I got an email a couple of weeks ago, asking:
how do you get started making stuff online?
If you’re starting from scratch,
if you have zero followers, zero subscribers, zero anything,
how do you get an audience?
How do you get popular on the internet?
The first time I tried to answer that question,
it was more than ten years ago.
YouTube didn’t even exist back then,
and I thought I knew it all.
I didn’t, and I probably still don’t.
But with another decade and a million subscribers under my belt since then,
I can at least tell you the rules that I’ve worked by for the last 15 years or so,
not just for YouTube, but for anywhere online.
The short answer is: you just make stuff.
The long answer… well,
the best way to tell that does not start on an incredibly rainy Scottish island.
It starts down in London.
Right.
I’ve been making stuff for the internet pretty much all my adult life.
I had a few decent hits when I was younger,
viral web pages and games and short videos
that were forwarded on through email in the days before social media.
But those were one-off bolts from the blue,
they were nothing you could base any sort of career on.
When I was 19, the British government mailed a leaflet out to every home in the country.
It was called Preparing for Emergencies,
and it gave some pretty obvious advice on what to do in the event of a disaster.
There was a lot of cynicism about that leaflet,
and while the intentions were good,
it was mostly seen as a waste of the taxpayers' money.
The government also put up preparingforemergencies.gov.uk.
They forgot to register preparingforemergencies.co.uk,
so I bought the domain, copied their web site,
changed all the text to be really sarcastic,
sent it off to a few friends, and went to bed.
That sort of joke was still new and exciting in 2004.
I’ll be honest, it hasn’t aged well since then.
This was before social media, way before smartphones.
Facebook had only just got its first round of investment,
and it was only open to a few US colleges.
That joke was being forwarded by email from person to person to person,
because that’s how it worked back then.
And the feedback that I was getting was by email.
Anyway, when I woke up the morning after,
okay, I was a student, so it was probably the afternoon after, but,
I had some emails from friends saying ‘that’s quite funny’.
And so I had some messages from people I didn’t know saying ‘that’s quite funny’.
And then there were some messages from people whose email addresses ended in .gov.uk,
saying, ‘that’s quite funny, it’s doing the rounds of the civil servants’.
And then there was a message from someone in
the government department responsible for the original leaflet,
saying ‘take it down’.
And I said no.
And it turns out that while mocking the government is a reasonably good gag,
mocking the government and then having the government not find it funny,
that is a really good gag.
At least in countries where you can get away with it.
That takedown request meant that the news got interested,
and this went all over the country, as in,
national newspapers and local television coverage.
And it was just a quick joke that I’d put together in an hour or so because… well,
because the alternative was not doing it.
Preparing for Emergencies was the first demonstration I had
of a principle I now know and have worked with for years:
that the chances of a project succeeding aren’t really coupled
to how much time, effort and money you’ve spent on it.
And it can often seem like the opposite is true. You’ll see people complain
that the thing they’ve poured all their heart and soul and effort and time into,
that thing sank,
but something quick and dirty that they slapped together has become popular.
And maybe that’s true, maybe that is how it works sometimes.
But I would bet that, like me, anyone with that complaint
has made loads and loads of quick and dirty things.
And most of those will have failed.
It’s just that they didn’t care as much about those quick and dirty things,
they just don’t remember them as much,
compared to that One Big Project.
If you spent ten dollars and one hour on an idea, it is likely to fail.
But if you spend a million dollars and a year on an idea, it is still likely to fail.
There’s an old adage called Sturgeon’s Law: “90% of everything is crap”.
I realise that isn’t what Theodore Sturgeon actually said,
it’s been cut down a bit over the years, but the idea holds.
Sturgeon was a science fiction author,
and his reply to the idea that “90% of science fiction is crap”, was yes, it is,
but only because 90% of everything is crap.
Most things fail.
And sure, something that’s spent months being polished
might have a slightly better chance of survival:
but the odds are still against you. Instead of polishing,
you could spend those months shoving out ten or twenty or a hundred ideas,
and each one of those projects is a new roll of the dice.
And each one of those projects is something you learn from,
something that helps make the next roll of the dice just a little more likely to succeed.
Of course, this is all assuming that your definition of success involves being popular
or getting paid for it.
These days, I know that I could probably make a lot more money
and save a lot of effort if I just stood in front of a green screen
and monologued about “Incredible Facts About Cartoon Series You Won’t Believe”
or “Ancient Mysteries ‘They’ Don’t Want You To Know About”.
But then, I wouldn’t be travelling so much,
I wouldn’t be having so much fun
and maybe I wouldn’t have kept going through rough times.
There are other definitions of success that aren’t just about the numbers.
More than a decade ago, I came up with this graph.
Across the bottom is effort, and across the side is awesome.
This is still the guiding principle that I use to determine
whether I’m going to do a project or not.
And sure,what I consider ‘effort’ and ‘awesome’ have changed over the years,
both in definition and in scale.
Awesome doesn’t have to mean money, or viewcount,
it can mean getting to do something really cool or working with someone you admire.
You define your own success.
Anyway. Naive me, at 19, thought there was a chance
of going right from Preparing for Emergencies to a full-time job
making weird stuff for a living.
There wasn’t any chance of that.
Obviously, in hindsight.
Because the people looking at the site weren’t going “oh, he’s good”,
they were going “oh, that’s good”.
There was no reason to stick around,
no reason to do the 2004 equivalent to clicking the subscribe button,
which was clicking a subscribe button, it just added an RSS feed to your reader.
I miss RSS.
Anyway, I got lots of lovely emails about Preparing for Emergencies,
I made a couple of contacts from it, but that was all.
I’d taken only the first step up the ladder,
and I had no idea how long that ladder would be.
So I kept making stuff.
But back then, I was missing a piece of the puzzle,
and it's a really important piece.
But to explain that, I need to start heading north.