My organic video didn't drive much of an impact until this business. My last business, we dabbled in YouTube and I made some videos. Yeah, it definitely wasn't natural, but I think just seeing the potential positive impact it could have gave me enough motivation just to keep trying.

Welcome to the Agency Our Podcast, where we help web design and digital agency owners create abundance for themselves, their teams, and their communities. This week we're joined by expert funnel analyzer and architect, YouTuber and Mavericks Club member Ryan Matthews. And in this episode, we're talking all things video, my favorite favorite topic. We explore leveraging credibility from other video creators while remaining true to yourself. We determine which businesses can and should use video to make money, how to use YouTube as a lead nurturing mechanism, and why you may want to consider going all in on video when it comes to your marketing and acquisition strategy. So if you're looking to find the confidence to take the leap and finally jump in front of the camera and create some content, this episode is for you. I'm Troy Dean. Stay with us. All right, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the Agency Hour, Ryan Matthews. Hey Ryan, how are you doing? I'm doing well, man. Thanks for having me. Thanks for being here, man. Um, for those that don't know, and I'm imagining most people listening to this podcast won't be familiar with your excellent work. Who are you? What do you do? And what are you doing here on the Agency Hour Podcast?

Yeah, I own an agency called Funnel Architecture. Our focus, our specialty is turning more visitors into customers with Inside SalesFunnels, websites, kind of all one of the same for us. Uh I've been doing that for about two years now, a little over two and a half years. Uh before that, I was in kind of an adjacent space consulting info products, cut my teeth there, um, and just really learned all about funnels and then launch padded into this. And yeah. Awesome.

Now I I gotta tell a bit of a story when you joined now. Full transparency, Ryan is a member of our Mavericks Club program. Uh, when you joined Mavericks Club, I saw your name come through and I saw your avatar, your face come through. And I was like, oh man, that dude looks really familiar. And I couldn't figure out where I knew you from. And then I realized I'd been watching your YouTube videos for like the last two weeks, showing Max going, hey man, this guy's making really interesting videos. Like, we should do like something similar to what this guy's doing. And then you joined the program. I was like, and then I remember you turned up on the first call and I was like, Holy shit, Ryan Matthews is here, he's a YouTuber that I follow. So the backdrop, right? That's what it was. Well, the the thing is, you know, the thing it like the thing about video, right, is I've experienced this myself is you go to a live event and people want to hang around and meet you because they think you're a celebrity, just because you've posted a video on YouTube, right? That they've seen or that you've got a podcast. And I had a similar experience when you joined Maprix Love. I was like, oh dude, this this Ryan's here, right? It's just but you like you're just a dude who does some stuff like all of us, right? And but because I'd been watching your videos, I felt like you're a bit of a celebrity. What is it about video, do you think? And when, at what point did you make a decision to go all in on video as your kind of marketing and acquisition strategy?

Yeah, the I'll answer the first question first. I mean, I don't know specifically. I I think it's it's much more intimate than other mediums, like written. There's obviously there's both word uh and video and um vocal intonations, there's uh body language that's represented. Uh are you familiar with the I forget the actual split, but there's a split from a professor named Albert Maribin. It's like 38557 or something along those lines, where essentially his idea that he proved in the study was the bulk of communication comes from tonality and body language. Right. So if you're purely writing, this is my hypothesis, it doesn't have the same effect as video would. So I think you get um in that modality, you get more uh communication across the time spent, probably as well, is probably another one. Uh I I I think you know it's interesting. I've thought about this a fair bit over the last couple months. There's certain businesses that by having that um medium, by having that audience on video, the monetization is just is far superior, right? I'm getting off a little bit of sidetrack, so I'll go back and answer your second question, uh, which was when did I decide? You know, it was multiple tipping points, um, different mentors kind of noticing it. I my last business we ran pure paid ads. So we were spending two, three thousand dollars a day on paid ads. Um, and that was great. You know, your the game was spend a dollar, make back two. Um, whole lot of fun, but also a whole lot of stress. So different mentors kind of pointing out just the future that they saw in paid advertising or sorry, in paid advertising kind of being secondary to organic traffic. Uh, and then there's just multiple different suggestions that I yeah, that I heard. Uh, started YouTube and kind of just focused on it. Another one actually that that comes to mind is on the all-in podcast. Are you familiar with the all-in podcast? Oh, no, of it, yeah. I I think three of them are billionaires, another guy's worth a couple hundred million. Um, but a friend of mine posted a clip where they were talking about Mr. Beast and he had just launched Feasables, or maybe it's Mr. Beast Burger, one of the two. Yeah, it was Mr. Beast Burger, because they had the the largest launch in restaurant history. You know, thousands and probably tens of thousands of people showed up at this thing. And they're just pointing out, and their hypothesis was the future of advertising is that it gets replaced by content creation, and content creation becomes advertising. So whether these big brands like McDonald's or whomever pay people like Mr. Beast to promote them, or these content creators just go and actually promote it. So a few of those were kind of just like the nail in the coffin of just showing me like there is no more valuable of a skill to be learning than of how to build an audience online. So that was kind of the tipping point.

