YouSaid · the spoken record

Dhar Mann

lines on the record: 106
first: 2024-04-29
most recent: 2024-04-29
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

“Nobody would have greenlighted. Exactly. And, you know, being able to do what my community loves and what I love doing every day is a blessing that I definitely appreciate. It's what drives me every day. And I've never lost sight that you can make mistakes in life and you can learn from them. You can overcome hardships. And most importantly, you can turn your life around. And that's what I did with my life. I'm not going to stop helping other people try to do that with theirs.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't take this success that I've been able to experience for granted because the videos, they wouldn't be able to exist without platforms like Facebook and YouTube. In the past, if you wanted to bring a film to life, you'd have to go get a big media networks approval for everything. And do you think there was any chance that they'd agree to greenlight my idea? An entrepreneur with no film experience and a troublesome past wanting to inspire others with life lessons.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you think about the journey, you're almost 40, and not that long ago you were at really a rock bottom professionally, personally, your reputation was in tatters. You made a bunch of mistakes. And now you are overseeing one of the largest digital studios YouTube studios, whatever, Facebook out there, right? I mean, with hundreds of thousands of square feet of sets, and now a guy like you can come out of nowhere and build a really significant studio. I mean, when you think about it, you put a ton of work into this and methodical work, but how much of where you are now do you think is because of work and how much do you think is because you were lucky?”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we've had really interesting conversations with different streaming platforms. So I think a world in which you can see Darman content outside of YouTube and social media is going to happen sooner than later. And even on the big screen. And so as those opportunities arise and our team gets bigger, I definitely think we're going to be working with all folks from Hollywood. And then at the start of next year, we're also taking our content on the road and we're doing in-person Broadway style shows.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“us to continue on digital budgets, but we do have ambitions to go beyond just digital later this year. We are planning on syndicating our content on traditional media platforms.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That experience was definitely a tough one. What happened was in the beginning of 2023, there was a small subset of our actors that were unhappy and they felt they wanted to be compensated more than the business could support. So some of the things that were being asked for. We upped our actor pay rates. We implemented minimum day rates”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And now, by the end of 2024, we should be at 200 team members. And a lot of folks we've hired, it's incredible. They've come from Disney, Universal, Pixar, top media companies in the world.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct. So just to kind of fast forward to where things are today, we've outgrown our space again, our three studios and the house that we have. We're now looking at a five plus acre campus to expand into. Wow. We currently have eight production crews, but before the end of the year, we're going to take that to 16 production crews. And that's going to allow us to put out 25 new long form videos a week.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the beginning, we almost did. But ultimately, I just thought the regret of me selling was much more likely than me feeling good about making that decision. And I'm someone who takes such the long view in the creator economy. I feel like we're just getting started. We have new content divisions that are launching. We're going into different genres. All these different aspects where we're barely scratching the surface. So ultimately I decided to turn it down.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A good rule of thumb is a creator will make around $5,000 per every one million views. And that's the reason why we have to operate on digital budget. So we have to break, you know, I would say like 5 million views. Just to break even.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's still 97 through ad revenue coming from Facebook and YouTube. And the remaining Delta is us having brand sponsorships in certain videos.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of different decisions, I created a domino effect. Reuben and Laura had to relieve themselves from certain responsibilities to take over mine, which meant more mid-level managers had to step up to the plate. And it helped be a big step for us to create brand new content divisions. That did not rely on me and also develop our own in house agency.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But these kept happening every couple hours for a month straight. And so all my problems were stemming from me not eating right, not sleeping right, not having work-life balance. So going into 2023, I knew I was going to completely change my lifestyle. I started removing a lot of my responsibilities from work. And you know how stressful it is when you start removing yourself from any sort of decisions. But fortunately, I had Laura and Ruben, the two people that were there from the very beginning, to step up to the plate. Laura took over all of human resources and finance, and Ruben took over all of production and operations. But the craziest thing happened. While the first half of 2023, the business really slowed down. The second half of 2023, the studio grew faster than ever. So it turned out by removing myself from lock.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, as you can probably tell by everything I've said, I've always had this insane work ethic and I was neglecting my health. I was neglecting my family. I had no life outside of work. I was so obsessive that there was no convincing me of anything else until COVID hit my whole family on Christmas Eve 2022. So all of us were sick. So I remember Christmas night. I was working through my sickness on my laptop and out of nowhere my breath starts changing. It felt like it was becoming hard for me to breathe. Now my heart starts beating really fast. I had to close my laptop, call the doctor and after explaining all the symptoms, the doctor says, he's just having a panic attack.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But to put in context of traditional media, that's still teeny tiny, right? We operate on tight digital budgets, far from traditional media complexity and staff sizes. The downside was that it started taking twice as long for each crew to make one video. So we again had to double the number of crews we had from two to four. And to keep up with that growth, now we need to hire specialized people and build. Just like you see at Universal Studio sets, which you've seen, guy. So that gave us around 30 film sets in total. And then we get into different languages. Am I localizing our content? It added around another 250 million monthly views. And we got really good at also repurposing our content. So we started posting our videos on every social platform.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That happened in 2022. In 2021, what I didn't expect is while COVID had a negative impact to the cosmetics industry, it had a huge positive impact for the media industry because so many people were at home watching video. So that year, our YouTube got to 500 million monthly views and our Facebook was still getting around a billion monthly views. So in 2022, we start putting out four 20 minute videos a week compared to four eight minute videos. But since the videos, we're getting more complex with longer runtimes, we had to hire more people. In my apartment, we operated two-person crews, but now we needed five person crews.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, that's the reason I mention this is because that became a very important part in being able to scale our studio. So once I made all these changes, I focused more on young people. That's when I started really caring about YouTube and our YouTube exploded. So we went from hardly getting any views our first couple years to 2021 finishing as the number two creator on the platform globally and number one in scripted.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct. And that was all based on looking at YouTube analytics. And so I was humbled really quickly when I saw our audience retention would tank as soon as I would come on to tell the moral. So I literally had to fire myself. And that's one of the great things about being a digital media creator is that it doesn't take us two years to work on a film like traditional film companies. I could write a script and one week later, two weeks later, put it out and have real-time feedback from my audience so I could see what they like, what they don't like, and then I could double down on what's working and cut out what's not.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“During this time when I started leaning into YouTube, I made one more important decision. So you know how earlier I was saying I would pop on at the end of each video.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Believe the stat is half of YouTube's US viewership is now on TVs and YouTube gets more views than any other single network or streaming service, even more than Disney+ or Netflix. So the creator industry is experiencing this rapid growth. It's an incredible opportunity. And it is very scalable.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, there are so many people that said YouTube is just a fad, Facebook is just a fad. And that was a worry of mine. So every year I treated it as if that may be my last year experiencing any sort of success. But YouTube is now the most watch outlet on TV.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was not thinking about any other revenue source. I was only focused on creating content for Facebook and YouTube and our business completely relied on us being able to generate revenue from those ads”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why we have subtitles on every video. And a lot of folks don't speak English as their native language. So because of the simplistic language, it actually helps us cater to a broader audience. So now that is designed on purpose. But as soon as it started hitting on YouTube, that's when I realized the next iteration has to be me writing scripts with YouTube in mind. And then this is where we go from three minute videos to eight minute videos because our audience on YouTube wanted longer content.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a great point. So, in my experience, the more successful anyone becomes at anything, there's always a certain amount of criticism that you're going to receive. And the important part is that you listen to your audience that you're trying to serve. I saw a stat early on that a good percentage of our audience watches without sound on. Because again, these are living on social platforms.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In 2020, I think we were bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars from Facebook. It was around six figures a month. On Facebook”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I remember after we recorded a bunch of school videos, I didn't want to post any of them because I thought they would all flop on Facebook. And they did. But Tony, my head of social, messaged me and said, even though Facebook views were low, the first school-based video we did was our top performing video on YouTube. Our videos were starting to get hundreds of thousands of views there. And that's when it hit me. Young people watch YouTube.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I saw the bid for all six sets, I think it was around $250,000, which I didn't have. So I asked, what were the cheapest three sets to build? And the contractor told me it was the two apartments in the school. So I said, all right, let's start with just building those three sets. But since I had this school set now, I had to come up with storylines for it. That's the only reason that I decided to write my first stories catered towards young people simply because I had the set.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was an empty warehouse. We create this floor plan for all the sets we'd build. I think there were six sets that could fit in the space I had allocated for ourselves.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Made the decision to commit to a commercial building hard, but I decided to take a leap of faith and I found this gym that was going out of business right next to the Burbank airport that was trying to sublease their space out. So the building was around 40,000 square feet, a big space.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So then 2020 came, and that year changed everything because COVID hit. We're still filming most of our productions in my apartment, but we'd also just started renting film sets to do some of our stories. But when the lockdown was announced, suddenly it became impossible for us to rent film sets. So I had to make a big decision. Was it time to rent an actual production studio to operate out of We weren't even two years in, and I had people in my ear telling me that the success wouldn't last, social media, so finicky influencers don't have a long shelf life, Facebook is a dying platform. Plus the cosmetics industry was getting hit hard by COVID. that business started declining. Then add on top to that that I was also about to be a dad, which adds financial pressure. So there were just a lot of things on my mind.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But by October 2019, three months later, we hit 2 billion views. And then two months later, by November, we hit 3 billion views.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And one day he asked me, Dar, do you think we should post the videos on YouTube? And I thought about it and said, I guess, why not? I didn't think anything of YouTube at this time. I was 100% focused on Facebook. So when we started posting on YouTube, my videos would get around 1,000 views, which was low for me because my Facebook videos were now all getting millions of views. So for two years that happened. From the middle of 2018, when we started on YouTube, all the way to 2020, they stayed at around a thousand views. So I completely disregarded YouTube. But on Facebook, we were experiencing rocket ship growth. So we kept up four postings a week all the way through 2019. And by July that year, we hit 1 billion views. So it took us just over a year from starting to hit. That milestone”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So every year, I would say I started diverting a little bit less time to the cosmetics business and a little bit more time to the studio. But keep in mind, I'm not making any money at this point. So I'm still relying on the cosmetics business in order to pay for all the content that I was creating. But at this time, our videos are starting to get more and more popular. They were getting shared by thousands of people. Each one was consistently getting millions of views around the same time. I remember randomly checking my bank account. And when I look into my bank balance, I saw there was a Facebook deposit for like $20,000 or something. So I was shocked. I hadn't even been paying attention to my earnings. So once I saw that deposit, that's when it made me think, hey, maybe this idea is scalable”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct. I experimented a couple of times in my history with not having the good guy win and my community did not like it when the good guy does not win in the end.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was writing everything. We were writing all on topics that were universal truths that everybody could agree on, which was very important to me because I didn't want to write about anything that was controversial or divisive. So no politics, no religion, no swearing, no explicit content. Everything from day one was meant to appeal to a broad audience of all ranges. Because in my videos, unlike in the real world, the good person always wins in the end and the bad person always learns their lesson. So I stayed consistently putting out two videos. For their lines”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It just struck a chord with stay at home moms who happened to be on Facebook and spending time on Facebook. So it was the right message for the right platform on a message that wasn't very prevailing on social media at the time. And after I had that viral hit, that's when I got even more motivated, especially after reading all the comments So many people were saying my video brought them to tears, stay at home wives were saying that they felt seen and appreciated. I started gaining a lot of new followers at that point. But it wasn't until I had a handful of more viral videos that I got the notification my profile qualified for Facebook ads in my videos. And I think the first month it made around $160 or something. So it was so small that I never thought too much of it or even looked at my dashboard.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct. And sure enough, that video within a few hours had gotten thousands of shares and over a million views. And I'll never forget it was posted on August 30th, 2018. And today, that video is gone to receive over 200 million views.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then after she cleaned everything, the kid made a big mess once again. And she didn't have time to clean it. So he looks at this notebook and he realizes how hard her day actually was. And then I would come on at the end and say immoral about how stay at home moms actually have it a lot harder than people may realize and why we need to appreciate them.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's a husband that comes home. He's dressed in a suit and he's tired from a long day of work. And as soon as he walks in the kitchen, his wife, who's hard at work making his favorite food, is excited to see him. But he looks around and he's clearly upset. There's this big mess that he's looking at. And he goes, this place is a mess. What have you been doing all day just sitting around? And she is absolutely heartbroken. She grabs this notebook that is on the counter and throws it in the garbage can and walks out of the room. So he grabs the notebook out of the garbage and looks at it and it's a to-do list of everything that she did that day. And so then we rewind in time to show what she was doing. She was doing the laundry, cleaning the dishes, taking care of the kid.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It only got slightly more views than my animation format. So at this point, I couldn't help but feel really discouraged that after trying all these different formats, none of them were working. Plus, remember, I was still running a full-time cosmetics company. So, I wasn't sleeping a lot. I wasn't getting to spend time with Laura. I wasn't really doing anything besides work. So I told her that my next video I was going to post was going to be my last video. It was another low budget live action video using actors I found on Craigslist and me narrating. The topic was a husband taking his stay-at-home wife for granted.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The issue is just an employee or a friend And I stand in the camera frame and I narrate the scene using them, quote unquote, my actors. That was my first attempt at creating what I now know to be called live-action filmmaking. So, I excitedly posted that video. And while I love to sit here and tell you that was the one that went viral, it didn't.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, just to give this some context, you are standing in a kitchen. I think this is your kitchen, your apartment. In front of your brother in law, who's just looking at his phone, there's a woman, and who's the woman in the video?”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Goes off, and then I go up to my brother in law, this girl, and I say, Hey, are you guys okay with being in this video? And thankfully they agreed. And I told him, just keep doing what you're doing. You know, my brother-in-law to continue being on his phone and the girl to continue to have her back towards him.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And my face again would pop on at the end and tell the moral of the story. So when I did that using the cartoons, now my videos went from 500 views to 1,000 views. So that's when I did one final iteration. So one day my brother-in-law was visiting from San Diego while I was writing a script. And the story I was working on was about cheating in a relationship. I was trying to showcase how cheating can start off as a small, seemingly innocent act such as a guy liking his ex-girlfriend's Instagram post behind his wife's back. I look over in coincidentally my brother in law is on his phone sitting by a girl who has his back towards him and a light bulb.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My ideas initially started off just inspired by my own life experience. So if you look at my earlier videos, it was more so messages that I needed to tell my younger self. My next iteration was I realized instead of just giving life advice, if I told a story and gave a moral at the end of it, then those videos started performing a little better. So instead of getting 100 views, maybe they would get to 500 views. And since I was telling original stories, I couldn't just rely on stock footage. I now had these cartoons that I would pay some international company around $200 or so to develop. So very low budget animations. And then I would tell voiceover over the cartoon.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I'm just grateful that I was at a stage in my life in my 30s where I was able to keep pushing past that. Even though I wasn't getting views, I still committed myself to posting two videos a week no matter what. And that consistency was key because you have good days, you have bad days when you're an entrepreneur.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you make this video, and by the way, there's a style to the way you're talking, it's very simple, short, enunciated, slow. Was a part of you worried about being judged or like people like, who is this guy? Or does this sound so dumb? I don't know. Was a part of you at all worried about that?”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. So I sat on my living room couch and he would fill him and edit the videos. Now even though my video was scripted in only three minutes long, it took me hundreds of takes to say my lines because I kept messing up. So all those takes later, I was finally satisfied enough with my first video. I posted on Facebook and I decided to post it on my birthday. That was almost six years ago now. So May 29th, 2018. After I post it, I refreshed and refreshed thinking I'd get millions of views. It never even broke 100 views. I thought there was a problem with the Facebook algorithm at first. That's how delusional I was.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The latter. I never thought this would go further than my living room couch because it all started with just me hiring one person. His name is Reuben Ortiz and he was 22 years old at the time.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I wasn't confident in my own abilities. So I told her, no, I can't. I'm in my 30s. People on social media are so much younger than me. So I basically told her every reason why this wouldn't work. But she kept on pressuring me to do this. So after a while, I said, You really think I could make videos as good as this? She responds and says, no, I think you could do them better. And in no way am I saying that my videos are better than anyone else's. But she just knew that that was exactly what I needed to hear. To get me going. And sure enough it was. It got me going. So I started making videos.”
2024-04-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT