Boring Money
Boring Money is for the people quietly getting rich the unglamorous way. Hosted by David Heacock, founder and CEO of Filterbuy, this podcast covers boring businesses, acquisitions, cash flow, EBITDA, tax strategy, fixed income, and the real mechanics of compounding capital. Built for operators, investors, and business owners who care more about long-term wealth than hype, headlines, or status.
Boring Money
I Spent $200K on His Playbook. You're Getting It for $0
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Eric Villa helped grow some of the biggest YouTube channels in the world — including MKBHD’s behind-the-scenes channel, The Studio — and then helped take my channel from struggling for views to millions of views in a matter of weeks.
In this episode of Boring Money, Eric breaks down how YouTube actually works today: why ideas matter more than consistency, why most personal brand advice is outdated, how to package boring business ideas so people actually click, and why one video can still change everything.
We also talk about the future of media, AI’s role in content, why wealthy founders are suddenly building personal brands, how boring businesses should think about social media, and what it really takes to build a channel that lasts.
This is a behind-the-scenes look at the strategy, psychology, and creative process behind building attention in a winner-take-all media world.
I'll just tell everybody exactly what I did to blow up your channel. And then they can reverse that and engineer that to any niche that they want. Your warehouse, your factory, even your office is your stats. Don't hire me, don't hire another content strategist, don't hire a guru, don't pay for consulting hours. Do you think it's fair to say that a bet on personal brand is also a bet on the permanent underclass?
SPEAKER_01This is the creative genius behind one of the biggest creators in the world, Eric Bill. Most people know Eric for running Marquez Brownley's million subscriber behind the scenes channel, the studio. But with just a few hours per day, Eric blew up my YouTube channel on the side. In a month, Eric made a video that got 2 million views on my channel that was struggling to do any views. This episode isn't just about how Eric blows up channels. It's about how anyone can dominate attention online.
SPEAKER_00Just for the record, every sentence I'm saying right now is me thinking of words that I need to say for the hook of this video.
SPEAKER_01Eric Villa, I've never been more nervous for a podcast because I know I'm going to be judged the whole time that I'm I'm I'm here talking. Every single thing you say, I'll start final.
SPEAKER_00I have final control over.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna start sweating. Um so Eric Villa, the man behind the YouTube channel. I love many YouTube channels. Many YouTube channels, but especially the one that matters the most, the one that you're my counting achievement, yeah, David Heacock, and boring money. Yeah, like I I you say that in jest right now, but I'm but I'm I'm going to make sure that that is true.
SPEAKER_00I mean, I'm I I am I am exceptionally proud of the work we do. You know, like I'm from Illinois. My ma is a labor lawyer. Like I I really respect people who just work hard and achieve something. And like that's the center of the brand. Like, that's why this is fun for me. I like it's not like I have to do this, I do it because it's cool. I do genuinely like what we do.
SPEAKER_01Well, I guess we thought it would be cool to kind of show people what it takes or talk talk about what it takes to be successful on YouTube and perhaps um ultimately some of the gaps that we see in YouTube and how it relates to boring businesses. But I guess we should start with what is a day in the life of Eric Villa look like?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So it's generally like a 10 to 12 hour day up at 6, trying to do 5.30, but that's hard. Um, so up at like six, and then from like 6.30 or 7 till about 9.30 or 10, I'm working on your channel. Uh, we work together through an agency. So I'll have like assets to review that the agency takes care of. And then I'll work with you and kind of like deliver video ideas. You'll give me voice notes and we'll turn those into scripts, blah, blah, blah. And I'm my job with you is essentially like your professional ideas guy, I guess is like the simplest way to put it, right? Um, and then at 10, I start work with Marquez Brownlee, MKBHD, big tech YouTube channel. Statistically speaking, if you're watching this, you're a fan of the studio channel. Thank you. And so, yeah, so from 10 to 5, I run point on the behind the scenes channel for Marquez, the studio. Um, again, like I'm the ideas guy there, but I'm more in like the weeds. So I'm planning our videos, like orchest kind of orchestrating like who's going to be in this video, pulling people's schedules together, hopping into the actual shoots and directing those shoots, and then running point on the first pass of the edit, as well as sort of giving briefs to all of the different creatives for graphics, thumbnail, kind of passing things along through the team, and occasionally just like getting to sit in a fast car and just enjoy that. Never driving one, but always sitting in the passenger seat very, very happy.
SPEAKER_01So, why are ideas so important for YouTube? I mean, I think that when people think about a YouTube channel, certainly before I got into this, you just think, oh, I'm going to um, you know, film myself Gary Vee style and you know, film a day in the life, um, and people are going to be interested in that, but that's not quite how it works.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think so I would say YouTube has gone through three regimes. We're kind of at the transition point to the fourth. Early YouTube's regime was will traditional news pick this up. That was kind of your growth engine because it was just frankly the growth engine for YouTube as a whole. So if you made a silly enough video or something provocative and your local news station would pick it up, then congratulations, you have a platform. And then YouTube included a subscribe button, and so the platform became a little bit stickier, but it was essentially who can you get a shout out from? I kind of came up during the tail end of that first regime. The first video that I ever did that got traction was from it was a fan video about Marquez. I was 13 years old and it was called Marquez Brownlee as Spider-Man. Marquez tweeted it and he was like, Wow, look at this child. I'm sure I'll never see him again. 10 years later. Thanks, Marquez. Um and then my YouTube channel started to fall off during the transition to the second regime of YouTube, the consistency regime. This is when we saw the rise of, you know, we're on Canal Street a couple blocks away from Casey Neistat studio, who did a daily vlog for two and a half years. And so you saw you saw the rise of all these people who just figured out how to regularly post. Gary Vee, he really hit an inflection point around this time for the same reason. Um, he was just like super consistent with it. And that's just a function of the incentives that YouTube wanted audiences to have. They had awareness now, but they wanted to create these super fans. People love the platform. And then the third regime happened in what I would call the Mr. Beast regime, where people realized that you couldn't just post consistently anymore. Now the incentive was to get people to click and stay on the platform as long as possible, right? The the economic regime, we might want to call it, or the click and watch regime. And so now important ideas are super important because if you don't have a good idea, nobody clicks, and then the rest of it doesn't matter. So and if and if you have a really good idea, then people will sit through they will forgive more. If you have a really good idea, people will forgive tons of different mistakes, slow pacing, whatever it is, because they trust that you'll be able to deliver, or at least you're you're teasing them with um a satisfying ending to a concept or something that has really high tension, and so people would be willing to sit through and learn.
SPEAKER_01So I'm gonna get some free consulting advice for you today. Cool. Since since this, since this is since I'm not paying for this podcast. Um, you know, one thing I've really been thinking a lot about that we that you and I haven't talked about before is the, you know, how do you build a YouTube channel as a brand? Um and and so, you know, obviously, you know, we focus on my personal brand, um, the David Heacog brand, but you know, I spend my day operating Filterby, and you know, we're a large brand and we spend a lot on advertising. Um, and one one code that I have never cracked is how to you know build an organic, you know, following for a brand. Um, how do you think if you had to attack that problem, how would you do it?
SPEAKER_00So there's no um like there's never going to be a perfect playbook. There's never gonna be a perfect playbook here. Fundamentally, whether you're a personal brand, whether you're an actual brand, if you want attention and any form, you're one click away from somebody who's always better than you at whatever you're doing. And so whatever your brand is, whatever you're building, and I mean the studio channel is a brand. It's intrinsically tied to someone's personal brand, but it in it in and of itself is a brand. And so from a growth point of view, you just need to be focused on why am I exceptional? What do I have that nobody else has? For Duolingo, that was being kind of out of pocket and young at a time where brands weren't doing that in the form of video and TikTok. Now other people are doing it, and Airlearn, a competitor to Duolingo, that's uh contracting through an agency that's owned by a YouTuber, Antho, that's all run by a bunch of Gen Z kids, is more interesting than Duolingo. Why is Airlearn more interesting? It's because they were more exceptional, more young, they they do more absurd concepts, and so they're they're better. So you just you have to start with the fundamental question of why am I better than every other person who's fighting for attention in XYZ market? That's why this channel works, right? Because we just we doubled down on boring businesses first because we said you run the definitive boring business. I hear$23 million a month in air filters, and that's so oddly specific that I do want to hear what you have to say about these other oddly specific topics that like we can cover on our channel that other channels wouldn't be able to cover as well.
SPEAKER_01So if you're thinking about building an audience for a brand, do you think that you um pick a lane that you can differentiate in that's maybe um tangential to your brand? So, like an example, saying for filter buy, um one thing that we're very focused on is our community involvement, right? So like I start I started this in Tal Dig, Alabama. We operate in you know a lot of rural places that that were maybe overlooked historically. Um, and so you know, perhaps tying a brand or having a having a strategy that is you know consistent with that, where that is the focus in some way, some type of community give back that just happens to be tangential to the major brand. Does a strategy like that work? Or how would you think about it? How would you think about like coming up with a idea of brands?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So I mean, that as like a a root makes a ton of sense. So we're we need to think about growth and we need to think about retention. Growth is a function of what can I do better than everyone else so that they're willing to click on my video? Or they stop their scroll if you're on short form. And then retention is how can I deliver on this in a more interesting way, in a better way than every other person. It's why we shoot this podcast in two to one on anamorphic lenses. It's because no one else in business is doing it yet. And so, and 55% of our audience is watching it on TV. And so the thought here is if we can go where other people haven't gone, and I can take what I've learned about cinematography from a tech YouTuber and bring it to this niche, maybe people will stick around more because they see a level of intent that they're not seeing other places. So you so you need to have that same sort of two-pronged approach. Now, the idea of I want to just do charity is not enough. It's why can you do charity better than anyone else? Or who are you already doing charity for better than anyone else already? And then we can reverse engineer from there. Because if we want to talk about um service-oriented content or content that like is about bringing jobs back to the states, you're in a you're in a really interesting position in terms of our media ecosystem because that can very quickly be like uh politicized. And so you have to ask yourself is there a competitive positioning here where we can also still be brand safe related to this? Yeah, it's possible. I mean, uh, Mr. B secured blindness for a couple hundred people, and that still got politicized. Like that still made people angry. I don't know if Filterby would be comfortable taking that heat. But this is the big reason that I think a lot of brands that are trying to do organic content struggle because it is safer to just do paid content. Because with paid content, you get a guarantee and you can be mediocre. So it's pretty chill, and it's a science. And so now with AI, you can A B test a trillion things and slowly optimize, and it that looks cool, but if you want sustainable organic content, you need to ask yourself, where am I willing to go that other people aren't? And as a brand, oftentimes there actually isn't an answer to that question.
SPEAKER_01It's something that I won't hijack the whole conversation on, but it's something that I think a lot about and I ultimately intend to do. Um, I will say that as a paid advertiser, um, I definitely think that the organic and the paid are ultimately converging. Um and and and I think it has to um because the the platforms ultimately want um platform retention above all else.
SPEAKER_00Right. So if you your ads just are are terrible and people leave the app because they hate the ads so much, then you're never gonna get shown.
SPEAKER_01Right. Um and so for you, like I think that in order for you to be relevant and get shown, um, and more importantly, for anybody to actually watch and not tune out, then your ads have to be, you know, the equivalent of good organic content.
