Episode 24

Henry Belcaster

The Long-Term Benefits of Daily Content Creation

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In this episode, Adam and Carlton are joined by Henry Belcaster, a co-founder of Clipt. Through his experience with building a business, Henry shares about the benefits of daily content creation and how the proof of work concept is a guaranteed way to get your foot in the door.

Highlights from the conversation:

  • How Henry got started (5:07)
  • From a podcast to a company (9:43)
  • Attention discrimination & squatter marketing (20:55)
  • The birth of Clipt (23:59)
  • Recruiting for Clipt (27:01)
  • Benefits of daily content creation (31:12)
  • What’s on the horizon for content (35:25)
  • The value of a co-founder (36:13)

 

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Transcription

Transcription generated by Otter.ai

Adam Vazquez 0:06
On this episode, we have Henry Belcaster. Henry is a co-founder of clipt.co, which is a recruiting service that helps you find really talented video editors.

On this episode, Henry tells us his entire story from starting the business during COVID, going from being on unemployment to producing clips and content for the likes of the My First Million pod, the All-In pod, Ana Fabrega, lots of other social media type celebrities that you’ve probably heard of. Henry really gets into the details of how they started the business, why they started the business, and how they’re building it to really fit their own core values.

I really enjoyed this episode with Henry Belcaster, and I think you will too. Let’s dive into it with Henry from Clipt.

Intro 0:54
Put that content down. Content. The close is over. What’s your name? Content. That’s my name. You know why, mister? Because you drove a Hyundai to get here tonight. I drove an $80,000 BMW. That’s my name. Content Is for Closers.

Adam Vazquez 1:16
Alright, Carlton, so we were sort of talking beforehand, you obviously enjoyed this episode, you notice some things about Henry, what was some of the stuff that stuck out when you listen to it?

Carlton Riffel 1:26
Yeah, so for those of you who don’t know, Henry is making a name for himself by making micro-content. And so he talks some about, like attention, discrimination, there’s different platforms that get some attention, and then others that get, you know, maybe a different type of attention, like a four-hour episode that some people do isn’t going to appeal to others. And so I think just the way that he approaches thinking about content and selecting what’s really good, and highlighting that and finding ways to capitalize on it is super interesting.

Adam Vazquez 2:01
Yeah, the attention discrimination thing was interesting, because— first of all, the words. I would say Henry is really good at coining terms that elicit an emotional response. So like putting the word “discrimination” in something related to content, I think it’s just, you know, he’s gonna get—

Carlton Riffel 2:18
And squatter marketing.

Adam Vazquez 2:19
Squatter marketing was my favorite part. Explain squatter marketing real quick. Obviously, he gets into it.

Carlton Riffel 2:26
Yeah, he gets into the whole story, but it’s basically deciding that you are going to be someone’s marketer, and then squatting whether they hire you or not, or you’re not and we pay you or not even if they’re a billionaire. And so yeah, it’s just this idea of putting yourself into deciding and making the choice on your side that you’re going to be their provider.

Adam Vazquez 2:49
Yeah, and he gets into exactly how they started doing this, who they’re doing it for, which was really, really interesting. Shout out All-In, if you have ever heard of that.

Carlton Riffel 3:00
The other thing he needs to do is squatter invoicing. That’s the next thing he should do.

Adam Vazquez 3:07
Well, and he talked about how he kind of is because— well, I don’t wanna give it away, but long story short, the squatter marketing provides probably a bigger ROI than any other paid campaign that they could do excellent in order to get similar awareness. So yeah, really interesting stuff. I thought Henry was he was just different than what I was expecting. He was really bright energetic, which, you know, that part wasn’t surprising. I think it was just his calm demeanor for someone his age and I got it I got the sense he was a lot older than what he actually is as he’s building this business, so I thought it was a really good episode.

Carlton Riffel 3:43
Cool. Let’s jump in.

Adam Vazquez 3:56
We’ve got Henry Belcaster on the show, the legend, the YouTube mogul himself. Henry, thanks for joining the show.

Henry Belcaster 4:08
Thanks for having me, Adam.

