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Hey friends, welcome back to the deep dive snippet. In this little clip, I'm speaking to Karma Medic, who is a YouTuber and also a full-time medical student at King's College London. And in this little clip, we are talking about tips for new and aspiring YouTubers. So I hope you enjoy the clip. So I was uploading videos every single week for about a year and a half.
And I think at that time I had 7,000 subscribers, 6,000 something. After a year and a half. After a year and a half. After making like 75-ish videos, one a week for 18 months. Yeah. You had like 7,000, 6,000 subscribers, something like that. Yeah, exactly. And then I posted a vlog about me studying for a medical school exam. And that really blew up at the time. And that got like...
hundreds of thousands of views within a couple of days and then weeks and brought, I think, like 30,000 subscribers to the channel or something like that. And that's why I felt like I had my big break or whatever. Okay. So it sounds like the, you know, I've been doing a lot of research on motivation these days for the book that I'm working on. A lot of
A lot of the research suggests that motivation is not a thing that you generate before doing an action. Motivation is the thing that comes after you do the action and you see some small level of success. And so for you, it's like, I'm going to make the video. And then you're out there hustling, trying to get an individual one at a time to watch that video. That person is giving you feedback and being like, this video was sick. And then that gives you the kind of dopamine hit.
to continue making the videos. At the same time, as you're making the videos, you're personally having fun because just the act of creation, I think, is an inherently rewarding experience. For anything, you know, making a pottery wheel thingy or making a YouTube video or writing anything, there's something about creation that really, I don't know, fulfills the soul in some capacity. You can say, look, I made that. I made that thing, yeah. It was just like, it was nothing and then I turned that footage into something good. And I guess those like more...
Yeah, qualitative markers of feedback, qualitative drivers kept you going even while the numbers weren't necessarily like incredibly high. For sure. And...
you know, the thing that I say to people is if you just make a video every week for two years and try and get a little bit better, I can a hundred percent guarantee that your life will change. I can't tell you when it's going to happen. I can't tell you at what, which video is going to go viral, how many views or how many numbers, how many, how much revenue, how many subscribers you're going to get. Yeah. But I can a hundred percent guarantee it will change your life. Yeah. Whether it's in terms of like the skills you learn or the people that you meet, or, you know, potentially at some point a video might pop and now we're talking. Yeah. The,
The YouTube game is honestly 100% consistency. I really think it's just about doing the same thing over and over again over a long enough period of time until something happens. Someone notes as your video, the algorithm notes as your video, whatever. But I just really think it's about repetition, repetition, repetition. Yeah. So, okay. On that note, we do often sometimes get students in our YouTuber academy who...
You know, take the consistency mantra to heart. All right, cool. I guess I'm just going to make videos. And they make videos about random topics, talking about things that they're interested in, filming it with crappy quality because it's like consistency and improvement over time. And one view that I've been thinking about a lot recently is that consistency alone is not the answer. Like there are like other ingredients that go into success. So for you, and I guess if you were giving advice to, I don't know, like...
people thinking of starting a YouTube channel or potentially like having started a Something to do with content on social media. What are the elements other than consistency that you think feed into the success equation? Yeah as it were Yeah, I think I should probably rephrase that consistency is a necessary requirement whilst you're also Constantly trying to evolve and learn and improve Consistency has to be there throughout but as you said you're right. It's not enough. I
I think the main things, I mean, YouTube is also partially a game. You need to make content that people are wanting to watch. You need to make content that you think is clickable, that might be shareable, the algorithm might pick up, etc. And also that is good to whatever the good standard is. And I think on YouTube, there definitely is this sort of minimum, sorry,
There definitely is this sort of minimum threshold of good and once you've ticked that box It becomes less important how good the video is right the production quality once it reaches a certain level anything past that is just like Okay, well this is this is nice, but it doesn't need to be here, you know um And so yeah the other things to kind of focus on for me It was just with every video that I put out I wanted to do something new and learn something different whether that was a new transition Um
I don't know, adding music or a sound effect or learning how to crop in, add text, manipulate things. I just wanted to do something new. And, you know, part of that was what made it so intellectually stimulating to keep on going every single week because it was really fun, as we said before. Yeah.
But yeah, consistency and constantly trying to innovate and get better. Whatever get better means incrementally for you over time. How do you think about this question of what videos should I make next? Okay. So the videos that I make next are ones that I want to make and then they need to appeal to who I think my niche is or my target audience.
So there's a lot of videos that I upload that I know from the get go are going to tank in terms of numbers, comments, views, whatever. But they're videos that I think are important. And I think for the few people who do watch it, it is going to be valuable. And so if it meets that threshold, then the video is going to get made.
And obviously there's like a long list and we move them back and forth all the time and there's a balance of what's gonna go out next but yeah, I need to think that I'm gonna enjoy making this video and that there's gonna be some value for the people who watch it and then after that it becomes about It becomes more about how do we frame this in a way that's clickable that people will want to watch Etc as opposed to starting from what's the most clickable? What do people want to watch? It's a balance. It's not so black and white so
Okay, so let's say you decide you want to do a video exploring your menswear wardrobe because you think it's the sort of video that would appeal to someone like me. But it's not really within your core focus of your channel to be doing menswear content.
Would you do the menswear video following this formula of like I think this will be valuable to some people like Ali who needs menswear advice or would you be like, oh it's not sufficiently valuable to the people that I think are following my channel ie maybe medics, maybe students like whatever sort of pseudo avatar you have in your mind and therefore I'm not going to do the menswear video. No, I don't think so. I would still do the menswear video. Oh, interesting. If I thought it was going to be fun and it wasn't going to be the biggest lift as you would say. Um...
I mean, this is kind of like when I made a 20-minute video about coffee and I was just drinking coffee from five or six different methods of grinding the beans or whatever. I made a video about how to publish academic research, which is pretty niche. What else have I done? How to take a patient history I did recently, which my channel is about medical school, my channel is about studying. It was a very medical educational video rather than a meta-medicine video. Yeah. So I knew it wasn't going to do well in terms of numbers and algorithms, but I was like...
This is a valuable video that I wish I had when I was in my first and second year. I think it'll be fun to make. Let me make it.