Review: YouTube and Jumpcut will warp your indie hacking mind; it warped mine
I'm not posting to convince you to buy Jumpcut's Viral Academy for YouTubers. I bought it, I've watched the videos and it's warped, sort of blown up, my indie hacker thinking, but I'm not here to shill for it. Instead, I'm posting to tell you some of what I learned from it and so you'll know that there's a different way of thinking out there.
Jumpcut (jumpcut.com) is a training course for making money on YouTube. I'm a website developer, a quiet nerd. I don't even watch YouTube; I bought it for my kid. I watched the videos so I'd get my money's worth but what I saw blew my mind.
Jumpcut is like a mirror universe for Indie Hackers: the same basic feelings and goals but with a radically different mindset, emphasis and techniques. Jumpcut taught me a lot of stuff that I can't get from Indie Hackers, reading tech business blogs, Medium, following famous VCs or the rest of our ecosystem. It's got its own ecosystem and I learned a lot from it.
Bullet points that stick in my mind:
-
A frame of reference and concrete stats: Our ecosystem is maddeningly vague about many things that Jumpcut is very specific about. For me, this was the most important thing that I got from Jumpcut. I'll forge my own route to success but having the details of Jumpcut's perspective/route AND certain very specific Jumpcut statistics is huge change to my perspective.
-
Motivation: Jumpcut devotes 1 (out of 5) sections to kicking us in the butt to do "something", not just watch the course. Jumpcut's take is a great mix of philosophy, emotion, habits, tricks and explaining their own journey. Our ecosystem knows about this but we're kind of slapdash about it; Jumpcut attacks it more officially and rigorously. I don't have this problem but I can still see the value in the way Jumpcut does this.
-
Choosing your channel subject/style or, for us, our app ideas: Our ecosystem should spend more time "before we start" to refine, brainstorm and twist our app ideas. We should spend more time deciding on our app idea, refining it, brainstorming it and twisting it into something unique. Jumpcut spends a good amount of time on this.
-
Use emotion: Maybe websites and buying apps are all about cold blooded logic ("choosing the best") but we should still consider if we can use emotion. Jumpcut's take is the presentation is more important than the information. Our ecosystem should consider emotion.
-
Multiple revenue streams: Why are you stuck on websites and apps? Why do you have only one way to make money? We should seriously consider anything that will make us money: YouTube, t-shirts, selling courses, donations, ads, opening a Subway restaurant. Branch out to explore other ecosystems.
-
How to become viral or, for us, how to become popular: Only about 20% of Jumpcut is actually how to shoot a video (which, for us, is equivalent to how to develop software). A full 60% is how to make it viral (for us, how to make our apps interesting enough to be popular), how to growth hack (same for us but Jumpcut's techniques seemed better for some reason) and how to monetize (for us, our "strategy").
-
A gotta-have-it marketing statistic: Sign up and participate in 100 Internet forums related to your subject. Why? Jumpcut's experience was 7%: despite everything being equal, 7 forums drove millions of viewers (which made their business boom) while 93 forums did almost nothing for them. The course is littered with this kind of hard information that I never seem to find in our ecosystem. This is huge and actionable.
-
Not everybody is like you: Not everybody is a techie, nerd, indie hacker. For a real stark (my own, not Jumpcut's) example, I will never use a tampon in my whole life but I could make good money starting a tampon company. Consider that many people are willing to pay good money for stuff that you personally wouldn't even use for free.
-
No legal, incorporation or funding talk: Too much time gets wasted in our ecosystem on unimportant non-problems. Jumpcut rarely mentions these issues because they know it's not important.
I couldn't include everything here so please ask questions. I'm still digesting the course and your questions will force me to think.
Sounds like a long promo to me but I feel ya
The guys behind it are Jesse and Kong who seem quite famous in YouTube circles. It’s also a YC funded startup now but it started out bootstrapped. I guess that it’s a promo in the sense that I thought that it was a good course but I don’t get any monetary benefit from it. I even had to pay full price!
Have you earned back the money you spent on it yet? If not, how long do you think it will take?