Yeah. There's a lot to unpack there, and I want to unpack all of it. I just want to start with were you naturally comfortable on camera? Because you don't have to convince me about video, right? You and I get it. A lot of people listen to this. There will be some people listening to this that'll be like, I'm never gonna do it because I hate the sound of my own voice. I hate the look of my own face, I look really awkward and goofy. I've had to overcome all of that. Did you have to overcome that? How did you overcome that? How did you just get to a point where hitting the publish button was enough of a driver to overcome all the psychological barriers?

I uh definitely was not natural at it by any stretch of the imagination. Um, going back to mentors, I had a mentor that I also did sales for a handful of years ago, I don't know how many years ago. And one of my roles was to film ads. So I was also creating some of my own ads, and those were video based. And he gave me some coaching on it, and we, you know, he was trying to teach me, but it was extremely, extremely painful, like you just mentioned, to watch my body language be so awkward on video, to listen to my voice and just hate the sound of it like being repeated back to me on video. So it definitely was not natural. How did I get over it? It seemed necessary, I guess. My organic video didn't drive much of an impact until this business. My last business, we we dabbled in YouTube and I and I made some videos. Uh, we were primarily YouTube advertising, so that also taught me the skill of it. Making things like video sales letters, webinars. You just, you know, through just getting thrown to the trenches, I think you kind of learn. But yeah, it definitely wasn't natural, but I think just seeing the the potential positive impact it could have gave me enough motivation just to keep trying.

I think there's got to be some element of like, you know, the all-in mentality. You just have to make a commitment to do it. And if you understand the benefit of video, like we see that people turn up on a call with our sales team, and if they've watched some of our YouTube videos or listened to our podcast, it's just such an easy conversation because they've, you know, you mentioned it before, we've had that intimate relationship in their in their AirPods while they're having lunch, they're watching a video, they feel like I'm right there with them. By the time they turn up on a call and they meet me in real life, they're like a little bit starstruck because they have that, you know, that intimate connection. And I don't do it for those reasons. I don't do it because I want to be a celebrity, right? That's not why I do it at all. I do it because for me, making video is the fastest way for me to produce content. Like we produce this episode of the podcast, then we'll have video, we'll have audio, we'll have a whole bunch of text. We use AI to summarise it, we'll have a whole bunch of emails that can go out, we'll have social media posts. So we're like in 45 minutes, I can produce a week's worth of content, right? That's why I do it. And also, I'm just more comfortable having conversations with people than I am slamming away on the keyboard. I've had to actually get over the self-consciousness. And I think for me, there was just no plan B. It was like, this just has to work. I know that I've got a natural ability to do it. I just need to hone that ability, and the only way to do that is time on the wall, as Max says, right? It's just keep going, just keep practicing. And realize that, you know, when my I remember my wife started a podcast and I said to her, well, she'd been talking about it for about a year before she started it, and I said, Look, this is like an intervention. You're either going to start this podcast or you're going to shut up about it because I'm sick of hearing about it, right? So why don't you just record the first episode with a friend and then put it in the bin? Just give yourself permission to put it in the bin, which she did. The first episode she never published. The second episode she published because she had a confidence up, right? So I think just giving yourself permission to suck at it to begin with is important. Um, I want to just go back and loop on a point you made about the like the type of business that can monetize YouTube or monetize video. I'm not in the business of like getting, you know, 100,000 subscribers and getting three million people to watch a short of mine so I can make 900 bucks in in AdSense revenue. How do you determine like what what is a business that can monetize the effort put into making videos?

Yeah, I I mean I think you just pointed out uh an interesting point, right? Of like kind of mass market of having hundreds of thousands or millions of followers or subscribers versus kind of a a micro niche, which is kind of what I categorize myself in. Uh and I think if you have a micro niche audience, the nature of it, like let's say you can convert 1% of your audience into uh paying SMRs. I have at the time of this recording 7,500 or so subscribers. So 1% of 7,500 uh would be 75, I believe. Is my math off?

That's right. Yeah, yeah. No, you're absolutely right. If you had 75 clients right now, you'd probably go under, right?

Like you couldn't handle 75 clients, right? Exactly, right? So, but if I was selling t-shirts, like, you know, I'm gonna be still working the day job. Um, so I think that that's important to know. And then people like, you know, Mr. Beast is obviously on the opposite side of the spectrum. He has, you know, he's in he's in uh consumer packaged goods, feasibles, he's in thousands and thousands of retail stores all over America because it's mass market. So a $2 sale for every one of his subscribers is you know a very healthy business. So I think that's important. I think if you can create an audience that can yield a lifetime value that is sufficient enough, um, that's where I think it it can be really magical because you don't need a hundred thousand subscribers to make it work and to make it worth your time. That's right.

