- If you're not crushing it right now as an entrepreneur,
you suck.
(upbeat music)
You got your perspective.
(crowd cheering)
Don't you wanna be happy?
(upbeat music)
- [Emcee] And that really got me to where I am today.
So if there's one person - Wanna get miked up?
in the entire world - Am I getting miked up?
that I have to thank for all my business hustle,
it is GaryVee, and he's here right now.
Gary, let's get on stage baby!
(audience cheering) - Let's go with this.
Welcome to VidSummit, Year 2.
Happy to have you back.
- Thank you brother.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Hello.
Hello.
Hello. VidSummit.
Thanks for having me.
So, just having a great sense of like,
the way people have been tweeting about the event
and a good understanding of who's in the room,
I actually want to do quite a bit of Q and A today.
So before I go any further,
you guys said you had runners.
I just want to get a sense.
Where are the runners?
I might go into like 10 or 15 minutes in,
so VidSummit crew be ready for me
because I'm about to go into it,
and so just raise your hand if you have a question
when I open that up.
And I wanna go questions, because ultimately
what I think is super important about
when you produce content or when you speak,
I think the biggest,
actually this is a great starting point.
I genuinely believe that the far majority of this room
is not achieving what they want to achieve,
if they're not.
So if you're sitting here and you haven't amassed
enough audience or revenue or whatever
might be running through your mind,
the biggest thing that I've seen over the
last 12 years that I've deeply been
paying attention to creators.
Just to give people context here,
it was great to see Rob Sandie,
the CO and founder of vidIQ who's also the CO
and founder of a company called Viddler,
which was the platform that I switched
my wine show from.
Because I started a wine show on YouTube on
February 21st, 2006, less than one year
after YouTube came out.
99% of the videos on YouTube when I started
were ripped off content from television
or these very quick, less than a minute
funny clips of like Mentos in a Coke bottle
and things of that nature.
I sat down and did a 25 minute show.
It was mainly kids and tech nerds.
I did a 25 minute show on wine and me tasting wine
and literally for the first 18 months,
barely anybody watched it.
And so it's interesting for me to like be
at this event knowing there's just so many
people that are creating,
but the thing that no question to me is a
great starting point,
is I am blown away how many creators spend all their time
being selfish mentally.
Like 99% of the emails and DMs and conversations I have
and conferences like this are predicated on
start with, "how do I?"
"How do I
"get more subscribers?
"How do I get more engagement?
"How do I get more money from brands?
"How do I quit my job and do this full time?
"How do I?
"How do I?"
So I will tell you without knowing most of you
in any shape or form,
I still will default into that 95%
of the people in this room will not get to where
they want to get to
because their entire fucking filter
on everything they're doing is 100% selfish
and the only way to actually amass victory in this game
where as amazing it is that we live in a day and age now
where you can be a creator and just like live your life
and love what you do and make a living,
the equal problem is anybody can do it,
which creates a very fun dichotomy of
supply and demand.
This is a simple game of supply and demand.
Anybody tomorrow can be a slimer,
or a travel vlogger,
or a business expert,
or a fucking entrepreneur, right?
Anybody can do that.
The problem for everybody here is
anybody can do that,
and then who's gonna get people's attention?
The people that are gonna get people's attention
fall into a very basic bucket.
Number one, the second biggest vulnerability for
the creators in this room and
the people at home that will watch this,
is A, it's I, I, I.
B, it's just not the truth.
For me, one of the most interesting things that
I watch every day in this space is people think that
fake it till you make it is still real.
There is so many people posing it because they feel
like they have to inflate their backstory
or what they're capable of or the advice
that they're giving to break out,
yet that is the exact same reason that
they won't break out.
To me, everybody who's trying to be a life coach
or an expert or ya know, an entrepreneurial expert,
like the amount of people that are
entrepreneurial experts but have never built an
entrepreneurial thing
(audience laughing)
Look, I wish I could be a quarterback of an NFL team,
but like, I can't and all of you can see that
and it's proven.
Unfortunately, with entrepreneurship, it's not proven.
You can just put it in your Instagram profile
and thus you are.
The big advantage that everybody in here
like myself that's over 40 has
is we've lived through an economic meltdown.
We've lived through everything.
Yeah, we've lived through,
I mean there was one in '01 and '07,
so we got two quick.
If you're older enough, you've got '92 and like
you know, '79.
That was the worst.
Jimmy Carter fucked it up, guys.
(audience laughing)
And so we've lived through it,
thus we anticipate it in a different way than
if you're under 32, ya can't.
Because if you've only lived life professionally
in an environment where the economy's been flourishing
you don't realize what happens,
which is literally tomorrow morning you can wake up
and we can have a Bear Stearns,
some sort of event that completely starts the collapse
of the economy and all of a sudden the DMs from
a detox tea or from Pepsi or Coach stop.
And if your entire money is coming from your
audience that buys 2O...
Let me tell you what stops when the economy collapses.
People don't just want to buy a $22 t-shirt
that has a funny saying on it.
Big brands don't want to pour money,
because they don't have it,
into the market.
And so where I'm really going with this is
a couple of things.
Context is what drives a lot of success.
When you read all your comments for all your content,
you get context from your audience
and it helps you think about the next place
you can go with your storytelling,
instead of you just being creative and guessing,
but you have to put in the work to read the comments.
Context and understanding what's happening right now
in the global economy.
This is all growing,
but it's growing during a time of frothy,
massive economic growth.
So if you're sitting here and your strategy is
I'm gonna get off my job and I'm gonna get into this,
or I'm now making $80K a year doing this
but I'm about go to a half a million,
you have to contextualize the moment we're in.
