This Took THREE Takes! But At Least I Got Gas...

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so you wouldn't believe it but this is the third attempt of making this video on the drive home the first time I forgot that my wife didn't leave me with gas so I talked about that in the the video from this morning so kind of remembered as I was driving and I'm like oh it's going to be stupid if I have to I'm not getting out of my car and holding a camera um to continue the conversation at a gas station so it's like I'm G to I'll just redo it that's fine no big deal it's only a couple minutes and then I started driving and then the camera died uh I only did one video without it being plugged in this morning so maybe I accidentally left the camera on all day not recording and the battery died so I don't know pretty suspicious

um this is a brand new camera and it's pretty high-end for like just this like for vlogging so pretty disappointed if that's the case but I'm going to assume it's an error on my part it's more than likely anyway um let me just make this turn because I can't uh think and talk apparently so yeah I was just saying that because I was getting gas I'm kind of taking this alternate route home and uh I was saying like we used to live down here when I first moved down to uh to the Seattle area so we lived like right by Microsoft campus and so that's in Redmond and then right now I'm kind of driving through um Kirkland and I can't remember getting onto the highway here if it's really stupid or not um the typical way that I normally go when I'm leaving from

Redmond is like it's it's pretty stupid for a handful of reasons but I just can't remember how stupid this one is so uh odds are probably pretty stupid because I feel like the highway here is garbage no matter how you do it so anyway we'll look forward to that in just a moment cuz it's coming up soon um but I was saying that today was the first day kind of with office travel with a bunch of people coming in so was funny I showed up at the office everyone's panicking because the way it works is like if you're in at the office regularly you can get an assigned desk which make sense and if you're not then you just have to use one of the flex desks and that way they don't have to assign desks to everyone you can have flexibility with where you're

sitting it's it's a I think it's a pretty good system that works well but because you have so many people that are coming in that will need Flex desks they're just trying to sit wherever they can so sometimes some of the you know the seats where people are assigned like people are taking them obviously they'll they'll give them up if uh you you know if it's your desk kind of thing there no one's being uh rude about it but it's like they're just looking for a place to sit um so when I got in everyone's panicking like oh no there's no desks left but um there's there's a person whose desk I've never met the person um and I've been sitting at their desk like every time I come into the office I've never met them so it's been months of doing it and I've

never seen them never met them so I guess we just work completely different schedules uh so I just was like I'm not going to panic and you know post it up at this guy's spot and sure enough went the whole day no issues so Dodge that which is great um but I did get to meet the PM from my team that I work very closely with which is awesome so great to meet him in person had a had a big lunch together with the team well the team members that came in obviously not everyone does which is fine so that was great um had a couple of collaborative meetings but I think tomorrow we're going to try for more um it's it's hard though right like everyone's especially for the people that are traveling in it's like they got they got their core people that

they're working with that are trying to schedule them for offsites and different meetings for different things so we're just trying to balance and make sure that we get some time together so uh got more of that coming tomorrow um I also mentioned in my video from this morning that uh I was talking about working remotely and like not meeting my team after a few years and I mentioned that there are two people that I've still not met in person and I also said that I should do some reaching out today to see if anyone's coming to the office that's you know from other places in Microsoft because I mentioned Jade Wilson is going to be traveling in and uh I had someone from my previous team one of these two people they messaged me on LinkedIn they were just reaching out to say hey and

I was like oh yeah like got to remind myself I got to ask like um if they're traveling so I did and I haven't heard back yet but it would be great to see her because we haven't met yet um you know awesome employee very proud of all the work she did she's very smart excellent Problem Solver so um it's uh I said this in the recording that I did and had to cut off because the camera died but um you know when you're when you're working on teams and stuff like kind of my perspective as a manager you're always going to have awesome people you're working with so going to a new team with different people and stuff is hard because you're kind of like leaving behind people that you really liked working with right um so you know she's one of the people

that I thought was really awesome to work with I had great people on my previous team so that's hard um but you know you go to a new team there's always going to be awesome people to work with and kind of uh have that next stage of your career with so yeah it' be good to catch up so fingers are crossed that she says that she's uh traveling into the office cuz uh I think her and her husband are out of state still so we'll see but um other than that I was starting to touch on before I was rudely interrupted by a loss of battery that I am going to be spending a big chunk of the evening doing some course work so that sun man that sun is super bright even with these Sun glasses um yeah so Ryan Murphy and I are

put finishing up our first course and uh I went to go record some material yesterday and I realized that we were using a different layout for our slides and I was like oh no um so I have noticed in particular for this course that slides are a huge pain in the butt for me to put together and it's funny because with the other courses it's not just like it's not like there's no prep work it's the same with YouTube videos if I want to make a programming tutorial I don't just pick a topic and and hope I can just talk my face off until I get through like you have to put together material so let's see if this can help a little bit kind of um it's a little better so when you're making programming courses you have to you know get your your

tutorial together same with the YouTube videos I means so you're like making a little application usually that's why you'll see in my YouTube videos I have like kind of dumb little applications takes a lot of time so the slides though there's something that's just so tedious about putting slides together I think programming is probably more work but I enjoy it so putting slides together I'm like man this is this is the worst but uh I would was telling myself yesterday okay I got to make sure I get the templates from Ryan it's my bad for not checking sooner um and I convinced myself I'm like look like you still need to do the work to come up with the material you want to show on the slides even if I know what I want to talk about and the other bit of the work is

like formatting it on the slides right so I'm like you're going to have to do that crappy part no matter what you might as well put in the word to to kind of get your notes put together for what you want on the slide so just made sure I did that yesterday so I wasn't totally behind um and I think I haven't checked because I was at the office but I I'm pretty sure he sent me over the the slide template so all good I will be spending some time on that before I do my live stream tonight and about to get on the highway I lost my sport mode yeah this is going to be a shitty part twoo it's extra shitty I shouldn't be saying that word on the YouTube right um I just realized that this part of the highway it's already

past the uh the fast lane that I normally get into so I have to go one stretch of no fast Lan G if you recall from a couple of uh couple days ago I guess the stretch oh no we're good we're good come on there's about to be a wall of traffic in front of me I got to get over nice okay woo so basically where I came onto the highway is like uh it was just past the first stretch of of having the the fast lane blocked to enter so you can only enter and exit the fast lane at certain points um legally and I play by the rules so um I thought that I was getting to the start of the first block but it was right at the end so perfect timing actually otherwise you can't see it because the camera's facing

the wrong way but there's a wall of traffic and I was trying to say one of the last videos there was a wall of traffic so I wanted to make sure I could beat that and we beat it so that's good I'm also realizing that it's about a million degrees in here you can't feel that that's okay so that's better feel like I was driving my wife's SUV with no AC okay so what else is going on I got um trying to think of some good themes for YouTube videos because been playing around with a few different concepts and like I did a series on WPF right and for if you're not like a net developer WPF is like desktop app development and I had a feeling that it wasn't going to be super awesome in terms of viewership but I figured we'd get like

I don't know some like Niche group viewers what's beeping at me um this like Niche group of viewers that like they need WPF material and they just never really panned out that way look at this bike coming up he's going to try to cut around me oh maybe not okay so with these WPF videos I was really hoping I'd get Niche viewers and like yeah there were some but there were so few so I actually watched my channel metrics instead of like continuously kind of like my Channel's growing slow which is fine um but instead of going up slowly they actually like went down and sorry the the growth rate went went down so yes the channel was still growing but like noticeably the growth dipped when I was putting at WPF videos so I said okay got to Pivot back did some more ASP

on that core stuff but I just feel like there's so much stuff on asp.net core that I'm like I don't I don't want to do like another tutorial on like authentication or rate limiting maybe I need to I guess but um recently I said okay why don't I try I had someone from Microsoft reach out to me he's one of the maintainers of a a popular link package called more link it's been around for ages um I think it's got like it's got millions of downloads for sure and he had said it's open source like if you don't mind like you're always looking for bringing more visibility to this kind of stuff maybe your audience would like to see that and I figured like hell yeah I think there's going to be a lot of people that want to see link again if you're not

