I'm 7 Years Old

I am 7 years old. I started this channel 7 years ago to make 10 highlining videos. How hard could it be, right? We're over 500-ish videos, and 400 are evergreen content. That is gonna probably stay up forever. This is a update video, slash anniversary video, slash budget video, slash... There's three versions of this video. People in my email list will see a much longer version than you're going to see, and my patrons are going to see an even longer version with things in there. I'm only sharing with them at this point. So buckle up, and we'll just go for a little ride of the behind the scenes of how not to if you're interested in that. If you're not interested in the last year of the channel, how much money I've made, how much money I've spent, there are 400 other videos for you to go watch. This video is for the people who really like the behind the scenes of a channel, because I know I like seeing these things of channels that I watch all the time. So anyways, I started this channel September 21st, 2016, is when I first published my first video. I did make four videos before putting my first one out so I could consistently put out. From day one, I wanted to never miss a Wednesday. For the first year, it was every other Wednesday, but I never wanted to miss a published day that I preset. And now it's every Wednesday. And I have never missed a Wednesday. And sometimes that's very hard. And other times I have 12 videos in the bank, and I don't know which one to choose to post that day. So that's a roller coaster of behind the scenes to stay and look consistent. What ends up happening if I do have videos in the bank is they end up feeling old and stale to me. They're new to you. But then if I live stream or make short videos or something of me like doing something like building a new lab, but I have like 12 videos from another lab, that's a little weird. I am actually still purging probably 15 more videos of stuff that we filmed in the past. I think two Wednesdays ago, I posted something with Bobby and I talking about bolts. That was filmed maybe a few months ago when he was visiting here. But those bolts we've been testing for two years, I never made a video about them. And I was just like, I still want to test more things with them. But at some point, you just have to hit publish. And usually I'm pretty good about that. But when I really wanted the perfectionist side of me comes out, I let videos take too long. The Dano jump on Leaning Tower, for example, is a video that I am perfectioning, procrastinating on. So I really want that out in November, because that will have been two years since I did that. People want to know how we rigged it. So I'm going to keep that video probably a very how not to style. Stand here, explain it, b-roll it, and not overkill it. Because I've been trying to overkill it for two years now. The short video we posted is kind of the buzz. And that was something Andrew and I edited for like 14 hours without sleep right after we got back from it. I'm glad we did that. And that way we got it out to you guys. But things like that get clogged in the system. And so this next year, I'm going to be talking about what happened. And I'm going to be talking about what will happen. And that's mostly the email list. And the patron list is going to have more of this side. I want to I have I have stuff that people have sent me. I have Chad. If you're watching, I still have all your tat. This is a break test video. That's of all the tat from the gunks that he replaced. And I haven't broken it yet because I want to edit the things I'm breaking closer to each other. It is a lot easier to edit a video I just shot. It's a lot more fun to edit a video I just shot. It's a lot more fun to get feedback on a video. It's a lot better for them to see the video while it's still fresh. And even if I could get ideally four to eight videos in the bank, it's like only a month away from when it actually happened for you guys. So I really want to get better about that. What ended up causing the bigger and bigger and bigger delays is that I would batch film more stuff every time I went to do something. So when I moved up here to Washington, which is in the Seattle area, because I met Andrea and I was living in my welder's house and I was renting the back of his shop where the drop tower was. And that was a great transition and only intended to be a transition. I wasn't trying to rent a room forever from them. I'm very grateful that they let me stay longer than I was actually planning. Just usually how roommates are, right? In 2022, I would fly down to the lab, which Seattle, Sacramento is not bad. You film eight videos. Cost per video to go down there isn't that much. And then or I would drive depending if I was going to 70 or not. And that's Bobby would come over. That's why he was in a lot of videos. We'd shoot eight plus videos at a time. And I paid the price for my sins of not staying organized when I would come home and try to edit all of that for six weeks. And there's a real disconnect between the stoke of breaking something, the curiosity, the actual thing of like, does this tat from the gunks break weaker? Is tat a good idea? Is plastic versus bolts like all the stuff that you're like jacked on making the video? When you say yes, you kind of lose it. Trying to get more of a connection between when we do stuff, when we film stuff. Moving on. What you measure really steers your ship. And I don't think subscriber count is a good metric at all. But that is the metric so many people use. It took me nine months to go from 80,000 to 115. And then I kind of just crawled through the year. And now I'm at 216, which is crazy that I kind of got stuck at 160 for a while, 150, 160, and then went because of one silly short had millions of views. I have learned to value how short form can be a good form of communication. I still like this long form. I like having a personal dialogue with you guys like this. Short form is a really powerful tool for the next project I want to do. But I still really enjoy the long form. Anyways, I think short form caused social media socialism. And so everyone's famous now. TikTok, everyone's got a million followers. And so you still, if you started a channel today, you'd have to work pretty hard to get a large following. And if you don't have a big 400 video bank before, even if you did get a viral video, it just is a puff in the wind and then it disappears. But to go from 162 to like 215 is kind of silly when it was on a slack line, not video. I wish it was over something that I worked really hard on, you know, whatever. It's cool to be over the 200,000 mark. So what metrics do I actually value now? Am I really happy with the video? I'm not self-conscious about my editing anymore. I like my style. I'm going to improve a little here and there, but I'm happy with what I put in the universe now. Am I really happy about a Bolt video from Jordan and how I edited that and took that the footage that I had to work with and made it interesting? Yes, I love that stuff. I look at the comments, generally positive. They're actually more positive. I've learned Troll Patrol. I've learned better communication. I've learned to add more value in the video, not just talk out of my ass. I had to learn everything from scratch when I started this channel, but I do appreciate that people have been going for the ride for so many years. Put in the comments how many years you've been watching. I'm super curious what the date ranges are of the people who are watching this, for example. With the algorithm being so wonky and realizing that I am so dependent on it dishing out the content, it's unnerving that corporate YouTube has got my entire brand by the throat, and that's why the email list is so important for me. We're at 5,700 emails with about a 55% open rate, and that's why the giveaways are based on those who open the emails. I really want to build up trust with my email list that I'm not spamming you. I'm just telling you what I've done for the week, because I don't think YouTube's doing that. One of the comments in my last big wall video was somebody who had the bell notification on and was subscribed, did not get the video notification, and they stumbled upon it, like you do on your home feed page. That's crazy that it's feeding you what it wants, and so that's why the email thing is relatively important for me. It gives me a form of security and redundancy in the thing. Instagram's an interesting animal. I'm at, what, 70-ish thousand followers. Those I've more or less earned with the types of shorts that I've put out there, because they're made specifically for Instagram. They are 60 seconds of something that does not exist in a long-form video that I'm trying to promote that video and make you go from Instagram to YouTube, which doesn't work. I actually, it sounds really stupid, but I got into the habit of watching Instagram stuff in the evening, like so many people try to not do now, so I can learn how to make better content. I think it's helped me understand what I like. You gotta consume it, right? So I'm consuming it to see what I like and what I don't like and what would fit in the Breaking Gear Fear zone I'm trying to do, where we're just breaking one or two samples. And I can, I've actually done, what, 50-something short videos like that, that I wouldn't have, that would never have made it on the main channel because it was one or two samples. Or they'd just be really shitty Wednesday videos. So I actually like the short form for that, which has made my long-form videos, not this one, edited a lot tighter. You'll notice at the beginning of, like, the first 10, 30 seconds of a video, it's just jumping around like it is a short, just to, like, hook you. And then we get more into the meat of the story. But I try to advertise what you're going to see before you commit 10 or 20 minutes to it. Your feedback is actually, has always been the biggest metric, honestly. I try not to look at the numbers. I actually, there's a, YouTube Studio is an app you can have on your phone. It tells you all the numbers. I deleted the app. I do look sometimes when I'm looking at a video. I was curious with the big wall video I posted yesterday. It wasn't a banger because I did no clickbait title, no clickbait thumbnail. It was a really cool thumbnail. I established a big wall title. Not that many views, which leads to the clickbait issue. Sorry about that. I actually hate doing that. If you try to Google, if you try to, like, search something, it makes it very difficult. But there's a long game here that I'm trying to do. I want to assemble everything we've ever done into a book. Actually, I don't think I've ever said this on YouTube. I want to make a book called Breaking Gear Fear. And it's going to basically be like the Bulletin Bible, where we talk about a topic, shows the videos that we've tested in it. Other people's stuff about that topic that we found on the internet. Just like the Bulletin Bible, it would be for cams and ropes and knots and everything we've tested. You know, can you dip a rope in oil and it still works? Makes it greasy. Spoiler alert. So if you can learn everything from what we've done on this channel in seven years, in two hours reading a book, that's the goal. And so that's taking longer than I thought. So the clickbait title thing gets a little weird since I never got that started yet. We'll get into the one man show problem, maybe into the email section of this thing. I am rolling something out in stages, and that's why there is a public video and then there's the email section and then there's a patron section. This is a termination plate. Think of how many boring titles I could have for this. Aren't knots free? $50 question mark is the title and thumbnail of that. Not termination plates. Clickbait. Not clickbait. To be fair, definition of clickbait is hot girls bikini top falls off on the beach, and then you talk about this. That's actual clickbait. So I'm trying to stay in the realm of acceptable when I put these titles and thumbnails. 