My guest today is Scott Tolinski who is the creator of Level Up Tutorials which has 335,000+ subscribers on YouTube! In this episode, we discuss Scott's big injury while break dancing, starting a YouTube channel, importance of good recording gear, juggling full time job and YouTube, quitting full time job to become a YouTuber, why you should own your content, moving premium content away from YouTube to personal website and much more! For show notes, guest bio, and more, please visit: www.designmba.show Level Up Your Design Career (Free Email Course): https://levelup.designmba.show/
Scott Tolinski is the creator of Level Up Tutorials where he has created thousands of free and premium web development tutorials. Scott also is the co-host of the popular web development podcast Syntax. In his free time Scott is a dedicated Bboy (breakdancer) & enjoys pushing himself athletically through dance, working out and snowboarding. He also enjoys green tea and Shaw Brothers Kung Fu movies.
SUPPORT SCOTT TOLINSKI:
CONNECT WITH SCOTT TOLINSKI:
LEVEL UP YOUR DESIGN CAREER (FREE EMAIL COURSE):
Namaste and welcome. This is Jayneil Dalal and you are listening to The design MBA. This podcast is a real-life MBA program for designers where we interview design hustlers and learn the skills, mindset necessary for a designer to launch a business venture. You can learn more. Find past episodes and stay updated at designMBA.show.
Why are you listening to this podcast? Think about it. Deep down you want to grow in your design career. And I’ve been in your shoes. I’ve pushed pixels for years without really knowing how the hell do I grow in my design career. So, I’ve created a free email course for you to help you level up your design career. The strategies I share in the seven-day email course are actionable and used by over 700 plus designers with success. So, head over to Levelup.designMBA.show or you can find the link to this email course in the show notes. Level up your design career today.
Jayneil Dalal: Today's awesome guest is Scott Tolinski who is the creator of Level Up Tutorials where he has created thousands of free and premium web development tutorials. Scott also is the co-host of the popular web development podcast Syntax. In his free time, Scott is a dedicated break dancer. Cool! And enjoys pushing himself athletically through dance, working out, and snowboarding. He also enjoys green tea and Shaw Brothers kung fu movies. Go to YouTube and just type in “Level Up Tuts”. Level Up Tuts has 326,000 plus subscribers which is insane. And if you want to become a better web developer and you want to find out cutting edge, focused and high-quality video tutorials for web developers and designers, head on over to LevelUpTutorials.com and, yeah, consider going pro and supporting Scott's awesome work.
Scott, oh my God! I am a huge fan since you first released those sketch tutorials and I cannot believe all these years later that you're on the show. Thank you so much for coming on the show, man.
Scott Tolinski: Hey! Thank you for having me. Happy to be here.
Jayneil: I got to say, man, this moment, for me, from my perspective, it's … you got like 45,000 followers on Twitter and maybe more, I’m probably getting it wrong, you've got like 300,000 subscribers on YouTube. So, I could not believe that a guy like you just agreed to come on my show. I mean, I’m just so excited, man.
Scott: I’m always happy to do this stuff because the people who lifted me up early on gave me a chance by my tutorials on or tweeting out or sharing my stuff. So, any chance I can do to do anything, help out anybody, I’m always on board. So, thank you for inviting me on in the first place. So, I’m happy to be here.
Jayneil: Do you remember any stories when you were just starting out before you became famous like people helping out, do you remember those specific moments like “This specific person helped me out in XYZ?”
Scott: So, one big one is Chris Epstein. He worked on some … I think Compass was his baby. I’m not a 100% positive that that was like his exclusive ever but he did a lot of stuff in the SaaS community, specifically Compass, and I had like one of the first set of, well, probably the first set of Compass and SaaS tutorials up on YouTube and he shared them like right away. And that's back when I had like 20 subscribers on the site. And being the person who created the library or worked on the library, he had so much you know social push for having created it, it was like a person who created my thing, sharing my thing that I created and that really helped me out a lot. In fact, if you go back and look at the subscribers, you can see it's like a little bump from when he tweeted it out. That was always pretty sick. And I think that was like the very first one that I got like a nice little bump from and nice little like “Oh, okay. So, people will take notice if I do things on content that there isn't out there a whole lot of.”
Jayneil: Yeah. And you're a break dancer. So, how did that happen? You're a break dancer, you're doing programming or was it something you were always doing on the side? How did you transition from break dancing into “I’m going to make a career in programming?”
Scott: Yeah, I think I danced first. It was probably around the same time although I did … When I was a in high school, I did a lot of like the Myspace hacking stuff and I was into Flash development. I was in a band. So, we were making our band’s page in Flash and I got into Angel Fire and CSS and HTML. That way just dropping in some like really one liner JavaScript snippets. I didn't know what I was doing. So, I started breaking in like 2004 and it was just like a hobby. I’d come from like sort of an extreme sports world before that. So, I’d been doing rollerblading and skateboarding. I was sponsored by Vans and stuff. So, I had like …
Jayneil: No way!
Scott: Yeah.
Jayneil: You did professionally.
Scott: No, not a professional. No, no, no, just simply sponsored like I got to open up skate parks like there was the Vans Skate Park in Novi, Michigan, that I got to be the like the very first rollerblader on it. It was like me and two other skateboarders for the press release. I got like backstage passes to the [inaudible] for several years. So, I was in that sort of extreme sports world, not that breaking is really … Breaking is way more of a creative endeavor. I think at a high level, anything is like very creative but with breaking, you have so much more to think about in terms of like musicality. It's funny because I’ve had two concussions in my life and both sort of had big changes in my sort of daily life. My first concussion was on a large handrail. I slipped off. I fell off. It even broke my helmet.
Jayneil: I saw the video, yeah.
Scott: And so, that one was really rough and that's what led me to start breakdancing or breaking or b-boying because it's like you stay close to the floor, you don't have to be in the air. So, I started breaking and I picked it up and I was part of the group at the University of Michigan. I was eventually the president of the group at the University of Michigan and I just practiced a whole lot. I practiced maybe like five six times a week. That was my social group, the b-boy. So, we would just hang out and we would do shows out at campus. And next thing I know, I’m driving around the US and entering competitions in some really terrible music videos and that sort of thing. I’d been programming this whole time but it was just sort of like a hobby. At some point in my life, I wanted to be a motion graphics artist. I was doing a lot of video editing. So, video was always my thing. It was like video, video, video. I went to school for music and I was doing too many things – design, video, art, whatever. And my wife was like “Pick something. Just pick one thing. You're doing too much stuff.” So, I picked programming and specifically web development and she was really, really good about doing this kind of stuff. So, she just started finding jobs for me left and right – “Here's a job, here's a job, here's a job.”
Jayneil: No way.
