Latest / Gimbal Podcast / The Impressive Business Behind Ali Abdaal's YouTube Channel

Transcript

The Impressive Business Behind Ali Abdaal's YouTube Channel · Gimbal Podcast

• 0:00
  Having all our eggs in that basket was also a bit of a risk because it seems like the threat of competition is
• 0:05
  Present. Is that something that you think about and that had gone from 2k a month to like 80k a month
• 0:11
  Could you walk us through those two weeks launching youtuber academy?
• 0:14
  We were making about as much money, but it was costing us three times more
• 0:18
  My guest today is Angus Parker. He is the longtime general manager for alieb doll and all things alieb doll
• 0:26
  And it's the first thing I wanted to ask you about is there's been so many businesses over the past seven or eight years
• 0:33
  That I've just kind of spawned from the youtube channel the one I want to talk about in particular is one that's kind of it seems to be quite popular in the content
• 0:40
  And it seems to be riding a quite a long wave. It's voice pal. Can you tell me the very first time?
• 0:47
  That voice pal fell on to your plate like what were those earliest conversations like and how is it evolved over time?
• 0:54
  30 thanks are me and
• 0:56
  Secondly, yeah with voice pal it it honestly started as a bit of a side project for alie and
• 1:03
  The kind of co-founder Pablo for context. How do you describe exactly what what voice pal is just for people who are to wear?
• 1:10
  I mean the tagline is like an AI ghost writer in your pocket
• 1:13
  It really helps turn and I guess a TLDR as it turns your speech into a clean text that can be used for
• 1:22
  I mean people use it for all kinds of things
• 1:24
  I'll use it if I open right is news lesser other greatest use it for them like their books
• 1:28
  Like first drafts that they can then put into cord and clean up other people are using it just to create like you know
• 1:34
  Task list to do lists. That's kind of more than edge case
• 1:37
  But for creators
• 1:38
  It's really about creating the written content that otherwise they would be they would struggle to do when they're looking at blind page
• 1:43
  A lot of people including Ali find it much easier to kind of walk and talk yeah rather than sit and stare
• 1:51
  Completely agree what voice pal is souls for and that's really what I wanted to so for when
• 1:57
  When designing it, you know when he still lived in London
• 2:00
  He would go on walks in Hyde Park and I think that's really where he wanted to be able to speak out his thoughts and and in a way that was
• 2:07
  Not just getting kind of back a transcript with ums and ours and everything like that
• 2:12
  But actually something clean and one of the other benefits that people have found where it is like the the follow up questions
• 2:18
  That it then it gives people to which allows you then to take the the thought and the idea that bit further
• 2:24
  Basically kind of we're not we're not going for like a spring for the fences notion can pester anything like that like
• 2:28
  It's not our aim is not to build an older one productivity tool our aim is not to raise money
• 2:33
  It's just to we I guess we've kind of seen that you know with her with the advance of AI and everything else that everyone knows about
• 2:41
  And so to go into that the relative value of distribution and trust is going to become even more
• 2:46
  Value important and add valuable and if you can offer that distribution
• 2:51
  with a product that is
• 2:54
  Much more scalable than necessarily digital products and also has enterprise value which our courses and other digital products don't really have
• 3:01
  Then that's really where I think there's going to be a lot of success in the in the near future for creators
• 3:06
  How novel was that idea in late 2023 when it was first getting developed?
• 3:11
  Speech to text apps and tools have always been around to a certain extent
• 3:16
  So the novelty potentially not I think the
• 3:20
  ability to leverage AI which you know, it seems funny now, but like even 18 months ago
• 3:26
  It was a very different place to where it is now
• 3:28
  Which potentially one of the more novel aspects but even then there are other like you know speech to text tools that are AI
• 3:35
  Intused I think where it's really different from from our perspective is is in the sort of the shadow reader and the questions
• 3:43
  Of people get back and and that kind of thing the interactivity of it
• 3:46
  And I think often people especially on the new business ideas
• 3:50
  They're trying to find something that is is novel. It can't be new. It can't be done in any way before and that is not leading to this
• 3:56
  Paralysis of trying to work out where there is a gap that no one's ever seen and sometimes that's possible
• 4:01
  But like sometimes it's just needs you know, the right
• 4:06
  Feature within a product and the right distribution to be able to get it going and yeah
• 4:12
  Well, it sounds like it's going really well every time that I speak with you. It sounds like oh, yeah
• 4:16
  We're getting bigger and bigger the audience is becoming less focused on Ali O'Dull and more about people who haven't even heard about him
• 4:21
  Like these are all great signs and this is coming at a time when like AI is
• 4:26
  thriving and growing and changing in a bunch of different ways and it seems like the threat of
• 4:30
  Competition is present. Is that something that you think about? Is that something that you worry about with this product?
• 4:36
  Not really and I kind of got less and less worried about it over the past like six or eight months to be honest when I've
• 4:42
  Because like before this year, I've not really been involved in any app related marketing
• 4:46
  You know, it's a space that we have never really dived into and it was just I knew it existed
• 4:52
  But I've not really lived into it the more I've realized that there are just there are so many apps out there
• 4:57
  And there are so many apps that are doing ridiculously well
• 5:01
  With very little distribution, but just the right
• 5:05
  Either the right feature set or they've had the right break from a TikTok video. There's gone viral like there's so much space
• 5:12
  In the market. I think that I'm not overly concerned. I think if you know
• 5:17
  An opening where I came out with exactly the feature set the voicemail has then yes, maybe it's like okay
• 5:22
  Well suddenly there's an issue, but the chance of them doing that is actually relatively no I would suspect
• 5:28
  Given they've got bigger things to worry about right
• 5:31
  So it's to a certain extent yes, there's always a threat of competition
• 5:35
  There's always a threat that the bigger players could suddenly see the feature you've got is
• 5:40
  Really what they need but I think it's quite unlikely and there's just so much
• 5:44
  Space and so many people thank you for going down this path with me
• 5:47
  I wanted to talk about voice pal because it leads to a bigger picture about
• 5:52
  The alley of doll business philosophy. I think and that is
• 5:56
  alley is much more and you in turn and everybody on the team seems to be very very
• 6:01
  Experimental in launching small businesses. I think that goes against the norm of what is kind of
• 6:07
  The usual grind in this YouTube space where people build up to build a single big product
• 6:13
  And then they run and they milk that as long as possible
• 6:16
  You're doing it. Obviously so I want to kind of get your perspective on the philosophy around starting a business
• 6:22
  From alley of dolls team in internally we move very fast and there are a lot of things that you know get scrapped
• 6:28
  After they've been developed for a bit and things like that pretty standard
• 6:31
  But I never see us as having releasing a lot of a lot of new products really
• 6:36
  We test a lot and I guess from the outside it might look like we are releasing a lot of products
• 6:39
  But I think that is just the general speed with which we we move and we want to move
• 6:45
  Even with like the YouTube recovery it was sort of two weeks from
• 6:48
  Idea to the first cobalt launching that's crazy
• 6:52
  Yeah, that's insane to me like with mark man
• 6:54
  So we've spent a year and a half basically building out the big product that we've launched this year
• 6:59
  And with my pre like the guy that I work with previously we also spent a ton of time launching this like
• 7:04
  Program that ultimately didn't really fizzle out that well
• 7:07
  But so much time and energy was spent on it and it sounds like okay two weeks until we've launched
• 7:12
  You know the part time YouTube Academy, which is you know insanely fast
• 7:15
  Yeah, and when I look at our most successful products, which I guess the YouTube Academy is the most successful one
• 7:20
  They've always come from that level of speed if I'm honest like the ones that haven't worked as well
• 7:25
  You know like the keyboard and the physical product brand that we had that was a product that took like 18 months to two years to develop
• 7:33
  And and you know, it's a physical product
• 7:34
  It's always going to take longer and there's there's more to do on that front
• 7:37
  But there's also more back and forth and more you know
• 7:41
  Adjustments and amendments need to be made up. I mean even down to something like
• 7:45
  We did a kind of skin case thing with the brown light three or four years ago
• 7:49
  And that that was fine and quite well
• 7:51
  But that was literally a three-week kind of turnaround
• 7:54
  And obviously a lot of it was on on them
• 7:56
  But again, it wasn't like one of our most successful products
• 7:58
  But I guess the point I'm making is I think there seems to be does seem to be a correlation with speed and success
• 8:04
  Because I do think if you spend time thinking about it you end up overthinking it
• 8:09
  And then kind of going around in circles and to a certain extent the amount you can iterate is
• 8:15
  Exponentially increased by launching like just just launching and getting feedback from people
• 8:19
  We did that with p2a that whole idea of that first cohort was decided to get like two hundred two hundred twenty people into
• 8:26
  Like a group that we could then improve the course on three hundred people ended up signing out
• 8:31
  And so like that was a very good data set
• 8:33
  But I think we certainly like and that and I can't really take credit for that because that's definitely been driven by
