Building An Audience of 20 Million In 1 Year - Masterclass with Jake Fellman

when you see someone successful you see what they're doing that makes them successful and oftentimes it's something that has very high quality output you can't make good artwork or you can't make a good social media video until you've made a lot of bad social media videos and the first project that i sold for this one company i sold it for a thousand dollars and it was like a one minute animation like took me a whole month to do and so and then i turned around in the next month i was like all right i need to figure out like how i can make this sustainable so do you have days when you're like you know what i'm just not super amped up today and if you do what do you tell yourself how do you feel how do you process that when i decided like okay this is gonna be my thing this is like my lifeblood that's gonna allow me to not get a job at a marketing thing i know how much of a blessing my career is and i overall really enjoy a lot of things about what i do that make it worthwhile being a perfectionist is going to be your downfall if you're trying to turn your passion or whatever it is into a social media thing or a full-time freelance thing and so although all my stuff looks pretty polished it still has that same mindset this scrappy mentality of like i'm gonna get it out the door whether or not it's something that i'm super passionate about in the moment i'm excited to talk to you jake because you have posted some serious numbers on your social media platforms you're smashing you're crushing it and you're so so young i'm very impressed by everything that you've done the other thing that i'm really impressed by and something that i want to champion is that as i understand it you start out your journey to build a portfolio to get work but now creating content is your primary source of income so you're now fully part of this whole creative economy you no longer have a boss you're self-directed you're an artist and hats off to you so in case people don't know who you are can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about who you are yeah so um i'm a 3d artist is the easiest way to kick it off and like you said i am a full-time social media person now i got my start doing 3d art as a freelance gig a couple years back and as my social media started taking off i switched over to doing social media full time so now i'm sitting at around 10 million on youtube and 11 million on tick tock but both of those figures have really come about in the past year and so it's like i've only been doing social media full time for one year and looking back i mean if we go back to january last year i was maybe around 1 million on youtube or 2 million but if you go back even just two months earlier i was at like 10 000 subscribers only and so it's really been like a 15th month journey to get me to this spot and so it's been a rocket ship of a ride wow okay so i was really happy when we were posting like 30 40 000 new subs a month i'm like this is freaking incredible and you're up there in the hundreds of thousands with a million subs a month and it's very hard for people to kind of process that because think about that like how long would it take a person to grow their social account on youtube to get to a million subs which is an achievement in itself and you're doing numbers like that a month a month and i'm looking at your youtube channel right now i'm going to brag on on your behalf okay i'm looking at your videos and if you go to jake's youtube channel um you're going to see his videos if you sort them by numbers of viewed your highest viewed video is a 19 second clip it's 212 million views it's a short i believe right is all your content shorts right now yeah i don't have any long form stuff on my youtube channel but short also in that they're vertically formatted under a minute long yes okay so look at this it's not an anomaly because he has multiple videos i don't even know how far i have to scroll down that have millions or 100 million plus views these are staggering numbers and do you mind me asking how old you are yeah i just turned 24. last week it hurts me a little bit i could be old enough to be your father my my oldest son is only six years younger than you so you are by all accounts completely crushing and living the dream do you mind if i just ask you some really kind of just business questions are you pretty transparent about what you do and how you do what you do and everything i'm transparent about everything but in terms of like specific figures i haven't shared anything in terms of like what my actual revenue is okay but i'm i'm more than happy to speak generally about it little known fact is actually against youtube's terms of service to share revenue figures and so yeah and so i have i have like a team at youtube and they've been like well you could a lot of people do but like on the back end in my impression it's a little bit frowned upon so yeah i haven't shared anything specifically but i'm more than happy to talk about it generally first of all i just want to comment really quickly because i also got this thing this very unexpected surprise from youtube and i saw that you posted on instagram your nft so let's talk about that a little bit so they sent some creators i don't know how many creators they sent it to these intangible sculpts and i see that you shared it on instagram do you have a crypto wallet no i don't i haven't even claimed it yet but like it's weird because i i support crypto and like uh web3 and stuff i'm like all following a bunch of people who like speak about it all the time but i haven't like really gotten into it personally yet it's a time constraint for myself i like to think but yeah well you're not alone because i haven't gotten into it either i still have my my box here and i need to claim it so i my son my 15 year old son has a crypto wallet already i don't that's just letting you know how the world is working right now yeah okay so i i presume they they've sent it to creators i think uh who've been pretty active with shorts i'm not gonna make that assumption i don't know because there wasn't a detailed note that said anything but one thing i will say for for for me at least and i want to know how you feel about this i think youtube is such a special and unique platform that they will assign an advisor to to help you grow your channel and to give you support and to to make gestures like this to send you things and i i mean what's your take on it what's your feeling towards uh youtube specifically as a social platform yeah it's it's the absolute best i sent a when i hit 10 million this past or two weeks ago now i sent an email to just like all my contacts or people who have like touched my career in unique ways that work at youtube and after i compiled the list it was like an email list of 14 people and i was like how blessed am i to have connection to that many people who work at headquarters who are like actively trying to support me to be the best i can it's incredible and so it's like as a as someone who's doing social media full-time of course it's nice to have somebody to email and just say oh i have a question about how do i start up a secondary account or do i need to be branded in this way or you know it's nice to ask questions but of course like i do not expect to receive end-of-year gifts like that and so it's like icing on the cake i don't need that but yeah it is uh certainly a special place and it really makes me feel valued you know as a contributor same here and i think there are many platforms that one can create on we know that if you have the short form vertical format video you can post it on tick tock and you can also do instagram reels but there's a special place in my heart for youtube because of how they create or how they deal with and the relationships with creators i think that's really really unique and i hope more platforms will do this and respect that there's it's a lot of work to actually to create content on a consistent basis now for people who aren't familiar with the kind of shorts you create can you describe it yeah um so the layman's term for the software i use i always say it's the same software that disney and pixar use that gives a little bit of context stylistically maybe to what i'm making so it's like animated characters and i really focus on doing pop culture and video games and so i create you know it's stylistic as in it doesn't really look exactly like the games typically do um so it has my own artistic take on it but um yeah they're really snappy most of them are actually even under 20 seconds long and you know lately i've been doing a lot of horror content but in the past i've done like a lot of snappy comedy stuff physical comedy sometimes if that gives a little bit more context but yeah i don't know is that what you're looking for yeah yeah absolutely i'll try my best to add on top of that based on the things that i've seen and please feel free to correct me if i don't have this right for the most part they look like holy cg environments that are bordering now sometimes photo real there's very dramatic lighting in your horror series when i'm looking at it and there's there's this character which feels familiar yet unfamiliar it's like this furry creature with really long exaggerated limbs a really happy looking smile until the creature opens its mouth and it's got all these jagged teeth in it so it's funny and scary at the same time so you've got this weird uh appeal i think where it's like i want to be scared but not so scared that i'm worried about my life so first question for you is it all cg or is there some compositing done with live action oh it's it's completely cg okay i've thought many times about getting like a rococo motion capture suit to make things a little bit quicker but um just with the way that i work it just makes sense for me to keyframe everything so everything is like manually done every arm movement is like keyframe frame keyframed so again since this is kind of like an audio platform i want to describe to you a little bit so if you imagine like monsters inc and sully is i believe the k is it solely the the blue well actually before you go on this the game that the most recent series that you're describing here is actually a video game so it's not of my own creation yeah and so it's still along that franchise that i don't own and the game is called poppy playtime and so some people may recognize that name but it's very niche okay very good i'm glad you disclosed that because i'm not familiar with that but it's just like this blue feathered furry creature which if you know anything about computer rendering hair and fur it's pretty computationally intensive to do and you're building these characters in 3d and they're rigged with skeletons and you're sitting there animating each and every part every primary secondary and even tertiary animation right and you're dealing with lighting and camera movements so there's a lot of work so on average i think you said like you spend like a full day making a 15 second animation and it takes hours to render these things out is that right yeah exactly okay so when we're talking about building content this is like a full-time morning to night endeavor for you on a daily basis right absolutely well in this past couple months i've actually been doing like every other day because doing a full video like this even though it's i always feel like a little pathetic when i say it out loud but like making a 15 second video sometimes takes two or three full days of work and i've kind of come off of the daily grind because i've made it to my milestones that i've been reaching for and there was a while where i would just like get up at six and just like work for 12 hours and then set it to render and then sleep and then when it's done rendering in the morning do it all over again and so now i'm kind of relaxed a little bit not that i'm like a jaded old 3d modeler but because i've only been doing this for a year but i think with the success a little bit i've been able to be like okay i can like eat lunch now yeah you know just chill out a little bit but so i do even spend multiple days making some of these pretty much my my practice is just get them out as fast as i can and so when you see two days in between it's like well it's because i'm spending a lot of time on it it's not because i'm hanging out on the beach yeah i want to talk to you a little bit more about the creative process because even every third day think about he's making a 20-second fully animated 3d film every single or every other third or fourth day that is a lot that pace is incredible forget about every day just even once a week is a lot so take me through your creative process how does an idea begin and take me through the the major steps that you go through well um i'd say first up is like getting the right idea right and so and everybody always asks me that's like one of the main questions that i get quite frequently is like how do you come up with your ideas and my answer is like honestly i don't really know where they always come from and sometimes there's like direct inspiration from other creators right so i follow a plethora of people who who inspire me and when i was doing the minecraft stuff specifically i did 100 part series on minecraft a lot of that is like following trends and seeing okay what are the other minecrafters doing right now and with the horror stuff um there still are a few people who do similar content online but it certainly is um difficult to come up with ideas regardless of what sort of concept you're revolving it around and so i'd say typically it comes from a shower thought or sort of like my own experience in game these are all mostly video game related content so my own experience in game or something i've seen someone else do but there is really no straight answer i go on a lot of walks and so when i'm walking around i'm thinking i dedicate a lot of time to creative thinking like that's one of the biggest well not no it's not one of the biggest parts of my job but i'd say on average it takes me an hour to two hours a day of like just sitting down and kind of like closing my eyes or having a cup of coffee and like only thinking about what am i going to make today and so it's kind of weird when i'm just like sitting there with my eyes closed and i've been at home for the last week so i'm like just sitting in the fire i'm like mom don't talk to me i'm trying to think of an idea but yeah there's dedicated creative thinking time in my life and and that's the biggest thing and so sorry for going on a rant about that but after there's the right idea it's pretty much like you sketch out a storyboard pretty typical creative process sketch out a storyboard know what my shots are going to be know what assets are going to be before i go into creating the actual thing and then you know animating it which is like we already discussed hand keyframes and then there's the rendering process and so yeah above and beyond everything else it's like once you have the right idea everything else kind of like is a mechanical process then it's production at that point and you know what to do yeah right yeah and i have the office going on a second monitor it's very like um yeah it's kind of just like they're in your flow stage yeah okay so do you have a large asset library of 3d set pieces furniture objects are you modeling a bunch of stuff as you as you need it um one of the sweetest things about doing this as a full-time job now is that i have a budget for buying stuff which saves so much time like if i was actually modeling every couch that went in the background or designing the buildings myself it'd be easily adds an hour to two hours on the production to actually do all that stuff oftentimes when there's a unique character i do a lot of the character design myself and there are many times where the the scenes can't be just simply bought but a lot of it is kit bashed from turbo squid or cg trader those type of places so i do have a quite a large and growing model set um is that also like with a large and growing shader library so that you can quickly change the way things look yeah absolutely and i i have an immaculate file system let's just say that i learned early on that if things are not labeled in absolutely every single little subfolder it adds so much more time to like trying where was that rock texture right so anyway yeah yeah it's what my my former creative director matthew encino would call digital hygiene you're very clean in how you organize things because anybody that's a prolific content creator knows this already if you haven't paid the price you now know it that if you spend minutes every day looking for an asset that's minutes away from creative thinking working or doing nothing so that's that's the thing that we all learn hopefully earlier in the part of our career you mentioned something you said you have a budget now to buy assets and produce things now in the beginning we talked about how you built a portfolio online to go and get work presumably to get a job at one of these design animation studios right did you actually ever wind up doing freelance design work and animation work yeah i did for a year and a half or so i did just freelance stuff that's like was my my full-time thing mm-hmm you were doing this while you're still in school well and to clarify that building my portfolio or as you mentioned wasn't necessarily to get a job at a advertising agency my goal was i i enjoyed doing the freelance stuff i liked being my own boss and so it wasn't necessary to land a job it was more like to land clients sort of right so there are showcases for your skill set right yes exactly okay um so were you freelancing while still in school because i'm trying to get the time here yeah um so basically i started freelancing my the summer after my junior year in college and then um i had so much success with it and i had clients that were like well we still have work for you regardless of whether you're not going into your senior year and so i just continued working with people sort of juggling my schoolwork and my clients you know at a balanced rate right and then by the time i was ready to graduate i already had several people who were like on my line ready to go with work and so i did that for i i want to say like eight months or so i did it for the whole year right and there was all that coded stuff going on too so it's like all my school went online so i was like equally spending time doing freelance and um school work to the point where i was like i was just ready to do full time freelance by the time i graduated so yeah it wasn't like it wasn't super long but it was certainly i would like to think that if i'd never did social media i would have survived as a freelance person yeah i think you would have so were you doing similar things were you doing modeling and animation or something different yeah it was similar in the way that it was a one-man band so i was doing all the modeling texturing animation rendering at that time working completely from my macbook which like now is like i can't believe that i ever did any of that for my macbook in the first place but yeah it was it was one man band all the way through so okay so for most people they actually never break this kind of orbit i get it first in the traditional um linear path is you you're at school you do a couple of freelance gigs and then you finish school and then you do a lot of freelance work and you post some things on social but that's the loop that people get stuck in or that's the cycle that they are happiest in i shouldn't say stuck so you're trying to finish school and also doing freelance work which to me is like trying to juggle one too many things did you feel tired stressed out burnt out trying to like finish school and also doing freelance work and what compelled you to finish school when you were getting freelance work as as a as a student i had my schedule lined up pretty well whereas like my senior classes weren't the most difficult and so i kind of had known for a while that you know my senior year wasn't going to be my hardest year and so with that and with everybody going online i had two professors actually just say okay we're not doing finals online and the grade which you had the grade and when kovid went online they're like we're done so part of it's that and i think i was so passionate about doing the work too the freelance stuff that it never really bugged me too much like spending a couple extra hours every day like at my computer and it's not like i was doing full time it's not like i was a full-time freelancer right there's balance there and all my clients were well aware that i was a student too so they're like well you know cut him some slack if he has finals week i i see that on your about page that you studied marketing and that seems quite different than what you're doing so did you is this something that you taught yourself to do yes i'm completely self-taught in the 3d world the story is actually kind of funny at the end of my junior year i was trying so hard to get a marketing internship and for the longest time i thought that i was going to be working at a clothing company i like clothing a lot and i feel like it the way i always think about clothing is like it's branding for people and so i think that working in the marketing section of a clothing company would be cool and i had plenty of interviews with like i actually went out to the abercrombie headquarters to interview for stuff and like tommy hilfiger and there was like all these brands that i really liked and i just kept getting rejected from them and so anyway by the end of my junior year it's like well i have nothing going on this summer i might as well do my give it the old college try and sell some animations because this is something that i've been doing on the side just for fun for a while and so what ended up happening that summer is that i landed actually one big client that ended up pushing me beyond my comfort level to the point where it's like all of a sudden it's like okay i promise this deliverable and i need to like get this stuff out the door as professional quality um and so i developed a lot of skills that summer that made me realize like oh i don't need to get a job at a marketing place or i don't need to go work for clothing companies like i have my own little business starting up here funnily enough that's this is the time period when i discovered the future and of your work chris um because it's like i was all of a sudden looking for mentors i'm like how do i sign a contract or what do i value my brand at like is this worth a thousand dollars is it worth ten thousand dollars like what do i price this stuff at and so this is the time period when i was like turn on to your stuff and i like really listen to your podcast like every single day during this time period like just trying to learn about contracts and stuff so yeah as as you're a freelance professional now we have to learn about the business stuff and how to price our work right yeah so for that period in between you doing freelance work before you just went full-time content creator there was that moment where you were working it out did you find uh that you were able to overcome these challenges and these questions that you had yeah but not without mistakes along the way i think my first project that i sold for i won't say who they are but the first project that i sold for this one company i sold it for a thousand dollars and it was like a one minute animation 3d animation which is like drastically undersold myself and it was like took me a whole month to do and so and then i turned around and the next month i was like all right i need to figure out like how i can make this sustainable on one side of the coin it's like when they sold that when they signed that contract i was like called my mom and dad and i was like oh my gosh