Scott: I was working randomly as an accountant for a record label just as sort of like a gig that I got through a friend. I don't know anything about accounting. It's mostly just entering data all day. So, the record label is Ghostly International. They're a fantastic label, still one of my favorite labels. And so, that was like always really cool for me but yeah, she found the job that would eventually become my first web development job and that was in 2011, I got my first gig and was totally hooked.
Jayneil: That is insane. I, mean I’ve seen you do the windmills and just crazy feats with break dancing. I don't think I’m that flexible a person. I mean, I do yoga but I don't think I’m at that level yet.
Scott: What's crazy about breaking is that if you tell a lot of people that you need this skill, X, Y and Z skill but it's going to take you like two and a half years before you can learn it, most people would be like “All right, I’m out.” And so, that's the hard part is that when we would teach people and people would see us on campus and whatever they want to do what we're doing, they would see us and be like “Wow! How can I learn that?” And you'd see them one week for practice, you teach them the next week, you teach them the next week and then they just stop showing up because they realize how hard it all is. The windmill, I practiced it nearly daily for eight months. At the end of those eight months, yeah, I got it but it didn't look good then and then only even when I watch my windmills, I’m still nitpicking loads of things wrong with them because there's just such a higher level that could be attained in all of this stuff. So, I never quite got to the levels where I would have wanted to get in breaking but my crew and my group, we won 20 plus competitions and it was a lot of fun and I still break for fun but I’m out of the competitive scene, that's for sure.
Jayneil: That's dope, man. I somehow feel like break dancing or breaking taught you the art of playing the long game
Scott: Oh yeah.
Jayneil: And I’m trying to think about that terrible injury you had and I watched this video where you kind of like fell down and you kind of like fell on your head and you thought it was okay. So, kind of walk me through that like just getting that injury and then getting this idea that “Okay, I’m going to now start YouTube tutorial videos.”
Scott: Yeah, that was actually the same spot that I practiced. And if you watch the video, it's on Honeypots YouTube channel. That's the same spot we practiced in for my entire college breaking life. So, that was in like a campus building, it's on tiled floor, tile on top of concrete. It's like the worst, it's uneven jagged tile. It's like the worst possible environment to be dancing in or especially breaking where your head's always on the floor but that's just what we did because we had no other spot because the club was poor. We couldn't afford practice space or anything like that. So, we just hung out in the campus building and if security told us to leave, we'd leave but that was like our general spot for many years. And so, that floor sucked. It was just a hard floor. You smack something there, you're going to feel it. And so, this is a move I’ve been practicing for several years. It's still a move that I practice and I’m only now like really … I’m not even getting it now but it's just a hard move. It's called an elbow air flair. You're on one elbow, you toss over, you land on the other one. And I’d been getting them kind of solid where I could hit it and then at least throw it into another move like a windmill. And I went through it into a windmill but my angle was off. So, when I went to like throw it down, I basically just smacked the side of my head into the ground. And I kept practicing for the rest of the week. The next day was valentine's day. My wife and I had like a valentine's meal. We had lots of wine and that sort of thing. I just didn't even think something was wrong. I just felt really bad for the next few days and I had a huge bruise on the side of my head. We had to cancel our wedding photos because I had a huge bruise on the side of my head. It was very apparent that something had gone wrong. So, once I found out that it was a concussion and a pretty bad one, I was just having a crazy amount of symptoms. And I can tell you it happened the day before Valentine's Day in 2012 and that's when I hit my head. I remember it so clearly. So, before this there was like a period of time where my boss and I, his name is [inaudible], he's a really, really talented developer, he and I had been watching a bunch of YouTube channels. And sort of like at the time, there was maybe one or two doing web development. I mean, it was really not a whole lot of people doing web development on YouTube. It was good video tutorial content but it wasn't on YouTube. Team Treehouse at the time was still Think Vitamin. So, Think Vitamin was doing good videos. There was like Drupalize Me. I think there was some Drupal specific ones that were doing it. And we were consuming a lot of those tutorials. We were buying them. We were watching them on YouTube. And I just remember being so annoyed with some of these presenters, whether or not they would have the bad audio or the mouth noises or weird little just quirks or something in their programming. I just felt like we could do it better. I had no background in it. I didn't really speak into a mic very often. I had no real understanding that I could do it other than like “Hey, I know what these people are doing bad and I can at least do the production side of things.” I went to school for music technology. I worked as a video editor. It's like I have all the background things and the only thing I didn't have was necessarily the skills for web development. So, that was only a year into my … I got the job in March 2011 and I started my YouTube channel in March 2012. So, I’d only been a professional dev for one year when I started the channel. And what I’d realized very quickly was that there's nobody doing this basic stuff really well like I don't need to do the hard stuff. I should do the stuff that's at my level. So, so I started just recording video tutorials of stuff that I knew. And believe it or not, the first like six video tutorials I recorded were of Adobe Premiere and Adobe After Effects and I just never … I think I released them eventually but they were really bad. So, I didn't even do programming tutorials because I wasn't confident in my ability to do that but it was at some point when I just started picking up, I started doing Drupal tutorials, Magento tutorials and SaaS tutorials. Those ended up really carrying me through. I think I did almost like a hundred Drupal tutorials and probably about that many Magento ones. So, I just picked up from there but either way, we had been talking about doing this YouTube channel for several months just because we were like “Oh, we could do it. We could do it.” And then when that concussion happened, I had so much free time. I used to break like three nights a week. So, it was like Monday, Wednesday, Friday, was my dance time. My wife was getting her PhD. So, it's not like she needed more attention. She had enough to do.
Jayneil: Was it a psychologically devastating facial injury?
Scott: I felt very … like I needed to go move. I mean, like I said, I’d been skating before then and there was like not a whole lot of downtime. That first concussion wasn't so bad. The second one, I mean, I couldn't do anything for eight months. I couldn't even do Yoga. I mean, it was just … I started taking Yoga and my symptoms came back and that was like sort of my marker. I was seeing a neurologist at the University of Michigan and she was basically like “The moment you feel those symptoms, that's like a cue to back off but you can do everything up until when you feel those symptoms” but it would be like nothing like I’d be doing hardly anything and the symptoms would come back. So, it was just really frustrating for me because I especially wanted to back out of dancing, that was like a point in time in our breaking that we had started winning everything. It was like if we were going to enter something, we were going to win it. So, it was like “Okay.” Well, now, my crewmates are winning stuff without me. I’m like “I got to get back out there.” I was able to come back … The first time I did any dancing after my concussion was on my wedding night.
Jayneil: Oh my God!
Scott: My whole crew was there and we did a performance and I hadn't been breaking at all, I was completely untrained and I was fine as like riding a bike, threw all my stuff and whatever. One of the guys in my crew was like hammered and he threw a backflip and we were like “How did you do that, man?” He could hardly stand up straight and he did a backflip somehow. So, it was a lot of fun. People loved it.
Jayneil: Were you not afraid? You haven't been practicing for so long and that fear that comes in like you get injured once like “What if I get injured again?” and that kind of prohibits sometimes humans and a lot of people from going again. Were you not afraid of that?
Scott: I think, I was just so antsy to get back into it at that point that I was just like … I was gung-ho. And it's my wedding night, man. I had a lot of adrenaline pumped up. So, it was just like “Let's do it.” I got a room full of 600 people whatever watching you perform essentially. And I’m used to performing but like dang, like it was you want to do a good job on your wedding night for everybody who's there and whatever and, yeah, it was a lot of fun. I had so much energy running through my veins. Yeah, I was pretty sore for the next couple weeks but other than that, it was fine.
Jayneil: Wow! And then going back to you starting the YouTube channel during your injury, I think, this is, like you mentioned to me, 2012, that sweet spot right there because I remember in 2011, I was like messing around with Linux and Ubuntu and stuff and I think I made some videos on there but I never follow through like you. And I remember because they also have me in my Indian accent, the original accent, so it sounded like “Today, we are going to talk about Ubuntu, how to install Ubuntu there.” I had to work a little bit on this accent. What was your gear like? Did you deck out completely when you were first starting out or first few videos?
Scott: Yeah. So, not necessarily, but I had been in this performing arts technology program in college. And so, because of that, I had literally these headphones that I’m wearing right now because to go to that program, it's basically all audio engineering stuff. So, to be in that program, you sort of needed your own at least a small rig. So, I had a nice microphone which was a Blue Snowball, it's not like the USB mics they have today but it was like a 600-dollar Blue mic. I still have it it's great. And I got it mostly for singing but it was fine for my voice. And then I had, it was called, an MBox. It was made by Digidesign. So, I could use pro tools. So, I had the microphone the MBox and these headphones and then a laptop and that was it. That's all I needed. I had good gear and I think I understood the importance of having good audio and good video quality from the beginning. There was a lot of lessons I had to learn in terms of how to produce and how to have the content appear the way I wanted it to appear but, yeah, I think, from the very beginning, I knew that I could produce at least better audio than 90% of the tutorials that I heard where somebody was using the pencil mic or they're even worse, they're like laptop onboard mic or something where you hear fans running.
Jayneil: Oh my God!
Scott: So, at the time, there was like only one person doing tutorials with even decent audio and his audio wasn't as good as mine. So, it was like time to just like show up and at least have better production. And what's funny is that I learned very quickly that if you watch a video tutorial and in the first 30 seconds of it you think the audio is bad, you just leave, you just say “If the audio is bad, then I can't sit through 10 minutes of this” or whatever unless it's the only video on the topic but if you're left between two topics or two videos and somebody's got good audio and good presentation, you're going to pick that one every time.
Jayneil: Of course. And you're making these videos. Did you think about that “Hey, I’m going to start a YouTube channel for monetization” because, I mean, 2012, I mean, YouTube had monetization, I’m assuming, but it was not as big as now? So, was that an active thought or was it still like a side project you were just pursuing?
Scott: There was like a calculator at some point. I’m not sure if this still exists. I don't even remember the name of it but there was like this website that would calculate generally how much people were making off of YouTube at the time. We typed in “the New Boston,” I don't know if you remember the New Boston, the YouTube channel, he's got like a million subscribers now but at the time he didn't, he only had like 200,000, and we typed in “the New Boston” and we thought we were doing a better job than he was or could do a better job than he was and he said that he was like making like 100,000 dollars a year of ads and we're like “Oh, that could pay our rent. If we split that 50:50 between my boss and I, that could pay our rent, that could whatever. That's great money if we can get it.” Sure enough, I mean, it was a long time before I got monetization and obviously, I don't know how much you know about how the monetization has changed over time but once we hit like 1000 dollars a month, that was like the high point. It's only gone down from there. It's ridiculous.
Jayneil: Wow! So, to this point where you have like 300,000 plus subscribers, there's a YouTube monetization that comes in from the ads, right? So, how much is that like roughly a ballpark or something like that compared to what it was before?
Scott: So, at one point, I think that maybe the highest we were making, it was maybe like two grand a month. Then they like cut it in half and then they cut it in half again and then they cut it in half again. So, what we saw is that earlier on when we had less subscribers like under 100,000 and we were getting probably about the same amount of views we're getting today, we were making way more money. And what was really apparent to me very quickly was just that big daddy YouTube could just flip the switch at any point and cut your revenue in half. It was still like extra money. I have always had a job as a developer up until 2016 when I turned Level Up Tutorials into a business. It was always just extra money. So, you can only complain so much but it always just felt like at any given point they could pull the rug out from under you. One of the big changes that they made was about the length of videos and this hurt a lot of animators, people who were doing like two to three-minute-long animation shorts which actually take a ton of time to produce, right?
Jayneil: Yes.
Scott: Those people were getting hammered because their videos weren't long enough for monetization. You're also seeing YouTubers pad the length of their videos with bumpers and extra stuff or whatever just to get to that 12-minute mark. And our video content was mostly between the 6 and 10 minutes. So, when they made that change about the duration being a big factor, not like percentage of watch time or something, we got hit hard because most of our videos were under that limit. So, like I said, it was like one morning you woke up and your earnings were like cut in half basically. So, that really opened my eyes to like who owns the platform, right? You can only complain so much about it. You are at behest to their control.
Jayneil: But in 2016, you decided to just quit your full-time dev job and focus on Level Up. so, you were quite aware that big daddy YouTube at some point could again slash your revenue in half but you still took the risk.
Scott: I took the risk but it was different. It was not a jump into doing YouTube full-time because what I had realized by then at that point was that if I was going to make a living off of doing this stuff, I needed to move my platform off of YouTube. YouTube is still a fantastic means of sharing content and uploading the content, producing the content, all those wonderful things that lets people discover your content but, for me, it was a big wake-up call that if I wanted to make enough money to support my family doing what I’m doing, then I needed to move off of YouTube or at least I needed to find a way to make money doing what I’m doing with the tutorials outside of YouTube. So, that was really where we went as we started offering LevelUpTutorials.com subscriptions. The website had always existed. It has always been sort of a thing but it was really just a place for SEO to help grow the subscriber rate. And at some point, we started offering a subscription and it was like 8 dollars a month and it got you just about nothing, it got you the ad freeze. That's it. You just didn't get any ads and we maybe got like, I don't know, over the course of a year or maybe like 100 subscribers, like nothing. And it was like definitely not enough to support the business or to sustain myself. So, I took a job at a startup. So, I basically had to like admit defeat. So, I took a job at a startup which eventually was ultimately the wrong decision because I could have like really invested the time into learning how to offer the right amount of value and how to actually create something people will pay for rather than giving like little value and expecting a little bit of money.