157,000 views. Are you kidding me? There's so many other videos that are worth watching than that. But anyways, that just shows you the power of the clickbait stuff. So a year recap of things we've done is around this time, we were putting out the Big Wall series, which was... I'm glad I didn't wait and be a perfectionist on that. I think that was a great kickstart for the bigger plan of the Big Wall Bible that I am still working on. But having that out there in the universe, more stuff comes back, which means I can add more to it. That's how the Bolting Bible got to where it's at today is by making the Bolting Bible. It's just like this feedback loop. That's what's so great about the YouTube thing. That came out. People really liked it. No one video did great, but that's not the metric I was going for a series like that. And then we put out the Ice Course. That got way more traction than I thought it would, because we had four Iceland guides share a whole bunch of stuff as if you were going to go new for the first time, which is super helpful to watch before you go try it. And that, I think, is going to do well again as winter approaches. And so I like that evergreen content. And I like that course type material that you accidentally find one of them and you realize there's like 14 video series that you can watch. But the Ice Course one was longer. You'll notice that these are longer single videos, which is like 60 to 80 hours to make these tight enough to be one video. Because it'd be a lot easier to make two or three two-hour videos. But to edit something tighter takes a way longer. So I have two courses in the works right now. One is a sport climbing, intro to sport climbing. And I actually filmed that with Hart Azizi because we were in Tenerife where he was on accident. And we're like, wait, you lived like 30 minutes from where we're staying. So we ended up filming half of that, filming the other half here. And I kind of almost have it edited, but I don't want to put it out until my secret is fully up and running because it will be really, really, really helpful for that. And then I have been interviewing rope jumpers, rope swingers for a really neat, unique way of teaching a complex topic. I mean, rope swing is not rocket science, but everybody does it different and skins the cat different. Instead of two guys standing here and being like, how do you do it? Leaving out the other 10 ways. We actually just did these one to two hour podcast style things where we talked about the anchors, the span, the swing, the fulcrum, how you connect it all, pulling people back up, injuries. And we just go down that list with everyone. And if you're not a rope swinger, you're not going to watch them. And that's OK. My God, if you are, though, it's just liquid gold on the Internet. And it's cool that I can contact any and all of them and get them to talk to me for two hours. And yeah, it's it's all in the works. But I want to release it when I have it as more of a package deal. And so that stuff takes longer. So those are things that you haven't seen yet that is in the works. But then when we upgraded the Bolting Bible, that took a bunch of time and totally worth it. I really actually like the new format where it has the sports broken out in the New Testament and everything in the Old Testament. And so I can build on that. I'll probably be adding a fifth chapter, industrial anchors. Mark Hannah lives around here, and he I think it'd be really great. He's he's really good at this stuff. And so it'd be really interesting to have in the Bolting Bible a lot about anchors that you trust your life to in the industrial world, because people do that every day and they want to know, too. It's one thing that something's stamped for approval and you have to clip it and your boss tells you to go over the edge. It's probably fine. But it is interesting to like actually understand what you're trusting your life to and not just randomly clip it. The Bolting Bible is actually intended for people who just trust their life to bolts and not just the people who put them in. But it's helpful for both. This lab, I was like, what did I do this year? I I moved and that was worth it. So I was in an apartment and then I'd go down to the lab and load. And then I'd come back to the apartment and it worked. But when I realized like I couldn't do what I really wanted to do on the channel without having to be able to break stuff like at a moment's notice in my socks, I was going to rent a space up here. And I was like, well, why don't we just rent a house and take that rent money I'd spend on a studio and or lab and put in a house? And so that's why this is in my house now. So, wow, it's temperature controlled. Like, that's a big deal. You can't hear when it's raining outside. There was a tin roof on the shop. My garage was 100 degrees back when it was in my garage at my house originally. So having this space down here that I can just come shoot and the camera was already set up. Oh, the lights are already on. I just it's I don't have to set anything up. It made me about three times more efficient on anything I was doing, because if I can break it and then go edit it like that, that flow is amazing. But I'm still editing all that stuff from that last previous life. This is so light. This is a titanium bolt, a wedge bolt. And this is a titanium hanger. And that is so interesting. And I want to break it. And I'm editing things that are two years old. It's not as much fun. And then when they send me that, they end up waiting for six months. Chad, who gave me all that gunk stuff, ends up waiting for months. And so I'm trying to get the assembly line better. But my new secret is going to help me with that. So there is a grand conclusion to all of this that you're at least going to have to be in the emails to see. If you sign up for the emails, you will see this video, even if you miss it in Saturday's video. I'm going to post this on Saturday. The thing about the lab is I had a 21-foot long test bed in Larry's shop. And that's pretty hard to find in a house. And so an average master bedroom is 13 feet wide. So I made that break test machine 12 feet 7 inches. And the ends are all honeycombed. We have the video, a link in the description of showing you how that more or less works. There's two chambers. So the hydraulics are in the bottom and it comes in. It's a U-shape for the under 50 kilonewton stuff. And then the big one is they're not usually stretchy samples. And so that is perfect for me. I don't know who else that'd be perfect for. But that was also something we spent a bit of time on when I was traveling back and forth from GGBY to up here to whatever. Steve's in Nevada and I was in California and Washington's up here. And Steve helped me build that. And it worked. Not every idea I have works. And so I was pretty happy. I really gambled on moving up my stuff up here and it was better than I hoped. So a lot of the year went to transitioning. So in 2022, I built a new website and I had a little code custom made for my filter so I could have it easier for you guys to find stuff. This was before the breaking gear for your book idea. I should have just summarized all the videos in a book like the Bolting Bible from the beginning. It'd be done already. But I zigzag towards moving forward. I spent a lot of energy blogging videos that would be nice in written form. Something you could just scan through five minutes. You get what the video was about. You see the graph, the chart, whatever. It's even more easy to share. Something I liked referencing when I just wanted to know the data because I don't remember it all. But it doesn't get the traction. There's no like buttons. There's no comments in there. There's no feedback in the analytics. I don't know what I did wrong with the SEO. It just doesn't get viewed. A couple hundred views just isn't worth the... I literally could have made twice as many videos. But I think the written form is so valuable. But not maybe in that form. But now we're going to do something completely hybrid and it just solves every problem I've had and I'm jacked on it. So I think about this stuff from a 20-year perspective. This is year seven, right? I'm not trying to race across some finish line for today. I'm in the game long enough to make moving to a studio slash lab just the most obvious thing I can do. To have a good website, the most obvious thing I can do. Because I'm trying to go real deep on this. My big picture goal is to answer every question anyone's ever had about their gear. Ever. If you trust your life to it, I want to answer the question. Oh, that's ambitious. Yeah, so I can't just have like a shitty lab set up and I can't... I got to have a good workflow and stuff. So I love answering questions that I have and then other questions that people have. If things go well, then Wednesday you will see this Paramotor video where we broke test a whole bunch of carabiners that break consistently 50% below their MBS, no matter how you pull it. I love that stuff and I want to do it a lot. And so I think having a good foundation helps with that. So I've been very transparent with the finances of this channel since I asked for donations. And we will get into the weeds of that in a little bit. Well, something I wasn't planning on doing, but something I think you should see is my lab. I'll start using my phone and I'll film for a minute and kind of show you what I've been doing. I think I'm going to show you because it's messy. Like so many people just put their best selves on the internet. And there's... I just want you to see like kind of what it looks like. It doesn't always look like this. But because I've been pretty busy for the last eight weeks working on my new project, life gets like this. A lot of people's stuff gets like this. I don't like showing you guys half-finished projects. I know I'll put a bolting bifle out there that's half-baked. But yeah, so let's give you a little lab tour and then I'll show you the budget. If we're going to be raw in this video, why don't we just show you everything? So you see me when you see the screen. But this is what I see when I'm looking at you guys. I don't see you guys. I see that. And so we're going to turn that off. And so it's kind of weird staying in a room talking to yourself, right? That's why it's like nice to have the feedback. This is pretty cool. I wanted to have better photos. And I have this paper here. It's going to be a light box. I want to take nicer images of different things for different videos, different thumbnails. And that is small if I'm going to do anything more than that in there. But this actually is going to be very helpful for our new project we're working on. This is an abrasion tester. Going to be. Joe helped me get so far on this. And I have somebody else maybe helping me take it over the finish line. But things like this, they're easy if you have 20 grand to throw at a project. But if you're trying to just cowboy it, these things take a lot of energy of mind, a lot of mental energy since I don't have the money to just throw at things. The idea is this will spin controlled exactly how I want. Just using Arduino. You know that requires code, right? Anyways, and then this will spin and we will have an edge right here. So it will rub. And these are variable weights. This slides up and down. And this is something I'm going to do quite a few tests on. I'm very excited about this. And these will be like long, long tests that take like weeks to do. Glacier Black has some really cool ropes out. And this is, I think, the Newt. And we are testing a whole bunch of things for him because they're high tech 8 mil ropes as canyoneering ropes develop. And it's interesting to see what goes into the manufacturing process as I get more of an insight on this than just reverse engineering this stuff. It's nice to actually work with the people who are making this stuff and the decisions they make. This is interesting. You see all the fuzzies? This is, I think, a rope spin a few seasons down a canyon. The fuzzies, Technora, the Dyneema looks perfectly fine. So I just the material science, we're going to get pretty nerdy about material science. Edge, I still need to replumb my hydraulics in there because they slip a little and they don't hold the pressure the way I want. So that's why it's a one full wonder. Just trying to grind my crack over here where I want once I test this piton scar, we're going to test what gear works best in this. Then I want to make it bigger. And so I'm trying to figure out how to grind that out. Steve pounded a piton in there until it rounded it out. So go, Steve. We have some basalt plates. We have some