Electrician U
Electrician U is a learning and teaching platform that explains all components, theory, and ideology behind being an electrician. If you’re looking to figure out "what is a capacitor, how does induction work, how do I bend 3/4" rigid conduit" – all of these topics will be covered. This is for electricians or anyone in the electrical trade. Also check out ElectricianU.com for more content.
Electrician U
An Electrician's Journey on Social Media
Ever wondered how a sparky with a knack for simplifying electrical theory evolved into a social media sensation with millions of followers? Dive into our electrifying conversation with Dustin, where we unwrap the essential tools and tactics for constructing a buzzing online presence in the electrician realm. We spill the beans on the realities of audience building, the unrelenting grind behind the glam, and how to maintain relevance in an industry where the algorithms switch up faster than a blown fuse.
Strap on your tool belt, because we're getting down to the nuts and bolts of content creation and the financial juggling act of keeping the lights on while pursuing digital dreams. I, Drake, open up about the transition from handling wires to weaving stories that capture and educate a global audience. The thrill of netting that first major sponsor deal is just the beginning; we chat about the intricate dance of retaining creative control and the shift from electrician to trusted online educator, sharing our voltage of experiences for those plugged into the influencer circuit.
But it's not all smooth currents and high voltage victories. How does an electrician-turned-influencer deal with the shock of negativity and the occasional jolt from trolls? We get real about the challenges that come with a public persona, the importance of authenticity with brand partnerships, and the resilience required to keep your personal fuse box from short-circuiting. Tune in for an episode charged with practical wisdom for content creators in any field, amplified by our journey from the toolshed to the trending feed.
Want to learn more about becoming an electrician or mastering the craft? Visit ElectricianU.com for courses, resources, and everything you need to succeed!
Welcome to the Electrician U podcast. I am Dustin, I am Drake, and today we are going to talk about building a following. Having a following Is it something you actually want to do? And maybe spilling some beans on the back end of it, the things that y'all don't ever get to see some beans on the back end of it, the things that y'all don't ever get to see.
Dustin:So the reason why I was doing this is I'm doing a business course right now and part of the course is like the marketing side of business, and for every business that I've ever had, I've had to embrace, you know, Instagram, Facebook, all these things and eventually you, you build a following. Maybe intentionally, maybe not, but to be able to have a following and curate a group of people around you means that you're going to probably have more business. So in today's age, you have to have an Instagram, you have to have a website, you have to be producing content, because that's just where the attention of the world is at. So, before you get out and start posting all these things and building a following around yourself, I wanted to talk about it, especially with Drake, because Drake is my editor but producer. He's been kind of side by side through this whole thing. So his perspective on everything we've grown. We have like I don't know, like 100 million views on YouTube and we got 700,000 subscribers on YouTube.
Dustin:Yeah, and like across all the socials, I think we got like 1.5 million people. Now, that's not a brag, but that's just. It's been eight years of us getting to this point.
Drake:It's been a grind yeah.
Dustin:Yeah, Non-stop, and it's taken more than one person to do yes. If you're somebody out there that's thinking like I really want're just an electrician and you want to like record what you're doing. I know most of the influencers, like the larger ones. There's tons of new influencers that are coming up, but I get to frequently talk to these people and you have too when we're at these different events, and this is way more work and it's a way different thing than what you're picturing in your mind it is. So let's talk about just the workload alone, picturing in your mind it is.
Drake:So let's talk about just the workload alone. Yeah, just in the very beginning, no matter what, it's a grind and it's slow paced. You might get a video or a thing that pops, but so does every other millions of people doing this, so you have to rise above the noise. And even if it's the best, craziest, awesomest video in the world, the chances of it rising to the top right away is not If you don't have a lot of followers. There's not enough momentum, once the video hits, or post hits, for it to get kicked into the algorithm, to be thrown out into more people, to be seen so right away. It's a little discouraging. It's like oh, I have this awesome product, I have all this in my head, I'm going to put it on Instagram and everywhere, and you get like a like 19 views 19 views is good at first.
Drake:Yeah, yeah.
Dustin:But it's the perseverance and, yeah, the continuation. So I talk about this a lot, but my son is, uh, doing similarly to what we do. He's just doing it for gaming and he has since he was in high school he's 19 now, so probably since he was like 16 17, he's been on the same path and just the slow grind of having to be consistent and make content. And then you're doing well for a little while and then an algorithm changes or some kind of thing happens with the zeitgeist of, like, what's popular in your niche changes, and so, like the nature of what you have to do to try to keep up with that, especially if you're trying to make money off of it.
