The Swyx Mixtape

Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZ0cG47msEk&list=PLNG_1j3cPCaZZ7etkzWA7JfdmKWT0pMsa
Read: https://reactnative.dev/blog/2021/08/26/many-platform-vision

Listen to the Changelog https://changelog.com/podcast/469 (40mins in)

React Distros: tweet, blog

Try it out: https://hydrogen.new/

Transcript

when we looked at the available set of tools in the React ecosystem, we felt like the existing crop of frameworks, and particularly ones for commerce, don’t solve the right problems, or maybe don’t stack the right decisions to enable this dynamic commerce experience that we’ve been talking about.

There’s a host of really good tools for statically generated pages, but if you really wanna build a fast, server-side-rendered, React-powered experience, you have to hire some really smart people to make that work. And that gets very expensive very quickly. So most teams fail. They end up with subpar experiences, and we thought we could help. So this is why we entered into this space and said – it’s not like we’ve invented server-side streaming.

JEROD SANTO

Right.

ILYA GRIGORIK

I think I was with you guys on this show ten years ago, talking about streaming in HTTP servers.

ADAM STACOVIAK

Yeah.

ILYA GRIGORIK

So this is not new technology, but it’s a new stack. It’s a different stack, it’s a different set of choices. So now the question is “Well, I do want to use React on the server and client. How do I do that, while still delivering a really fast server-side streaming solution that is not blocking on data requests, such that I can enable the clients to quickly render at least like a visual shell of the page, provide some loading indicators, and speak to that user experience aspect of speed, not just the technical metric of speed?” Like, did you get the fast time to first byte?

JEROD SANTO

Yeah.

ADAM STACOVIAK

I can imagine us being two years down the road, having you back on, Ilya… So we’re at the opening gates of a new thing for you. You’ve put six months into this, you’ve worked closely with the React core team, so you’ve had very knowledgeable people involved with this project on how React works. But I can just imagine, to Jerod’s question, like “Why did you choose React over Vue, Svelte, and does it lock out other frameworks?”, I can imagine this as the beginning. And like any beginnings, you start from somewhere.

ILYA GRIGORIK

I think that’s exactly right. We took a pragmatic choice. So if you look at Oxygen - as I said, it’s a thing that accepts an HTTP request and spits out an HTTP response. It doesn’t matter what JavaScript code runs inside. So any server-side JavaScript is fair game. On top of that we have GraphQL, which is framework-agnostic, of course… And now it’s a question of “How do you make the right architecture decisions on the server? How you compose the response such that you don’t end up blocking the response for too long?”

[36:12] So let’s say you need to fetch product data, query some product description data, maybe figure out card discounts… Can you do those things in parallel, as opposed to sequentially and blocking, and stream that such that the user has a good user experience?” So that’s a set of choices that you have to make, and that’s a problem that we’re solving with Hydrogen.

• Listen to devtools.fm: https://devtools.fm/episode/19 (23mins)
• My livestream going thru Remix docs (ft Lee Robinson): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZV1pT-qMqg
• Remix's blogpost today: https://remix.run/blog/react-server-components

Transcript

Andrew: I've heard the core of remix referenced as that compiler. Can you explain that a little bit? What's it compiling? Is it kind of like Vite where it's more in browser? So what's happening there.

Michael: Yeah, that's a great question. So, um, the way I kind of think about remix is it's a compiler for react router, compilers, it might seem funny to somebody that, to sort of think about it this way, because if you're new to web development, you might think, well,haven't we always just compiled our web apps?

And the answer is no, we didn't, that's, that's actually pretty new. I remember when I, when I worked at Twitter, we used to have, we had a file. Uh, that we, we just sort of cargo culted into our app from some other team that was working at Twitter, it was called T w T T R dot JS.

And it was like, that file was just sort of like making its way around. And if you needed something, some shared thing, you would just go and add it to that file and then you just commit it. And then like the next team would come along and they would be like, oh, we need a, we need a thing in there too.

