A Month into the Season

Hello! Checking in with some stats about how things are going with my seasonal game mode related vids/plans... Safe to say, it's going well lol.

Just had a MASSIVE vid last night. Was really tough to throw together quickly but that thing took off really hard and will likely continue to tick up in the coming weeks. 27k views! That is wild for such a short time -- it is now my most viewed vid on the channel. Really cool to see.

I had my first real experience of waking up to like 300 comments and that was overwhelming. I did manage to get through them all, but I can understand now why larger creators don't. Think it took me roughly 4 hours to knock them all out. Eek! lol

I also want to add a quick note since I was talking with

@Gemma Ferguson

the other day about this. Something that has been really helpful for me in this process is very clearly defining why I'm doing this experiment, and then further defining the scope of the experiment/videos. To elaborate a bit: I have made seasonal content before. Every time it does better than my other videos, generally takes less time to produce, and has helped in growing the channel past milestones plus highlighted areas to improve in my production process. All of these things are really great, so to boil it down a bit; I do these stress tests for massive channel growth and process improvement. In this particular stint I also wanted to see if I could front load my content and then essentially relax once the game mode started (imagine actually playing and enjoying the game you make videos on lol). This is where I was coming from when I started this.

Now, on the scoping out of the experiment/videos -- one thing I learned in previously stints like this is that making content quickly sucks. I work full time, so I often don't have that much time day to day. The way I get around this is by defining the space I have for making videos during the entire season plus each day and then deciding what I think I can fit within that. I am not always perfect at this but it does give me a much better success rate. Only have 2 hours to work on a Wednesday? Ok. What tasks or smaller videos could I fit into that time frame to keep with this seasonal game mode? I essentially work backwards from what time I know I'll have available and then decide what can slot in there. What I ended up with this time was essentially 2 months of content planned. The first 3-4 weeks would be at a pace of 2-3 vids a week. I had space in the following 3-4 weeks for daily videos (this is the phase I am in currently) and then a bit of space on the end for a few larger daily videos as the game mode kicks off. I'll be trailing with 2-3 follow up videos after the fact, but the main goal is to allow myself space to enjoy the game mode.

Something that I appreciate about this style of seasonal stints is the limited nature. It does suck making content quickly. That part hasn't changed, but by knowing the bounds around when and how much I'll be making it allows me to be ok with the suck. Embrace the suck if you will. And with it comes the rewards of some or all of the positive things I said before.

Anyway, enough of a book for one day lol. Looking forward to seeing how things continue to go. Thanks for reading. 😄

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