business-plan, business-model, videoI’m a YouTube video maker. As my YouTube channel grows I want to make sure I have all my business bases covered. There are many jobs that I do currently, some of which I’m going to delegate sooner or later. There may be other jobs I don’t know about yet that I should be doing, or that I should hire someone to do. Please help me fill in the list of necessary elements for a small online entertainment business!
The current state: I make short, funny videos based on comments and questions that viewers leave on my earlier videos. So every day I spend several hours reading and replying to viewer comments, and I keep a list of all my favorite questions, along with a ranking so I can know which ones to shoot first.
Each day when I shoot a video, I pick a question, and write a loose script with about 10 jokes based on the question. Then I set up my simple video camera and homemade lighting kit in my apartment in Los Angeles, CA, USA, and I make jokes based on the question for about 10-20 minutes.
I use Adobe Premiere CC to edit the video down to 2-3 minutes. That process takes 1-3 hours, and may involve finding royalty-free images to use in the video. Using Adobe Photoshop CC, I create a thumbnail image for the video, which is like a miniature movie poster. That’s a 15-minute process. Then I upload the video to YouTube and add a title, description of the video, and tags (another 15-20 minutes).
Once a month I receive a SMALL electronic deposit of my income from YouTube. (How that works: I allow YouTube to place ads on my videos, and YouTube pays me 55% of their ad royalties in return.) About 3 times a month I need to buy a prop for my videos, but other than that my videos are essentially free to make.
Here are the job responsibilities that I think I’m doing:
There are some other things I’d like to add to my business. I’m not going to “name” the role, since I don’t clearly understand the titles of the people who should be doing these things:
Are there any roles or responsibilities that I’m missing? Are there any responsibilities you would split, or set up differently, or delegate / outsource?
Thanks for your advice!
PS: If you’d like to see the kinds of videos I create, I included a link in the first paragraph.
I think you have it pretty well set out there, those sound like exactly the functions you need. I agree that the role is more important than the job title. How much you do yourself, how much your first employee can do and how much you outsource all depends on how quicky your resources to pay for it grow.
Are you planning this growth (to being an employer) to be funded by the revenues you generate from youtube, or are you going to try and attract funding so your production company is fully staffed from day one?
If you are looking for another one person to mostly do those things (at first), and maybe outsource tax etc, then you are looking for one seriously multi skilled and MOTIVATED person. They do exist, but how are you going to keep them engaged? You may need to offer equity to attract someone of that value. Your first hire is going to need to be your best hire. Now I know you are probably doing all of those things yourself at the moment, but it is clear you ar emore motivated than the population on average!
Perhaps I have misunderstood and you have the resources to hire several people right now. A web designer, PR, social media buff, merchendiser etc. However if you want to be the celeb you are going to need someone to run the back office for you. One of those people, or another person is going to have to be general manager.
A lot to think about, but you seem to have judged the scale of the problem pretty well
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