Like, we'll just add it to the file. And then, and that file just was huge. And I remember opening it up one time and thinking like, I remember, uh, cause we, it, it had existed in the days before ES five. And so it had like, it had like a lot of the array pro prototype methods, like reduce and filter and like basic stuff in there.

Except they had it like five or six times, because the file was so long that like people didn't take the opportunity to like go back further in the moment. So w why, why am I saying this? Well, that was a decade ago, that was a decade ago at a high-tech company in downtown San Francisco. We were not building our apps.

We were not using, modules, uh, and, and a compiler like Webpack and all that stuff. We were, we were literally just like writing JavaScript. Uh, we certainly didn't have TypeScript, uh, or, or, you know, uh, CSS in JS, or a lot of the stuff that people nowadays are, are using compilers for it.

Um, and, and honestly, it wasn't even a popular thing back then to pull code off of NPM. Like if you were doing note, it was, but I remember the first time I saw installed jQuery off of NPM, I was like, Like jQuery off npm? Like, why don't I just go to the website and download jQuery? Why am I installing it from NPM?

Nowadays if you're a JavaScript developer, it's like, why would you go to somebody's website and download a file? Why don't you just NPM install it, right? Like that is the way we get code. Right? So, so the whole model of consuming front-end code has dramatically changed over the last eight or nine years. And, um, and, and so, compiling for the web is now the thing and installing dependencies, and that's how you share code that is now also the way to do things.

And so as a front end team, the front end development team, uh, your job, has, has ballooned in the last 10 years. You used to just write JavaScript and HTML and CSS, and like there's already enough there for you to know how to do right. When you're talking about semantically sound HTML, like building accessible app.

And performant apps. There's a lot to discuss with those technologies, but now you, you also are moving further back in the stack. And so you now also have to understand compilers and build pipelines and even things like code splitting, how are you going to do that?

And, and, dynamic importing and loading the bundles that sort of run time. And, um, th th there are just so, so many concerns as a front end developer, now that you have, that you didn't use to have. It used to be pop the script tags on the page and go. And so, uh, so yeah, so, so that's kind of how I tend to think about remix is, react router is one piece of it.

You can take react-router or you can serve a render it, you can not server render it You can do code splitting with it. You get ignore code splitting. You can build a static site with it. You could build a fully dynamic site with it. It's not opinionated at all. You can build whatever kind of a site that you want with react-router remix comes along and says, Hey, you know, that, that cool router that we built, uh, we're actually going to build a framework for you to take full advantage of that router. So, uh, so we're going to give you TypeScript compiling right out of the box. Uh, we're going to give you things like a strategy for loading data right out of the box.

And we're going to give you a strategy for a mutating data right out of the box. And by the way, how do you keep that data fresh on the page? As you do things as you, as you do mutate data, how do you keep other other routes, data fresh, um, how, how do you do things like, transitioning gradually or gracefully between.

And so react router or sorry, remix is, uh, it, it really is this a compiler that, your, your input into remix is basically your routes on the file system. Um, and then your output is this, this code, split server rendered app that, uh, yeah. That we can run and we can run on node, we can run it in the browser. We can also run it in places like cloudflare workers. So that's something that I don't think we've we've even hit on yet. But, um, you, you mentioned, I think Justin, before, before we started, you said node was not an option for the app that you're working on. Um, and I totally totally get that.

Nowadays we have multiple JavaScript runtimes, so the, you know, the cloudflare workers people. Uh, they just have these V8 isolates with this kind of custom runtime that's based on server work service workers. And they're saying, Hey, we'll run that at the edge for you. Right. So that is, that is not node.

Um, and I'm not speaking specifically to your, your use case because a lot of other people are, have that same case, but yeah, they're, they're building, uh they're building something that is not node and they're saying, "Hey, it's still JavaScript. You might maybe want to run your app here." And so one conscious decision that we made early on in the, in the design for remix was this thing is not going to be dependent on node.

Uh, we've also got Dino or Deno. I'm not sure how to pronounce it. That's that's out there, right? That is also a not node. Definitely not node and node has been forked in the past. You know? So like, I, I just anticipate that the future is going to be a proliferation of, of runtimes for JavaScript that are not node. Node is going to be a big popular choice for a long, long time, but I think that we're going to see see more and more options for developers going forward. Uh, and so remix is not coupled to node. We actually run natively on CloudFlare workers and our server runtime is completely generic.

