How To Get Started on YouTube with Augie Johnston

Josh Wilson
 A good day fellow deal makers. Welcome to the dial. Scout out. This show is all about deals. You're probably going to hear me talk and say the word deals a lot. The purpose and mission, everything we do here on this show is to connect deals and dealmakers. That's our revenue model, that's our business model. That's everything we do. We find cool people who are doing cool deals, we ask their advice, we find out the kind of deals that they're doing and maybe how do we get better as a deal making community so on today's show, we're going to have a lot of conversations around video marketing. We brought in a YouTuber who has hit some massive milestones in his YouTubing career and wanted to give you some tips on this. So, Audio, welcome to the show. 

 Augie Johnston
 Hey, thanks for having me. 

 Josh Wilson
 Yeah, man. We're hanging out at a coffee shop or pub or bar or whatever, and someone walks up to you and they go, hey, Auggie, who are you? What do you typically say? 

 Augie Johnston
 Well, I'm a serial entrepreneur. Back in 2009, I did that famous Google search that so many people do where they say how to make money online. I was living in Europe at the time, and that's what brought me to YouTube, basically. Over much money wasted on courses and just other things where I just never found my path. Ever since then, I've been building these little online businesses, trying to provide value. I've done it in the information product digital space, and now we're more of a service with a video editing service and a podcast editing service. 

 Josh Wilson
 Awesome, man. All right, so first of all, let's start with what the heck are you doing in Europe? 

 Augie Johnston
 How did you yeah, I played college basketball. I'm actually the varsity basketball coach here in my hometown. Basketball is one of my passions and I'm still in it. Anyways, after college, I went and played in Europe professionally. When I say professionally, I don't think I was some big time guy. I was getting paid peanuts. Basically, we're talking about like $1,000 a month, right? Almost like being on scholarship again. I didn't have a lot of money, but I had a lot of time. I did do that Google search, and from there it was just like the rabbit hole. The first thing I actually learned, the first dollar that I made online was, I'm not really proud of this, but it was creating like these spammy vidchops that I would post on YouTube. I'm talking like hundreds of them, right? It was just like a video that said, click the link in the description. 

 Augie Johnston
 I would drive people to other CPA offers, like free teeth whitening kits and building these leads for other businesses. I actually made a couple of $1,000 doing that. Yeah, that's why I was in Europe. Over there I was in Germany mostly. There's no TV in English, so I was watching a lot of YouTube. This was back in 20 09 20 10. YouTube was different back there, my man. 2009, you didn't have as much good content. The content was really cut and dry, and it was the infancy of YouTube. I think YouTube was just acquired by Google like, a year or two before. So. Yeah, I mean, I've been on YouTube a while. I love YouTube. Even to this day, I don't watch TV or movies. I watch YouTube and yeah, so I'm lucky to still be in the space with vid shops. And now we're editing for YouTubers. 

 Josh Wilson
 Yeah. How to Make Money Online is probably a search that I'm 40, so I think anybody who is graduating in early, two thousand s, and they're breaking out. What do you want to be when you grow up? We see this thing called the Internet. We see these people and Ferraris driving around, it's just like, here's how to make money guru. And they took all my money, right? Because I gave them a lot of money. I went through the courses and I didn't quite crack the code the way that their programs said, but I made money online in other ways. You said you're making $1,000 a month throwing basketballs and have fun doing that, but then you started making affiliate money making videos just as much, 1000 here, 2000 here. At what point where you're like, I need to get serious about this and there's some opportunity here. 

 Augie Johnston
 Yeah. Once I saw the money coming in, eventually was like, okay, this is not sustainable. This like Spammy way of doing this. That's when I started creating the basketball training tutorials. That's when I launched Baller Boot Camp. That's the YouTube channel that has 200,000 subscribers. I learned through all those courses, and I did even before I launched Baller Boot Camp, I had a couple of products to create it, right? I had a lead magnet where I had my very first video on basketball training channel. I said hey. At the end I was like, hey, and if you want a free workout, click the link in the description, head over to this end of your email and I'll send so I was set up. I had already done all my education, right? I told you the courses and all that stuff. I knew what I was doing at that point. 