Dustin:You have to think about it, you have to study how this stuff works. You have to study human attention and what people pay attention to and what they care about. So there's there's a lot more to it, but it takes you a lot of time, a lot of consistency over a long time, to build a following. And you said, like you can have something that just pops right, like we had a video that we put out that's got like 30 million views or something like that, and while that did give us a nice swell of followers on every single platform cause it got like 10 million per platform that we put it on. That was a one-time event in eight years of doing this.
Drake:Yeah, and we and we got some followers from it, but by this point it's already in the past.
Dustin:Yeah, it's already like a year in the past too, right? Well, the nature of how content's consumed now has changed. It used to just be long form YouTube, and that was it, or pictures on Instagram, and then this whole short form vertical thing came out, and now nobody really cares about the substance length of content. Sitting there for a long time and having patience, now it's just like scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. What's what gets my attention? Flash in the pan.
Drake:The fastest amount of information I can get at once, or the laugh, yeah, yeah, who can I share this with? They know, oh, I love, love this. This reminds me of x, y and z.
Dustin:That's the content that's popping yeah, and that's changed everything about how people make content. So trying to fit things into 60 seconds or 30 seconds or three minutes you don't know how many times- dusty and I.
Drake:I'm holding a phone and he's trying to talk about a box or a type of switch, and he's halfway through his thought and it's already a minute.
Dustin:He puts your hand up and I'm like no way, at 50 seconds I put my hand up.
Drake:And so it's like go, go faster. It's like all right, and we just keep cutting the fat out of it. Yeah, and I ended up talking really fast.
Dustin:You can't breathe.
Drake:You can't say and?
Dustin:and y'all know I'm a talker, I can rant and rant and I talk too much, I over talk, I'm very expressive, but yeah, dude, it's really hard to give anything of value in 60 seconds. I could easily make some crap yeah of educational value.
Drake:There is value in humor. Oh sure of educational value. There is value in humor. Oh sure Of educational value. It's super hard to do.
Dustin:Yeah.
Drake:Just to take a step back the idea of having a following and being a influencer. I hate that word.
Dustin:Yeah.
Drake:Well, that idea like, oh, I want to be, that that's not enough, that that's not enough. If you are dedicated and strong within whatever you're doing and you have the gumption to keep going with what you want to make in, in our case, electricity, everything in electrical trades, whatever it is your son's doing gaming, I do music if you have that drive, the following will come with it. But if you really want to get that following, make sure you love what you're doing, because you got to make 1000 videos, yeah, in what you're doing oh yeah, and you, it's not gonna be a constant.
Dustin:so anything that you do that much and I mean all day, every day go work, try to film some stuff while you're at work, come home, edit, film some more Like you're talking like 20 hours.
Drake:Film yourself, editing.
Dustin:Yes, and then edit, edit that, edit everything. Yeah, but if yeah, if you don't love it, you're going to have a really hard time. Even if you do love it, you're going to have a really hard time. You time, even if you do love it, you're going to have a really hard time. You're going to go through times where you're like, why am I doing this? This sucks, I hate this. I'm not seeing results. You know I've been doing this for a year and I've got a thousand followers and I know none of the companies will sponsor me because I'm not big enough. And yeah, it can be a tumultuous thing. But you're right, like don't do this unless you like really love what you do and you see the benefit. So let's talk about that for a second though.
Drake:What's your why? Right, yeah, to be an influencer. And what you're doing. If you think you have a strong enough voice, within whatever field you're doing it in or whatever concept you're working with, then, yes, you should be heard, right. But if your why is I just want to be famous. Well, that never gets.
Dustin:No, that's see-through as hell. Yes, so for me, my why when I started doing this was because nobody else was doing it and because I was having trouble learning electrical theory and codes and things like that. Because I'm a visual person, I like analogy, I like really complex things broken down easily so that they I can understand them really easily, and so I just there was nobody doing what I was doing and I'm like I found a niche that I think a lot of other people are probably having problems with. So let me just start making videos and then, once I started doing it, all the feedback from people and interacting with all these people from around the world like charged me, you know, and I people would would be saying like, oh, you're doing a great thing, you like helping out a lot of people. I'm like fuck it, I didn't realize it was helping anybody. I was just out here making videos because I think it's cool. Um, so my why has changed over the years, but there was never a point where I wanted to be an influencer, and in fact, I hate that word. I hate when people call me an influencer. They like literally makes me throw up in my mouth a little bit. I'm a content creator, sure, but even even that, like I'm an electrician that just makes videos, I'm not out here trying to influence people. I'm not trying to like make money so that because you bought a drill that I was holding in a video, like all that stuff is so plastic and I hate it.
