7 habits of highly successful YouTubers

0:00The Colin and Samir Show is supported by Microsoft Copilot. This is something I thought I would never say, but can I share with you my favorite prompt? I mean, like when you say something like that, I have to say yes. Were you going to say no? No, but okay. Just let me hear it. So when I'm researching for a guest or I need to know a lot about a subject matter, I say, make me a podcast about. And when you do that, you're going to get a short blurb about that subject. And then in like two minutes, you're going to get a podcast. So check this out. Welcome to Co-Pilot Podcasts. Picture this, a guy working the front desk at a hotel, making lacrosse videos in his spare time, completely unaware that he's about to become one of the most influential voices in the creator economy.

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1:10Try it for your research. Try it for getting variations of your titles, your ideas. It's one of my favorite tools on the internet right now for our creativity. And now back to the show. What's up, everyone? Welcome to Creator Support, the show where we answer your questions about the business of being a creator. In today's episode, we talk about seven simple habits of highly successful YouTubers. Also today on the episode, we're going to be talking about Bobby Althoff, the creator that seems to be everywhere since her interview with Drake. We're also going to be talking about how to make a good creator event.

1:42And if you make it to the deep end, we are picking and announcing the winner of this signed Mr. Beast Feastable Bar from our last interview with Jimmy. All right, let's get into it. All right. Our first question comes from Ramses, who is the meme king of our discord. If you're in the deep end channel in our discord, you've seen them. Okay. So Ramses question is schedules and habits. He basically goes on to talk about how he's approaching his 30th birthday. He has adult commitments and he also wants to explore his creativity and be a creator, but trying to figure out how he balances his schedule and how he creates habits.

2:19This question spun us and me specifically into thinking about five habits of highly successful creators that I wrote down. We will address the question of, you know, I guess personally how we think about our schedule and our habits, but it is a really important thing to think about as you're getting into being a creator. So I wrote down five. Should I go through three. So we'll get to five in total that are good. Okay. I have five that I'm confident. You're confident. I'm super confident in all five. I'm happy with three. Okay. All right. I'm going to go for my five. These are five habits of highly successful creators.

3:00A lot of creators that we've talked to been around. This is what I boiled it down to. Okay. The number one habit that I wrote down is simplifying everything. I find that so many of the successful creators that we're around have simplified so much about their creative process, their life. An example is Marques Brownlee. When we went to go to his studio, we started talking to him about all the different opportunities he had and how many different things he could do. And he was like, listen, here in my studio and what we're doing here is we're just going to be the best video production studio we can be.

3:38And he focuses on just making videos. It's an incredibly simple thing. And he just like boils it down to that. The second person I wrote down was Ali Abdaal, who was just on the show. And he simplifies his content into a list. It's like everything is a list. And the third thing I wrote down was that Jimmy, the last time we were with him, he talked about how he's gone through this kind of evolution of landing now at his life is all about the main channel, Feastables, and working out. He's simplified it down. So I think that to me is like anytime I've recognized that we are out of that habit of simplification, it's typically affecting our schedule, right?

4:23If we do anything overly complex, if we don't have like set rules of here's everything needs to be simple, then we, it gets complex and everything kind of breaks. I'd agree with that. I think simplification leads to focus. All of the top creators that we've interviewed have an incredible sense of focus and discipline. That was my number two. Number two is discipline. Discipline in process. So that was the second habit, um, where like the example is you always hear creators go like, come up with the title and thumbnail first before you make the video. To have that discipline is a whole nother thing outside of saying it out loud, right?

5:02Ryan Trahan is a great example. We were just with him. He does not move forward and he works on designing the thumbnail with his team before they even have the camera on. Like that is serious discipline. He has a notion document with like all these ideas and thumbnails. You know, you look at Ali Abdaal, who we just had on the show too. When he was talking about it, he was like, his team makes the title and thumbnail. He doesn't like to do it, but they make it before he can film. And I think we know that and we talk about it, but it's something that we need better discipline in. No doubt about that.