• 8:39
  Ali always driving forward this kind of speed mentality
• 8:44
  Not recklessness I wouldn't say at all but more
• 8:47
  You know, let's just let's just launch it list to see this to see what happens
• 8:50
  And whilst there is a degree to which
• 8:53
  He is frustrating in sometimes like
• 8:56
  Changing his mind after he used it now to have like a boat and he often thinks he's on a speed boat
• 9:00
  When we've actually got like a cruise ship and it can't just change like course
• 9:04
  Without some degree of disruption
• 9:07
  But it's also the benefit that we've had by keeping the team relatively and even when we expanded a bit like it's
• 9:13
  It's allowed us to be that that flexible and we're always very keen to to try new things and
• 9:19
  But with a with an eye to the future and an eye to thinking about what it means for the from the
• 9:25
  From a business model perspective in terms of resilience as well, which I think will be more important
• 9:29
  You know as Ali
• 9:30
  You know, it's just start the family and then there's other
• 9:33
  Commitments and responsibilities and things we want to create a business that's not totally relying on on him ideally
• 9:39
  We can't get away from the fact that it will be
• 9:41
  For a somewhat reliant on him and me making videos and there is still a large
• 9:46
  Reliance on you know videos coming out on a YouTube channel the business would struggle to survive if he's just decided
• 9:52
  He didn't want to publish videos for a year, but at the same time
• 9:55
  It's all about for us like just building in those those different income streams that allow us to hold things up and and not have to rely on
• 10:04
  The video going out every week or every other week to follow up questions
• 10:08
  I'm still like hung up on the two weeks to launch thing
• 10:11
  Could you walk us through those two weeks from the time you came up with the idea to
• 10:15
  Launching youtuber academy the second question was could you also give us like a little bit of a big picture
• 10:21
  Overview of like the business and business model. Yeah, so with the with the YouTube Academy
• 10:25
  So this is back in
• 10:27
  October 2020 Ali had put out a tweet like three or four weeks earlier about like why are people starting a YouTube channel?
• 10:35
  Essentially and it was a fairly like for a way to eat in the sense of it wasn't done with the intent of like creating a course around it
• 10:41
  But any course that we were going to create was potentially going to be like a self-paced pause
• 10:44
  We had launched on Skillshare about six months earlier and that had gone from two K a month to like 80 K a month
• 10:52
  In the space of a few months
• 10:54
  It was
• 10:55
  Ridiculous amount of money coming from come Skillshare
• 10:58
  Um, but that was your audience size at that time he he passed a million subscribers in August of that year
• 11:03
  So Skillshare at that point was just very lucrative for us in terms of in terms of revenue
• 11:08
  But we also recognized that just like we'd moved onto Skillshare to get away from relying on YouTube
• 11:13
  Skillshare's to the third party platform
• 11:15
  And we knew that having all our eggs in that basket was also a bit of a risk because you know
• 11:20
  They could change their monetization policies as they did and we went from earning 80k miles to like I mean now is down at 4k
• 11:28
  So it's quite significantly lower. We have taken a couple of classes off to be fair
• 11:31
  Um, and that's obviously within the right and I don't help out anything gets them for doing that
• 11:35
  But it it means that you're outside of your control. So
• 11:38
  All that to say we knew we wanted to create our own thing
• 11:41
  I think they've had a chat with
• 11:42
  Chava 4k and David Pharrell who had their own like live courses and so suddenly it was like actually let's do
• 11:48
  A live cohort and so I went over to we both lived in Cambridge
• 11:51
  I went over to Alice flat on
• 11:53
  October the 20th and come over the date
• 11:55
  We really over the next week or so did a lot of sort of building in public
• 11:59
  Allie was tweeting a lot during that time
• 12:02
  Getting feedback on the name. I remember when we first chose part to mutual academy
• 12:06
  I wasn't in favor of that name. I can't what the others were but I was like, ah, I don't think this is right
• 12:10
  Um, I'm glad I was wrong
• 12:12
  Um, and we essentially went from like ideation to putting the kind of curriculum together over about a week
• 12:20
  And that was essentially just him and I having calls more or less like 24-7 because that was really the cell focus at that point
• 12:26
  We didn't have any other products. It was just just that we worked with like a curriculum designer as well for a bit then
• 12:32
  And then we launched it. I think probably like first week of November it must have launched
• 12:37
  How did you know to bring in a curriculum designer?
