I've made my biggest business mistake yet (Emerald Scales)

oopsy-doopsy i did it again with a new oopsy now this mistake was actually not made too recently it was made a couple years ago but i actually don't know exactly when which might sound weird but it'll make sense once i start explaining it now the reason i'm talking about it now is because i didn't realize this mistake until recently and i've been thinking about it a lot the past week or two so i put my thoughts in the videos and i put videos on youtube so here we are now now to concisely explain this i'm actually going to read my twitter thread because i wrote one a week ago which is exactly what i'm going to be talking about but if it doesn't make sense don't worry alex i'll explain it all but ultimately it revolves around goherping which you mostly know as my youtube channel and emerald scales which you mostly know as the website that i take in and re-home animals through i recently realized the original plan behind creating a reptile service totally backfired the purpose was to serve as a backup source of revenue if primary sources of revenue became unreliable but somewhere along the way the primary source of revenue became entirely dependent on the backup source of revenue interestingly the backup has become my entire identity this isn't inherently bad but still unexpected like every time someone sees or talks to me the first thing they think of or bring up was ultimately just a backup plan it makes sense and is completely understandable but it feels weird people are surprised when they learn that what i'm best known for isn't actually my career or even necessarily my passion probably because it comes off as a successful business it's certainly not successful and the most ironic part is emerald scales isn't even its own registered business of any kind i don't mean to rant i'm mostly just reflecting because this little project turns four years old next week so many good things have come out of it so complaining feels off but i want to explore new ideas and projects but i have no idea how when it's the indirect backbone of everything that i do in our original game plan airmold skills was designed to be easy to offload and put on hiatus for this very reason because neither of us knew what we would want personally to work on in the future but i totally messed up that structure without realizing it so as most of you know i am primarily a youtuber that is my primary source of income and that's i mean yeah that's been my job since i was a teenager that's how that's the only job i've ever had actually now in 2017 uh is when a friend and i decided to create emerald scales you've heard the story probably many times but i normally only talk about the front end of that and what the front-end public goal was and the public point was and that was to be a service to take in and re-home animals to good homes while taking a profit along the way and we actually wrote this whole game plan business plan in a google document and had it all laid out and ultimately our personal goal for this was to create an additional source of revenue i wanted to be a full-time youtuber and although he didn't want to be a full-time youtuber he did have career goals the thing we were building wasn't actually our end-all be-all goal we didn't want to run this thing forever and we actually were both willing to sell it someday our original plan however was for it to serve as an additional source of revenue because being a youtuber is not super reliable in fact having any job is not super reliable if you're employed somewhere you can get fired you can get laid off or you can no longer do your job so you get hurt or something you can't physically do the job that you have if you run a business maybe you run out of customers you run out of clients you run out of money so inherently any single source of income is bad and that's why it's always good to diversify your revenue and that was the goal of remote scales was a form of diversification where we would hopefully someday employ other people to do the work and we can simply take a cut of this recurring income we launched emerald scales as an llc which is a limited liability company but when me and him decided to part ways and try different things we dissolved the llc so in early 2019 less than two years after emerald scales was created it was actually no longer a company of any kind now the oopsie itself happened somewhere between 2019 and 2020 and this is when the primary source of revenue go herping which is an actual like company uh a small company but it is a company became dependent on the backup source this just other little kind of side project uh primarily because emerald skills created such interesting content for youtube i was like why wouldn't i make videos about all this this is such good content and it's performing so well when it comes to building emerald scales when it comes to taking in animals and unboxing them now what i did not realize while recording these videos is that people were primarily there for the reptiles not so much for the growth of a side hustle or a small business or an extra source of revenue that side of it i thought that that was why they are mostly watching but also it happens to be about reptiles and reptiles are kind of cool so say i switched emerald scales halfway through and i was like actually i don't want to do this i want to build a car vinyl wrapping side hustle instead well i would actually lost most of the viewers i didn't realize that because the viewers were putting reptiles first they liked pet reptiles they liked keeping reptiles they were like reptile videos but they also didn't mind learning about the backend and the finances and stuff when for me the most interesting part of the videos was not actually the reptile side it was everything else but most people weren't clicking on the videos for that and so throughout the year of 2019 everything started to revolve around emerald scales and people knew me for emerald scales i think the really interesting part is lots of people like lots of younger people and teens will email me with questions because they need to interview someone that owns a small business i am in no way shape or form qualified to give any form of business advice but what i do love doing is talk talking about my experiences so if you do ever ask me a business question or a finance or money question i have absolutely no idea what you should do i simply know what i've done what has and hasn't worked so far and what i haven't done so i'll happily tell you what i what i do what my experiences are and and what's working and what isn't for me personally just no idea what you should do but the funny part is every single person that sends me interview questions for say their school project or asks me questions personally because they want to do something similar 100 maybe 99.5 but basically 100 percent ask about emerald scales i always expect them to ask about go herpe because go herping is well an actual company that's my job that's my source of income and that's what generates the revenue but everyone asks about emerald scales now that is in no way the fault of people asking me questions because look at how i talk about emerald scales i'm constantly mentioning the name but basically i kind of made it look like everything revolved around emerald scales because that's where i was trying to push traffic and push viewers and get the name out there and over time i ended up actually revolving around emerald scales because this was growing faster than anything else even if it wasn't actually making money but that's okay because the things that emerald skills does creates such good content for goherping and that's what pays off really well both in a rewarding personal sense and in a financial sense that supports me and my bills and stuff but of course everyone that asks they're like well hey you own like your your your jobs emerald skills you're a business owner that takes in and sells animals i like to just call myself a youtuber but of course because i am constantly talking about the emerald scales animals because that's what make good content it seems like that my life is emerald scales and so my life has become emerald scales but interestingly that never was exactly what i wanted i mean i knew both of us knew when we were creating this thing this is going to take a ton of energy and even though we're both working like a full-time job hours on our own well jobs we wanted to do this too and so we work an extra full-time job basically but hopefully temporarily so just for ease of math let's just say that i always spend 40 hours a week on goherping which averages out probably someone accurately i probably used to spend 60 to 70 sometimes i spend 20 hours a week sometimes 10 hours a week other times 80 hours a week so on average let's just say 40 hours a week for go herpes which would be a full-time job and then there's emerald scales and we would spend 20 to 25 30 hours a week usually on top of this and this is totally fine it's you've heard the word hustle the idea that you can temporarily really push yourself and exert yourself and sleep less and use more energy drinks to work on a project that you really want to that was hopefully always temporary because well hopefully it would either someday become self-sustainable or we decide this isn't for us we don't want to do it anymore let's just stop and so that's when it comes down to why our original game plan was specifically designed to be easy to put on hiatus or easy to liquidate we would never take in too many animals we'd always keep the number low we would never employ too many people or work with too many people that rely on us for their jobs um we never like rent anything out crazy we we were never gonna do like a three year lease on a place because who knows if we'll do it for another three years but i made the mistake of once we separated i kind of revolved everything around it and it became harder and harder to put on a hiatus so yeah also we were both i think we were both 17 when we started this i'm about to turn 22. we knew even as teenagers who knows what we're gonna want to do in our 20s maybe we'll want different jobs or whatever we didn't know and we knew that maybe we would want to do it more but we just wanted to leave options open i've i've mentioned a lot in videos that i would like to take a break from old scales for many reasons but i usually don't go into the reasons and people are like what are you gonna make videos on emerald skills is your entire channel which is kind of true i don't really want to admit it and i refuse to admit it for a while i've made lots of off-topic videos now those videos receive like almost 100 positive feedback and those of you that watch them really love them and i really appreciate that because i really love them but ultimately they do not perform well enough i mean that's they literally just don't get enough views like that's the most simple way to break it down like i'm looking through the channel now i haven't experimented too much because it is risky to experiment on a channel that you rely on and so basically my main channel needs all my undivided attention but the problem is for my channel to do the best that it can as far as i can tell right now i need emerald scales to exist and to put it as honestly as possible i don't want to do emerald skills anymore i've i've hinted at it before i've mentioned before that i want to try new projects i want to take a break from remote scales and then of course most people say well what do you what do you mean again take it that's like taking a break from your job animal skills is your job and of course yes animals are being helped but i feel like that's obvious enough i don't need to keep mentioning it but ultimately from my perspective i don't know how to i don't know what to do how about that that's a good way to say it i i truly don't know what to do because here's the dilemma i don't believe that emerald scales and goherping at the same time are sustainable but now i'm worried that goherping isn't sustainable without scales i've come to the personal conclusion that at the four year mark i think that would be the perfect moment to just end it like this cool four-year project thousands of people experienced it it helped lots of animals that helped lots of people i got lots of experiences and it's not even like a sad thing it's like wow this cool project happened now it's time to end the cool project and start new cool projects now in theory if i had stuck to the original game plan that could have worked out fine my channel would be a totally separate thing i keep making videos on whatever my channel is making videos on and maybe i even show one of my next projects on the channel as a fun little side thing as emerald scales was meant to be on the go herping channel right now here's an interesting statistic one third of the revenue i make every month is still from unboxing videos and i've only uploaded seven my channel has over 500 videos and a third of my monthly income is from seven videos that just keep racking up the views and i i mean i hope they keep racking up tvs but someday it's gonna run out of people that want to watch the unboxing videos so i will happily make more videos about animal skills and why i think it's unsustainable for example um but i do not at all want to end my youtube channel i in my current state i feel like i would happily do youtube for another 10 years i'm about to hit the 10-year mark why not make it 20. i've

had so much fun i would happily do it 10 more i have multiple video series ideas some of which are reptile related but others of which have absolutely nothing to do with reptiles and i certainly don't at all feel the need to incorporate all of my hobbies and interests into a channel that's not even a good idea anyway it's better to have your channel have a topic but even if i just were to do reptile videos the reptile videos that don't involve remote scales animals just don't perform as well but again i can't take in any animals right now i can't ship any out if i could dedicate 100 of my time to emerald scales i do believe that it could grow and become more successful i just simply don't want to which i think is i used to feel guilty feeling that that's why i'd never say it now i don't feel guilty i've i mean i've changed as a i started creating emerald scales almost 25 of my life ago i was a quarter younger a lot of the things i've gotten to do were literally achieving my childhood dreams but now i'm not a child i'm an adult now and i have different dreams and so it's like cool i did those now i want different things unfortunately it gets even more complicated though because of the fact that i'm in the middle of so many uh rehoming things with emerald skills there's like 40 people waiting to send their animals which is a total of like 60-something animals and that's going to be very hard uh just just a little sneak peek of how emerald skills i don't believe is sustainable i can essentially only run it six months a year because of shipping if that the past couple years it's been like four months a year because of so many additional shipping issues that are completely out of my hands which really sucks i mean i could i can't drive to california every week which is where the majority of animals end up getting purchased from and so yeah a hard part is that when it comes to reptile content by far the best performing reptile content is when i have lots of reptiles to show you but if i'm not taking them in and sending them out um then that's not the same so i've had countless ideas with exactly what to do for example one idea was what if i just take in five to ten animals at a time no more just five to ten do an unboxing video on ten or five even make a couple videos on those and then chip them out maybe that's what i'll do who knows but that is literally the opposite of growing that is shrinking because that's what i used to do i used to take in five to ten at a time if i go back to that where's the room for growth where do i go from there one thing i keep thinking about is back when i had 600 subscribers which i think is funny i think it was 600 because now i have 600 000. and when i had 600 subscribers i went back and forth in my head for weeks on end if i should change the name of my channel and i was absolutely terrified to what if i lose everything i've built so far because at the time that community of 600 people was just was so absolutely massive to me that i was so scared i was gonna mess it up hey i'm alex and today i'm going to be talking about a pretty big announcement for the channel and website nc nature news so actually in a little bit uh the nc nature news will no longer be known as nc nature news and i am going to be changing the name so before i talk about the new name uh i will the first thing i should say is nothing else is changing uh the website i mean the website and youtube channel that you're subscribed to and follow it's not gonna change you're still going to be interested in it if because it's going to be the exact same stuff same videos same series same me same everything all this changing is the name which that's a pretty big thing and i'm doing it because i think it's for good reason the new name that i came up with is go herping but if i had stuck with my original name and never changed the the path of my channel say i built it from there then i would have been unhappy so much sooner with where it would be because i simply would have just been growing that because i was too scared to change it and so i'm kind of in that same position now again of i have 600 000 subscribers now if i change something this could totally ruin everything and i was like wait that's exactly what i thought when i had 600 subscribers and it worked out great when i finally made the change to make that pivot and change my name and slightly alter my videos so i'm in that same position but i'm like realistically 600 000 is a lot more than 600 and also now i have like things i have to pay for but then i didn't have anything to pay for because i was 14 15 something like that so it's just this weird repeat of history of my own history from like six years ago of oh my god i i really want to make this change but i'm so scared too and i'm doing it again i really want to make a change but i'm scared to and i don't really know exactly how it would work out and what i would do so it's the same experience so yes i could continue to downsize i could probably fit five reptiles just in this room behind me and just have emerald skills be this but that just feels like the totally wrong direction and i made the right choice the first time with 600 subs i know it's very different a very different decision now but uh that's kind of how i'm reminding myself and why i'm not trying to just like beat around the bush of making tiny changes because i kind of want to make a bigger change i just have a lot more that i'd be risking and also i'd be really scared i can't figure out which one i would regret more i think a lot of decisions that people make is based on what you will regret the least in the future because you don't want to die with regret i feel like every decision you make is ultimately am i going to regret this on my deathbed or am i going to regret that on my deathbed and then you pick the one that you won't regret i feel like this maybe it's not and so this is one where i truly can't figure out am i going to more so regret continuing on the same path and growing it even more even if it's not the path i want to do even if it's working or am i going to regret more changing it risking what i've built and possibly ending up in the same position what if i did keep altering content until it starts to perform better and i enjoy it more and then i get bored of the content again or i don't want to do that anymore am i gonna just keep changing it in this like constant struggle because that doesn't seem right so ideally i would love to be able to just keep making reptile videos because i feel like i'm good at it i enjoy making the videos even if reptiles aren't my number one all-time passion i mean so what does that really matter at the end if i enjoy it enough to do it and it performs well and viewers enjoy it like that seems like the ideal scenario the one problem with that which i've been kind of comparing it to like say i was a minecraft youtuber i'm sure being a minecraft youtuber is hard i actually used to have a minecraft channel and that you just open up minecraft and you make the video even if say you hated minecraft well you could still open minecraft and make a minecraft video even if you don't enjoy it so even if i hated making reptile videos which i don't hate making them i actually do enjoy the videos that i'm making but i can't just magically make reptiles appear when i want to make a reptile video and then the reptiles disappear the reptiles need lots of resources money time space heating and electricity the food just the personal time to make sure that they're comfortable with handling and being held and being taken out and healthy and all the little things that come along with it so it is a bit harder it's not like i can just the way i walk in here flip a switch all my lights come on i click go on the camera i click record on the mic and i'm good to make a video i really love that process but then it's like oh i'm doing a reptile video i also have to have this whole room dedicated to animals with uh all these setups and yeah i already said all that so i don't have a solution yet this can be considered part one to my quarter life crisis and um i mean yeah i'll definitely read the comments if just whether you have input or ids or whatever but uh i'll keep you updated and let you know what's going on thanks for listening to my very long rant where i basically just go on and on about the same thing with no solution which secretly i'm just recording the video to hope that i figure out a solution along the way while saying this stuff out loud but i have not come up with a solution i do have many more reptile videos coming up that i've had a lot of fun making i really like making the red and instagram ones and although they don't do as well as an unboxing video i'm really grateful that you like those videos too and i'll keep them going so i'll keep on doing those and exploring new ideas at the same time and i'll be thinking so that's it for this video i'm alex and thanks for watching you

2022-01-27 14:44

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