hi everybody today I'm thrilled to talk to Fabu Fey is a Content creators content creator she has been consistently sharing her knowledge around how to build audiences how to effectively create content across blogs video podcasts and other mediums and how to help companies use social media more effectively and she's been doing this for many many years in the following chat we cover everything from how she got started how she made a transition from a stable job to becoming an entrepreneur how she traveled the country with a film crew to record a series of documentaries with some very famous people and a whole lot more this is a fun one so let's get started hey it's great to meet with you I've been following your content forever so I'm

going to chat with you right now is like you know it's a lot of fun it's like putting the face behind the words and the videos and the images that you often see so it's great to be here so before we get started what's face world who are you and what makes you tick

oh thank you so much and before we get started I just want to send so much gratitude towards your work since 20 years ago uh when I was a college student studying computer science and math I had so many doubts and when I stumbled upon Kirupa.com I learned so much from you I really couldn't believe you reached out to me I barely get to say this to anybody who reach out for an interview so I'm so thrilled and thank you for asking so face world media has has taken many twists and turns it has existed since 2014 first as a podcast just like you I started reaching out to my colleagues at advertising agencies marketing agencies but since then because of the podcast I've left my

full-time job officially as of January 1st 2016 trying to save some money on my LLC setup that's why so trying to get every penny into the 500 incorporation money January January 1st and I started Consulting for other local small businesses as a project manager as a digital producer sir but very quickly I realized that content at its core is something that I wanted to be a pursuit of a lifetime it wasn't something I wanted to do just for a year for three years so I was very very uh how do I say this uh ambitious about like how do I do this um so that I can do it forever like Dory Clark says uh how to play the long game so as evolved and I will try to

summarize that we can go into details if needed but I did my documentary 2018 fast forward two years and it gave me the break it broke me away from them taking on high paying clients I'm on the road and then when I came back from the documentary I have to build everything from the ground up so that's when I really started working full-time with creators and creative businesses at the same time I started my YouTube channel which took off in 2020 right in the pandemic so nowadays phase world has evolved into a tutorial all Sites helpful sites for people and businesses looking to integrate artificial intelligence into their business much Beyond Chad GPT by the way um looking at their processes helping them do their business better more

efficiently at the same time I'm still a YouTuber creating tutorials I still love talking to people like yourself Kirupa still running my podcast so in a nutshell that's sort of what it what it is content creation business as well as a Consulting side um to support what we do no that's great

so let's go back 2016. you know that's a long time ago in Internet terms today everyone is a content creator the tools the services the ecosystem is just great to be able to do this so what made you decide to be a content creator especially when back then it wasn't a very popular or common path

yeah for sure you know thanks to the corporate life which did not really meet the needs for me as a human being I felt so much of it was missing I was doing well the paycheck was really good was steady I felt respected you know it was doing well at work but there was just this void that I couldn't quite describe it because nobody you know taught me in school my family members didn't quite you know point to exactly what was missing so for me Kirupa was really about like let's just start some conversations what do I love doing love talking to people in this format back then was more like bringing people to Chinatown I'm originally from Beijing China I came here when I was a high

school student so so many people at work wanted to say hey I really want to try dim sum could you take me there and we then quickly sparked into this unbelievable conversation with anybody from I.T from copywriting from and I just thought what if I could record these conversations I'll just listen back to them myself self when I feel I don't know sad or like dissatisfied and I finally had the got to launch the podcast it was really scary for the first few episodes I did not like how I sounded at all and I was really surprised by how supportive people were and I said okay let me just keep going then whatever it took and we can talk about the struggles it was very much I

would say not easy there are a lot of negative self-talk at the beginning and um and I just thought you know what like you said I think at the beginning before even hit recording if it could help 10 people then I don't want to take that privilege away from people what if I can develop a relationship so just let let that fuel me and um that's that's what I did but to be quite honest in 2016 I was not thinking about how do I turn that into a money machine right away how do I get sponsors and so I was still working as a freelancer for you know different businesses so money really wasn't an issue I saw working for clients as a menu for me to drive Revenue so I can do

this work that I really love and know it's important

but that's quite the story so let's go even further back you know I believe you made it in computer science and you got internet computers so how do you get involved in computers in the first place like what was it that sparked your interest in that fun field which I'm a huge fan of of course

of course I mean you're definitely an inspiration I remember stumbling upon your site sporadically um right when I graduated from high school around 2001. I didn't know what I wanted but I just remember that transformation the feeling believe it or not all the flash models and sites that you get literally I couldn't believe I still can't believe we're sitting here having a conversation so you played a really important part and at the same time to be quite honest as an international student I was someone who needed a work visa who couldn't really work immediately after graduation I was someone who had to be 17 18 and start really seeing my seeing through my future years in advance so you know being a Chinese immigrant talking to

relatives one of the reasons is not a good reason is how do I major in something that could probably guarantee or give me a good job when I'm a 22 and graduating computer science was was really the field and as a result I think one thing that really made me quite happy was I had three different internships during college I went to Northeastern and it just kind of opened my eyes up to not just the theoretical computer science applications we're learning Java at a time and you know and to be able to practice that and to see what it can do it was it was satisfying it definitely again had many struggles

yeah you know it's an underrated skill sometimes to kind of pick an area that you think long term has viability as a career which you can either make it your full-time passion or you can I think in teams like what what you and I do as well which is like yes it's a part of what we do but then this is a jumping off point to do other more interesting things and it gives a great foundation for being able to pull this off yeah

very true and actually I like what you said about uh computer science almost as a social skill there were a lot of hidden gems of learning computer science and thinking about all the Practical applications things and terminologies I have to learn and I think later on even still today as a creative entrepreneur I really borrow and I apply a lot of things I've learned back in college I probably didn't appreciate back then to leverage in the work I do today

that is so true a lot of what I'm doing now you know I always go back and go you know I've only spent more time in college actually really understanding the importance of this you know instead of just like cramming for the latest exam or the short-term idea behind it and you know if time machines ever become a reality that might be one of the things where I go back and see like you know let me do this differently this time around

