How To Meet Will Smith and Mr Beast ft. Colin and Samir | Iced Coffee Hour Clips Ep.13

welcome to the 13th ever episode of the iced coffee hour at this point we have gained 2 359. gained earned i think we're yeah that means we're averaging about 30 a day that's pretty good that's really good yeah and we were able to um secure some guests really excited about these guests today i'm really excited uh so why don't we welcome them to the show welcome graham and jack come on in it's just great thank you so much i think you're a better host than we are just need to take over how did this start you're making some really good videos right now and you did like it's too good i think like the quality i think is is is too too much too high of quality i really really appreciate that um our history dates back to um 10 years ago in or about 10 years ago in 2011 we started making youtube content um i had just graduated college i grew up here in los angeles and um i played lacrosse which was a very foreign sport to play in los angeles i had this idea coming out of high school and going into college that there should be a network for the sport like there should be the nfl network for lacrosse and when i graduated college it was unlikely that that was going to end up on television but i still wanted to do the idea and so just took to youtube to start making content about lacrosse and at the same time during that exact same you know two-month span of us starting this network uh myself and a friend colin was making content about his lacrosse team in colorado there was only two people making lacrosse content on the internet and it was us in la and colin in colorado and so it was like small community yeah it was a small community so we connected very quickly i uploaded and i think 30 minutes later i had an email yeah so that's so cool and we were really viewing it as like a network so we wanted to acquire content and um he was making like a docu-series it was a very good filmmaking very good storytelling and we wanted to acquire his series so that's how we met um convinced him to move out to la for a three-month internship yeah and then he stayed for nine years now we've been making content together ever since we had we had a really great ride with that company it's called lacrosse network we built it from 2011 to 2014 and we ended up selling the company to a new york based media group called whistle sports at the time they had just brought on dude perfect as their primary partner to go into youtube and we then became you know we brought on our company uh and our goal was to build that brand but then also join the team and help build out athlete and sports content across social platforms i gotta know how long does it take you to make a video the amount of work that i bet you put in it it's mind-blowing to me because we're actually you know in this ever evolving process of trying to pin down um and balance between letting your creativity flow but then also being efficient and making sure that you're getting enough videos out to support yourself as a company and and uh you know for us we oscillate between some of our videos take 10 days uh because they have interviews they have a ton of different pieces of b-roll they have writing sessions rewriting sessions uh colin you know totally leads on that process and he from day one since the day i met him he's just like super intensive on storytelling and if the story doesn't make sense it doesn't go out uh and that means like every frame builds on top of each other and if it doesn't we're gonna lose people's attention we're gonna not you know create something that's conversational at all um and so now we're starting to work into spaces where when we started talking about ourself like we made a video that you commented on called how much youtube pays us which is kind of like a i see anything money related i comment on that i loved it very on brand for you um but that video took less time because the storytelling of it was like personal and we were able to tell our own story and doing that it was it was a lot easier to flip that video around so we're trying to balance now and understand what are the videos that are the big swings like you know the video we made with mr beast obviously that's a big swing i love that video that's gonna cross a million views uh you know probably in the next week or ten days and that was a big swing that's worthy of spending a ton of time on now we also need the frequency of building a community and having a conversation with our audience so we have to tear off our videos and say this is a tier one video that is a big swing and here's a tier two video that's you know probably in the we're aiming for a hundred thousand people to watch it how do you know everybody like how do you get mr beast for an interview like that yeah it seems like you know a lot of people in space it's like you are you're the one who's interconnected i think uh we've always i've i've personally always prided myself on networking um i think somehow it just happens coffee shops yeah but also we've used videos as networking tools um we made a video about will smith uh two years ago and within an hour we got an email from his management company and then we were able to connect with them the real audience for that video even though it hit maybe 300 000 views was actually the five people in the will smith management office that's who it was directed at so they got it immediately even like you said like you'll see anything about money so there was a purpose you knew going into it that that was your intention that was just a better version of cold outreach in an email okay but what about mr beast because you had him in the video how did that happen beast came from uh i so we also met yes theory in that way we made a video about them and that's how we met them we became very close with them yes theory ended up doing a video with mr beast um we made a video about mr beast he saw it didn't reach out to us and then uh i had a i had one of the s theory guys on my podcast talking about the experience of working with mr beast and right after he dm'd us and he was just like hey guys i really like your videos um can i call you and i gave him my number and since then he's just been that's fun a super close connection uh a guy who's like an amazing mentor i think he's a great person to be who he is on our platform because of who he is uh and he just has a very vested interest and creators growing and he's taken an interest in us and uh that's awesome again super cool we're now at a point finally where we're able to like actually do this full-time as youtube creators which was not the case over the past three years we've been operating as like a creative agency um we've been like doing uh doing projects for other people that don't have anything to do with our youtube channel there's even a point where we made videos for a real estate company about a building yeah which was super interesting and um yeah now we're doing youtube full-time youtube like from an adsense perspective it's pretty small like i didn't see it yeah let's see um how many people do you have working with you so we have a full-time editor uh named jesse shout out to jesse i know his wife you know what is this editing software jesse uses yeah of course yeah yeah we all use premiere i mean we're all editors you all use premiere yeah we all use premiere i'm trying to choose what i'm gonna like translate here's our revenue over the past four weeks and then you can go to lifetime how how it did james look at that well that always how so do you what do you mind if i say it or no please say okay yeah i don't care about this one let's round it up 1.4 million views in 28 days 2800 that doesn't make any sense no it doesn't make any sense can we see the but it's our cpm what is the cpm our cbm is probably somewhere around four dollars maybe five bucks why is it so no let's let's see the reason is but that's what i was saying is that you talk about money and money has a trades that are really high but our iced coffee hour is not like here yeah here's the iced coffee hour literally a hundred and thirty thousand views a thousand dollars yeah right and what what is that revenue revenue australia hey guys from australia watching yeah thank you so much for watching you guys are trading at over double rcpm almost triple yeah but but even then that doesn't make sense i think even double why we've made more money in adsense this month even though it's not much than we've ever made before more money this month than ever and part of that i think has to do with the fact that three out of our last five videos have to do specifically with money right yeah so i think that's that's one thing but you know we're lucky to have a very significant brand partnership with samsung uh and that really changes the way that we operate yeah we also have long-term partnerships with uh storyblocks and a couple other brands and so that allows us to have recurring revenue that then bases like how we're operating as a business and let's us experiment we've just moved into the direct to consumer space um with our paid educational course what is that so it's not sponsored yeah it's an i'm gonna plug it every time i get but uh it's it's a uh online storytelling course it's about our process of coming up with ideas and and filmmaking and um how we basically uh brainstorm and craft an idea before we turn on a camera so it's a very extensive process an hour and a half of content we're adding to it throughout this year that is selling at 100 price point it's been out for a week and we've been able to convert 265 people uh to purchase that course uh in the past week and so for us that's a really interesting model i think that's where we fit in more naturally we feel like we are kind of educators yeah we feel like we're building a relationship with our audience where they are willing to pay to uh learn from us and to be a part of our community into workshop ideas and uh we see ourselves as being able to turn into kind of a modern day film school and a modern day um you know media academy yeah uh and i think that's where when i look at our revenue like i definitely think we'll have uh brand partners like a samsung that's just like we're with them they're like our our uh ambassador brand or we're ambassadors for them um but i don't see the content that we're making being that advertise like ad supported or advertising i think we'll probably move into direct to consumer content smash the like button smash uh the like button yes for the youtube algorithm yes for the youtube algorithm algorithm algorithm yeah cool thanks guys until next time