And I think that you know, I the trap that we've fallen into, like full transparency, following YouTubers and kind of trying to reverse engineer what they're doing and getting advice from YouTubers, is like, oh, make shorts, make shorts, make shorts and get heaps of views on your shorts. And I watched this one guy do a case study where he used AI to make like he runs a faceless YouTube channel. He run used this AI to make a short about a trending topic and got three million views and made 900 bucks. I'm like, dude, if I spent that long making a video and made $900, I'd just throw myself off a bridge. Like that's awful. That's an awful outcome, right, for me because I have a business, I have a team, I have staff, I have to pay, you know. We I look at someone who watches one of our videos and becomes a client, they're gonna be worth anywhere from six to you know 75 grand over the next three years, six grand to 75 grand. So I I don't need a hundred thousand subscribers, it'd be nice to have a plaque on the wall behind me, sure, but I don't need a hundred thousand subscribers and I don't need three million people to watch my videos. And you know, like I can't handle if I had, you know, we've got uh I don't know how many ten and a half thousand subscribers or something, we had 105 new customers land this week, I'd be in strife. Like I just couldn't handle that many customers. So I think the point I'm trying to make is you have to be careful of like trying to copy other people's tactics because you have to understand what their business model is, right? And I think that's how do you kind of work out what you're gonna do next on on the channel?

I think it's a mix of looking at what's worked in the past, uh, but at the same time, I'm filming a video tomorrow morning. My my videographer's gonna come to my house, we're gonna film a video before I head to the airport and and fly to California. And that video was inspired by a video I watched either last Friday or Monday that was like a light bulb moment of like this is an awesome topic. And I just geeked out over the past few days. I wrote the intro, and it was just this like seed and uh what what what the topic is is this uh have you heard of uh the Institute Mech Labs, the Mech Labs Institute? No. They're uh they're a marketing research lab based out of Jacksonville, Florida, and they came up with this thing. It is one of the most fascinating things I've ever heard. I'm just I'm a nerd for this stuff, but it's called the conversion heuristic. And they ran 20,000 split tests, and what they found was conversion is equal to five variables and and the the level of which these variables are. Um, and anyway, the variables are motivation, value, incentive, friction, and anxiety. But I won't get into all the details. But my point is I watched this video, was which gave me this inspiration, which gave me an idea that then led me to, you know, basically scrap any of the other idea I had, film this, and now this will be out in two weeks. So it's probably a little bit unorthodox in that sense. Um, but it is a bit of just looking back and saying, okay, this video, like we had a video uh a couple months ago on True Classic. Are you familiar with the the company that they make t-shirts?

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Dude, I'm wearing a true classic t-shirt right now. I love them. I'm wearing true classic underwear. True story. Love true classic. I actually I actually watched your video on True Classic, but tell the story because it's a great video.

So that video bombed, in my opinion. Like it got some views, but it did not do much as far as driving sales calls uh that turned into clients. It just didn't. And I was like, okay, why? Like what happened there? And my theory is one, what like if I look at what things does it have or does it not have that successful videos have, it wasn't about somebody, right? Like Alex Hermozzi or Iman Ghazzi or Sabri Subi. It wasn't about that type of person. It was about a brand. That seems to be characteristic. And then that carries over to the thumbnail, which it's not a recognizable face. And I think there's multiple things like that. And I you could boil it all down to the audience didn't want to click on it and the audience didn't want to watch it at a high enough frequency. So that didn't change my approach because then I was like, okay, who else is similar to these other people? And I came up with Dan Koe, who's somebody I made a video on, and that's now our third most popular video, I think. So it's just kind of getting feedback from that, but then also remaining true to like what I want to talk about. There's people that I get comments, I'll get comments like, oh, make a video on this person. And I just have no interest in it, like for whatever reason, that like I don't care if it's gonna get a bunch of views, I'm not gonna make a video on it. I just whether I don't respect what the person does or whatever it is, or it doesn't light you up.

Like I've made videos, I've made videos, I can watch some of my videos back and I go, yo, I'm just not feeling that video. I'm just like going through the motions. One of my favorite YouTubers guy called Rick Beato, who's like in his early 60s and he's a music guy. He's unbelievable, over three million subscribers. He's been made, he's been on YouTube since 2015. He's incredible. He's interviewing everyone. Like he's interviewed the police, he's interviewed Stone Temple Pilots, he's interviewed all these great producers, he's trying to angle to get to an interview with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. So he's like telling his subscribers to share the channel because the more subscribers he gets, the more chance he'll interview the last two remaining Beatles. And anyway, he's a legend. And he's talked about this as well. It's like I only make the videos that I want to make because the reason that his channel is so appealing is because when he talks about music, he he's he's like a 62-year-old, he's like a six-year-old in a 62-year-old's body, right? He lights up, he's so enthusiastic, and he's so full of joy that you I just smile when I'm watching his. I'm just like, here's a Rick Beato video, and I'm just happy because he's so freaking happy talking about music, right? And when you make a video that doesn't get you jazzed, people can sense it. Much more like you could fake a blog post, right? Because as you said before, the body language is not there. But when you're watching someone and they're genuinely enthusiastic about what they're talking about, it rubs off and you can feel it kind of coming out of the screen. Your your model, I kind of understand your model is like, let's break down someone's funnel, like let's break down a successful entrepreneur's funnel, like a Sabrisubi or a you know Alex Wormose or whatever. And then the model is right, well, so I understand funnel so well. If you want a funnel, we're the right person to talk to because we like literally I spend my life analyzing people's funnels and I know what works and I know what doesn't. Is that is that kind of it in a nutshell?