We actually borrowed the idea for our server runtime from them that I said they, they based their whole thing on the service worker model, which of course includes, uh, the fetch API requests, response headers. We took that and we ran with it.

And so our entire server runtime is generic and just runs on the...

Listen to NSSDeviations: https://nssdeviations.com/145-get-used-to-being-unhappy (30mins in)

https://counting.substack.com/p/what-data-folk-were-saying-about

the offensive tweet: https://twitter.com/ryxcommar/status/1456045288079204358
his actual thoughts: https://ryxcommar.com/2021/11/06/zillow-prophet-time-series-and-prices/

The following is my conversation with Adam Argyle, CSS Developer Advocate for Google Chrome.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/xEyJ6LY7DKI

The conversation covers a quite a few topics that are relevant in the webdev and web design industries: UI complexity cliffs, DX vs UX, Self Disruption, and what Web Design Tooling could be.

Along the way we touch on what OpenUI is, Adam's Deferred Inputs proposal, the 4 Jobs of Developer Experience, Thoughtleading for Good from Emily Freeman, Ilya Grigorik, and Dion Almaier, and Adobe vs Figma vs Webflow!

Links: 

• Button tweet https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1450333133300064259
• https://open-ui.org/
• https://jasonformat.com/application-holotypes/
• https://siliconangle.com/2021/09/29/devops-dummies-author-emily-freeman-introduces-revolutionary-model-modern-software-development-awsq3/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
• Ilya Grigorik Perf.now talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIfVPtN6io
• Visbug https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/visbug/cdockenadnadldjbbgcallicgledbeoc?hl=en
• https://web.dev/learn/

Timestamps:

00:00:00 Cold open
00:01:05 Complexity Cliffs and the Reusable Button Problem
00:03:28 OpenUI
00:04:32 DevRel vs Personal work
00:05:52 DRY vs Design Systems
00:07:10 Building in Phases
00:08:04 Thought Leading for Good
00:10:33 Learning
00:14:13 The Surprising Complexity of Tabs
00:17:12 What is Open UI?
00:19:59 Hot Take: Deferred Inputs
00:23:40 Cathedral vs Bazaar
00:28:01 Illya Grigorik: Head/Torso/Tail
00:32:45 UX vs DX
00:45:51 4 Jobs of DX
00:50:33 Self Disruption
00:54:50 Adobe vs Figma vs Webflow
01:01:04 VisBug
01:05:05 Shameless Plugs