sandstone plates because we're going to test a lot of cams. And just general file, metal on metal. And that holds really well if I just want something consistent, depending on how the rocks held. The end of the video will show you why and what we're testing and how these three are very different. That's a Z4. This is a C4 and how very different these two things are. That'll be the end of the video for the email people. Somebody sewed their own loops and they wanted me to test them. I don't do that for everybody. Please don't request it. This is the rope that broke in the Seneca rock accident of the video we made. And this is the part that broke about a foot away from there. And so I'm trying to decide what to do with that. If I just want to pull on it. If there's more to it, I want. But that's here. That's that. 1000 Hertz load cell. The laptop. That's all stuff you've seen. As far as this goes, these hold in the hydraulics and the load cells. And the stuff is all under here. And it's just worked so well. These two arborist bullies have have done well. Climbing Taiwan sent me some shackles because it's very hard to break bolts. And he's breaking bolts. And he found that these actually performed really well. Because you end up breaking the quick links or whatever you put on there. This is a chemical test for to see if it's what type of stainless it is. And that's really cool. We'll be exploring hollow drill bits. If you can drill around a bolt that's being stubborn and you want to reuse the hole. There's a science and art to it. But that requires time. My ceiling is falling and I have to put that back up. And it's just life. So some of these have made it into a short video or long form videos. But there's still quite a few pieces in here. And it's nice to have kind of a pile of these to pull from. So this is a Climtec perma draw. And somebody was making some of their own. Because, you know, if you're making a lot and you have the ability. If you're using a lot. So I think they made a version of this. And so this is stuff people send me. And it sits here for longer than I want it to. And I might have a solution to prevent that from now on. Oh, sorry, Renato. Damn it. He's been waiting so patiently for me to test those. This is interesting. These are cryo-freezed. These are like negative 300 degrees. And it's supposed to line up all the molecules and stuff. And we're going to find out if that and this break stronger than normal. So Tebow on Instagram throws all this stuff. And this is a very interesting episode. But again, I don't want to film that or break it till I can film it. This. This stuff is enegra. So Dyneema is polyethylene on steroids. This is polypropylene on steroids. And so this might be some pretty amazing stuff in the future. That you see in a lot of ropes in 10 years. And so it's kind of cool to see it early on and get to test some of it. SK99 Max. This is the really, really premium Dyneema. And I want to really explore more of that. And Canyon Zone has these hangers that are something you can put your rope directly into. And they're welded. And it's just an interesting thing. So I wanted to test those and he sent those. Meet Woody. These gloves are because he's dirty and I need to get sweatpants on him. But I want to do different ways of connecting him to things using the drop tests. He kind of sits a little awkward on here because center. Center is here. It works if it was if I was pulling dead center. But if I want to test harnesses. That's that's a great start. And my arborist friend Corey hooked me up with this. And that was great. This is the spunk rope that shredded on past the Peton Pete's team on El Capitan. And I can't get it to break weird. And so it kind of just sat there. That's a small insight into maybe a quarter of my world. There's there's more. There's more we'll go into later in the video. But let's talk about money because that's always awkward. And I like doing stuff like that on the Internet. So yeah, I started asking for donations when I started break testing stuff, because I was like, that's when things got expensive. Otherwise, I was just showing you how to rig a high line. Like I already was doing the stuff, whatever. But I wanted to break more and more. And well, now you see what I'm into. But when I asked for donations, I felt like it was only right to be transparent about where the money's going. And you can see I'm making videos. You can see I'm working my ass off. But still, I have a sour taste in my mouth from religion and donating a lot to churches back in the day. So I want to if I ask for money to be very transparent where that money went. Let's start with the income income. So you understand context. The Patreon money is $1 per episode or $2 an episode. Some people do $3 an episode, and it's amazing. And I had about $300 at the beginning of 2022. This budget, by the way, is January to December of 2022. Yes, I do know it's September 2023. I'm stoked I got it done before my extended tax deadline was not over yet. So now that it's done, I can give you these numbers. Usually I do this on January 1st. Patreons, I had 600 patrons after the Big Wall Course came out because I was really pushing to have more patrons because I needed it really bad to move here. And so all of that kind of came together. The Big Wall Course was more of the why or more of a call to action. If I don't beg for money, I don't get as much money. I hate that. I would love to just never beg for money again, which is what the secret is for that. You can see if you want to sign up for the emails. Please don't make it to the end of this video without signing up for the emails. You can always unsubscribe if you felt like I was spamming you on something. Anyways, $28,227. And that was more than the $18,000 the year prior. So that averaged $2,352 a month. It actually was more like $1,500 a month. And then it ramped up to like $3,000 or $4,000 a month by the end of the year. And because I got most of that chunk at the end after the Big Wall thing. So the reason I like the patron thing, I actually hate the platform Patreon. Which is also I'm fixing with my secret. What I like is I know that I have a relatively consistent amount of money coming in every month. So I know what I can do because I'm always filming or planning to film things one, two, three, six months in advance. And so I'm projecting what energy I can exert on that project, knowing what money's coming in. And so that's why the patron thing's great. One-time donations are also great. And I hate subscription stuff, right? I get it. So the one-off $20 donations, or sometimes people donate a hundred bucks and they just want to check and be done with it. And it's almost the same thing as having a patron, right? If I put out a hundred videos. So the one-time donations was $10,590 and the year prior was $27,000. And the reason was, is because I was doing a lot of drop tower videos and raising money for the drop tower, which I can still use. It's still there, but actually it was able to do it on a tree near my house. And that is actually really nice to be able to just kind of like work out here, work out there, work in here. Because I built that tower, I knew how to do it on the tree, which costs a thousand bucks, 1,500 bucks. I had to go through that journey to get to that journey. And then I want the dream. We're going to put stuff out in the universe and indoor drop tower. Because I don't know if you know, but it rains 400 days a year up here. As I often joke on the channel, 200% of your donations go back into the channel. You can see that the expenses were $47,000. Let's go into those. Labyrinth was $500 a month at Larry's and that included that massive drop tower. So that was really awesome. He was really, really a helpful stage of this journey. So I appreciate you, Larry. You're watching this. And then the rent that we rented for this space was the other part of that. So the how not to part of this rent is $1,300 a month because I was looking at $2,000 a month places. And I ended up getting way more value out of this. Software, website, and subscription stuff. Wix, domains. I have like 15 domains. Adobe, et cetera. $1,540. Editors. People I've hired online. I tried. 2,500 bucks. It helped. I learned actually quite a few things. I'm glad I did it. But I could teach a climber how to edit faster than I could teach a good editor how to climb. You got to understand like the culture, the question you're answering, how to communicate the science in the best way. Because it's what you want to know. I can show you the 10 keystrokes on Premiere in an hour and you pretty much would get it. But you got to be sitting here. It's like an in-person thing is what I found. And it's nice to know that's how it works. It's going to work for me. Luckily, I live in a populated enough area of people who do this kind of thing that I should be able to get a person like that. I spent about $3,800 having my website designed by somebody who's good at it. I wasn't trying to bite that off. Andrea was super helpful in helping make a mock-up of what we wanted to look and feel like. And then he implemented everything. And so I think he did a great job. I think the price was reasonable. The filter thing, the custom coding, what I got for $5,000 was a good price. I probably could have paid $10,000 and had somebody who was better at doing it. I spent a lot of time on it. It's okay. The filter works. I mean, you can go to hownotto.com and see it right now. Like just standard blog categories didn't quite cut it. And so I wanted a video that met like, do you want to see drop tests? Just a whole thing of drop tests. Do you want to see bolt tests? Because we have bolt drop tests. Do you want to see ones with Bobby? And because we have bolt drop tests with Bobby, but they're not all like that. So it would be nice to be able to filter it all out. The filter functions. The problem is it's hard to put 400 videos you've already made on the website while you're trying to make a hundred more in a year and blog and keep up with those. So I've more or less did okay blogging as I went on videos that deserved it. And we did okay back blogging what we could. I think a combination of the new project I'm working on, the Breaking Gear Fear book being a better solution. I will eventually have a written form of everything I've done. Never judge how somebody's doing on the internet based on what they put on the internet. I put the best stuff I've got on the internet. There is a thousand failures and things I feel like I'm not doing right happening behind the scenes. Life is real for everybody. Moving the lab, not me, not me moving up here, but actually going down and grabbing all this stuff and coming up here and going to Nevada several times was $2,832. Travel for filming stuff. I went back and forth to the lab. Cost per video, not that much. Went to Iceland and we got quite a few good videos. That was awesome. Moab and Yosemite. Now I put that in there just because it's an expense. Yeah, it's fun. I filmed the whole time. Is it work? Is it play? That's always been a debate, but I'm spending more than I'm getting donations. So whatever. I just like to throw the number in there. Nobody's paying for me to go to Cancun and sit on my ass for a week. Lab gear and filming expenses. Five grand. I break more stuff on accident than I break I think on purpose. It was also nice to set up the Slack Snap, whatever .0 I had, the mobile version where I could do like seven people pulling. And this is where we discovered a 5-to-1 was basically the best option. And we ended up... So I had created that pulley system that we're able to use in Iceland and other places where you have a mobile solution for it, which is opening up a lot of doors. And I might actually be able to put a winch on the back of the 5-to-1 as long as I got a fuse and know what things are going to break out and I can test bolts and real rock a lot easier without having to pull out the hydraulics. As far as bolt break tests and the bolt requests go, I do that in batches and I will always do that in batches because it's so much work to go and take the hydraulics somewhere and pre-install a bunch of gluons and then do everything. But anyways, that's why I'm still putting out the Nevada limestone bolt videos. We did like 50. And editing them is actually tricky. But I'd like to incorporate other things like what's