Adam Vazquez 4:09
It’s not just reserved for the female. I like that. I like just taking over. Dude, it’s so good to have you on, very excited to have you. I don’t know how much you remember, we’ve DMed a few times. But we, on our side of things, have been fascinated watching what you and Dylan have been doing over the last— what is it? Year? 18 months? Two years? I don’t even know.

Henry Belcaster 4:30
I don’t even know, dude. We started July… maybe a year. Call it a year. Let’s use round numbers.

Adam Vazquez 4:36
Okay. Yeah, so we’ve been following along the journey and it’s been very exciting. Henry, for those of you who are not watching the video, is currently in a van, doing this from his van. I’m very excited about the Nomad thing. So, lots going on. But Henry, as I kind of explained to you, our entire show is based around this idea that content can lead to so much more. It can lead to business, can lead to opportunities, whatever, and you are the perfect example of that. There are like 2 million podcasts. I think last year 860,000 podcasts published an episode and somehow, out of that, you and Dylan—you can tell the story—but I think we’re just friends doing a podcast together, built an entire business out of it. How did that come together?

Henry Belcaster 5:23
It’s so much worse than that. It’s so much sillier than that. I was taking a gap year, I was taking a year off, and Dylan was leaving a place of employment because it was mid-pandemic and he wanted to start a podcast, and he wanted to do it with another friend. It wasn’t even me. So he calls up our much goofier friend to start this podcast, Smart Nonsense. That friend doesn’t answer the phone. He calls me next. I’m like, “Screw it. I’m on a year-off gap year after college. I’m not doing anything, so sure. I’ll do the podcast.” I didn’t know I was second choice. That’s as silly as it was and how it started.

Adam Vazquez 6:05
That’s awesome.

Henry Belcaster 6:07
But yeah, no, we were both— It made sense, now, in hindsight, looking back. Like, we were the two… Of all of our kind of college friends, we were the only two entrepreneurs, the two that wanted to start something or build a personal brand. I don’t know, just we were very much like anti-rat race so looking back in hindsight, it makes sense that we found each other like that. And then we’ve become like 10x as good as friends since. So, yeah, that was the start of the Smart Nonsense podcast.

Adam Vazquez 6:38
Good enough to have a great business around. So recruiting note from Dylan, just like call people until somebody answers. I love that. And then just start businesses with them. So you start this show, it’s kind of like a goofy, what are you learning? What am I learning? Or that’s what I’ve kind of gotten from it.

Henry Belcaster 6:57
Gen Z is all messed up. We’re like, Okay, we see some kind of light at the end of the tunnel for Gen Z, like, we’ve got this amazing thing, the internet. But we’re right in the middle of Gen Z and millennials. So it’s like, we grew up with kind of the brilliance of the internet, but we’re not so Gen Z doubt that we’re like this all day long. So we’re like, if we can be the guide for Gen Z, teach them entrepreneurship, self-development, and how to challenge norms, because like so many of our peers were just sheep, especially at like, elite colleges. That that for us was like our purpose. Let’s help Gen Z crush it. Because like, we’re right on the fence of Gen Z and millennials who kind of understand the world a bit better.

Adam Vazquez 7:40
I have a good delineation to tell you which category you’re in. Did you see the Superbowl? The halftime show?

Henry Belcaster 7:47
Yes, only— Well, I started at the halftime show, yes.

Adam Vazquez 7:51
Did you like the halftime show?

Henry Belcaster 7:53
I loved the halftime show.

Adam Vazquez 7:54
Okay, so you skew millennial. I feel like that’s the easy—

Henry Belcaster 7:57
There you go.

Adam Vazquez 7:58
If you liked it, you have some of that in you.

Henry Belcaster 8:01
I got goosebumps when Lose Yourself Came on. I was just like, this is 2003. This is 2003, like, mm! You know? If you’re my sister’s age, she’s three years younger than me, she probably didn’t know what half those songs were.

Adam Vazquez 8:17
Yeah, it was a very clear dividing line. I don’t know if you were following along on Twitter or something like that. If you liked it, you have some millennial tendencies. Okay, so you start the show—

Henry Belcaster 8:27
Really quick. I had to I logged off a Twitter because I was sick of all the people talking about the Coinbase ad, as brilliant as it was. I’m not watching the Superbowl through Twitter. This is ridiculous.

Adam Vazquez 8:38
I was one of those simps. I didn’t scan it because I was like, I’m not doing this. Like, I know what this is. And then as soon as I found out it was Coinbase I was like, oh, so so brilliant.

Henry Belcaster 8:50
Dylan, yeah, we texted and I was like, Man, why didn’t we think of that? It is brilliant. Yeah, million-dollar idea.

Adam Vazquez 8:58
Literally, probably more. Yeah. Okay, so you guys have the show, you’re sharing ideas, but there’s still a huge— I mean, lots of people have shows like that so there’s this leap between that and you guys have… Correct me. Is it Smart Nonsense? Is that still the business? Or that’s just the media and then Clipt is the business?

Henry Belcaster 9:18
Clipt is just the business now, and I laugh because it has been a tumultuous two months going from Smart Nonsense last year, Smart Nonsense Media (the thing we started), to rolling all of that up into this new thing, Clipt.

Adam Vazquez 9:34
Got it. Okay. Okay, so yeah. How did that happen, though? How did you go from the pod to the company?

Henry Belcaster 9:41
Pod to the company. Okay, so we’re shooting the pod, I’m living on Dylan’s floor in an apartment we moved into together in Chicago. I’ve got my own startup at the time. We live with my other co-founder who’s working on that startup with me. Dylan’s… What was Dylan doing? He was just doing the podcast all day and we were both on unemployment but we’re running out of money. Yeah, he was just doing the podcast. And at the same time, we were getting really into these like self-development books like four-hour workweek. The magic of thinking big was one, but mostly the four-hour workweek. And that’s when Dylan he had so much time. We had these crazy unemployment checks. But he really started applying the learnings of The Four Hour Workweek. And it was like, Okay, we’ve got this podcast. We love doing this podcast, we’re shooting it daily. But it’s really hard to produce a podcast every single day. Seems like alright, I’m reading The Four Hour Workweek. Yeah, it was daily. We’re like, it’s hard. It’s already hard enough to sit down and record these things and come up with ideas and be entertaining and this out of the other, it’s another beast to then go home that evening and like, produce the whole thing, as I’m sure yeah. So he starts a buying these four-hour workweek findings, which is like, what aspects of my life can I outsource or delegate you? Mind you, this is also kind of the blessing of the timing. This is mid pandemic, the world’s blowing open. The idea that you can work with a video editor on the other side of the world is new, most people do this in-house. So Dylan starts finding folks in the Philippines, that would be able to Okay, let me get this right. So we shoot a podcast, say we upload it to Google Drive at 3 pm. It’s 12 hours later in the Philippines. So when we go to sleep here, they’re waking up, they can edit the thing. We wake up the next day, we’ve got an episode in our inbox, doing find this like magical nugget of time travel, and that kept blowing our mind. We did that we found this superpower. It’s like, wow, we can really cost-effectively produce this podcast daily. And we just have to sit down for 20 minutes and shoot the thing. So that’s when we started to have an inkling that there was something there, Dylan then didn’t really want to do anything with that. I think. I mean, obviously, in an ideal world, the podcast would have taken off, my vlog would have taken off and we would have personal brands. We know like, a personal brand is the way out. We can talk about that later. But then, what happened was we started running out of money. And we’re like, alright, we, you know, we got to figure out something here. We got to start something. I was folding my cards with another startup, wasn’t working out, and at the same time, the My First Million guys— Do you know that podcast?

Adam Vazquez 12:30
Oh, yeah. We just had on Ethan Brooks from The Hustle who is a writer.

Henry Belcaster 12:35
Oh, yeah. We’ve done some clips for Ethan.

Adam Vazquez 12:39
Oh, yeah. Cool.

Henry Belcaster 12:41
So we’re running out of money, the My First Million podcast is like, “We don’t know how to do video. We want to grow our podcasts. We don’t know how to be a video podcast.” That’s when Dylan and I saw this opportunity. We have this superpower. We get video podcasting, we figured out how to create a system that just automatically produces a podcast every single day. MFM doesn’t get it, so let’s just commit to showing them what we can do for them. That’s like a super— We could have an entire podcast episode about that event but, long story short: through proof of work, through our content, we showed them we could do it and got that job.