yeah isn't it true though I'm just curious you know like lately I was listening to this like Random episode of Tim Ferriss I really hadn't listened to his podcast for a little while but he mentioned the idea of our live actually come in Seasons where he was reflecting the same thing when he was 20 years old 30 years old he wish he did this but I he didn't think he would be ready for them so I I think about the integration of our knowledge our feelings and our experiences uh in my 30s and I I just turned 40 very recently and I think about being an entrepreneur pretty much throughout my 30s and the things I was able to learn probably was and they weren't something that I could easily

pick up when I was a teenager or in my early 20s so in a way like okay there's kind of No Regret and I've had fun along the way

yeah you know one way I could always think about it is like imagine you're solving a maze you're solving like a gigantic hedge Maze and you're trying to figure out like how do I get to places do these moments when you're actually stuck and you're trying to figure out where to go a little bit of panic a little bit of fear of the unknown all these things kind of kick in where it isn't until you fully finished it into amazing like oh wait a minute it wasn't that bad it turned out that it was okay there were some paths I took that I didn't know if it worked out or not and then you go back and go like okay it all turned out you know fine and then you

remember like oh there's a water fountain there what was in the Waterfront was there anything there right oh I saw a sign there what would that sign say in hindsight you look back at it now that you know that you're safe everything is okay you start reminiscing about like what if those options there at that moment though you don't have a guarantee no one's going to be and able to constantly say like it's okay everything will be fine just take a deep breath relax and and make this work it's never that sense and even today I look at you know like how I'm approaching life right now now they're things that I'm like oh of course you know 20 years ago I don't know I was worried about

that like there's nothing there but I look forward to 20 years and I'm like I'm terrified of like how some of these things will play out and so it just repeats itself right here right it Seasons it repeats itself I don't know how to overcome that fear though because I'm no longer fearful of many things but I'm absolutely fearful of things in the future that I don't have any control over it's one of the things where until you get there you won't be like you know yeah it's irrational why are you afraid of it but I guess that's what makes us human

yeah I'm so curious and I don't know if your guests uh ever ask you these questions but I'm kind of curious like for the past 20 years we obviously only connected now but for me to look at someone like you who's you're you clearly have very high IQ they're things that came very natural probably easily to you than most other folks I mean myself included for sure especially when it comes to computer science and programming very intuitive so I wonder like in the past 20 years did you find yourself having to reinvent yourself reaching New Heights or making some parallel moves like what are some of the things like related to what you just said that you experienced in in recent years yeah first of all I'll say I was a

terrible computer science student you know and the reason it's basically I'm a visual learner I need to be able to visualize what I'm learning and see the actual meaning behind it because for me the bar for is it a good use of my time or not I was spoiled you know and so for me like taking classes and even though they were great teachers great classes like nothing actually complain about I just found it all to be meaningless I'm like I know that this is not going to be important why am I learning this and no one was actually explaining it in a really good way and the reason I bring it up is also like I'm writing a book right now on data structures and

algorithms and and the reason for that is because that was one of the classes I did absolutely the worst thing back in college and I never have I never I've never talked to engineer I'm a product manager so I basically you know have to understand at a high level like how these things go but I don't deal with technical details at all in any way shape or form but I still do enjoy writing and teaching people various technical Concepts and so that gave me a perspective like okay 20 years ago if I had a book like what I'm doing right now how would that actually help me make sense of like this topic and see the meaningfulness of it and there's so many examples when I go back in my life of

like why am I doing this why is this completely you know why did I hate it at that time now you see the value of it and that keeps coming back as the as the main theme in like what I do here because I wasn't really good at computer science and and I always knew that I enjoyed working in a real company like doing some of these things so this is like a side project like what I'm doing right now like with like you know my blogging and my podcasting and so on it's just a thing like in another side like I'm doing it like an apparel to it but what I realized is that what I really enjoy is this is solving problems and talking to people and doing these

things in a very abstract scale and I love large companies mostly because it takes a certain kind of skill to survive a large company you know the politics the inertia and all these things like I enjoy it and so that is the thing that I used to like how can I use my learnings here to indirectly feedback into my hobby so what I really created is a I like to call it a career reinforcing hobby so it started off my blogging I think was the primary thing I did and I had like a job on the side over period of time I realized like I actually really enjoy my job more I really enjoy the people I meet with the challenges I see and so on then I just flip the

equation around so it became a career enforcing hobby is what I do right now as opposed to a hobby reinforcing career and the things I do and all that purely accidental I never actually planned it out you know it's mostly a case of like am I enjoying this do I find this meaningful and can I use what I'm doing right now to help me be better at my job itself and so like one of the big things about podcasting I really enjoy is I have to spend a lot of time like on the Fly understanding situation making presentations talking to people customers execs and so on and to me podcasting became a natural extension of that where I'm just channeling my own curiosity and trying to figure out how

to communicate ideas and get information from others in a very effective way as well and so that's really been the the driving force in a lot of what I've done

it's so refreshing to hear that because I realize we kind of lost in touch even though we're never really in touch but I fell very close to you because of the work you have created you know 20 years ago and to hear uh so much more about your current Journey it's just so satisfying for me to realize like number one how relatable you are and what is precisely what you said about computer science I was really bad at programming on paper I remember going through midterms and finals having to program on paper and I also argued a lot of these professors did not really explain the problems very well or certainly did not make them interesting and it was a struggle that I never thought you would

be going through and it's so satisfying to hear that you know channeling our curiosity without and also the unintentional unplanned path is something I hope we'll get into as well is that I also did not anticipate that okay I want to start a podcast and I it makes me smile to see people want to to have at least 10 episodes in the bank they want to know everything they want to have some sponsors already lined up um and then you see that still on average most podcasts will stop after the seventh episode and for me it was like I didn't have these spectations these expectations I would sometimes release two episodes a week sometimes I would take a break for two weeks I didn't think anybody would care but that

actually helped me create content very consistently which I know is a thing that you're also interested in as well

yeah and we talked about this before we've hit record so the motivation behind why we do the things that we do if your motivation for creating a podcast is so that you can get a million you know a million visitors and then like you can get the big sponsorships and things like that some people are lucky and you know they hit it at the park from day one but 99 like you know up people it takes time it takes you know a certain commitment you know being able to go through this gigantic trench of like you know no one watching your content no one watching what's going on and things like that and so you need something bigger to motivate you you know why do you do the things that you