A fair question but, no. I bought it 2 months ago and didn’t really look at it until blitzing through the course in 3 days, finished Sunday morning. I plan to redo the course and actually do the worksheets with my son.
Jumpcut (or, to put faces on it, Jesse and Kong) are “real” when they say it took them 5 years and they can help anybody do it in about a year. You just can’t jump from making boring, crappy videos to consistently making viral videos and running a self-sustaining business based on the that in a month.
They offer a 365-day full money back guarantee which I think that they will honor but it isn’t no-questions asked. It’s a show-us-that-you-did-the-course-and-tried-to-make-it-work guarantee. They openly discuss the guarantee in some of their emails and they seem genuine.
I feel that I’ve gotten value from it so I won’t ask for my money back unless my wife really pressures me hard.
I watched they're promo videos but ultimately didn't buy due to the high price tag and the negative things I read about them online. In particular, there were a number of customers claiming it was a scam and that they couldn't get a refund or even halt billing. I have no knowledge of whether or not it's true, but it was enough to deter me.
Given that YouTube is my primary acquisition channel, I was very curious about what they had to offer, though. Their strategy seems to be the exact opposite of what I settled on. They were suggesting huge markets like nutrition or dating and then monetizing through ads or affiliates. I chose to focus on a niche programming language and to monetize with a subscription offering.
I suspect that while my method is "safer" theirs has a better chance of a break-out success.
I think that the high price tag ($997) is a good point. $997 is affordable to me but not affordable to many and even impossible for many.
I paid all at once so I can’t say much about the guarantee or billing issues. They do seem genuine and do discuss giving refunds openly. But, you are right: the 365-day guarantee is not as good as it sounds and may actually be as bad as a scam.
I’m happy to share the knowledge here for free so you don’t have to buy the course. I don’t have the time or interest to paraphrase the course line by line but I’ll do what I can.
I can see where you get the dating/ads impression from but, no, that’s not accurate. It’s more “we, Jumpcut, made our start in dating/ads, then moved into paid online courses” (a.k.a. Jumpcut itself) but it’s more like giving you the motivation + building skillset + enough monetization options (ads, brand deals, paid courses, merchandise and on). In fact, subscription offering, like you, is what Jumpcut is and so they like that quite a bit. But it’s more about a “student” getting the tools to choose his own concept and his own combination of monetization strategies than Jumpcut pushing one over another.
Thanks for the informative replies. Once I return to the point where $997 is no big deal, I may check it out.
If you have additional questions, I’m willing to dig into the materials and find if and how Jumpcut addresses it.
Knowing your business a little, the most important thing (but not the only thing) that Jumpcut would tell you would probably be: “Tons of videos present your same information but your unique take and presentation will be key. You need to resonate with your audience, not just professionally deliver the information.”
Given that we're hackers and they got big as pick-up artists, it's not surprising at all that the Jumpcut guys have a different approach!
Could you share maybe the five stats you've found most useful? There's a good chance it could help others here, too.
I couldn't agree more. Hardly a day goes by when I don't see someone posting about various (usually EU-related) bureaucratic issues. I empathize with those who are burdened with them, but it's not very useful in terms of growing my business!
I’ll try to remember to look it up but, off the top of my head, for me:
It seem to have triggered a lot of emotion and drive to share within you. Do you think you can make actionable points and lessons from it and write a IH article on it?
How to apply the knowledge they spread for YouTube in a Software / App / Service Context. I am sure you can translate it into IH-language and examples.
I would be very interested to read it...
Yes, I’d like to do that. I considered making this an IH article but I started an IH discussion because my impressions from the course are still raw (I finished Sunday morning) and have not jelled into consistent thoughts. I’m still trying to reconcile seeing an old subject in a new light (as well as a new subject in a new light).
It will be a challenge: 5.5 hours of videos -> most useful and actionable points for IH’ers.
I’ll definitely keep it in mind while I do the bonus content, redo the entire course with my son at a slower pace and start my own YouTube channel to apply the course to. It will take a while.
Here's some additional info on the course:
It's about 5.5 hours of video + 10 hours of bonus videos and almost all the core videos have a PDF worksheet which sometimes is only notes and other times has notes + exercises + additional/advanced info. There are 5 sections: