Brian: Hi, welcome to PodRocket. With me this morning is Jessica Chan from Coder Coder. Hello. Jessica Chan: Hi, thanks for having me back. Brian: Welcome back. Does it feel like six months? It doesn't feel like six months to me. Jessica Chan: It's just been a whirlwind. I'm sure everyone can say the same thing. The last year's just been like a strange fever dream. Brian: Yeah. I agree. There's lots to talk about today. I guess the big news is that Coder Coder, you're doing this full time, like this is your job. There's no other safety nets. This is you. I don't want to put it in and make you nervous. Jessica Chan: Well, it's my main focus. Brian: Got it. Jessica Chan: To be completely transparent, I am still contracting for my previous employer, so my previous employer's still my somewhat current employer, but I'm only working for them part time. Just trying to ease in a little bit into the full time content creator thing. Brian: That's great. I know this morning I looked and I saw that you were up to almost 200,000 subscribers. Jessica Chan: Yeah, it's been great. Brian: That's incredible, really. I don't know how you're supposed to respond to that, but I was just like, "That's crazy." My first question and [inaudible 00:01:29] when I watched the announcement video that you have up there, like, "Listen I'm doing this. This is my main focus." I wanted to know more about how you made the decision. When was the moment when you were like, "Okay, I'm going to quit and this is what I'm going to do." What were the things that you considered? How long did it take? Did you talk to anybody about it? Help me understand it a little bit. Jessica Chan: Yeah, for sure. When I started Coder Coder way back at the beginning, my ultimate goal was to do it full-time. So I knew from the beginning that I wanted to eventually quit my job, but obviously I'm not going to quit unless I feel like I have a financial future with whatever I'm doing. So, I've kind of done it on the side while working full-time and it was fine. I think the turning point for me was earlier this year in January, my YouTube channel just started growing a lot. What happened was, as I've mentioned many times, I'm working on making a course, like how to build a website. To promote the course I'd done some silly time lapses of me building the actual website that we would learn how to build in the course. For some reason, this 90 second video with 8bit music on it just kind of went viral, which sort of made my husband, I think, slightly happy, but also slightly sad because he's also my video editor and animator and spends hours and hours and hours on some of these videos. Jessica Chan: But for some reason, and then that video, and then I made another video about the course as well as a video telling my story about how I got into web development and that one was a very high intensity, animated video. They all kind of released around the same time in January, I think, and they all just did really well. I'm not going to bank my financial future on one hit wonders, but I felt like at that point it felt like my channel was starting to hit a bit more of a faster pace of growth. So I felt like, "Okay, I'm not replacing my full-time income right now from YouTube, but I feel like I could do it within this year." Jessica Chan: And so, we had some savings and I'm still sort of contracting, so I felt like it was the right time to make a calculated risk and make that jump at that point just because I love my job, but I felt like I would like to spend more time dedicated to the Coder Coder stuff versus working the day job. So, that's what kind of led to that decision. Brian: Yeah. There are a million other, probably better resources for figuring out the YouTube algorithm and, "Hey, can you make it a content creator?" If you're listening you shouldn't listen to me, but maybe people could listen to you and that's why I'm asking what your thought process was. I wonder how many web dev ... What do you prefer? Do you prefer YouTubers, content creators? Do I make something up now on the spot? I never know what to call people? Jessica Chan: Yes, it's amorphous. Brian: Let's go with content creators, right? Jessica Chan: That sounds great. Brian: I feel like there should be something where all of you can get together like, "Listen, this is what we're doing." Does that exist? Is there a community for that? Jessica Chan: I actually am a YouTuber discord channel. Brian: Do you have to get invited? Jessica Chan: You do have to get invited. Brian: Oh, there's rules. Jessica Chan: Sorry, there are some rules in place. Not many, but some. I'm in a discorder YouTuber channel and that's been incredibly helpful for me personally because there's some big channels in there who are already full-time. They've been doing full-time for years, and just seeing what their business model is. That definitely gave me the confidence to feel like I could make that jump now because I feel like I have a path forward that will hopefully lead to also being able to support myself with YouTube and other content creation. So that's been really great. Brian: How much time does that community or channel or whatever is the right word, do all of you spend thinking or talking about the YouTube algorithm itself and what happens if you get demonetized? That would be my biggest fear if I were doing it, not to bring up some kind of stokes and fears, but that's what I would think about as a [inaudible 00:06:06] that's so variable and I have no control over it. Am I right? Jessica Chan: Yeah. There's definitely a lot of talk about, "Why is this video doing not good or what happened to this video?" People share thumbnails to get feedback on it and there's definitely a lot of discussion around how we can hopefully maximize our YouTube ... I don't know, please the algorithm gods because it's just a black box. It's hard to even AB test. There's some tools like Tube Buddy or VidiQ that they can AB test titles in the thumbnail images, I think. I personally don't use them just because I feel kind of weird giving a third party my YouTube account access. But some other people do use that and they really like it. I think a lot of it is just talking about how to make a video successful in terms of good thumbnail and title. That's probably 90% of getting views, and then people will share videos and ask for feedback and stuff like that. It's just overall a really helpful community. Brian: I guess the next natural question is how do things change, at least for you, how does the content change now that you've got more time allotted? Jessica Chan: Yes, I do have more time allotted. I will say that even though I've been doing YouTube on the side for, I guess, a few years now, after I made the decision and was like, "Okay, now I'm a full time YouTuber," I just had this weird ... I felt like I had too much freedom or time. It was almost overwhelming that I didn't have to be on Slack for my job all day long. I just felt very unfettered, but not necessarily in a good way. It took maybe a few weeks of feeling like I don't know what to do now with all this free time that I have, but I feel like I'm getting more into the rhythm of, "Okay, we have a calendar for the different videos we want to create." Jessica Chan: In the future of planning, I'm sure you're very familiar with this kind of thing with LogRocket stuff, but yeah just trying to have a better structure for content planning. I'm not great at that. My husband actually is a much more organized person than I am, so I was like, "Oh, I'll just work on this thing and work on this other thing next." He was like, "Maybe we should have a schedule with a calendar of release dates we'd like to hit." That's been very helpful as well. Jessica Chan: It's definitely different. I will say my happiness level has actually increased a lot. Even though I'm still contracting, I think just the feeling of having complete autonomy over my day and not having to be on Slack all the time and having that freedom to ... My boss at my job was like if I send you a message on Slack, don't feel like you have to respond until the next day. That was awesome. Now I can take a walk outside or I can go run some errands and not feel like I have to run back to my desk because that's kind of how I had been feeling even though I had been working remote for years. You always have your phone and can answer messages and stuff. Jessica Chan: Overall, definitely felt much happier and learning how to manage my time, I should say. Brian: I think feeling happier is generally considered a good thing. So that's cause for celebration. I remember when I first ... 10 years ago I was freelancing and I remember having the same feeling. When I made the switch from one career to another and I had all this so called unstructured time where I was like, "Okay well ..." I think in the beginning I remember thinking, "I'll just kind of wing it." And then eventually I thought, "Well." Brian: I remember reading up a lot on how people write long form things like books. I just described books as long form saying this. Clearly firing on all cylinders this morning. But kind of this set professional schedule where you get up in the morning and this is what you hope to accomplish by then, and then you have lunch, you want to do this by lunch, and you take a break and all that stuff. It's weird, but that actually, go figure, it actually produces great results. You're giving me a look like it might not produce great results. Jessica Chan: Oh no. I agree. I'm just thinking back to when I used to work in a building back in the day, in a physical office, and I will say it was easier to focus then as opposed to working from home, working remotely. It's just a constant struggle for me to come up with the good structure and keeping discipline to exercise and wake up before a certain time and not go to bed at 2 am every night. With time I suppose. Brian: I've been doing this episode, and my couch is right over there so you can see my couch in the video. You really have to be ... Don't sit on the couch if you can help it. That's my one big advice, big piece of advice. Brian: What about the content itself? Does it change or are you just going to do more? Jessica Chan: Yeah, definitely trying to do more. It's still a bit of a balancing act trying to work on my course. I just sort of constantly feel guilty for not having it done already because I'll get comments. Brian: I was just going to ask you that. I'm so sorry to ... because you looked like you feel guilt when I'm being asking the questions. Sorry, I'll shut up. Jessica Chan: No, no. Brian: No, go ahead. Jessica Chan: You should ask because I'm making a course for the past two years. I do kind of feel guilty about that, and then also trying to make regular YouTube content. I am trying to go back a little bit to Instagram these days. I think it's just trying to move multiple, I don't know, ships forward at the same time. You can obviously only work on one thing at any given moment, so just trying to divide that out over the weeks or the days. Brian: It's exciting, but there's that kind of fear that comes with, which I'm, again, exasperating. Good job, Brian. Kate: I have a question. How much time do you spend on titles if that's 90% of why stuff goes viral? How much time do you spend thinking about that? Jessica Chan: I would say a fair bit of time, not as much time as I spend actually recording the video because sometimes that can be a couple hours, but less time than we spend trying to workshop the thumbnail. The thumbnail is by far the most time consuming aspect of it. I feel like I have a decent handle on titling videos at this point, but the thumbnails always ... It's more complex than coming up with a title. Kate: So the actual image? Jessica Chan: Yeah, the actual image. Designing it. In a past video, I think the original thumbnail when we uploaded it, this was for How to Make a VS Code Theme, we didn't put my face in the thumbnail because I was like, "People are probably tired of staring at that." Then it did terribly so we had to change it back and stick my freaking face on the image because people just wouldn't click through. People aren't going to a channel page and clicking on videos. They're usually going to see your video in the side bar on their home page. As dumb as it sounds, if my face is there, it's like, "Oh, this is a Coder Coder video." But if my face is not there, because most of my thumbnails, I'm in them, it's hard to sort of maybe have that channel recognition. This is where it's like, "Well, was it the thumbnail or was it just the topic of the video?" Maybe VS codes are a little bit more niche than some other topics." It's this whole, you want to test, but you don't have data from YouTube to actually do good testing. You're just making a lot of educated guesses. But yeah, lots of time spent on the title and thumbnail for sure. Kate: That's so funny. Yeah, that's interesting. There is a lot of faces on YouTube. That's definitely, you see a lot of YouTube faces- Jessica Chan: Faces and expressions. Kate: Yeah. Jessica Chan: Yeah, it's like surprise face or sad face or angry face. You're really trying to appeal to the base lizard brain of people. This is what I've realized. Brian: I'm so glad that you said that because, I don't want to say annoying because it's not annoying, to me, it's funny where you're watching a video then the creators stops and is like, "Okay, I have to get a thumbnail now." The video you're making, you're breaking the fourth wall and you're saying, "Okay, can you be a fourth wall if you're already talking to people correctly?" Is that a thing? If you've studied film you can tweet me later and be like, "No, this is how it works. Read a book." But yeah, it just stops. It stops the video. It stops the flow and then you get to watch somebody make silly faces, like several different silly faces. Do you know what I'm talking about? Have you seen that or am I the only one who's seen this before? Jessica Chan: In videos people are doing this? Brian: Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Not necessarily developer videos thankfully, but other stuff. I can't believe how much it's so important, and they're all kind of the same. Like you said, the lizard brain part. It feels transparent. Jessica Chan: I think that's the core of advertising, honestly, whether content creation or selling cars or other products, it's appealing to the lizard brain because that's how we all operate and that's what makes us decide to buy something, I guess. Brian: Or click. Jessica Chan: Or click. Brian: I actually really like when people opt out of the face making kind of genre and instead just stare blindly at the camera. To me that's the funniest one, but maybe that's just me being weird. Jessica Chan: Yeah, we might be watching different YouTube channels. I actually don't watch a lot of YouTube videos myself, which is a terrible thing to say. I mainly use YouTube to play background music when I'm doing stuff. I don't watch a ton. Brian: Well clearly. As you said, the last year and a half there's been a lot of free time to be like, "Who's going camping in Alberta, Canada? Let's give that a spin." That's it. I've learned a lot about Alberta. If you're listening from Alberta, I know a lot about your Province now. Kate: I have another question. I'm curious if you're not already looking TikTok, fleets even though I know they are now not going to be a thing, Clubhouse, even though, again, I don't know that much about it. What other platforms are you looking into, if any? Jessica Chan: Yeah, TikTok, I sort of made the decision not to get TikTok just for various reasons. Instagram right now is really pushing reels, which is their TikTok clone. I'm trying to do more content on Instagram in reels. The plan is later on, maybe after I finish this mythical course that I'm working on, is to try to get more to that short form video content. So it's like YouTube shorts, Instagram reels, posting some content on Twitter. I don't have an iPhone so I can't use Clubhouse, but I don't know if I'd be interested in it anyway because I think just the whole live audio thing, where it's like this is a timed event basically, I think that's just not ... The very nature of that is not appealing to me at all in terms of time efficiency, I guess. Jessica Chan: A lot of people are really into it and I think it's great. There's a lot of events that I've seen on Twitter. They seem super helpful to people, but I think it's not something that I'm going to invest my time into. Kate: Yeah, no, totally. With Clubhouse, I always see talks I want to listen to and then I go to them and they're over by the time I get there. I haven't done it successfully. Kate: Jessica, on your YouTube channel there was a comment, and I'll read it for everyone. I must say, the number of dev turning content creators is sort of alarming. Many who don't do it are sort of on the fence about it, too. As aspired software engineer I am worried. Is this a sign? With that said, I wish you the very best. As one of your subscribers, if you do well to some extent I do well. What are your thoughts around that? Jessica Chan: This question comes up a lot, especially because quitting videos are very popular. Yeah, a lot of people are like, "Oh, you're just quitting. All the developers that I know are quitting. Is this even a viable job industry?" That's a result of, I don't know if the right term for this is survivorship bias, but it's like, "Yes, you will see a lot of content creators go full-time on YouTube because a lot of content creators become content creators because they want to go full-time on YouTube." What you don't see are the millions of engineers and programmers that are not on YouTube because they have no interest at all in becoming content creators. My previous company, I'm pretty sure I'm the only YouTuber at the entire company, and it's thousands of people, so hundreds of engineers and programmers. So I think it's just an unfortunate ... It seems like there's so many YouTube videos about quitting your job so it makes people think that, "Oh, is this not a good field or did you get fired or laid off or burned out or whatever?" They need to keep in mind that the number of [inaudible 00:20:17] on YouTube are much less than the total of programmers in the entire world. Brian: Yeah. That commenter said, "As an aspiring software engineer." So the only software engineers that they're coming into contact with are on YouTube. Jessica Chan: Yeah. Brian: When you get a job and work with others, we have engineers at LogRocket and I can't think of anything they'd rather do less than be a YouTuber. Maybe a few of them might consider it, but definitely wouldn't be about programming. It would be about start a history podcast or a history based channel. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I understand the impulse if you're trying to get into the career and you're like, "Oh my god. What do I do? Is this a thing?" I'm troubled. Jessica Chan: Yeah. Yeah. I think it's like you said. If you're not working, you're just learning by yourself at home then you just don't have a picture of what the industry looks like. It's sort of understandable. If I had to redo my quitting video I would probably have a little disclaimer of, "Just keep in mind, the vast majority of programmers never do YouTube, so it is still a good industry. Don't be afraid." Brian: Everything is fine. We said content creators and think of them as individuals, which of course they are, but I remember years back when there were lots and lots of gaming YouTubers. There still are, but it was much more common for them to form, I don't really know what you call it, YouTube syndicates. They'd be loosely organized groups of people who are kind of like, "We're this. We're this group of people or whatever. That was their brand." I always wondered, do you think that there's some reality in the future where it becomes literally more corporate on YouTube for web dev videos?" Jessica Chan: Yeah. I actually think that's sort of already happening with the whole developer advocate, developer relations field. It seems to be booming now. I don't have any actual numbers, but I've gotten so many emails and messages and Dms from companies, tech companies asking if I would consider joining their company as a developer advocate. The YouTuber discord that I mentioned earlier, it seems like half of the active members are now developer advocates at companies, like big companies. I think that's awesome, one, for content creators because that's another career option for you if you're sort of doing both things. I think it's interesting because I think the companies are realizing that if you want people to use your tech product or whatever it is, traditional channels of marketing maybe won't do the job, plus you have a whole education angle where if you have a developer advocate they can do trainings and workshops and speak at conferences and reach out to individual developers for creating content. I think a lot of companies are realizing that content creation is a great form of marketing. I think that that's only going to grow from here. Jessica Chan: In that sense, and I know this isn't exactly what you were sort of talking about with a loose indication thing, but it seems like there's definitely more of a corporate influx into content creation. It's exciting. Brian: Oh, that's for sure. We had Kim Maida on, how long ago? A couple weeks. I was saying to her that it seems like, or at least I always thought, that people would be more interested in following other people rather than brands. You were just saying for the thumbnails, your face on the video, that's the brand. It gives you a lot of flexibility when switching jobs. If you are established as a content creator and you are a dev advocate for company A and then a couple years later, company B people will follow you and Kim was like, "Yes, but also not really because maybe company B does something vastly different than company A, and these are completely different audiences," which made a lot of sense to me. Brian: I don't know if there are ... because i wonder that about Log Rocket, or just written content. I'm seeing more and more content agencies pop up. I don't know how successful they are. I know that I've seen them exist and so I kind of wonder, is there a world where there's YouTuber type agencies? Let's say that everyone in that YouTuber Slack channel decided to form a guild. That's a world that could exist. That seems weird now, or not weird, it seems kind of more elaborate and maybe not a fully fleshed out business model. Jessica Chan: I could see that happening in the future. There are influencer agencies that cover, I'm sure some of them specialize in YouTube. I could see that happening. I think one of the most, maybe, time consuming parts of making YouTube content aside from the thumbnail art, of course, is trying to handle sponsorship deals because it's a lot of emailing and not everyone likes that aspect of content creation. There's so many hats you have to wear. Trying to negotiate deals with brands is definitely time consuming and can be kind of taxing sometimes. So I think the idea of having an agency or someone to sort of find these deals and negotiate on your behalf with a small commission or whatever, I think is definitely appealing to a lot of people. Kate: Maybe there will be an agency that makes YouTube thumbnails exclusively. Brian: I would love to do that. I can't promise that it would work, but I would love to do it. I don't promise results, but I promise interesting thumbnails. How's that for a value prop? What I'm thinking about is really the future of YouTube. Is it sustainable in 10 years, which is something that I've picked up from Shawn Wang or Swyx. On his first episode I asked him, "What do you think is going to happen this year?" He's like, "I don't answer questions about just this year, I only think in 10 years." I know he's listening. It's fine. Hi, Shawn. Jessica Chan: 10 years. Brian: There's no right answer, obviously, because I don't know, but I am curious how do these videos change? Or do they never change? Is it just it's educational content and we are showing people how to do X, how to do this thing? I always think of other formats. Not other formats on another platform, but are there other ways to present the video? Jessica Chan: VR coding videos? Brian: I would enjoy that a lot. I could do that in addition to questionable thumbnails that are loosely related to the topic. Jessica Chan: I think that 10 years ... I think that people are always going to need to be educated. There's always going to be a need for that, whatever form that may take whether it's VR videos or some other form of holograms. Is that possible in 10 years? Maybe a few more decades after that. I would predict, if anything, this is my optimistic prediction, or pessimistic depending on what side of this you are, but the higher education system, I think will eventually in large part get replaced by YouTube and other forms of online education. Brian: Interesting. Jessica Chan: That's my prediction. Brian: Because, this is me name dropping guests that I've had on other episodes, but I do remember what I talk about with other people, which is what an amazing skill. We had Monarch Wadia on again, maybe a week or two ago, and he's all about boot camps and he's a big champion and kind of comparing boot camps versus traditional education. Obviously he's not a ... I don't want to mischaracterize what he said, but generally speaking he's saying there's a place for boot camps and there's a place for higher ed, but boot camps offer you distinct advantages. You're saying that maybe they don't, right? Am I understanding correctly, I guess? Jessica Chan: Maybe they don't. They being? Brian: The higher ed. The formal CS degree. Jessica Chan: Yeah. That is what I was saying, but maybe I should avoid getting flamed by offering some- Brian: I'll do it. Jessica Chan: Disclaimer so that- Brian: Put it on. Okay. Jessica Chan: Yeah. I think the Harvard's and MITs and Berkeley's, they're probably always going to exist, but I think a lot of these smaller private universities, unfortunately some of them are already fading away. I think for certain fields where you really do need that higher degree like quantum programming, and physics, and things like that, I think you will still need the higher education experience, but I think for web development and maybe other fields, I could really see that being replaced by the online education angle with coding boot camps. Depending on the company of course, you don't necessarily need a CS degree to get a job there. I think they'll both coexist, but I think maybe there's going to be more of a emphasis on the lower cost, online education model. Kate: Yeah, we also talked to, again name dropping, Eve Porcello, who is co founder of Moon Highway, which is a course. Her job originally started as teaching current web developers coming from the back end, she would teach them frontend code. Even if you do have a CS degree, there's still continuing education piece. It seems like there's something missing, but it's interesting to see whether it's YouTube or constant courses or boot camps. All these things are filling this space that is empty. It's really interesting, yeah, to think about YouTube as a resource there as well. Jessica Chan: For sure. Yeah, I think things are just getting more decentralized just in general in terms of knowledge. Not always in a good way. Brian: Yeah, that's the part that I worry about a little bit. YouTube is free for the user, which is great. Boot camps are not free, but they're not nearly as not free as university. Neither are really necessarily guaranteed successful results. I think that, and this is what I said to Monarch, is that comparing boot camps to a university, I understand the impulse because there is some competition there, but I would prefer to evaluate them individually if that's possible. I might be naïve to do it in a vacuum, but at least theoretically or at least with public universities in the US, there is some oversight. You're supposed to get something for ... There's a set of rules for the things that you get. That's where accreditation comes from and in boot camps not so much. You have to do your own homework and then hope that wherever you go it is run in good faith. Brian: And so for YouTube to hop in or YouTubers or content creators to hop in, it's kind of like you're not really asking much from the audience other than time, which is precious. Maybe that is a lot. Kate: Yeah, so Jessica, I'm curious of the future of Coder Coder. Is there a plan for bringing on more folks or I know you mentioned your course. Tell us a roadmap plan for the future. Jessica Chan: Yeah. I think my plan is to keep it as small as possible for as long as possible. I don't really plan on hiring anyone for administration stuff, hopefully. We'll see. I think that is one of the things I'm trying to be really mindful as I scale. I think the first hire I would probably do would be I'm going to have a discord for my course. Assuming things go well, more and more people will join it. I would see myself hiring, maybe not full-time, but paying someone to moderate that community and maybe moderate ... I don't know, if I start doing more streams on YouTube, moderating the chats there and stuff like that. Jessica Chan: Other than that, again, I say this all the time. I'm very fortunate my husband can do all the video and creative stuff and then I sort of come up with the educational content aspect. It's a lot of skills that other YouTubers would have to outsource somehow and we fortunately have it in house. I think we can go for awhile without having to hire outside people. Kate: Yeah, that's super helpful. Having done YouTube before, that is huge. Jessica Chan: Yeah. Other than the hiring part, I think just the plan is to release a course, maybe do another course. I'm not planning on doing courses every year. I think I'd like to have maybe one or two flagship courses and then just after that's out do more frequent, better content on YouTube just because the Trello board of ideas is just keeps growing all the time. It's sometimes a little frustrating not being able to get to all them. Jessica Chan: I have other ideas like I would like to do merch at some point, as cliché as that sounds because I think there's a severe lack of beautiful, artistic well designed shirts aimed at coders. That's something I would probably hire out for. I would hire an artist to design really cool tee shirts that show coding in a really awesome way, that don't say, "I turn coffee into code." Which is fine, but you see it everywhere. It's been overdone. Kate: Yeah, the sticker, might have to compete more with the sticker culture in web development. Tee shirts, haven't seen too many tee shirts. Jessica Chan: Yeah. Brian: I think that's so common with not the tee shirts, but the pressure to have to constantly put stuff out. Obviously we can relate on the blog, but I think it's a much different kind of animal when it's your face and you're the one that has to be the creative force. I see it everywhere. A lot of the YouTubers that I follow will ... I think I've seen at least one video where they hop on just to apologize for not creating enough content. I think people are being hard on themselves. It's really tough. I almost feel bad for them. I wish that there was a way where that was less true, that you can do something cool and creative and maybe not feel so bad if it takes a month or two months. This constant need to produce stuff so that you can keep the lights on. Jessica Chan: Yeah, I think the platforms also make you feel that pressure, especially Instagram. It's like, "Oh, you're going to tank if you don't create content every two or three days." It's definitely a constant battle to fight against those pressures where you're feeling them from the platforms or from people commenting being like, "When's your next video coming out?" I think people are always going to say that. I don't know if I've figure it out because I obviously feel very guilty about not releasing my course yet, but I try to not force myself to stick to a certain schedule if something comes up. I would like to release a YouTube video every week, but I don't always, and I'm sort of okay with that part at least. Because I think the YouTube algorithm is at least a little bit more forgiving than some of the social ones. You can release a video and then not release one for a month. If you release a new one, it'll come back. So I think it's just trying to keep things fun without grinding away your motivation and the joy that you originally found in doing this content stuff. It's a balance. Brian: Yeah. Again, I'm so sure that there must be mountains of content about this thing, but from a more, I'll just say a more traditional artists or creatives where this kind of need to produce and the business side of it, kind of making you feel like, "Well, if I don't keep this rolling I'm going to be penalized and now I feel bad because I'm disappointing not only the algorithm," which is weird, but you're feeling like disappointing an algorithm, but also the audience. People are like, "When's this coming out?" "Well, when is your next video coming out, YouTube commenter? You try it. It's hard." Which is probably not a great way to build up an audience, to yell at them afterwards, but maybe that's why I'm not on YouTube. Jessica Chan: That could be your brand. Brian: Jerk? Jessica Chan: Yep. Brian: That must exist on YouTube already. They definitely exist in the comment section. I don't know if you can build a whole channel on reviewing ... maybe you actually could, reviewing people's comments. Never mind. Now I'm definitely on another tangent altogether. Kate: We could just reply to all your comments on this podcast, Jessica. We'll just go through every single. Brian: Oh, that's what you could hire. Hire me for that. I'll be your community manager. I will manage that community aggressively. The algorithm likes engagement. Is it semantic? Are they actually reading it? Jessica Chan: Probably more the counting the number of comments that pop up. Brian: Yeah, okay. Positive, negative, I guess it's all good. I'm kind of interested in, I saw here in the notes about a list ... because last time we talked about how popups were the worst. Do you want to do a list of things not to do that we see? Jessica Chan: Sure. Carousels. Brian: YouTube carousels. Jessica Chan: I guess in general, website, it's like a marketing dark patterns, it's like carousels. There's a website, I think it's called shouldyouusecarousels.com or something like that and it's just a carousel explaining why you should never use carousels. Or if you use carousels you can put the piece of content that higher in the C level wanted to add to the website because you know no one's ever going to see that, but then you can go back and tell them, "Hey, we added this thing to the carousel on the home page." Just in general, I think carousels are maybe not the best for users. Brian: I was pausing because I was thinking, "Do they even have a place in eCommerce if you're trying to buy shoes, maybe." Maybe I would say that could work, if you're ... Jessica Chan: I feel like people like scrolling better, especially on mobile. Scrolling infinitely is better than having to try to swipe. Tinder is just a big carousel then, right? I haven't used it, but it's like you're just swiping so it's a giant carousel. Brian: People seem to like Tinder. Jessica Chan: Instagram ads. Jessica Chan: I'm not sure this is the direction you wanted to take this thread of conversations. Brian: This has stopped being a podcast and more of us just hanging out now. Carousels are stupid. The audience is cranky. Jessica Chan: The commenters are trash. Brian: Brian might be a little bit [inaudible 00:42:49]. Okay, so we probably should close on that. What do you think, Kate? Kate: Is there anything you want to plug, Jessica? Jessica Chan: Just my YouTube channel Coder Coder. My Instagram and Twitter. They're both The Coder Coder, the handle name. Then my course that will someday come out, I'm hoping in the fall, but it's Responsive Design for Beginners. You can check out the writing page that hopefully doesn't have any dark marketing patterns at coder-coder.com/responsive. Kate: Yeah, we'll include all of those in the show notes. Jessica Chan: Awesome. Brian: Also, do you want to let people know who they should email to get an invite to that content creator? Because I'd want to know an app. No, is it private? Super private? Jessica Chan: It's on the smaller side. Brian: Oh. Well. Jessica Chan: I'm sorry. Brian: Maybe send an email just to me so I can see what's in there. I'm not going to do anything with it. Wink. Okay, thanks so much, Jessica. It was a pleasure. Come back anytime. Jessica Chan: Yeah, thank you Brian and Kate. It's been fun. Brian: Thanks for listening to PodRocket. Find us @PodRocketpod on Twitter or you could always email me, even though that's not a popular option. It's brian@logrocket.