 Augie Johnston
 That wasn't until a few years later I was on the hamster wheel learning and trying and failing. I tried all kinds of different stuff. Once I started releasing videos on YouTube, that was probably 20 13. 20 12? Yeah, I grew that channel big. I grew my Gmail list with that strategy to over 50,000 leads. And I released over eleven products. I had the twelve week shooting program, the twelve week ball handling program, and then I got into physical products and I sourced stuff from China and we had some physical products, like some training tools and stuff like that. And it was a full blown business. I did that full time for a while until I kind of got burnt out and I said, hey, how can we serve these video creators? It's not easy, right? Everyone knows that now. Everyone thinks, oh, the life of a YouTuber. 

 Augie Johnston
 All I need to do is upload videos, shoot them in the morning, upload. It's easy, but no, it's really hard actually. That's when I kind of launched vid Shops instantly had success with it and I was like, okay, this is the direction I'm headed now. 

 Josh Wilson
 Yeah, it's so true, man. Creating content is really a lot of work because I don't know about you, I've been making videos, I've been doing podcast SOP s really long time. We build a bunch of different brands and people are like, oh that's so cool. What do you do? I'm like, I spend a lot of my time in the past fixing errors, fixing my arms, editing stuff. You'll record for 15 minutes and edit for 2 hours and then your production stuff go out and then you just lose the drive to create more content because for every piece of content they create, it's going to be 2 hours of work. That will burn out a lot of people. Luckily we found some ways out of it. You said you got burnt out before you got burnt out, you had some things, some milestones that you hit on YouTube that a lot of people will never do. 

 Josh Wilson
 Like give us an idea of what milestones you hit through YouTube. 

 Augie Johnston
 Yeah, so the channel sits at about 200,000 subscribers now. The biggest milestone was a hundred thousand subscribers. That's when you get the play button. It's just the Play button from YouTube. The milestones there are 100,000, you get the silver 1 million, you get the gold and then 10 million subscribers, you get the platinum play button. So that was a big one. YouTube to me was always just the lead generation machine, right? I knew it. Because I started uploading to YouTube with three or four years of grind and learning through courses and learning all that kind of stuff. I definitely had a plan and stuff when I started YouTube. Yeah, I got 20 million views on there. The cool thing about creating content and I didn't even really know this, I thought I would just be making money by selling products and getting some AdSense revenue. 

 Augie Johnston
 You start to become an authority in the niche, right? The more views I got, people started hitting me up. People fly me out to different countries even. I went out to Singapore and trained some players, ran camps in Vegas. I became like this basketball authority and it was funny because now I'm going to the gym, coaching nowadays even, and I don't upload my channel still gets like maybe 500 views in a month or something, which is okay, but it was getting like around 500,000 views and it's prime. Even today I'm a coach, so I'll go to a basketball tournament, people come up to me, oh, baller boot camp. What are you doing here man? You're famous. Like, well, not really, man. I just actually had the grit to wake up at 06:00 a.m., go to the gym when it's empty and get my wife convinced, my wife girlfriend at the time to hold the camera. 

 Augie Johnston
 That's basically what separates me from a lot of the other trainers that are probably better in working with bigger players. The content is that valuable, that will continue into an authority. 

 Josh Wilson
 Yeah. You hit some major milestones, but you said you got burnt out. What did it look like? How did your business do when you were starting to burn out? What were some signs of burnout and then how did the business get affected? 

 Augie Johnston
 Yeah, there's so many factors when it comes to burning out. It's a pretty common thing. YouTube burnout, if you did a Google search that you'd find 1000 cases of that and just people making videos about it. For me, it was mostly, I would say, because I was a solopreneur all by myself. I didn't have a video editor, I didn't have a copywriter. I didn't have a web designer. I didn't have a graphic design. So I was doing everything. Imagine kind of the name of the game is to create more products. I told you I had eleven products. You have this big email list. You sell to your email list, you're making sales, but you want to have these big launches, right? That's kind of the name of the game. You can imagine like, okay, I'm releasing one video a week. I got to get that recorded, I got to get it edited, I got to get it up with the thumbnail, the graphic design. 

 Augie Johnston
 I got to get a blog post created for that. I got to get that on my blog, all that, and then, oh yeah, and I got a new product coming out here in two weeks. That's 70 videos. I got to somehow get those edited. People are paying money for this, so they better be good. It was all that just put together that I was like, man, I cannot sustain this any longer. I got to get a better computer to edit all these videos. I got to do all this. I was just what's next? I'm making some decent money, full time income. In the long run, I was like, this is not going to work out. In the long run, I was plateauing on my views or plateauing. Right. That kind of led me to burn out. 

 Josh Wilson
 Yeah. What are some signs of burnout? Right, so being an entrepreneur, I've been a solopreneur. Now we have team and such like that. For me, man, it got lonely, got dark, and building a business, especially from nothing, is tough as h***. What were some signs that you saw in your own life? 

 Augie Johnston
 Yeah, it's typical procrastination, that kind of stuff, but I think kind of the signs are like, I was super excited to edit a video and get it up and hit that publish button. At the beginning, I was like, every time, I'm checking all the comments, the first day I'm waking up in the morning checking the video, how to do. By the end there, I was just like, not caring, not looking at comments, like not trying to edit. That was kind of one of the ways that Vidro started, was like, well, I need to get somebody to start editing my videos. I'm not going to do this anymore. How can I create, like, a system here where I can upload the footage, have some SOPs, some standard operating procedures for my editor? Once I saw that worked, I was like, okay, I want to try this. 

 Augie Johnston
 I want to try to create something. Because I had bought the Domain Augie Vidchops.com, like many years ago, and it all stemmed from a book I read. Like I said, in that beginning stage, I was doing a lot of learning. There was one book called The Seven Day Start Ups. It's from Dan Norris, and it's actually the same book that the design pickle guy who has a flat rate graphic design company. He read that book and inspired him as well. After I'd read it, I was like, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this for graphic design, I'm going to do it. I went and bought the Minute graphics.com. I was like, and I never launched it, right? I was like, no, I'm doing this baller boot camp thing. I never launched it. I saw the design pickle guy. Russ Perry. Dude, it's growing, man. 

 Augie Johnston
 I watched a couple of interviewvalet of him. Oh, we're at a million dollars run rate. Oh, we're at 2 million. I'm like, dude, I need to do this. So I launched it. And it was perfect timing. It wasn't hard to launch. It was a seven day startup, right? It wasn't too hard. I had a couple of editors ready as well as myself, ready to edit. I created the landing page, created some checkout process, all that. I just shared it in a Reddit group. And boom, woke up the next day. First client over delivered. Got my second client. He happened to be an influencer that taught how to grow on YouTube, right? So we over delivered. He said hey, Vid Shops is editing my videos. From there's always of luck, right, that's involved. So that was my luck. 

 Josh Wilson
 Traction comes from good planning. Put in the hustle, but at the spark that really makes traction and success happen is luck and a relationship, right? 

 Augie Johnston
 Yeah. 

 Josh Wilson
 It's usually a person who kind of sparks it, and it takes you over the line as you're building. And you built your YouTube thing. You've had some success there, and now you're helping other people. Do you still create stuff for yourself? Are you getting back into the content creation on your own or is it now just purely external? 

 Augie Johnston
 Yeah, I am getting back into the game just for more of a personal brand thing for the entrepreneurial journey. Because like I said, it's not going to end with vid shops. We have this podcast wings company that we're looking to launch as well. Sorry, launched, but we're looking to grow. And I want to acquire businesses too. I want to acquire put an operator in that business. It's just I look at them all the time. I'm always looking at different websites to find a good deal and I find them and I signed the NDA and I'm like, this is a perfect fit. This is right up my skill set. I'm like, what, at this point I don't want to get distracted, right? Everyone says don't get distracted. Shiny object syndrome. I'm like, let me just keep my head down for one or two more years on vid shops. 

 Augie Johnston
 This can be something really special with podcast wings as well. Yeah, soon enough I'm going to acquire a business and go from there, man. 

 Josh Wilson
 Yeah. How many domains do you think you own? 

 Augie Johnston
 That's funny. That's a good question because I was like the other day, I was like, that'd be like a cool little YouTube video where I could go through and talk about all but I got about 18 or 20. 

 Josh Wilson
 Yeah. Domain investing was big, right, do you remember that? Like maybe 2010 or eleven or twelve. Somewhere in there, like domain investment gobble up all the domains. I know it happened early 2000s, but we caught wind of it and there was domain courses in seven figure domain buyer, right? 

 Augie Johnston
 Yeah. 

 Josh Wilson
 I had so many ideas. I'm an idea guy. Sounds like you are too. What were some of the flops in your content creation history? What were some flops that you look back and you're like, what in the world was I thinking? 

 Augie Johnston
 There's a lot of them. The first one that comes to mind is I wanted to build a YouTube channel for kids. So I bought a domain name. It was foreverkids.com. I bought a $500 puppet and I was like, I don't really want to be in the videos, right? I just want to use a puppet in front of a green screen. So I created one video. I was like, this is going to be a huge education company for kids, and made one video. It took me like the whole day, 8 hours just to make it and never took that. I still have the puppet, but I never took it out again. There's one right there. Another one was mixtapeplanet.com where I thought I listened to rap music and there was all these mixtape websites, like ones called.com there's all these different ones and I just got into it and I thought I was going to make a mixtape website. 

 Augie Johnston
 I mean, even to this day there are some that are like flops, not flops, but just didn't take enough action on them. 

 Josh Wilson
 Yeah, I had one back in the day. I built a fitness technology company and I just tried so many different things to get there. I had like a ninja or something like that get caught up or something so dumb. I had one for affiliate marketing where I'd like peel back the layers on the truth of these guru programs and it's called like Naked Opportunities. It was just so many dumb ideas that I threw at the wall to see what stock and a lot of them I'll just keep out there. That way I could remind myself and remind other people. It's going to take a while to find your fit and to try a lot, right? Definitely you're a coach, you spend time and you help people kind of miss all those failed startups because you have done a lot of them, right? Let's just say I come to you and I go, listen bro, I got this business over here. 

 Josh Wilson
 I'm a deal guy and I need to start doing video. Everybody tells me I need to do video. I don't even know where to begin. You Ian Hill, bypass all that startup pain, all that editing s***, right? All the things that sucks. And you can help them get started. What kind of advice do you have for that real estate investor who needs to get on YouTube and TikTok and all that other crap? What advice do you have for them? 

 Augie Johnston
 The advice is just to get started. It's just to use the camera on your phone to write a script with a good hook. Three bullet points from this, three bullet points. You can add more bullet points, like sub bullet points, right? A call to action at the end and just to make that first video. Because the truth is that your first video is going to suck. Your second video is going to suck. In time around video 20 or 30, you're going to be pretty good. The advice that I always give because everyone always gets caught up on the tech or the camera, the video quality, it's not that important. My advice is set a goal. Say, hey, I'm going to shoot 100 videos on my iPhone and once that hundreds video is posted, then I will go and invest in the camera and spend the money or something like that. 

 Augie Johnston
 Because then you're just like my only goal is to pump these things out and you just get so much better in time. You don't have to script it out. Just three bullet points. If what you're talking about, then you can probably talk for 5 hours on three bullet points, so that will get you through your first few videos. The only thing on YouTube that you really need to do is make videos that people will click on and make videos that people will watch all the way through. That's how the algorithm works is that you got to make high click through thumbnails and titles and topics and once they click on it, they got to watch it all the way through and the content has got to be good. If you do that, then the algorithm will recommend your video and push you out to people so that you can get discovered. 

 Josh Wilson
 Yeah, I've had some that hit maybe 100,000. Right, nothing huge at all. 

 Augie Johnston
 That's really solid though. Thanks, man. 

 Josh Wilson
 It was back in the day when, I mean, there's some ridiculous videos that I put out. Yeah, it was back in the day, the fitness thing, because it was a simple thing. I put like how to fill in the blank, right? Like it was a how to and it was exactly the way that the people would ask the search. That was one of the things that worked really well for me when it comes to you said title, description, image, thumbnail, right. All those things matter if you had to kind of give do you guys have a checklist or some guidelines or something to help people get in the right direction and maybe some advice there? 

 Augie Johnston
 Yeah, I mean, I kind of said it already, but I'll say it again, it can get complicated. There's a lot more to it. If you follow these things, then you can succeed without knowing anything else. The first thing is the click through rate. Believe it or not, that's really important to the algorithm. Click through rates. Three things. It's the actual title, right? The actual words that you see on the YouTube. That's got to be a little clickbait, it's got to be interesting. The thumbnail image and kind of the advice for the thumbnail image is you want to use like a big face, right? Big face with a motion. Works well. Arrows on there work well. Text, if you're going to put text on there, you can or you cannot, then it should be like three to five words. It should never be just the title restated. 

 Augie Johnston
 The thumbnail should never just have text on the title restated. It should play off of the title. Whatever the title is and whatever the text says or whatever the thumbnail is should play off each other to create curiosity. The third part to get people to click is the topic. Right. So what's the topic? Right, so for example, for basketball, I could say how to shoot a basketball. Okay, decent topic. Or I could say how to shoot a basketball like Steph Curry, right? That's better of a topic, more clickbaity, more just interesting. And that creates curiosity. Like the thumbnail for that could say something like Steph Curry's secret. Shooting trick, right? There you go. It's a secret shooting trick. They said, I wonder what that is. Or the most important thing Steph Curry does. Okay, so that's click through rate. The second thing is the watch time. 

 Augie Johnston
 The watch time is how long people are watching your vidchops. The main thing is to hook them. You want to hook them at the beginning with the one liner. Some people, my buddy, he recommends like, the first minute of the video should be a hook. You should just be hitting them in this and open loop and teaser here and just keep them watching. Other than that, it's just the content. Just deliver good value based content where you're delivering value and you'll win. You'll win if you do that. 

 Josh Wilson
 As you're going through this process of building vidchops out, you've done it for yourself. Now doing it for others as you're doing it for others and you take an outside perspective, what mistakes do you find? A lot of YouTubers or video content makers who maybe this isn't their full time career, but they're looking to begin, what mistakes are you seeing? 

 Augie Johnston
 Just not making content for the platform. So specifically YouTube, right? You can't make a vertical video there. Well, there are shorts, but like a long form content. There like make sure your phone is sideways, right? This is some no brainer ones. Yeah, all the things like no hook, if there's no hook, no value in the video. People talking just too much about themselves instead of the viewer. Like, you always want to keep your target audience in mind with everything you do come up with the topic. Would they find this interesting? No, not really. I find it interesting. They wouldn't. So don't do it. That's kind of the main things. And then all the video basics. I said, you can just use your phone, right? You can, but you got to have some decent lighting, you got to have some decent audio, and that's about it. 

 Augie Johnston
 Some people will use their phone, which is fine, but they'll be in a really echoey room. They'll be really far away from the phone. If you're going to record on your phone, you got to be kind of close, right? Because the smartphone is on the phone. Unless you use an external one. But just get the fundamentals, right? Lighting is a fundamental. Getting good audio is a fundamental. Normally we like to teach having good depth behind you. Most people will sit directly with their back touching a wall. You don't want that. You want to be out from the wall. It's called depth. Those are kind of the main things right there that I would make sure to avoid. 

 Josh Wilson
 Okay, sweet, man. As you're looking at YouTube and you're looking at the platform, I've heard some deal makers and people talk, they're like, there's millions and millions of people on creators. They don't need another me on there talking about commercial real estate. What are your thoughts there, man? Is there room for more? 

 Augie Johnston
 Oh, definitely, yeah. I mean, the platform, I don't have it right here in front of me, but you can see the number of creators and viewers on there. It's just going up every year. It's getting more and more. The thing about it is that for me, in my basketball stuff, there was other people and the viewers that viewed my channel also viewed the other guy's channels too. Right. But why did they buy from me? Well, it's just because they vibed with me more, right? They just liked me more. My personality. They could relate to me. They might be a slow white guy themselves like I am. They're like, oh, I could learn something from this guy. He can't even touch the rim, can I? I want to learn from him because this other guy who's making the same kind of content, well, I can't relate to him because he's athletic, he can whatever. 

 Augie Johnston
 So, yeah, I think the method is just to find your super fans, right? 1000 true fans. If you can find 1000 true fans on YouTube, you can make a full time income, charge them $20 a month to give them whatever kind of other value that you can off the platform. Look, $20,000 a month business right there. So you need 1002 fans. 

 Josh Wilson
 Yeah, that's the turning point. 20k. 

 Augie Johnston
 Who says it's? 

 Josh Wilson
 Russell? I think he says at 20K, he's like, that should be your first massive goal. Once you hit that, then you can focus on scale and all these other things. That should take care of all the pressures of life, financially at least. As you're building ups this vid shops. You also saw an opportunity in podcasting. Are they similar? I'm probably doing this wrong and maybe there's room for improvement. But we're recording our podcast shows. We started capturing the video and we just oh, cool, here, copy and paste and throw it to YouTube. What opportunity is there for both podcaster to then expand into YouTube? Because I'm probably doing it wrong. 

 Augie Johnston
 Yeah, well, the cool news is that YouTube just announced they're starting YouTube podcasts. There's actually going to be like an extra tab you could click on that are going to just be for podcasting. I'm not sure the full details of it's just going to be audio or video and audio or just video. But YouTube is a monster, man. And they are so smart there. They're getting into everything. Now they have YouTube shorts, so now they're competing with TikTok. In my opinion, the right way to do it on YouTube is to take a video podcast and then find like a ten minute segment. That's the best ten minute segment of the whole podcast and sniper and create a video out of that. Because the thing about it is we do this for my podcast as well as we post the full 60 Minutes video on there and stuff. 

 Augie Johnston
 It doesn't perform that well because people are clicking on it. They're watching a minute 30 and then they're doing something else. We're not getting that great watch time. Right. We're not triggering the algorithm in any way. You can, I think, trigger the algorithm if you do what I said, right? A short ten minute snippet. You put it on YouTube, people will find it. And it looks like a YouTube video. Right. It has maybe a full frame of someone talking, just like a talking head, like we're doing right now. I've seen a podcast called My First Million, which, I don't know if you've heard of that one, it's recently got very popular. But that's the strategy that they use. Their YouTube channel has over 100,000 subscribers now, and I watched it grow from 10,000 and over the past, not even a year, they're up to 100,000. 

 Augie Johnston
 It's the strategy that they use. Yeah. 

 Josh Wilson
 Super smart, man. It's great. Where do you want to see your business go to? Vidchops, she said, I'm going to focus, I'm going to build this out. This could be something really special. What's the win for you? 

 Augie Johnston
 Yeah, the goal would be to get to like 1000 active clients. That's kind of a number I've had in my mind because I'm like, what it's doable? When I launched it, I'm like, look, crunching the numbers, and we charge anywhere from three hundred and fifty dollars to one thousand dollars a month depending on how much we're editing. That kind of allows if we get to that, then we'll have significant scale. I would consider that scaled up. Yes, the ultimate goal, just seeing what design Piccolo has done, getting to over 10 million in annual recurring revenue. That would be the ultimate if I could ever get there. I could start talking about an exit or some acquisition, maybe start hitting up fiverr, I don't know, and see if anybody would be interested. But that's a big goal. We're not even close to that yet. But that'd be the ultimate awesome, man. 

 Josh Wilson
 When it comes to deal makers, right? Like what industries would YouTube or content creation not be a fit for you? Like, what, I've seen it, tried it, boring or whatever. Or would it all work? 

 Augie Johnston
 Yeah, I can't think of one that it wouldn't work just because of the fact that people are searching for everything on YouTube. Right. If they're searching, then that's the ultimate kind of traffic that you want. Right. Facebook ads, they're not that great. They work, but it's like, it's one of those things where you're popping up and saying, hey, check me out. Right. So that's cold traffic. If they click on your ad, they're coming to you and they're not really thinking about signing up for vid shops, but I'll check it out. When people searching, like, how to hire an editor, how to hire a video editor, right? They're warm. That's warm traffic. YouTube is the second largest search engine. No, Mattio, what industry you're in, you should be able to find a way to monetize whatever you're doing on YouTube. 

 Josh Wilson
 Yeah, super awesome, man. So let's do this. A few things. When you're creating content, you say just start with your phone, get 100 videos out there, put it out there, work on these three few tips that I gave you. What's the next level up? Should we start investing in better mics, better lights, studio? Like, what's the progression of YouTube success? 

 Augie Johnston
 Yeah, I would say the first thing is just get your background right. When you got the phone going and stuff, get your background right, have it look decent. If you're watching the video right now, you can see I got the lighting going. I see you got the nice little audio foam on your wall too, like you're framed up really nice. That's kind of thing, just get framed up. You don't need to spend money. Just get framed up. The next step would be audio. So many people get this wrong. I see you've got a really nice podcast mike right there. Like the industry standard, basically. I would look to improve your audio and from there, go. The next step is to the camera. Now, the camera can get tricky because once you go from the phone to the DSLR or the mirrorless camera, like, you're looking at lenses, you're looking at there's a lot of settings that you need, but if you're able to learn and learn that learning curve, then you can create some really good video. 

 Augie Johnston
 It's really hard to say that the iPhone cameras are getting better, but if you want to get like 10% better from the iPhone camera, then you can upgrade to the DSLR. It's not going to give you like 150% improvement, but it'll give you 10% to 20% better look. 

 Josh Wilson
 Yeah. My goodness. I started with the iPhone and then I moved to like I tried to go pros and then I tried all sorts of different cameras. The this I bought more crap trying to figure this out. I still don't think the settings are right on all the stuff that we have, but we now moved to a mirrorless and just trying to fix it over time. A lot of people will say, man, I need to have all this equipment to get started. I'm like, no, man. I started with a $20 headset mic from Logitech and a computer. As we make more money, we invest in more stuff and we still need to improve upon it. But it's a journey, man. For me, it's been the fun part of trying to figure this all out. Let's talk tools. We talked about YouTube and Mic or maybe phone or whatever. 

 Josh Wilson
 What are some tactical tools that people can do to kind of make the process more enjoyable or maybe up their game ? 

 Augie Johnston
 Yeah, there's actually like a really cool Google Chrome extension called vidIQ. What it does is it just gives you all kinds of insight to different keywords and topics and it just kind of gives you like a quality score. Like when you optimize your video, when you enter the title, tag, description, all that information kind of gives you the checklist and says, all right, you're optimized for this keyword. It gives you like a rating. That's the one that we like to us at Vid shops. There's another one called TubeBuddy that does pretty much the same thing, but we like vidIQ, but all the tools and everything. It's good, but that's the after thought. I think everyone's going to get caught up in the equipment and the tools and never actually get started. I would not get hung up on that. Yeah, vidIQ is the one that I usually recommend. 

 Josh Wilson
 Right on, let's do this. I've got a bunch of cards. During that interview, sometimes I pull up these cards and I'm like, man, I have no clue what question could pop up by this. So tell me when to stop. I'm going to read you one of these questions. 

 Augie Johnston
 Stop. 

 Josh Wilson
 Alright, here we go. This usually brings up some really interesting thoughts. Okay, so the question comes around, I got to say it in a way that doesn't make things too weird. All right, so it says, how should we create success or maybe punishment? What are some things that we're doing wrong as a society to encourage success and to maybe punish criminals, in your opinion? That's a weird one. 

 Augie Johnston
 What are we doing to create success in our society? 

 Josh Wilson
 Yeah, what are we doing not only so to encourage success, right? Like to encourage right behavior, but also to punish criminals or bad things. What are your thoughts? 

 Augie Johnston
 Wow, that's a really tough one. I would say one thing that we're doing to encourage success is we are building technology that allows people who normally might not be able to get on the Internet to be able to get on the internet and learn. Right? The internet is the college killer, right? Like back in the day, you had to go to college, you had to pay the money to get educated. I didn't learn any of this, at least digital marketing and online business stuff in college. Like I told you, those all came from the Google search, from the courses. Every day I find myself doing a Google search to learn something new. I think that the internet has kind of leveled the playing field and whoever wants it the most now can get it. 

 Josh Wilson
 Yeah, I agree with that. The Internet has opened up opportunity, but it's also created a flood of like, where do I even begin to get information? Right? Because there's a lot of information. You got to kind of sift out as you are looking for information because you say, I don't watch TV, I don't do all this stuff. I study through YouTube and I learn and such like that. How do you filter out good and bad and find something to follow deeply? 

 Augie Johnston
 Yeah, it's all about just finding who you want to be your mentor, who you want to learn from and learn from them. I think the worst thing you can do is learn from everybody. I think you mentioned Russell earlier. Was that Russell Brunson you were talking about? 

 Josh Wilson
 Yeah. 

 Augie Johnston
 There's a guy right there that I've learned so much and it sounds like yourself too, right. In the digital marketing world, those three books that cost like $10 each, and there you go, you have everything you need to start an online business. That's kind of my thing is when you go to learn from somebody, like, just say, like, hey, have they done it before? Do they have any past record? Because you will find people teach to you how to grow $100,000 business that have never made $100,000 online. So just be selective, right? 

 Josh Wilson
 Yeah, absolutely. So let's do this. Auggie, where can people go to connect with you, do deal with you? And what does that even look like? What does a deal look like for you? 

 Augie Johnston
 Yeah. You could reach out to me on Twitter at auggie. Houston on Instagram is probably the best place at Auggie Johnston. Shoot me a DM right in there. I check my DMs. I'll check the other folders, too, pretty often because it'll get lost in that spam folder on Instagram. I check those too, and I think everyone should. Like, a lot of times you're getting spam in there, but sometimes I would say, like, some people pop up, like, hey, I love what you do, and if you need help with the video editing stuff, vidchops.com is where you can learn about that. 

 Josh Wilson
 Yeah. Give us an overview of what would be like, the perfect group that would deploy you. 

 Augie Johnston
 Right. 

 Josh Wilson
 If I'm doing this and this is how best Augie Vidchops. 

 Augie Johnston
 Say that one more time. Yeah. 

 Josh Wilson
 What would be like, the ideal customer for you or the ideal group where it's just like, it's a perfect fit, like, I've had enough success or enough traction. Now I need to bring in an external team or what does that even look like? At what point should people reach you? 

 Augie Johnston
 Yeah, it's normally the people that already have success. Right. Don't come to vid shops. If you're like, I'm looking to start a YouTube channel because you're just going to burn money paying for your editor unless you have another business behind that. Right. That can kind of fund your YouTube channel, but if you don't have any revenue coming into your business, like, probably not a good fit, but anybody else? We are a good fit. We also offer a white label solution so agencies will come to us and they'll say, hey, I'd love to get all this editing off our hands, get it out of house. We have this two in house editors are paying them $70,000 a year. What can you do? It's a really good solution to give them like a brandable project management tool that they can use to kind of monitor their clients and yeah, it works well. 

 Josh Wilson
 Yeah, super cool. Vid Chop is a good place to do that. Now during this interview, there's probably questions that I should have asked you that I completely screwed up and did not ask you. What question should I ask you? 

 Augie Johnston
 That's a tough one. Maybe about my podcast journey. 

 Josh Wilson
 I don't know that, man. Yeah, I love talking podcast. SOP s about your podcast, which one is it? 

 Augie Johnston
 Yeah, so I'm on my third one. I started a podcast for Baller Boot Camp, my basketball training one many years ago. It was a solo thing I was doing but never took off. It did okay, but when I gave up Baller Boot Camp, I stopped doing that as well. During COVID when the Quarantine started meeting, ID was a varsity basketball coach at that time, and I still am. At that time my buddy was like, hey, we should start a podcast, do something productive with our time. We started like a coaching basketball podcast. I did that for over a year. We were proud of ourselves. Yes, we did it a full year. 

 Josh Wilson
 We're consistent. 

 Augie Johnston
 And then we stopped. And now I have another podcast. It's called the Video Creator Podcast. And that one I'm really excited about. I have a co host who has a YouTube channel with a million subscribers and yeah, that's once we started that, were like, it's a good time to start the podcast wings one and help people with that as well. Still looking to see some success there. We're growing my whole thing with my podcast. I don't know if you do this too, but I look mostly at the audio numbers and all I want to see is upward trend every month. I just want to make sure I get more downloads than I did the month before. If we do that, then I'm like, okay, everything is going as planned. We go from we're not getting a lot. Maybe we're at maybe 500 to 1000 a month right now. 

 Augie Johnston
 As long as the next month is more, then we're good to go. We're just going to keep plugging away. 

 Josh Wilson
 Yeah. Super awesome, man. What is that business that you help with podcasters? What is that called? Yeah. 

 Augie Johnston
 It's called podcast wings.com. 

 Josh Wilson
 What made you think of that name? That's an interesting name. 

 Augie Johnston
 Well, there's actually of a story there. We launched it as podcastbuddy.com. Speaking of domain names, I bought that domain name for $800. Because I'm not the smartest person, I realized, wait a second, there already is a company called Podcast Buddy that does the exact same thing. What am I thinking? I didn't even do a Google search on the name because I was just so excited when I found the domain name was available, bought it. Went searching for another name, and I was just like, Podcast Wings. I like it. Give your podcast wings and watch it take off. Red Bull gives you wings. I'm like I like the wings. I could brand that. That's a pretty cool thing. I can use that, some images, and we can play off that. 

 Josh Wilson
 The idea is to give some podcast traction. What do you do over on the podcast? I'm curious. 

 Augie Johnston
 Yeah, it's very similar to Victoria's. We edit audio and video upload. We can take care of if used to video podcasts for YouTube. We can do the thumbnails, the titles, the tags, all that. Just trying to create like a done for you type solution for podcast creators that don't have time to edit and do all that. 

 Josh Wilson
 Awesome. And that's podcast wings.com. 

 Augie Johnston
 Yes, sir. 

 Josh Wilson
 Super cool. Fellow deal makers, as you're listening in, I definitely want to encourage you to create some content if you're being drawn to do that. Sometimes it's scary meeting in front of the camera and when the red light goes on, you forget everything you're going to say. I definitely want to encourage you guys to do that, especially if you're feeling like called or drawn to do that. As always, reach out to our guests and say, hey, I'm growing my stuff over here. We've got some traction. I need some help on my podcast. I need some help on my YouTube. Reach out to Auggie and say, hey, I heard you on the Deal Scout show and I want to learn how to apply this to my deal making business. If you in the audience have a deal that you'd like to talk about here on The Deal Scout. 

 Josh Wilson
 Head over the deal. Scout.com Fill out a quick form, maybe we'll get you on the show next. Love you guys. Talk to you all on the next episode. See you guys.