need a stronger purpose of like what makes this work and I think that's the hard part that many people often don't realize is that you know survivorship bias is huge especially in the world of social media and algorithm and so on where not only thoreship you know bias like you know there it amplifies it at an almost like unrealistic scale where all you see are people basically talking about how like I woke up one morning and hit publish and now I you know I'm like the spokesperson for a b and c and you start and you see it over and over again you start internalizing that being like wait there's something wrong with me here you know this is going to go back to college again right you know if every

student was struggling and having difficulty I'm absolutely certain the professor of the curriculum they would be like wait let's take a step back let's revisit this I was an outlier all my peers did fantastic like they had no difficulty like looking at this like gigantic wall of text and diagrams and be like Oh yeah this makes sense I'm making connections I can do this homework and all these things I'm still going like what is this what you know what what am I looking at here I'm trying to sort some numbers yet I see these mathematical equations I watched like this over and over again it doesn't click and so I'm like wait there's something wrong with me here and so when you get to that point you're like okay I

can either give up or I can adapt and realize okay how do I tweak this situation to be something that I can get past and figure out how to do things more meaningfully you know beyond that and those are all the hard parts that I think that may have been easier for us back then in a world where we didn't have like a massive amount of social media and the amount of pressure we see from like what the success look like you know what is the first 10 minutes of a video supposed to what's first our video is supposed to do you know Mr Beast talks about like yeah here's how I pick my topics and so on I'm like I don't do any of that maybe I should but it feels

unnatural and that going back to like what motivates me if I'm not enjoying it if I don't think I'm learning something from it then that's okay you know I'm not going to do that even if it means that I greatly you know reduce the amplification of the continent create or the people I reach it's fine because at the end of the day you know no one escaped the world alive you know so I'm like let me just give you a little bit amount of time on Earth let's just do what makes us happy it makes us fun and you know provide for the people around us and just be a positive member of society everything else whatever happens it happens or it doesn't but that's the

intrinsic motivation part again you know it's like you know you have to focus on what are you going to get out of the learning part of it I think fun and happiness are so essential for for anyone and especially for creators because we're having a good time chatting and people should visit your podcast and your YouTube channel nearly 20 000 subscribers and a lot of conversations they can see the smile on your face and even if they can't see you you know some people will listen to the podcast and I also focus on uh actually a project on disability so I think about people with different abilities can still experience you even just through hearing your voices right they can sense that and I've spoken with creators

believe it or not um who are extremely successful I've spoken with you know women as one woman comes to mind who started this sort of um you know like a sort of like a food blog she's not she says she's not into food and her blog generates half a million dollars on you know just just one blog and she was really not having a lot of fun she was telling me she was thinking about quitting and I I was thinking like what a what a privilege to be in to have like a steady income and then that is you know a lot of people would be like a dream that would be a dream come true but for her she said she just she wished she paid the different

Niche and she's thinking about how to start over again so I think that's absolutely true about connecting with the work that we're doing as opposed to only doing it for the money

yeah I completely agree on that that completely makes sense so as an aside one thing I've noticed in Riverside right it shows up both of us as guests oh do you see an upward sign

on your side versus uploading oh yeah I can see uh I can see recording uploaded 99 for me okay then it's working yeah I was just curious oh yeah yeah they're they're pretty solid believe it or not I was like one of the first creators to do a uh do a actually branded video for them there's like two years ago before they became so famous oh my God yeah I went through so many podcasting Solutions you know from like Zoom to Google me to ultimately Riverside because of what they do here and you know we're gonna cut this part out by the way this is all part of like you know the show like people are gonna be like wait what are they talking about

I'm like yeah this is us doing it live like this is the life of a content creator or like in the middle yeah this moment of panic I only see one icon that is me would guess I don't see because I used to see both you and me like showing up in like the I see it there's a drop down do you see the drop down like you and one other yeah so I can see you and me both yeah Bo says guests but I think that's okay I can see uploading consistency um yeah and I know to keep the tab open when I'm done as well yeah no all right we'll we'll we'll figure it out one way the other face so ah no worries at all

yep so getting back to you know your first days of creating content you know how was you mentioned earlier that you know it's never easy to start off creating content what how was it what motivated you to keep going

absolutely I have three at least three different scenarios I just want to call it out like first day recording uh my podcast which was Audio Only uh the recording part was really fun but my goodness the editing and hitting the publish button process were extremely painful I I felt it in my chest in my gut to be like well this is the I shouldn't be doing this I sound too funny I'm not a reporter uh I am not a radio host uh I'm you know who who gave me the permission to do this right and uh so that's we can delve into that guess what well a few years later you would think that I was really quite comfortable with podcasting believe it or not a few years later my producer

Haman said we should do a docu-series we should invite the most famous people like we just had this plan so we ended up having Seth Godin Chris Voss Sarah Cooper Atherton twins from Cirque du Soleil you know we we had all these folks to join me at Dory Clark as well and and I just remember I was on the road I had very limited clothing choices and I was with the production team was working with for the first time oh my goodness I relive that all over again I did I you know I was like oh like people are like you know on camera you put on 20 pounds I was like oh my God you know I I look horrible and then I would say

another year later after that I wanted to be on YouTube and once again I was nervous but then I look at myself now on YouTube compared to the first video it I I'm like two different people and keep in mind I've been an adult this whole time right so yes it doesn't I feel like it's not just once and done it comes in ways and you know Ebbs and flows and it's kind of exciting to know that you're growing even eight you know 18 plus

that's that's great to hear and so you mentioned that you're evolving as a content creator and all of this how much of it is your own personality itself like a lot of people have like their on-screen Persona then they have their off-screen Persona do you have that same kind of thing or is it just Fae all the time

I think that's such a great question uh I've been thinking about it and thinking about my answer for that my Persona has been pretty consistent for a couple of reasons because primarily my content on artificial intelligence tutorials I did a lot of Zoom videos like virtual meetings so it was frankly be kind of easy for me to be myself versus we're just talking about Sarah Cooper a moment ago obviously you know she has different personalities because she is a comedian and so I'm pretty consistent but when it comes to me versus authentically me I think when we create content we do really dial up the energy by at least at least 10 to 20 percent so as soon as I'm done with this recording I'm sure I'm

going to talk to my partner my mom slightly differently right my my I'm probably going to be way more chill uh same thing with my YouTube video that I try to perk up a little bit so that I deliver that energy to whoever is watching it so I'm I'm I guess I'm 10 to 20 not exactly my myself right now

1024 is actually great you know so it's not like a method actor who's like you know 100 different on screen versus like when they're uh camera recording stops you know it's actually really fascinating because you know many content creators typically are just like a it's a solo show like they basically you know do these things on their own they you know make all these things work how did how do you find the crew how do you find the people how do you what are the logistics even of like going from location to location with like a bunch of people and making

this work yeah it was so fascinating uh I was figuring it out with my producer pretty much for the first time that they also were doing a documentary for the first time except that they are all professional video editors they would go shoot something for like half a day a day maybe a couple of days but not a document or on the road for three weeks plus two more towards the end so it was so fascinating me as a product manager and also a project manager coming from those years of experience really helped me with spreadsheet with planning with budgeting and and also communication skills frankly like what we had one member at the time was gluten-free you know traveling and how do we really

arrange for all of that um and uh you know I'm also like have you talk about how I got a little bit of the funding it was partially funded by myself as well about like uh 60 40 coming from a sponsor and um so we made it happen I think exactly like what we're talking about like you even as a professional film maker you will never know all the pieces or have all the answers so we basically try to figure it out as we came along and literally in moments where we were traveling and I was still emailing a guest to say is it possible for us to interview you if he were to say yes then I have to drag and travel with the entire production Team

all the way to San Francisco and then back to LA then we fly all together to New York I'm you know live in Boston so the travel Logistics are so crazy as a result I wrote a series of like documentary how to 101 for people who want to do this for the first time publish on my blog you know I was getting like a lot of questions it was really fascinating because it's almost like inside baseball for a lot of people you know the audience of people who probably are interested in like how do you go from point A to point B with on a location with set and a crew and so on it's a small audience but that's the kind of information that nobody ever

gets to know what the answer is unless they actually live through it and I think that's actually fascinating you

can actually watch some of those and that I was related to him like this is so fun because even though it's like I have no plans of doing that you know anytime soon but just seeing because it's it's new it's novel it's something that no one else has already talked about and I can see like the you know 80th video on the same topic or I can watch your video on this top and be like wow like I have no idea what goes on here you always see bits and pieces of it and we watch like behind the scenes documentaries of like bands and music shows and Comedians and things like that but it's always very different because I can't really relate to like you know how

YouTube or Taylor Swift probably like yeah that's a whole different thing of its own or even like comedians it's like it's a very different world in terms of it but a Content like I can relate to this because I can sort of relate like what all goes into like you know hitting a record button and like being a topic in people like this is a whole this is fun this is entertaining and also informational at the same time yeah

exactly it's so crazy I think people I first of all I develop such respect for people who do this for a living because for us it was kind of a temporary thing and uh to to figure it all out like you said I we try to capture as much behind the scenes footage as possible I mean I wish we could do more I wish we had another cameraman which is follow me around because there were so many funny moments there's no way for for me to forget for instance we you know on on location we have to either rent a studio which we're totally out of our budget or the timing some of those just won't work out so we end up booking a ton of

airbnbs as you know film locations and there was one that we the the woman was super nice but there was just no way that would have worked so I remember on site I had to call her we became really good friends and I found out that this this is a woman who started basically started her own Organization for domestic abuse for for women and children I ended up interviewing her she fully refunded me for the Airbnb and even it was following me calling me to say fake can I help you booking a local hotel you just don't know the relationships the friend friendships you're going to be developing fast forward we ended up booking a hotel it was Marriott and we had to set up all

the film equipment and guess what nobody could stay in that room you pay 300 and now you got to find a different Airbnb to live in and because everything is already on site and that by the way was for Seth Godin which I absolutely admire discovered him at the exact same time that I found out about you Kirupa and I just remember walking Seth go to my heart was just pounding out of my chest he was there early I walked with him towards the room it's like it's room 104 and I just remember the look of the hotel as if I was going to kidnap him or something like something bad and then you open it up with just all the film equipment fill out the room and he's

like it's okay this is how professionals do it and I was like oh we're gonna be okay and then you have 40 minutes to do everything uh when you book with these guests right like it's 40 minutes you have to be you have to show up two three hours ahead of time and they show up and leave if you don't have the footage you captured well that's it you just you just lost a whole day of money with audio Engineers with everybody so uh I it was um I think for me the last thing I will say is you know when I was facing those moments I know that there were literally completely out of my control that I could be sick the guests could be sick

they could cancel I still have to pay the audio engineer and I actually ended up feeling a lot more relaxed I just go so be it if I lose five thousand dollars today that's fine I I'm just I need to be mentally okay with it you know so it's crazy you learn so much you're richer for the experience as well you

know I think like a lot of people say right you know the the way to measure a life well lived is how many interesting stories you can ultimately come up with on things that happen and so to me like all these things are like whatever happens it's a good story it's something that you can tell people about decades from now and it's still gonna be as interesting as relevant as it was when for you the moment you were actually there yeah you're right I love it so you know getting back to the audience for example right one of the biggest challenges of being a content creator especially starting out is how do you find the first you know first couple of people who are like oh I like this

content and then the first hundred first thousand for ten thousand and so on so how did you pick your first audience or how did they find you how they choose

you yeah such a great question at the beginning I really had no idea and I think for a lot of content creators uh you know relying our family and friends they're obviously very supportive very lovely they're not enough and they can be short-lived because you know I look at the creative entrepreneurship content I create now frankly they're probably not quite right for uh my family and my friends and uh so you know going beyond that what I have learned is to trying to find out kind of that pyramid ikigai or kind of find the three Circles of knowing you know what you're good at what you want to do and the values that other people are seeking for like what can you teach others at this something

that they actually need as opposed to something that's in your head so going back to you know what you've always taught us is to experiment treating a lot of things that we do in this live as experiments as opposed to set in stone this has to work for me the transformative experiences are I would just name two and we can talk about like maybe one or both in particular that your audience might be interested in learning more about see what I did there uh one is what is my YouTube Journey really transformative because given how how much work money we put into the documentary you know like I could only market so much I I put it on Amazon Prime but then what Amazon Prime would

do just like any big platforms after about two years or so you have to compete with the other films and now it's something you have to pay as opposed to free with Prime and we didn't really make a lot of money from the documentary but it was a really good social proof now building an audience is something entirely different I think when I finally started my YouTube YouTube channel in 2019 no plan and uh the one moment that I realized was the pandemic happened we were all doing uh Zumba dance I want to give something really like a specific example I'm into technology you know when I was thinking group I was like man I have to dance at home I need to help all my not very

technical Zoom the instructors to get online and teaching on Zoom was really impossible because of the the syncing issue between you know movements music and sound and I figure out a hack I did a very frankly crappy video I edited probably in 10 minutes put it online when my channel have 300 subscribers and I remember waking up the next day it was a thousand views so something I never saw before and then the next day was 2000 then it was five thousand my channel was monetized within the month so from there with all the comments sorry that was considered a takeoff video from there I was able to create a lot more Tech tutorials for Zoom then Branch out to Google virtual events then companies start really discovering me

that's how I build an audience there YouTube is not perfect I'm a YouTube strategist I can break that down for people if they're interested another new venue that we started off is it's SEO based so we're trying to knowing that the internet and Google all that everything is different now we know that 25 of the content discovered every year is net news brand new so how can we create content that fill a certain Niche and and build the kind of bridge the gap within that Niche so that's that's kind of how we build our audience uh little by little and to engage to reply to comments it certainly work

you know that's actually you know the the essentially what you're saying is it's not easy it takes work it's a conscious choice to you know pick an audience nurture them grow them and make this all work and then you can lose them

too exactly like you can uh once you pivot like for us being on YouTube even for four years our content has really changed and shifted we've done brand deals sponsorships um you know people my leave the previously Zumba instructors probably won't find as much value in the content I create now so I think to know that they may come and go and how do you communicate that you have to know what you want uh so I think it's um it's it's definitely an art and takes a lot of perseverance and it takes a lot of practice

I actually want to talk about exactly that so kind of nice segue here because you talked about Ika guy and the bounds and all of these things is that we evolve as human beings you know as people you know what you might have enjoyed talking about and doing like seven eight years ago very different than what you might be interested in right now very different way you might be interested in let's say in the future as well and like you mentioned audiences like you for a certain type of content and that's where they start following it for they may not be ready for their journey of you evolving into something new so that's why the churn often happens how do you bounce that I'll give

you a personal example please what I used to do is talk about animation and like making things move and all these fun things but then my interest involved you know my change you know I started enjoying more of the more technical side of like why do things work the way they do why do big systems work the way how do database work how does AI work more than behind us in details and I Knew by doing that I've alienated everybody that I've basically built up an audience for for a very long time and you know it's and I saw the numbers I saw all that you know going in a different direction I'm like that's okay though because the whole okay part of it you know if I'm

not going to be happy doing this I can't imagine like I'd be writing the kind of content or creating kind of content that makes me really excited and even today I deliberately don't talk about half the things that I actually really want to talk about you know because 90 of my time these days is think about product management product leadership how do you navigate corporate politics that's what I enjoy I Mentor people around that stuff so I no longer spend any time actually actively teaching about programming and development but I do artificially force myself to do that because talking about something completely non-technical would be too much of whiplash by the audience like you know if I already like churned 90 of my audience from like you know 10 15

years ago I'm gonna turn everybody you know by the time I talk about this so you artificially control myself and say on LinkedIn I'm going to try to talk about these kind of things even though that's what I really care about but on everything else I gotta continue the image that I built up falsely or not of being this Tech person that's visually creative interesting things even though none of my day job I spend zero percent of my time time they think about how do you mix animation work how can you fake 3D in a 2d world that thinks that I was really passionate about like back then I'm not as passionate about right now I am I enjoy it Android's consuming other people's content but to be a content

creator that you gotta like internalize the pain that someone's feeling especially if I don't teach people something and go there I don't do that anymore and so I often do struggle like you know from the fears for example I have is like you know how long can I sustain basically doing something that people have known me for for a long time when I'm no longer happy doing that and so coming back to you how do you how do you how do you bounce something like that because you also evolved in your content greatly from the time so oh

thank you so much for the question I so appreciate you bringing that that up because clearly you're not alone I'm not not alone in in that at all right and I think number one you said internalize that that pain there is certain level of pain associated with it but also as you're saying that I feel like I was smiling because it feels like we are it's literally like there's like a mother and child or a parent-child relationship that you were born this baby and you you know you learn to crawl to walk you go to school then you go to college you start your own life and you know throughout that I'm not sure if you realize that too that we've also developed these frictions with our

parents you know obviously there's a lot of Joy but there's always a lot of pain that we no longer function like a child who's like needing them all the time I feel like my mom's still struggling with that sometimes as as um you know as close as the last night I'm like did she say something to me that did she really intend to say that but I think it's important for us to be creators and to realize that we we have to there's not a choice that we have to evolve and change one of the things that really helped me was I believe Freddie Mercury from Queen said that especially you know they're operating at the time I mean the world world's top tier level he

said that he was smoking drinking he's like you know he said I even wrote an article about this it was I discovered an interview he's like you go on stage everybody's like Bohemian Rhapsody like everybody wants to hear those three hit songs that's what everybody's there for and all of a sudden these are like I have the solo I have this really mellow um tune that I've been practicing me and his fans were like what are you doing we don't we don't want that and he said he sat there and as a Creator you have to know who you are you have to know what you want because if you keep saying keep creating the same things and that audience eventually probably leave anyway so who you are now what are you

left with so I think that's basically what I think about that that's a story that that's something that really happened and he's someone I do look up to so to to remember that and it's really hard sometimes because we won the views so also like we wanna I wanna mention something really practical it's not just something that's in our head I have Brands reach out to me okay we're okay with the negotiation you know this is how much we'll pay for sponsor content and they will go you know hey I was just looking at your last few videos on YouTube I realized that you're not talking when you're not talking about Ai and things like that your views were generally your views are are low on

certain videos um you know things like that and uh how do you respond to that and my take it is like don't work with me I am not someone who's going to spend you know YouTube advertising dollars just to please your eyes or just to fake the data when you uh you know look at certain channels where the numbers so consistent and people like oh you're so consistent with content creation well I can tell you how to do that exactly with fifty dollars right so I just refuse to kind of go down that path um you know for me I think one thing but I don't know if you have a when I say A Team if you have someone you you love and try who can be there for you is I

find myself not just in any Creator Community but I find myself in a very small group of creators who have been growing up with me who live with the same pains we're here to support one another to reinsure that this is this is the way obstacle is the way right so um yeah that's kind of day by day that's how I I continue to be a creator

that that makes a lot of sense and it totally resonates now here's the other angle to it you know you bring a pretty Mercury because the music part is an interesting angle because you know we talked right now about how we evolved how we changed and you know what our audience kind of grow with us there's another flip inside of it the world moves on the world evolves and we just cannot keep up anymore like you know independent you know flash was probably the big thing that you and I you know connected on like long long time ago and of course technical reasons business reasons flash is not around so the world we have had at least those of us who are doing things in Flash had to adapt to

newer Technologies web-based even though they weren't ready and all these things so let's struggle up like how do you make something work when the the actual tooling things aren't really there so true same with music as well you know what might have been very popular and like what people enjoyed listening to in the 70s and 80s very much not something that you see here you can probably count on one hand the number of bands that were able to reinvent themselves over the decades to still be relevant in some form of fashion even today but it's a very small number that survivorship buys and the percentage power law all these things fully apply here we're like yeah it's probably five that we can probably think about Rolling Stones you know and

and examples of that but everyone else is like tied to the decade or the era that they were pretty much known in I think it's very true for Content creators as well they're moments where like these content creators were like extremely relevant because they hid the Zeitgeist of the moment that they were currently in but then the world moved on the interest moved on taste moved on demographics shifted greatly as well back when you and I were creating content there are probably maybe two billion people on the internet and they were probably all mostly in you know very developed western parts of the world they all spoke English now you know six billion 5 million people on the internet right now and I can't imagine a

world where what worked with a small audience will scale now because The Persuasions and interests of this much larger audience very very different and many content creators and I'm going to say we included have difficulty understanding that world understanding scaling to that

new audience yeah I mean I'm so glad you brought up this point because we literally very recently started using uh we got um w-e-g-l-o-t to translate uh not one website one site we're running actually two of them and I was so surprised at the beginning I was very a little bit uh uncertain because facebook.com is now you know thousands of Articles and I'm just thinking how is that going to be relevant what language do we translate to my producer who happens to you know speak Spanish originally from Argentina and the moment we process the site using we got into Spanish now we we get Spanish brand deals uh out of all things and we start to see different articles different topics pop up in very

different ways like you said Compared to North America and we're just learning so much from that experience and exactly like you said it's absolutely internationalization things like that you have to be aware of is no longer optional

yeah and the topics that International audience are interested in often very different as well like what they want to relate to what their immediate challenges are that they're facing often very different than things that you and I might think are the biggest ones as well so do you create custom content tailored more for international audience sometimes do you like jump between various problems at different group space how do you navigate that

complexity yeah really interesting I would say not yet but it's customization based on uh International uh audience needs is something that I think we'll have to consider quite soon right now we're letting it kind of surface organically I am primarily writing content you know for Stu I would say for English speaking audience however because of my background that I am fluent in Mandarin Chinese when I for instance when I went back to China in 2017 I would just sitting there in the hotel room thinking what if I can help American podcasters launch their podcast on shimalaya that is like 10 times the traffic of Apple podcast it was just absolutely insane because of the population density and I did that it was so funny I created a simple course at

the beginning first 30 days qriket nobody even talked about and all of a sudden people start signing up even today which the course is clearly outdated people are still signing up and I was getting a lot of Consulting engagement so I think part of that is let your natural instinct letting who you are your key differentiators kind of come through you don't want to kind of Target a market you kind of know nothing about whereas for me I wanted to kind of be the you know sort of the bridge or kind of fill the Gap a little bit more and it's really interesting like for instance um I wrote uh I I made a point to say you know what now I'm a slightly more

established content creators I gonna I'm gonna give myself the permission to talk about what it's like to be a home-based creator that I built my home around the work that I'm doing so solar panels why I think heat pumps are important I installed the swimming pool and the kind of my way of exercising helps my mom who I'm a caregiver for of course this content is completely not relevant to everything else yet that they are also driving traffic um as well and I think it's just fascinating for us to know that we have to Branch out we can't just hold it's like so tight to this is what we know this is what's gonna rank it will drive yourself crazy I think

exactly because it often goes even look at creative Endeavors in general one of the big things people say is like how do you get out of a rut how do you even know you're in a rut in the first place because once you get comfortable creating a certain kind of thing you don't realize that the world has moved on or there's enough sedimentary rock that's basically buried You by like you know several layers that you don't even realize that you know you have your small audience you have the echo chamber you know the feedback loops are often not perfect so you think you're still doing great things when you realize that you have to the meteor hit the dinosaur's no longer here okay you're still writing for dinosaurs and

targeting that you know particular audience of creatures that you know have now evolved to become mammals and fish and things like that but getting to the the translation Parts interesting because you're talking about you talk about AI quite a bit so you're probably where you've probably seen all these examples of like people who are let's say famous world leaders but in real time it translates into a different language using their own voice and their inflections and how it works I just think they're going like wow you know what how easy would it be for basically me to just upload a few clips of my audio a few pictures of what I'm doing and then having all these AI Services pretty much make this entire company you

and I happen because you want to have a backward of content that the AI can train against and so it doesn't require us to actively be participating because we talk consistently about certain kind of topics and it knows our tone it knows their style and all these things it is very possible one day maybe it's already happening right now where we just tell an AI to like you know Pretend We're going to talk about how AI is going to impact business and it generates a full interview with exact same facial expressions and style and all these things and then I'm going to choose a drop down and say translate into these 20 languages as well and it's like no problem it translates it not just in an

audio in a text-based format but it actually gets the audio just right as well then you're like upload to all these Services worldwide not just your usual ones of like anchors Spotify podcast Apple podcast but all the services worldwide that it needs to be relevant into because of the languages they're available in how how far away are we from being able to pull that off

yeah I think we still need some uh more time because a lot of the the systems and apps that uh you did not mention but I know you're thinking about like 11 labs for uh voice cloning not only I mean they're transformative they've really figured out the intonation and all that but still I mean I have tested on multiple clients I've tested out multiple versions of my voice it's still not quite there yet they're leading the industry right now and then I think about the facial recognition speaking portraits so the ID which is an Israeli company that we have also partnered with as well that there it's magical but I have also touched my image do I really want you know there's so many subtlety

to our eyes that it's again it's not quite there yet I'm not someone who would use that however I do have clients who are super busy and who wouldn't otherwise have any time or interest in creating content I would recommend this to them so I think aisle solution it also depends on the project we're talking about the creators themselves I think it's going to be I think we're moving at a really fast pace I wouldn't be surprised by the end of the year the different versions coming out is going to be even more realistic but for now when I work with clients on AI initiatives it's never and primarily they're um well I call content-based businesses or established creators so the example you paint out is precisely

the people I work with that I focus on having a discovery call and conversation usually takes up about 60 to 90 minutes and then pinpoint like is this something that you enjoy doing they say I love it and there's no reason to take that away but sometimes when it comes to content repurposing getting the right Clips transcription subtitles share on social media I almost never hear anybody enjoy doing that part well let's see what we can automate from there so it's again that's a very human process there's a lot of empathy involved I think for now that's still the right approach

this goes back to consistency which is something that you brought up earlier on how do you create content it used to be that you publish once a week once every two weeks on the spot it's great and it's going really well nowadays you have content forms that create good enough content you know it might have been great but it's good enough where people are like yeah I can totally you know go with this you know if I'm getting it you know 10 times a day this big information as opposed to like one time a week from a person's probably more authentic and more a subject matter expert in this area that's okay I'm willing to sacrifice the quantity over the quality the quality is not like terrible but

it's good enough how do you balance that out but got to give an example I know I don't use tick tock a whole lot but every now when I go look at that I see like you know I love historical things it's often like you know historical battles and like things like that 90 of AI generated you know the voices are generated the visuals are generated and things like that I'm like you know I'm pretty sure this person or this group of people who behind this probably crank out dozens if not hundreds of these videos a given day because they're not going out there creating the content it's like looking at whatever you know AI chat service give you for here to give you a 10 paragraph summary of like

famous battles in Greece famous battles in Rome they just copy and paste that into some service and adds the audio to it as little captions in the video so you can actually see like the the bubbly text through them that shows up here and and they're done whereas here I am like you know creating this slides going and like you know making sure it's all perfect and like I'm American is my code snippet working properly and I feel like I'm like why am I doing this you know it's like the end of the day like you know if I I can publish one video Get x number of views or I can publish 100 videos and each get x divided by 100 a smaller number but the end result is so

the same thing but the amount of effort is like zero in one where it's like high effort in the other how do you balance those you know two opposite Opposite Worlds when the end result might be the same

yeah that's such an interesting example I think when you think about the audience of who consume your content versus the the Greek myth or battles right the the audience uh themselves are very they're very different somebody's looking at your code like who follow you accuracy probably does not just accuracy the style of communication probably does matter quite a bit uh whereas I think the other part maybe is more uh entertainment um not one is education and the other is entertainment and in the world we live in there's education edutainment which is like the content that also wins and I think you have to to for me for instance like I think you have to balance the two again if you don't you kind of go crazy

is number one you you gotta cut yourself some slack of um I think I had to deliver 110 give yourself the permission to do something at 80 90 like knowing what's good enough that's really important and if things ever made I think again like give yourself a break to know that you did your best right I think we we've all been there to publish something like oh they wasn't like I made a mistake there's a typo good news in the digital world that those can actually be corrected as long as your intention is is good um I think I don't I I've been I think I look at some of even the AI content on YouTube it's just a voiceover some images and it's very repetitive it's

like millions of views I do feel that once again in my chest and it might got to be like what why am I doing this this is such a waste of time so right and then so I do same thing again like we're on this topic now I would highly encourage you like in addition to tick tock on group consider publishing your content on YouTube as shorts have you

done that yet I've done a few and it's just one of those things where coding stuff doesn't it totally works I can absolutely make it work like that it's just more of a Time issue for me it's like okay you know naturally everything's like white screen and makes this work here and I take care of it I have the extra work to make a fitness smaller screen whereas I'm like you know what forget this I'm just going to talk about historical battles send the AI bot to it it's going to create like square shape for like you know for Instagram it's bringing the white screen for like you know like longer videos and then to create the vertical one for tick tock and I'm gonna call it a day because you

know what it's okay yeah yeah okay I'm

gonna challenge you I have a like be a little playful here is I too thoughts because consider like some of my earlier Zoom tutorials for instance it is clearly uh landscape okay so like why do I have to do something extra to fit into a vertical screen first of all it doesn't even fit uh right like you can exactly like now you can see something over there and as everything is all connected so I'm gonna challenge you to try post some of the clips with black bars at the top at the bottom with just your little landscape or Square screen in the middle try to publish that of course under 60 seconds on YouTube shorts chances are you're going to see a significant increase in the number of

views for shorts compared to your regular videos it's very very possible because for the entire past year and actually even towards the end of 2022 YouTube has intentionally been sending so much organic traffic towards shorts in order to compete with Tick Tock in fact YouTube now a platform that people would like prevent you from people say podcasters I don't respect you if you upload audio content on YouTube that's just lame you should never do that well guess what today um thank goodness I didn't listen to any of those people on my some of my audio podcasts are on there actually contributed to my channel being monetized early that nowadays YouTube said sixty percent six zero percent of the people who are listening or watching podcasts on YouTube are doing it for the

first like they're doing it for the first time there are people who never even consume podcasts we're now doing so on YouTube so I think we have to really rethink about the quality the orientation sure if you have time a team to do it fine otherwise just upload it with black virus and see what happens

all right I will absolutely do this you know I've done a few but I'm gonna you know take your advice here and just take regular content and make that work but now the podcasting with YouTube is actually really interesting because before I just had a playlist it says regular playlists with like all the things I recorded here United force on anchor which publishes like all these other podcast platforms and I also the video itself to YouTube as well so Spotify and YouTube give you the video version everything else is the audio version YouTube was like oh do you want do you know you want to publish a podcast or like turn your Disney Channel oh way ahead of you here this playlist is exactly what you want to do and and

hitting that box I agree it was actually very interesting that there's a recognition from like dismissing podcast and interview like content to being like let's embrace it let's actually go after the big podcast players was actually pretty cool you know right side of history on that one for us yeah for sure

I mean since we're all into podcasts one thing I really want to mention that people are still watching are listening to this at this point is repurposing long-form content so that includes like longer videos even if Solo or an interview show like this to repurpose that into shorter content will absolutely help you you know three times ten times to reach it's just how the social media ecosystem is designed that is true for YouTube shorts for tick tock for Instagram especially for LinkedIn I think this type of content is something that people on LinkedIn are very interested in so when you repurpose you don't have to think about moving like Faye below Kirupa creating a vertical content because landscape works just fine on you know on LinkedIn on Facebook

so um you know that's why I kind of you know got into developing pod intelligence.com with my partner Adam so that we're using you know AI to automatically identify the keywords the topics the speakers and giving you Clips um that you can use automatically the one more thing I'll mention is interesting that I initially were thinking like targeting right around one minute but we noticed that YouTube along with other platforms are now favoring way shorter content this blew my mind that their content if you can pay attention to this like pay attention on YouTube 15 to 17 seconds generally under 20 seconds worth of shorts are getting a lot of attention because YouTube is using its algorithm to say oh look somebody watched 80 of the shorts that's

15 seconds it must be doing really well as opposed to somebody watching 15 seconds of a one minute shorts YouTube's like whoa I guess it's not all that engaging is it so it's like there's a psychological element but I think as long as um as opposed to us aiming for whatever the requirement is it's also important to explore other durations outside of the requirements absolutely

accurate I read an article on some of these AI kind of clipping that I think Riverside also provides as well so I'm actually going to try it out for the first time after you know with actual recording here to see like how well that works and and basically purpose that no I agree with you I think that's uh our content has a longer life than we might often give it credit for especially in Snippets because people's attentions are not infinite you know and like I it's read every study that you know us going almost the hour mark right now 90 people are going to stop like you know I'm not gonna get to this point maybe 99 will not get to this point but one person

gets there and like they got value out of it so great good for that one person you know to do this so I totally recognize and I agree I think the cutting the pieces of it that might be relevant for a certain audience for that pretty moment in time I think it's a critical part of it so one video can actually it's kind of like you know getting back like an analogy stuff like you know when like a lion like you know kills a gazelle or whatever you know it's not just for one meal it like goes for like a week basically right that's kind of like what it is like yeah it's like you know a long form contents like a good sell and then you know it's it's

a shame to only use it for like one meal you can actually repurpose it in multiple different ways so absolutely

yeah let me know how you like magic cut so that's a new feature from Riverside it's still in beta and I've already tested out so I definitely have some of my kind of uh you know I was doing that in comparison to the work we're doing so I would love to I'll be so curious to hear your feedback on all right how you like it yeah absolutely let you know and

so you know one you know we're getting close to it in a day hour I don't want to keep too much of you here but I am always curious to know because you're a content creator what's your Tech setup like I look I see you know I'm sort of familiar with what you have here but what camera do you use you know what things you try and not try and you're like I'm gonna settle on this one

curious to hear that yeah absolutely I can even move my camera around so a lot of the questions the question that comes up a lot is um first of all the camera I'm using uh it's nothing super fancy it's a Logitech Brio uh webcam it is a 4K cam but still I think it's just not quite the quality comparative I were to use my phone you know using alongside with like camo maybe or I have a 4k camera so I'm gonna show you that's the camera that's kind of the my YouTube setup and that is the Sony 6400 mirrorless camera it's four years old and still works really well uh my mic it's on a boom arm so I can move it around really easily without having to

like move my table shake my table as much um so so this is a very special microphone this is a Newman microphone it's it's an investment but it's something that I know I'm going to be using for so long I have been for 10 years this is a pop filter so when I see you say things like the P's and T's I won't blast into uh my mic I really like this kind of Wireless Logitech keyboard that I'm using I try to be as ergonomic as I possibly can I even got this new like Ergo chair which is all white but in terms of the lighting I have two so I have this is a Elgato that's a key light and I also have a Elgato ring light

there so it's just something that I can play with if I need to move things around but it's pretty basic um anything else Kirupa you want me to share at my text setup for my business perhaps the software we use every day it's up to you like whatever you think would be

interesting yeah because it's all like for me you know my setup is essentially you choose my iPhone as we talked about earlier but for whatever reason it's not cooperating with me right now for these recordings so I'm currently on like a Logitech c925 I actually do have a Brio as well but I'm like oh yeah iPhone worked out really well so I'm just gonna you know use that for all these things so I'm going to create a lower quality you know video setup right now but yeah what software do you typically use for your recordings and things like that

yeah so I have a comprehensive list actually for my recordings my for my podcasting for YouTube and for my small business on my website at faceworld.com for a slash tools or it's on the website in the center it's called the small business toolkit in terms of recording I love using Riverside there's an alternative I always need to have a plan B for this type of stuff uh the other one I really love using is called pod Castle so podcast so has a 4K video recording prior to we had these tools I used zencaster which is still very solid we even had to use zoom for people who are super busy and just don't want to learn a second or third tool and so for in terms of editing I have basically

eliminated editing these days I live stream every single piece of content using restream and if you're looking for a cheaper option one stream dot live is really helpful it's ten dollars as opposed to 19 for the same tier of service and I don't really edit much anymore and for our email marketing I use brevo b-r-e-v-o very is it Breville it's very previously send in Blue uh they're they're really quite powerful and uh our website runs on WordPress was previously on Squarespace for many many years making that transition was well worth it so uh I will not I guess I will not bore you with the rest of the details but I have a whole Tech stack like created as a blog post on facebook.com for anybody interested no

actually I'll definitely check that out and so I think this is a technical set if you also coming in so the computer science degree and all these things kind of you know indirectly plays a role in like just giving you this willingness to be like it's definitely you know I get it I know exactly why it's important so anyway taking a background definitely show us here in your description of like Squarespace WordPress for example not a trivial thing you know as people have cried yeah yeah it's so fun to talk about this I can nerd out all day long

it's it's so fun well faith yeah I think you can talk forever on this one but you know is there anything else you like to you know discuss before we you know wrap it up for a bit

oh I I really appreciate it I appreciate finally meeting you after 20 years and please let me know group anything I can contribute to what you're doing what your audience is looking for uh feel free to send me an email faceworld gmail.com that's my personal email so anything I can help question you know help answer and health question as well and uh just let me know I'm open book and here to help um creators and content-based businesses

well Faith this is a blast thanks again and I'll see you soon thank you