I tell entrepreneurs all the time,
and I don't want to razz here,
but I want everybody to wrap their head around it.
If you're not crushing it right now
as an entrepreneur, you suck.
(audience laughing)
This is the easiest era ever to be winning,
and you have to contextualize that.
So, a couple of things.
You might just start now and you're only three months in.
You didn't have time to crush it, but fuck.
If you've been trying to do it as an entrepreneur
for the last five and a half years and it's not clicking,
you need to work for somebody.
You wanna know what most people's
vulnerability is?
I.
The reason I always win every time I enter
something else,
it's what can I do for you?
And not the person that has 11 million,
just the person that's right next to me
because karma and doing the right thing
and kindness and being a fucking human
always wins in the end.
Always. (audience applauding)
It does.
Because what you don't know is the person
next to you may have 48 subscribers
but his aunt runs shit.
(audience laughing)
And everybody here's jockeying and overthinking
and politicking in their head,
all from a selfish place,
and all the magic's sitting in the doing the
right thing, saying hello, being patient.
But most of all, the thing that will speed you up
in the thing that you want to accomplish,
no question, is you've got to become religious
about your audience.
Like you have to become religious about your audience.
Guys, honestly, straight up, if you're sitting in the
crown right now, it's unacceptable for you not to
reply to the comments you get on your content.
Honestly, like fuck it.
Like I'm just gonna go that literal with it.
I don't like to do definitive things
because that's just not how life it,
but I'm just comfortable going there.
It is actually fundamentally grossly negligent
and unacceptable for you to be in a place where
you do not reply with a thank you or a heart
or a meaningful you read it and you meaningfully
wrote something back to every single comment you
have right now in whatever limited that is,
because those seven people are disproportionally
the reason you're gonna get 17.
And yet you're so worried about getting the next 10
that don't know you, you're giving no fucking love
to the seven that decided to watch your horse shit.
(audience laughing)
My favorite people here are the ones like,
"People don't get me yet.
"I'm too over the top for them.
"I'm too futuristic.
People don't understand me yet."
(audience laughing)
They understand you.
They think you suck.
(audience laughing)
I love that shit.
Like, "Gary, I'm coming from a totally different angle."
No you're not, Angel.
You actually just suck.
People want to PR themselves to not
address their insecurities.
To me the market is right.
If you're not winning right now,
it means you're losing.
It means the market doesn't like what you're putting out.
Now, you have a question to ask yourself.
Are you gonna do something that you think the
market's gonna like because you want that short term,
but it's not your authentic self?
Or are you gonna stay the course of what you do
and see how it plays out?
For me, the second one's clearly amazing.
Here's why.
My big problem right now with this space
is that everybody's trying to
make a million dollars a year.
I'm trying to get people to understand that if you're
making $53,000 a year or $92
or whatever it may be doing something you hate,
wouldn't it be awesome if you could make that same
exact number just making videos about Star Trek
or fucking Supreme clothes or like making yogurt, right?
Like to me what has really bothered me about this space
is I don't think people realize the long tail of
this space is the special thing of this whole game.
To me the person in here who's making $114,000 a year,
doesn't like it, super passionate about streetwear
and she or he is trying to make their content online,
I'm always trying to convince them like yo,
you're making $114,
can you look at what you're spending?
Can you live a little more humbly so
actually you only need $82?
Because if you only need $82, you could get faster
to getting happy and once you get on the game
to making $82 in ads and brand deals,
you'll get to $114 in a second because now
you're in a full time energy and it'll open it up.
We have a very big problem that we're creating
infrastructure costs around ourselves.
There's a lot of people here who are hiring post
production people and a PR person and
fucking building out a team and they've got
no money coming in.
To look the part.
The market decides, not your self esteem coach.
(audience laughing)
You know what I mean?
The market.
If you're so good and you're worth $500 an hour
as a designer or an editor,
that means people are actively paying you.
And if you're not,
living in an ivory tower in your own fucking head
that you're worth $500 bucks is why 99% of people lose.
They buy shit they don't need,
which then makes them stuck in their business.
It's a fucking evil game.
You see me talking a lot about move back home,
do this stuff.
I'm doing it because moving into your in-laws basement
as a man takes a level of humility and confidence
don't most people don't roll with,
but it's gonna be the single reason.
How old are you?
- 38.
- It's gonna be the single reason.
The core foundational reason that you're gonna be
happy for the next 70 years.
(audience clapping)
People are literally not willing to take one step
backwards to be happy in perpetuity because
they're worried their buddies from high school
on Facebook are gonna make a snarky comment of them
living in their in-laws basement.
I fucking... fuck.
Go ahead.
(audience laughing)
- No, I mean that's where I'm at.
I have an MBA.
I'm a retired Marine.
I'm like what are people gonna think?
And at some point
I was just like forget it.
- It just doesn't matter bro.
- Yeah.
- Like, they're not living your life.
- So, you're right.
So you always say people offer you lunch or coffee
and you're like there's no value in that for me.
- Yeah, I mean.
I don't like when people do it.
I hate that people at this point still think
they can trick me.
(audience laughing)
Like I'm disrespected by their audacity that they're
fooling me with their big up front.
Like, "Gary, I'm gonna do you a huge favor.
"I'm gonna pick you up at the airport and get you
"cozily to your fucking hotel."
I'm like, "Dick, I'm tired.
"I don't need to fucking give you advice for 40 minutes
"after I land off a seven hour flight
"to go into my hotel room."
It's not that it's not worth it.
I hate when people posture and pose it
as they're giving me something.
It's far more likely when they just ask authentically.
(upbeat music)