Dustin:But you have to understand that anything that you do that you spend a lot of time doing and you're good at, you should be able to monetize that. Whether that's just being an electrician in a field, you have to have a job. You have to get paid by some means. So if your job is working on the field, you know you're going to make money doing that and you're going to demand that your time is exchanged for money. Same thing with creating content.
Dustin:If you get to a certain level and lots of people are at this teetering level where they're like starting to really build traction here and get a following. But I still have a day job and one of these things is suffering all the time because one of these eventually has to go, yeah, yeah. And so to do that, to make that jump, monetization has to be a huge part of what the jump to being a full-time content creator often is a very. It's often the threshold that makes people not keep going or, you know, stick with their old thing, or it's the thing that makes them leave their old thing and now they're only doing this thing. And that can change your life drastically. If you're not expecting, if you're expecting a certain thing and then you get into it and you realize, oh man, this is not what I thought this was going to be.
Drake:That can be a huge reckoning yeah, it also changed throughout the few years that we've been doing this together, or actually it's been like four or five by this point yeah youtube used to pay a lot more.
Dustin:Oh yeah a lot more never consistently, though you know like they would be tens of thousands one month and a thousand the next month. You know it would just be kind of all over the place and you could never really rely on it, but it did pay, really really well.
Drake:Yeah, and so now it's a lot less than that. In general, I feel like the money is being spread through all the people, right, and then like the short form content that stuff doesn't pay at all.
Dustin:It's like pennies on the thousands of dollars, you know, yeah, or thousands of views. So the nature of it has kind of made people have to rely more on sponsorship.
Drake:Yes, because these companies will pay um and just in case there is any stigma with taking a sponsorship, you know, I I've I've watched youtube videos or other videos that they suddenly have a product and they're like and it's sponsored by so and so, and the people I'm watching with kind of like grunt or roll their eyes, it's just like well, how do you think they're getting paid? Yeah, it's kind of awesome that whenever that's happening and you see someone relatively new with a sponsor, you should feel proud of them, be like cool, they got to that point where a company is now saw value and yeah it's, uh, it's commendable, yeah, and it's, it's needed also yeah, yeah.
Dustin:I remember the first sponsorship I ever got, when I got an email and it was like a it. It was a really good chunk of money for me, like it wasn't something I could quit my day job over, but I was just like. It was a $10,000 deal for a year and I got sent a whole bunch of tools every couple of months just to talk about and do unboxings, review them and everything. But I was like dude, 10 G's, like that's just 10 G's out of nowhere, and so like was such a proud moment. I even doubted it.
Dustin:I remember I had a buddy next to me in uh, in the truck when I was going to a job and I got this email and I was like it was from a really, really reputable company and I handed it to him. I was like brothers, no way, this is real right. Like this is, this is some fake email. And he's reading it. He's like no man, like, check the dot com. Like it's coming from this is it? This is for real. That's awesome, yeah, and so that was really exciting.
Dustin:But I will tell you that there gets to be this point where you start having too many sponsors, yeah, and you have too much expected. All the time, you lose the nature of being able to just have a message and talk and do stuff whenever you want to now, and it's kind of like being an electrician if you have a boss, you you have to go right, you have things, you have people that are expecting things of you and you have to represent him yes, and do the way of things and do things the way he wants well, yeah, for sure.
Dustin:Yeah, with this it's a little different. Like I've always maintained with any sponsors that I've worked with, that, I'm me and I'm just gonna be me, and and if you got a problem with the way I speak the words I use, anything like that, we're not going to work together. So either you let me be me or we don't do work together.
Drake:I've definitely seen you shut down sponsors that are like. You need to read this script.
Dustin:Yeah, Like no, I'm not going to do that.
Drake:I'll give the information, but I'm not gonna say that super corporate sentence. Yeah, oh man, corporate writing is some of the worst oh, it's terrible, man.
Dustin:And when you, when you're dealing with sponsorships, like most of the time you're dealing with the marketing arm of these companies. Yeah, so if you get a sponsorship from, like I don't know, walmart or something like that, you're not dealing with walmart, you're dealing with whoever their social media marketing manager is or their PR company. And how these companies, how every large company, spends marketing dollars is. They have this massive chart with all these bubbles all over the screen and all every single bubble represents a type of marketing that they are going to put a certain amount of money into. So they might have billboard ads on there that they put $4 million in that bubble and that's what their spend is. And then they're going to have this little influencer bubble and it might have $5,000.
Dustin:And it's just that they most of these companies don't. There's an unparalleled relationship to what the value they see in an influencer video versus what they see on a billboard. They're wrong. I mean, in all reality they're wrong. Most of the time, nobody's paying attention to billboard ads, but they're paying attention to, like PewDiePie or one of these YouTubers holding a thing talking about the thing. This is where all the attention is, all day, every day. So a lot of these companies, especially in the trade community, they are just now starting to understand what an influencer even is, let alone having a budget to sequester for influencer marketing. So it's a. Really it's like a. It's a rough business model to be in to try to monetize a following Also from their point of view.
Drake:Like any advertising, when you spend money in advertising you don't get a direct response. You know you put an ad in the newspaper or a billboard or a commercial and then you get a little bit of an influx. You don't know how much came from that, how much right now. So it's. It's really hard to give money to an influencer and then have a direct amount of money that you just made off of that influencer. Yeah, you can't, you can't.
Dustin:I mean there are like deals and codes that you can yeah, they do make, like some of the people we worked with, they like they're. The reason they wanted to work with me is because they wanted to get traffic to a website, yeah, so they can create some kind of a tracking link. They can actually see the analytics. The numbers matter a lot to them how many likes, how many interactions, how many views and everything like that and it was awesome, yeah, but that was the reason for that. So every single partnership that I've done in the last eight years and I've worked with, I would say, every big company you can think of in our ecosystem pretty much every one of them is going to completely different. We've had to custom tailor a partnership and the money side of everything how much content we do when we do what we do We've had to cater it completely to every single company because everyone has a completely different thing that they want.
Dustin:So, like tool companies might have seasonally, they might have new tools that they drop, and so for them, they're going to want to talk about things when a tool is dropping or right before a tool drops, and it's not necessarily about getting you to go to their website to buy the tool, because they don't sell direct to customers. They're like just trying to announce, so hopefully you'll go to like Home Depot or some of these other places to go buy these things. But it's really just brand awareness over time and showing things off. There's no way you can directly correlate that. My video made someone go to cleveland, ohio's home depot to go buy this widget tool.
Drake:Yeah, and every company is different. There's some companies that are just like yeah, just do whatever you want. Here's the tool yeah, there's ones.
Dustin:Those are my favorite. I know there's some money. Here's a tool have fun, and then there's ones that we have to wait for weeks for it to go through their legal department and we have to sign stuff and we have to make sure that we can't say these type of words or wear this type of stuff or I said the word and too aggressively, and they need to change, or we didn't position their logo with enough white around the edges, and so they want us to redo.
Drake:You know yeah, that was a rough one. I, the legal department, was just like you, actually changed the logo a little bit. I was like, oh sorry, like they were bad. Yeah, they were bad. I, I did. I put a little bit more white around the box because it just didn't need to pop a little. Yeah, I needed something for something. I kind of forget by this. You didn't change their logo, you just I just added more white, added more white around it.
Drake:Yeah, there's like a very specific it has to be a corporate amount of white for real no rounded edges. That was the other thing too. I was like all right yeah, even to get.
Dustin:So this is something you don't I mean, you hear about but you don't get. Like you're not on the calls and dealing with the the money side of things, but like dealing with some of these companies. There are companies that I've worked with that it has taken 18 months to get paid for a contract that we'd already signed yeah, and then six months to figure out what they actually want, what products they want to talk about, because at first, like, a lot of the partnerships were companies that there's a specific reason why they're calling. Another one is like we met them at some kind of an event and they were just like holy crap, yeah, like I've seen your videos, I'd love to do work with you. Let's just pay you and we'll figure out later what to do. Some of the companies it's like a zoom call and a check immediately and a contract signed overnight and it's like super easy and smooth.
Dustin:But the bigger the companies, the more worldwide they are, the more that you have teams of lawyers that are looking at everything and constant negotiation back and forth and redlining stuff out of contracts, and that's the other thing too I guess like is an important thing to know if you're like if you are an influencer or you're somebody that is actually making content right now, understand everything that you do is negotiable. Don't sign a contract from somebody that wants you to do a thing without you putting your piece. You can say no to things. You can say no, I'm not comfortable with this, I want this, or like that's nowhere near enough money for me to do you want 40 videos for 500? Like no way, bro. I'm sorry, but like, just understand, everything is negotiable with these companies, and I think, like moving past that, one thing that's really important to think about is I'm watching who the influencers are now. So like now that content creation in the electrical sphere is a safe thing to do, there's tons of people doing a lot of it, yep yeah.
Dustin:So, like now, it's not a niche anymore. Now it's just flooded with people and, um, I've been able to observe and I've been able to meet a lot of these people and I will say almost every single person is cool as hell. How they appear on camera is exactly who they are in person and they're people that you would love to sit down and have a beer with, because I've done it and they're all great yeah, like many times, most of these people have their phone number, they have mine, we text, we call life, stuff, so that's that's all.