Adam Vazquez 13:23
But we gotta like just touch on it because they even talked about it on their show. I think that might be how I first came in contact with you. And for quick context for you: I came from the ad agency world. I worked at VaynerMedia and then I started this company about five years ago. So when the My First Million guys put out the call for the video thing, I was like, wow, that’s super interesting. We’ve helped professional athletes in the past, and they say that, but it was COVID and I’m just like, man, I wonder how that’s gonna work out. And they’re like, yeah, these guys flew to our house.

Henry Belcaster 13:56
You’re right.

Adam Vazquez 13:58
So it was a great story.

Henry Belcaster 14:01
We must go into it because you’re talking about how you can rule the world with content, and that’s exactly what we did. We’re messaging these guys on Twitter, like, “Hey, we’ll do the work. We’ll do the work, whatever.” And they’re like, “Are you guys serious? Are you stalking? Like, eh.” And then Dylan and I realized, oh, they have no idea what we can do. It’s a classic: actions speak louder than words and we’re just giving them words. So like, can these guys really deliver? Who’s this? He’s got a silly profile picture. Whatever. So we’re like, okay, content is our way in. It’s the only thing that by tomorrow, we can show these guys, hey, we’re real. We can do this. We’ve done it before. Let’s show them proof of work exactly what it would look like in their terms and let’s use content to do that. So I race out of the apartment because we kind of got our foot in the door with them. They’re responding to us on Twitter. I race out of the apartment. I shoot a vlog on, like, here’s exactly what we can do for you guys: use this camera, use this preamp, use this microphone, I’ll set up your studio so it’s in one switch, I’ll show you all of that through content. While I was out shooting that, Dylan was working with some of his editors in the Philippines—AJ, in particular—to come up with edits for My First Million’s clips to show them exactly what an edit would look like, if we were to do it for them.

Adam Vazquez 15:28
So just like taking their content and making edits out of stuff that was already existing, right?

Henry Belcaster 15:34
Yeah. And easier than that. We weren’t just taking random content. We went to YouTube, went to My First Million, sorted their page by most popular content, and found like a four-minute clip. It was about Sam meeting the Silk Road founders. So we’re like, let’s just do what already worked and put it in our terms, show them what we can do. And that’s where we kind of found our synergy. Like, oh, I can use my vlog to get people’s attention, show them we’re real, show them I’m legit, that I can do stuff and we’re authentic. Dylan can use these editors he’s got, same thing. We can do all that and the next day, we can have all this produced. So we can say one thing on Twitter, and the next day have a vlog and a sample of what we can do, and it blew their mind.

Adam Vazquez 16:20
Yeah, that’s powerful.

Henry Belcaster 16:21
Yeah, that’s blown most people’s minds, actually. Dylan and I were just saying, we should start like an incubator or something. My girlfriend is applying to a job at an art company, a design firm, and she wasn’t necessarily qualified for the role. She doesn’t have the experience. It’s a shoe designer, shoe design position. So what did she do all weekend? She put together a pitch deck with exactly the shoe designs she would pitch them. I had her outsource some 3d renders so they could actually see what she can do. And it’s like, that’s how you get your foot in the door. Give them the content.

Adam Vazquez 17:00
I love that proof of work language. You hear a lot in the crypto space or whatever. But applying that to just normal business work, normal, normal work of life. What I love about you guys’ story is that I think this was your intent to but most people when they start a podcast are like, Yeah, I’m going to start a podcast, get famous, get advertisers build a business that way. And like, that works and is cool, and seems to be super cool. I can’t say that I’ve never done it. But there are all these other things that can be built all these other concepts, all these other companies, all these other connections literation. And, and just from good, you know, paying, I didn’t mean to do just from paying attention to the opportunities that come. That’s what you guys did.

Speaking of iterations and continuing to move, you start there, then you kind of begin this process of pulling clips, doing that for other companies, and then how did that evolve into what you’re doing today? You can describe what that is better than I can, but it seems like pulling clips for shows or podcasters or content creators and helping them promote them.

