This is the written version of this week’s episode. The podcast is the full, unedited, chaotic version, this is just the rundown of what we talked about, cleaned up from the transcript with an AI tool.
Hey,
UUugghhhhh i’m tired lads.
Too much travel the last few weeks. My brain is sludgy, but i’m back in the studio!
I had a completely different topic planned for this one, but I ended up talking about what’s on my mind, which is why this thing is called The Unscheduled CEO.
What was on my mind was what it’s actually like when strangers start showing up in your comments, because the channel is growing and new people keep arriving with zero context on me. It’s a good one if you create anything online, or you’ve been thinking about starting.
Anyway, here’s what we talked about in the episode:
Where the show actually is right now: the YouTube side did 984+ new subscribers and 30,000 views in the last 28 days, the channel is at 4,600 subscribers, and the total number of people listening across all the platforms is coming in on the 10,000 mark. Total, not weekly. My initial goal of getting each episode to approximately 10,000 listens is NOT going to happen, and I talk through why the Thursday videos grow fast while the main show grows slowly, and why that’s the right way for this to work.
The trade nobody warns you about: the closer your content is to something real, the more people connect with it, and the more people get irritated by it. The book funnel video is at 14,000 views and brought in a wave of new people, including a full grown adult male getting bitchy in the comments about my hair not being cut.
Criticism vs trolling, and how I tell them apart: a guy on LinkedIn told me the colours on the Substack made it hard to read, he was right, and I changed it immediately. A different guy commented “I don’t believe you” under a video he clearly hadn’t watched, and I made the mistake of trying to reason with him until I found him complaining about my haircut further up the thread. If the bigger videos keep growing, Eli will start removing the excessively trolley comments before I ever see them so I don’t just give up making them out of sheer annoyance.
Why I keep doing it anyway: I quit Instagram in 2020 and LinkedIn last year, and YouTube is the one platform I still enjoy. Creating stuff makes me feel good, consuming stuff all the time makes me feel bad, and the show brings new people into the orbit of our businesses, which beats relying on partnerships and paid ads. Tim Ferriss’s point about audio-only shows comes up too: way fewer people getting weird about you, but the video version just does so much better.
Bobby Fingers, and a little tease: one of my favourite creators of all time has a new video called “Who Crapped in Johnny Depp’s Bed?”, and if you’ve never seen his stuff, start with the Jeff Bezos one. This turns into a tease for a series I want to try on the channel called “works of art,” where I respond to things other creators have poured their heart and soul into.
If you only listen to one section of the episode, make it the criticism vs trolling one.
Cheers,
Jonathan
P.S. If you know one business owner or creator who’d enjoy having this on in the background, send them this episode.
P.P.S. A letter from a listener named Nicholas arrived at the office mid-recording. Nicholas, I’ll read it.