SPEAKER_00So, an interpretation of something I'm seeing in the startup space that could be really cool to localize back to boring businesses, there's an app called Locket. And it's kind of like a Snapchat competitor. You use it if you have long distance friends and you can send each other like a message or a photo every day. Their content strategy from a couple years ago, and they've they've kind of scaled this up since then, is really compelling. They have one person on the Locket team who just makes a bunch of different types of creatives. Every day it's a new, fully new concept. They're not really iterating. Once they find a concept that works, they go to small creators, creators with less than 10,000 followers, and they say, do this exact creative on your page. Because they already know that that format works, they can then buy these creators at much smaller prices, but then give them an optimized creative to still get outsized returns. And then most importantly, they can take the highest performing posts from those creators and then refab them into ads. And so they have this great organic to influencer to paid flywheel. And I don't think that we're seeing that happen across boring businesses or cash-flowing businesses. That's usually because either A, they're too localized, and so organic content can be really hard to do if you're just trying to speak to people in Indiana. Although there are some interesting case studies there we can talk about. Yeah. But it's also actually it's mostly just that, honestly. It it's the hardest thing is geography, I think. Because like Lockett is ubiquitous amongst the geography of American Gen Z people. But yeah.
SPEAKER_01So I'll tell you, you know, um one thing that you know, at Filterby, you know, I've struggled um over the years with creating content for social. And so like if I look um, you know, for the first 10 years or so of the business, basically all of our um advertising dollars were spent against intent-based marketing, which means um like somebody searching for air filter or you know, something that feels like the perfect case study for a brand like yours.
SPEAKER_00And I'm sure that you dominate all of those keywords.
SPEAKER_01Which which we do and we have for a long time now. But my point, which I think is kind of ultimately relevant, is I I don't I don't think that that model works anymore if you want if you're starting out. Or I'm not saying it doesn't work. I think that the barrier to entry or the cost to entry is so high that for a lot of a lot of times it's not doable. Yeah. I do think that social is like like if I were starting an e-commerce brand today, um, I would be all in on say TikTok shop um and a strategy related to that or you know, whatnot, and a strategy like live, which is you know, live social shopping. You know, like if I were just if I were starting today, I think that I would start, you want to start where the white space is. Um and you know, but then I say to myself, you know, I started this journey with you a year ago, give or take, and um, you know, I've put a lot of money and a lot of energy into getting this YouTube channel to where it is today. Yeah. Um, and I have a lot of advantages that at this point from you know, both financially and from a um a content strategy. From a content content strategy and and also just from you know having receipts to be able to show people, yeah. Um, you know, I have a lot of advantages that the average person watching this probably doesn't have. Um and like one one pushback that I would give when people give advice on this stuff, um, like or like Gary V is an example, who um, you know, he like the oh, I'm just going to start filming myself with uh with my phone um and start posting content. That worked during a different regime. It worked, but that worked during a different regime. But people are some people are still giving that advice today.
SPEAKER_00So what do you think about that advice? Yeah, no. So if I think something that's really interesting, a great exercise, go to literally any YouTube channel that you want, go to their most popular videos, scatter plot their past hundred videos. You will invariably see an exponential graph where a few videos are the vast majority of performance, vast majority of growth. One video is the difference between whether or not you have a healthy channel and isn't, right? One video can change your life. And the question is like, how do you get to that video? Our channel, I mean, what's the delta between our second and and most? Yeah, yeah. Exactly. And this is this is standard amongst the space, which I think is a cause of burnout. Like we we can kind of get into mindset stuff later if you want, but that's on an individual YouTube channel. Go macro, look at the distribution of hundred million subscriber YouTube channels, tens of million subscriber YouTube channels, hundreds of thousands. It's the same curve. Go on Nielsen ratings and look at the most popular television shows on any given night. It's gonna be the same curve. Media is always a winner-take-all game because your product is not media and it's not even the ability to harvest people's attention. Your product is your ability to connect people or to get people to talk to each other or to be at the center of a community. That's what media actually is. And so if you're if you approach content from a I'm trying to aggregate attention point of view, you're already on your back foot because that's all content on these platforms. The difference between a top one percenter, a top 10%er, and the the bottom is how do I stand at the center of culture? And and that question is incredibly difficult to answer. But the reason that we've been able to have traction is because the second I went into the channel, I said, Oh, this stands at a point in US culture and sort of global culture where we're starting to become disillusioned with tech, with finance, and with the playbook for wealth that we were taught, or at least my generation was taught as we were coming up. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So I guess the the the question to come down to though is like let's say you're somebody that's just getting started, maybe doesn't have the resources at their disposal that I do to be able to hire you. Um how do you what advice do you give them?
SPEAKER_00How do they how do you start? First of all, don't hire me. Don't don't hire me, don't hire another content strategist, don't hire a guru, don't pay for consulting hours. If you do not know why you are better than everyone else, do not play the game.
SPEAKER_01And if and if you So you're so you're actually the the the opposite of Gary Vee. Like you think that if you don't, if you don't have what it takes to win, you shouldn't start trying to play the game.
SPEAKER_00Well, you should start trying to play the game to learn how to win. You shouldn't start playing the game to be like, oh, how am I going to get a million views? You need to start on the fundamentals. I I have a friend who's this super talented documentary filmmaker. Every documentary that he made in film school would pass 50,000 to 100,000 views on channels with like 300 subscribers. And he graduates and he goes and he works in uh a documentary company that makes documentaries for a big streaming service. And he goes, gosh, this is this stinks. I don't I don't know if I like this anymore. I guess I should just try and make YouTube videos. Eric, how do I get a million views? It's like, no, no, no, that's not the question. The question is how can you sustainably get stories that a million people would want to watch? Because he has the skills to tell them. So that's his gap, is just his access to interesting stories. The gap is gonna be different for everyone, and so I'm never gonna give you prescriptive advice because it will never work. It's the same, like it's the reason that I resonate with the content we produce because you can't give prescriptive advice for a business because that won't do well either.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, but there, but there are some fundamentals that you have to do if you want to be so.
SPEAKER_00So if we want to if we want to break past exceptionalism, I will I'll just tell everybody exactly what I did to blow up your channel. And then they can reverse that, engineer that to any niche that they want. Okay, let's do it. Just for the record, every sentence I'm saying right now is me thinking of words that I need to say for the hook of this video. Every single thing I'm just giving myself selects for for the first minute.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and and and I think like this would be just a good good point to say, you know, one thing that I've been surprised by is just how important title, thumbnail, first 30 seconds of video. It's the game. Like that that is that's the game. That's the game. And it's and it's actually as a creator um really annoying because you know, I feel like so like I feel like there's a big disconnect between and sometimes between the quality of content I put out and the performance of the video, and that like some of the best quality content from my perspective um gets the least views, yeah. Um just because there's not like it doesn't hit on the title thumbnail, whereas like some of our better performing videos, I don't think I think are getting more views than they deserve, at least on a relative basis.
SPEAKER_00This is the this is the dark side of the zero sum game, right? Because if attention is only gonna go to whoever's better, the person who promises you, I will get you stable returns over the long term and you will do well, like our Warren Buffett video, that's really good. Nobody's gonna watch. But if you say, This business never fails, lots of people are gonna be angry at you in the comments, but at the end of the day, it's going to do numbers. And it's so frustrating. This is something that like we don't have any infrastructure to properly regulate this or create safeguards around this. But this is a problem. This will be a problem a few years down the line. And no one's really thinking about it, but we need to like completely rethink how we're doing the recommendations infrastructure across business and finance content because it's really frustrating that the best advice is boring and therefore isn't good media and therefore people won't see. But I got people to see you. And so how did you do that?
SPEAKER_01So how do you package something boring and make it and make it something that people click on?
SPEAKER_00So that's that's the question. So there's this thing called outlier theory. Uh you can download tools like ViewStats or one of 10.com. And basically what I did for you is you had one video that already had traction before we started. It had 250,000 views and it was your third upload. So it started a brand new YouTube account. And I just watched that video on this brand new account. And then I saw what YouTube was feeding it. What is what are the suggested feeds? What are the browse features when I refresh YouTube after just having watched that video? And I noticed a few patterns. One of them was there was an outlier video. So an outlier video is when a video does substantially more views than the channel average. It's a good indicator of a supply-demand imbalance. The audience is desperate to have interesting new information, and so they'll take a chance on a new creator. That's generally what it means. It means that the concept is so compelling that people can overlook the lack of a brand. Yep. And I noticed two outlier videos that really spoke to me. One was a guy making a video about how he did a fix-up on a Toyota Siena or some sort of no, a Toyota pickup truck. Toyota Tacoma, like car fix-up, like a pickup truck. So I Google like what are the most popular markets for a Toyota Tacoma? Let's see if we can get a better idea for what the demos are here. And generally, pickup truck, there's like certain affiliations with that audience, largely being, oh, this is US-based. You don't sell pickup trucks in Europe. You can generally say it's like middle America leaning across like South Rust Belt, the West. That's less of the case, but it was enough that I could kind of go off of it. It's a cultural staple. Everyone knows pickup truck. And then I also saw another video, multiple videos, about boring businesses that you should buy, or you don't want to hear this, but you need a boring business. And I realized it was one of Cody Sanchez's, not her most popular videos, but one of her most popular videos from 2021 or 22. And so I was like, okay, this is relatively evergreen, but it's having a second coming right now. If we look at the narrative around the US election when we started working together in 2025, there was a lot of this talk of Americans feeling left behind. And so that sort of culminated both my understanding for where the cultural zeitgeist was as well as seeing this data in me saying, okay, the brand positioning is boring business, uh essentially embrace tradition, reject modernity, but in an economic sense. And then we could reverse engineer that into the strongest outlier video I found, which is here's a direct list giving you exactly what information you want about boring businesses that you could run. And then you crushed it and gave me really interesting ones I had never thought of. And then we spent three weeks on that video just working on pacing, and I just said, cut this, cut this, cut this, cut this, cut this.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and just so behind the scenes from my perspective, um, you know, I had no not I we had done videos in a very different format before. I had never done talking head videos. Yeah, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing in that first video shoot. Um, and you know, to give I think I gave you this feedback before, but like I was not even prepared for like what I should expect or should be doing there. So I was kind of winging it. Yeah. Um, and you know, I probably talked to camera for two hours or something like ridiculous for that for that video because I was not I was not properly prepared. Um, and I still find it, but it but you did your magic in editing title thumbnail. Um, and you know, I think I probably said the right words in that two hours, and and that somehow became you know the number one video on the channel.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So the other thing to know about that is because you were on this cold streak, and then we immediately come in with this new video, your core audience, the 1500 people who are watching on every video, saw that video and they all clicked on it. They all watched it to the end. And so it pushed things out even further and further and further. And so oftentimes YouTube channels will sort of have this hype curve where the first video that you do with like a new strategy or a new view will see tons of performance because the entire audience thinks it's new, they rally around it, they get really excited. And then eventually the audience realizes wait, this is just the format now. You're disincentivized from really doing anything else, and so you just have to continue to slowly optimize. And so the curve pops, you see a retraction, and then sort of linear stable growth after that. And that's sort of the universe that we're in now. We're sort of moving past a retraction after that big pop and moving into our stable growth era.
SPEAKER_01So so from your perspective, over the next year, what is it going to take for us to be successful in this channel and growing this channel? Like what are the what are the fundamentals?
SPEAKER_00Actually, there's three basic levers that you can use to grow a YouTube channel: volume, brand positioning, and general quality. General quality, we work with the very good agency. The videos are, I think, very well edited. I love all the graphics. We're getting better at scripting, like the that universe is moving. So that's sort of like an optimization operations kind of pipeline thing. Yep. Then there's volume. We're doubling the output on the channel. Well, if we're including shorts, we're like quadrupling the output on the channel. So that just creates more opportunity, more surface area for luck, right? And then the third thing, the biggest thing that we'll need to figure out is positioning. Because if Cody Sanchez is doing 150,000 to 250,000 views a video and she's the largest person in our boring business, pragmatic business niche, we need to ask ourselves how can we punch above that and build a brand that goes beyond the quarter million people TAM in this space? And more importantly, we need to ask if we want to speak past that quarter million people TAM. There's a very real chance that that might require doing very real work in more entertainment content or dumbing down the content more or making the content less specific or doing something in self-help and self-development. And we have to ask ourselves, can we be exceptional in that space too?
SPEAKER_01Yep.
SPEAKER_00So yeah, I'd say those are probably the three biggest things, and the one that we'll need to really understand is brand positioning. And this, but this is why I like getting to work with people like you who already have a business, a high margin business, a business that's doing well, because we can think long term about different ways to use a high value audience in a way that somebody who just wants to be a creator wouldn't be thinking.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I and I would and my advice to people would be do not get into this game thinking you're going to do it for a year and then um, you know, be successful and be able to um, you know, be a full-time content creator and have that be your, you know, how you're making a living. Like I just don't think that that is realistic.
SPEAKER_00That is, I mean, yeah, I guess it took me like 15 years to be recognized on the street for the first time like a month ago. So I think I agree.
SPEAKER_01And it's only getting harder. I mean, like, I think the next like you did it, like the next 15 years is probably takes higher skill to get you the.
SPEAKER_00Oh, 100%. But there's so many kids who are so much better than I was. I was an idiot. And that's the thing that does kind of make me sad is I do miss early YouTube when it felt like a meritocracy. Like it felt like this opportunity for I was I grew up very disillusioned with traditional media. I have an uncle who worked in traditional media, film and TV and music and stuff. And I was I just knew like people aren't treated very well there, and you can be high one day and low another. And so YouTube felt like this olive branch. And it's really, really quite disappointing the way that YouTube is now TV. And that's cool for me because that means I'm I guess I'm a TV producer, you know, and anamorphic lenses. Like it's great for me, but TV also means there's there's gatekeepers now, and that's a bum.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, the bar I think that the barrier to um entry has gotten a lot higher. And I I think that's where like the some of the advice of just take out your camera and start filming because one video can change your life.
SPEAKER_00I mean, that is true, but it's also you know, the the probability of having that one video is but I think we I would say still pick up the camera, but you're picking it up to one gain skills and two be seen by a small number of people who can change your life. Yeah, I made a YouTube video that did 1100 views on a channel with zero subscribers. One of those people who watched it was the CEO of the agency that matched me with you. And now I got my favorite billionaire. I get to hang out with whatever is in New York, you know?
SPEAKER_01Uh like so there are two other two other um kind of you know thought bubbles I want to go through with you. Um you know, the first one is for people that are watching this podcast, um, let's say they um, you know, own a boring business doing a couple million dollars a year. How do you think they should be thinking about YouTube and social media?
SPEAKER_00Your warehouse, your factory, even your office is your set. That's number one. Every creator lives on this spectrum. On one end of the spectrum, you have people like Marquez who can shoot, edit, write, and do every single thing themselves. Marquez will never work for your company because he's exceptional and he can do it himself.
SPEAKER_01Yep.
SPEAKER_00And then on the other end, you have people with no skills whatsoever. If you have a boring business, that means that you have a differentiator that you can hand to a talented creative person and fill the gap. I personally never grew my YouTube channel past 7,000 subscribers. And there were a lot of reasons for that, but uh among them were the fact that I wasn't particularly exceptional at anything when I was 17 years old. But I got good-ish at the craft of filmmaking, really good at the craft of YouTube. And so when you plug me into the studio with Marquez, or when you plug me in with you paired with a full agency infrastructure at Dragonfruit, I can do really good work because I have all of this leverage, all of these different things I can play with. And so if you can start to think about how is the space that I have unique and fun and interesting, and then once you have those fundamentals, you can hand those off to a creative. So much of the guesswork is already out of the picture. Because if you say, Oh, I have this really, really cool warehouse where I have air filters and it's in New Jersey, and the creative I'm gonna hire is a DJ who's really good with videos, and we're gonna do raves in the air filter place and turn all the air filters into fans, and people are gonna fan themselves when it gets really hot. That that's a YouTube channel. That's a content strategy. But it's lame if you just make videos about air filters. So you have to ask yourself, what am I doing to give a creative a competitive advantage? The creative that you're hiring or the social person you're bringing in, they're not going to be your differentiator. Because if they were, you either got super lucky, they're gonna realize you got super lucky, and they'll go independent, and then you don't have a strategy, or you'll hire somebody who probably doesn't know what they're fully doing. I've struggled with it.
SPEAKER_01Hiring creatives is a very tricky thing.
SPEAKER_00We're so annoying for snickety, and we have so many feelings.
SPEAKER_01That's not what I mean. The problem is like when it's somebody talented like you, then you know, like you know, you're I told you, bro, this is gonna be the two Erics in the room. I was talking to the other Eric. Um No, but like when there's somebody talented like you, um, you know, like a creative person doesn't want to be boxed in. That's just it's just nature. Meaning me what I mean by that is like you don't want to be just say, oh, you can only focus on David Heacock's content for the foreseeable future, because that's that would be too boring. That would be too boring for you.
SPEAKER_00People ask, is the studio channel sustainable? We do really weird videos. We made a game show last year and it took like nine weeks to build this full crazy TV set. And the answer is yes, but it's because the level of quality we want to hit on a channel where we're regular regularly doing phone reviews that box those creatives in is only sustainable because we give the other people and the other talents outlets to push themselves, try new things, keep figuring out the limitations of everything we can do. Um, and so the studio channel is in a lot of ways our sustainability play for that exact reason. And and this channel, the David Heacock channel, is my sustainability sustainability play for the studio for me, because I can go and try new things and play around with new hooks and continue to push myself in another way. And it all feeds each other.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, but I guess where I was gonna get into is I think one thing Marquez, I'm just guessing reading between the lines, is very smart about is he doesn't try to box his creatives in because he allows you to come and work with me or do other things, um, which I think is super smart because he knows if he says, Oh, you can only work on this, yeah, um, and this has to be then he then Yeah, people will there'll be so much more attrition, and it's it's really hard finding a team.
SPEAKER_00And I think he doesn't want to be a professional hire. He just wants to be.
SPEAKER_01But I'm just saying, I think that that's super smart, and I think that's something that people need to understand um when hiring creatives is that it's a it's kind of a different game and you have to be okay with that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. You know, it can be, but I guess in that model on my zero to a hundred scale, that's implying that a creator is maybe 70, 80 percent of the differentiator, and that can be the case. But if you have whatever unique differentiation it can be and you intrinsically know what it is, then you can have increasingly more uh fungible talent, which is kind of a mess-up thing for me as a talent to say, but there are people who can create these content machine systems where the differentiator is the set or the format or the logo or whatever it is. And in those instances, people can come and go more freely. And sometimes that's more sustainable. Like you know, you if you're a business owner, this doesn't mean you have to sit at the behest of a creative, but you just have to ask yourself, where am I sitting on the spectrum?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I was I I know I said three things, but I'm gonna add add one to it. Um, how do you think AI is gonna change the creative process? Or how do you think AI is gonna change YouTube?
SPEAKER_00I have two kind of conflicting takes on this. I actually kind of want to flesh out my takes on this with you. Yep. Um, David and I will sit on Slack and like text about AI for like hours on like a Sunday.
SPEAKER_01It's my it's my favorite subject.
SPEAKER_00It's it's very fun to make it.
SPEAKER_01Everybody around me hates it now because that's all we talk about.
SPEAKER_00It's very, very fun to cook on this. Luckily, I only see you every couple of months in prison, so for me, it's still very fun. Um, basically, I see three things are going to be increasingly true. The first is that right now it uh on YouTube specifically, AI is largely a tool for and and more specifically, it's a tool for higher volume. Depending on your niche, you should use this tool. In business, where the number one differentiator is how qualified are you and how much do I like you? Yeah, volume makes sense. Like the the audience doesn't necessarily get fatigued that often. In tech, where the number one differentiator is production quality, can I trust this individual person more than anything? If we touch AI, there's real brand risk, real risk to the long-term sustainability of that. So you need to understand why your audience is watching you first and foremost. If they are watching you for a reason that you feel you can get away with higher volume or where volume doesn't adversely impact your brand, AI should 100% be used to in some way, shape, or form, get more from what you're already doing or produce more at the same level of quality and or produce more and better. And I I think that that's sort of like the basic rule is if your audience is down for volume, use AI, assuming that they also like AI. I think the interesting thing, Eric, the other Eric, a camera guy, he shoots a bunch of our behind-the-scenes footage and um a bunch of your videos with the Sony FX3, which is a tiny cinema camera. It's it's this big, it's like$2,500. You could buy them used for sometimes even$1,800. A whole generation of filmmakers is growing up using this camera as their de facto image. They took the sensor from that camera and they stripped out all the other pieces and then attached it to F1 cars going hundreds of miles an hour. And no one knows that when they watch the movie. That's how good these sensors are. If there's a$2,000 camera that can give you Hollywood level visuals, and that didn't fundamentally alter the fabric of YouTube, I don't know if all of this hype around the amazing quality that you can get from AI is actually going to meaningfully change much. Nobody sees a camera with a higher megapixel amount and goes, oh my gosh, zoom lenses are cooked. I can crop in on anything. It's a new, it's a new tool. It is not a substitute for differentiation, it's just leverage. All forms of of different creative tools are just leverage. It just gives you, it just compounds on differentiators you already have. And you have to ask yourself, number one, if the audience actually wants those differentiators.
SPEAKER_01I think that one hack in life is don't listen to what people say, watch, watch what people do. And one observation I would make, which I I started to make early before I launched my channel, and I think I'm being proven right on it, but like almost every um almost every successful person, um, like disproportionately suc successful person that I know is looking at starting a personal brand or um starting to build a presence on YouTube. Um, why do you think that is? Why do you think that why do you think that is now?
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_01So I'll give you an ex just just some examples. Like Joe Joe Longsdale from Palantir decides to go out and start, and he's putting in a lot of money um in into YouTube, and there are a lot of people like that. Um, you know, why do you think people are deciding to do that now?
SPEAKER_00It's really difficult to give a prescriptive answer here. If we wanted to give just a simple business case answer, attention and liquidity are really tightly correlated. What PE has Tesla traded at for my entire awareness, my entire adult life? And and why hasn't it been able to do that? I actually do think that there is an economic equation here where people can buy, sell, and invest in companies much more efficiently when they have talented, smart people coming directly to them. So I do think there's there's an entire sort of financial markets element here that isn't necessarily tied to AI specifically. I also think that people will want real people and they do want trust. And I could see how especially a lot of tech people or or just technically aware people are worried about the Silicon Valley narrative of the permanent underclass. And they see the members of the permanent upper class being people with brand awareness where you know about them because there will be so much AI content produced in the future, so much volume that sifting through it to find a real human will get harder. And functionally, your your luck for breaking through, the odds will just continue to exponentially decrease. So I think in a way it's sort of a um it's a bet that yeah, it's just going to get harder the more volume there is. I go back to the thing.
SPEAKER_01It's harder and also more valuable if you if you if you are one of those that broke out.
SPEAKER_00I guess it dep, but to me it depends on which audience you're aggregating. Like it's more and again, do you think it's fair to say that a bet on personal brand is also a bet on the personal uh the the permanent underclass? And what I mean by that for the context of the audience is a lot of Silicon Valley people are saying once AI comes, there will be no more jobs and then there will be no more social mobility, and we will live in this sort of like feudalistic um society where like a bunch of people got rich during then and they go and they aggregate their money, and then because of compound interest, they keep growing, and the people who didn't get their money didn't get their money, whatever.
SPEAKER_01Maybe I'm getting too existential, but I think that's pretty existential, but I I would argue that that's already happening. And I think that um you know, it's like it's just what it's just another way of saying that the divide between the you know the rich and the poor, for lack of a better term, has has never been larger, and you don't have as much in the middle. And like that's just a trend that's been happening over the last 20 plus years. And so like you're like you're just like that whole thesis is is taking it to the extreme. And so you're basically saying that AI or what it represents. What it represents is ultimately just going to widen that that that trend. Um, and I think that there's a risk that that happens.
SPEAKER_00I don't conflate the the personal brand with that necessarily, but maybe like maybe you know, when you're a hammer, everything's a nail, but I can't help but see it and think organic is by far the cheapest way to reach wealthy people because wealthy people when when you do wealthy people, first of all, can avoid ads really efficiently because they pay for premium content. Yeah, and second, It's exceptionally expensive to target y wealthy people. Like, yeah, you could go and you can try and sponsor the opera or jazz at Lincoln Center or something and get a little bit of brand awareness from wealthy people. Or you can just make videos about boring businesses and it's there's a way higher return. And so I think if if you're betting that there will increasingly be, as we've already seen from economic data, right? 50% of consumer spending comes from the top 10% of households in the US. If you're in if you're increasingly betting that a small number of people are going to be making the vast majority of economic decision, then having a relationship with those people so you don't have to rent from platforms in order to access the limited attention you can get from them, it's just a good bet.
SPEAKER_01That's interesting. I don't think that that's wrong. I mean, I I definitely think that um, you know, you definitely see people choosing to do this. And generally, especially when super wealthy people um, you know, go out and start taking their time to build an audience. You know, I put myself in this in this bucket, um, you know, you want to pay attention and kind of figure out why. And um, you know, ultimately, I do think it comes down to influence in the YouTube world. Um, you know, money and even fame in and of itself can't buy distribution. I mean, you see examples of like, you know, the Obama podcast, you know, or the you know, Bruce Springsteen podcast we kind of talked about earlier, like fame, like famous people launch podcasts that then you know they're not displaying.
SPEAKER_00I also watched that diary of a CEO video.
SPEAKER_01Um I don't even know that I watched that, but um I've I've read about this, but it's like you know, it's very hard to keep people's attention, so you can't really pay. Like if you have a really bad ad, for instance, you can't pay for people to actually pay attention to it.
SPEAKER_00I mean, people are going to it could be so bad it's good. That could work.
SPEAKER_01But but but but my point is that like you know, to to really break out, you actually have to produce something that people want to watch.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yes, that a hundred percent. Yeah, this is what's really interesting is YouTube is a lot of people have have media companies, but that's companies that produce media for the distribution channel of YouTube. And so YouTube is sort of like the silent winner. I really am curious to see how Apple and Amazon continue to justify the economics on their media businesses because those are substantially more expensive and probably reach the same amount of people as HubSpot's media ventures on a bunch of really non-s that you think is that big of a or actually that's I I think HubSpot is pretty well known. I actually I need to check the numbers here. I might actually look like an idiot saying that. Let's clip this on Twitter for later.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I have no idea, but but I I actually am curious though. Um, you know, um like HubSpot just bought um Starter Story Starter Story, who was like one of the first people to comment on one of my early videos, funny enough. Um and um what do you think about that strategy?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean HubSpot has been buying media companies, they bought the hustle, and I think that's been going pretty well. Yeah, they own my first million. It's interesting, right? They spent hundreds of millions of dollars on these direct-to-consumer media businesses. Um, well, my first million, I think, is owned by the hustle. It's all the sam par universe, right? So that whole world crushed it on direct to consumer. In theory, like this great business. They tried to break into YouTube and now they've bought Starter Story to break on. I'd be really curious to hear how much of the conversation there was around buying starter story for domain expertise to scale across growing all of the other media ventures that they own versus just buying starter story in and of itself. I think that this is great for the creator. I think it's a great bet for HubSpot, but I'm very curious whether or not they saw it as a aqua hire, I want your domain expertise play, or if they saw it as we can genuinely see a return off of this specific media outlet in and of itself.
SPEAKER_01My my take on it is as you know purely a sales and marketing expense. I mean, in for them, and in that, you know, they like it's a way to, you know, in the same way that I say for Filterby, how do you build a you know brand presence for them? Like they have the same problem in that make how do you make a brand presence for uh for a SaaS company, and like that this is their way of doing that.
SPEAKER_00Starter Story is among the few YouTube channels that feels very personal and authentic to YouTube, but also doesn't have a face at the center. There's a center creative visionary, but I think he could start to delegate and build a team, and then eventually Starter Story could kind of run on its own and be its own brand. That's really appealing and something that I don't think a lot of people are thinking about because previously selling a YouTube channel just never worked for people. But increasingly, people are, whether it's these private equity firms that are going and buying YouTube channels or it's individual companies, people are interested in buying YouTube channels. I think they can find ways to get value out of it over a long enough term. But the question is how do you get it to sustain over that long term? The average career in our space on YouTube is seven years. How do you make something that lasts for longer than that? The reason that the podcast is branded as boring money is eventually I want to have episodes where either we can sub in another host or we just have two entrepreneurs interview each other and there's just a producer off camera who's feeding them questions. I want to build with scalability in mind because this is kind of the first time in YouTube's history where you can and there's genuine incentive to do it instead of just keeping everything scrappy and holding it close to chest.
SPEAKER_01In your mind, what does success for boring money look like?
SPEAKER_00My I want to find a way to capture the value of a high value audience. I think success for boring money is uh growth for the next three years and then a really critical analysis on whether or not growing more and potentially degrading the editorial value, the level of detail we can get into, the types of people we can speak to, whether or not that makes us a commodity. To me, success in anything I do is doing something that uh essentially only I could do, or like could only uniquely be done in a context um with the team that I have. I never want to make something that somebody else could copy. It kind of drives me crazy. And so I I want to be really, really, really, really, really good at speaking to this audience of predominantly Americans, but people all over the world who feel like they've been left behind by a overly financialized and tech tech economy and present a way for them to get exactly ahead and get out of it. And I think if we can speak to that audience, the tailwinds will grow that audience for us naturally. And I would rather not focus on taking the immediate win of how we create some, I don't know, political podcast or something that just like turns into like a cash grab or uh, you know.
SPEAKER_01Well, the nice thing is we don't have any sponsors, don't have that, don't don't need to have a that's why this is cool, man.
SPEAKER_00Like that's why this is cool. Because yeah, we can do we can do things that other people would think is completely not economically sustainable, but it can support a much broader, larger vision. And and because it's a part of this much broader, larger machine, it is economically sustainable. That's cool. That's that's alchemy. Like the fact that we can turn this into something sustainable and other people can't, that's like witchcraft.
SPEAKER_01I like building one-of-one you know, businesses or one-of-one things. And um, you know, for lots of reasons I've talked about on the channel and we'll continue to talk about, I think filter buy is a one-on-one company um that is uniquely mine, you know, uniquely built for me. And you know, my vision for all of our content is ultimately to build a one-on-one, something that only we can, you know, uniquely bring. Um, and you know, I I have a you know, bigger vision for how we can do that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's what's hard about strategy stuff because strategists will always tell you what they tell everyone else. The thing that sucks is like that that is what works in the short term, but it's not what grows a channel. All of strategy right now on YouTube or the strategy space is very focused on how to get videos to do well. I don't really care about getting videos to do well, I care about getting the channel to do well, and that's very different. And right now, all of that strategy and attention is essentially in the creator's court. I think that, you know, part of the reason this works is because you know, we cook on it together.
SPEAKER_01I agree. I agree with you. I mean, I I know I know that I would not be where I am without your help. I mean, I I do know that, and I'm very thankful for that. But I think that um, you know, it's fun. It's also what makes it fun. You know, like if I um was doing this kind of this kind of YouTube thing on my own, um, I don't think it would be as sustainable for me because it wouldn't be nearly as fun um if it was you know super easy and I just could just you know pick up a camera and do it like um but I guess you know I kind of want to wrap with um you know we talked a lot about you know you know our how we work together and our views of YouTube, but what is success for Eric Villa personally look like 10 years from now? Like what what is it that drives you? I mean you're a young you're a young guy, you're what, 24?
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And you know, that which is wild to me. You're almost 20 years younger than me. Yeah. Um, just getting started. Um, 20 years from now, you'll still be 10 years younger than I am right now. Um and just getting started.
SPEAKER_00That's that's what we say about people like you, David. We call you unk.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's what the youth say. You might you might you might want to want to learn from respect to elders, you know. I might have a thing or two I can teach you. I know you're you're always teaching me, but I may be able to teach you a thing or two too.
SPEAKER_00Um so I'll give you the professional answer and I'll also give you sort of a creative answer. Professionally, I would love to one day have a business like what Marquez has built, where it's super high revenue per employee and it's a bunch of very, very, very talented people who are intrinsically motivated by making great work that lots of people watch. There's never a moment where somebody comes and says, How can we think about marketing here? Or how can we we all have one clear focus, which is be the best at making content. And I think that that's what makes it such a fantastic place to work. I would love to do that. It would be really cool to do that in somewhere like hometown of Chicago, Illinois, greatest city on earth. But that's definitely like the tangible goal for me is I I want to kind of proliferate what I view as the workplace of the future. This place where really high-agency, very talented people can do exceptional work in a small group and not have to worry about a ton of bureaucratic red tape. Like that is definitely the dream. Um, and more specifically, to have all those people explicitly just focused on treating an audience well and not worry about annoying needy clients like you, David. Uh after this interview, Eric was probably fired.
SPEAKER_01Um forget you need talent, you need talented people that have domain expertise to be able to um to do the YouTube strategy that you articulate. 100%.
SPEAKER_00David, you're gonna be employee number one at my operation. Duh. Um no, but I think like existentially large, like larger. I I just got to be the editor, producer, maybe if we want to call it director on our You're in the Life video, 90-minute long kind of documentary about what working at that workplace of the future is like. And I really caught a bug. Um, not explicitly for just like filmmaking, but for work that I think can last a really long time. Work that I think people can look at when I'm older and be like, damn, that was really good. I'm obsessed with the career of Spike, Spike Lee right now. Um, and I I'm watching Mo Better Blues and I've watched Malcolm X twice now, and I just think his career is so exceptional because everything he makes just sticks around for forever. Like it's all just so evergreen. And I just want to make stuff with an infinite shelf life. And I think what we're doing here can have that infinite shelf life, very lasting brand, very strong affinity. Um, as long as we just continue to get really good at it.
SPEAKER_01What I love about you is that you're so passionate about what you do, um, and you have such such a clarity of a vision on around what it is that you want and what it is that you enjoy doing. And I think that that is very unique. Um, and I think that like when like you see all the convers a lot of the conversations we have, um, I think that that's what a lot of people are lacking is they get to a certain point and they may have some financial success and they see that, um, but then you know they're kind of confused as to what's next, whether they know it or not, and it's because they're not really sure what they're passionate about, where you have great clarity around that. And I think that that's that's a very compelling thing. And I know you will be successful in doing that because of that passion.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think passion is really interesting because when I was 18 and really passionate about my career, a lot of people were like, you're not thinking practically. And then COVID happened and all my freelance clients went away, and I was very broke, and I had to figure out how to make money on upwork, and eventually things started to become exceptionally practical. And so now, now that I've kind of self-actualized and I've got my my bag, it's self-actualized for for the 24-year-old version of myself, right? Now the question comes back to where's passion? Because I can think about it. And that's what's cool about the show we make and what we do. And I finance YouTube in general is something that I'm really passionate about because eventually you can get people to a place where, yeah, they've got enough coin to worry about bigger questions than how to get more coin. That's fun. That's a good journey.
SPEAKER_01Well, I guess we'll we'll we'll leave it on we'll leave it on that. So, Eric, thank you for talking with me today.
SPEAKER_00Thanks for signing my checks, David.
SPEAKER_01We'll see, we'll see if they still if they still clear.