5:35Yeah. The other person that I wanted to talk about was Tim Ferriss on brand deals. When he, he, in his process, he's like, I have to try the brand and test the brand before I talk about it. That's incredible discipline. And to have that discipline in the process creates credibility, reliability, consistency. So that habit of like, I'm disciplined in my process. My third, which goes in line with discipline, is one habit I've noticed that like not only successful creators, but entrepreneurs and just successful people is that no is their default. And I actually think like saying no as your default is a really interesting habit to adopt.

6:13It's like no matter what it is, the answer is no, unless I'm convinced that it's a yes. Yeah. It was Thomas from yes theory who said, if you say yes to everything, you're actually not saying yes to anything. Right. And I think, um, Ryan holiday, if you go back and listen to that episode that we did with him, he talks a lot about the value of saying no and getting good at saying no. Um, talk about, he talks a little bit about too, like you don't have to respond to every email that's in your inbox. You can live by your own, you know, craft, what you are focused on. He even took it a step further of moving out of New York because he felt like there were so many things coming at him.

6:54Hey, do you want to have coffee? Hey, do you want to do this? Hey, do you want to do that? Where he moved outside of Austin so that it wasn't even an option. All he could do is focus on the craft of writing. So I think like saying no as a default is something I would like to get better at. But Like that is the third habit that I thought was like highly successful individuals all do that. So since I have three, should I share my three? Sure. Okay. So I tried to think about the creators that we've spoken to and have spent time with and think about what are things that they actually do in their day-to-day life?

7:26Like what is a habit that they have or even kind of a tactic? And when I thought about Mr. Beast, I immediately think about the fact that he takes walks and he will call YouTube creators. and ask them to teach him something. Yeah. Right? That happens to you. You get calls and all of a sudden we're on the phone with him and telling him what we've learned. And alongside that, he also has his friends who are creators roast his videos. Yeah. At all times. Like whenever we've been there, if there's an edit up on the screen, he's like, get in here. Tell me what you don't like. Good. So that's one habit is that he goes on walks.

8:02That was my four. That's not walks? No, I put studious in their own industry and various industries and disciplines. They do not live in an echo chamber. That was one thing that like Jimmy also, when we were with him last, like he's, he reads books from outside of his, outside of, you know, just the video creation industry, right? To learn about entrepreneurs and businesses. And I found that like sometimes you can think that you want to study just inside of your own industry, like you need to study everything about YouTube, but actually studying outside of YouTube is what totally really changes you.

8:37So developing that habit of being studious or even like that. I love that. The going on walks and calling. That's a good one. He does that all the time. That's good. That's OK. So another one I have. This is I first heard about it with Ryan Trahan, but I now know that Michelle Correa is doing this, too. And this is holding a weekly think tank where they have trusted advisors, friends, pitch them ideas. And I had just never heard of a creator sort of like taking the idea pitch process that seriously. Yeah. And getting a group of people, whether it's like thumbnail experts, packaging people, script writers, getting a bunch of different people together and having them pitch you once a week.

9:18Yeah. That's something that I think tangibly you can do as a creator is like think about who are your creator friends, who are people in your circle. Obviously, these people are like compensated to like they're actually putting money towards idea generation and holding these think tanks. Yeah, it's good. I would say that's kind of similar to my fifth one, which was athlete mentality. I think I've noticed that every highly successful person we've been around has the mentality of an athlete. The first person to say this to us was robert kinsel who was at the time the chief business officer of youtube And what robert said to us is he said i'm a work athlete Which means he has to rest like an athlete treat his body like an athlete Treat his nutrition like an athlete treat his mental health like all this stuff You have to perform at such a high level that you can't be reckless With how you treat yourself And I think that's a really interesting thing that all creators should think about Like I definitely do not think I treated myself like an athlete in my 20s.

10:18I was like, it's totally fine if I work through the night. It's totally fine if I eat pizza, you know, all night before I go to bed. Like just that's not fine. Just think of yourself as like you need to go play like a top level professional sports game at all times. So pasta at night. Sure, you could carbo. Yeah, why not? Yeah, I mean, don't go crazy with it. But I think, you know, thinking of yourself as an athlete, especially with rest, Like rest is something that LeBron James credits so much of like his performance to rest and sleep. And so I think really listening to how athletes treat themselves and realize as a creator or creative, you have to have that athlete mentality to compete at the highest level.

10:59Yeah. The majority of creators who are at the top that we've spoken with have figured out the form of working out that they, I don't even know if they enjoy it, whatever, but like that they can commit to. all of them have like whether it's like running or hitting the gym or boxing yeah they have that figured out they've started to take diet more seriously yeah sleep more seriously yeah the last person i wrote down was uh jerry seinfeld who obviously we haven't met but or interviewed but he did an interview with tim paris where he talked about carving out uh 45 minutes every day to write and he was like i can't do anything else but i don't have to write but i just can't do anything else i sit with a pen and pad and to me that reminded me of like athletic training right of just like, if you're gonna be a creative, every day you have to invest in the craft of being a creative.

11:46And that to me is like training like an athlete. It's like, if you're playing the NBA, you're gonna go out and shoot. And what Marquez said to us about this was like, if you wanna make it as a creator, similar to an NBA player, the guy who's gonna make it is the one who has fun shooting hoops in the park every day, because that is how you work on the craft. And so the equivalent of that to being a creative is like writing, you know, ideas, working on editing, like whatever that craft is every single day, you have to love doing that. And you have to set time aside to do that as if you were an athlete, you know, working on your craft.

12:20So hopefully some of those habits help. I would say like tangibly when the question is like schedules, I find this really hard to do, like to navigate the adult commitments, the family obligations with being a creator. But the one that I'll pick out my number three of like saying no as a default, super hard, way easier said than done, but it might be one that you adopt is like, I really need to create a value system to figure out why I say yes to something so that I have more time. That would be in my number one. And then read Atomic Habits, such a great book, teaches you a lot about habit building.

12:59Another one that's coming to mind right now is when we sat down with Thomas and Amar from Yes theory. And Thomas said that instead of necessarily evaluating the performance of the video, the viewership, he evaluates the process, which I found to be really insightful that if the video didn't perform, it most likely was because there was some part of the process, a box that wasn't checked. And even when we spoke to recently Zach King, we did a creator round table, which we're working on right now. First time we've ever done it. And Zach brought up something where he said, every video idea I have has to hit this check mark of, can this be watched in 10 years?

13:36And I think that's like a part of his process that I think we should start thinking about too, especially for the main channel. Are we doing something that can be watched and is adding value 10 years from now? Or is it just like a quick conversation about what's happening in the moment? Yeah. I think that falls into discipline and process. Committing to a process and being like, this is how I do it. It's so easy to get outside of that box. It's so easy. You're just like, well, this week, I'll just do it a little different. It's all good. I don't have the thumbnail. No problem. We'll figure it out.

14:07We always figure it out. Like, it's so easy to get outside of that box. Discipline in the process is like so incredibly important. All right. If we missed any other habits, if you guys picked up any from our interviews, I saw there was a website that someone posted on Discord of like all of our episodes summarized. It was super cool. I don't know where that is, but it was great. If we find it, we'll link it. I found it interesting. I clicked into the dream episode and I was like, oh wow, this is like, this is really well articulated. Wow. I think show notes is something that would be really cool to develop for our episodes.

14:38So you can go back and reference like, what did this person say about brand deals or what did they say about their habits and their schedules and routines? Speaking of habits, schedules, and routines, we ran a film fest in discord about basically how it worked. Weekend film fest. If you've never heard of it. We used to do it a while ago on Twitter and now we've brought it back into our discord. We offer a prompt, a creative, you know, essentially assignment. And the assignment was to create a 60 second video, um, that showcased a day in your life. And, uh, the entries are just so great. You only have the weekend to do it.

15:16You have from Friday to Sunday. So it creates this constraint. They're so, so great. And I love seeing how people like evaluated their days. The last thing I'll say about schedules and habits is one time you and I did this. Do you remember this? We filmed a week in our life to match that against the goals we had set out for us. We were like, are we actually taking enough action every day? Are we working efficiently towards those goals? And you don't have to film it, but it might just be writing down on a piece of paper what you're doing in the morning, like afternoon and evening every day, and then matching that against your goals and being like, all right, does this make sense?

15:57Or can I cut something out and replace it? Yeah. In that instance, the goal was to be, uh, to make a documentary film. Yeah. And when we started filming our week, we realized we weren't really going to see documentaries. We weren't watching documentaries. We weren't studying. We weren't looking for stories. There were just so many gaps where it was like, oh, well clearly if we're not doing anything on Monday. We didn't do anything on Tuesday. You know, those days are going to add up and we will not end up making a documentary. All right. Second question. Well, I guess to close that, go to the discord, check out the weekend film fest tab, watch all the entries.

16:28They're great. We will be announcing a winner very soon. And the winner is going to get two tickets to VidSummit to come hang out. Okay. This question comes from the Publish Press. Bobby Altoff is everywhere all of a sudden. How did this happen? Who is she? I've watched a few of her episodes and I don't really get why she's so popular. That is probably the question of the world right now. She is constantly trending on Twitter. Her clips are everywhere. If you don't know who we're talking about, how do you explain Bobby Althoff? So Bobby Althoff has like three to four million followers on TikTok, was primarily making like mom content.

17:06And then, you know, when I first learned about her, I'm sure it's when everyone did, is when she uploaded a long form podcast with Drake, where she is essentially she's in character. Yeah. And it's very similar, actually, to Amelia de Moldenberg and Chicken Shop Date, where she is in a character that is uninterested and kind of like snarky in the guest. And there's that tension there that has been shared virally all over of like, oh, my gosh, here's this Drake interview where the interviewer is not interested. yeah it's like the anti-interview yeah she did she when she uploaded the clip first because like it she just uploaded a clip to tiktok of her and drake in a bed doing an interview you and i were in london at the time and we were like what the what is this what the hell we got tagged in it a ton because people were like calling it's rear what what is this um i had no idea i couldn't believe this person got an interview with drake funny enough we were with amelia de moldenberg later that day.

18:06And, and, you know, no one knew about Bobby Althoff. It was just like, yeah, who is this person? You know, in February, 2023, which is earlier this year, she, she wanted to make a podcast. She wanted to create a show like how I built this. That's a show about how people build their companies, but she wanted to do it in the, you know, the between two ferns, Eric Andre style. Like this style has been done before she offered$300 to people who could connect her to celebrities to get on the show. So she had a, she had Colleen Ballinger on the show, uh, the ukulele apology, Miranda sings. Um, she had a comedian, Rick Glassman on the show.

18:42And those early episodes are really, really awkward, like truly awkward. She came up to LA and did those. Um, and I don't know how she jumped from that to Drake and offset and Tyga and Mark Cuban. No idea. Lil Yachty. Lil Yachty. Like no idea how they made that jump. But there was a lot of speculation that she is an industry plant, meaning like Hollywood has been like, we're going to make you a star. Like we're going to just do this internally. We're going to figure this out. She's represented by WME, which is one of the biggest Hollywood talent agencies. Most of the talent that's on her show is also represented by WME.

19:23There's a lot of speculation. most recently after getting 10 million views on the podcast she deleted the episode with drake and all the social content with drake as well as unfollowed drake and drake unfollowed her who is bobby althoff i don't know the question remains uh is that the story though like is the story of bobby althoff who is bobby althoff exactly right so i wrote down some notes like i don't see many people dissecting the interviews outside of like a clip here a clip there the majority of the conversation is just, who is she? Where did she come from? How is she doing this? It's a fantastic marketing campaign.

19:58Like how it does feel more strategic than like, oh yeah, like I just wanted to make a podcast and here it is because, you know, she, she did this run of episodes that really brought her into the limelight. And most of it was through clips. Like most of it is people clipping the show. So her face is everywhere. Everyone knows there's the girl that's next to offset. There's the girl next to Tyga. And she, right after that massive run of episodes and like just tons of viewership, she went on the Today Show. After she went on the Today Show, she went on BFFs. She went on another podcast today. Like she's on a podcast tour.

20:39Then the week after she deletes the Drake stuff. You know, like she is, there is some strategy here that's happening. And the one important note is that she has said that her goal is to become an actor. that is an important note there's something happening here but what can we learn from it that's like that like i don't know i don't want to make any speculations here about industry plant or what's significant about the actor comment because if you wanted to become an actor and someone is your agent and they're like how can we how can we build your brand big enough to get booked on a movie and they they got commissioned on that right like i'm just saying like there's a lot of incentives there to be like how can i get you a massive role on on a movie what's a really out of the box idea to do that, to grow your following, to grow your just general name, like Bobby Althoff.

21:26We all know this name now. And if it was announced in December that you got cast in a movie, everyone would be like, oh yeah, that girl who did the interview with Drake. Yeah. What's remarkable about it is the lineup of guests. That lineup of initial guests for a podcast is without a doubt reserved for someone who's already a celebrity. It's just it. A Celebrity launches a podcast. They have other celebrities on the show because they're a celebrity. There's the network they're a part of. These are their friends. It's unheard of, really, that you would have someone who's never had a podcast before launch a podcast with these guests.

22:01She went to the Variety Young Hollywood party. How does it happen, Samir? I'm telling you, man. How does it happen? To me, it's just really good marketing and there's really sophisticated marketers involved and PR people involved because a week after the podcast run or maybe four days after the podcast run, she went to the Variety Young Hollywood party was fully styled by a celebrity stylist, was photographed by a celebrity photographer. Like you just don't learn about all this stuff within a matter of weeks and just have it activated immediately. You just don't. It's just, I don't know. It's just not something that happens.

22:38So, okay. I wrote down some notes about what I think a lot of creators can learn about this, or at least what my, my takeaways are. Number one, it's something I say all the time, but I think this is super important. The world glances, it does not read. What I mean by that is we all know the surface level. Bobby Althoff is next to celebrities. She books incredible celebrities. I have never listened to a 60 minute or 90 minute episode of her podcast. And I've had conversations with tons of people about Bobby Althoff. None of them have listened to a full episode. So the substance of what is in that podcast does not matter as much as the concept of that podcast.

23:18Yeah, it feels more like a stunt than it does a podcast. Exactly. Like listening to 58 minutes of her and Mark Cuban is unlikely. If she ends the podcast tomorrow, it did its job from a publicity standpoint. She can move on to something else. You don't get the feeling that this is a long-term podcast play. Yeah. The story of something is oftentimes better than the actual thing. And people connect to the story of something more than the actual thing most times. And this Drake thing I think is great. It's a story about a thing, not an actual thing. Right? Like she didn't create something. She created a moment through this story of deleting the show, unfollowing Drake.

23:59Like that is sophisticated marketing to think about. Like we didn't have to make a new piece of content. We can actually make headlines and trend on Twitter by just doing this thing, like deleting the episode. And you're making the assumption that it was done for marketing? No questions asked, man. It's like, there's just - What if there's real drama there? No, there's not. It's just, it's impossible. What if Drake didn't want to be associated? He thought it was cool at first, but then she brought in all these other guests. It became this thing. No shot. I don't know. No shot. That is a moment that they have created.

24:29A very calculated moment. So I think, but I think as creators, it's important. When you're about to do something, what's the story of that thing? How are people going to talk about it? Is it remarkable? Is it worth making a remark about and everything she's doing is worth making a remark about it's worth talking about I wrote network is everything relationships are one of the biggest parts of your job as a creator I think that might be one of the most overlooked things In our industry is that to to be a successful creator Especially entering this next chapter of the creator economy Relationships are everything Whatever relationships she has or is building at the moment are really supporting her rise.

25:13And sometimes we can think that like work is editing or work is, you know, just reserved for working on videos or working on the craft. But part of the craft is building relationships because they can lead to things like this. They can lead to collaborations. They can lead to strategy. They can lead to ideas. They can lead to so much. And I think building your network as a creator is almost as important as building revenue. Network is so important as a creator. But we don't know historically what her network has been like. No, we don't. We don't know if this has been long-term relationship building or if it's just happened very quickly post-Drake.