Transcript

• swyx: Alright So the first thing we're talking about is ui complexity cliffs what's on your mind what was his first on your on your list.
• Adam Argyle: yeah you had a tweet the other day that was i'm at my fourth startup or something like this and we're pressing buttons again like, how s it 2021.
• swyx: And by guys
• Adam Argyle: Are popping up i needing refactoring or something like How are they not solved and.
• Adam Argyle: i'm sure you had threads of people that have their ideas there and mine was it's a omplexity cliff it's the first introduction, where you as a front end ui person who actually.
• Adam Argyle: is like goingto go build out all this matrix of states that a button needs that it lands on you it's like you've been in the car using a shifter this whole time using a steering wheel this whole time and then someone said hey.
• Adam Argyle: Go change the steering wheel out and you're like oh that's just a component just a single use like that things totally only got like one attachment right, and then you walk up to it and you start working on it you'd like.
• Adam Argyle: To see just like really integrated into the system.
• Adam Argyle: And or whatever right, you have these like discovery moments with it and you realize it's much more complex than it is in a button just does that buttons like yeah well let's allow an icon to be on our button and you're like okay left and right.
• Adam Argyle: sides can be I can have both sides because you could have a shopping cart with a little drop down arrow.
• Adam Argyle: Oh man Okay, and you have to have dark mode you better have this and that and that the matrix like i've seen the of states, is what I mean by this complexity cliff like it's just not visible from the surface, it looks all innocent.
• Adam Argyle: And then you go map it like if you mapped out everything you need it's it's a lot, like the CSS alone that it takes to have like a custom button and the design system is absurd it's absurd, but at the same time I love it anyway.
• swyx: So this is the tweet and question and honestly like this is this is genuine because.
• swyx: yeah I had that to Sigma away, where I had my first front end job and then modify and now it's immoral same stuff again and all did you handle disabled Oh, is it a link, or is it a button.
• swyx: And it was interesting was also just the replies like Nicole from Google So what does she do she like.
• Adam Argyle: beats I worry record directly.
• Adam Argyle: These days, she was on frameworks and she's now shifted to ui and sort of like how did she empower people to build flexible and fluid interfaces on the web.
• Adam Argyle: And that's why she points to open your eyes it's like a community for that, but anyway that i'm part of her team because i'm I work on similar things.
• swyx: Okay yeah and so like you know, first of all I didn't I didn't expect this to reach anyone in Google.
• swyx: But then also like the Web components people reached out to me and they're like how come work a foreign service officer for you and i'm like it's not about the tech.
• swyx: it's more about like understanding the specs of what people wanted people not agreeing what a button should do.
• Adam Argyle: yeah.
• Adam Argyle: yeah Google cloud had had too many.
• Adam Argyle: They had them in multiple frameworks in the same.
• Adam Argyle: repo right being like just because they grew so fast or whatever like your project always gets out of hand and all of a sudden yeah you have more than one button.
• Adam Argyle: which some people have enough time or England one, how are they going to wrinkle two or three and built in different frameworks right you could your islands architecture with buttons you're just like oh snap touch mean any button from any framework just shows up in an island.
• swyx: that's an interesting discussion is that a big.
• swyx: Is the islands architecture, a big discussion within Google, or because I always have hard I have trouble separating Jason from Jason Miller, who wrote the article architecture markers.
• swyx: When is he talking in his own personal capacity, or when is he saying like No, this is something we're tight with thinking about a Google.
• Adam Argyle: Oh, in my opinion Jason and I are pretty straight shooters about our own stuff like we work for Google and chrome and we love our job, and we want to represent chrome well and do all the things our job want us to do, but we have this like I don't know where our own personal opinion like.
• swyx: jake Archibald as to he.
• Adam Argyle: he's working on a lot of his own stuff we kind of balance, both I mean Jason definitely does things internally that he might not have chosen to go do if he just could choose whatever he wants to do.
• Adam Argyle: But that doesn't mean that's what he's going to go pitch outside of Google and the islands architectures.
• Adam Argyle: yeah This is just sort of the micro friends evolution into let's eventually docker eyes every component and then manage them with communities in the front end right we'll get there, I don't know.
• Adam Argyle: yeah.
• swyx: Well, so the this discussion of the reusable button and the ui complexity cliff makes me wonder because there's a lot of discussion about how dry is overrated you know.
• swyx: We should we should write everything twice and sometimes if you're just customizing it so often you're reusing it so much maybe just don't reuse code just just copy and paste and then that makes it easy to the really easy to modify the only thing that.
• swyx: That goes wrong with that so whenever you need to do a global update then you'd run into trouble, but how often do you really need to do that.
• Adam Argyle: Right isn't that what the super RAD typescript refactor button is for like tha...

Listen to the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIOyB9ZXn8s
Listen to the analysis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zs0U8Z6yI8

Listen to https://www.theinformation.com/articles/the-talent-cloud-the-411-podcast (7 mins in)

• https://www.theinformation.com/ti50 (paywall)
• My pitch: https://swyx.io/podcast/learn-in-podcast/rss.xml

Listen to MFM (1hr in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBIgYNAI9Fk)

how to grow podcasts

• big guest
• "how to" episode
• buy ads on niche audience - eg podcast junkie types - castbox, overcast
• be consistent and at least ok
• treat side hustle like a job -> grind at it
• maintain and improve an existing winner instead of constantly jumping around "there are no silver bullets, only lead bullets"
• impatience with action, patience with results

Transcript

uh in 3-1 so what was that march march 
we did 338 
000 downloads in april we did 436 000 
downloads so 
uh that's a 30 game about in may 
it's tracking towards around 520 000 
which is another 
20 20 increase i think we can keep going 
and i want to tell you what i think is 
is causing all this 
the first is 
the biology episode so guests 
typically we have found don't work that 
well but a really 
big name guest or someone that has a 
cult following 
like a tie or biology um that works 
who's ty lopez oh tai lopez okay gotcha 
uh when we did that one because he's 
like cult following 
and a cult unfollowing he's got both 
yeah 
yeah so that that worked so the 
biology's episode is probably gonna be 
the most listened 
one ever um so that worked out 
how much more is it than the usual is 
like 20 more 50 
more than a typical episode it got to 30 
000 
like in the first week typically our 
episodes get to 30 000 over like 
two months gotcha okay so it it did that 
in like a week or whenever it was when 
did it get released a week 
days five days wednesday i talked to him 
on the phone and he said yeah 
a good episode i shared it so hopefully 
that helps 
and then uh he's down to share more but 
we only tweeted out i think one clip 
from it so he's down to share more clips 
and he liked the 
animation he was like oh like looks like 
production value's going up 
i was like sweet yes it is yeah uh 
so that worked out well and then do you 
want to announce what's working really 
well is how to's 
so any time a title is called how to 
build a paid community 
how to build paid events how to whatever 
we've done 
those rank the highest no matter what or 
not no matter what but more often than 
not so like in our top 10 most 
downloaded stuff 
it's either an interview with a huge a 
well-known person 
um which like an andrew would be a 
well-known person or a how-to 
blank so we have to do some more almost 
like 
they don't care about us and our great 
ideas they care about themselves 
learning something and being able to do 
something they want to do 
i think that's exactly what it is and 
then it's ourselves peppered in there we 
are the spice but 
the meat is the how-to right and then 
finally i got a last update um we're 
running some ads on 
do you know this thing called the 
billionaire investors podcast 
what's it called it's like a famous 
thing is it we study billionaires is it 
that one yeah i love that podcast if 
you're looking to do it 
yeah so we're running an ad on their net 
on their network on that podcast i think 
uh we bought it last week i think it's 
gonna go live this week 
then so there's two types of podcast 
advertising that i'm learning about the 
one 
is what we do is people advertise now 
hubspot advertises on our podcast 
and people go to hubspot.com mfm 
whatever 
the other one is podcast platform so 
like overcast have you heard of 
overcast yeah like these clients these 
apps you can use to listen to podcasts 
yes and on those clients those uh users 
click subscribe 
and the strategy that i'm doing is what 
we're doing is we are going towards 
niche ones because those niche ones 
typically have a far loyal following 
and you could get low cost per click to 
download and subscribe 
and it makes sense because those people 
if you are 
you got to be a real podcast junkie to 
go get like a new podcast app because it 
has these extra five features about 
podcasts so it's actually a really good 
audience 
that's probably really cheap because 
nobody else really goes for them so i i 
like the strategy a lot 
and they're like they're techie they're 
like tech they're early doctors 
yeah and so we're running ads currently 
on cast box 
i've never even heard of them but it 
looks cool and then overcast and so 
those are some of the updates uh it's 
going well okay what about the 
so the ad on the we study billionaires 
podcast what is it because i'm always 
like 
if i'm listening to a podcast what's 
actually going to make me 
go subscribe one is a guy comes on or a 
girl comes on and they're a guest 
like this happened with elaine elaine 
came on our podcast she did ideas 
and she said it was like i don't know 
one of her biggest uh her newsletter got 
like a huge spike in subscribers like 
her next email send was 
welcome all my new subscribers this is 
amazing and she said she got you know 
thousands of new subscribers from her 
appearance on the pod which is great 
and so that one makes sense because if i 
go and guest on somebody's podcast 
you listen to it for 45 minutes or an 
hour because that's your favorite 
podcast or that's what you listen to 
regularly 
and you might be like oh that guess was 
cool they said they have a pod i'll go 
check it out 
i like that method and i'm i've said it 
i got to do this i still have to go do 
it which is 
i want to go guest on as many podcasts 
as i can that would be part my 
contribution to this growth strategy 
but this ad is a little bit different 
it's just like a 30 second 
sound clip what are we saying in that 30 
second sound clip that's going to make 
somebody want to subscribe 
unfortunately it's not a clip i think 
it's going to be stig the main guy 
reading but frankly i don't know we just 
closed the deal on friday 
okay fair enough uh so i have to figure 
it out but 
we have our guys so we we got this team 
uh henry and dylan 
they're making like a height like a 
sizzle reel right um and we might be 
able to use that 
but i don't know but i agree with you 
like in theory i agree with you i just 
don't know what's 
what's available at the moment and we're 
doing some other stuff to make it easier 
to follow 
so i'm emailing i've grown my email list 
and this year 
from zero to twenty six thousand 
subscribers now 
and at twenty six thousand i just sent 
it out the first time last week 
so just uh it's uh just seanpuri.com so 
if ...

Listen to the Corey Haines podcast: https://www.swipefiles.com/everything-is-marketing/43 (1hr in)

How to grow a writing audience

• SEO important to start
• Something Owned (Wordpress), Something Rented (Google), Something Borrowed (Medium)
• Inspiration over Information: "Medium really rewards writing that makes it easy on the reader"
  • 5 habits that will make you...
  • Straightforward, and plain, not too intellectual
  • No enormous paragraphs of text
  • Most people want to feel something more than they want to learn something
  • People click in to clickbait titles and find a thoughtful article - challenge expectations
  • Put a little cheese wiz on the broccoli

Transcript

• Could you share, well, one how you built your audience we've briefly touched on. Okay. We started blogging for a medium thrown out a few times. So like, how have you built your audience that allows you to now make a living online and just any sort of, I don't know, numbers or scale you can share. It's just, some people have an idea of like where you are.
• Yeah. So I, I had no following on line really to speak of when I started. And so I just put up a WordPress blog and I had a email newsletter and I, I sent out an email to, I don't know, maybe like 50 friends and family and I, my first newsletter probably went out to like 30 or 40 people, again, friends and family.
• And that, that was probably the case for the. Three or four months. I like, I literally don't think it, it wasn't above like probably 70, 60 people for like three miles. Like it just really, but I do remember finally, like after every single weekly newsletter, my grandfather would always email me back saying great article.
• Like this was really good. You know, he just always have like something nice to say, and that sounds stupid. But like that made so much of a difference to me. I knew it was kind of like corny and yes. Just to be nice. And like, I mean, I think he did like him, but it's very grandfatherly thing to do, but like, God damn it like, that actually helped, like, despite my like, cynicism, like having someone, just one person like that, it was really helpful.
• So I, yeah, I wouldn't skip that step again. Like kind of recruiting friends and family initially the next thing, the next, like, bump that really. And I, at that point, by the way, I was getting like zero traffic to my blog. I mean, I had no. And I wasn't on any social media. Really. I was literally just putting stuff out there, like into the void, didn't know anything about SES and publish, just pressing, publish and sharing it with this really small group of people.
• My first kind of big break came when I, I just, I had known about meeting them, but I decided I, I heard that it was like pretty easy. You can just cross post stuff. I saw, I already have these articles written on my blog, so I thought, yeah, what the hell? I'll just like, put this on medium. And so I, I put this article on medium and.
• Within like a day, someone from an editor from one of the bigger publications they're called the startup said, Hey, like I saw this piece somehow. I don't know how I saw it. Can we publish it in the startup? And I said, yeah, sure. I guess why not? And then it, it kind of had a little mini blow up. It seemed like out of this world, to me, like at my stage, he got like, I don't know, 10,000 views or something like, and that got me probably.
• I don't know. I mean, it bumped my, my medium follower account, but I also had a CTA at the bottom of the, of the article. So that kind of doubled my email list probably in all sorts of new people. And then. Obviously like that was super exciting. And so I was like, all right, this medium things is great. I'm just repurposing.
• I'm just literally copying pacing. Might this article I've written already and putting it on a medium. So that kind of progressed fairly well for about a year or so. And at that time I also started learning just like the real basics of. SEO. I like, I got like the Yoast plugin and I wasn't even doing keyword research at that point.
• I was just kinda like following the Yoast thing and, and over the course of about a year, I started getting fairly good, some, some pretty good SEO traffic. And then about, at about the year point, this is when I was talking before about, I started. Actively like trying to learn from a few of these writers, I admired on medium and developing this more conversational style.
• And that's where my, my medium growth like really took off. I mean, I went from like a few hundred subscribers up to thousands, you know, eight, nine, 10,000. And then at the same time that I was starting to build up like SEO kind of organic traffic to my website and common misconception with medium, you can actually set the canonical link to be.
• Like your WordPress version, so that if an article like blows up on medium, all the SEOG is still goes to your website. So I was having these pieces blow up on medium, but then I break for forum for the, my site's version. So I'd get all this more organic traffic coming to my website and yeah, so that's, so my email list was just growing, I think, after the first.
• A year, year and a half, I was at, you know, a few thousand subscribers. And then last year I just really kind of hit my stride with medium. And I figured out like the right format, kind of like the right tone and format for writing on medium. And, and the SEO had really started kicking in. I was getting a lot of traffic.
• There. And my, yeah, my newsletter went up to, you know, pretty quickly got up to like 15, 20,000 and that's kind of where I am today. So, but it's almost entirely been medium and SEO and that's, that's where I get probably 80%, 90% maybe of my newsletter subscribers, which is my primary kind of metric that I track is that I just include links and CTS at the bottom of all my medium articles.
• And then. I, you know, I, again, I don't, I don't do tons of keyword research, honestly, again, I'm too selfish. Like I just write about whatever I'm interested in and I'll do a little, like kind of minimal, you know, SES stuff. But yeah, that's worked really well so far. Although to be honest, I've [00:05:00] been kind of winging it so far, but I've realized if I, if I do want to kind of get to the next level, I do need to be.
• Thoughtful, I think about strategy and some of the more formal aspects of the approach. But I think the big thing was just like medium was just my home. Like it's like a writer's platform and I was a writer I just liked writing and it was easy. It was simple. I could just plug stuff over there. And I was, I liked the people I was reading on there.
• And I, so that allowed me to kind of learn from them and create a voice and a style that worked well for. Audience and for the people on that platform. And so I think that, I think that's just, I think that really helped a lot. Yeah. Oh yeah. I've been kind of toying and workshopping this idea of owned, rented and borrowed platforms and just like helping people like really like break it down fundamental, like what, what is marketing?
• What does it mean? Like how do you sort of strategically engineer something that just, you know, gets you, traffic gets attention to whatever thing it is that you do, whether it's content or a product or a service and a. You know, even. Between owned, rented and borrowed. You basically just need one platform that's like, or at least one that gets you discovered and like gets kind of those initial eyeballs and new people through the door.
• And then you need another one that kind of keeps people around retention that, you know, lose the mints. And so, you know...

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Transcript

as a quick recap for anyone 
new who is listening i have had a 
youtube channel for i think about eight 
years um 
and i've grown up to two thousand two 
hundred and three thousand subscribers 
in that time so it's been like a slow 
growth but you know that's quite a 
sizable audience um 
and 
several months ago i decided to start a 
second youtube channel to split off a 
portion of my content and um yeah i 
don't know 
there might be people out there who 
think why would you start another one 
when you already have one that's got all 
these people why start a game from 
scratch you know um and so we're gonna 
talk about that today about the why 
behind it 
how to try and get as much of your 
audience as possible over from one to 
another when you start a new project 
we'll talk about youtube specifically 
but i guess it could apply to in general 
creators like starting a new project 
after already having built an audience 
somewhere else you know 
yeah thank you for giving me the 
platform to talk about this today 
youtube because i feel like it's been an 
interesting experience and i have 
learned a lot oh well charlie why don't 
you kick us off why do you start a 
second youtube channel 
yeah well 
so i started it because um 
okay backstory i have this podcast 
series called inside marketing design 
quick plug inside marketingdesign.co 
season two is happening right now um but 
i i ran this last year and i uploaded 
the episodes to my main youtube channel 
because it's like me making the content 
it made sense for me to put it in one 
place right um 
i found that my first of all those 
videos didn't get as many views as my 
regular like vlogs and you know or other 
videos did and also the youtube 
algorithm i feel like i confused it by 
suddenly uploading content that was a 
very different format a very different 
length like these episodes were like 45 
minutes long compared to like 10 minute 
videos i was making 
um 
that all of a sudden it was like i don't 
know i felt like my whole channel took a 
while to recover after the season ended 
but my views on my more regular videos 
were then lower as well which i was like 
damn this sucks because i feel like this 
content is really great like i believe 
in it you know 
um 
i had some advice from roberto blake 
i'll definitely plug him he has a lot of 
really useful advice for youtubers you 
just search roberto blake on youtube and 
you'll find him um 
he was like i think you should put this 
content on a second channel because it 
is such a different format it's like its 
own brand and like in doing that you 
might have a better chance in the 
youtube algorithm to to keep it separate 
and also it could be a very different 
audience right people wanting to watch 
these 
their interviews with designers who work 
at other tech companies about the behind 
the scenes of their work there might be 
a different audience for that compared 
to someone wanting to just watch me hang 
out in my office with my cats and do my 
work you know like 
that's kind of very different content so 
it made sense to me um 
to put it on a separate channel and so 
that is the why behind why i did it 
and 
oh go ahead 
okay um a question that uh someone might 
have um about this is is that someone 
youtube allows you that someone might be 
me uh 
but i think someone else might have this 
question so okay here we go uh 
uh i know that youtube has the ability 
to kind of segment things within youtube 
so you can have different playlists and 
you can have like sub sections of your 
work there so 
why would you take the extreme of 
starting an entirely different channel 
instead of maybe the you thinking oh the 
overarching thing is this is 
charlie and these are the different 
things that charlie does and here are 
the different playlists of the things 
that i do 
you know go down the rabbit hole that 
you prefer choose your own adventure why 
why 
what's the main benefit of completely 
separating because 
you might also 
you kind of benefit from the fact that 
you're using your current audience to 
do this other thing right instead of 
starting all over 
so you're kind of taking a hit there as 
far as like possible eyes in front of 
your work that's a really good point yep 
yep that's a really good point um i 
think that doing that like you said 
having it in a playlist on the channel 
that can solve the problem of there 
being different audiences you know that 
makes it easy for the audience who likes 
interview content to find that on my 
channel but it doesn't solve the problem 
of the youtube algorithm and like as i'm 
talking about this please listeners take 
all of this with a grain of salt i'm not 
saying this is the only way to go about 
it if you want to do a different type of 
content i just know that from my 
experience um 
the youtube algorithm stopped 
recommending me as much and like my 
previous videos weren't getting as many 
views 
once i was starting to put out this 
interview content um 
and so that's why the why like a 
different playlist couldn't solve that 
basically unfortunately 
yeah 
um as far as the youtube algorithm goes 
specifically i mean is this all trial 
trial and error right is there somewhere 
where it says 
that's the real unfortunate thing here 
right because 
really realistically there are so many 
creators that are really diverse in the 
type of things that they do so having 
like one persona one youtube channel but 
all the different things that they do 
doesn't seem like it should be something 
i i guess i don't understand why youtube 
is doing this i don't understand what 
the benefit is on youtube right 
because i i think for us our our mission 
we always talk about this is supporting 
creators right so like is it is it 
it it i don't know it doesn't feel like 
it's um i don't understand it so i don't 
understand the value of it that it 
brings to youtube i guess 
yeah it's more channels 
yeah and that's the thing for the 
youtube algorithm is it's like it is a 
bit of a black box in that you don't 
know for sure like i could have made a 
huge freaking mistake by putting this 
stuff on a different channel right um 
and ...