When Creators Fail

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If you are in Vienna join us on May 24 for a Creator Brunch 
Next I’ll be in Berlin June 20 for a Davinci Resolve Event
and we just set our date for a Barcelona Meetup October 10.

Let me know if you want to join on of them
💛 Valentin

Is Failure Inevitable?

Ali Abdaal is known as a productivity expert and successful YouTuber, recognized for being a smart and likeable guy on the internet. Despite his efforts to continuously improve, including working with top-notch coaches, he still failed.

Late last year Ali launched a physical keyboard, under the brand name lightmode, to create a brand that isn’t reliant on his face. However, at this moment it looks like a massive mistake on the balance sheet. Despite investing approximately £300,000, he has only generated £23,000 from 206 orders. Moreover, the reviews from Keyboard enthusiast are less than stellar saying, it’s an average product at a premium price.

What's particularly intriguing about this is that despite all his resources and experience Ali about the most crucial thing—What problem does it solve? In his own words he just wanted to make something cool. But getting people to pay $160 for something cool is a hard business case to make. However, convincing customers to pay $160 for “something cool” poses a considerable challenge.

Reflecting on his experience, Ali acknowledges the pitfalls of trying to juggle too many ventures simultaneously. Saying: “When you are trying to do too many things, things go wrong.” This keyboard project, relegated to a side hustle, lacked the attention it needed for success. To turn that boat around he put one of his team members in charge of this new brand and to mkae it clearer what the product is and who it is for they are going to completely overhaul the marketing around the product.

My takeaway is that despite Ali’s access to so many resources and experts he still gets things wrong and fails. His very honest video about it shows that criticism is an opportunity to learn and it’s always possible to change direction to turn things around. So if you had a failure recently — don't be too hard on yourself. Is there a lesson you learned and can you turn it into something new?

Going Cheap To Go Big

Despite all the technological advance cameras and generative AI have had, you can’t fake the bullet time effect from The Matrix. To create rotate around a person in slow motion you have to have a lot of cameras, no way around it. So It’s still an expensive shot — unless you buy the cheapest camera on amazon for $9. That’s what 3DSage did in this wonderful scrappy build.

This video won’t win any Oscars and it’s certainly not on par with current camera quality but maybe it could be a way to really stand out on Instagram again …

Are Real Things Coming Back?

Every once in a while you see a thumbnail that is just different. Ted Cutina’s video about the importance of real things is one of those. It immediately stopped my scroll and while I just clicked to know what’s behind I ended up watching the whole thing.

Over 137.000 people thought the same making his most viewed video by far. And to me it’s another piece of evidence that people are developing a real need for physical media after a long stretch of getting everything from the cloud.

Could you imagine having a disk with all your favorite YouTube videos on it?

Fun stuff to click on

David Ritt explores what music Beethoven would make today

Critical Role launch their own membership site

Eva zu Beck answers all the questions people have

Otilie has her life changed by visiting a hut

Alex Thaxton explains why we all want a cabin in the woods

I Need Your Help

I'm doing a bit of traveling the next weeks so keeping up with the latest Creator Stories might be a challenge. To keep the content flowing, I'd love to feature YOU in the next issues!

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