- We saw that on YouTube it's really
hard to get an audience from scratch.
But Darral, has gone from zero on a new project,
to over 50 million people in less than a year.
And he wants to share with you guys the strategy
of how he did that,
so you guys can do the same with your projects.
(upbeat music)
Hey guys, my name is Tim Schmoyer.
Welcome to Video Creators.
We are all about helping you grow your YouTube audience,
so you can spread a message that reaches people
and changes their lives.
And Derral is working on a project that it will literally
change peoples lives.
- I am really excited about this project.
It is a passion project for me
and I am just so excited about it, that I can use
my skills set, and really grow an audience which is fun.
- Yeah, so you have a process, a method that you follow--
- Absolutely, I've been on YouTube since 2005.
I've helped 21 channels start from nothing,
and get over 1 million subscribers each.
I think we're at 41 billion views at this moment.
- What's the project that you are working on?
- I've been very passionate about a project about
creating a TV series about the life of Jesus Christ.
Now, I have a couple partners in the this, and it's
something that we're all really jazzed about.
And we had two major issues.
Number one, it was gonna cost a lot of money.
We're talking $1 million per episode.
- Yeah.
- The second thing, the biggest challenge was
is we had no audience.
So those are two huge challenges.
The first big thing that we did, is you have
to bring the right people together.
Teamwork on this, is about finding people that are
aligned with your vision or your mission.
And so you have your core team, and then you start
spreading that out.
That's how you actually do audience development,
is you get everyone aligned with your mission, your purpose
and your vision and then you start branching out.
- So once you have those people together,
then what do you do next?
- For us, it was locking ourselves in an Airbnb
and coming up with a strategy.
We created a roadmap and a plan talking about things
that we can do, we can't do.
And we're really defining what our brand is.
Then, we actually had a message.
If you don't have a message and you have a plan,
you're never gonna attract the outside audience.
- So you didn't jump right into like storyboards--
- No.
- And like planning content.
You actually have developed a strategy
for how do we get this thing to reach people--
- Yeah!
How to we get this funded?
And how do we actually have people watch you know,
the content or engage with us?
And then, what's the strategy behind that?
We were looking very specifically of who
our target avatar is?
We wanted to know more about them.
And we define several individuals like that.
I know this seems like a long process, but if you really
wanna do these types of numbers, you have to give
it a lot more time of defining who you're
actually presenting to.
- I know I've done this too guys.
I just wanna make something cool and you throw up there
and then you try to figure out who should watch this?
And then you try to figure out like where's your
audience gonna come from?
As oppose to the other way around.
- Yeah.
- Which is, knowing no, we're gonna start
with the audience before we even get to the content.
So that when we craft something it's exactly, something
that like fits.
- It has to fit like a glove.
When you define that before you put the plans together,
then you need to start bringing the elements that
will gather people together.
First big thing, is defining who's gonna be our leader?
It was not me.
The writer, director of the new TV series
that would be our spokesperson, be the person
that's out in front.
We have a leader, we have a plan, and now we need to
go out and find like-minded people.
So we're looking at different places
and communities that would have these type of people
that we're looking for.
We actually created a page on Facebook,
and we started to create content.
We put up a nine minute video, kind of pouring
out the hearts of what this project means to us, and why
we wanted to come together to have this vision
of making this television series.
When that came out, it was really heartwarming to see
that it had 1.2 million views on it.
It's still climbing because people, it resonates with them.
And all it was, was our creation story, but it was also
our belief structure, our creed, it was like,
this is why were doing this.
And there was a really strong call to action there,
which was something really important to us.
It's because we wanted to start raising money by the crowd,
to help us fund this project.
We're doing eight episodes in a season.
Every episodes at least $1 million each.
That $8 million we were trying to raise, that's hard.
(laughs)
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So what you're saying, is like we didn't just go from
zero to 50 million overnight.
You're like, we did one video and we started from there,
and then we start getting momentum of that, and it
was like, we're gonna start just with our small network
of people we already know.
- Right, we knew exactly the audience right?
And we knew what we needed to do.
But it's like we couldn't do everything all at once.
We felt like, hey people are trusting us, we need to
take it up a notch.
And so what we decided to do, is get our project approved
with the Securities Exchange Commission, actually
take public money.
Now, what that means, that we could actually, when people
invest in the company they actually come our partners.
There's over 16 thousand people that believe in us.
And that we were able to raise just shy of $11 million.
- Wow.
The way you bring people on board is,
what for I hear you saying, is like no, we're gonna,
we're on a mission here together.
This isn't like, hey guys, can you give us money
so we can go to this thing we really want to do?
No you're like, no you're gonna join this,
you're gonna be an owner of this company with us,
you're gonna be like on mission.
And you're like equipping them to like join you
in this movement.
I think that's really key for us as creators too guys.
You can just go off of your own to make content,
but the best content revolves around a community of people
who want to be a part of something that's bigger
than they are and they want to feel like they're a part
of that with you.
So you need to give your audience opportunities and ways
to be able to do that.
- Yeah.
And the next thing was timing.
There's certain times of the year that it's gonna make
more of a difference.
And for us when people are actually thinking about
Jesus Christ, they're gonna be more responsive
to our content.
So we actually made a Christmas campaign, where we were
showcasing a very beautiful, well done short film on
the birth of Jesus Christ.
That was a great thing for people to see.
And that was shared across the world.
Far surpassed at 30 million views on that,
which is so amazing.
- Do you feel like you guys got lucky on the viewing thing?
- I 100% believe it's reproducible.
It wasn't a lucky thing.
We planned for everything.
We had the right visibility from the right people.
We were looking at cross posting.
Getting other people to give us shout outs, and to post
and to comment and to share.
But once you start doing that,
you can start that momentum going.
- So you took advantage of tent polls events.
which is like when
society and people are talking about something, you join
into then into that conversation.
But what you also do, is you're actually tapping
into peoples beliefs.
It's important for you guys as creators to not
just know, well, I want to make this a video,
and not know just who wants it, but also have
some sort of creed.
Too many people think, well, my content's funny,
people should watch it or
I think it's really awesome I had fun making it
and all these other human elements that people
actually connect to.
In order for content to perform
it needs to have a good audience.
You need a specific audience and a belief that's around it.
And you got to start small and just kind of grow from there.
You need to have a strategy and do everything with a plan
and a purpose, like this doesn't accidentally happen.
But what happens ultimately, is that within one year
you're reaching 50 million people.
- Absolutely.
- And most of that, from I'm hearing is because
of all the work it was an upfront that no one ever saw
behind locked doors.
- It's having a plan but also having a backup plan to pivot.
Everyone needs to do, is just think okay,
what happens if we go here, what are we gonna do?
And I can tell you time and time again we were using
the alternative plan, than our actual plan.
- If you guys actually want to see the first episode
of this whole project Derral's been working on,
there's a link down the description below.
you could go click it.
- [Both] It's free!
(laughs)
- Completely.
You could go watch it.
And if you wanna watch more behind the scenes
of Derral's thoughts on this project, click that video
you see on your screen right now
to go over to Derral's channel, and watch more behind
the scenes of him working on this project so.
- I'm really excited about this one.
- Check it out guys.
Subscribe here and he will see you over in that next video.