(gentle music)
- Today is a very special day
in the land of CharliMarieTV,
because on this day last year,
I uploaded my first YouTube video and started this channel.
As of last week I have officially been making videos
on this YouTube channel for two whole years.
(applause and horns tooting)
(laughing)
As of this week, my YouTube channel has existed
for three whole years.
I technically just held up six fingers,
but you know what I mean.
It's official, this YouTube channel is four years old.
Now though, it's 2018,
and CharliMarieTV is officially five years old,
so it's time for my annual YouTube life catch up.
Tell you the things that have happened this year,
and what I've got planned for the future.
(upbeat music)
So there was a lot of exciting things
that happened this year,
but probably the main one is that
I hit 100,000 YouTube subscribers.
What?
That number still feels huge and like unfathomable to me,
that that many people have clicked subscribe
on the little red button on my channel, amazing.
And I honestly, I cried when YouTube Play Button arrived.
Which seems ridiculous, but I know,
when I first started YouTube I always told myself
that if I could get to 100,000
and get that silver play button,
that would be success to me.
I would have done what I set out to do,
so it just felt really cool.
It was a really special moment.
So thank you, to you, if you subscribed to my channel.
To be honest,
I don't know why you're watching this particular video
if you are subscribed, but hey, each to their own.
My videos of the past few years have become very,
very nerdy to be honest, and lots of like,
in depth design process and projects and stuff like that.
And I love that you are interested in
hearing about that sort of thing,
because I love talking about it.
The second thing that I found really exciting
in this past year that I've spent on YouTube
has been the amount of public speaking gigs, I suppose,
that I've been invited to do because of my YouTube channel.
I think I talked about it in a goals video that I did,
like for my 2018 goals,
and I talked about how public speaking
is something that I wanted to get better at,
it's something that I wanted to do more of,
and that was my focus for the year.
I set out intending on making like a speaker's reel,
and speaker's page, on my website and things like that,
which I never did, to be honest, yet,
but I still managed to get four speaking gigs.
I hosted a workshop at Epicurance,
Winter Work Week, in February.
I spoke on a panel at VidCon.
I gave a talk about design for bloggers
at Blogtacular here in London.
And my favorite talk that I've given so far in my life,
was at Craft and Commerce, the Convertkit conference,
where I talked about growing a YouTube channel
in a slow and steady way.
So those were all super great opportunities.
Public speaking is still something that I wanna focus on,
like in the upcoming year as well.
But I wanna focus more on speaking at design events,
or like speaking about design,
rather than speaking about YouTube.
I just wanna make sure that the balance doesn't shift off
too far into YouTube land,
where I find myself teaching about YouTube
rather than teaching about design, if it makes sense.
I still find public speaking very scary,
and it's very far out of my comfort zone,
but I think that's why I like it.
It's challenging me, it's a great challenge,
and it feels super rewarding when you do it well.
In these annual videos,
I always like to name a favorite of mine from the year,
and honestly this year I can't pick one favorite,
but I'm gonna name two series that I started,
that I've been really enjoying making.
The first one is my website redesign series.
I think at the time I'm putting this out,
there's only three videos in that series out at the moment,
so I'm very sorry for the lack of videos there.
I've had a lot of people asking about the progress,
but I've really loved the ones I have put out.
They've been really fun to make.
And the second series that I've loved making this year
has been my deep chats series.
So this is where I get a friend on and we discuss a topic,
like an issue, something that both of us
have experience with or have dealt with in the past,
and share our thoughts on it basically.
Just going to a bit of a deeper level
than talking about tools or software or process
or something like that,
more of a human side of being a creator
and the emotional impacts that it has.
So I've loved making that,
I've loved that the people that I've had on
have been super willing to be open and be honest
and share their thoughts,
and it's made for some
of my favorite conversations in general,
and they just so happen to be captured on camera.
So if you haven't seen any of that series yet,
then I'll link the playlist in the description.
You should go check them out.
Now because I hit 100,000 subscribers recently,
I have noticed a very big increase
in the number of people who are asking me lately,
when I'm gonna do YouTube full-time,
if I'm gonna do YouTube full-time, and all of that.
And it's forced me to really sit down
and think about what I'm actually trying to get
out of my YouTube channel, because I don't know,
when my channel was smaller,
it was really easy to just brush that off and be like,
no what are you talking about,
of course I'm not doing YouTube full-time.
But now that my channel's getting bigger,
and I can see that if I did wanna focus on this,
and if did wanna make this my full-time thing,
there's a few things that I need to change,
and I could really go after that.
And so, now that that's an option, I guess,
it's an active choice for me not to make it full-time.
I wanna remain a designer, first and foremost,
that is the thing that I love the most,
and design is why I love making videos, too.
I don't like making YouTube videos
for the sake of making YouTube videos.
Every now and then it's fun.
I'm not really talking about design in this video,
I'm just having a catch up with you.
But I think I would find it hard to keep making videos
if that's all I was doing every week.
I love sharing pieces of my design process,
I love sharing with you projects that I've worked on,
things I've learned as I've worked on certain projects,
like keeping you updated on my learning to code,
that sort of thing.
All of that is stuff that I'm doing as a designer,
in my design career, and telling you how it's going,
and how I did it over on YouTube.
So YouTube wouldn't be the same for me
if I did it full-time.