Henry Belcaster 18:10
Correct, yeah. You nailed it there. I want to touch on that, this idea that like, yeah, it’d be brilliant to start a podcast or a vlog and wake up in a week and have 5 million listeners and 10 million subscribers. It’d be great. What’s also great is, like, we have very small audiences, we get to target the exact people we want, and we spun it into a business, and we would have never thought that would have happened. Yeah, so we definitely played that right. We take the long approach.

Adam Vazquez 18:44
We’re the working man’s content creator. We probably need to make some t-shirts out of that, too.

Henry Belcaster 18:50
I like it. Okay, so we go to MFM, we do the thing. They’re stoked. Everybody’s stoked, except for Dylan. Dylan’s not that stoked because he didn’t want to start this thing. He’s like, I want a simple life. I want to make 100 grand. He was, at this point, doing this kind of post-production stuff for his previous employer, getting paid handsomely, and life was pretty good. And I’m like, no, there’s just so much more here. If you want to talk about product-market fit, people were like banging down our door to get what we were doing for My First Million. So we kind of baby-stepped it over time, spun this thing into an agency, Smart Nonsense Media (the agency), but then we realized, okay, agencies kind of suck because everyone wants something a little bit different. Someone wants logo design. Somebody wants podcast clips that are 60 seconds. Another person wants a four-minute YouTube video. The CTO of HubSpot wants a 10 minute YouTube video. Someone might want to long-form— We’re like, this is ridiculous. If we want to talk about the four-hour workweek, it’s like, what’s the one thing we can do that 10x everything else? It’s not getting on calls and talking about different projects all day long. So we’re like, that’s definitely not it. We’re like, okay, how can we kind of be tech founders here? Let’s niche down, let’s productize this thing. As an agency, let’s sell one product. And for a while that was a package of animated clips. 10 60-second clips per month. That’s all we did. 10 for 10. 10 clips for $10,000. So now we’re a productized service and we’re much happier about that because it’s just one thing. You want it or you don’t. That’s all we do.

Adam Vazquez 20:42
Just to continue to annotate, this is where I feel like you guys had a pretty big public surge. You were doing All-In and—

Henry Belcaster 20:54
Okay, okay. I’m curious, what do you think we do for All-In?

Adam Vazquez 21:00
I have no idea. It seems like you just go through and take stuff that— essentially what you described you did for My First Million. You go in and take things that you think are interesting quotes and make them into animated versions, usually making Sacks look good.

Henry Belcaster 21:15
Okay, and do you think Sacks pays us?

Adam Vazquez 21:19
I would imagine he does.

Henry Belcaster 21:21
Okay, good. That’s the intention. I keep forgetting to give you the content gems here. Most all of our work came from doing the All-In podcasts clips. So they record a two-hour podcast. We chop that up into bite-sized chunks that can be shared on Twitter, TicTok YouTube shorts. And we do that because there’s this attention discrimination thing where, I’ve never listened to a three-hour Joe Rogan podcast, but I’ve seen clips of Joe Rogan on the internet. It’s just a different market, so let’s hit that different market. The thing about All-In is everybody came to work with us because they thought we were doing their clips. All-In has never paid us, they’ve never asked for us to do anything. We just decided one day, All-In is a client of ours now. We’re like, All-In’s our client, so let’s treat them as such. So we put a team on them. We called it squatter marketing. Let’s just act like they’re our client and do all of their short-form content. If they like it, if it’s good enough—like the My First Million guys—if we put David Sacks big face on it enough, he’s gonna share it, right? We tap into all of their eyeballs, all of their audience, the distribution, and it comes back in spades. So, no, we’ve never been paid for All-In. However, most everyone who’s come to work with us thinks they’re a client of ours. It’s like this crazy social proof.

Adam Vazquez 22:55
Right, and they have, I mean, they’ve more than— I’ll have that term squatter marketing, but they’ve embraced you. They like it and so that, I would say, is worth its weight in gold, just the promotion that they have given you that way.

Henry Belcaster 23:12
Right, so it ended up being a really lucky organic growth hack. Now they just kind of bully Sacks about getting his Belcaster ransom because they call their clips “Belcasters.” So it took on this weird like fan fiction thing of its own where David and I are like in love. He’s Scorsese and I’m his little editor, but that’s another brilliant example of just doing free work.

Adam Vazquez 23:42
Cool. I keep interjecting here, so like, then you pivot again, sort of, and you went from the productized service to… That’s where you were heading to.

Henry Belcaster 23:58
Correct. So we reached out, we offer one thing. That’s going great. Cash flow’s awesome. For the first time ever, Dylan and I start paying ourselves. We’re like, This is it. And then a week goes by and we’re like, this is definitely not it. This is also kind of like Dylan and I’s ADD in our everlasting search for product-market fit. It’s just like the agency model doesn’t scale well. If we want 10 more clients, we need exactly 20 More animators. 15 more graphic arts, like all these things. There are just so many people involved. You probably I mean, vain. I’m preaching to the choir here. Yeah. 1500 People 2000 People chump, like, it doesn’t scale. Nice, right? It also, if you take the four-hour workweek to be your Bible. It’ll drive you mad in the sense that like, we’re on the phone all day. We’re answering emails all day. We’re in Slack all day. We’re like, this is not enough. We’re not getting the best output for the work we’re putting into this thing. And it scales very linearly. So then something, something, we realized something interesting, which is okay. Most people aren’t coming to us for these 10 animated clips, we’re just dictating that’s what they have to do, because that’s our one product. Now, most people are coming to us and DMing us, because they don’t know how to hire video editors on the internet. They don’t know how to do this magical overnight editing outsourcing thing to the Philippines, for instance. And we keep turning people away, because like, we’re like, that’s not a problem we’re solving, we just do animated clips. So we’re like, Hmm, maybe we should listen again to the people banging down our door. There are a lot of people on the internet with video that don’t know how to get it post-produced. Maybe we should listen to them and start doing that. As opposed to the very small niche of the internet that wants these animated clips that are probably a fad. Turns out they were. So we’re pivoting in that sense to where we’re like, Okay, let’s get away from the agency. Let’s get away from the animated clips, we can merge that whole thing into Clipt and Clipt is the marketplace where people can hire our video editors directly full time. So no longer do we have to be an agency yelling at them about revisions. And saying Nope, you only get 10 of these clips a month. Nope, they can only be 60 seconds. Now it’s like, hey, we vetted these editors, they’re on our platform, they’re the best in the world. Do whatever you want with them, but be nice.

Adam Vazquez 26:35
Oh, that’s so cool. I didn’t even realize that.

Henry Belcaster 26:37
We love our creatives. But other than that, work on any video projects you want.

Adam Vazquez 26:44
So you’ve essentially become… You just stripped out all the fat between the consumer desire, which is ultimately what Dylan discovered at the beginning, the time machine, and the fact that you all had these connections, these relationships with resources. So are you actively recruiting over there? Or are is just people you already knew from your thing? How did that come together?

Henry Belcaster 27:09
Actively recruiting? Yes. And you’re spot on. That’s exactly it. We’re getting back to like, what was the magic? Every time Dylan and I get confused. We ask ourselves, like, how would we scratch our own itch? How would we build this thing for ourselves, so we would want to use it. And that goes back to Day Zero of the podcast. If we’re scratching our own itch, it’s like, we just want to upload content. And we know the best editor in the world is taking care of it. And it’s going to be in our inbox tomorrow. So like I said, we’re in this kind of tumultuous phase of It’s this. It’s this funky thing where we’re platform. Now we’re a marketplace. We’re like Fiverr or Upwork. But very hyper-specific, and focused on real matchmaking. There’s like too much crap going on at Fiverr and Upwork. You know, it’s hard to find someone. So it’s been a really tumultuous two months in the sense that we had 50 People at Smart Nonsense Media, all totally primed to be the best agency teammates of all time. Right? They loved Game Day and their benefits. And Henry and Dylan always have your back and paid time off. Like all these things. There’s so much inertia from 50 people, when it comes to saying overnight, hey, now we’re a marketplace. You’re independent contractors on that thing. This is better for everyone in the long run, we know it. It was a lot of change and it took almost two months to unwind that even with clients trying to explain to them, yeah, we’re no longer going to be in the middle. We’re trimming out all this fat, you work directly with your video editor. So it’s been slow. But we’re like, finally, the dust is settling and we’re building back up.

