitter is um I really want the algorithm to have more data points of the type of audience that's watching this and so if they watch it on Twitter then and they don't watch it on YouTube then you know YouTube won't be able to pick up that audience characteristic and the the people that are willing to go move to YouTube and watch it they're 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 though is probably post it on YouTube and then I might just repost it on Twitter like a few days later or something so that way I know okay people have probably already seen it and I'm not going to Tweet about it anymore so that this is probably a good time for me to just post it here I am really curious because I do think that they bias towards video and they do Boost it a little bit in the algorithm like every time I post a screenshot tweet I do notice there's a huge difference versus if it's just a plain text tweet versus a screenshot tweet so but I've never done a long form video tweet so I think I

might do that the next one to be honest

and see yeah definitely give it a shot because when I've done like experiments on it and I posted the full 30 minute 20 minute video on Twitter both in the vertical form as well as the long form form the video's got like 10 times 20 C more views on YouTube okay yeah it's just like it's very surprising but I don't do it enough same reason as you mostly you know I 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 is just gone forever and so I like to keep it as a central source of Truth and in my case I also embed the videos on my blog itself

so for me like people actually using YouTube is less interesting to me than people who actually visit the blog and then happen to have the video as part of text based content below it and the way I embed the videos means that the tracking on YouTube doesn't happen as well so if you view the we if you view my video on group.com that view count does not count towards YouTube because I used to new I use no cookies you know light version of YouTube which basically cuz if you just use a native YouTube embed it's like 800 kilobytes one megabyte of stuff that gets downloaded as a part of it I use a light YouTube script created by I think one of the developers you know at Google who

optimizes for web technology things and it's like it's like 10K and I'm like I would rather have it be 10K and the views aren't being tracked than add me like one megabyte and then having it like you know the views count for it maybe at some point it probably be like you know the YouTube algorithm is going to penalize me because the view count is low because no one is I'm not sending people to YouTube directly I'm sending people to my blog where I'm viewing it itself and and that's the part that I always have this like tension between is like how much of my content do I have it living permanently in some other source where it always being funneled through to my own know blog or my own form of

what area I own essentially yeah I I think that makes a lot of sense yeah

that that's actually a really good point that's not something I've thought about too heavily to be honest but it's probably something because I I do want to spin up a um like a landing page because a lot of people have been like asking hey do you do like you know where like do you have a newsletter do you do stuff like do you have a central like blog or something that I can follow um and that's been something I'm kind of been interested in and if I do that one of the things I wanted to do was have a place where people could see all the videos and I can categorize them a little bit easier so I might run into the same problem probably in a few weeks

I think yeah you know one thing to try out would be like having a small blog post for each video itself where we 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 a good yeah that's actually pretty good especially for my type of content I feel like where it's really educational and like long it would probably do it would be you know honestly be very useful for people to be able to see it in that written format and then yeah for indexing purposes that would probably do well SEO wise I think but the challenge of course is that the more we go deeper into it the more it BEC a full-time job in its own like actually you know he

like you create content for half the time and the other half you spent on marketing which is probably right balce for it but I'm guessing you're a one person shop and so it's not like you can spend time you know on one thing and then be like okay now I'm going to flip a switch and then have my brain of all the energy and creative capabilities at this very moment to now go into marketing mode and creative mode yeah

it's a little harder um to be able to do that here uh just as like a oneperson a oneperson team but what what I've been trying to do right now especially since I have to swap between like honestly just in general I have to swap between development customer success uh being able to answer emails then marketing and like specific marketing that's not really the content and then the content marketing um I've been having to like I have been having to train myself to kind of turn off like part of the brain and then like swap into that mode and then try to focus just cuz I realized I was having a hard time like kind of doing like a little bit of both each time I

realize I have to kind of dedicate which is also why my my video frequency decreased it's still pretty good cuz it's like every two weeks but my goal was actually like I'm going to do one YouTube video a week which in hindsight I'm like why did I think that that was possible but um that was what I wanted to do but I realized I did have to compromise a little bit and start like putting a little bit more focus in each thing to be able to do it correctly so that's something I'm still trying to figure out too is just how to balance all of this and in the most effective way and I don't think I'll ever figure it out I think it's just going to be a

constant like Evolution so for like let's say a 10-minute video end to end how long do it take for you to come with the concept the script recording it and then hitting publish it's it's