AET developer link is l i NQ it's language integrated query and it's just a way that you can work with collections I'm I'm oversimplifying it so if you wanted instead of writing a for Loop to go over a collection you can kind of structure a pipeline to process your data simple way to put it um it is a lot more than that but I was like yeah people people like this kind of stuff people are always ask asking about link things and writing with link so I think it's a good topic but even those videos haven't been doing well so uh I'm like I'm struggling to find something that people want to Anchor to seems like ASP on that cor stuff is is the thing at least from my experience but um I just have to keep keep putting up the videos a a cop

and uh obviously I want the material to be high quality so I'm not just like looking to rush through videos but at the same time like I want to find themes that like are attracting people I have not had one single video that's like that's kind of taken off and I've been making videos now for this is the 21 months 21 months of making videos and every single one one of them is like a slow build right I so if you're not familiar with like YouTube and creating content um a lot of my videos if if they do like I'm using air quotes here if they do well it's never when I post the video it's like 4 to 6 months later and that's because people like when they're searching for tutorials they come across my content right like it's pretty if you think about

this conceptually it's probably really rare that you log onto YouTube with you know everything that you see on your home screen and you're like wow like I can't wait to watch this tutorial like that's the most eye-catching thing on my my YouTube homepage and that's like the only content I make so when you do research about like how to make YouTube thumbnails and titles and stuff like this is why people make this like the stupid YouTube faces and the the clickbait titles it's because they're competing with literally everything that's on your homepage so if you happen to like anything that's not programming which most people like at least something else almost anything is going to seem more exciting than programming right like I like cars right I like cars I like the gym so those are and I like video games right pick those three

categories you can imagine my YouTube home feed is going to have tons of stuff on it that's way more interesting than a programming tutorial so again like I think it's just the nature of the content I make but I don't I don't want to put myself in the category where I'm like I have super clickbait titles and over the top thumbnails it's a balance and it just doesn't feel like it's for me but the the struggle kind of comes from like like how much time and effort goes into it right like I've made hundreds of videos now hundreds um and I feel like the videos aren't low quality like I feel like they're good tutorials people let me know they're good tutorials but the rate that the Channel's growing maybe maybe it's a decent speed maybe I'm trying to compare myself to other people that

grow away faster but it's uh it's really like difficult to I don't know to to be motivated by that I just realized this Lane was ending um yeah cuz it's like there's so much time that goes into making the tutal tutorials and all that that it's like it's certainly not for the the YouTube money I make $2 a day I make $2 a day on YouTube from ads um I don't really I've only done a couple of like like ad or like uh affiliate kind of like product placements for packed which has been great I've appreciated that but if pack pays me to put to advertise a book right for context that might barely cover just the editing cost of the video and I I want I want to make this pretty clear like I used to edit my own videos I simply do not

have time for that um it was a good skill to learn I'm not amazing at it but I got better I just don't have time it's not something that's an effective use of my time so the problem now is that because of the number of videos I put out I spend like well over half ,000 a month just on editing and I make $2 a day so if you do the math on that it's not looking so hot but uh this is why I'm saying like it's like the motivation to try and put out like I try to do three tutorials a week it's been slower the past couple weeks just CU I had two Dome train courses in parallel so that plus the podcast we backed up but I'll I'll uh I'll get back to that soon I've been trying to do two plus

the podcast uh so still like like four videos a week basically plus a live stream so it's a lot but um takes a takes time and the the return is pretty minimal so the goal is like it's uh you know if I if I keep doing it and I keep improving that I don't know I'm hoping it's not years and years from now but I'm hoping you know whatever it is in a couple years I'll say thank you P Nick for setting me up for Success this way um you know I do appreciate when people let me know like tutorials and stuff helped I don't think people realize like how big of a that makes when you're like a super small Creator when you have like you know like tens of thousands of views or like a million views on a video like sure like

I'm not saying people don't appreciate comments and stuff but they probably get lots of them and they're probably making money right from it right so they're probably not complaining but when you're losing lots of money and still trying to publish educational content uh yeah like comments and stuff go along long way because it's like for me I'm just I'm just hoping that it's helpful for someone and I'm hoping that at some point in the future it's not always like this right but that's okay um you know I'm thankful for the course opportunities is something to to offset all of that so that's why that's why truly like I'm really excited for the chuses with Ryan because uh I I just want to be able to focus more on on General software engineering so it's all good um what else is going on I should talk