Dustin:Just to say that I've gotten to see and meet a lot of other people and see what they're going through and how they're doing and where they're headed, and there seems to be a pattern. So, if you think about companies that want to work with you, they are assessing your character. They're looking at who you are, what you do, how you do it and trying to figure out does my brand align with them? Do we want them like NASCAR? Do we want to put a patch on their car or on their chest, or do we want them talking about our brand and coming out of their mouth? And I think that's something that a lot of people unfortunately don't take the time to think about, because there are some influencers out there that are just hateful human beings, that are liars, like all of y'all. I just want you to, like really be careful who you follow, because there are people out there that are not who they appear to be Not very many that I've met, but I have met a few and there are people that are out there publicly lying, saying, oh, we're associated with this brand and they're absolutely not. And they're in fights with people and they're like they get off camera and they're talking mad crap about everybody. They're trying to destroy people and so if you're somebody that is out there to try to destroy people, your options are going to be really, really limited in you doing this, because that stuff see-through and you're going to develop a relationship, like there are some influencers right now that have a relationship because they burn so many bridges with so many people that it's just known about them throughout.
Dustin:All sponsors Know it, all influencers know it, everybody but you, the followers, because they throw on a shine and put on a video. But you have to be really, really careful with the delicacy with which you treat these sponsorships. So, like we've always had the idea of, we want to help the audience out with whatever they need to know and we want to help our brands out, because we have certain brands that we love, that are really great, and so we like talking about them and we don't mess around with businesses that we don't like. But we're always in this collaborative environment with the brands that we work with. We're always, when we make a piece of content, we're not going to tell them what we're going to do. We usually just give them the content. We're like here's what we've done. What do you think about it?
Drake:They never like it when I make it explode.
Drake:We've done some really funny stuff that you guys have never seen funny stuff that you guys have never seen, because it's like I made this beautiful explosion montage. There was this uh disconnect that we were uh that we had to do a video on and we did the whole install and it was a really involved video. And right at the end, when he was going to try it, when he pulls the switch, I mean let's see if it works and it just explodes right in your face and then it zooms out into space and you see a big mushroom and then like this like dark, sad music of just like burning forests and then burning buildings, and it just goes on.
Drake:And then I was just like just kidding and it rewinds it.
Dustin:Yeah, it goes back, and then we turn the thing on and it worked so good they hated it.
Drake:Oh, they did not like it so I tried it again with another something, and they didn't like it either.
Dustin:Yeah, but everybody would have liked it. It would have been a like there's nobody that watched that, that didn't laugh, yeah you know, and get like drawn into it and then would probably want to show somebody, right, hey, man.
Drake:But I mean I get it there. We're showing that their product literally blows up the world. Yeah.
Dustin:Well. So my point, though, is like you really have to think about if you're going to be an influencer. You need to think about your influence. Are you somebody who your entire following is based off of you commenting on other people's content? You're using stuff other people have made, and spent the time as content creators, to make and give and put out into the world, and all you're doing is sitting and commenting on their stuff, and then you're kind of like utilizing their work for you to get a following that I bring into question what your why is. Why are you doing this? It's obvious to me that you don't actually. You're not giving anything. You're not doing anything great. There's zero greatness about you. You're just trying to find flaws in other people.
Drake:Well, I think they're called trolls.
Dustin:Well, a troll is one thing. A troll that wants a following, that's a hater. Yeah, that's a completely different thing. But I the unfortunate thing is, like these people I don't think have they're not in our shoes, where they've seen almost a decade of like how this works from a business side and maintaining relationships over time and how that's super beneficial. They just see the here and now right in front of them and they're not looking to the future to see like I'm really shooting myself in the foot because there's no brand in the world that wants to partner with me.
Drake:Yeah, well, people will do anything for attention. You know. It's really what it comes down to and this is something that is important to know. If you do start getting a following, you are going to get haters and you're going to get trolls. Yeah, and it's hard to deal with, you know. I know you in the beginning would like read all your comments and if somebody like everyone, if somebody said something a little discolored about you.
Drake:You'd be like, yeah, um, but eventually you just realize that first off, whatever you do, even if you're the best at it, you're not gonna somebody's gonna not like you. Yeah, they're not gonna like the way you're gonna hate that.
Dustin:You're good at it.
Drake:You're not going to somebody is going to not like you.
Dustin:Yeah, they're not going to like the way you're going to hate that. You're good at it.
