I started a vlog!

A few months ago—okay, more like 6 months ago now—I was at the Seanwes conference hanging out with Levi and Charli talking about vlogging. The running joke was that I’d start a vlog by the end of the weekend. There’s even a clip about it in Levi’s vlog.

I was so caught up in the details of how to shoot, what gear to use, when I would find time to edit it, and what I’d talk about that I never started vlogging. But for the next few months I watched more vlogs, talked to Matt and Charli a lot about vlogging. And had fun contributing to the ConvertKit company retreat vlog that Charli made.

How?

Topics for the videos ended up being easy. After writing out the first five ideas they just kept coming. I have vlog topics to take me through the end of the year. Also the more I record the more ideas I get.

For gear I finally settled on just shooting on my iPhone 6 and it works great. I may buy a real camera later (I said I was allowed to after publishing 10 episodes), but that may not be necessary.

For editing I got my brother-in-law Daniel to do that for me. He’s an up-and-coming video editor and I’m excited to work with him on more projects. My workflow is to just shoot videos on my iPhone, then once a week I drop the clips from Photos on my Mac into Dropbox folders named for each video. He takes it from there!

Why?

A lot of initial comments and replies were asking “why start a vlog?” And I agree. I’ve got a company that takes all my time, two little kids, and if I wanted to create more content I’ve got a popular blog and email newsletter. Why not focus on those?

Good questions. It comes down to a couple simple reasons:

• Trying a new content style. I wrote 1,000 words a day for 650+ days in a row. The habit goes away over time, but I know what that takes. Writing is amazing, but it’s known. I want to try something new.
• I want to feel uncomfortable. The final straw in starting the vlog was watching Nathan Kotny’s vlog where he talked about how it was uncomfortable to walk around talking into a camera with strangers looking on. And it’s good to feel uncomfortable. I agree. The idea of vlogging in public makes me super nervous. So I decided to do it.
• Showcasing Boise. We have an amazing conference coming up in Boise and I want to show off the city. People don’t know how great it is here. I’d like to fix that.

There are more reasons, but that’s good for now.

Watch and subscribe

I’d love it if you followed this experiment and subscribed on YouTube. I hear it’s also important to turn on notifications for videos. I’m on a quest to get 10,000 subscribers by… Actually I don’t have a date. But still. I want 10,000 subscribers as quickly as possible. So subscribe and then tell a friend to subscribe.

And for a little sample you can check out the first episode.

Now go subscribe. As of right now I need 8,500+ new subscribers!