happening in Thailand and with the trail, like making the morphable value. Rabbit trail. Sorry, I do that. I got the 1000 Hertz load cell instead of just using the crane skills. And the 10,000 Hertz load cell was great for like drop tower stuff, figuring out how fast you need a load cell to be. But I wanted a slow one because then you get a live graph and that's why we're able to see the graph and I can actually see what's happening as I'm pulling. I will get something maybe for a screen that's next to the sample so you can see the number go up as I see the value in that. I have to figure that out. I think universal testing machine is going to be the next investment this year. But the kind I want is like 100 grand. I'm too dirtbag for that. So maybe find a used one. But then hopefully Instron will work with me because like, oh, I mean, it's pretty good advertising. I really would hate to pay full price for something they're getting one hell of a commercial on. Slack snap 5.0, the machine here. Steve put in so much work. I paid him, but way underpaid him. Metal's not cheap. We end up going with steel on this so we can go with a thinner gauge and getting away with the size we were doing. The aluminum always made me nervous. It flexed. Aluminum was the last machine. $29.83 for a machine that should probably cost $30,000 if I was like, make me this. Oh, I can only dream. Someday, maybe. Cameras and audio. The nice camera I have now, so worth it. I was able to split the cost with Andrea and so I was able to get a very nice camera for only five grand. The Spratt class, $1,875. And so I got my Spratt level one. It was nice to get a feel for that world to better understand that stuff. And 2023s, that budget's not in here. I didn't spend a lot of money, but I focused more of my energy on learning. The best investment you can make that is never going to be taxed and you have with you forever that pays the best dividends is knowledge. And so the better I can get this, the better the channel will be for the rest of the channel's life, right? You can throw $10,000 at an idea and you might get a handful of videos out of it. But the more I know, the better the content will be for you guys. And it's not that I know everything, but I know how to interview better. I know how to edit better. I know how to communicate better. I know how to do the short forms. Like just, it gets better the more I know. And the Spratt class was a step in that direction. General business expenses, running an LLC in a business. You're just like, holy crap, 2387. So that adds up to $47,000 for about 100 videos. There's about 80 evergreen videos of last year. But about, you know, I make like 20 and then they're like Monday updates and they eventually get unlisted. But short form too, we have about 50 short forms. Anyways, that's less than $500 a video for what we're doing here. It's like pretty good. Personal income, painting, zero, which is a big step. I was a painting contractor for 20 years. I was making good money. But you know, it's painting and I love doing this. And so it was kind of a big step for me to stop doing that because I believe in this. And the thing that I'm going to talk about after we cut off the public version of this is just going to solve, it's going to solve a lot of problems. Personal income, Google AdSense. So ad revenue, $25,450. Not bad for a niche channel. If you're just making silly videos, $25,000, pretty awesome. But $25,000 doesn't pay for the content. That's why the donations is such an essential part. Extreme gear. So we'll get it out in a minute. Rakitaki's, lifesaver. They helped sponsor the Big Wall Course. That was about six grand. And then 10% of what you buy supports me and you get 10% off if you go to rakitaki.com slash hownotto. That's why I plug those. And I like the rakitakis. I literally just use it on the Big Wall. I'm literally taking it in the cave we're going in because it's a dome and goes around the corner and radio waves will bounce in there. 9703 is pretty helpful. I really like Bryce, one of the owners I talk to often. That was unexpectedly nice to have and work with them and for it to work and it being a sponsor that doesn't be like, oh, Black Diamond sponsored me and so now it's awkward to talk about like a Mammut product or something. Swag, $36.79. It's pretty good. Usually for a YouTuber, there is a lot of streams of income that come in that add up to making a living. But 40 grand a year is about $4 an hour. So 40 grand a year is fine-ish. That's technically all I live on. But then I end up having to put another 10 into the channel itself. So overall, 2022 was a loss and I use the word loosely. I feel like my life is way better. Money is not everything. As far as 2023 goes, since we are nine months into it now, the patron thing actually kept picking up. And so now we're doing about, in donations, about $5,000 a month. That is a breath of fresh air and that's really awesome because I can run pretty much everything I need to run off $5,000 the way I do it, especially now that the lab is done and the abrasion tester is more or less just getting that coded. Even if I pay somebody maybe a grand or two worth of coding. So the donation thing has been wonderful. What I can live on now is about $4,000-ish a month, sometimes $5,000, depending on... Well, I'm getting into the extreme gear thing in a minute. That is super sustainable enough. I'm not going backwards. And I was able to actually put money back into the YouTube checking account. And about two months ago, I actually finally hit my zero minimum balance in my checking account. And if you don't know what that is, let me give you a little budget secret. Have a month's worth of bills in your checking account so you can pay them before you get your money and you're not stressed. So yeah, it's a couple grand, right? In a checking account, you're not going to get that much in a savings account. In interest, it's okay. It makes life a lot less stressful when you have a nice healthy zero balance in that checking account that you can... It's called cashflow. I finally hit that for the first time and was making about what I was spending over more about two months ago. I finally made