about brand ghost a little bit so and not because I'm like I don't want to like try and sell you on it because you might not even care but more from like uh might be interesting to hear because it's still software development right so brand ghost is the sort of the SAS that I am building on the side uh it's a platform that I use for posting all of my content so if you read content for me online there's a 99% chance that it's been posted through brand ghost and I built the system because I just don't have time to sit on social media and post and schedule things now comments you still got to go make the comments um can't like schedule com oh sorry I do schedule comments on my own stuff just to help with algorithmic things like adding links in after

um you'll notice I try not to put links into my post because especially on LinkedIn kills The Impressions Pro tip uh I wish they would change that but hey I don't run the platform so you still need to engage with your audience is my point so I still have to go on to social media and comment and engage with people but I truly don't like to be on social media and not because I don't like people but like if you said hey Nick how would you like to spend your time I would like to be with my wife I would like to be with our animals and if I have me time I would like to be building stuff so I don't want to be like trying to go find comments and posts and stuff like to it's just it's too much uh it's it's

not an interest of mine so so anyway oh this is a disaster up ahead oh my goodness it's kind of hard to explain but there's this ramp is like it's technically one lane but I'm like driving on the shoulder right now and as I'm talking it's still the shoulder and it's because there's two lanes at the end of it which I'm now in the right lane and uh yeah basically some people treat it as two lanes even though it's one and other people treat it as one lane because it is one and it was back on the highway people were starting to make the second lane even though it's just a shoulder so anyway so brand ghost stuff um it's been it's been awesome so far um I'm I'm happy that we're getting feedback and iterating because with uh with the pre previous SAS I

tried doing on the side meal coach which was a nutrition platform we just struggled getting like any feedback so um so far got feedback um trying to launch with a couple of people uh when I say launch I I should say like trying to onboard a couple of people with more bulk content so doing that with uh One content creator specifically had another another content creator I'm not going to say people's names just cuz it's their business um so with another content creator today was talking about trying to do a comparison um man this guy's not turning right on a red light like it's Quebec and then I have a guy that does Real Estate uh he's going to do two of his businesses through this which is awesome so again from a software development perspective we have been able to lean into sort of

my needs like I am I am a user right like built this to help me and how I publish content but we want to make sure that we're proving that it's not just a Nick problem being solved that other people do have this problem so getting the feedback is helpful then of course too like you have your your typical situation where like you know we're using the software one way and then someone else tries it and everything's broken or something so um you know that kind of feedback is good uh but yeah like we're just in this stage where we're able to iterate which is nice so we we have a couple of different phases that we're trying to do and we started with content scheduling because that's the bread and butter of it so I had to build out all of that so it's

built in asp.net core and that's been good so like I've been using the API for that for a while now a long while and then adding in a nextjs front end to it I don't work in the front end because it's not C SHP no I got a one of the engineers is uh significantly better than I am in front end stuff so I handle database stuff in the back end he's very capable in the back end but he's focusing on the front end we balance those things out uh majority between the two of us at least I can't remember what I was saying um SC oh yeah so the the different uh areas we're focusing on right so scheduling is sort of the main part once we sort of launched once we said okay we're going to start onboarding people we said great we

should move over to the next thing and the next thing is having a social media like a single social media feed so that if you're posting across different platforms you don't have to jump between five apps to go figure out like which content you should go comment and stuff on and we quickly realize though that like we're kind of um like while that's very valuable like I know I want that and I've talked to other people that say they want that we start to dilute our initial offering because we have like a pretty strong story around being able to schedule like repeatedly post and schedule content across a bunch of platforms without having to go remake it for each platform right like that's that's super handy but we start to dilute it if we're not focused on things like adding more platforms or more capabilities

to it so we said okay like let's pump the brakes a little bit let's not like we know we want this uh like prioritized social feed let's instead focus in on the on the core offering that we have in place so we're building out an onboarding workflow and this is I should have talked to about this more cuz it's super interesting but the team that I'm working with on this on the side right like we are very data driven did I did my camera move here we go sorry folks um we're very data driven I don't know when that moved so we want to make sure that we're measuring everything we're doing because like if not we're just guessing right and for us we're like kind of monitoring the the onboarding life cycle for users I missed my light oh should have went anyway um

what we're noticing is like people sign up but the first step they have to do is they have to figure out like call them topic stream so we have to figure out as a user like how do I go set set this up and so we're measuring where people are dropping off and basically it's like people just aren't getting their stuff set up and it kind of makes sense because like that's a bit of a barrier you have to go it's easy to to type in a password and have an account but um you hit your first barrier when you need to start considering the content that you want to include so we're trying to build out a workflow that will kind of look across your social media that you have connected and uh and give you example posts so we're hoping that that will