• 12:39
  Did you just realize it was a blind spot between the two of you and you said we need somebody else?
• 12:43
  I think we had been I think it was more just a suggestion from from someone that it would be useful to
• 12:49
  Actually get some like a decent consultant to to help with with that
• 12:52
  I mean, it would not build a course or done a live cohort before
• 12:55
  It makes a lot of sense, but when you're like deep in the moment like that
• 12:58
  It's hard to realize. Oh someone else could help me solve my problems so much earlier. Yeah
• 13:02
  Um, and it was just useful to get like a third party perspective on that as well
• 13:07
  And yes, so we launched like start of November again
• 13:10
  We kind of kept it very conservative with the prices at that point
• 13:13
  It was like a few hundred dollars like it wasn't much at all
• 13:17
  Compared to where it ended up being. Yeah, it was it was a weird kind of moment when we were on the call and we put it live and
• 13:23
  I kind of wore the exact numbers where but I think it was about ACK in an hour
• 13:26
  Uh, same
• 13:28
  Yeah, it was it was mad like it was completely insane the first cohort was four weeks
• 13:34
  And basically just it's raised on that for another eight cohorts before we eventually turned it off from a cohort model once
• 13:39
  With a self-paced self-paced model, but yeah, that's what those two weeks look like really and again
• 13:44
  It was very much biased action launching iterate and see and get feedback and and that kind of thing
• 13:50
  And then in terms of like the overall business model
• 13:53
  I generally see the business when I'm kind of looking at it is really being split into two main areas
• 13:58
  It's sort of content and commercial for me all of the sponsorship and out cents. They still falls under like the content bucket
• 14:04
  And the commercial is really just the the digital products of course is the apps that anything that's not
• 14:09
  basically the content, but
• 14:11
  Yes, so that's kind of how I generally kind of divide it and how we've always seen the two sort of
• 14:17
  teams within the business
• 14:18
  We have people on the commercial side managing marketing
• 14:22
  Product delivery community all of that and then we have the content team
• 14:26
  Which is essentially YouTube and social media and things like that
• 14:29
  And I sort of straddle the two and I manage the partnerships and things like that
• 14:33
  So that's where the content side really
• 14:36
  Has an element of commercial element to it
• 14:38
  But yeah, and that on a very high level that's kind of how I see how I see the business
• 14:43
  And fundamentally we have always wanted to move towards a place whereby
• 14:48
  We could have the content team kind of surviving off the commercial team
• 14:52
  But the content team provide marketing for that
• 14:54
  Right
• 14:54
  Ideally we get to a point where the course is the apps we're making enough that Ali can make videos
• 14:59
  Has him when he wants and we the sponsors would essentially be our own products
• 15:03
  And then you've got a really nice flywheel or whereby
• 15:06
  Do some content for as marketing for the courses and you know that hasn't happened yet
• 15:10
  Or exactly in in the way that we would want as I said yet
• 15:13
  And we're still working with sponsors on the on the main channel
• 15:16
  And there's no intention of changing that in any any time soon
• 15:20
  But I think in an ideal world and the business Ali would really want to make
• 15:23
  That fundamentally doesn't have a requirement or a deadline
• 15:28
  If he hates deadlines
• 15:30
  Then we would get to a stage whereby we were yeah
• 15:32
  Just sort of promoting our own products in a way that felt like authentic and things
• 15:38
  And then those own products then funded the the kind of content being produced and stuff
• 15:42
  Yeah, that's kind of like the the go-to strategy from what I'm hearing in the educational space where it's like the content itself
• 15:48
  Isn't necessarily profitable it maybe breaks even if you're pretty lucky with the sponsors and stuff
• 15:53
  At least that's what we've seen
• 15:54
  And then it's the off the other products that are built around it that you use to