i'm making a thousand dollars for my artwork you know and then i was like wait a second that's actually not that good of a deal if i'm working on this for a whole month and so then the same client came back to me and wanted more work and i was like well it's going to be a lot more expensive yeah and they were okay with it so yeah there was a lot of hiccups along the way though okay pause right there i think everyone who's listening to the surprise or smile on their faces we've all been there we're doing something we're not i don't know if it's worth anything and then we find a client who's willing to give us real money to do this work and so you're going into it like i'd be happy with a thousand bucks because prior to that it was zero so a thousand compared to zero is a lot did you estimate in your mind at that point it was going to take you a month to do or did you not even think about that i didn't even think about it because here i was like okay well i failed all of my internship applications so it's like if i could make five dollars this year selling my artwork like that would just be cool i was even i just remember even debating behind the scenes like 750 or a thousand dollars i don't know if they're gonna sign and i knew i did something wrong when i sent them the email for a thousand dollars and they immediately like within five minutes send it back signed and i was like okay that was pretty quick like they didn't think about that right they weren't concentrating about should we or and can we afford to do this because you're talking about a hundred dollars uh no not even let me try to figure this out like per second what is that a thousand divided by sixty it's ridiculously low it is ridiculously low um okay so you learned a couple things and then you're like wait a minute this is not gonna work what did you come back at them with in terms of price and they're like yeah we could do that still um then they then they had a set of three more animations ranging from like 30 seconds to a minute and i think we signed a 20 000 deal wow yeah or maybe it was even 25 um but yeah so it still was like not what i started charging later on after i'd been doing it for a long time but i remember i even consulted i had a friend who runs an advertising agency in my college town i asked him about i was like do you think that they're gonna sign this or like do you think i should just maybe bump it up to 1500 or what do you think and he was like yeah you they're definitely not gonna sign it and then i was like well if they don't sign it oh there's a lot of back and forth right and there's a couple people that tell me this isn't gonna work but they did and i i guess part of it too is like they liked what i made the first time around so yeah yeah i want to say this for the future jakes out there in the world that if you're talented and you're doing this you're not quite sure don't call your cousin don't call your friend in your town call me i will tell you how much to charge i'll tell you the market rate and you can adjust based on that okay so this is a huge jump though a thousand to 25 000 in your next gig it tells me a lot of things one you're easy to work with you delivered something of high quality because for them to to agree to pay you not quite 25 x because we're talking about three different video projects here but it's a significant jump up and that means you're probably still under market but how did you feel then because if you're happy to call your mom and say mom i got a thousand bucks and she's like awesome this is amazing and it's not even what you're studying in school so when you got 25 000 and they signed that what was it feel like for you at that point i was jumping around but more than anything it was that like i already briefly mentioned earlier there's an epiphany of like oh i definitely don't need to go work for a clothing company or whatever like i love making art i feel like i'm getting paid to just like play around on my computer and so at that point it's like well i'm gonna do my absolute best at this and then see what we can do to sign the next contract with the same client you know and so it's like let's keep the ball rolling i was super excited about it awesome so when you're a young person and i think what are you are you 23 at this point 22 no oh man i was uh just 21 maybe 21. wow this is yeah uh i don't know it's a few years back i want to say this is after my junior year it's 2019 maybe yeah because i'm getting messed up because you just graduated in 2012 well so i turned yeah so i just turned 24 last week and i've been out of school for two years i don't know it's so hard to do the math on it where like it has made everything make feel like yeah i know what you're saying one of my friends tweeted it's blurs day like we have no idea what day it is anymore okay yeah well you're still in your early 20s yeah and you got this gig for 25 000 bucks and you deliver it everything you get paid what did you spend the money on tell me the first couple of things you bought for yourself with this money in your pocket i didn't i didn't buy anything at all really nothing not a single thing i didn't buy a new watch or a new pair of shoes you monitor new computer new video card nothing really i did not buy a single thing um because i was like now all of a sudden it became my stipend because when i decided like okay this is gonna be my thing this is like my lifeblood that's gonna allow me to not get a job at a marketing thing so i was like this is when i have to make pay my rent next when i graduate so i didn't at that point too you don't know is this a fluke like did i get over my head am i gonna be able to deliver on this stuff and like is anybody ever gonna pay me 25 000 again so for me all of a sudden it became like okay this is the most important thing for me is to just like save this and eat ramen noodles for the first like three months after i graduate because i don't know where it's going so i didn't buy anything and i think sometime in the winter after i had been doing a couple more freelance jobs i bought a new macbook um but it wasn't insanely in expensive or anything like that but it was like okay this is a tool for my business to like be able to but i was still really bare bones on everything in terms of like my things i use for work like i didn't buy even like a new mouse or anything i was like this is working for me now i'm gonna keep it as low-key as possible so you know you're a very mature young man because you're looking at this as long term you made some money you're like this needs to last me from now until when i make my next gig and there's no predictability and i love that you're so disciplined where does this discipline come from um i really i've gotten this question before too actually and i really think that it comes from listening to guys like yourself um gary vaynerchuk too i feel like he's a very polarizing guy but i'm sure if people who listen to the future there's probably some cross over there and just kind of absorbing the aura of you know people who are in the space doing well and i couldn't necessarily point to a specific thing but if there's anything it's like having some people that you look up to that just like are pointing in the right direction so yeah so people are listening to this i just want to be clear about a couple different things i think the thing you're referring to about gary is like he's like you know what move back in with your parents don't spend any money be smart about this money and and don't be don't fall in the trap of what many professional athletes and hip-hop artists do which is they make some money and they spend it all and then five years after they had their moment time in the sun their dead broke each and every single one of them because they go out and buy jewelry they buy cars and buy things they can't afford they pay for their entourage it's a foolish way to spend your money okay so you're doing really well now at some point your your videos start taking