Fund BMC

What a crazy ride. Ten A-M-A-Z-I-N-G guests!

Editing time is cut down to about 20 minutes per episode and improving. I hope that building the process down into an online tool/service will allow for more people to create videos faster, better, and with more creativity.

Since last update, I've recruited a designer, working on closing the deal on 2 engineers, and accepted an offer to join a mini-accelerator program.

If you're reading this and feeling stuck, keep on keeping on! I know we will, you should too!

All of our recorded interviews from pre-covid have now been released. Season 1 is complete. I honestly can't believe we stuck with it for 7 episodes.

We're approaching 2000 downloads of the audio podcast and 1000 views on YouTube. It has been a crazy journey, we all learned a lot. I think the host, Hong Quan, has received a lot of inbound requests for his recruitment services with all the layoffs.

For me, I discovered a lot of subtle things. Instagram boosted posts have a limit of 1 minute before it must be trimmed or go to IGTV (which crops to a different aspect ratio than Instagram). Google search ads and SEO are doing the worst out of all marketing channels right now which is so weird. LinkedIn organic reach is really good considering very little investment. All of this data will go a long way towards marketing & distribution for my company's future products.

Looking forward to season 2 and more! Stay safe out there everyone.

5 episodes into the launch schedule, we've just hit 1000 downloads of the audio podcast and almost 600 watches on YT. Mostly organic, we've field testing some ads but haven't done anything serious.

Some interesting trends, release day consistently does okay. Similarly consistently, on the next day, Thursday, there's about a 10-20% dip followed by a large spike on Friday. This has happened exactly so since the initial release. No other consistent pattern on other days.

So grateful for everyone who watched the show and reached out since we started. It has been amazing meeting so many cool people and learning about what they're working on.

This almost went poorly as the guest received our auto-generated, standard video release form and decided to decline so we wouldn't be able to release it. Apparently the form was pretty broad and unnecessary in general. Thankfully, he agreed after some back and forth discussion, so going forward, we stopped using the form. It was a scary time and early in our filming process!

I won't post milestones at every episode after this. Editing speed, thanks to custom software, has gone down from 28 hours for ep1, 8 hours for ep2, and now 3 hours for ep3. I might take a break and focus on refining the software and get it such that eps 4-7 take less than 8 hours total.

There are 7 recorded episodes, the second one has been edited and released today. However, we launched it as a premiere and 4K hasn't finished processing even after a full week so its stuck at 1080p. We also just launched the website with proper links and analytics.

Uploaded to simplecast and youtube. Discovered that you have to verify your account before you can upload videos longer than 10 minutes. But it only told me that after I uploaded a 10GB file and let it process for hours. Also discovered that it can take days to process the 4K version on YouTube. After attempting on a couple of files, the process was far too unpredictable to rely on week to week unless you give it 2 days to the longest 2 weeks of processing time. I bet popular YT'ers get prioritized but that won't happen for us any time soon.

Recorded our second episode today. This time, I had a helper to set up and tear down. But she was new and we ended up taking longer because I did not take the time to show her in advance. We quickly resolved that issue and gave her a lot of practice. Additionally, discovered the the audio recorder we used, when in multi-track mode, records all 13 available tracks even if nothing is connected to it so it ended up ballooning in size. Additionally, there is a filesize limit on the recorder so every 30minutes, it must pause and create new files. This pause created audio sync skew so that subsequent audio files were stretched by milliseconds which caused the out of sync to increase for every 30 minutes of filming.

Recorded our first session today. I set up and tear down by myself and found lots of room for improvement there. I tried to keep up as the host and guest spoke by taking notes but it was impractical to stay organized while trying to listen, while also not distracting the two being recording.

I needed to take a break after a toxic workplace environment. So, I wanted to have fun making a video series related to entrepreneurship using the gear & knowledge I already had. The series would serve both as a relaxing sabbatical but also product research to figure out what kind of startup I want to build.