• 15:59
  You know pay for the whole big enterprise
• 16:03
  I always I always like seeing kind of the sponsorship revenue for the channel
• 16:07
  As kind of our recurring revenue piece
• 16:09
  So I have seen that for the past like few years as like we know we can
• 16:13
  If Ali is able to produce eight videos in all likely amongst in all likely could we can get
• 16:17
  Most of not all of them sponsored and so there is a degree to which
• 16:21
  There's a nice comforting element to that that I've always found with with the content side
• 16:25
  Did we've got that recurring piece and obviously add sense is not necessarily recurring
• 16:29
  It's not always the same, but there's it's always going to be there with a large channel like like Ali's or like Mark's like
• 16:34
  There's always something coming in from that perspective
• 16:37
  We only have one very new kind of recurring product previously when it's a self-paced course or any kind of digital product like that
• 16:44
  It's always like okay new month
• 16:46
  Say I'll start again
• 16:48
  And so having some kind of recurring piece which again is another reason why we're going down the app route is
• 16:54
  It just it itself so many questions and concerns and anxieties
• 16:58
  Did you mention your team size for both content like you mentioned kind of like the the org chart
• 17:03
  But how many people specifically do you have on the content side and also on the the business side?
• 17:08
  So we've gone we've gone from as I mentioned earlier like four in 2020 to
• 17:13
  19 in 2021
• 17:15
  Back down to like 13 for sort of a couple of years after that back up to 20 and now 10
• 17:21
  Oh my gosh, okay, we're not yeah, we're not there's a story there somewhere isn't there? Yeah, so
• 17:27
  We so where we um the usual economy went very well
• 17:31
  and it was
• 17:32
  Throughout 2021 that we really started to then use the money that was generating to hire more
• 17:37
  We initially hired some more writers to basically replace me so that I could concentrate more on the academy
• 17:41
  And throughout 2021 we really we read a book called traction
• 17:47
  Took the kind of cool away from that started you know creating an actual org chart and an org structure
• 17:52
  But the mistake we made then was
• 17:54
  Creating that chart and then thinking we need a person for each of these seats
• 17:59
  Rather than thinking we're still a start-up. It's fine. And this is wearing five hats and
• 18:03
  Guys is wearing two and knacka throwing one like three like it's
• 18:08
  It's it's that's actually quite fine
• 18:11
  And instead we sort of hired for every role and and we got halfway through 2022
• 18:14
  And we realized that we were kind of making about as much money
• 18:17
  But it was costing us three times more and so we kind of shrunk the team back down to
• 18:22
  12 or 13 and that's kind of where we stayed for a couple of years
• 18:25
  And then as we launched another product last year and we had more people to run that product
• 18:29
  We kind of started to expand again made that mistake. We're going past a kind of 13 14 person mark which
• 18:36
  We've been told and numerous times that there's always like an element to which
• 18:40
  In that space between 12 13 and like 40
• 18:44
  You're in a weird zone where Daniel Prissy
• 18:47
  He's a kind of one of our coaches calls it like the desert because you're too big to be small. You're too small to be big
• 18:53
  You know you need to have layers of management
• 18:55
  But equally at the size of like 15 to 20 people
• 18:57
  It's like actually leather management end up causing more problems than they saw right even though one person
• 19:02
  Can't imagine everyone so you're in this weird space whereby if you can go from like 13 to 40
• 19:07
  Like almost immediately which some companies do obviously if they're growing and expanding then great
• 19:11
  And I'm not saying the businesses can't work in that in that zone
• 19:14
  But I think it's it's hard. We noticed that nothing necessarily broke when we went into that space
• 19:20
  But communication lines suddenly became trickier
• 19:23
  Not in a sense of like and I must say anything like that but more just like certainly as air for the business
• 19:28