I don't think that I would like it as much,
and it's not where my main passion lies.
However, more and more these days,
I'm seeing YouTube as just another part of my design career.
That design career isn't just made up
of moving pixels around,
it's also made up of doing YouTube videos, and speaking,
and in the future I want it to be made up
of running a online course, and writing a book.
So all of these things are gonna come together
to form my dream career, essentially.
So because YouTube for me,
is a small part of my wider career,
it just doesn't make sense
for me to want to go full-time with it.
So yeah, that is my answer to that question,
if you were thinking about asking it.
For this to work for me,
and for me to have the brain space
to focus on the things that I'm truly passionate about,
I am going to have to make some changes
to the way that I think about my YouTube channel, I suppose.
I feel like I've slipped into
accidentally just doing what other YouTubers do
in terms of earning money through YouTube.
As you know, I have a regular sponsor on my YouTube channel,
I work with Webflow about once a month,
and they are a wonderful company to work with,
great people, great product.
I love the videos that we've made together.
But I get a lot of other sponsorship requests too,
through my email.
And I don't know,
I find email really overwhelming to be honest,
to go through and deal with when people are writing to me,
and so I have to consider each one and think,
oh is this something that my audience
would be interested in,
and then if it is I need to try out the product itself,
and see if I actually like it,
if I'd be willing to let them sponsor.
It's all a process, and it's a lot of work,
when to be honest,
I very rarely take on new sponsorships anyway.
So going forward in this next year on my YouTube channel,
I'm gonna give myself permission
to just immediately say no to anything,
any request that comes through,
whether it's a product or a tool
that I don't already know and use and love.
So that severely cuts down
my moneymaking opportunities on YouTube,
but I'm OK with that, because like I said,
this is not my full-time focus.
I would rather have the time that I would spend,
evaluating that product, deciding if it's a good fit,
filming the video, whatever,
I would rather spend all that time
working towards the projects that I already know I wanna do,
and that I already know I don't have a lot of time for.
Things like making my website, first off.
But then also the course and the book,
like I alluded to before.
I think I worried that I was doing myself a disservice
by not fully investigating each of these opportunities,
and giving them a good going and thinking them through,
because I know that I'm lucky to be in a position
where brands are reaching out
and wanting to sponsor videos on my channel.
But you know, just gotta do what's right for me
and go with my gut.
Another example of this
is there's been a few times this year,
in this past year on YouTube,
that I've been offered invitations to come on a trip,
to attend an event,
or see something and make a blog about it,
and that blog would be sponsored,
the trip would be paid for, et cetera.
I love travel, as you know, I do a lot of it.
And so these are the opportunities in particular
that I'm really interested in.
But, I think I've come around to thinking
that I'm less interested
in being paid to go somewhere and vlog it,
than I am in being paid to go somewhere
and speak at an event.
That is the sort of travel that I wanna be doing.
So those are the opportunities
that I'll be paying attention to,
and less so the ones where I get invited to come on a trip.
Again, it feels weird saying this,
and it feels like I'm being super ungrateful or something,
but I don't know, I had a lot of travel for work this year,
and a lot of conferences and things like that,
and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out
some of these trip opportunities,
and trying to make them happen, 'cause like I said,
that's exciting that someone wants to pay you
to come on a trip and make a video about it.
It put a lot of weight on my shoulders
and lot on my mind, and it stressed me out a lot.
So again, I'm just gonna cut that off
and allow myself to not think about it,
and not worry about it.
I know I'm gonna hate editing this video,
because all of that just sounds like
the ultimate in first world problems,
but I hope you understand what I mean.
I just really wanna tell you how I'm thinking of YouTube
at the moment, and how I'm framing it in my mind.
Basically I just want it to be an outlet
to share things that I'm learning,
and things that I'm doing,
so that's what I'm gonna stick with.
Coming up in the next year on this channel,
I have no growth goals.
Getting to 100,000 was my ultimate dream on YouTube,
and I've hit it, I think I'm at 114,000
at the time of making this video.
So we'll just see what happens
from here on out to be honest.
You can expect more in the deep chat series, hopefully,
when I can find new people to be on it.
More on my website redesign series,
I promise that it'll start moving a bit faster
once I stop traveling so much.
Yeah, more of my process, more projects that I'm working on,
things that I'm learning, there's just,
there's a lot that I have saved up and ready to film
and share with you all.
So I'm excited about it, I hope you are too.
Lastly, I just wanna say a huge thank you
to my Patreon supporters for sticking with me.
I'm not the most organized person when it comes
to setting up all our calls on time and things like that,
and I just really appreciate that you have stuck with me,
and I love having your support, I love having you there,
and I love when you listen to my Patreon podcast,
and reply to the posts that I put on there.
Yeah, it just means a lot and I'm thankful for your support,
so thank you very much.
All right, gotta wrap this up,
because I gotta go and get some work done.
So thank you for listening to this very long ramble,
I would love to hear from you,
what you wanna see from my channel in the next year.
What types of videos do you wanna see,
is there some you wanna see more of,
is there some that you've seen me put out
that you wanna see less of?
I don't know.
Let me know, so I can make sure that I'm creating the things
that are the most useful for you.
All right, thank you for watching,
I really appreciate your support,
and I will see you in the next video.
Bye.