What's up guys, this is Ben from Life In 360
and today I'm going to show you how to create
a tiny planet photo, with your Ricoh Theta S Camera.
Theta, theta, theta?
Whatever the hell you wanna call it.
Oh my God,
that's so cringe.
So that was my first ever video on YouTube.
I posted it on June 25th, 2016.
That joke, it didn't work, it didn't work!
And I think it's safe to say my videos
have gotten a bit better.
So I've been wanting to make this video for a while now
but I haven't quite found the opportunity.
Today's gonna be the day, I owe it to you guys to
tell you what happened, and what is happening.
Back in 2016 I was Ben from Life In 360
and now I'm Ben,
no Life In 360.
So I started Life In 360 in late 2015, early 2016.
By the way how cool does my new print look?
I'm spinning it like it's a basketball.
So back in late 2015, early 2016 I started Life In 360
I had a business partner and we had grand plans
to make this epic multi-million dollar company.
As most mid 20s entrepreneurs do,
and we really went full out, we registered the business.
I started posting regularly across
all social media platforms.
And we started exploring all the ways
we could get paid.
Here lies the problem, it was a bad business model!
We were trying to sell T-shirts
and re-sell 360 cameras and I think we made
minus 5000 dollars.
It felt like we'd tried everything,
I kept posting content all the time
but the business side of things just wasn't working out.
We weren't making a dime from it.
This in turn caused my business partner
to lose confidence in what we were doing.
And I lost my faith in him,
and he probably lost his faith in me.
And it was just not a good situation,
we were always on good speaking terms,
he's the nicest guy ever and I still love him,
but this business thing, it wasn't working out
and something had to be done.
So after making nada after two years,
we decided to part ways.
Despite this, I kept building the Life In 360 brand.
I kept posting under Life In 360
on all social media platforms.
And I kept the Life In 360 spirit alive.
And in turn, each video I got better
at talking to the camera, and teaching people stuff.
So whether you call it Life In 360
or whether you call it Ben Claremont,
whatever it was, it was still growing.
For the first few years I was filming
all of my tutorials in my bedroom.
I was just really clever with my cinematography
and I made sure you couldn't see my bed in every shot.
It looked like legit right?
Nobody ever questioned whether it was a studio
I was filming in, or somewhere
very close to the place I sleep.
Now I've moved to a bigger, better apartment
with cool backgrounds like this one,
this one, this one, this one, this one,
which is really just a combination of the previous two.
This one, oh wait, I already did this one.
So after making all of these new videos,
like a 100 or so it was hard to maintain the appearance
of an actual company that did stuff.
Because it wasn't, it was just me posting on Instagram
and Facebook and YouTube.
I couldn't even get the website LifeIn360.com
Some guy with a small European soccer league
decided to name his website Life In 360
and it's about soccer.
How does 360 even relate to that?
He also took the Facebook URL, Facebook.com/LifeIn360
which made it kind of hard for me
to have consistent branding as Life In 360.
So more time passed and after seeing a whole bunch
of highly successful vloggers all in the photo
and video niche that were operating under their own name.
There was absolutely no company attached to them.
It made me think, what's the point?
Why do I have this company?
What's the actual tangible benefit
of being attached to this company?
I couldn't think of many other than
it making me sound really official
saying I'm Ben from Life In 360.
And then I had a good think about it
and I thought about the kind of vloggers
I like following, and not one of them was a company.
They were all individual people
and then I had an epiphany.
People connect to people.
They don't connect to companies,
this is something I talk about in my video course
A Beginner's Guide to Building A Personal Brand,
I'm gonna give it to you for free here,
real short real quick.
If you take a company like Under Armour.
Who are the popular sports clothing company,
I can admit it my wardrobe is
filled with Under Armour clothes.
Are they successful because they say
hey we're Under Armour we're a big massive
multi multi multi multi million dollar company,
buy our stuff.
No that would be a rather unappealing marketing strategy.
What they do instead is pay Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson
a shit load of money to be the face of Under Armour
because people connect with faces
and people and not companies.
It's as simple as that, people are relatable
because they're people.
They have flaws, they have strengths,
they have quirks, they have attitudes,
they have beliefs and virtues.
If you can associate all of those things
to the media you put out on the internet.
That is how you build a following
and a trustworthy reputation.
The number one hack in the social media blogging game
is humanizing yourself.
If you can humanize yourself better than anyone,
then you'll attract other humans
that see you as a human just like them.
And that want to follow you, it's magic!
There are actually many strategies for humanizing
yourself which I talk about in my course.
But the most basic one is operating under your own name,
so people actually know your name
and they can refer to you like you're a friend,
or talk to their friends and say
hey did you see Ben Claremont's video?
Did you see Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson's new ad?
So with that in mind I started the rebranding experiment
two months ago and I changed my YouTube channel name
to Ben Claremont.
I have a question for you, did you notice?
Did the world explode, did Voldemort come and eat my soul
and your soul and everyone's souls?
No, not that I know of.
In fact 99% of people didn't notice
and now two months later my channel
is growing faster than it ever has.
I'm almost at 50k subscribers!
So naturally, the rebranding process would follow on
to all of my other social media channels.
And yes I've been putting it off a bit
but with some things you just know
when the moment is right and it hasn't been right.
Until now, from this very day on,
I will be no longer be operating under Life In 360,
it's going to be just Ben Claremont.
- Mr Ben, does this mean you killed Life In 360?
- I'm not killing off Life In 360 completely,
I'm just putting it there in the background
if I want to pursue it again
in the future it's always there.
But I have no need to at the moment,
I'm finding good success with what I'm doing
and attaching a company to me
and what I'm doing now is unnecessary
and it doesn't really serve any purpose at all.
So here are my brand new social media handles.
Finally, finally, I have consistent branding yeah!
Ah it feels like a weight has been lifted.
By the way, there is still a Life In 360 Instagram account,
I will keep that going and I'll try to be better
with sharing your guys' work.
My goal is to share the best tiny planets on Instagram
on that account and yes I've been very slack with it.
But I will be better.
So feel free to subscribe to us on YouTube guys,
that would be much appreciated,
yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah, what he said.
I'll see you in the next video.
(light music)