Jayneil: And what year it was?
Scott: 2016, 2017, going there. The very edge of that happened when I quit the startup because they were horribly managed. There was just like a lot of unfulfilled promises and they were cutting pay and all sorts of stuff and I was the CTO and I was just like “Listen…” I was never given the support I was given. Everybody else was not doing their part and I was putting in way over time and I wasn't getting paid for it. So, I was like working my ass off essentially for nothing because I believed in the company but at some point, I was like “Listen, this company's never going to happen with these people in charge” even if I owned a huge chunk of the company and it was like a good idea, they’d just given it to me, and I was just like “Okay, I believe I can execute on this” but nobody else was doing their part and I basically I quit. One of the managers, one of the owners who was at least a little bit clued in was like “I get it. I understand it. You're clearly the only one here who's really putting in the time.” So, that was May of 2017 or April of 2017 I quit. In the same week I quit. It might have been literally the same day I quit because I was feeling really juiced up about quitting, I was feeling really pumped about quitting.
Jayneil: So, you're saying that you quit finally the startup and your buddy quit at the same time, who was working with you.
Scott: No, no, I just quit. I just quit. There were two owners of the company. Two of them both had owned like larger bits and I had owned a smaller bit. And one of which who was like … she had her own job; she had another job. So, she was just like not into it and the other person, she was not good at her role doing what she was doing in the startup. And because of that, it was just floundering even though my work was excellent. So, I quit. I felt really great about quitting and it was literally maybe a couple hours after quitting I went on to Slack because Wes and I had already been acquainted for like over a year at that point, I just messaged him and was like “Hey, you know that podcast idea we were kicking around? Let's go for it right now.” And that's when we started Syntax and we had … I mean, we probably started it like the week after that because we had the year before talked about doing it and we had maybe like 20 episode ideas already lined up but I was so busy with my work and he was busy with his work, neither of us made it a priority. And then at that point when I didn't have a job, I was like “Okay, we got to do something here. Let's start this podcast. I’m going to try to do Level Up Tutorials full time.” It was the right time to do everything and everything worked out.
Jayneil: Did you save up? I mean, you quit the startups. So, two questions come to mind. First is when you're a CTO and you're busy at the startup, you're still producing the videos for Level Up Tuts, right? You're still doing that on the side.
Scott: Yeah but the effort that I was putting in was kind of dwindling because, like I said, I was working. So, over time, with this code base, it was just very frustrating but there was a time when I was doing a lot of those like media tutorials, they were like the media tutorials on the web and there was a lot of cool stuff that I was doing at that same time but my output really plummeted especially on YouTube.
Jayneil: How were you managing your time because you're still a CTO, and most people when they come home from work, they're exhausted, they're tired? So, were you like doing it in the morning and the night? And you're also like editing the whole thing before uploading it.
Scott: Yeah.
Jayneil: How were you managing all that, man?
Scott: Well, at some point, when you're recording like a few thousand tutorials, you get very efficient at it. I didn't have any preparation time because the stuff I’m teaching is stuff that I’m working on all day and I’ve always done that. The whole time that I’ve done Level Up Tutorials and even now, the stuff that I’m teaching is the same exact stuff that I’m actually coding all day. So, I don't have to take any time to study a subject or something. And two, I got really good at video editing, especially with my tutorials. If I make a mistake, I stop, I take a breath and then I’d take the take again. And then that way I could visually edit. If I see any gaps in the audio, I know that's where I messed up. I don't work off a script because I’m not a good reader. So, I just sort of make it up as I go. And I’ve just been doing it for so long that it just feels like second nature. So, I honestly don't know, I just got good enough at it where editing wouldn't take me that long. If it was a 15-minute long video, I edit at 2X speed like I listen to it twice as fast, I cut out the gaps, and I could probably edit a 15-minute long video if there's not a ton of mess-ups in 10 minutes or something. So, I just got good at that aspect of it, which still even now is a huge help. I can edit my entire 25-video series in two days. That's like six-hour days, not even like eight-hour days or something. So, I just got efficient at it and I would do a couple here, a couple there or whatever, nights and weekends, whenever I could. I mean, once May hit, my son was born in May of 2017, once he was born, it was like all that time went away like just completely disappeared. Another thing is I quit, we had a child and then all of a sudden it's like “Oh shoot! I don't have any income, you know.” That seems like a terrible idea. I did not have any income. Luckily my wife had a job but her job was basically just cover and run. So, it was like “Well, we need to do something or else our bank account's just going to keep going down and down and down.” So, I just hustled and found a way to make Level Up Tutorials provide more value, provide exclusive content, better production, better everything and just went for it. And in a few months, luckily, Syntax became a hit just about instantly. It was like we'd recorded three episodes and we released all three at once and we were like “Well, maybe by the 20th, 30th episode we can get sponsors in here. We had sponsors on episode number four and we haven't had an episode without a sponsor since.
Jayneil: How did that happen?
Scott: I think Wes has a huge audience and I have a huge audience, both in different places. His audience is like Twitter and all sorts, his mailing list and then my audience was like YouTube. And we did some sort of like audience analysis comparison and it was like “You have 14% overlap.” We were like “What? That's it?” So, we both had like an ability to reach a lot of people from the get-go. And we released three episodes at once and just blessed our list and because those three episodes got a lot of downloads, it put us up in trending and we've basically been in the technology trending ever since because we've always released on a schedule, we've never missed a Monday or Wednesday now at this point. So, we've had two episodes a week from whenever to whenever. He and I had both have been so equipped to produce something like that at this point, I think, that the only thing that was going to stop it from being good was the actual content of the show itself but luckily, we both teach by talking. So, that was always the number one goal. He and I, actually before we recorded a single episode, we had a huge list of just stuff we hated about certain podcasts like “I don't like this in this podcast because of these reasons. And here's why we're not going to do that” or “Here's why we're not going to do this commonly done thing because I don't like it because of this.” So, we had this big list of ideas of what makes a successful podcast and what doesn't and we listed like the podcast we liked. And he and I just had such similar taste in that stuff from the beginning. It was almost like finishing each other's sentences in terms of what we wanted out of it. So, I think it was just a naturally good pairing. And I think we maybe got a little bit lucky because he and I, we were acquaintances, we had been part of this mastermind group, helping each other out with our product pages and we've been talking a lot and doing meetings but he and I had never created one piece of content together before that first episode of Syntax. That was the very first thing we had ever done to create a piece of content together. And I think there's chemistry from the start. I think it just worked out really well for some reason. And he and I, like I said, we both teach in this medium for so long that, I think, that was like the number one focus was value, value, value like people don't care about what you had for breakfast today, if you're going to talk about that stuff. I listened to some web dev podcast, I don't remember who it is at this point, before we had done Syntax and it's like 30 minutes of the 60-minute long episode was just like talking about “Oh, what did you do?”, whatever and like we did some of that stuff but it's like we keep it under a couple minutes and then move into the actual “All right, here's the meat. What are we talking about in this episode? This is what we're talking about. Let's go back and forth,” whatever.