Our services is primarily conversionary optimization, as you know. So I think it it it it tends to that more. We yeah, so to answer your question, yes. Uh and I think I I've told you this before, it was so unintentional, right? Like it's not like I sat in my room and it's like, oh, on my whiteboard, what can I do? There was definitely multiple inspiration points. One of which, have you seen uh Patty Galloway? No, he's amazing. Uh, he has videos, he doesn't post much anymore, but he posts videos breaking down successful YouTubers, like a specific video. So he talks about like what Mr. Beast is doing in an intro or or whomever. Uh, and his kind of the idea and his thumbnail idea, if you look at his thumbnails and my thumbnails, they're shockingly similar, uh, which I'm not ashamed to say. But so there's different inspiration points like that. I think a a downstream consequence of it was yeah, when people get on calls with myself, they see, oh wow, you broke down this person that is a great marketer, but you pointed out things they could do better. And I think that gives me some you know credibility that I again wasn't planning on getting. But going back to what you just said about liking the videos, these like this is what I would be doing if I wasn't making videos on it. Like ever since I was a kid, I was looking at cereal boxes, like wondering why they put certain things on the cereal boxes for the purpose of marketing. It's always just intrigued me. So this is like literally what I I just like I said, I geek out about it. So yeah.

Same. My Oscar, my little boy who's almost seven, his reading has come along a lot in the last few months, and he's doing the same thing. He's reading the cereal boxes at breakfast now. And I'm watching him and I'm going, Oh my, I said to him the other day, dude, I used to do exactly the same thing when I was your age. He turned the turned one of the cereal boxes around the other day and he said, I'm just making a coffee, and I hear him go, This is the boring but really important side. And it's actually a carton of oat milk that they have with breakfast. And the boring but really important side is all the nutritional information in the oat milk, right? So he's read the whole carton and then he's turned it around. He's gone, this is the boring but really important side. And I turned around and I'm watching him read everything. I can see the cog sticking over. He's fascinated, but like, why do they say this? And why do they put this here? Oh, that's awesome. Let let's let's talk about how you get like I know there's a lot of people listening to this going, there's no way someone's gonna watch a YouTube video and booking a sales call and and and hire me as an agency. What's the mechanism? How do you get people off YouTube and get them into the calendar and have a conversation with them?

Oh man, I mean, so I I do not do any call to actions in my videos. Probably to my to in some ways, yeah, probably in some ways to my own demise. I think I could make more money next month if I didn't. I just don't. And I yeah, I I might have in some of my first videos. Uh, but to answer your question, it's just in my description. So I'll I'll give you some numbers actually, because it's literally just in my description. Again, I don't mention it. I'll sometimes, like in the video I'm filming tomorrow, when I'm talking about friction, I'll probably mention a test that we just ran for a client that we finished today that increased their conversion rate by 12%, right? Because it's just it like it just fits. So I'll I'll do that, but I don't say, oh, go to the description and and check out you know my funnel or whatever. So I'll I put in the description and I also pin it to the top of the comments, which was actually a pretty, pretty sizable lift when I did that. But to give you some some metrics, last month we got around 25,000 views. Those 25,000 views, more or less, turned into 24 or 25 booked appointments with no call to actions. Right. Again, as an agency, I can disqualify half those people. And then last month, 41% of the people I talked to on live calls became clients, which was a really good month for us as far as call conversion. So it doesn't, it doesn't take all that much, right? And as you get, you know, 25,000 views, I think isn't a ton, but it's a good amount within a micro niche. So does that answer your question of like the mechanism? Totally.

So they just go to the description in your in the link in the your about on the YouTube page, and then it's so is that on every description of every video, or do they have to go to your like the the about page on your YouTube channel?

Both, yeah. So it's it's in the the link on the you know, the channel page, and then it's in the description, and then it's on the pinned comments, the number one pinned comment. Got it. Okay.

You know, I had this conversation yesterday with one of our marketing guys. He's like, well, you know, you're a successful business owner and you don't spend a lot of time hanging out in Facebook groups, so why should we be spending more time in Facebook groups? I'm like, dude, I answer a question in a Facebook group. I got tagged in a Facebook group yesterday, right? Someone asks a question like, oh, I've been doing this for, you know, a hundred years and no one's ever paid me more than three grand for a website. And I don't, I when I hear people charging 10, 15, 20k for a website, I want to call BS, but part of me thinks that it might be true. So help me understand what am I missing, right? Josh Hall comes in, shares an episode of the podcast where he interviewed me. Josh Hall's got a great podcast. Uh he interviewed me and we talked about pricing. He goes, Hey, Troy D and I broke this down in this episode. And then I mentioned something about paid discovery, and then the guy goes, You know, um, you know, how did how does this work? And so I just shared a YouTube channel. I said, I man, I made a video about paid discovery recently. It's the it's the thing that there's three profit killers in any agency, and paid discovery wipes out all those three profit killers. Just go watch the video, right? And people People are now in my DMs going, hey Troy, um, we're at 50k a month in revenue, we've kind of tapped out, we don't know what to do next. We really want to scale, we're a certified Google partner, we need some mentoring. How can you help? I'm like, that's because I have these assets called YouTube videos that we spend a lot of time on. I can use them to answer questions. I'm not spending this, I'm not spending money on ads. We do spend money on ads, but this particular channel is just completely organic. It's just conversational, right? So the question I have for you is what do you say to someone when they're like, well, you know, like my ideal clients aren't watching YouTube videos because they're too busy. And what are you finding the clients that are coming from YouTube that reach out to you after watching your YouTube videos? Are they the right are they the ideal client profile or are they way off?