off and i'm gonna make this assumption that you're you're because of the numbers that you're posting even though they're shorts because shorts don't earn as much money as medium to long form content that now you're also drawing revenue from youtube adsense is that right it's very very small amount okay it's practically negligible and unless you're at the very top like i'm at the i would say i'm among like the top five or ten short form creators on the platform um unless you are in the very very tippy top it's like you can't count on making any money from that okay this is good to know for everybody listening so you can post huge numbers for shorts but shorts you're not getting a lot of adsense revenue from that and we're seeing the same thing so then this begs the next question then where are you drawing your money from um the short answer is i'm not i don't make a ton of money um to be frank but there is the the uh youtube shorts fun which was recently released i think it's been running now for four months or so five months maybe which is a cap of ten thousand dollars a month which i have not met that cap yet um which again it's like pulling 200 million views a week and not being that cap is sort of a surprise to a lot of people so i'm certain there are a few people who are meeting that or i shouldn't say certain but i'd like to think there are a couple people like lanky box if you're familiar with them they do a lot of short form stuff and there's this other guy named dan rhodes um who pulled even double what i'm doing so yeah i think there probably are people that make that money but frankly i don't make a ton and as far as i'm concerned as long as my rent and my food is paid for i'm happy and my sort of attitude towards it has been like just keep the machine running and there's gonna be a time in my career i have no doubt that i'm gonna be rich one day but i feel like right now i'm not doing any sort of cash grab for that reason and i've done a couple brand deals which also pay the bills nicely and tick tock also has a creator fund so yeah um yeah okay this is really good to know and it's very refreshing so even though you're posting ginormous numbers and depending on which blog you read you're one of the fastest growing content creators on youtube and only to be rivaled by your following on tick tock so i want to talk to you about a couple different things i'm a content creator i'm speaking for our audience and i can choose to create a short form vertical piece of content for instagram for youtube or tiktok if i had to pick one which one would you say for me to work on and concentrate on well it's just it's not a question because you don't have to pick and so if you're asking my opinion of which i like the most i think there's probably more opportunity on youtube for like having the breakout success that i have had but it's such a silly question like there's no circumstance which you are you should ever put forth effort in making a short form vertical video and not have it on every single platform let's talk about this a lot of people call that syndication or content repurposing uh so if you are able to make one piece of content that works with the guidelines for for multiple platforms there is really no reason for you to not do this right to repurpose your content and post on multiple places now i understand that reels does not like it when the tick logo is burned into your clip they will probably push that down an algorithm but since you're creating all this content in an original format as long as it's under i think 60 seconds as long as you use the proper hashtags and you can post on any of your platform you will build your audience the reason why i asked that question though because i noticed there's a huge discrepancy between your followers on instagram to youtube and then tick tock 11 million on tick tock 10 million on youtube and a little over 100 000 on instagram theoretically and you have to tell me using the exact same content what do you think the the issue or the challenge is um so all of my content got it's got it got its kickoff when among us was really big which is a multiplayer game and this was really a big hit in late 2020 and at that time i wasn't committed to doing social media full-time and so my instagram was actually still like very personal at that point in time too and i didn't uh start posting my artwork on instagram until last february so it missed the initial kickoff point that my other channels had because literally both of my channels got their start at the same time with the same content notably with different audiences um i'll circle back to that in a moment but i like to think that the uh one of the main reasons why my instagram didn't take off is because it didn't get started with the same content and at that time too i saw a lot of my videos going viral on other people's stuff um my among us stuff when that was popping off still to this day it has my most views on youtube um but that was really like the kickstart of my stuff um so i'd like maybe that's it but it's just hard to say i think that it's really difficult to push your followers from one place to another the best way to grow a following is to do it organically on the platform itself and so it's taking a little bit more time but i think that it'll eventually catch up okay so i have a question for you because i'm still relatively new to tick tock and you're right like we we tend to create content somewhere we get familiar with the platform how it wants us to label to add tags or titles a certain way and each platform is a little bit different and so you have to kind of switch gears so i'm noticing wild swings from one platform to the next something on instagram will grow really fast in the first couple of days and then it'll taper off and that's it and and youtube might take days or weeks for it to then find its audience and then it spikes and one of the reasons why i love youtube so much is because it's not so ephemeral there's this evergreen quality to it that if it's a good piece of content if you title it appropriately that an audience will eventually find it and you can pick this weird second wind third win and then you can just take off like a rocket ship so what have you learned in posting this repurposing the same piece of content on multiple platforms what does each platform want you to do if you have any insight there that would be really helpful um i think that a lot of people get caught up in the idea that they're very different and this is a personal opinion right but i think that at their heart they're all very similar in that they're just trying to connect the people on the other side of the screen to a video that they want to watch and so they do it through the algorithms that they all have and the you know they all have their own little life cycle which we could certainly debate about like you said youtube has a much longer tail than other platforms but i think at their heart like your goal shouldn't be like okay do i need to have a different title on my tech talk versus on my youtube caption or whatever i think the the heart of it needs to be like how do i make just the best less than 60 second video that i can and trust that the platform is going to do its best with its own algorithm to find that audience and so in terms of optimization and stuff among the platforms like they work differently sometimes but they really are trying to do the same thing right well see the reason why i asked that question because i'm in a more nuanced place where i create all kinds of different kind of content because i try and write guides to help people through this process as far as i can tell with youtube it's your title and your thumbnail and i don't even bother with with hashtags or meta tags anything like that except for shorts you have to have the word shorts and as a hashtag for it to work and then on instagram people are saying you know it's like six to ten hashtags and then so i got a little bit more work to do and