definitely different per video depending but in general what I've seen and I've getting a lot faster at this I think it takes for a typical video um probably I think like 6 to 7 hours total most likely 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 where it's an hour an hour or less of just shooting the content before it was like three hours of footage and then my editing would it would take so long then the the editing takes the longest time so it's like an hour of shooting and then editing and chopping really takes me like probably six hours to be able to do in total and

the reason it takes so long is because I think I just have to keep rewatching it over and over again and like like all I do is basically just rewatch it throw things out rewatch it throw things out rewatch it throw things out then when I'm really happy with it then I can go ahead and add like the Graphics the text the accompanying stuff which then that one takes me about like 1 to two 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 and now I can go ahead and just do the overlaying and everything like that but yeah probably so I guess like eight maybe eight hours

on average to make a full video and some of the videos where you actually have

the camera facing the screen and is showing parts of your app UI itself are the voiceovers done in real time or do you do the voiceovers afterwards after you've done all the edits oh they're

done in real time so when I'm do pointing the camera those ones I'm actually talking and I think I'm I'm still using the same mic because I just wanted to keep the volume level like around the same and so yeah those ones are like there there are maybe there was one or two times where I did actually do an actual voiceover and it's probably where it's probably at a time when I was I'm editing and I'm like oh that actually didn't make any sense oh I have some leeway here maybe I can re-record record this and no one will notice so maybe there was like one or two times where I was able to re-record things but most of the time it's like when I'm uh I

treat it almost like I'm it's facing me and I have no choice but to like keep it in there so I do do the voice over like while I'm actually pointing it at the camera it but it does make editing it more tricky because you're speaking and then the visuals might be different than the voice you're currently speaking which means if you cut it in the middle your mids sentence of your previous point but the visuals have already shifted over yeah yeah and that's happen so many times I think I had to throw out entire things cuz I'm like yeah it doesn't make any sense like this this is not going to work like the visuals are so off um maybe there was also one time

where I was able to swap the visuals with something else there was a there was a a video too I think it was the might have been this hackathon video I did where I was building the leie attachments feature um I could not get the overlay to work at all so I had to re-record just record a whole new thing the next day and just kind of like swap it in and be like yeah it turns out this didn't work and it looks like it's like a whole other thing but it actually worked out very well so I I had to study some other YouTubers and see how do they do it especially ones where they're just kind of talking at a camera or they're

doing multi-day long things how did they do it in a way where I didn't even notice this was happening over multiple days and so I learned some techniques on how to like swap in things that don't make any sense or or from completely different time segments and then go back to the current time period and make it seem natural so 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 towards the screen as opposed to just doing a screen capture itself from the Prem machine

yeah that was deliberate because I did try a bunch of things especially on um it was interesting because one of my first uh Tik Tok videos I did I wanted to share something on the screen and I actually recorded the screen and then put it in the Tik Tok video and then for some reason when I played it back I was like this just doesn't feel natural like for some reason it made sense because it was on Tik Tok and you don't really typically see that on Tik Tok usually people just point their phone at something like at the screen and it's more natural and I realized there is actually a huge difference between the two um the bias I think for me and I think probably for most

developers too is yeah you know do the screen recording because people can see it clearly but for some reason recording the screen versus pointing your camera at it actually just conveys completely different things I think that one is so much more polished and clear that I think that's great for like if I'm going to record a here's how I use my app video I'll probably do it that way cuz I do actually want it to feel a little bit more polished I do want them to see every element but if it's just me recording the screen I think it conveys to the the viewer hey this is this is supposed to be very casual or like like oh we're actually in the moment of me

building this like this is actually like a like this is not a Polish thing like this is a you know a very raw look into how he's coding and 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 like record the screen like with the camera instead of doing a

screen recording wow that's very cool I feel like there's nothing further we can talk about your video recording this I think they touched on like almost every topic yeah yeah yeah we did is there anything about the videos or anything you want to just like highlight that I may not have covered um I think I think

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

only thing I would say is if anyone's thinking about doing it 100% go do it and then if you want to start definitely start small like maybe something on Tik Tok where the risk is low actually I love Tik Tok because I didn't have an audience there so I felt less self-conscious posting on there but even Twitter like I I was self-conscious posting video on Twitter because I'm like I kind of know some of these people now like this is kind of awkward so that would be just something I would share is that piece of advice like 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 ramp up and start gradually

trying to increase it to something like YouTube where you share it with people that you actually know so that's just

one thing I wanted to touch on no very cool and then you know shifting your a little bit to your Twitter content itself where I see a lot of the content you post I I love the before and after screenshots you often post of like here's a small tweak I'm making like I think I saw recently you had one where here's the menu expanding with an animation and without an animation and and these are nice because it touches on several audiences one is just usability of people who 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 like Curious see how it is actually done and then in some of

your comments there's a technical audience which is like how did you make the expanding Behavior work where it expands but the the check boxes also animate in at the right time so it doesn't look it feels natural because animating expansions are always tricky because you're redrawing the entire screen so when do you do the redraw when do you paste your new content in and I love those discussions that I often end up seeing on your threads yeah yeah I I

think that's also why I love posting this kind of content too is because I can tell people genuinely it does actually spark some some interest or discussion and one of the things that I'm also hope that people do is when they see this kind of stuff they're like I need this in my app or like I need to figure out how he did this and I need to bring this here and which is great cuz then I I think people are doing that when they do ask questions like that like how did you do it cuz I know they're asking so they can do something similar which is really good like that's like what I want but yeah it's been uh it's been really fun posting those

before and afters and a lot of them or two are are for me to be able to see like cuz 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 like man remember when it was so static and I love being able to go back and see that before and after just for myself

wish the common hook as well on the videos if you look at some of these marketing articles like people like to think the progression of something even if they directly using it so it's a it's a great way of doing it but then again the other angle also is just the genuine of it you know you mentioned like video form is getting you know a lot of traffic and you get 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 because it's you know the way described it as you know to someone else who has exact same question

to me about why when do you do the camera facing the screen versus when you're just doing a actess screen record the example I often give is like imagine doing a nature documentary in your backyard if you want to show something that's happening there it's probably better for you just take your camera point at what you're trying to show as opposed to going to like high-risk 4K footage of what you're trying to show outside the context of what you're trying to do here there's a moment in time for those kind 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 I love watching the Apple Keynotes because they're just like really well done like

you know half the products there I don't really relate to but I'm like the transitions between where they go from like here's a real world example of someone like walking by on the screen to then going to actual live content from the from the slides or whatever they're trying to show there I thought it's also a good touch as well because you kind of take the reader or the viewer from a world where they're seeing the person talking then the camera zooms all the way out you're know seeing like basically you know I think like wherever they're recording it in like California you're seeing that almost like a birdside view of the entire geography it zooms back in you see the person then you're suddenly into a higher res

version of the PowerPoint presentation or in their case keynote of course the keynote presentation and I always like that transition as well it's in the back of mind I'm like if I had more time and skills maybe I should learn Premiere or after effect that would be something I

totally consider doing that's I need to go back and watch the because like you're right I I didn't realize that that was happening but they do it so seamlessly where like it's not jarring like which is I'm like that's very hard to pull off now that I've been doing some video stuff being able to go from that to a whole other like point of view like that is very challenging so I bet so much thought went into how they were going to do that and not make it feel drawing so that's interesting that's interesting point of brought up as well

now that you are doing more video editing and you see some of these things do you ever watch TV shows or movies and so 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 have been doing that all the time like when I see things I'm like I don't want to imagine the work that went into like doing this or like how many something I've been noticing a ton is is just how many Cuts there are in things yes that's something where I as I was watching I don't I don't know what it was maybe it was Breaking Bad or something I was like I think the camera just cut like 40 times in this one minute and I'm like that is so crazy how they and and the different angles that they have I'm just so surprised now that I did something I didn't notice which again if you don't notice it too that

means that they did such a good job where like it felt so natural and um I have been like definitely subconsciously picking up on this stuff now and then trying to apply some of it my own to my own videos too like how can I how can I also do something similar here where the transition doesn't feel as weird or I can take something from the movie but yeah that's I think that's something

naturally that just happens yeah when you do that you know in my video I talked about in the last time we talked as well is that my goal is to do everything in one take so I do not do multiple takes so if there's any mistakes there it's staying in the video and so if you ever look at the camera the shots that I'm doing it's it's just one continuous take which is easy because I'm just really sitting here and I you know I don't really memorize my lines I just add Li bit as it goes on which you can of tell it's like okay this guy's just winging it at this point you know it's like Way Off Script and whenever I watch some of the the movies

especially some of the more Eastern East Asian films like the action movies specifically like I think I watched The Raid recently and the raid is like you know it's a great film and there's like this massive scene where it's like a fighting scene it's like you know apartment complex the entire thing is like maybe five 6 minutes long for one particular sequence the camera never cut anywhere one gigantic life action shot un they're going like how in the world they pull that off because it was seamless like if they had any transitions I did not notice it yeah I

don't know how I have not seen anything that does that so I might go check that out too cuz yeah I I I'm just so impressive I think there was another movie too I forgot what it was where they did most of the things in one shot like or maybe I'm Mis understanding what it was cuz like that doesn't seem possible at all but they did a lot of things in like like either one take or one shot or the scenes were all in one go which now knowing what I know like it's so impressive that people can pull

that kind of stuff off yep and also when you know that there were multiple shots taken and like let's say it's like a rain sequence in like an action way or something like that you're like okay for every shot they basically had to refill that water tower with the actual grid of fake rain thing on and above it and probably get everyone to like wear dry clothes back from their wet clothes he kind of start having appreciation for how much time it takes you often read about actors going like yeah shooting started at 400 a.m. and we didn't end until midnight and we got like make 5 minutes of content I'm like yep I can totally see why it was almost you know 20 you know 18 hours of recording and

only five content came out because resetting the context to where it needs to be especially if it's not not trivial that's a lot of time a lot yeah it is a

lot and then other things to like lighting like I didn't realize that time of day matters so now I also understand why some director are like no we must shoot this right now and like I was like oh they could just like just use lights like just go or go film it on like a green screen or a backdrop no the natural light I realize makes a huge difference so like and you only have like a finite amount of that each day and you got to pay a whole crew so yeah I think uh I think we have it easier than a lot of people but I have a lot of appreciation now way more appreciation for for film and for 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 all these things work because if one person forgot their lines or made some mistake that was like as they're walking and doing something for example the whole thing has be done over again whereas in our cases you know just you and I just on the screen just once if anything happens it's like H you know it's just me but in this case the I always at like probabilities and if everything has like know a 50% chance of working correctly with each thing you add that's like a a point of focus whether it's like a prop or an actor or something like that you know you're

multiplying it by like smaller and smaller numbers at the point where it's like there's like a one % chance that end to end this is all going to work well if everything lines up and those are the odds you're literally working

with yeah this is this is why directors are so stressed all the time this is why they get like so frustrated I think whenever something doesn't happen or one person messes up the line or something like I I think this makes a lot of sense now yep so last question there's a lot of content you see especially on Tik Tok where it's this AI generated there actually is no person it's just like the fa I think they call faceless videos or something like that where you you just have a script an AI generated thing creates the background creates the voiceover and everything like that and some of those have been very very popular like I follow a handful of historical videos like you know ancient

Rome history and like things like that and almost all of them follow very simar format which just a a panoramic view of some like you know classic photo from that era a voiceover captions flying in and out you know interesting music of like battle sequence or something like that and that's it have you considered that for some of your videos to kind of just have like autogenerated things maybe maybe some of the maybe some of the backgrounds and some of the b-roll um to be honest it's a little harder I think to match the aesthetic that I go

for but 100% if if if there is a tool or if there is something that can get like really good b-roll footage or something that's autogenerated I will 100% do it if it adds to the story or it helps like keep the viewer engaged especially I'm always looking for something like since I'm talking for 12 minutes straight anything to make this interesting I will 100 % Do It um probably wouldn't do like the the the the faceless part or like the autogenerated talking but the background yeah if I I I would love I'm honestly looking forward to the day when we can get a lot of that stuff autogenerated even Graphics like I think some of the graphics that I've had done in cap cut are autogenerated like AI

generated in cap cut because they do have some of those features and so yeah I'm uh I'm very open to doing it I think when done well it adds to it when done poorly you can also tell too like when

it's done poorly Cool Chris I think this is fantastic chatting with you about all these things link to your apps will be in the description in whatever format you're currently watching or or listening on is there any parting words that you want to share about in general about app building and all that yeah

yeah just definitely follow along if you're interested in building um I'm filming 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 just reach out anytime if anyone's

listening perfect Chris thank you so

much cool thanks so much Kupa thanks for having me