Transcription
So, it's been almost two months now since I published my "How to Become a 37-Year-Old Broke Loser" video, and I owe everyone a bit of an update. I was originally planning on doing a much more polished update video, but in the interest of actually getting something published, I'll just do this much less scripted video.
For starters, let's talk about my financials. In my last update video, I said that my revenue for the month of November was on track to be about $1,000. The final value for November that actually went into my bank account was $977. But what you're probably wondering is, what was my revenue for the month of December, the month that my one-hour video started to go viral?
For the month of December, the total revenue was $745.31. The revenue breakdown was $4,530 from watch page ads, $143 from Super Thanks donations, $155 from people who have YouTube Premium, $257 from live stream super chats, and $173 from memberships. It's worth noting that all of the numbers here are in Canadian dollars, and the figures listed for the Super Thanks and live stream super chats are after Google takes their 30% cut.
Considering my living expenses of $1,600 a month, that gives me a net cash flow of $5,852 for the month. Now, let's do a review of my balance sheet. On my first personal credit card, I now have a balance of $50. On my second personal credit card, I now have a balance of about $30. On my business credit card, my balance is currently down to about $270.
In terms of assets, in my personal account, as of about the end of January, my balance was about $1,700. In my business account, I now have a balance of about $700. So, considering the sum of the assets and liabilities, my liquid net worth is now around $2,050. I should also mention that I've already had the root canal done, so the cost of that is already considered in these figures. This means that the immediate financial urgency of my situation has now been resolved, and you guys can stop giving me money now.
When I originally posted that video, I wasn't quite sure how many views it would get. I thought maybe it could get around 10,000 views or so on the low end, but hopefully at least make enough ad revenue to put me closer to being cash flow positive. I figured that there was a small chance that it might get a lot more than that, and it looks like that actually happened.
I told people not to give Super Thanks donations in the video, and to be fair, I did kind of expect that I might get a couple small ones. I didn't quite expect to get so many, though, and I really appreciate everyone who gave one. A number of people gave well over $100, and I think that's a huge amount of money to give someone who you barely know on the internet. Some people even gave a Super Thanks despite the fact that they're not in the best financial position themselves.
The $75,000 didn't actually go into my bank account until about a couple weeks ago, after the 22nd of January. So, until just a couple weeks ago, I continued to be even more broke than I was in the numbers that I showed in the original video. As of today, the month of January has ended, so I also have the revenue numbers from the month of January as well.
For the month of January, the tentative revenue for the entire month was $6,193.19. This figure is not finalized, and it's not in my bank account yet. It won't be until sometime after February 21st. Now, looking forward at the current revenue, so far in the month of February, the revenue is down substantially since I haven't produced many videos.
So, what gives? Why haven't I been making more videos? Well, that's a great segue into giving an update on the current rent eviction situation. The first thing that I should mention is, in my last update video, I said that my N13 merits eviction hearing was on February 19th. But on January 8th, I got a notice that the February 19th hearing was canceled, and instead, I was going to be pulled into a case management hearing.
There are still currently about 30 other people in this building who are still fighting the rent evictions, and the point of this case management hearing was to ask the question: should all these hearings be held together? I learned that in this much earlier case management hearing, which is almost a month earlier than I was anticipating, there was actually a possibility that they could adjudicate on certain preliminary issues that would later have an effect on any N13 merits hearing.
So, for the last half of January, I was kind of scrambling to get my evidence together in what I thought was a much shorter deadline because I really had no idea how many topics they would be reviewing at this case management hearing. I didn't want to get caught off guard and have them rule on something that I didn't have evidence prepared for. Overall, the case management hearing only lasted about three hours.
As it stands now, my understanding is that another N13 merits hearing will be scheduled for the future. During this hearing, we'll argue whether it's necessary to actually evict the tenants to complete the proposed repairs and also whether the proposed repairs are actually in good faith or not. As of today, the next hearing has not been scheduled yet, but my understanding is that it will not be scheduled before March 31st.
So, I'm still good to live here for at least another couple months, possibly more than that. It depends on when the hearing is scheduled. Now, for the next section, I'm going to respond to some random comments. This video generated thousands of comments, and my mind is just swimming with ideas for responses and new video topics that I could do. But if I actually just sit down and try to make a high-quality response to some of these, then I'll just never get anything done.
Someone commented, "Is this video AI generated? Well done, very realistic. Why do you talk like an AI?" I actually got a surprisingly high number of responses from people who thought the video was AI, and I think that's actually kind of amusing. But in another way, it's actually kind of scary. In the future, we probably will have to deal with AI-generated sob stories from people asking for money on the internet.
I think the primary reason that the video might look like it's AI is because of how much work I put into it. For example, right now I'm pausing and not enunciating things, using "um." The total time it took me to produce this video was approximately one month. The total recording time of the video was about 18 hours, and if you go back and watch the video, you'll notice that my beard is slowly growing out throughout the video.
Another Easter egg is you may notice that at one point it looks like my mustache has been shaved off, and that was on the day that I actually had the root canal. I probably spent about a week in total writing the script for that video, and for many days in a row, I would take about 100 lines of the script and then edit it in the morning, and then spend about two or three hours speaking off the day script later in the afternoon.
I would often repeat a sentence over and over again. In my natural speech, I use a lot of "ums" and "ahs," and I often mispronounce things. I figure if thousands of people are going to watch this video, I might as well just say a word over again to pronounce it correctly. Even in this video, I'm still probably going to edit it down quite a bit to make it not so painful to watch. If you really want to listen to how painful it is to hear me speak, you can go watch my live streams.
Okay, for the next comment: "As a student right now, this is kind of scary but also maybe slightly reassuring. American CS major here, I am scared for my future." Now, for me, that video is primarily about entrepreneurship, and this is something that I probably should have done a better job of emphasizing in the video. Personally, I plan to never go back into the corporate tech world at any cost.
But if you read many of the comments in that video, you can find a lot of people who really do enjoy it. I also went to school with a number of people who said that their corporate experience was a lot more pleasant than mine. So, there's definitely a way to make a life out of it, and as long as you don't have grandiose and unrealistic ambitions like I do, then it might suit you very well.
Having said that, even if you do plan to do a 9-to-5 career, there's still probably a few nuggets of wisdom you can take away from my video in order to maximize your career. Okay, on to the next comment: "1 hour, 13 minutes, and 25 seconds of excuses, blaming everyone and everything imaginable for your personal and financial failure. The several hours, if not days, that you spent recording and editing this video could have been instead spent getting up to date on the latest in tech and applying for jobs. But nope, let's go on YouTube and soapbox about 'woe is me' instead."
I do see a few comments with a sentiment like this, and one of the things that I almost think I could make a video topic about is the fact that people seem to often confuse excuses and explanations. For example, I can say to you that if you try to light this match underwater, the match will go out. You could say, "Robert, you're just making excuses. You need to try harder. Haven't you ever heard of a magnesium torch? A magnesium torch can light a fire underwater." And that's definitely correct, but it doesn't change what happens when you try to light a match underwater.
Now, to be fair, I did provide some justifications as to why I didn't take a 9-to-5 job, and you maybe could label that as excuses. But the main thing of value that I'm trying to produce by putting this video out there is to provide some anecdotes that explain what happens when you try to do certain things. If I posted a video about a secret treasure map that had directions to a giant pile of gold in some national park somewhere, most people would consider that valuable because you could just follow the instructions in the map and then find a giant pile of gold.
That's very valuable. Unfortunately, I don't have any such map, but what I do have is the opposite. I have a map of places where if you try to dig for gold, you will find absolutely nothing and go broke. So, the next comment was, "Seems like you forgot that pretty much all successful consultants start in existing companies to gain experience and a better network before going out on their own. Consulting is mostly about having good connections and a built-up reputation in your industry."
Now, for this comment, that is definitely correct. It is all about networking. In fact, the best consulting leads that I had were almost all through network connections. Now, during my co-op placements in my undergraduate degree, I did actually work at five different companies, and at each of those companies, I did my best to network around. I drank all the Kool-Aid about how to give proper handshakes and how to introduce yourself.
Unfortunately, most of the people that I met at all these companies were just other software developers, and it shouldn't be too surprising that full-time software developers aren't exactly the most networked people. Most of them only have other software developers as friends. I did keep in touch with some of these people for as much as a few years, but over time, after not really seeing these people face to face for many years, most of these contacts just dried up.
The other part of this comment says, "For most good gigs, you don't call them; they call you." In my experience, that was absolutely correct. The amount of effort that it takes to do sales on a cold lead is extremely high, and in my experience, those were also the worst quality leads. However, for a few of the contracts that I did, the way the engagement was initiated was they would call or email me, and I could tell right away from the initial conversation that the sale had already happened before I had picked up the phone.
Okay, onto the next comment: "The most striking observation I have in watching Robert's story is that he should have gotten a regular job in software or IT and stayed on that career path until having a hardcore specialization that may have allowed for a solo shift, but only after having a large W of cash to coast on. Being a consultant or entrepreneur is not for everyone, and it helps to have a huge amount if you're in a large metro area with a big tech sector."
For this comment, I did post a response that you can see here, but I thought this comment was worth highlighting because there's really a lot to say there. Now, I should mention that I'm not exactly trying to argue with the comment here because this comment is definitely not wrong, but it's also much more complicated than that.
In my experience of having tried both entrepreneurship and working with big tech companies, I think it could potentially be a huge trap. I think if you go and work at a big company like Google for, say, 10 years, you will learn a lot about how to build highly scalable systems. But this will also spoil you quite a bit because you'll have access to Google's build systems and deployment systems. If you work at a company like this for 10 years, it's really going to distort your perception of how easy it is to run a company.
With the benefit of hindsight, I do think that it's probably not a bad idea to go work at one of these companies for at least a year or two after graduation just to build up some cash. However, I also know a lot of people from my university days who used to have entrepreneurial ambitions. Most of those people who went into big tech companies completely disappeared from my radar afterward. I check up on some of them sometimes, and most of them don't even post to social media anymore. Most of them seem to have just become ghosts of the corporate machine, and once they go in, they don't come back out.
All right, next comment: "Honestly, dude, all those business failures at your 9-to-5 have no impact on your ability to get hired. Nobody cares that the company went bust if you can clearly show that you made a meaningful contribution there and that you have the skills to show for it." Now, a few people made comments similar to that one, and that's a topic that I want to push back on.
There were people who watched the video and I think had a favorable impression of my software development abilities. However, if you look through the comments, you can also find a lot of people who have the opposite impression. But from the audience's perspective, you really just don't know for sure unless you can hear the other side of the story. And that's exactly the point that I want to make. If you can focus your career on only associating yourself with successful projects, people won't even care what the other side of the story is.
Okay, next comment: "Funny coincidence that everyone you mention in this video seems like a bad person who misled you or mistreated you. A nice guy trying to make cool software and build community." Now, for this comment, I do have a few relevant things to say about this topic. The first is that I definitely do consider some of my consulting leads to have been good. If you skip around randomly on the video, it's quite likely that you'll stop on a part where I'm explaining where something bad happened.
For the good contracts, I did mention them quite briefly in the story, but I deliberately didn't go into detail. One of the main reasons for that is that the better contracts were actually building something useful and economically productive, so I have to be a bit more careful about the confidentiality there. Furthermore, these businesses still exist and didn't fail spectacularly like the other ones did.
The second reason is that the good contracts are also a lot more boring. There's really not much to describe other than the low-level technical details of the project itself, which were, of course, confidential. In general, for the other leads I had that didn't work out, I would say there was only one client I had who I would refer to as a bad person. For most of the other ones, I would just refer to them as people who were unprofessional or clueless entrepreneurs who had no idea what they were doing.
Okay, next comment: "I think knowing how to vet people and opportunities is an important skill set too. You wasted too much time on useless leads." I think for the most part, I was able to dodge some of the worst leads, but this commenter really does raise a good point. Knowing how to vet leads is extremely important. Unfortunately, what I learned is that the bar is extremely high—so high, in fact, that I've come to the conclusion that it's borderline impossible to tell if a lead is going to work out or not.
I think if you really want to survive in this business, you have to adapt your business model to be prepped for any one of your clients to go under at any moment. The IoT company that I wasted time chasing around in court had a very impressive board of directors. Both of the founders had seemingly very impressive resumes. The company had existed for years and had cash flow, and the chair of the board of directors had a net worth of approximately half a billion dollars and supposedly all kinds of connections high up in the U.S. government.
The facade that they put up was enough to fool me, and other than having tighter invoicing terms, I don't really have a lot of advice on how to vet these kinds of startups. The only other thing that I can think of is something like an extensive background check or a credit check, and I'm not even sure that would have raised anything in this case.
Okay, so that's it for this video update. I actually had been working on another long-form video, but I got interrupted when I found out about my case management hearing being rescheduled for the 27th of January. So, the next thing will be to focus on the long-form scripted content and hopefully get my net worth away from zero.
As for the rent eviction, I'll continue waiting to hear when my next hearing date will be, which supposedly won't be before March 31st. So, for now, I can continue to live in my apartment for a few more months, but I have to start making lots more videos; otherwise, everyone will forget that I exist.