Jayneil: Yeah, I’d like to hear your pet peeves after you're done. What is your release schedule like? Do you still do like the twice a week, so it's like then so many episodes a month?
Scott: Right now, we recorded all of our episodes until the end of this month. So, we've been taking two months off for the first time ever but the episodes are still coming out because we were recording like six episodes a week for a little bit just to get ahead of it. And he and I both have a lot of subjects that we're interested in. Occasionally, it’d be like “All right, who's running this show? All right, Scott's running this show because he's done all the research or Wes is running this show” and the other one just like plays a support role of asking questions or takes the role of the audience and kind of leads the episodes. We work off of an outline and for some reason, we can both read each other's brains enough just to know where things are going to go. It all just sort of works out. I don't know if it's just because we've produced so much content this way that we just have it but at this point, 280 episodes done, I think we're just locked in. Yeah, that's really where it is and we're going to start recording again in the first week of September. So, we're starting the Season 2 of Syntax, 280 episodes later or whatever.
Jayneil: Man, for me, personally, it's maybe a little bit of a selfish reason but instead of paying 200,000 dollars to go to a business school, I was like “Why don't I just do a podcast to learn.” So, I try to ground myself in not getting obsessed by the vanity metrics. And I’m not going to lie, when I saw your 45,000 Twitter fans, I was like … you start to think like “When I’m going to get there” and it is like whole analysis paralysis but then I was like “Listen, you're doing this just so I can know you.” I mean, yes, I could like hit you up by just be like “Hey, Scott, I had a question about this” and maybe you reply or you answer but I feel like podcast gives me a way to learn from you. And the other thing is I like to build relationships. So, everybody that comes on the show, I try to like form a relationship and figure out how I can help them in some capacity or introduce them to someone that I know from before. So, for me, it's less about monetization. I mean, if it happens, good, but if not, who cares. For me, it's always been about the relationships and the learning.
Scott: You've got to put in those reps with anything too. Like I said, you stated so eloquently that breaking taught me how to do the long game but I created 2000 video tutorials before I turned it into a business and before I tried to do anything with it other than make YouTube ads but even then the goal was never for it to become my main source of income. It was just like “Let me get better at this thing.” And so, 2000 later, you get pretty darn comfortable with it. And what I’ve noticed more than anything is that people who have the ability or the talent or whatever, really, it always definitely shines through. As long as you're grinding hard and you're working at it, it will pay off. My wife used to get very upset because I would work really, really hard on stuff like specifically that startup and there'd be no payoff for it. She'd be like “I just want the people who could consume this stuff to just know how hard you work on it all the time.” And I’m just like “Well, you just got to give it time maybe. You know, we'll just see. I firmly believe you just keep going for it” but that was always just something that was in the back of my head was just get the reps in, get the time, get the ability to gain an audience in those sorts of ways. The funny thing about Twitter for me is I would imagine that many of my Twitter followers found out about me from Syntax because when we started Syntax, I probably had like 6000 Twitter followers. Twitter was never my platform. When I started Twitter, I started way late. I didn't really know too much about it and for a long time, I didn't really necessarily understand providing value on Twitter. It was just there as like a social thing. Wes is good at Twitter. He provides like value with his tweets. For me, that's like something that I’m getting better at. That was always something I was good at doing on YouTube but that was one of the reasons why everything worked so well is because I had a YouTube audience and he had a Twitter audience and we could combine them in different ways.
Jayneil: Damn! And just thinking about it makes me understand like the scale is so shard to get. If I’m correct, you said even with 300,000 plus subscribers and max you were making 2000 dollars a month. So, when people think about “Oh, I make 100 grand a year in YouTube,” I’m just kind of imagining how many subs you got to have.
Scott: It's all about watch time. And even after the transition, you have to have longer videos to make more money, even after that transition, I didn't necessarily change my format because my format was my format. And, again, it was just all sort of like fun money to me while I was working at another business. So, I never focused on the monetization aspect of it and I never changed my content to fit it. And nowadays, I don't even turn monetization on any of my new videos because the idea is for them to be driven to LevelUpTutorials.com, not to be driven away from my content because I’m shoving ads in their face. So, there's a lot of lessons around there about like “The watched pot never boils” or something. Is that a saying? I don't know if that's like an actual thing but if you're really going for that aspect of it, it might not happen for you in those sorts of ways but if you're going it from pure intentions of just trying to help and provide good content, it will work itself out, hopefully, at least.
Jayneil: No, I absolutely agree to that. And now, you've got your own business set up as Level Up Tuts where you're providing not only just ad-free video but you have a lot more add-ons now since the first time you started. So, I saw that you're providing the community and a lot of added values. What are the added values you have planned for the roadmap?
Scott: When I started Syntax, I swear, it was like the same day I don't have a confirmation of this but in my mind, it was the same day I had all these declarations like “We're going to do the podcast. I’m going to revamp Level Up Tutorials” because I was good at recording content at that point. I’m like well “We're going to do a new tutorial series every single month,” obviously, even though that's a crazy amount of work and I don't think most people could pull that off but I was so good at releasing content, I was very confident in myself to be able to record a new 24-video long series every month or so. And I just stated it on the page – “This is what you get. 24-video series every month like a magazine.” And here we are, however many years, three years later or whatever, I haven't missed a single deadline. Every single one of my courses has been out before the last day of each month. And I’ve been doing, I don't even know how many courses now, I just released my 50th pro course which is like ones that are behind the paywall. So, I just released my 50th paid course. And that was the whole thing was not to stop doing free content because I still do free content all the time on YouTube but the free content became my extra time, that became my fun time and the paid content became “This is the value.” So, I think it works out best that way because the content being behind the paywall means the content can be better, I can focus so much more effort into it because the video has the potential to take care of all of our expenses for the month rather than just hoping that a single video makes me a couple hundred bucks here or there. So, for me, the big epiphany was to get off of YouTube and to own the content a little bit better. And the past two series are actually the first two series that we've released with our own video player now. We're off of YouTube for those entirely. Before I was using YouTube's video player and we've moved to Mux. Mux is a fantastic host for a developer like API-centric first. I wrote all the code just about on LevelUpTutorials.com at least for the first long time. I built the site from an e-commerce solution with subscriptions and a store and all this stuff. I built it all myself from scratch and then now I have a couple people helping me on it. So, I just declared I was going to do all these things and I just grinded it out and the nights and weekends that I was putting in and the extra time went to building my own thing rather than building somebody else's thing that was never going to work. So, it felt really good about and the whole what-if for me is like “What if I would have never taken that job as a startup and I would have started this endeavor a whole year earlier, where could I be with it?” but you can't play those games and I think the startup stuff really taught me a lot about how to run and structure a code base of this size and magnitude myself.