then i'm adding captions which i don't do for youtube it's kind of weird like what each one wants and i really believe in this and that even though it's the same piece of content you still have to post it in a native way and speak in the native language of that platform because you're training that algorithm to understand and recognize this piece of content and i think your shorts work really well because there's no dialogue as far as i can tell it's it's a cool visual you're you're tapping into different trends so you're being powered by a trend and also the the kind of interesting stories and the sometimes funny dark comedy that you're able to do and so it has this kind of much broader universal appeal that has a much higher chance of going viral than saying talking about here's how you price a project which is a very narrow audience so i have to understand and work the algorithm a little bit more and understand what each platform wants yeah and so like like you said i am i'm treated to a little bit of a different well yeah i get pampered a little bit because my stuff is not that niche for the most part and i haven't had to work that hard to distinguish how i'm posting each video i really just slap him up on each thing and that has worked for me and other people may have to work a little bit harder than it so perhaps i'm not the best person to give advice on that but i love your answer your answer is still super awesome because you're like and i believe in this if you make content so good you don't have to worry about what the algorithm is doing at all and i think that's your philosophy i will spend i'm speaking on your behalf here like i would spend 8 10 12 14 24 hours working on something to make one piece of content and that effort shows up in the way that you're rewarded with the audience that you're able to build right exactly okay yeah you said something and i want to circle back to this which is you said i'm confident i'll be rich i'm not worried about it right now yeah okay so i love that confidence what does being rich mean to you it's funny because i'm i'm not a collector of cars i don't have a nice apartment and i don't really necessarily have aspirations to own like a i stout rolex for me rick's rich is like being able to travel without worrying about my work and so there's a whole plethora of things that would have to happen along the lines for that to happen um but also in a lot of ways like i feel like i'm rich already with my following online is like a it's a wealth in and of itself and so yeah it's not always necessarily monetary payoff that i'm looking for and yeah maybe that's why i haven't been driven by money in the first place so is being rich just um you having freedom yeah yeah i would say that's a that's probably a shortcut to it yeah yeah i think somebody else i read online said something like being rich or being wealthy i think that's a word that you use being wealthy means being able to do what you want with who you want whenever you want and we all have different definitions of that because you're not you're saying i'm not a materialistic person per se i don't need to floss and flex how much money i have so that means your threshold for being wealthy or rich is much lower and you can you can go for much longer because you're not spending that money in ways that don't really mean something to you right yeah okay sorry i was just going to add a little interesting thing to that when i committed to doing social media full-time i had made like a total of a hundred dollars from my tic toc and no money from youtube at all and so i committed to knowing that the money i had saved up from my freelance stuff was enough to last me like eight months or whatever eight months maybe a year and so i was like all right if i really put my head down and work at this like i believe that it's going to bring some money in but even at that point i was like paired to just eat ramen and like live in an apartment that had rats in it and stuff um so it's like i'm seriously like i'm not living high and mighty i think it's funny because i think a lot of people who have 10 million subscribers who are benefiting from adsense are sitting pretty in a in a mansion in beverly hills and so it is different to be a shorts creator too but also i don't really necessarily have aspirations to just spend a bunch of money yeah okay i hate to do this because it feels like you're not a guy who's motivated by money but i have to ask you the business question because i don't get that many opportunities to sit in front of somebody who's just very recently hit huge milestones on multiple platforms i'm just curious comparatively speaking not necessarily the number but from the the creator fund from youtube to tick tock are are they about the same or is one uh over performing the other for the same kind of content um youtube pays i'd say if i was gonna like give you percentages i'd say 60 or 70 comes from youtube yeah actually probably 70 tick tock pays me a fraction it's funny because um we mentioned this briefly earlier like people often share screenshots of their earnings and stuff and i look at this stuff i'm like how is this person making so much money and even on tick tock too like i feel like i'm making a fraction of what other people are making and i'm not sure what the deals with that maybe it has to do with the frequency of my posting or the number of views i'm getting but you know in terms of in terms of where my revenue is really coming from mostly from youtube okay that's good to know that's very good to know thank you for for sharing that okay i'm curious with everything you're a passionate human being you're a designer an artist and you make stuff because it gives you joy to do and then an audience emerges and then you have some level of notoriety and fame how has that been for you because i i heard you on clubhouse i'm like who's this young man talking right now right and and people are saying we want to interview you for this or that how's that been like for you um you know i really haven't had that many run-ins with quote-unquote fame i'm in a pretty unique position where people don't really know my face um and so it's like i've never been recognized and it's also i'm not getting dms about like oh you're so cute or um you know i get those all the time just kidding everybody yeah well no but i mean when people think about fame i think that's really what they're thinking about and so it's like i always like to say i'm not famous my artwork is famous because as a person people don't necessarily care about jake feldman quite yet and it's it's on the agenda eventually but you know at this point people who care about minecraft or among us or poppy playtime they like me because of my artwork and so yeah i haven't had that many run-ins with it it's cool to it's cool for people to want to hear me speak that's pretty cool and like this uh you and i sitting here right now i was like yeah it's dream come true it's like i used to listen to your podcast quite a bit and so yeah there are a few opportunities here and there that have like made me feel like oh this is like a small degree of famous but i wouldn't necessarily call myself famous okay good i would love for you to kind of reflect because you're still in this place where you're close enough in age to my my two sons i have an 18 year old and a 15 year old if you were to to talk to someone who wants to be where you're at today where you're an independent creator an artist and you're self-sustaining and you're able to do the things that you love and not have to worry about working for the man what kind of advice would you give because my son is into video games he's into making art and and paintings and drawings but he hasn't found his groove yet like what kind of advice would you give to him the number one piece of advice that i give to people who are trying to do their own thing or to make social media a full-time job i think it applies across a lot of things is to number one find