YouSaid · the spoken record

Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry

lines on the record: 32
first: 2022-07-21
most recent: 2022-07-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think on TikTok, you're a cog in their algorithm. You're going through it and you're just seeing what's next and it's learning about what you like in terms of what's next. It's much less about the creators and much more about the experience of the for you page. And I think if you look back in time, history has shown us that people follow people, whether it was the radio, television stars, movie stars, musicians, like we're interested in people. And YouTube lends itself really well to building relationships with people.”
2022-07-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Colin and Samir: Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I also think to remember that if you want to make it on YouTube specifically, YouTube is a search engine. So thinking about searchable topics is really important as a starting point. A lot of times it's important to start with searchable topics within underserved communities so that you can aggregate that initial audience and then introduce your personality into that as well. I think the mistake we made was starting to think about just making whatever interested us. And there just wasn't an audience for it yet. So I do think you need to take a lot of shots and getting yourself in a space where you can do that and where you aren't relying on YouTube.”
2022-07-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Colin and Samir: Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I would say whether it's we just entered a race or we just entered a marathon, I would say we haven't even hit mile one yet. And to have the stamina to do this, I think it's helpful to have a partner. It's helpful for us to keep each other afloat. And it's not easy. You're dealing with algorithms. You're dealing with audiences. You're dealing with a creative output that's not easy to do on a week-to-week basis. So we're lucky to have a team. We're lucky to have started to build a business out of this and started to build a company and a culture where people can support each other. And we can put some process around this and try and make this real run at this.”
2022-07-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Colin and Samir: Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say that's absolutely fair to say. You know, we reflect on the last 10 years and say that it took us 10 years to get our ticket to enter the race. Now we're in the race”
2022-07-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Colin and Samir: Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's a tough question. I think right now there's a lot of people who are going to try. The barrier to entry has been significantly lowered. And a lot of that is because of TikTok or YouTube shorts, this short form vertical content. People are having a lot of success. And most importantly, they can take a lot of shots. It's not as hard to make a video anymore with short form vertical content. But it is hard to sustain an audience over a long period of time. I think a lot of people can make money right now in the creator economy, but to make a career, I think, is extremely challenging. And I think it's just like any other entrepreneurial venture. And I think it's really important to recognize that the term creators are a subset of entrepreneurs. It follows the same trajectory of how hard it is to launch a startup. Our product just so happens to be media.”
2022-07-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Colin and Samir: Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, in our experience, right now, the experience we're having, the answer is yes. And I would say that similar to what we talked about before, it's about depth and that depth of connection. Now it's not as easy to build a business. I think getting 40 million views on a video like your advertising rates are going to be fantastic. But it's also a lot harder to produce a video that gets 40 million views. And we've spent time with Mr. Beast. We've spent time with Dude Perfect and watching them make their videos. It's hard work. And you have to study the algorithms. You have to study the metrics. But you also have to want to do that.”
2022-07-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Colin and Samir: Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the opportunity that we're moving into right now is for more niche audiences. I think what's amazing on the internet is you can find content about almost anything and you can find really well developed communities about all kinds of different things. And so I think the future or the present right now is growing a depth of connection with an audience rather than growing wider audiences, growing deeper. And I think that's something we're going to see a lot of as we move forward in the creator space. I think there's a lot of different opportunities to meet those communities where they are and find the right monetization strategy. Some of that might be a Patreon or some of it might be merchandise or some of it might be ad supported. But I do not think you need millions of subscribers to grow. I think you need a passionate community to build a business.”
2022-07-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Colin and Samir: Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To solve audience value process and monetization, it really is kind of the creator business plan. Now, to get to that point, even you kind of just have to create a lot to find yourself and figure out what you want to create because it's a really long road. It's taken us 10 years to get to this point. And obviously we uploaded all types of different content to get to the Colin and Samir show.”
2022-07-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Colin and Samir: Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We decided to turn this into a podcast, into a talk show, that's when we could actually understand and build a foundation for process and process also enables team. We were able to bring team members on to help us with that process. And it also enables monetization because then you're able to communicate to the industry, what do I do? What can you buy? What's the product that I offer? And that's a really important piece of the puzzle. And you can also look out in a year and say, okay, for us, we upload every Monday. We take six weeks off. That's how much inventory we have. You can buy a 60 second ad slot. And because we're talking to creators and we want them to feel educated, who are the advertisers who have that same mission? Let's talk to them and let's see if they want to support our mission as well because we're aligned. And so I would say those four things.”