Jayneil: Man, that is so deep, trying to own your own content. And it's just a hypothetical, I’m just imagining, so I could be wrong with the numbers, but if somebody were to work at GitHub as a software programmer and then assume they make 150, now you've got your own business where you've got a paywall, now I’ve not done a paywall like that, so would it be fair to say that in the long run it's easier to make more money than that?
Scott: It's definitely easier to make more money. Well, okay, it's possible to make more money. I wouldn't say it's easier because without Syntax being the hit that it is in the sense that we get probably 35,000 on the low end to 80,000 downloads of most episodes of Syntax.
Jayneil: 80,000.
Scott: Yeah, I think 80,000 is the upper ceiling but the average is probably somewhere around 45,000. Without that amount of people listening to me talk twice a week, I don't think Level Up Tutorials would be able to support my family or additional developers working on it. I just don't think it would. Maybe I would have figured out a different way. I think I got lucky in a lot of different respects. And luck does not just happen out of nowhere. You put in the time, you put in the time and then an opportunity comes about and it's getting lucky with this opportunity but you've been laying the groundwork to be able to accept the things that have come from getting lucky on something like that. So, like I said, I did all the ground work, I did the hard work and the podcast being a hit, I think, was because of the work that we had put in beforehand but, again, I couldn't have predicted that it would have been as large as it was. I don't think either of us did. So, very happy that it was obviously because it allowed me to keep doing what I’m doing. So, yeah.
Jayneil: Dude, I mean, just talking with you, my mind is blown away, the ruthless execution that you have in place in terms of going out and continuing to execute.
Scott: A lot of it has been me failing into success. People do talk about that a lot but me specifically, I failed at just about every single attempt to make Level Up Tutorials into a business until this one. I mean, I even tried the Wes Bos model at one point of releasing a course for like a big course like an 80-video course for a bunch of money. I tried that and I didn't get a sale for two weeks. I didn't get a single sale.
Jayneil: No way!
Scott: I was just in tears. That was actually probably the catalyst that led me into having to take that job because I was just so beaten down by it, just trying so many different things and I’ve never been a good salesman or any of that marketer stuff and now I’m getting better at it but it's a skill you got to practice and I never practiced it. So, it was all about providing value and I wasn't providing any value. That's really the end result. I also picked a bad topic to make an IDEO video course on, which was React Native which at the time was just constantly changing. So, a couple months later that whole course is invalidated.
Jayneil: Oh yeah. Oh my God!
Scott: Good idea, yeah.
Jayneil: So, how big is the current Level Up Tuts team like? Is it you, Wes and then you guys have other freelancers that work with you that hop in the production side of things?
Scott: Oh yeah, Wes is not involved actually at all. Wes’ got his own stuff, man. He's rocking with his stuff and it lets him spend more time with his family. So, Wes has been doing his own thing consistently. And so, Level Up Tutorials is just me. Well, I’m the only full-time employee of Level Up Tutorials. One of the guys in my breaking crew decided he wanted to learn web dev a few years ago, watched a bunch of my videos, took a bunch of courses and now he is like one of our main UI devs, Eric Sartorius. So, one of the guys is my breaking crew and next thing you know, he's working with us. So, he works maybe like occasionally anywhere from like 10 to 20 hours a week. We have somebody in Ohio, Sidney. She just started doing our email newsletter stuff and our Instagram stuff which she just started a few months ago. We just hired a contractor to do 40 hours a week server-side code for us. I got a couple of people here and there that are in our Discord channel and they're going to be doing one-off projects or here and their sort of stuff. So, at the end of the day, any given day, it's pretty much just me but we have a cast of really talented people that I’ve found throughout my programming life who can help out at any given point. And I have also enlisted a couple of my friends in the video tutorial community like Travis Nielsen of Dev Tips on YouTube. The very first guest course we ever had, he did. He’s a good friend of mine. And then Spencer Carly and then James Quick, they all did courses for Level Up Tutorials. They're the only three people who have ever done a Level Up Tutorial’s course other than me. And then in the past, Ben who left pretty early on. He has a large family, he's got a full-time job and it's just not going to happen with him, there was just not enough time in his day to be able to produce video tutorials or even getting quiet to do so.
Jayneil: And then what are your thoughts on scaling the business? Do you want to keep it small on purpose, do you want to outsource all the aspects so you can relax or do you still want to be involved in this hands-on as you are right now?
Scott: That’s a good point. I’m starting to get more comfortable giving up parts of it. I’m the type of person like “It's my code and I've done it.” It's like really hard for me to give people things to do but with Eric, I’ve known him for so long and he's done such good work and he programs a lot like I do, so it was like a nice little training for me to toss some stuff. And once I figured out I could just make a GitHub issue and tag his name in it and then it would get done in like a day, I would be like “Whoa, this is pretty cool. I don't have to type the code.” So, it's been a big learning experience for me but I am realizing now that the thing that I’m best at is making the content. And sure enough, the site's good, I did the design, I designed it, I built it, I coded it, whatever, yes, I can do all of that stuff but ultimately, my efforts are best utilized if I can get in there and just record the content. And so, that's sort of what I’m learning right now is that I need to rely on other people more and be comfortable with that. So, we're going to see with this new dev we have coming on, he's very talented, he's probably a better developer than I am, which is going to be fun for me, it's going to be fun to be able to lean on somebody who's very talented and say like “All right, what do you think we should do here?” rather than me having to make all the choices because that is really, at the end of the day, I’m making all the choices, producing all the content, I’m managing the business, I’m answering every customer support email, I still do it right now. I mean, the business is me. It's so funny when people respond and they're expecting it to be some sort of a big corporation.
Jayneil: Yeah, I would expect too.
Scott: I’m just putting in the work. That's really just it.
Jayneil: It’s your baby.
Scott: It's my baby, yeah. Oh yeah. And it's been for a long time and I wouldn't have expected my career to have gone the direction it did and I’m happy that it has. It's been very cool for me to have my trajectory evolve the way it has.
Jayneil: Now, because of your brand and popularity, I’m assuming you get a lot of freelance projects. So, how do you deal with them? Do you still take them on you're just like “I don't have bandwidth. I’m going to refer you to somebody else?”