self-directed projects like before i had any freelance clients i made a commercial for rolex like if rolex hired me like this is what i would animate for them if nike i made another one for nike right so i made a couple different things on my own right it's very self-directed nobody is going to tell me like jake you need to build a portfolio of things looking back at them they're so bad right and that's where the second part comes in is like you need to be being a perfectionist is going to be your downfall if you're trying to turn your passion or whatever it is into a social media thing or a full-time freelance thing um because the thing is about making good artwork and this is again personal opinions right um you can't make good artwork or you can't make a good social media video until you've made a lot of bad social media videos because through the process of making a lot of bad content or not necessarily even bad just stuff even at the time you can be proud of it but through the process of making a lot you're going to learn about how to make or what is good or what are the redeeming qualities of the bad videos that you've made along the way and so yeah it's like i don't i don't necessarily have advice for how do you find your groove but if there's something that interests you certainly follow that path and don't be afraid to put things out into the world that you may look back on even six months from now and say it's kind of like a cringy video or maybe i should take that down that's all i have all right i just wanted to make sure you weren't looking for the next thought there okay i have a question to ask of you in that if someone is sitting there and thinking i need to make a really high quality video because at one hand you're saying spend the time to make a really great piece of content so you have to worry about the algorithm and i'm also hearing you say that you have to get through a lot of quantity before you get to the quality yeah how does one reconcile that because so many people and i'm sure you know this too in the creative space they never make anything because they're like i need to make my thing my ps2 resistance you know this is it my whole meaning of my life has to go into this first piece and they don't make anything how do you help them to reconcile these two opposing ideas where make a really great piece of content but in order to get there you have to make a lot of crappy stuff sometimes that you might not be super proud of later it's tough because it's also one of those things it's like do as i say not as i do because i'm sitting here at the upper echelon of the amount of time and effort that you can put into a 15 second video right right but i didn't start out making animations like this if you scroll to the very first tick tock thought that i made it's something it's a screen recording that took me less than 15 minutes to make and the first 50 or 100 videos that are on my page are these very quick snappy screen recordings and they're really low production and this wasn't even my very first tech talk account i had two tick tock accounts before the one that took off where i tried different formats different content styles i showed my face on one of them and so it's like you don't necessarily always see when you see someone successful you see what they're doing that makes them successful and oftentimes it's something that has a very high quality output but like if the average 3d artist came to tic toc and said i'm going to make an animation like jake feldman does and it's going to go viral odds are it's not going to go viral because you haven't made i've made 300 animations now and i have that leg up and it's like this part needs to be 5 milliseconds shorter and it's like i have the innate ability to know what is good and what is bad about a viral piece of video because i've done it so many times and so yeah it's hard it's hard when you're at the beginning to know that like you just have to get something out the door but that's the reality of it for people who are already in the successful positions they have put a lot of stuff out the door that isn't high quality okay very good i think what you're saying echoes so many different things we've said in the past which is it's like the iceberg thing you just see the tip the success and you don't see all the ugly weird bad things that someone has to go through and you put in the time on the mat on the road so that you've learned and little tweaks you've gone through so many iterations that now you can do them fairly intuitively you kind of know what works and what doesn't and that comes through thousands of hours of practice and you put in that time wonderful i have to ask you a couple other questions before we get out of here one is are there days because i'm astonished too that you've made 300 shorts because i used to work in animation in production and i know what it takes to do something like that at the level what you're doing so do you have days when you're like you know what i'm just not super amped up today and if you do what do you tell yourself how do you feel how do you process that i have those days quite frequently and i do it anyway i do the work anyway and so that's not necessarily good advice for the average creative person like some people it makes more sense for them to take the day off um but for me it's like i'd rather have a video that um concept that i'm not necessarily passionate about or a video that i'm not necessarily proud of i'd rather have it posted and up out the door than to spend an extra day wallowing and like i don't feel like animating today and so that's a personal thing i don't know if it's necessarily healthy all the time but i do the work regardless of whether i want to or not and there are plenty days where i don't want to do the work but i think that i know how much of a blessing my career is and i overall really enjoy a lot of things about what i do that make it worthwhile i think it was seth godin who said something to the fact where the difference between a professional and amateur is the professional shows up even when they don't feel like showing up right that it's not on your creative whims if you're so inspired you just do the work and eventually you'll get through the funk and then you'll do the work that you you you feel passionate and strongly about and that hopefully will inspire other people um one other thing i'll add on to that is there's plenty of videos that i have like halfway through production almost scrapped and been like this is a bad idea i just want to go uh grab a beer with a friend or something i don't feel like doing this and there have been plenty that i've been very close to just like scrapping the entire file and it's like we'll start over tomorrow with a new idea and then i power through and it gets 100 million views and it's like okay that was definitely worth it and you do that a couple times and you realize like it doesn't matter if i think it's good throughout the process it more than anything it matters that it's posted and it's up and so although all my stuff looks pretty polished it still has that same mindset this scrappy mentality of like i'm gonna get it out the door whether or not it's something that i'm super passionate about in the moment what do you attribute to that kind of idea that that mindset that i'm not loving it it's been a painful process but i'm going to check myself and i'm going to finish it i'm going to get it out there and that that is its own reward just finishing the project where does this come from i think it comes from what i briefly said a minute ago is just that once you get it up the door and it gets 100 million views and you have that anecdote to remind yourself of okay this is one i was very close to throwing out the door and you see okay even the bad days can turn out to be good days once they're up but that sounds to me like a chicken and egg problem you have the evidence that you pushed through and persevered and so you're rewarded with the result