like Kickstart people's uh Journey on our product because otherwise like you might go great I made my account but now I have to go do work like oh I don't want to do that so we want to do the work for you what the goal I'm watching a bunch of people in front of me doing u-turns it makes me think like something's going on with this road so I just watched three more people do a U-turn completely ridiculous this happened the other day when I was driving home um in this exact spot I think I had flown home this video is already 31 minutes I think it took me 10 minutes to get down this stretch of road which is like I can see the lights from here it's really not that bad but this light sucks I guess so anyway we're using Telemetry to

figure out where we need to focus which I like I said is probably a video on its own so for us it's onboarding um what's another good kind of point to call out here we're there's a couple things we could do to like to kind of to kind of get people from One Step to the next but when we talk about the onboarding workflow that we've designed if we look at the life cycle it basically Gets You Through the entire life cycle except for posting your first piece of content and that's because you're probably scheduling it like the way that our stuff works is like you're creating a Cadence for posting content so maybe in the future we can kind of get your first piece of content published right away kind of thing but uh this onboarding flow is being designed in a way that

that gets you through the entire Journey uh and when we like like when we look at it by hand the biggest drop off is right in the beginning you've made your account you don't take any action so that it's uh like that can be frustrating right it can be frustrating because you're like oh like why the heck aren't people doing it I can literally talk to the camera right now because I'm just barked in traffic um it can be frustrating because it feels like why is the user why is the user dumb why can't they figure it out or like whatever right like why aren't they but it's not like it's obviously the wrong attitude because there's a reason so instead of being frustrated by that kind of thing we have to look at it like an opportunity like okay we literally have data that

tells us like the fact that people are registering is also sorry is already an awesome signal they're at least interest it whatever we have pitched them depending on how they came to the site has caught their attention where they go I think this is a problem that I might have excellent like this is a very good start so when we see an very abrupt drop off it's just opportunity right like well what about it is making them drop off well we realize when they land on our site they have to figure out where to click next already that's like no good right and I'm not not blaming anyone for Designing it that way like not at all uh so we we just know like we so there's a couple things we could do we could make it so that you know the first time they

uh they log in we just kind of redirect them to that first page where they need to be so we could do that but we said like the workflow that we want to build is like is already going to accomplish that oh my God buddy you're letting in people and we should be driving you don't want to be polite you want to be predictable yeah so it'll be interesting to see like I'm actually pumped I think once we have that onboarding workflow and we kind of get another batch of people coming through uh I'm curious to see where the drop off point moves to right obviously I hope there is no drop off point but there always will be in a workflow so for example just to you know to make things up say we get the onboarding workflow in place and we see that

our user Journey basically looks solid right we get to a point where they're posting content great okay what's the next part of the user Journey look like are they adding more top streams are they adding more content to each topic stream like are they trying to make it so they have a a bigger pool of content are they extending their trial are they inquiring about pricing so when we look at this user life cycle the target's going to move and that's a good thing right like if we can optimize certain parts of it it just tells us we're starting to solve a problem and now we have to to go tackle the next challenge so I'm very excited about that cuz uh what never happened with meal coach so unless you've watched my my weekly Vlogs that I post they're kind of like a diary

check-in and unless you've watched those like the journey with meal coach was a struggle because we weren't at the point where we could iterate Based on data it was such such a disappointment in that regard because it was like I feel like we had tons of awesome ideas and we could keep building them but we had no feedback and like even not even just like users talking to us but like data to say like look like here's how it's being used here's the the journey just no users so I'm just super excited to have data so that it stops being like I feel like this would be a good thing I feel like this would be useful um they can start to be like let's try it let's run the experiment and prove if it is or not so that's that I'm at home looks

like the wife's not home yet we got all our animals in the window let going to back up this hill I wonder if I can turn the camera around to show you guys give me one sec put it in park maybe we can see the all kind of it's really difficult to see you can see one of the dogs just kind of moved away but they're all there waiting for me so um yeah more of these to come I'll probably have something interesting to talk about tomorrow but thanks for tuning in I hope you had an awesome drive if you were driving and uh see you next time