Drake:They're going to hate the way that you talk, or they'll they'll genuinely have a different opinion that you have and a very correct different opinion. Sure, you know. And so you're going to have the whole gambit from like an educated dislike to a hater slash troll and you kind of just have to be okay with it and just stand with your integrity yeah, right if you do make a mistake and you do say something incorrectly, you can address it if you want to.
Drake:If it's something really like, if you did a total mess up, then you definitely should. But if it's just something that somebody didn't like, because they didn't like it, it's move on.
Dustin:Yeah.
Drake:As long as your intent was to do the right thing, essentially to educate, to entertain or to whatever.
Dustin:Yeah. So I mean all of that just goes to like the ideas. Think about your following and what you're doing out there. If you're, say, an electrical contractor and you're like we're going to try to start getting more business, so let's start putting posts of the work that we do. Make sure the work that you do is good. Yeah, make sure that you know, like in every picture, that you're scoping every image to make sure there's no code violations, because you're going to get a lot of hate putting stuff out online. If you're within the community, talking to people, you're going to get flagged for for things like that. If you do really great work, you're going to have an easier time. There's going to be more people that are like oh dude, you guys are great, I'm going to follow you. But you got to think about that and you do have to understand that, that the nature of a million people consuming content in a niche means that everything's up for grabs the likes, the hates, it's all going to be there. But you're absolutely right. Like, no matter what we do, there are just some people that want to see us burn. Yeah, and you gotta just keep going forward. That's easier said than done. I will.
Dustin:I will say, like, from your perspective and my perspective, my face is on this stuff. Sure, it's my name, my brand logo, everything that I did, but it's not my company, it's, it's all of ours that are involved with it. At the beginning it was a huge, tumultuous thing. Every time I would get hate and after a while I got to this point where, like, I can't even reply to every single thing. There's tens of thousands of DMS everywhere. Like I can't't, I can't keep it up at like. At the same time, I kind of realize if I, um, if I'm hanging on every word of every single comment everywhere, I'm gonna lose a part of myself. Like, if I let stuff like that affect me, um, it's gonna take me down and it often does. If I get somebody that's like they used to comment stuff on my kid and my ex-wife and you know like really take it down to the dirt, and that shit makes me want to go strap up and find them.
Drake:Like that's who I am, you know uh, it's so weird when, like, somebody makes fun of your beard. Is that really? Is that where you're at people? You, you know, like, what's the? You know? I mean, I understand it. It's the facelessness of it. The anonymous yeah, anonymous, it's like I can. I can say whatever I want, it doesn't matter.
Dustin:Well, yeah, but my point is like I, at a certain point I got to a point mentally where I realized, through talking to a whole bunch of other people that have way bigger followings than I did, people that are like out doing Ted talks and stuff like that and hearing them speak, and even they have haters. Some of them are justifiable, some people have differing opinions and they don't like people and all that. But I've just realized I'm not going to please everybody. There's just going to be some people that hate me and I got to be okay with that. So I need to stop looking in my comments so much. I just need to keep moving and doing what I'm doing and knowing that it's like 98% positive the feedback and you know, 2% of people just want to see me burn.
Dustin:But I can't get hung up on that. For me to be successful, I just have to stop caring so much about what everybody thinks and just keep doing what I'm doing, because I know that what I'm doing is I'm trying to be helpful to people and I'm trying to do good in this world. I'm not out here doing anything heinous, I'm not hurting people, I'm not doing any of that kind of stuff. So for me to be successful and for any of you to be successful, you have to have the idea of like wearing a shield almost, and just keeping pushing through.
Drake:Yes, and finding an editor that helps you out. You don't know how much I take out how many cuss words have not made it into a video, or how many times I'm like, hey, did you mean to say this?
Drake:and you're like, nope, thank you, yeah do you realize how like 30 000 people will perceive what you just yeah, yeah, and it's like oh, I didn't mean it like yeah yeah, or sometimes you've, you have just said wrong things that I've come back to you and just like, hey, this is the the benefit of me being an electrician as well, yeah, or a past electrician, but yeah, for always an electrician. Yeah, on my end it's.
Drake:It's interesting because the spot that I feel it, there have been times where I've created a video a masterpiece a masterpiece that it's like oh, this one's gonna be awesome, like there's a lot of information, it flows, it's fast paced, it's there's a lot of music, like a lot of everything's custom, and then it gets like a thousand views yeah, and the last video we did got like 500 000 and this one gets.
Drake:Uh, and it's just like we spent like literally an hour on the one that got 500 000 views, yeah, and this one I spent a week on. Yeah, if not more. You know, it's just like we spent like literally an hour on the one that got 500 000 views, yeah, and this one I spent a week on yeah, if not more you know it's, it is what it is there's there's a little bit of a feeling where I'm just like, well, what's the point of even trying right?
