Hey, this is the daily overpass, my name is Eric and I make apps!
Now today I wanna talk about why you should learn to record yourself!
Ok so let me start off by reminding you that we are changing the time of our live stream
this week.
We've been doing it every Friday at 8pm UK time and a lot of people have complained that
they're not able to make that time because they're in India or Singapore and that time
is just inconvenient because it's the middle of the night.
So we're moving it up three hours to 5pm on Fridays, so that will be 9am on the west coast
of the states and it will be 9.30pm in India and I think it will be midnight in Singapore,
so hopefully that'll be better for everyone.
I really hope to see you there!
I don't know what we're gonna talk about yet but if you have questions and you want us
to take a look at your google play page or just put something out to the entire group,
that's the perfect opportunity to do it.
So I hope to see you guys there!
Secondly, right now as I film this, we are at 9953 subscribers on the channel, so by
the time you see it, we may be at 10,000, so I'm really excited about this! and I know
10,000 is not a lot in terms of youtube, right, but to me it's a lot!
It's a huge number and I'm very grateful to everyone who's subscribed and asked questions
and kept with the channel over the years and put up with the bad videos and hopefully benefited
from some of the good ones!
So I'm really grateful.
I was in this business mentoring group the other day - so every couple of weeks I go
to a business mentoring group - and I was talking about how we have the youtube channel
and we put content out regularly, and somebody asked me how often do you do it and I said,
hmmm...daily.
Then somebody said "do you ever feel like you're on a treadmill that you can't get off?"
And I thought about it and I thought "no, I'm not".
This is the one highlight of my day a lot of the times!
This is the thing I really enjoy talking to you guys, even if I have a really bad day,
I can tell you guys about it!
The only thing that I have any issue with is when we have camera problems or technical
difficulties - that's kind of a drag to do it over and over again!
But it's something the more I think about it, I really encourage anybody out there who
you're doing your own business or you're doing your own apps, is to start putting videos
out because videos are much more engaging!
If you have an app on google play, you wanna have the app videos there anyway, but you
might wanna also put out content where you're just doing like I do - talking to the camera,
sharing your thoughts, talking about your app, talking about some of your experience
and everything like that, even if not a lot of people watch it, it helps you get used
to being more comfortable in front of the camera.
I've talked before how my clients are always really impressed with the fact that rather
than just sending them a document with some screenshots, like when we have an app where
the build is just not ready to send them, I don't want them to click on anything because
everything will crash, or it's not ready for testflight - I'll send a video where I'm talking
to the camera, I've got the screen sharing on there so that on one half is the iphone
or the android device, and I'm using a reflector or quicktime player and I'm just going through
and showing them what it does.
And they're always really impressed with it and it's easier for me now than it was in
the early days because I'm not so self-conscious in front of the camera.
That's one of the reasons why it's hard!
Especially for me in the early days, I was really...I hate the way that I look, I hate
the way that I sound, I start to think I look like a dork, all this kind of stuff.
So I thought "well, I'll start doing it more often and hopefully get used to it", and I
do.
And sometimes, like I had a friend send me a video the other day, it was his first video
for YouTube.
He said "Eric, can you give me your opinion of this?"
And I watched it and it was good.
The content was really good, but he was doing this thing where he was going like "hey everyone,
welcome to the channel, today we're gonna talk about this", and I thought "it's really
good but you're not looking at us!
You're looking off to the side, it looks like you're reading something.
And he said "I wasn't reading anything", so I said "in that case, I know exactly what
you were doing!
You were using an iphone and you were looking right at the screen, and you should've been
looking at the camera", and he said "that's exactly what I was doing".
So you just get used to these things as you go.
So I wanted to share a few things that I've learned over the last year and a half of doing
the daily videos.
So we've done probably 500 videos nearly!
So we've been doing the daily video which was just 5 days a week up until about three
months ago, and then a couple of years before that I started doing the weekly video, and
if you wanna see something cringe worthy and embarrassing, go back and look at those early
videos!
And those are the one that I thought were good enough to go onto youtube!
The ones before that were really really bad! but there's a few things I learned from doing
it daily.
First of all, the more often you do it, the more comfortable you get with it.
Doing it at a daily timeline stops me from being able to be a perfectionist.
When I was doing it once a week, I was spending too much time on the videos.
I was going "that's really bad!", I would watch it and edit it and then change my mind
and then do it again.
Sometimes I would spend days on a video and the content was really not worth the days
putting into it, but I wanted to do it on a weekly and everything, so doing it daily
was having that deadline.
If you just picked up a camera right now and started recording yourself and just jump headfirst
into it, that would be better off than making a plan and going off and doing that, in my
opinion.
Second, people don't say rude things all the time! the big thing that I was afraid of was
that somebody would go on and say "you're an idiot" or "you're a dork" or whatever like
that.
And you know what?
It does happen.
It happens from time to time.
You'll put something out there and you wanna talk about something, something you're passionate
about.
I'm just giving my opinion on this, let's talk about admob revenue or whatever, and
somebody would say "you're an idiot" and you would just have to get used to that and that's
one of the ways to do it.
Another thing I learned after doing the daily videos is that I start to pick up the quirks
in everything I do.
People have talked about how I say 'like' and 'you know' too often and i'm really trying
to stop and editing the videos each day helps me see where I'm doing that, and just being
more critical of those kinds of things.
And also I start to see how often I need more clothes, I need a haircut, whatever.
And the last thing, and this is really weird, this is a cosmic thing, I have no idea why
it is - whenever you film outside, somebody's gonna walk up just as you press record.
It always happens!
You could be on a deserted island where there's nobody around and you've been scavenging for
days hoping someone will rescue you, but if you took out a camera and started filming
yourself, some guy would walk up walking his dog.
It just always is, every time I film outside, somebody walks up!
And I can go to the most remote places and I think there's nobody around, I can just
do it.
The amount of times I've talked to you guys and there's been somebody walking his dog
and just be like right off camera, and his dog's taking a dump and he's just watching
me like "huh, what's going on over there" and you're trying to keep it going and everything
like that.
So anyway, my point this week is I encourage everybody to start getting used to it.
I think it's the future, even if you're a developer, you work for another company, and
even if you don't show it to anybody, start getting used to filming yourself and putting
yourself in front of the camera because it's painful for all of us to start!
It's painful for me, it's painful for me now sometimes to watch them and to not be used
to it because you're the most critical person of yourself ever, but it really helps you
relate to your users and your clients and everything going forward.
So anyway, once again thanks everyone for subscribing, I really am so grateful!
Now that's it for today, I'll talk to you guys again tomorrow!