it. And this is where the secret comes in. But let me share the extreme gear thing. So let's start at the beginning. January of 2022, I started promoting extreme gear. John Ferroni helped me get the ropes I needed for the Dan Osman rope swing. Super helpful guy. Cave Exploration Society. And I was like, oh, that is a weird name to promote if you're going to start selling climbing gear. And so I came up with extreme gear and he couldn't get .com, so we got .org. And I was like, okay, extremegear.org. And it's really Cave Exploration Society, but it was like, if we're going to make a climbing store, that's what it was. I don't own any of it. I got 10% if you bought something from there. And there's caveats that if there's something on sale or we donated something or whatever, like I wouldn't get those commissions. So full price items, 10%. It was simple enough. The starting something from scratch is like the momentum phase. So let's call that three months of growing pains. The website was built on Squarespace and it was really hard to make pretty. And he was doing it all himself, right? And so Andrea would help us like try to give us tips on what would make it look nicer. Squarespace was not the platform to do it on. And so we ended up losing probably nine months on that. And so when people show up, the conversion rate's low because it didn't look great. And that's no one's fault. That's just, we didn't know. And when John is home, he would be pretty helpful. You'd see me in emails and stuff. He was helpful. So we kept going and I kept promoting Extreme Gear as an exclusive thing on the channel. And it was in 122 videos. So he eventually moves over to Shopify because you can integrate it into under the YouTube thing and Instagram. You could like buy it on the platform. If you would feel like we talk about cams, it's like, oh, this makes a lot more sense. And there's still a disconnect though, just from me promoting a store, not touching the gear. The store's on the East Coast. I never saw it, right? I just, I see the website. So there's a disconnect between the manufacturers, the gear and all this stuff. So my videos all were doing over 100,000 views in December of 2022, January, 2023. And everything was going really well. Extreme Gear with the new website looked so much nicer, started to do better. So this year of 2023, Extreme Gear has supported me about two to $3,000 a month. And that is a great next step from the $949 I got in 12 months in 2022. The unfortunate part is Extreme Gear no longer supports me because I no longer want to promote it. This was my decision to no longer promote it because the customer service started to fall off. I don't know why, but I started to get a lot of messages of, like a core problem is if he would sell stuff that he didn't have in stock because drop shipping is a thing. But the supply chain is so unreliable that if you sell something and then you have to wait for it to come for you to send it or send it and this part isn't reliable. But then if he's not communicating, like it's kind of like exacerbates that problem which is already a problem. And that's cool. If you want to run a store like that, that's cool. I just like too many people are complaining. People said things were getting shipped really slow. And if they were willing to wait, they would buy stuff to support me, which I can't believe how many people bought some from Extreme Gear to support me. I appreciate that. Like just to support me when you can get something on sale, typically if you're chasing all the sales because nothing often was really ever on sale because like there isn't enough margin for him to give me 10% and knock something off 20% or 15% and chase all these Labor Day sales, right? So John went on two extended trips and I started getting a lot of emails. People weren't getting their stuff in the mail and that's because he didn't have a really good system on getting stuff in the mail. He had somebody supposedly putting stuff in a box but there was zero communication and via email. They didn't touch the emails. And so if something wasn't sent fully because they didn't have it all in stock, you know, the lady didn't know what to do. And so he didn't have a system in place. And so, and he was in a cave. He was in another country. Like it was just started. All these emails came in. I'm trying not to sugarcoat it. I'm trying not to throw anybody under the bus but I refunded a bunch of people a bunch of my own money because I don't like what happened and that made me quite upset. And I was like, this is not what I'm promoting. I'm not, I don't wanna associate my brand with that because I'm trying to do something with this. And so I decided to end it with Extreme Gear which is a bummer after 20 months, 122 videos and about 30 million views. But just like everything else I've done on this channel I could not get to the next step without the previous step. You can't look at the last brick and say that's what built the house. It was all the bricks that built the house. So that chapter is closed and how to communicate Extreme Gear no longer supports me in a efficient manner is weird and awkward because it's so ingrained in my audience's mind that supports me. And you can buy from there if you want. The website still exists. He didn't handle it well. It wouldn't be such a big deal if he just was like that's a bummer but okay and just continued on with the store because that's kind of what I just continue on with it. But he just ghosted me and he still owes me money and he owes some other people money that I'm finding out and I'm still getting messages every day of people who have partial orders filled and I'm not getting any emails and I had to like get Shopify to take my face off of his website because he wasn't doing it and so it's like this really awkward thing and I'm just like don't want to make a big deal about it on the internet but I want to make sure people understand Extreme Gear no longer supports me. And I'm going to move on with my life and that's where the rest of this video is going to continue on what I'm going to do. Thanks for watching. Click this and please go sign up for the emails to watch the next part of this video.