2022-07-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Colin and Samir: Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I think the mistake we made when we stepped out of La Crosse Network and started creating wasn't think about the audience we wanted to create for. So I would say that a large part of starting out is thinking about an audience and a value prop. And thinking, here's the people I want to make content for. What do I want them to feel? How do I want to transform them? So for us, once we started to figure out what we wanted to do in our format, it was, okay, we want to make content for creators. We want them to feel educated. We want them to feel empowered. We want them to feel less alone. And that gave us a guiding light. Now, the next thing that was missing was process. And that's an extremely important part of being a creator because what was happening for us was we were having some pieces of content that would do really well. They would get millions of views, but we would try and reverse engineer and say, how do we do that again? And we couldn't figure it out. And so when”
2022-07-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Colin and Samir: Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Aggregate this audience that we're passionate about, deliver value to them in a different way in a way that we have more ownership over. And as we look to the future, I think it's expanding upon this concept of education, moving in that direction where we can roll out more education and more ways to deliver that value to the creator audience.”
2022-07-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Colin and Samir: Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think to start, what we want to do right now, we want to focus on is delivering our value to the audience as best as possible and as many ways as possible. And a lot of that is telling a diverse set of creator stories so we can educate people on the different roadmaps that exist. We do that right now on YouTube through our show. We do it across social platforms. We do it on our podcast. And we do it in our newsletter, the published press. So we get to hear a lot more about what's happening in the creator space. We get to work on that project and build an audience in a completely different way. And an audience that we own. And I think that's a really important distinction. When you think about all of us as creators, we're building our companies on rented land in a sense, right? Like YouTube could change tomorrow. I don't think it will, but it could. And we would lose our access to that audience there. So what we're doing with building this newsletter allows us to”
2022-07-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Colin and Samir: Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, this is aggregating an audience of a certain type, building a community, and then finding the most relevant business for that community.”
2022-07-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Colin and Samir: Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I can actually give you kind of a high level of how much the platform has paid us over the past couple years. So in 2020, our channel did 5.6 million views and we made $16,000. In 2021, our channel did 107 million views and we made $109,000. And in 2022, so far, we've made $50,000 on 73 million views. you can kind of understand from there that we have a team of six people who work on the show, that would be hard to sustain a business just on what the platform pays you.”
2022-07-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Colin and Samir: Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Us, when we look at our business, it's always kind of worked where I'm more of the business revenue partnerships and Collins more of the creative director. And that's naturally been how it works. It's kind of funny that I'm the one that went to film school and he's not, but that's just how we operate.”
2022-07-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Colin and Samir: Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everyone's focus to online creators. And a lot of people became online creators during 2020. A lot of people became more interested in online creators. And it was just this moment in time where that audience just expanded in 2020.”
2022-07-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Colin and Samir: Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It wasn't a kind of decision that we sat together and made. What happened was during the time when we were trying to figure out what to make content about, we would have these conversations over coffee about the world of creators and this community that we were a part of. And one day we just thought, what if we just turned these conversations we're having in the morning into videos? And so we started writing scripts about our thoughts on the creator space, different creators. And over time, what we started to recognize was that we were doing the same thing we did in lacrosse. We were making content for the community that we were a part of, telling stories about the people in that community. You know, as the pandemic happened, everyone's attention started to shift to online media. It's where the global conversation was happening. We had a universal experience and a universal topic that shifted.”
2022-07-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Colin and Samir: Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The years between 2016 and 2020. Would have to be some of the most discouraging of our careers. It was not because YouTube was oversaturated. It was because we couldn't figure out what we wanted to make. There's this great quote about making movies that talks about how making a movie isn't the hard part. It's figuring out what to make the movie about. That's the hard part. And that was our experience. We were making all types of different content. We made a show called What's Good about Good News. We started to make our own skateboards and made a show about making skateboards. We were just trying to find ourselves online. And all the while, again, like Colin mentioned, struggling to build a business and doing odd jobs to get enough cash to keep going. And we described this term burnout as creative output without direction. And that's what we experienced.”
2022-07-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Colin and Samir: Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Us going to our favorite coffee shop. But quickly, we started to recognize that the audience that we had built in lacrosse was not that interested in us talking about Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles. And we were where we thought we were starting from a position of we've built an audience, we've done this for four and a half years on YouTube. We were actually starting from zero. And I think that was one of the most startling experiences to go through.”
2022-07-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Colin and Samir: Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's only a few times in your life and in your entrepreneurial journey where you're lucky enough to be as naive as we were in that moment. And the reason I say that is because we had for some reason no fear around the fact that we had no idea. And we stepped out even my dad and my family was very confused why we left. You know, it was almost, it sounded like it should have been exactly what we wanted to do. We were getting paid really well to make lacrosse videos and sports videos, but we just knew that we wanted more. We wanted more, a more diverse set of storytelling. We wanted to explore ourselves differently. And so we didn't really have any ideas. And we just started making whatever was interesting to us. Our first video on the channel is just an exploration of the street Fairfax in LA. The next video after that, I think is.”
2022-07-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Colin and Samir: Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was money people who had done this before or something like it, not on YouTube, but had done something like it, media expertise, and community. We got to be a part of a group of people who wanted this reality of sports networks or the modern day sports networks existing online and recognizing that niche communities had value on the internet.”
2022-07-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Colin and Samir: Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. It was an aqua hire. You know, there was a cache component of them purchasing RIP and the network, but the main part of it was that we got jobs.”
2022-07-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Colin and Samir: Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there was a moment where I did try and raise money. And I got on the phone with an investor that I connected with through my brother. And he had experience. He played lacrosse. He had experience working in sports broadcast. And he was working at a big venture capital company. And I got on the phone with him and I started to pitch him what we were doing. And about 90 seconds in to my pitch, I said, we're broadcasting games. And he stopped me and he said, I want to stop you right there. You just use the word broadcast. I've worked in broadcast. What you're doing is not broadcast. What you're doing is making home movies. And to be honest, you're not that good at it. This is not a business. This is a hobby.”
2022-07-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Colin and Samir: Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did not raise money. And the reason that I positioned it as an internship to Colin was because we had no money really. You know, the money that we had was partially my savings account. And that went a lot quicker than I thought. I had written out a financial model and a business plan around the lacrosse network. And, you know, I had this per video budget that was around $4,000 when we first started. Now we never spent that money because I showed it to someone who actually worked at YouTube. And I was trying to get them to get excited about our idea. And he was like, you're going to spend $4,000 of video. You're going to go out of business. That is not what YouTube is. A YouTube video has to cost you zero dollars. And you have to be able to do it over an extremely long period of time.”
2022-07-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Colin and Samir: Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was times and days where we would get a call that there was a game going on in San Diego at 5 o'clock and it was 11 a.m. in LA and we would just get our gear together and drive and go film it. But as we started to recognize we needed more content, we started to license content. And over the course of the next couple years, it went from one channel to 60 different channels about lacrosse.”
2022-07-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Colin and Samir: Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I had another co founder with me, and both him and I, we felt like we could do the broadcast side, but we knew we were missing this storytelling side. So I was very convinced that it was the stories about the people who played the game that were going to take us to the next level. And Colin was the guy to help us do that.”
2022-07-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Colin and Samir: Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's exactly right. That's exactly what I did. And I think I was met with a I'm good, don't worry. Like I'll just do this on my own or something around Colin not being that excited.”
2022-07-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Colin and Samir: Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The video was a trailer. It was a trailer for a show that Colin created called Club Ball. And it explored what it was like to play Club Lacrosse at the University of Colorado. And at the time, what I was uploading was highlights, full games, some news and analysis, but this was the first piece of storytelling I had seen in Lacrosse, where it was more about the players than it was about the game. It was a story about young people coming together and trying to achieve something. At least that's how it was portrayed in the trailer. And it just so happened they played lacrosse. And immediately I knew it was the type of content we needed to make this network work.”
2022-07-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Colin and Samir: Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I graduated. I was paying my bills by working at the front desk of a hotel. But when I would get off work, I would go film.”
2022-07-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Colin and Samir: Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but I would say, unlike Samir, I was not a film major. But once I graduated, I wanted to be a filmmaker. So for me, the good story that I knew I had access to was my college lacrosse team. So I had just graduated, bought a camera, and started a web series about the team.”
2022-07-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Colin and Samir: Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. I spun up a YouTube channel. I thought about it as the NFL network for lacrosse. And by no means did I have the financing to do that, but I had a camera. I had a laptop, and I had a bunch of ideas.”
2022-07-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Colin and Samir: Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We met on the internet. We met on YouTube. I had graduated college and I grew up playing lacrosse and I had this idea that I felt like the sport lacked coverage, it lacked media. There wasn't a way to connect with other people who were playing the sport. So, you know, I was a film major and I wanted to use my film degree in one way or the other. And I tried my hand at Hollywood and didn't really like the experience of working in Hollywood. So decided to just take matters into my own hand and film the community that I was passionate about that I wanted to tell stories about.”
2022-07-21 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ICYMI... HIBT Lab! Colin and Samir: Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT