Dave Ceddia: Entrepreneur and Creator of Recut – Editing Your Videos in a Fraction of the Time (#301)

Dave Ceddia: How to edit your videos in a fraction of the time – powered by Happy Scribe

Alright. Hi everyone. This is Faye from Face World Media. I am here with Dave Sedia. Welcome, David.

Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

Awesome. By the way, you know, I just by accident called you David. Is there a big difference between Dave and David? I wasn’t so sure.

I don’t know. I usually go by Dave. Doesn’t really matter though.

Got you. Okay, cool. So let me briefly introduce you to Dave. And this is pretty incredible because I was watching a YouTube video and then I discovered the software that I’m so passionate about and I pay for it. And that’s why we’re here to talk about it, which is called Recut. And the website is called Getrecut.com. It’s developed by Dave. And real quick, dave is a software developer based in Burlington, Massachusetts, which is not too far away from me. I was getting excited interviewing someone, chatting with someone locally. And he’s also a content creator who in 2018 quit his full time software job to focus on creating educational resources for JavaScript React developers. He runs a blog, Dave.com, and wrote book in React in 2016. And in 2019 I expanded to a full self paced video course called Pure React. Pure React.com. And after making hours of screenshots, that’s the origin story and helping frustrated and I’m just going to kind of riff this part. For video content creators like myself, whether you’re a YouTuber or video editor, individually or as an agency, this software is just incredible because it cuts out all the silence, the UMS, the odds, or just me pausing.

Not sure what I’m trying to say and it’s amazing. It will reduce my we’re going to do a demo shortly, but reduce my 17 minutes recordings to sometimes like 1515 to twelve minutes. And if you’re not an editor, you won’t get this because it takes forever, like hours to head it out, all the silence segments and on top of that, it literally takes minutes, sometimes seconds for the export, which is unlike Descript, that takes forever. So I love DScript for other reasons. So anyway, long the intro. Dave, welcome. I’m so thrilled to be chatting with you right now.

Me too. Really glad to be here. This is going to be fun.

Awesome. Well, so let’s please jump in. And if you’re watching this, currently we’re after Lifetime, please leave us questions. And I tend to monitor the channels and we’re here talking about creative entrepreneurship, greater economy. So the first question we want to kick it off is that dave, I’m a current user of Recut and absolutely love it. It’s so simple, clean, effective, so easy to talk about it because I’m in on it every single day. But I want to hear a bit of your origin stories on noticing that this is something that people might need, people like myself. But to actually develop that from ideation to launching, like what was the beginning stage like? Did you have any doubts about, like, I don’t know whether I have time where I want to do this. Would this work?

Yeah, there was a lot of that, actually. So you kind of touched on the origin story a bit. So I was, you know, was still am. I course creator writing mostly for JavaScript developers. And so I made a bunch of screencasts, and the editing process was always, like, my least favorite part. I think it’s partly because I’m just not great at doing stuff on the first take. So I would leave these pauses between my tries and then the editing was kind of like mechanical at that point. Just go through, chop out all those islands and stuff. But it’s really tedious and it always felt like the computer should be able to do it for me. So at some point I wonder if there’s a way to automate this. And I went looking around and found some scripts and actually kind of like my first attempt was to write my own script to do this. And it was like, hey, it sort of proved that the concept, this seems like good work, but it’s not visual. It’s not like you don’t get the live preview aspect with the script. And so it sort of put the idea in my head like, I could build this thing.

But there was definitely a lot of, like, I had to kind of convince myself that I should try to build a video editor, not a simple piece of software to build. And I don’t know anything like, I didn’t know anything about video, like, really no video background development wise. So that was kind of the beginning of it.

Interesting. I think you touched upon something that I am I don’t want to say, oh, I’m so bad at it, but I tend to want to create this kind of fully fleshed out, like, this hub of tools and features and, you know, everything that anyone would ever want for that. Whatever, you know, for zoom, zoom guide, zoom webinar. And that’s kind of part of my niche and YouTube strategy. But I also realize that you have nailed a part of our process as video editors, as YouTubers. Is that the grueling editing process? Especially at the beginning, I think preparing rough cuts, it’s a very challenging process and it’s not very interesting. And there’s a lot of one thing I don’t even think I mentioned to you earlier is that there’s a lot of negative self talk judgment that goes on watching your first iteration of a video. Like, of course we’re human beings. We’re going to pause. I’m not sure what to say, but because of recut, I kind of remove myself from that process and whatever I get in return is just a much cleaner version of it. So I find myself to kind of dive into work more positively, more quickly, and just overall more effective.

That’s awesome. Sort of a nice side benefit. I never really thought of that, but that’s great to hear.

Awesome. If you don’t mind, I’m just going to do a quick demo. And this is the area, by the way. I was a software developer for several years and studied computer science. And the funny thing is that whenever we do a demo right, we’re always thinking, I hope it really works, right? And so for everybody who’s watching live, I’m going to hide. You can still see us in the lower corner. And literally, I’m just going to go to my downloads folder and show you guys. And feel free to comment on this. Dave let’s say you’re using it wrong. I am going to drag a file. And this is kind of interesting. This is me literally demoing comparing this part, which is recut versus descript. But you can see, like, the moment I get this file in here, this is like just watching a phenomenal painting. I’m just getting so excited. You can see there’s a little, like, fainted red bars here. And you can zoom in and zoom out. What are those?

Dave so interesting that the waveform stopped displaying.

Oh, there we go.

We were just talking about demos. That doesn’t do that before.

No worries.

So you’ve got the blue waveform, and then the little red sections are chunks of silence that it’s found. And those silent bits are still like tweakable. You’ll probably keep going with this right here.

Yeah, absolutely. Like you said, you can change the minimum duration, change up the padding here. You can remove blips. Some people like their videos cut really tight. I’m someone well, I like there to be some breathing room. So actually, by default, the threshold, by default or what’s here considered auto. I think it’s quite good.

Yeah. So it tries to make a best guess at what’s a reasonable silent threshold. But you can tweak that, too, if it seems like it’s cutting off two words too closely or not enough or whatever.

Yeah, and I love it, by the way. So as I’m moving around, I’m able to preview it. So I’m able to kind of move this cursor around. And I can see there’s like something that can be removed very easily. And it just this is super helpful. And we talked about the panel on the right. I love how clean it is. It’s the only software that I think I’ve used without feeling overwhelmed or, like, stupid inside. And here, this is the export feature. So you can just simply export this original format. The pass through is so fast, but you do have the high quality reencode, which is slower, but not much slower, frankly. So let me show you. I mean, this is crazy. This is a fast pass through and I don’t think I’m so I can just simply save it. This one’s probably has been done, but it literally takes less than like 30 seconds. Dave, am I crazy or is that no.

Yeah, the pass through is really fast. I think there’s some issues with it sometimes. Like certain files don’t play well with the pass through. I’ve had some people say that doesn’t always work, but if it does work, it’s awesome. So I feel like that’s like, try that one first.

Yeah, super helpful. And then you’re so honest about yourself. We’re like, oh, there’s some imperfections. But here what’s also amazing is this is by the way, it’s not even sponsored, but the export timeline only down here. I am a Final Cut Pro user, so you have different formats. And my producer uses Adobe Premiere sometimes final Cut pro. My content managers use DaVinci. And you literally can choose these apps and you can import those XMLs right back to Final Cut Pro or whatever the software of your choice. And it will remove the silent clips. And as a result, I will stop the share right now. As a result, I get a much tighter, shorter video rough cut to go from. And I have noticed personally, for me, if you guys know me, I’m on YouTube twice, two videos a week basically has saved me hours. And so therefore, I think it’s really wonderful. And I do have included a link right in the description. No matter where you are, there’s a $10 discount thanks to Dave to provide add to Facebook. Definitely check it out link below. I think it’s definitely one of the best $100 I’ve spent, which is going to be $89 or $90 for you guys.

So, yeah, check it out. Well, let’s keep the conversation going. Dave, is there anything else you would like to talk about?

Well, thanks for that demo. It’s awesome to hear. I think one of my favorite things about this stuff is like just being able to save people time. That’s kind of the whole goal is to make it fast to use and just to make the whole editing process less painful.

Yeah, for sure. This part is it is very painful. I like learning how to edit, but at the end of the day, as a solo entrepreneur, where me, someone was running a very small team, it’s just so important for everybody to not only work harder, myself included, but also work smarter as well, which I think is so underrated sometimes because we live in this world economy. Everybody’s focused on efficiency, but not so much on as much as on selfcare and working less and enjoying life more as much as they should. Let’s see, I’m going to route to some of the questions that I’m so eager to ask, which is a lot of my audience here on social media, but especially on YouTube, are entrepreneurs. It’s interesting. There’s kind of a spectrum. People who are starting out thanks to the great resignation, people of different levels as well. And there are also people like me who have been going at it for a while. I’ve been an entrepreneur fulltime since early 2016. So six years into it for me, and there’s some people I’ve done it a lot longer and trying to work smarter. So could you maybe talk to us about your journey, maybe why you decided to leave your job in 2018 and start stepping into the unknown?

Yeah, so thinking back, I think before that, I just worked as a software developer full time, and I kind of got the sense that I wanted to branch out and do stuff on my own. I think part of that was this feeling of maybe unfulfillment in some sense. The software stuff was fun, but we never really had direct connections with users. We didn’t know what kind of impact our software was having or whatever. And yeah, so I felt like maybe doing my own thing, I have a more direct connection with people, and I think that was a big part of it. And I think also, just kind of personally, I have a lot of hobbies and stuff, and I always kind of wanted more time to do stuff that doesn’t work. I owned my own time. This would be ideal. I think I spent a good number of years kind of doing nothing. I did a lot of reading and watching stuff and not actually doing any business stuff, though. A lot of reading business books and things. And that was sort of my intro to it. And then I went down this brief well, not brief my plan for a while was the early retirement thing, which I think is a little more common now.

Mr. Money Mustache was my intro into that world.

Yeah, I love it.

That idea of save up, we use like, 25 extra annual spending or something, and you could basically live off of dividend returns or whatever. And that was my plan for a little while. And then I realized, well, if I get a job, make some side income, sort of make that happen faster, and combined with minimizing expenses and stuff, it’s like, well, okay. Once the side business got enough revenue to where it was covering expenses, I felt like, well, worst case, I can go back and get another job. So I’ll just try this out for a while.

By the way, quick question. You said you find a side gig that covers some of the minimum or reasonable amount of expenses. Which side gig are you referring to?

Yes, I realized I skipped that. So, 2015, I took a business course called 30 by 500 by Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman. And this is the one that got me out of the spinning my wheels and finally got me doing something. And so 2015, I started a blog about then AngularJS, but, like, JavaScript developer stuff and teaching developers that way, and then wrote a book in 2016. So that book was, like, the first product that ever sold online. And it got to the point where that was making, like, $2,000 a month ish and it’s like, okay, plus some savings, I can probably make this work for a while. It’s no developer salary, but you know, we won’t starve, right? So, yeah, and that was kind of it. And then 2018, I went full time on creator stuff and did a couple more courses since then. But yeah, this is really good.

I’m hearing 30 x 500 for the first time and that is incredible. And so I always love discovering new things at the same time. I’m always surprised by how much sometimes the same resources and people we follow before we begin as entrepreneurs ourselves. First question from Michael Buckby how much time do you save making videos with recut? So I would love to hear the answer from Dave as well for me to clarify, Michael. So I don’t really I’m not a Vlogger, I don’t really kind of capture my daily lives running around like beauty stuff. But instead I do a lot of tech tutorials and I’m super passionate about making technology really accessible for anyone who either hates or really intimidated by tech in general. So I do a lot of sit down talking head and I also do a lot of screen tutorials, which means I’m recording my screen like click by click. So I would say that as a result, I find myself with a short video. I save a good maybe 1 hour if I’m editing the video, typically for two to 3 hours, I can cut down like an hour just with a rough cut.

And I also think the quality is really good. I’m not waiting for recon to spin and I have to go get coffee. No, I throw the video in and I just sit there like, yeah, I got my coffee already here. I’m just going to continue working. I actually like the minimum distraction, frankly. Whatever you’re waiting for. That’s kind of the problem with software. Like I find myself and then I come back and say, wait, what was I doing again? So a lot of time for sure. And I would say longer videos, sit down videos. Yeah, knock off a good hour. That means a lot to me. I’m not sure if you guys ever measure your productivity. For me, average day is about 4 hours of air, concentrated work. A great day is six to eight. So that 1 hour in kind of perspective is 25% of my valuable time back in the day. So Dave, what’s your answer? What videos do you create? How much time do you save or do you hear from your audience that they actually save?

So I’ve heard from people who have saved like multiple hours per video. I think one person emailed me and said they saved like 30 hours of editing and I was like, wow, that’s awesome. Personally, I do the same kind of stuff. Same kind of stuff, really? As you do like screencasts. And that’s the use case I originally built it for, which is why it’s like really simple and kind of stripped down. We can talk a bit about that too. But yeah, for the screencast, it probably saves me a good hour or so per screencast or something like that. The other thing that I have, sort of like a side benefit I hadn’t realized was that it makes me less worried about messing up while I’m recording because I know I don’t have to edit those out. Like, I just stay silent. Not like, oh, I’m piling onto my editing time by dragging this out. It’s like the quieter I can be between takes, the easier it’ll be to edit out later than just stay silent and try again.

So true. Mentally, it is such a relief that I used to judge myself, too, for getting into a silence or not sure what I was doing. And I think in a way, that recut helps me become better and more efficient as I’m mediating and recording. And I can imagine, by the way, someone is saving a ton of time. So if you are a Vlogger and you have so much footage, a lot of broll, I’ve been there. I actually did a documentary film and I just remember, like, out of every the output of twelve to 14 minutes came from days of shooting. So can you imagine, like, that we’re easily talking about saving a ton of time, cutting out and cleaning up all the broll. So super helpful for anybody who’s watching. I saw like, just now there’s like ten, you know, twelve people hopped on. Please say hi, you’re here. I would love to know if there are any video editors or people running production companies among us and say hi and please ask your questions and welcome if you’re watching. Thank you for joining us. Again, I think I would love to for people who are listening to this to understand that we don’t always go from point A to B on a really smooth ride.

Because everything at your website, whether it’s Dave setia, whether it’s Getrecord.com looks really clean, a beautiful website, everything that you’ve listed there, it’s popular content, but could you talk about how you were kind of navigating your journey and maybe didn’t get here so quickly? Like, what are some of the roadblocks or stealth out that you run into?

Yeah, you mentioned the design specifically. That’s always been thank you, by the way, because I feel like I don’t think I’m great at design. I definitely know that I’m better than I used to be. And that’s one of the things early on, I was just a horrible at, and I’ve gotten a lot better at through practice and courses and things. But yeah, I feel like there are lots of ups and downs in entrepreneurship. There’s lots of self doubts and stuff. And even if things are going well, there’s this sort of constant churn of like, I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing. Should I really be spending time on this or am I spending too much time on this or whatever. That’s just kind of a constant thing. I kind of thought like, oh, once I make a product or once I quit my job or something like then I’ll be successful and that’ll go away. Not how that goes.

So true. Yeah. I mean, you mentioned that there are a lot of ups and downs. So even critical part is even when you’re doing well, you feel like you need to do more. Yeah, I think as human beings, one thing I learned that I’ve talked about before is the idea that you need to if you’re working fulltime right now, you need a bigger, better title, you need more salary. And I get it. It seems like part of the natural progression, like you’re making progress. Same thing with being an entrepreneur. It’s like I need to make more money now in February than January and I need to work smarter. But it is impossible to think that I’m going to be OK once I get to a certain point because you may or may not get there. And also I want to say just because if you publish a video on social media or YouTube, you have experienced this, you have some posts you didn’t even put much thoughts into and it became sort of relatively viral. Tons of comments. People love it, they share it. Oh my God. Then you look at your thoughtful content, you dwell two days on it, you lost sleep over it.

You feel like you’re putting your best work and people kind of ignore and don’t really care. And it’s important to sometimes ignore the vanity metrics or really important to ignore that because it’s so easy to judge ourselves to say, okay, now I can just send more, I don’t know, something called a shit posting, I think on Twitter. Oh, I just only do that now because those are the things that work. Like how do you balance that date?

Yeah, that’s always tough. I’ve never really been very good at guessing how well something is going to do, which might mean that I’m not good at coming up with good content ideas, I don’t know. But my solution to that was so when I was blogging more, all of those ideas, almost all the ideas came directly from things I would see on forums. This is something I learned from that 3500 class where they call it Sales Safari. So you’re like taking notes and kind of reading through places where people are hanging out and figuring out what are people struggling with and how can I help? And really writing posts to answer those questions. And it was kind of like, well, even if this doesn’t go viral or something like I know that this is a useful thing for at least a few people and that worked out pretty well. I think it kind of gave me a natural SEO. I get a bunch of traffic from search these days, and like, that’s built up over time, but I never really did much in terms of, like, SEO hacks and keyword research and all this kind of stuff.

It was kind of like, well, finding the actual problems is the keyword research. And so if you write solutions to those problems, it ends up working out pretty well. Yeah, some of them do well and some of them don’t. And kind of like, you know, you end up building this back catalog stuff.

Yeah. Speaking of back catalog, I know that this may not even be I mean, it says every post ever, but I’m sure you probably have written and published somewhere else. But in terms of a blog post, I mean, these are the articles. And I would say, like, some people, some people I might look at this are like, oh, I’ve published even more than that. Or some people just say, oh, there is no way for me to reach this level or the number of posts. And it’s interesting how we process that as individuals and content creators, that if somebody told me that I have to interview 300 people and write 300 additional blog posts, it’s going to be hard to swallow. Like to say, really, how can I get to that one viral post? And it just doesn’t work that way. And what I realized over the years is, where did the time go? When I look back six, seven years of being an entrepreneur, and I ended up creating so much content, it’s impossible to really predict, like, to your best ability. It’s not possible to predict what’s going to hit. So you might as well write them using Dave’s example recut.

I think as a YouTuber, I do wake up in the morning, go to sleep thinking, like, how can I possibly reduce the time to make editing more efficient? Because that literally is the one thing that stops me from creating more content or even wanting to create more content. And you solve that very problem. And I’m looking at this, like, as a developer, I can see, like, oh, how to read react errors, like how specific errors we all run into them and react, or a certain brand, these companies might not provide us with the most accurate, most helpful content, and you step in here to really do a much better job explaining it. So I think these are really good tactics.

Yeah, thanks. I think some of the posts, they’re more specific and less specific. I think some of them were like, broader tutorials and stuff. But over time, I think to your point about being told that I need to do 300 blog posts or something, I think that’s something that you hear a lot in creator circles. It’s like, just do two years of work or just do 100 blog posts or something. And I think it’s kind of true in a sense, but also super demotivating to look at this mountain that you have to climb first. And I think it’s easy to look at that and say, like, well, I won’t be successful until I hit at the top of the mountain, but actually there’s going to be a bunch of little successes along the way and those are the ones that really keep you going, I think. And it’s like hearing from people who read a post like, oh, this is super helpful. This saved me a bunch of time today, or whatever. Like those things kind of kept me going.

Yeah, so great. Keep telling us, what are some of the small mountains? I like that metaphor, and it’s very true. People sending you these lovely messages and things that money can buy. If we use Getrecut, we’re recut as an example, how long did it take for you to develop, like the MVP, minimal viable product, something usable? How long did it take and when did you see that little I don’t know, like that kind of milestone. That’s significant to say, oh, I probably should devote more of my timing. This is a thing now. Like, people like it and there’s a future and growth to it.

That’s a good question. So recon. I think I started it in 2019. I guess there’s probably a few months of development or something.

Full time?

Yeah, full time.

20, 30 hours a week is a significant it’s up there.

Yeah. I’ve never been great at tracking my time. I think looking back, I don’t know if it could have been 40, it could have been more. Like I’ll end up working into the night and stuff. Like if I’m involved in a problem or it’s exciting or something, I’ll just kind of keep going. But it was probably a few months and then before that, prior to that was probably a good I would say maybe six months or so of like, oh, I think I could solve this problem. Video editor is probably too hard. Oh, maybe I could solve that problem, maybe not yet.

And thinking about it.

Yeah, kind of thinking about it and getting myself, I don’t know, to build up the courage to build it or something that honestly was like it took a little while. And I think I’m trying to think of like I shared a couple tweets about it and reached out to some people to give out beta copies and people seem pretty excited about it. And then the actual launch day tweet, I don’t know how that ended up getting picked up, but it got picked up by a bunch of big YouTubers and people retweeted it and stuff. And that was kind of the point where I was like, oh, maybe this is cool because these are not people in my audience, really. Like, I built up this audience of developers. Not a whole lot of overlap there with video editors. And to tweeting that. Out and seeing all these positive reactions around it like, oh, cool. Maybe this is a bigger problem than I imagined.

Yeah, I mean, you launched officially. I saw excuse me, the tweet that you pinned at the top of your Twitter handle. I think that was January 2021. So it’s been just a little over a year since the official launch of Recut, and you had beta users. Do you mind giving us a rough number of how many current or active users or users in total that you have generated?

I think it’s like 500 or so now. Almost 600, actually.

600 or so copies.

Yeah. And so I’ve also changed the pricing around a few times. So it’s not like 600 times $100. But yeah, it’s pretty great.

Wow. So let’s talk about pricing real quick because that part is you hear such contradicting feedback sometimes today. Right. So you want to offer something for people who are new to pricing. Thinking about pricing, there is a pretty big difference between one time versus recurring, which in this case, for Recut, it is a one time I should probably drink some water like Dave just did. It is a one time payment. And then you think about it. Dave has to maintain the software. There may be support that goes into it, which I don’t think the software needs much support, which is freaking brilliant. Right. And it’s just so intuitive how many iterations of pricing and what goes into the consideration. Like, it’s too expensive.

Yeah, no, that nails it. That’s exactly what goes into the consideration. And then eventually, I just picked a number. Yeah, originally it was $29. I was thinking, like, well, it’s like a utility. I mean, it will save people a lot of time, but I don’t know if this is a real thing people want. And I think it was a few months after the release and seeing the feedback I was getting, and also people saying, like, I would have paid $200 this. I was like, I should probably charge more, especially for a one time thing. And then the whole one time versus recurring thing. Personally, I don’t like paying for subscriptions. I’m not sure anyone really likes paying for subscriptions. But there’s also the aspect of, like, keeping things simple. So, you know, one of the things I had in mind building this in the first place was, like, video editor is a large project. Like building something that’s going to tackle, like, screen Flow or Final Cut or even Descript. Like, these are huge things. And I was like, well, I can’t build that whole thing just to solve this problem, right. Like, I’m just going to build a thing that kind of bolts into one of those other editors.

And as part of that, keeping things simple is like, well, I’ve sold one off products before. I know how to do, like, set up a product and send Owl and have a download link and stuff versus setting up recurring billing. And then there’s also this kind of like ongoing, ongoing expectation of maintenance and like, I don’t really know what the future roadmap is. What if nobody likes it? There’s all these questions. It will just be simpler to do one time billing. So that was kind of where that came from.

I mean, do you regret it? Do you have any challenges thinking about well, any software needs maintenance for anybody using any software who’s not a software developer should know this. If you have a website, it doesn’t matter how clean it is, it needs maintenance and yeah. Do you still think about, now I need to bring this off to the next level, maybe working with influencers now you’re developing a Windows version of it, you’re thinking, maybe I need to charge more, maybe I need to create a subscription for the community or something. What are your thoughts?

Yeah, the thought has crossed my mind for sure, like, whether I should be charging some kind of subscription or discharging more or something. I haven’t made up my mind forever. I might change at some point. I think the one thing that I haven’t been one of the pricing options that I thought of was the Sketch model, which is the kind of like you basically pay once and you keep it forever, but you get a year of updates with your payments. So you pay $99 for sketch, for instance. You get a full year of updates and then in a year you just stop getting updates, but you can keep using it forever. Yeah, and I was thinking of doing that with Recut, and I probably will at some point because that feels like kind of a natural like a natural thing, like you’re paying for updates, but it can be one time purchase if you want it to be, basically. But anyway, that’s one of the things I thought of doing that also requires some development work on the back end. And I was like, I’ll do that later if this works out.

Yeah, well, thanks for the kind of the deep dive into thinking about pricing, because I think that’s an area, like a lot of us run into the thing that there is a magic number where there sort of is and isn’t and just because something that works, that has worked for other people may not necessarily work for you. And so, like, I actually forgot to ask this question, Dave, related to your audience. I think we just assumed that people who are most likely video editors or YouTubers or agencies, of the 600 people, roughly, I mean, now you have more than a sample size of people. What have you noticed about their roles? Who are they who decided to buy Recut and how did they discover you?

So that’s a good question. I think mostly it’s been YouTubers, which is sort of like when I built it, I was thinking for course creators and how am I going to find course creators? And it has turned out that, oh, actually there’s a much larger pool of people who make videos, they’re on YouTube. So kind of logical looking back like, oh, of course it should have been YouTubers, but I think that’s most of the audience, at least most of the customers I’ve interacted with anyway okay, yeah, I think there’s probably not it’s not all YouTube, but it’s a lot of YouTubers.

Have you noticed the kind of characteristics of these YouTubers? Are they big YouTubers? Are they just starting out like they’re trying to learn how to edit? And you’ve made it really simple. I’m just wondering what type of YouTubers are they small business owners, companies?

Yeah, I think it’s kind of a mix. I have heard from a few people who are like just getting started. I think there are definitely people who already have channels and are familiar with editing and know the pain that this is solving, which I think is in some sense almost like a more natural sale or something. Like the people who already know they have this problem. And in terms of like how people have found out about it, I think that’s also been mostly YouTubers, I think. I think people talking amongst themselves or like I’ve had a few people do videos about it and some affiliates like yourself. I think the affiliate Avenue seems to be working out pretty well for getting the word out. Yeah, I’m always kind of looking for more ideas for that too.

Yeah, I’m just wondering because it does I think it’s a very pleasant surprise. I realized there are a lot of YouTubers and YouTubers tend to have some similar goals, some not so much. For instance, the YouTubers that I’m going after that I’m working with in terms of strategies are often small business owners. So I haven’t really worked with anyone per se who are focused on developing that one viral video, whereas a lot of my clients are focused on how to connect better in terms of creating smart content, content creation that’s linked and matched to their services and products. And a lot of my clients are speakers and authors and entrepreneurs and it’s so fascinating to realize that for an engine like YouTube, the marketing is evergreen, that you could literally have only 50 to 100 views on your videos but the right people get to you. That’s it. You know, a lot of my basically clients are charging 100, 200K retainers. So every view, when it’s high quality, it’s huge. And when I think about how recut is being positioned into the work I’m doing, it’s not just for my channel. I really very much look forward to using it for a lot of my clients work as well.

So with that said, Dave, I got so distracted by how much I like the product, I really do. And this is so phenomenal because I have purchased like everybody else. I purchased so many things I don’t use and I don’t can’t return anymore. But this is something that I just open it up and I use every single day. I’m so glad I get to say this to you. Seriously, what is the community aspect of things? Because I should ask the first question is, are you like a one person solo entrepreneur? Do you have a small team supporting you right now?

It’s just me. Yeah, it’s amazing. There is no real community aspect to it outside of me on Twitter. I think it’s pretty much it.

Yeah.

I’ve thought about setting up some sort of a recut discord or something, but nothing.

Yeah, I can see you a discord first. But because I think it’s really interesting how people would like to use rate cut tend to be a certain type of YouTubers, I think, a certain type of content creators. It would be really interesting, kind of bring us together, which I think is the power of today’s, like digital age, when the moment you talked about 30 X 500. Com and I already know, I already bookmarked it and I want to read it. Okay, that’s really interesting. So what would be the future of not just get recut, but also Dave said, yeah, you’ve been an entrepreneur for now four solid years. What will be an ideal situation scenario to be like in the near future? Like will be an ideal outcome?

That’s a great question. I’ve always been so bad at this. Like, what’s your five year plan question? I don’t know. Trying to figure out tomorrow.

Today, I guess. You’re the day right now?

Yeah. No, I don’t know. Right now, I’ve got this mix of things where I’ve got the kind of content creation education stuff on one side and kind of recut on the other, and there’s not much overlap there. And lately I’ve been spending more time on recut, but I can also totally see myself kind of getting that to a point where it’s sustaining itself and I can go back to the education stuff for a while. So? Yeah. I don’t know. That’s kind of the plan for now. Can I keep rolling with it and see which direction I get pulled in? I guess so.

In terms of which directions, one thing we haven’t talked about, which is multiple streams of income. It’s one of the most important things I’ve learned. Even when I had a full time job, my biggest fear was, what if this goes away? Like, literally, like everything is gone. And so I noticed that in my twenties and watching my very artistic parents, I have different clients and travel the world a bit and to realize, you know what? It’s nice to have not just one client. And so we’re just wondering, Dave, from what you have learned, running your blog, having your courses, your book, and then now get recut, you’re balancing. There are a lot of plates spinning right now. Is that intentional? And, you know, you don’t have to reveal your revenue and dollar amount, but roughly, what is the percentage of income just to give people a sense of why having more than a single stream of income is so crucial.

Yeah, so I think last year it was kind of split evenly, actually, like in thirds. It was like recut and then course stuff and then client work. No way. It kind of worked out that way. I’ve got like a little bit of part time client work, kind of keeping my hands into the react world and doing some work there and then a bunch of other stuff on my own. But I enjoy having a bunch of different things going on. I think I like being able to hop around between things, kind of lines up with my many hobbies, I guess.

Well, let’s talk about many hobbies. That’s something I definitely relate to and thanks for sharing that. One third, one third, one third. And it’s true, I think we don’t acknowledge that somebody should go all in to doing something which is kind of from my culture, my background. You’re supposed to be a scientist, go work for NASA for the rest of your life and be the best at something. And I think that can be such a detriment sometimes. And so let’s talk about interests you mentioned at the beginning. I didn’t ignore you, so what are some of the things you like to do on the side?

Yeah, so totally like, I think maybe there’s a generational thing here, too where, I don’t know, at least my parents and stuff came from generation where you get a job and you stay at the job forever and you’re lucky to have that job and you never leave. Whereas now we’re sort of like hopping around and stuff. And I think when I left my first job, they were like, Why are you leaving? This is a great place, very prestigious. Like, why would you leave? And yeah, I think things have changed a bit and it’s easier to hop around and I think it’s less stigma or something. But I think in terms of hobbies, it sort of changes. Like, I play music, like, I’ve got guitar and bass and ukulele and I do some woodworking. I have my pilot’s license. You’ve got some instruments too. Yeah, I wouldn’t say that. I do all these things all the time. It’s not like I’m round robbing between guitar and woodworking and recut and stuff every day. I’ll do one thing for a while and then I’ll completely forget about the other stuff. And then there’ll be kind of like seasons where I go through different activities.

Love it. So you mentioned definitely musical instruments, woodworking, which is just incredible for me now in Renovating, the basement, for me to recall the people I worked with who were so good with their crafts and make me want to learn some of these things, but you mentioned kind of going through seasons with your interests. Like, I think that’s good, right? That’s refreshing. Anything that takes you away from the everyday grind, react JavaScript, and like in a coding interface all day, every day, like, it does, it bring inspiration. So how do you think that balance your life more that way?

Yeah, I guess it probably does. I think day to day, like, lately it’s been pretty much just coding and stuff, so I think maybe the balance is kind of longer term. Like over the course of over the course of a month or something, I might pick up something else for a while, but over the course of days or weeks, it’s kind of focused on usually focus on like, one or two things. Yes, I definitely do feel like deep down that I should be doing one thing. I definitely relate to that feeling of, like, well, even if I do, all these have all these interests. Like, I probably should just tear it down to one, though, right? But that hasn’t happened so far and I don’t really see that happening.

So, yeah, whoever’s watching this with many interests, you’re not alone. And it’s been Dave, it’s been such a pleasant conversation and I get to know about you, your work, and it’s like talking about recut. It’s one of those things. As a creator, like, where has it been my whole life? I mean, I haven’t even been a YouTuber that long, but I’ve been, like, working with videos for a long time, so I wish it existed. And I just listed the link on the screen once again. So yeah. Dave, thanks again for joining us. Any parting words? Anything? I listed your bio, all your socials in the description below. Anything that you like to say before we wrap up?

Thank you. No, thank you for having me. This is a lot of fun to talk, all this recut and content creation and stuff. I love talking about this stuff. And if anyone else wants to chat about this stuff, I’m at the city on Twitter. You can find the links and everything, but always happy to chat about this stuff.

Awesome. All right, I’m going to take this offline. Please don’t go anywhere yet. All right, to our Life audience, thank you so much for stopping by and spending the hour with us. And I will see you next time.