I think a small percentage, a smaller percentage actually than I used to get for ads, surprisingly. Uh, a smaller percentage that are not ideal. Um our typical clients are doing anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000 a month. However, we just got a client a couple days ago that's doing 10 million a year. That client didn't come directly from YouTube. They were referred, but then there's that, there's that traffic source, or not traffic source, sorry, there's that content source so they can go absorb and build some proof. I actually have a client that we we got um last month that's doing around 300k a month, and he did come from YouTube. And he told me uh just yesterday that he referred somebody to me, and they're doing 25 million a year, and he just sent them my YouTube and he's like, hey, you got to check this guy out.

Uh so one of the things that we've been doing is uh using so we've got a new offer, top of funnel offer, right? I read this really interesting post this morning by Miles Stutz on Facebook. He's a sales guy, right? And he's like the future of like the whole set of closer model that everyone's been doing and SDRs and appointment setters, that whole model's under threat because of basically because of AI that a sales, what like what you could do with like 10 SDRs or appointment setters, you can now do with one and some AI and some tech. And anyway, in the post, he talked about top of funnel offers. And so what we've done is we've carved out basically the first month of our programs, we're now selling that as a separate standalone product, basically to remove the time commitment that people are required to work with us. So instead of signing up for a three-month or a 12-month program, they can just do like essentially the first month, low commitment, no obligation to continue, come in and you know, it's basically our version of paid discovery. So I think top of funnel offers are definitely going to be a thing in the future. You and I have talked about this. You could basically just like help someone architect their funnel and then give it to them and they go and build it themselves, and you don't actually do the done for you, but you still get paid to architect it. Um, but what we're doing is what I've told the team is they have to go and watch this video that we put on YouTube called The Three Profit Killers, which basically explains why paid discovery is the answer to the three things that kill the profit in most agencies. And if they don't, if they watch that video and they're like, yes, I want to, I know, I understand paid discovery, I want to dial it in, they're a perfect fit for us. If they watch that video and they're like, I'm never gonna do paid discovery, we're like, well, this could be a you know, this is like a core pillar of something we teach. So it's like someone coming to you and saying, Oh, well, I've watched your videos, man, but I don't believe in funnels. It's like, well, we're probably not gonna be here. So we're actually using long form content, i.e. a YouTube video, to qualify people before we even have a conversation about whether or not they're right for a sales conversation.

So this is in between this the 15-minute triage and the and the 30-minute full call.

Well, yeah, I I'm now even using it before the 15-minute triage. I'm going, have you seen this? So in Messenger, when anyone approaches me in Messenger, the first thing I do is say, awesome, love to have a conversation. Have you watched this video? They go, watch it. They, you know, some of them disappear, which is fine. Most of them come back and like, yep, I've seen, you know, I've already watched it, or yes, I just watched that. I love the concept, great video. I'm all in, you know. Can we have a conversation? And then I know that they already believe the same kind of things that we believe. So they're probably going to be a good client. They're not going to push back on these concepts when we start to teach them.

Yeah.

No, that's a great idea. Using long-form YouTube as a nurturing mechanism, not just a lead, we're actually not using it as a lead gen mechanism yet. We're about to start rolling out of that, but we're using it to nurture people who come in. We send emails to anyone who opts in. We're, we're using it to nurture people and to kind of get them on the same page as us.

Yeah, I think, you know, one of the one of the hardest parts about YouTube is getting the platform to show your videos, right? Like if you, if that's like, which is my strategy, but that took, it took one year to get 500 subscribers. And that one year mark was last October, I believe. And since last October, we've gained another 7,000. So now we're pasting about a thousand a month, more or less. So that the growth has really picked up. But that first year with 500 subscribers, like it might have brought in one, maybe two sales calls a month, probably more like one. And that was with me, like kind of doing what you're talking about, going in Facebook groups, posting it in there. I that that's the hardest part. But I've seen people, to your point, use it as lead nurture. So whether they run ads, like a common strategy you've probably seen is people are boosting Instagram posts. So they're building their organic audience through boosting Instagram posts, getting people into the the direct messages, and then sending those people to YouTube videos and then just warming them up and then putting them onto their calendar. But that strategy is like the perfect blend where you have the content and then you're when you boost posts on Instagram, you're you're growing your or not organic audience, but you're growing your audience, which is basically like a you know, what it's I think in my mind it's what Facebook groups used to be, right? This that new strategy. But yeah, I think it's it's a great strategy.

