- Content.
Mark Zuckerberg.
Ew.
- It's been a year.
- Please clap.
- Thank you to our supporters on Patreon
for helping this channel and making this year possible.
Hey there, this isn't the usual Answer in Progress video,
so if you're looking for an extravagant book report
to tell you that we live in a society,
you're in the wrong place.
I just wanted to provide an overview
for how this year went, how far we've come.
Consider it your Answer in Progress wrapped.
Hold on, that's better.
Graphic design.
All right.
To tell y'all this story of this year,
first you need to know how last year ended.
Answer in Progress was about to end.
I'm not kidding.
At the start of 2020,
the three of us made an agreement
that assumes that Answer in Progress,
the whole channel,
all of the videos,
end on December 31st, 2020,
unless we all decide to keep going.
For context, the channel was not doing well.
We were losing subscribers every time we uploaded
and video views were way down.
We were out here chasing our dream
and the universe was saying,
"This is a bad dream."
Are you ready?
- Let's do it.
Do you guys remember why you wanted
to keep doing Answer in Progress?
- Well, I don't think that I gave
Answer in Progress enough in 2020.
I wasn't ready to let go of Answer in Progress in 2020
and I knew that there was more that we could give it.
- Well, I was at university
and I really didn't want to get a job.
No, I'm going to do that again.
I had to put all my eggs in this basket anyway
because I hadn't started applying for jobs.
I was going to graduate this year.
I feel like I've sort of dabbled in YouTube
for like eight years doing random stuff,
but I've always like put it on the back burner
and this was the one time where like something,
a concept that I really liked
and believed in was like possible.
- When we all decided to keep doing Answer in Progress,
we had actually set three conditions that we needed to reach
or else we couldn't do this again.
We eventually do need to start living in the adult world.
Do you remember what those conditions were?
- To pay us a living wage so we could do it.
That's all I remember.
- To get 500K subs.
- And there was just one last condition
where we needed to produce two videos a month,
which was kind of a bold decision
given the fact that we were struggling
to produce one video a month in 2020.
- Did we do it?
I don't know.
I feel like we're like kind of that right now,
but like not really.
- Well, let's find out.
We released 20 videos in 2021,
we organized our lives,
we faced our fears
and we did some crime,
all the while learning something new
with our little neighborhood of nerds
that isn't so little anymore.
And we launched a Patreon
which is currently running a sale until the end of January,
where we got to share what happens
when three idiots run a business.
- Every day is a random day.
They just come one after another for what reason.
Throughout all of this,
I was finishing up my final year of university
writing exams while also trying to figure out
how to make our videos stand out on YouTube.
We tested out title after title after title.
We change our titles a lot
and I have no shame.
- And I was balancing my life as a server,
along with all the emails, paperwork and accounting
that come with having an actual business.
- And all of this kind of came to a climax in August
when something kind of massive happened.
We got an email from the History Channel saying,
"Hey, let's work together."
It was kind of the dream.
Not only because real ones remember cool history,
but also because they let us produce the show
we wanted to make exactly how we wanted to make it.
This one.
Hey there, I'm Sabrina
and this is History Remade with Sabrina.
This is working.
In each episode,
we deep dive on an iconic object
in history and explore the interesting engineering
behind the build.
Our only goal now is to get water
from the top to the bottom.
We're going to keep lowering our standards
until we can reach them.
Tada.
This is already harder than I expected.
Hark, the telegraph remade.
I regret this immediately.
Go check it out.
It's linked in the description.
All of the episodes are live.
I still can't believe it happened.
Anyway, it also was a massive turning point for us.
We had 500,000 subscribers,
we were uploading two videos a month
across all of our projects,
but for the first time,
we could finally afford to pay ourselves
more than $4 an hour.
But seriously, that last one is really important.
- I was working full-time at the restaurant
and I like needed to just keep working.
I just needed to work to make money.
That's the reality of it.
And then when things started getting better
for Answer in Progress and I could quit my job,
I was like, "Wait a second,
this is a real thing that we can do
and like this is
us three idiots
running a business can make this happen."
- I feel really in control of what I'm going to do next
because I get to make the YouTube videos
that I've always wanted to make.
And before, I feel like we were really focused
on figuring out how we can get ourselves paid,
but now we're in a place
where Answer in Progress is doing well,
we can really focus on making really good videos,
exploring questions that we have
and just like chasing our passions more,
rather than like,
"Ah, how do we make this work?"
- For the first time,
two years since Answer in Progress started,
one year since we decided
to keep chasing this bad dream of ours,
we are finally able to put in 100% of our time
and our effort into Answer in Progress.
And I just realized that this is basically
a "we quit our jobs and became YouTubers" video,
except we didn't have jobs to quit,
so it's worse.
But seriously,
none of this would have been possible
without our supporters on Patreon,
our team of incredible, lovely, talented freelancers
who help us make better videos more often
and it definitely wouldn't have been possible
without you watching our videos, sharing them,
engaging for the algorithm.
So thank you.
- Thank you.
- But either way, have a lovely day.
See you next year.