I sincerely thank every one of you reading who have offered support, encouragement, or even assistance in this new endeavor. Just want to put something out today to outline where I think things are going, and when. The TL;DR version is, not soon enough 😀 (and that TL;DR is required because as you will see below, I write a lot when I get started). Before I completely “go live” I have some things I want to do, and some things I need to do:
- Needs – the things that I feel like need to be done before I can proceed with creating and publishing real episodes:
- Decide on editing software, even if the decision is “this will work for now” and plan to upgrade when time and finances allow. Since the editor itself doesn’t affect the output product, this is a matter of knowing how much work I have to take on that the software won’t do for me, with the promise of it getting better in the future.
- Decide on recording scheme and software, again even if the decision is “this will work for now” and plan to upgrade. Many cloud systems exist, but almost all of them are paid systems, and I can’t start at a deficit. Thus, I may have to “settle” for something with quality not as good as I’d like so I can get content created, and hope to upgrade in the future. The trade-off is that if the quality is too bad, then there won’t be a future.
- Practice! I’ve already made a couple test videos with just myself on two devices, and ran into the quality issue mentioned previously, so once I sort that out I can practice on the process. Then of course is the practice part of the actual episode, which I’ll probably tap a friend or two to help with making – someone who will understand that episode may never see the light of day, or may not be as structured as things will be when everything is fully underway.
- Finally, I think… monetize. I don’t like the word (mostly because it’s marketing-speak, ask my wife how I reacted when she transferred to the marketing department at her job and started using those terms). And I will say from the start, I’m not setting out to do this “for the money”. I know that’s a recipe for failure, and it means the metrics I’d measure are based on financial success and not emotional or spiritual. I’m going into this because it’s something I want to do, but to be honest there is an opportunity for some income no matter how small. So it is important to me to try to capture that, with the goal of having enough to be able to improve. The better recording systems mentioned above, better editing software, maybe even later on better hardware for doing it all, those things take money, and as much as I want to do this I can’t simply decide to pour finances into it and hope for recovery later. So I need to make sure to set things up so that the opportunity for funding is there, and if it happens then I can use that for upgrades.
- Wants – the things I would like to also have ready before pushing the big red button:
- Logo/images! My wife and I started coming up with something (wait, that’s a lie, she did all the work so far and showed it to me and I really like it) but that needs to be finalized and then turned into various brand imagery. Think things like profile images, banner pages at the top of social media sites, maybe even title graphics, etc. Other things can go forward without it, because of course edits can be made to put stuff into existing video and until I actually publish there’s no pressure to have all the socials looking pretty, but I still want it done before actually going out and widespread sharing that this exists.
- Website theme and tie-ins. Right now this website is using the basic theme that came with the software, and it’s sufficient to display text. But I want to make sure to have something that looks good, fits with the design of other things, and properly conveys all the information that I want the website to have. I did start looking at themes before, but didn’t get much past scrolling through them, so what I’ll need to do is try a bunch to at least see what types of things I like and want. Then I can narrow it down to more specifics. And of course, unless you make a lot of changes to the base theme code, changing themes is a couple clicks away so it’s not super important to get it perfect from the start, but I want something better than the basic starter one, even if only so my site doesn’t look like every other site that someone installed and didn’t configure beyond the title.
- More ideas! I’ve got some ideas for what to start with, but I want to brainstorm more so I have a nice list. My goal is to be able to either find a person for a topic I want to discuss, or pick a person and then with them find a topic together we want to discuss, and go from there. I’m not looking to create a huge backlog of episodes so I can push them out over time and have a cushion, more than I don’t want to be in a position of having not published something and no ideas of what to do next.
So where am I in all this? Well … not as far as I’d like to be, but further than I have been before, and still moving forward. I found editing software I like, but then found the recordings going into it weren’t good, and went back to look at that. I may have found a replacement, but won’t know until I test later. And since I have a full time job, other responsibilities outside of that, and other hobbies and interests as well, I’m not yet at a point where I “dedicate” time to this project. So it’s slow, but it’s going. And that’s about the best I can do for the moment.
But rest assured, for those of you who expressed interest, I’ll be reaching out!
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