I want to talk about uh two things. I want to talk about the tech that you need to make YouTube videos because that frightens a lot of people. They think they'd spend $100,000 on a studio, uh, which I did, but I'm an idiot. And they also they I want to talk about shorts. So first let's talk about shorts. I think shorts has ruined YouTube. I think shorts, I think shorts is ruining creating mental health problems all over the world. But anyway, TikTok came out with a platform that was basically built for shorts. They stole a lot of attention off YouTube. YouTube then had to compete, rolled out shorts. TikTok have now rolled out 30-minute videos, right? So we're back to long form. I know Hormozy has kind of recently said he's not doing the kind of ADD style editing and he's just gonna do more kind of unedited long form content. What's your take on shorts? Do you use shorts? Do you think shorts are part of the future? Do you think we should care?

Yeah, I mean, personally, I have had a ton of success with them. We the goal for us is to post one short, which is basically the intro of every YouTube video. So every time we post a YouTube video, we do that. There's that new feature where you can add a related video, which I'm sure you've seen and used. Um, so we link those two together, and there's no, at least on what from what I can see, there's no analytic on the back end that tells me if that's actually driving anything, which I really wish they would add. Uh so to answer your question, I haven't seen a ton of ton of success with it. I think when they when it first came out on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, because they were all competing for that market share, they were really pushing shorts that were getting posted. And I have a massive regret that I wasn't one of those first to markets on that when it when it first came out, but now it seems like it's just as competitive as everything else. Uh so I I'm sure there's a place for it. I think as the the algorithm changes and you know things will continue to shift around. Uh, but I think I think it it it it serves a good function if you can find a way to get YouTube to push it and then that those people that watch it go into the longer form stuff. So kind of more top of funnel.

Now you might be thinking, well, this is great, Troy and Ryan. I'd love to make video, but I don't have time because I have too much client work on my desk that needs to be done. Well, lucky for you, the exclusive sponsor of the agency our podcast is E2M Solutions. Visit e2msolutions.com. That's the letter E, the number two, the letter m solutions.com slash agency dash mavericks. Of course, we'll put a link to that with the episode here. So wherever you're listening to this, just click the link. Visit E2M Solutions and explore how they can help you with your client work. They are a white label WordPress development agency, SEO agency, and content writing agency. And they can just take some of that work off your desk right now so that you can focus on growing the business. And whether that's making video, whether it's doing more networking, whether it's going on other people's podcasts, whatever it is. I've said this for a long time, and I mean this with all due respect. If your business is you and an assistant somewhere, whether it's, you know, the Philippines or South America or down the street from you, if that's your business, well, I'm sorry, but it's not really a business. You're self-employed and you've got an assistant, which is fine. If that's where you're at and that's where you want to stay, totally fine. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. However, if the only reason your business generates revenue is when you are tapping away on the keyboard or clicking the mouse, then let's just call a spade a spade. It's not really a business, you're just self-employed. Again, no problem with that, but let's just be honest about what it is. If you want to grow your business so that you can generate revenue and profit while you're sleeping, while you're on holidays, while you're thinking about other things, you're going to need to have a team of some description. And hiring a team is hard work. It takes a lot of time. You get it wrong when you first do it, because like anything, when you first try a new skill or a new activity, you're inexperienced at it. We have a whole bunch of training that will help you hire the right people and grow your team. But in the meantime, maybe you just need some help to get your care plans done or to get that website built or to get that funnel looked at or to get some content written or to get some SEO done. Maybe you just need some help. E2M Solutions is a great option if you just need some extra capacity on your team right now. So go and check out e2msolutions.com slash agency dash mavericks. I'll put the link in the show notes. Have a conversation with them. You get a discount if you're part of our community off your first months, which will help you. And then maybe you can think about making some more videos to bring in some higher quality clients because you've got some extra capacity to get stuff done. I know it works really well for comedians, stand-up comedy. My shorts feed is basically full of comedians because I followed Nate Bugatzzi and a couple of those guys. Uh, and it I I get it because like you get a joke in in a short, it's like, oh, I want to see more of this guy because he's really funny. And then you go check him out on YouTube, and then you go to their show, and you know, so that kind of makes sense.

Yeah, to your point, I just I'm thinking of a couple more examples. I think if you can find a strategy that works really, really well on shorts, it could be very valuable. Two that come to mind. We're starting to build a uh a custom home, or we're in the beginning processes, or I should say, of building a custom home. And I saw this short and it was like 10 things to not forget in your custom home. And I, you know, he's showing all these different things at super fast pace. And I go to his his feed, and it's just like it's just short after short. And I was just sitting there for 10 minutes, just like, oh, these are great. And uh eventually I find out like I go to a site and he's selling like a checklist. It's like a hundred bucks or fifty bucks to get the things that you can't forget in your custom home build. So he found a strategy in shorts that YouTube is pushing, and I'm sure that's driving a ton of revenue. I'm just getting free consulting now, which is great.

Thank you. Um I think you need to be careful for anyone listening to this or watching it. I think you need to be careful of copying what other people are doing because, and you would have seen this as well, people come to you and they go, Well, I want this in my funnel, I want this in my funnel, because they've seen tactics that other people use, and the tactics are what are what are visible online, but what we don't see online is the strategy behind the tactics. So I think you need to kind of really understand what people are doing at a strategic level before you start copying their tactics. We've kind of experimented with shorts again. I'm not, I don't know, I'm not convinced yet. I do want to just caution people of kind of going, you know, I had a client recently say, I want to do the whole Gary V, you know, omni-channel marketing thing. I'm like, dude, it's gonna kill you if you do that. Like you're gonna burn out. Like you've got there's you and two VAs in the Philippines, like you just can't do it. Why do you want to do that? What it boiled down to was the guy wanted more calls booked on his calendar. It's got an email list of 35,000 that he wasn't emailing. I'm like, mate, this is a no-brainer. Just email your list and you'll book calls and don't worry about all that omnichannel, omnipresent Gary V stuff, because you can't do that, right? Because you don't have the resources. So, uh, about resources, what do you need to get started from a tech point of view? Your videos look great. They're really well edited, but they look great and sound great. If I'm just starting out, what's the bare minimum I need to make a YouTube video that is gonna have some kind of impact?

Yeah, when I when I started, I I kind of used two different strategies. One, I had a friend that had a studio that I just went to. I paid him, I forget exactly how much, a couple hundred bucks per video. He set everything up. I sat down, I had my script, I recorded, and then he sent me the raw footage. And then I think we went back and forth. Sometimes his team would edit it, sometimes I was dabbling with some other editors, and that that worked pretty well. I hated driving all the over there, all the way over there. And I think just the barrier to go film led me to not film. So I was like, okay, I gotta invest into some equipment here. I guess to answer your question with the with the second way I did it in the beginning was just with my iPhone. You can see on some of my older videos, they're filmed right here, but without proper lighting, just my iPhone, and they don't look amazing, but you know, those brought clients. So I think that's the bare minimum, uh, is literally just on the iPhone. And then I would um I would then take my like Yeti blue microphone that I had at the time, sync the two together. I would chop it up myself in the beginning and post on YouTube. So that that's the bare minimum. What I like now is I have a pretty cheap Canon camera. It's a Canon R50. Uh, it's I think 500 bucks the base, maybe a $400 lens. I have a Canon 16mm lens. Uh, I got this Shure MV7 microphone that's $200, maybe $300. I don't know exactly. And then I got uh a light here that's $150 on Amazon, uh a couple lights in the background, and you know, some bookshelves. So we're talking maybe $2,000, maybe a little bit more than that. I'm not exactly sure. Oh, and of course a tripod for the camera, but that's it. Uh so that's you know, it looks good. I like it. And then I pay an editor uh because that you know that's uh for one, I am not very good at editing, and secondly, it's a lot of time. So how do you connect your camera into the computer? My editor, my editor kills me for this, but currently I don't think I'm gonna do this very much longer. But currently, since I am doing like funnel breakdowns, I use Loom. So I just I my audio is on my screen recording, and then so they're not actually connected as I'm filming. And then in post-production, he does that. However, my editor has been pushing me to use uh it's called OBS, I think. You probably know.

Yeah, OBS uh open broadcast studio, I think it's called. Um, but right now, and I and I I I know the answer to this question, but people watching might want to know how to like it, people get stuck in this. Like, well, I've got this this canon or this Sony camera. How do I connect how do I plug it into my computer?

Yeah, and this is my my first time doing so. Um my yeah, my my videographer sent me a uh it's a little adapter that's on Amazon. It's like 30 bucks. I forget the exact name of it, but it's it's a U USB to HTMI, and then I'm running the HTMI into my camera. So yeah. It's like four, four or five different adapters put together, is the way I have it right now.

Yeah, yeah. Got it. Awesome. Love it. Where did you find your editor?

Uh family friend. Um, or actually, sorry, not family friend. He's in my extended family. Um, but I've I've used a couple. He just was uh launching his video agency service, and I was like, hey, you know, if I'm I'm more than you know happy to give you a shot uh because he's just freelancing as a as a videographer. Um I just said, you know, I'm gonna be pretty harsh with feedback, and he said that's fine. Uh and it's been you know a year and a half now. So he's been absolutely uh incredible and still has bandwidth. So if anyone needs an editor, um he still has bandwidth.

Awesome. Reach out. Um and also, you know, uh I was hoping you were gonna say, well, I found him on YouTube because you know it this is the thing about YouTube. Like I search you, I don't I hardly ever go to Google these days. I I search YouTube or ChatGPT for answers to anything. And uh I search YouTube, I find an answer. I'm like, oh wow, this guy's taught me how to do this amazing thing in DaVinci. You follow the breadcrumbs and you realize the guy's a video editor and you can hire him to edit your videos, right?

That's my videographer actually just uh started posting again on YouTube uh because we had we've had that conversation many times. Uh like, you know, a video, like if you're a videographer, a video such as like what you just asked me, uh the equipment you need to get started on YouTube, or how to get your studio to look like how you want it, right? Like my problem when I started on YouTube was I saw these really cool looking studio setups, but I didn't understand, like, oh, they have a light above them, they have a light over here, they have a light behind them. So, anyways, breakdowns like that, right? Maybe I'll I could do a breakdown of recreating Troy Dean's studio, right? Maybe without the bookshelves. Just like what lighting Troy Dean uses, what lens he uses. For somebody that watches you and they like your setup, right, or Chris Chris Williamson or anyways, so yeah, to your point, that would be a great strategy.