  Suddenly didn't know what other parts of the business were doing on like a daily bait or weekly basis and
• 19:33
  It just it everything sort of just slows down
• 19:36
  And so we're now back down to 10 and that just feels feels like a more sensible number
• 19:40
  It feels like the right size really and also just from my own perspective anxieties around
• 19:45
  Overheads and things like that and now much reduced on a
• 19:48
  monthly basis and just even from a
• 19:50
  Zoom perspective everyone's suddenly on one screen
• 19:55
  And that's all that's important just being able to see everybody's face
• 19:59
  It is just an extent and it's a good sort of almost like a good indicator of like whether you have the right
• 20:05
  Team size I think it's just more business like this
• 20:08
  Okay
• 20:09
  Yeah, yeah, are you how are you more thought like how are you thoughtful about whether or not to expand or to bring on a new team member now
• 20:16
  Having gone up and down like the way that you just did
• 20:19
  How do we know really depends on how successful we see that opportunity being okay, you know
• 20:24
  We made the bet last year that the kind of productivity product would be probably more successful than we then it then it has been
• 20:31
  It's still been relatively successful. So there's a degree to which like you need to sort of do some level of forecasting as to just really
• 20:37
  What you'd expect from this
• 20:39
  I think one lesson that I have learned and we are trying to sort of employ moving forwards is
• 20:45
  Moving more towards a just in time method of hiring rather than just in case I think in the past
• 20:50
  It's been like oh, we're building this product less highly this person just in case because we think that we can't take it on
• 20:55
  Ourself sort of that kind of thing rather than I feel we've really got to a point where everyone is so stretched that we need to bring someone on
• 21:01
  And you could argue that that's actually a bad place to be because it might take a few months to hire someone and suddenly like
• 21:07
  Things break, but I don't necessarily agree with that because I think you can bring on freelancers to cover things if needs be and
• 21:14
  So that's kind of the approach we have now is really just in case we have a couple of other people who are answered two or three days a week
• 21:21
  Contractors and that feels like a much more sustaining placed position to be in so yeah, it's kind of more thinking in in that realm
• 21:30
  The alley adult team has kind of made a name for itself in terms of people working behind the scenes who have gained a bit of a
• 21:37
  Reputation for themselves like you are kind of known in the space now for your work with alley
• 21:41
  But there's also been people like ten ten smith who you know is kind of become popular as his own thing and there's staff as well
• 21:47
  He's to be the creative director and he's gone off in his own done his own thing
• 21:51
  You're smiling like this is cool to see like these probably our friends of yours and you're excited to see them succeed
• 21:56
  The question I kind of want to get to is like what's the philosophy around
• 22:00
  helping behind the scenes employees kind of succeed and thrive and
• 22:04
  Even if it's at the threat of them leaving the company like ten ten is literally now doing his own thing
• 22:09
  And so as staff they're not part of the company anymore
• 22:11
  Ali's philosophy on this has always been he would love it if people
• 22:15
  join the company stayed for a few years and if they were entrepreneurial minded
• 22:20
  Where then had the confidence to be able to go out and do their own do their own thing
• 22:24
  I know that was sort of staff was sort of one of the first people to sort of consciously
• 22:29
  make that leap last year
• 22:31
  In doing that and it was probably more so on
• 22:35
  Side and says of hesitation and then Ali encouraging him to do it
• 22:39
  And so we've always had that that mindset of if people want to go and do their own thing
• 22:43
  Like that is just a natural evolution and and tint ins another example where he'd been in a youtube producer seat for like two over two years
• 22:49
  As a limit to what you can really learn in that and in that role to a degree
• 22:53