and so the next time you're like hey remember last time it worked you would do that but there's a lot of people out there who are going to be listening to this like they actually never went through they didn't push through the pain they quit they dropped the project they started something else and then they stopped that and they started something else seth godin describes this in his book the dip where there's this valley where the amount of effort and results you're getting are upside down where you're putting a lot of effort and not getting a lot of results so most people just quit they quit before it gets good you have consistently gone through the dip emerge on the other side so you have all the positive reinforcements and affirmations that you're able to get what can you tell someone who's stuck in that dip who quits and changes their mind again i don't necessarily have advice but i'll tell you this i'll tell you this for a long time i wanted it so bad like i really really want this and like i said when i committed to doing social media full-time i wasn't making any money at it and i i wanted it and there's two things i keep taped to my monitor one of them is a little quote that says someone else wants it more and it's this constant reminder to me it's like if i don't want it there's somebody else that's gonna go out and take it whatever it is and for me it is success on social media freedom like we talked about monetary gains down the road but without that grit for me frankly it's grit like you have to put your head down whether you like it or not and so yeah it's not necessarily good advice or like it's brighter on the other side because sometimes it isn't bright around the other side i don't know but what i'm saying is like i really wanted it and that's what's put me through the i think my big dip was like okay how do i turn this into a full-time thing and the other thing is that i keep on my monitor and i don't know if this is necessarily relevant but i have another thing that says are you capable and when i feel like not doing something i look at that and it's like just read it and it's like well i am capable of doing this today and it's not a matter of like do i feel like doing it it's like can i do it and if the answer is yes if there's enough hours left in the day i sit my butt down and keep working and so yeah it's not necessarily good advice and perhaps you want to add on to that something for the future listeners here but my advice is grit yeah that's what i have to share about it yeah grit and perseverance and just trusting the process and not probably allowing yourself to excuse yourself are you capable of says well i have time i can move my hand and there's still like oxygen in my lungs so really the only reason why i don't want to do this is it's emotional otherwise you're able to do this i love that that's awesome okay here's the the last hard question for you i think you're 24 years old having all kinds of success with content creation and a massive following i think you're unique and special in in many different ways in any which way you want to interpret that but a lot of people can slog at this for a decade and not get to that number and so they're going to say well you're an anomaly you're lucky and all that kind of stuff and they're a little bit older how can we help people who who may feel like maybe that moment has passed them up um i'll say this that on youtube specifically some of the biggest creators in the short form game have not entered the space charlie demilio little huddy the whole high post crew among plethora of other have not posted a single short these are people who have upwards of 50 100 million followers on tick tock right who are killing the short form game who have not even posted a single youtube short right and so the space is actually really really new still it's growing up but the opportunity certainly has not passed and i have no plans of doing anything different on youtube this following year and i think that there's a lot of opportunity for people to jump into space now and have the same exact story that i had starting it tomorrow throughout the next 15 months i really do believe that it's not a mature format yet on youtube specifically and if you're making it for youtube might as well post it on tick tock and i really do believe that the opportunity is all still right at the front door yeah a lot of times what we don't recognize is opportunity when it's knocking at the door we don't open that door and you're saying what and i also believe this that it's not over saturated yet there's some shocking statistics about how many videos are uploaded to youtube on a daily basis it's astronomical in terms of minutes and hours of content created but a very small percentage of that those hours and billions of hours i don't know how many hours of content is created on a daily basis but a very small percentage is actually short content and so there's a there's an opportunity here jake you're you're experiencing we've experienced massive growth on our channel not compared to you but compared to our old self in that it feels like there's a gold rush here and there's just you're tripping over bricks of gold and you're like guys it's right here all you have to do is do it and stick to it and get over yourself and be consistent and every day do a little bit better than the day before and eventually the the platform might reward you right exactly yeah exactly what i'm saying it's still there yeah do you get a special plaque after hitting the 10 million views or something uh yeah there's like a i'm pretty sure it's the last award that youtube gives out it's like a diamond play button thing it's not really diamond though it's like chrome yeah that would be a very valuable plaque that you get yeah did you already get yours uh you have to order it and i i'm moving next week and so i haven't ordered it quite yet all right well i'm i can't wait uh for us to get there we have many years of work ahead for us to get to that 10 million mark but what a wonderful accomplishment that you've had and i i would say this i mean i think whatever conditions in which you grew up the town you lived in the parents the culture of the society they did a good job they did a good job in you young man you got your head on straight and i love that you're a success story what i like to do is collect success stories of creative people who have gone on to become their own independent person without the need for clients and you figured out the balance between revenue versus expenses and as long as you manage those two things you can live this way forever and do whatever you want from wherever you want and and do it whenever you want and so congratulations yeah thanks man it means a lot coming from you yeah well what is next for you any anything that we can get excited about or are you just going to plug away for another year and just see what happens um one of my big goals for 2022 is to hire additional animators and start taking a step back into a creative director position and stop spending 10 hours 12 hours a day in front of the computer so i don't know if that's necessarily outwardly anything that you notice on my channel but certainly something i'm trying to get done this year love it so you're going to scale the team you're going to have a couple additional creators helping you maybe you'll take on bigger projects maybe maybe things get more complicated or you can have a specialist doing dynamics and particles or other things so you can tell the story the way that you see it in your mind i love that look at you all right trailblazing here uh jake thank you very much for doing this uh podcast with me appreciate it yeah such an honor if people want to find out more about you where's the best place they can go i have a website it's jakefeldman.com and so all my contact information is on there yeah jkelman.com you'll find all my contact information there wonderful my name is jake fellman you're listening to the future