I could, I'm definitely gonna have you back on the show, right? Because I just want to talk about YouTube videos. Like, it's all I want to do for the rest of my life is make videos and put them on YouTube. I just love it so much. I love having conversations about subjects that I'm passionate about with people who are equally passionate about it, sharing these conversations. Uh, it's it's video, I think, is the ultimate positioning piece of content, long form video. I feel like I'm just hanging out with some friends having a conversation. If there's one bit of advice that you could go back and tell yourself when you were starting out and thinking about putting stuff on YouTube, what would it be? I know it's a cliche question, but I think it's helpful.

The the one piece of advice that comes to mind is do it earlier. So I guess that wouldn't apply to my my first self. But I think that's what I'll stick with is do it earlier. Because going back to that thought that I have is that there there is no greater or more valuable skill than learning how to build an audience online. So I think even if it is starting a blog post, right? Like I think there's many people who have built super successful businesses because that's just the medium that they're skilled at or the medium that they'll stick with. And I'll I'll give this other piece of advice as well. A couple mentors of mine said, if you want to be successful on YouTube, expect to post a video every single week for two years and expect nothing for two years, and then expect it to start taking off. So that mindset of like, okay, this is I'm investing into something that is gonna take off in a long time. Uh Ali Abdahl has a you know a lot of videos on how to make YouTube videos. And one of the things he says is a YouTube video is like a seed. And as you plant more seeds over time, they begin to grow, and they actually kind of work in a symbiotic way where somebody watches one video, then they go to another video. So start earlier, start developing the skill uh and know it's gonna take time and just stick with it because if you do for long enough and you're scientific about it, eventually it's gonna have you know really, really big payoffs. My YouTube is the single best asset I've ever built in my entire life. From just a just a profit perspective, yeah.

I agree 100%. And and and it and it's the ever it's evergreen. It's not like a Facebook ad where you gotta like keep pumping money into it. You put like I make videos, and you know, you know, eight months, 10, 12 months later, people go, I watch that video and they reach out, and they're evergreen assets. And the more your channel grows, the more people discover the videos you made previously as well. So I love it. Great advice. Um, hey, where can people reach out apart from what is your YouTube channel, by the way? We should we're gonna put a link in the show notes, but what is the YouTube channel and where can people reach out and say hi?

Yeah, it's just it's it's just my name, Ryan Matthews, Matthews with one T. Uh, where can people reach out? I'm kind of on other platforms like LinkedIn and and and Twitter a little bit, but actually per your recommendation, I'm focusing on YouTube. So I'm kind of on those. Uh, but uh yeah, I I don't really check much, honestly. Awesome.

Love it. Um, hey, we didn't talk about which is which is fine, we didn't talk about Mavericks Club at all, uh, but I will just ask one question. How did you find us? How did we come across you? How did you come across us in the first place?

Okay, so I told you when I when I first met you, I told you I'm very hopefully your media buyer doesn't listen to this. Do you buy your own ads or do you use a media buyer?

No, we have it, we have a we have a team that does that, yeah.

Okay, well, what I told you was I'm very upset with your media buyer because I had been looking for something like agency mavericks for literally two years. Uh and what I mean by that is just like there's a lot of sales and marketing advice in the agency world, but that was that never felt like my problem. My problem was I I I knew we had a valuable service, I knew we had expertise, but I didn't feel like we had the model to deliver it at in a scalable way. So our capacity was bottlenecked at like one or two new clients a month. So to go to your back to your question, the way I found you was probably the most unconventional uh way anyone has ever found you. I was looking at go high level and I found some landing page that was you know go high level for agencies or something, and you were on there talking about how you use go high level, and you know, you said you own this thing called agency mavericks. I was like, oh, I wonder what that is. And I went and I went to your website, and then I think I you know filled out something for uh a growth plan or something, uh, and then got an email and eventually got on a call a couple weeks later. So that's how I found you. Super unconventional, but I wish that I would have seen your ads two years ago. Maybe I didn't, I just had banner blindness, but uh yeah. Love it. That's awesome.

I'm gonna take that snippet and I'm gonna feed it straight back to the marketing team. I love it. Awesome. Hey, Ryan Matthews, thank you so much for joining us on the Agency Out Podcast. Yeah, man, I really appreciate your time and uh love to hopefully we get to hang out in San Diego in October at MavCon. And I'm looking forward to doing this again sometime. I'll definitely have you back on the podcast at some point.

Awesome, man. Thanks so much for having me.

Hey, thanks for listening to the Agency Our Podcast and a huge thanks to Ryan for joining us. I could chat video strategy all day long, and I intend to get him back on for part two. Okay, folks, remember to subscribe and please share this with anyone that you think may need to hear it. And remember, the average adult spends more time on the toilet than they do exercising. I'm Troy Dean. Let's get to work.