  Obviously you could if you wanted to just continue and I guess learn some more but you know
• 22:58
  He wanted to do his own thing as well
• 23:01
  And so we don't really hold people back from from doing that
• 23:05
  Yeah, it's it's something that we kind of actively encourage
• 23:09
  Ali doesn't stop people doing consulting or contracting on the side
• 23:13
  There was just an impact the work that they're doing or isn't with like a competitor in the space
• 23:18
  And even then it would be a polite conversation if this late yet
• 23:21
  It's probably not what best to do work with them rather than anything else
• 23:24
  So yeah, like and that's never happened either
• 23:26
  It's very much like part of the culture that people probably would start to you know
• 23:31
  Do their own thing on the side and it that ends up becoming bigger than the main thing that with us then
• 23:36
  That's fine. Yeah, I like that
• 23:38
  I've had conversations with people in the past where creators would say something like oh, you know
• 23:43
  I'm afraid to train up this editor because after six months if they know everything that I know
• 23:47
  They're gonna go off and do their own thing and it sounds like you're saying well actually that's kind of the point
• 23:51
  Like we want everybody on the team to thrive and succeed and if they have entrepreneurial ambitions
• 23:56
  They can go off and do it. I always feel like that mindset is quite defensive
• 24:00
  It's like you're trying to just retain
• 24:03
  Obviously you want to retain people as much as as you can
• 24:06
  You want to kind of build up that culture and not just have a culture where people join for a bit kind of rinse everything
• 24:12
  And then leave like you don't want that but at the same time
• 24:14
  I think that is the extreme and that is taking like a stance on it
• 24:18
  Which is sort of set like a really negative outlook on it rather than seeing
• 24:22
  I mean, I could actually train someone who if they go on to work with someone else and
• 24:26
  Then known as my editor who now looks incredible
• 24:30
  Then it's gonna encourage it's gonna attract more talent than it puts off. Yeah, yes
• 24:34
  You don't want to have turnover of people leaving every three or four months. You do want people there for like you know a year two years
• 24:41
  I've never quite
• 24:43
  understood the the anxiety around are they gonna learn everything and leave like yeah
• 24:49
  Yeah, but that's you know if you do it right then it won't be a problem rehiring the next person
• 24:54
  Especially they leave on good terms and everything like that. So yeah
• 24:58
  And it kind of like leaves a really strong taste in everybody's mouth about the alley of tall alley of dull business
• 25:06
  And just the opportunity to potentially work for him and you and for the team like it looks like a really nice reflection of
• 25:12
  Of what things should be like in this creator economy. Yeah, and and I mean you've mentioned two people there
• 25:19
  But there's been three or four people Tintins and SAS Tintins, especially video went sort of semi-viral when yeah less to come
• 25:26
  They always make a video high quit working with alley of dull and that's the one that like kick starts their work
• 25:33
  And um, but again, it's it's that they're all they're all I don't mind any any of them making them and they're all very positive and
• 25:40
  um, yeah, Tintins one especially which was sort of the first one
• 25:44
  I just found it quite entertaining kind of reading the comments people being like I came here for the gossip analysis
• 25:49
  And yeah, what I expect
• 25:52
  Um, and for me it's just like a good like job
• 25:55
  Um, advert really advert for working with us definitely if people are leaving and and creating like videos that are saying
• 26:02
  Oh, I had such a great experience. I learned a lot and now because of it
• 26:05
  I'm able to go do my own thing like what does that say as a reflection of the company? It says only good things, right?
• 26:10
  Yeah, exactly um, and it's you know free marketing for us
• 26:14
  Okay, we'll take it. We'll take it
• 26:17
  Yeah, exactly. We're hiring right now. What do you look for across roles when you're looking to add someone to the team?