Drake:when that happens and the the point of trying is just keep going. That video is still out there and a lot of people loved it. It has a. It has a very good thumbs up rating yeah, but yeah, that's.
Dustin:It does seem like all of the things that we've spent the most amount of time get the least amount of views. Yeah, the things that we barely put any time into. Like that video that got 30 million views was very little editing.
Drake:It was a short, like a vertical, you know, and it was maybe a minute it was one take and yet one take no stuttering, no editing just a little bit of music, and you know and even that because there's 30 million views.
Dustin:The amount of hatefulness, oh yeah, it's proportional, right? Yeah, so if you have a video that's got 99, uh like thumbs up and one person shitting in the comments, and you have something that has 100 million views, you're gonna have that same proportion of people. So the people that hated it it was like words that I said, because I think the video was about like using a multimeter to uh use the resistance setting on a if you have a reel wire in front of you to figure out how much wires on the reel you know, and that's like a super awesome thing and I was like you want to know the most gangster thing an old man ever taught me and there were people like oh yeah, that's so, gangster, you're a thug, you know.
Dustin:Like just like you're not old, yeah, but it's like people hate the dumbest things and you got to realize too, when somebody hates you, it's a problem with them. It's more about them than it is about you. It it takes all kinds of make the world go around Like I'm not even hating on people that hate. I don't comment under anybody's stuff ever. That's well, that's not true. I always comment under people's stuff to give them props. If somebody that I follow put a thing out and I'll sit and watch it. I'm actually, surprisingly, I'm never on social media. I don't sit and scroll and like I'm just not in that ecosystem. I make content for other people to consume. I don't necessarily consume.
Drake:It's kind of like if you're a baker all day and you come home, you don't want to bake bread when you get home, right, yeah, we're the same way, like I don't. I can't stand looking at Instagram and YouTube.
Dustin:It's just like this is what I do at work. Yeah, but if I do take the time to comment, it's because I'm going to write something thoughtful and I'm going to contribute and like give props to somebody and write something kind and helpful and try to lift people up.
Drake:I do the same with uh reviews on Google and Yelp as well.
Dustin:Yeah, all right. So, all of that being said, let's talk about some of the positive sides of this. You have a way to make a revenue stream outside of your day-to-day job. That was the first thing that happened with me is like master electrician making a certain amount of money, and then I have this side thing as a journeyman electrician. You're not allowed to do side work, so this is becoming an influencer is a really attractive thing because it means that you can legally make some money on the side. That does happen. It's going to take you a long time to get there and you're not going to make anywhere near as much money as you think you are for a very, very long time, but it is a great thing that you can monetize something. The second thing is that you build a network of people and you get to meet a lot of people. So, like events that happen if a bunch of people go out and fly out to something like you know, nika is a big convention for electricians every year you get to meet brands, marketing departments, product experts and stuff for all these massive companies, and so you can develop a relationship with these people. So, if you ever need anything, want anything, need to know something. If you got a buddy that's looking for some weird part, you can call these people and be like hey, man, I got somebody out in the field that's looking for something. So, like the connections that you gain from doing this is really really huge.
Dustin:There's also, like, depending on what your why is, I will admit when I first started doing this that there was some sort of vindication of needing a father figure, like an okay from a father figure sort of a thing that I had in my youth, um, and I think that this gave me a certain level of validation, like being an electrician in general gave me that validation because I had all these older men around me telling me like at a boy, you know, you're doing good, your work ethics really hard.
Dustin:Like I just got a lot of that positive feedback. And then, because I started making videos and gaining a following, I was getting a lot of that feedback and so that helped drive me to continue to do it. But after a while I didn't need that anymore, like I had gotten a certain amount of validation. So there are other things like that that that are benefits that you can gain, depending on what your why is, if your why is to earn more money and get more customers. You can use the getting a following to do that. If your, if your thing is to just gain followers for the sake of followers, you can do that too. It's just going to be a really rough road for you because that's not a good enough why yeah, another thing is just being proud of your work.
Drake:After a while you end up with a good library of videos and a good library of whatever you've been doing and you can just be like look, I did that, it's proof of what you did. Yeah, a lot of times, like even in the trades, sure you can see like, oh, I wired this up, but once, once that drywall goes up, all your work is gone.
Dustin:Yeah.
Drake:Right, yeah, and a lot of people. If you're working at a grocery store, you know there's nothing wrong with working at a grocery store, but your end all product is just gone.