Scott: I think my last freelance project was about a year ago and I had only done it because it was a former co-worker of mine at that first agency and it was like a quick Gatsby set I could just knock it out. And then, of course, every freelance project, you end up waiting for the client for assets, you wait for this, you wait for that and like eight months later the project's finally done and I think I was just like “You know what, fine, it went fine, I got paid but it was not worth the amount of time that I spent thinking about it. So, I’ve really stopped all the freelance stuff because specifically it gets in the way of what I’m doing and the amount of value I can provide. We're working on so many neat features for Level Up Tutorials right now just to make it a better experience or to offer more stuff and we're working on so much more of that stuff and my time would have been so much better spent, even though I wouldn't have gotten paid for my freelance rate or whatever to do that project, I could have put that time into the site, which I really enjoy working on the site. I don't want to diminish that. I really enjoy working on my site and I still call it my site even though it’s the business site at this point but I’ve like really crafted this thing to be what I want it to be and I’m very proud of a lot of aspects of it. So, when I can get in there and do something fun or cool with that, I’m always very happy to do that.
Jayneil: I’m assuming that now that so many people in different companies like Facebook, GitHub, they're just watching your videos, you can easily get a job there but you wouldn't want to go and work full-time at a company now, would you?
Scott: No. Well, I don't think I would. No, I don't think I would although I did actually get turned down from Google.
Jayneil: No way!
Scott: This is before Syntax. They came to me and they were like “We want you to work on this specific project.” It wasn't even like “Here, let's interview” or whatever. It's like “We have a project in mind. This is what you're going to do for the project. All you got to do is get past the interviews.” I did the first interview. Okay, it was easy. I did the second interview. It was like a technical whatever. I did the third part of the interview which was like building this app, I built the app, the app was perfect. And then the fourth part of the interview, I flew out there and I had to be in Google's offices for eight hours, I had to give a presentation to a room full of people, I had to do all these stupid brainstorming things and coding on the whiteboard. At the end of it, two weeks later, I get an email that just said “We have decided to turn you down for the job” or whatever. That's it. It was one sentence. I was about to rage because I wasn't really exactly excited about moving to San Francisco but at that point, the person who would scope me out for the project was already like “This is what you should expect for an offer” like “This is the amount of money you should prepare for” or whatever like “In case you want to start looking for places” and then I got the email and it was just like “Oh, you didn't get it.”
Jayneil: Oh my God! All hopes were high.
Scott: That's when I made the decision to move from Michigan to Colorado. So, I moved to Colorado instead. That was great. Beautiful Colorado. I’m a big fan.
Jayneil: I have been to Vail. Oh my God! I haven’t seen a place that beautiful. So beautiful.
Scott: I know. My wife has a conference that she gets to go to every couple of years that's in Vail and I’m always just like “Yeah sure, I’ll watch the kids or whatever while you go to your conference” just because I want to go ski on Vail.
Jayneil: Wow! So, walk me through your structure to making the videos. I mean, if you're going to show how to program or something, I’m assuming that before you go live and record the video, you're going to make sure the code is working or let's say in between something breaks, are you okay with this, how do you prep for all that?
Scott: Sometimes I know the content really well enough that I don't even write test code to make sure that it works. My test code is parts of the Level Up Tutorial’s code base. So, I’ll just have a little code base right up there. And then I’ll sort of go around the topic and I kind of get the smaller aspects of it that I don't know people might get hung up on. And sometimes those little bugs that you hit when you think you know how to do something and it doesn't work, those bugs are really, really great, happy accidents that really lead to you having a better understanding of issues and other times, they make you go crazy and you say “Why isn't this working?” And I get very upset and I just got to pause the video, chill out, fix the bug, read the code figure it out, figure out what I’m doing wrong and get going again. And I have had too many of those situations now in the past few years where I don't do that anymore. And now, I meticulously code out just about every single episode ahead of times now but I still make mistakes like forgetting to import something or doing a weird import here or there or missing a misspelling or something, dyslexia, so I misspell a lot of things oftentimes in my brain. And so, those kind of aspects of it are difficult for me but like “Hey, if I got the code sitting right here, I know it's going to work, whatever, just go through it.” So, I prepare. Actually, it’s funny, a couple days ago I did my first Twitch stream just for fun just to try it out and what I did was the process of me writing the code for what will be one of the videos that's coming out August 31st. So, that was like the preparation for the recording of that video that I had done in that. And sure enough, I tweaked the code that we did in the tutorial based on what I did on Twitch but I tweaked it and the code that we ended up doing in the tutorial is way more elegant but that fact that I was able to just get it all on the code base, whatever, get it ready, prepared allowed me to see what the potential pitfalls might be.
Jayneil: Wow! So, you kind of just like keep it straight to the point? Because one thing I’m thinking about as I’m listening to your editing process, you mentioned listening to your videos at 2X speed, so I’m wondering, for Syntax, do you also listen to the audio at 2X speed and then edit out like the ums and the filler words so you just keep as it is? What is your trick?
Scott: For Syntax, we have a video editor or an audio editor, Adam. He has a company. Let me shout out Adam real quick. In fact, Adam is essentially like the third member of Syntax because we talk to him all the time and nobody ever hears us talk to him because we're always like “Adam, that's bad. Cut that out, Adam. We don't want to do this. Let's do this.”
Jayneil: One of the things I struggle with maybe and I’ve been told multiple times you need to get a podcast editor, so I use Dscript, which basically converts like the audio into a transcript. So, I just edit the text file and then listen to it and I manually edit it myself, it's all me. And I don't know, it was just like one of those things where I mean … like there's this guy in the Philippines that I always got put in touch with, that can do it for, I don't know, anywhere like 8 bucks an hour or something. It's not about the money but it's like am I at that level where I need to start outsourcing to somebody else and I felt that maybe for the first 50 episodes, I should do it myself so that I learn where I am messing up like if I’m talking over you, I’m only going to know if I edit it myself.
Scott: Yeah. And personally, I edited quite a bit of the maybe the first like 30, 40 episodes of Syntax. I did it and I did the audio and everything like that but, to be honest, the audio got a lot better when we moved it to Adam because I just didn't have the patience to cut out all those ums and stuff. I just didn't have the patience for it. So, his company is Podcast Royale, PodcastRoyale.net and they have been absolutely fantastic. Hey, there's a quote from Wes on here – “Simply put, Podcast Royale is good at what they do. We get a killer sounding audio, more concise.” Oh, I have a quote from here too. Okay, cool, they put a quote from me. They're just such good and we just drop it in a folder and then they publish it. They do a poll request on GitHub and we accept it and it goes live like that's it. And that's been a huge help for us as we've grown because I don't have the time to edit this, I just really don't.
Jayneil: But they don't know the context matter like, I mean, if you're saying something about HTML, CSS, maybe Adam doesn't know, so how do you correct that part if something's incorrect or maybe that's one-off things.
Scott: We often don't mess up in that sort of way. If we mess up, it's because we said something stupid or there was like a big gap or something like that or a dog's barking but for the most part, it's as simple as just saying “Adam, that was bad. Cut that out” or “Adam, cut back to this point” but for the most part, I think Wes and I are just prepared for what we do at this point that if we're messing up, we almost know immediately that we're messing up. We stop, we tell Adam to cut it out and then we just start the sentence again. There are very rarely more times that we have to do more than two takes or something and even then, it's like 90% of the podcast is recorded as it is. We don't mess up a whole ton, I think, at least at this point.
Jayneil: And after Adam's done editing, do you listen to the whole Syntax episode before releasing it and sending it back to him like “Hey, this is something you missed” or …
Scott: No. I just listen to it live when everybody else does it, pops up in my player as like “Oh, that new episode is released.” And at this point since we're like so many episodes ahead, I’ve forgotten which ones are coming out. So, it's really great to get a little episode pop up and I’m like “I don't even remember when we recorded this.” It would have been like a month ago or two months ago at this point. So, right now we're so ahead of the recording schedule, it's been a blast to listen to all these episodes but now I listen every single episode. I’ve never ever been like “Adam, you need to do this or that” or whatever. And I think he'd like never, and I don't know if it's him doing the editing or someone on his team, but there's never been a situation where we've been like “This was a really bad edit” and it's like just never happened. It's been very easy for us.
Jayneil: Then why don't you also outsource the video editing aspect of your videos as well? I’m curious because you only do that for Syntax?
Scott: It's harder because the tutorial content is a little bit more prone to making mistakes. You're teaching something. It's a little bit more prone to having to go back and whatever. It's also a little bit more prone to the editor needing more context to what was correct and what was not correct. The podcast is way less so or at least like if I’m saying something that's wrong, Wes is going to be like “That's not right” and then we'll work it out but when I’m doing the things, a lot of the times like the editing is just not easy to do that way. I had an editor Tim Smith who did maybe half of the series last year and he was awesome, he did such a good job and I was really, really excited to be working with Tim and then he got like a really nice full-time gig and was like “Hey, I don't have time for this anymore.” So, I had to drop him and I just haven't found a good video editor since. It's like I’ve auditioned a bunch of video editors and I’ll give them like “Here's a tutorial to cut” or whatever and I don't know if I found anybody who's been like the right person who had a bit of web development knowledge who could do it, knock it out. That was the whole thing about Tim is that he coded in React, he knew the stuff. So, he can really easily tell where I had made mistakes or whatever. It's just really not easy to find that person.
Jayneil: Wow! I guess, I’m just learning from you that there's no right or wrong way. You can have somebody do your own edit, you can have somebody not do your edit but either ways, I mean, as long as you're producing value, that's what counts at the end of the day because it sometimes eats me up because, to your point, when you see everybody doing the best practices like everybody's getting a podcast editor, they're churning out content and then I’m here on this route where I’m trying to build a relationship and craft like a through line like what am I going to ask you, listen to your previous episodes, stuff about you before just saying that “Hey, book a slot on my calendar. Just come on.” You see what I’m saying?
Scott: That's what makes room for all these different approaches, right? I don't want to listen to another podcast who's doing the same thing Wes and I are doing. I don't listen to that. And I think even what you're doing with being like a good interviewer, I don't think being a good interview is easy to do. I wouldn't say I’m a good interviewer. When we have guests in Syntax which is like pretty rare and we've had a handful of guests on Syntax but when we do, I find myself talking about myself way too much and I’ll listen to the episode and I’m like “Why am I not talking about them or asking them questions or whatever? Why am I talking about this?” I’d be really harsh on myself. I think just doing those kinds of things, it's just a very different skill. It's very difficult, in my mind, to evolve. And so, I think there's room for all sorts of stuff like this and just so many different approaches. When we started doing video tutorials, even then there was like four or five channels and people thought the pool was too crowded and now there's hundreds of thousands of web development tutorial channels. I mean, there's still room for somebody to come in and do it a little bit differently. The biggest thing that I remember is when Travis Nielsen started releasing dev tips. I was getting really jealous because it had taken me so long to get 100,000 subscribers and he got them like in a weekend and I was just like “Is he way better at this than I am?” And it was just like a totally different approach. And I think he had watched a lot of YouTube in general. So, he knew what the YouTubers were doing well. I mean, he's a very charismatic dude. So, at first, I was like really jealous of Travis and then he had me on his show, I had him on his show, we went to Vidcon and hung out together and soon we became like really close friends but at first, I was like “There's this guy coming in here trying to take some of my pond.” There's enough room for anybody doing something different in a positive way or doing it well.
Jayneil: On the corollary, does it worry you that somebody else, the next James or Janet, could come in and just rack up this many subscribers that you have built over these years and be your competitor? Does that worry you?
Scott: No, I don't think so. Sometimes I’ll display slightly jealous tendencies of “A new podcast coming up” or something like this or that and like my wife will be like “What are you talking about? You're the co-host of Syntax? Why would you be jealous of them growing an audience?” and I’m like “Oh yeah, okay, whatever.” She's very wise. She is very smart.
Jayneil: Wow, man. What advice would you give to designers, developers who are trying to work for themselves just like the path that you went on, what advice would you give them?
Scott: Make sure that you like working for yourself and everything before you just jump in. I wasn't necessarily a good freelancer. Wes was a very good freelancer because he's very good at managing contracts and managing clients and all that stuff. I was never good at that stuff. I was good at developing. I would have been much better working for like a small two-person agency where one person handled all the biz stuff and somebody else handed everything else. So, just make sure you realize what exactly it's going to be day-to-day, if you can get a period of time where you're maybe working part-time at a company and you have that steady paycheck and you can learn a little bit about those things before totally jumping in the pond. I think that's the thing because, honestly, I’ve met a ton of developers and while working for myself is absolutely fantastic and I have a hard time imagining in any other way considering I work better for myself in many respects but not everybody does and that's definitely the big situation is that not everybody should be an entrepreneur and not everybody should work for themselves or whatever. I don't know, sometimes people try to shame the people who are just working for even like a small agency or a big company and to me, that's crazy wrong because I loved working for the agencies that I worked for, I loved it. If it wasn't for some odd turns of events in my life, I’d still be doing that happily.
Jayneil: Thank you so much, Scott, for just coming on the show and sharing your wisdom with me, man. I really, really appreciate it.
Scott: Yeah, any time.
You can find show notes for this episode and all the others at designMBA.show. If you find this episode valuable, share it on social media and please leave a review. Thank you so much for listening.
Until next time.