• 26:24
  Maybe it's a culture personality type question more than specific um skill sets
• 26:31
  I guess the slightly annoying
• 26:33
  Answers it depends the culture piece is to a certain extent as important as the the existing skill set
• 26:40
  The sense that you get that they'd be a willingness and ambition to learn I think
• 26:45
  Um, because if someone is the right fit, but they're not quite haven't quite got the right skill set
• 26:50
  They can always be be trained especially in the space that we're operating in the crazy space
• 26:55
  There's a lot of skills which can be learned on the job
• 26:58
  I would I would say even something like editing to a certain extent
• 27:01
  Although I wouldn't like necessarily higher for a technical role where they didn't have the skills
• 27:05
  For other roles, I think there's a lot of space for the learning and growth and you just need to find the right ambition
• 27:11
  I'm very bullish on that partly because that's kind of what I did
• 27:15
  I was hired as a writer and I just gave me more and more responsibilities and trusted me in that process
• 27:20
  A lot of people underestimate the culture piece
• 27:23
  And I think in terms of hiring more broadly one thing that we've found very useful on a more tactical level
• 27:28
  Is getting people to like record looms as part of their videos as part of their application process
• 27:35
  Because with AI and everything these days like anyone can put together a CV or cover less other sounds pretty or cover
• 27:41
  So especially this sounds pretty convincing. So we although we have them as like optional and sometimes ask for them
• 27:45
  I'm more interested in sort of how someone comes across in their room and the trial task that we always give people
• 27:51
  Like those two things are the things which I look at far more before even going to interview because
• 27:56
  You can get so much and you can't be fake a little well, I guess in the AI these days you probably can
• 28:01
  Um, but uh, yes, we pretty tentacle to be able to do that
• 28:05
  So that's really what I I based it on because especially with such a small team
• 28:10
  You can't have anyone that's not a culture for even if they don't quite have a skill set yet
• 28:15
  And obviously if they can't learn then they you know that that makes another culture fit
• 28:19
  Because we need to kind of people who are ambitious and and proactive with their learning actually love that the loom idea
• 28:24
  So clever because that's the big outlier right like you get 200 applications or 200 portfolios to look at and you know
• 28:30
  They're all varying degrees of good
• 28:31
  But how do you know it's a culture fit like that is such a critical thing
• 28:35
  Yeah, and I'm also putting a limit on the limbs as well
• 28:38
  It's like so often we either say like two-minute loom or whatever and anyone who's over spin it's it's just like
• 28:43
  Immediately just cut because eggs can't fall out instructions
• 28:45
  And so by even just doing that immediately helps and and helps filter and yeah
• 28:50
  I think you attract the right people by doing that as well
• 28:54
  Mm-hmm in this uh very AI environment what are you most looking forward to and least looking forward to
• 29:02
  I'm all good question. I'm kind of most looking forward to
• 29:06
  Actually being able to
• 29:08
  Actually being able to leverage and understand AI automations and agents a bit more to be able to make the business more efficient
• 29:14
  I don't mean that I'm a sense of I want to like reduce head count
• 29:16
  I think like that but I just feel like there's so many more opinions
• 29:19
  And there's so many unknown unknowns. I don't even know
• 29:23
  Where I could be leveraging it more
• 29:26
  It's a weird place to be
• 29:27
  Yeah, and so so like I'm most important really
• 29:31
  leveraging that way more and building into the business a lot more and I think you know one of the things I've been pushing people to do
• 29:36
  In their quarterly reviews that we had like a few weeks ago was very much like leaning into the AI side
• 29:41
  over the next couple few months
• 29:43
  And I saw like Shopify CEO and it's the other one but I noticed had put out a memo to their team that they share on Twitter
• 29:52
  Basically being like you need to learn how to leverage AI properly otherwise you're just not gonna kind of survive
• 29:58
  Not just in this business, but in general and I think it's I think it's pretty pretty accurate
• 30:03
  And so that's the thing I'm actually forward to is actually just like being able to leverage it a bit more
• 30:07
  um least looking forward to I think the thing that I find most frustrating is and to be fair
• 30:13
  Companies are moving against it now and YouTube especially in the last week or so as we're speaking
• 30:18
  The rise of like this just quote-unquote AI slot that is I think it's a frustration that
• 30:25
  needs to be addressed in some way I'm glad YouTube again
• 30:27
  I've moved against it with sort of demonetizing a lot of AI content but equally having said all that
• 30:34
  There has been some fully AI related created videos with Google's new video thing on channels
• 30:39
  I've seen that I've actually found pretty entertaining
• 30:41
  So like there needs to be a bit of a balance I think but that's what I'm like leasing in photo
• 30:46
  I just think there's going to be a proliferation of really crap content
• 30:48
  I don't know if I can swear on this but um
• 30:51
  And so I think that's that's something which uh, we will need to be mindful of but at the same time
• 30:56
  I think that presents an opportunity for anyone who's got a decent personal brand and can build up trust in their audience
• 31:02
  As I mentioned earlier, I think there's this kind of more opportunity for the real authentic
• 31:06
  Connection than ever before really so yeah, whilst I'm not looking forward to there being AI slot at the same time
• 31:11
  I think it increases the value of real content so
• 31:15
  Yeah, thank you for being on the show
• 31:16
  It's been very insightful hearing your side of things and uh, we'll have to have you as a guest again one day in the in the future
• 31:22
  Nice. Thanks. That would be me