Dustin:Yeah, so having basically a documentation of your progress and seeing your first video that you're, you look at and you're like, oh my god, this is so cringe, yeah I do that every so I'll see, like the first video I put out and then the stuff that y'all are putting together now, even for you as like, uh, somebody that didn't have any video editing experience you had a lot of audio editing experience but like the first videos that you started editing and what you guys are making now is like holy crap.
Drake:I watched the first video and I remember thinking like, oh, this is so good, yeah, and I watched it. I actually just watched it, like a few days ago, and I was like, oh boy, did I not know about that?
Dustin:effect. Yeah, well, and to be fair to you, like, I think four or five years ago editing, editing videos, was way different the tools that people had, the kinds of videos that were out there.
Drake:I mean Jurassic Park was made way longer before, so like I have no excuse for those wonderful effects I put in that video, yeah, dude, there is a certain level of like pride to like.
Dustin:When I first started making videos, it wasn't electrician you, it was journey to master, right. A lot of it was like therapizing for myself, because that was more in the truck, just talking about stuff, talking about life, talking about like paying child support and barely being able to make it, and then like being self-employed and how sometimes it sucks, you know, and I was just kind of documenting my life and so the ability to speak into a camera and capture yourself thinking about things and then watch that again it's very self-reflecting. Realized had you not watched yourself? On a video you get to see the way you think about things in moments, whereas if you watch them the next day you'll be like that's not how I actually think and how I actually feel. I was just pissed off yesterday, I think. Um, I want to give a couple of like pointers to to wrap this up.
Dustin:If you're thinking about developing a following, whether it's for business, for your electrical contracting, whether you just want to be an influencer out there or you have some kind of why to show the world your thing and what you know and what you do, understand that it's going to take you way longer than you think, even if you have something viral. Think about this the quicker you gain a following, the quicker you can lose it. The longer it takes you to build a following, the longer it's going to be to take away a following. So this greatness takes time. Greatness is simply consistent execution of goodness over time. As long as you just keep being good and keep going time, time, time, time time, let the clocks fly forward Eventually you will get where you're going to go. It is going to take longer than you think it is going to take to get there, so ensure that your why is right. Ensure that you're doing this for the right reasons.
Dustin:Next thing I would say is consistency is massively important. If you're going to start putting content out there at scale and you want to grow a following, you need to be consistent, and it's not even just for the algorithms, because these algorithms youtube and everything they promote consistent behavior, um, but it's also for the audience sake. You have to think about if I am going to watch your thing, one video that comes up every once in a while, I'm not going to remember that I saw another video. I'm going to forget you. You're forgettable. But if you're in front of my face all the time and every time I log on, your face is there and in fact, every time I go to every platform, your face is there, saying some kind of new, different thing, all the time in different places. I'm going to follow you because I like your stuff and I want to follow you on every platform because you're doing different things on every one of the platforms, so you kind of have to be interesting.
Dustin:The next thing to think about is there's reasons why people follow people and watch content. Think about is there's reasons why people follow people and watch content. The three reasons that people do to follow people are either it is super engaging and like entertaining. The other reason people watch content is because they're trying to figure out a problem that they have and they're looking for a solution. And the third thing is people want to learn, so they just want an educational kind of experience. Those are the big three. So either you got to be funny and entertaining, you got to be fixing some kind of problem or offering solutions, or you have to be an educational and have. That's the reason why people are going to watch.
Dustin:There are three levels of content that people have time to watch. So you need to make sure that you're making content that is very quick, very easily consumed. If somebody doesn't have time and they're like waiting for a bus and they're about to get in on the bus, they got maybe about three minutes to consume content. So you need to make some content for those situations. Then you got content where people have, I don't know, maybe like 15, 20 minutes and they've got time. They're not waiting for a bus, they might be on their lunch break, so they do have a finite small amount of time, but a little bit more time. You got to make content for that. And then there's the long form thing where people have they're sitting in bed, they're cooking dinner they got three hours to burn on a Joe Rogan podcast. If you think about why people consume content, it's usually out of boredom, and so ensuring that you're making things that correlate to the certain types of boredom.
Dustin:And then, the last thing I would think about the whole niche versus saturation effect. If you're in a niche meaning, like I was, electrical has a huge audience and no content, and so I was the first really I wasn't the first, but I was the first one kind of that broke the seal on all of this stuff and started building a following and everything like that. I have an unparalleled headstart than anybody else. So it's not really fair because then the market's only going to get more and more saturated. If you're in a place like gaming like my son is having a difficult time with, there's millions of gaming creators in every game, every kind of content, so it's really going to take you a lot more time to build a following. So those are just some tips consistency, keep doing it, keep your head up. Don't listen to the haters. If you really love doing this, just keep doing it and you'll get there. Love you, crazy people. See you in the next one. Bye.