Adam Vazquez 28:50
Yeah, and by the way, I can speak to this first-person. I didn’t know that’s what you all are doing, but we have a video editor in the Philippines. It took us probably—from when we started to when he came on board—it was probably a six-month process. And a ton of— I know, I know, but we didn’t know we were doing. You knew what you were doing or you had these connections or whatever. And we were so typically we just move and you know, but with hiring someone specifically on the other side of the country, I was so cautious, overly cautious. And anyway, it’s worked out like he’s great. But the company we use we would never use again, they had no clue what they were doing the portfolios that they provided, and just the entire process was a mess because they didn’t understand what we do as like a creative company. So I could totally see where this process in this service you’re offering has a ton of value for really anyone making on the internet, because to your point, I don’t know what’s going on or what’s in the water over there, but the editors are unbelievable. We’re super happy with him now, but the process was terrible.

Henry Belcaster 30:02
Yeah, and think about that: you all get this and it took us six months. Imagine the tech companies we’re working with that have a marketing team but don’t have any in-house editors, they that you don’t even know where to start. Right? Or, or it’s really just scratching our own itch. Imagine you’re dealing in AI, you’re starting your podcast from nothing, you’re on unemployment. It’s like, where do I go? That’s cost-effective. And it’s like time traveling. Before we did that, there wasn’t a good place to get that done.

Adam Vazquez 30:36
Yeah, no, it’s super valuable. Okay, so I want to flip now to just your content. You, I saw, recently past 1,000 subscribers on YouTube, which, congrats, by the way. That is so much work and I think that’s something to be celebrated.

Henry Belcaster 30:50
Thank you.

Adam Vazquez 30:52
And you all, I think, maybe still have the podcast? I haven’t looked recently.

Okay, so you’ve got that. Obviously, you already kind of unveiled the curtain on spec work but how has that creation process helped you as you’re working through where to take the business or where to find new customers or all those sorts of things?

Henry Belcaster 31:11
I think the biggest way both the Smart Nonsense podcast and my vlog have helped is for the sole reason we started them. It was to be a daily diary of this craziness Dylan and I were doing (because it is crazy). And in that daily diary, we found all this accountability. It’s like if we said something on the air but nobody’s paying attention, we still said it on the air and we want to see it through. If I tell my 1,000 subscribers, which seems small. That’s like, I don’t know, find a big auditorium where the people, I was gonna say five chemistry lectures worth of people sitting around waiting for me to say something every day. Hmm. So on the accountability front, it’s like, if I say something on the air on the vlog, we got to do it. There’s no other choice. So it’s been like, to me this, this awesome driving force in, let’s make a piece of content today. Instead of just consuming stuff all day on TicTok and YouTube and whatnot, let’s make something let’s put something into the world because it’s hard. If we can do hard things, we’ll be better off. Oh, and by the way, if we say something, now we’re accountable for it. So it’s going to be that fire under are asked to keep going. That to us is has been the driving force. On top of that, we’re scratching our own itch. We have these amazing editors that turn our stuff around overnight. Once you experienced that magic, you can’t undo it. I could never edit a video again. I can’t because it’s so hard. Now I specialize in telling a story for 30 minutes on camera a day. My editor specializes in chopping it up into a compelling narrative in four hours a day. And because the process is so magical, I just keep recording the vlog.

Adam Vazquez 31:45
That’s a great testimonial.

Henry Belcaster 33:08
Yeah, there you go. We’ll put it on the site. But we hope our customers experienced that same magic. And we think if we scratch our own itch, they might.

Adam Vazquez 33:17
Yeah. Just to touch on what you were saying: I mean, the 1,000 people, especially people who haven’t made anything, are like, Oh, 1,000 Like, that’s whatever. We just crossed the 1,000 on our podcast, and this is off and on basically a five-year effort to get to that point. And I know how much work has gone into it. And to your point, it’s not Joe Rogan or whoever, but that’s 1,000 real people with ears and jobs and stuff that they do, and they’re listening. Like, it’s crazy when you really think about it.

Henry Belcaster 33:56
It is crazy.

Adam Vazquez 33:56
But we just get numb to it with all the content that’s around these days, but that’s super cool.

Henry Belcaster 34:03
What I’ve realized in it is, like, when we look at the Casey Neistat’s, the Peter McKinnon’s, the Sara Dietschy’s, the Marques Brownlee’s of the world, we’re like, Ah, I would love to be that. Peter McKinnon got a million subs in one year, but that’s the anomaly. To get to that year, Peter McKinnon I’m sure made 10 years worth of content, didn’t publish it, whatever. People need to stop expecting that this is going to happen in a month. Or like it’s going to be five years, in your case, seven years, 10 years, 12 years. And then things will start to happen. Then things will start to snowball. That’s another reason we love this kind of, Clipt, yes, but this editing system we’ve set up. It just allows us to do this forever. We know the people in the game the longest are the ones that look like an overnight success in eight years.

Adam Vazquez 35:03
Yeah, and ended up winning, right? It’s just like a war of attrition at that point. This has been awesome, Henry. Thank you so much for spending time with us. Before you van off into the Nomad abyss, aside from Clipt, obviously, what has you most excited right now? Content-wise, ideas-wise, just in general. What has you most excited for the rest of the year?

Henry Belcaster 35:25
Content-wise, it’s this exact thing: consistency wins. We tell all of our clients, there are no shortcuts just like there are no get-rich-quick schemes. There are no get-rich-growth schemes, with all the growth hacking we do. To finally see a year in and after 1,000 subscribers, it’s like Oh, okay. Consistency, consistency, consistency does when that’s very exciting to me. Other things content-wise, we’re actually just getting into the short-form game. We kind of found our niche on Twitter, but now we’re like in TicToks and YouTube shorts. Loops are rocking my world. You say like, at the end of a video, you just go like, because and then it goes right back to the hook. Oh, yeah, that’s sick. trick people into watching things multiple times. I think that’s it. What’s rocking my world this year and beyond is like, build something with your best friend. I never thought that would be the case. The lows are really freak in painful and the highs are just crazy. My girlfriend doesn’t have all the context to understand what’s going on from the day-to-day, but to have that co-founder who’s like in the trenches with you, that’s the gold right there, so find that co-founder.

Adam Vazquez 36:41
We talk a lot about that with my co-founder, Derek. Normally, one of the nice things about having co-founders, like when one is down the other one’s usually up, and I bet you all will see this over the years. We have found though that like every March, I don’t know why, we both hit like a depressive state and are like, Should we continue? So that’s the goal of this year, to not let that happen. I don’t know how we’re going to do that.

Henry Belcaster 37:11
Maybe it happens in March, March Madness. We have this dopamine thing where your dopamine wants to be at some base level in your brain that’s stable and average. The highs are so high that they can only be canceled out by going into the craziest dopamine trough. So we’ll have a week that is just bliss and then the next week is like, why are we doing this? What’s this all for? And what it takes is to note, okay, in 10 years, none of this matters. My dopamine, those Marches won’t matter. Everything will even out and it’ll all be worth it, but doing that alone, and I can’t even imagine.

Adam Vazquez 37:53
Oh, it’d be brutal. Yeah. Well, Henry, this has been awesome. Where can people check out all the stuff that you’ve you’ve talked about today?

Henry Belcaster 38:00
All the stuff. Go on my YouTube, Henry Belcaster. Same on Twitter. And if you really want, you know, we hold nothing back on the Smart Nonsense podcast. People should check that out. If you get us a microphone for an hour with two best buds, there’s a lot there. So the Smart Nonsense podcast, and hire our editors! There at Clipt.co. Anybody can now.

Adam Vazquez 38:25
Yeah. As I said, I’ve experienced not doing that. I don’t think you offered the service when we did it, and it’s painful, so don’t do what I did. Go to Henry’s. Cool, man. Appreciate you. Thanks for coming on.

Henry Belcaster 38:36
Alright, Adam. Thank you.

Carlton Riffel 38:38
And that’s a wrap. Thank you for listening to this episode of Content Is for Closers. We hope you find this show really helpful as you grow your business with content. Maybe you know of other people who would find this show helpful as well. How about you send them our way? If you didn’t like this show and you want to tell us that, then you can head over to contentisforclosers.com where you can send us a message, give us some feedback, ask questions, or find detailed notes for every episode. Until next time, keep creating and keep closing.