#288: He gained 190K Instagram followers in 508 days…but wouldn’t do it again | Yoni Smolyar

Yoni Smolyar [00:00:00]:
I oftentimes would sit down in front of a camera, click, record, and not know what's about to happen. And my objective is to tell the story of myself and this point in time. So I think that's like a much easier hurdle to clear is just like, what's on your mind. Hit record and start talking. Anybody can do it.

Jay Clouse [00:00:34]:
Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. A few weeks ago, I came across a post on X from a user named Yoni Smolyar. It said posting a video on Instagram every day for 508 days in a row taught me that I never want to do that again. I realized that I had seen and followed Yoni on Instagram, where he has over 190,000 followers, nearly 20 times what I've built on Instagram. And I really liked his content there. It's billed in public, but almost like the vintage build in public, where it was truly about sharing and having fun and not just bragging about your own numbers. In the process, Yoni built an iPhone app called Brainrot, which had a $10,000 launch that he credits to his social media presence that he built during this daily Instagram posting challenge.

Jay Clouse [00:01:23]:
At one point, I had seen Yoni's Instagram account and I thought I should do Instagram like this guy. And yet here this guy is saying it wasn't worth it. So I had to talk to him. And in this conversation, you'll hear Yoni's approach to Instagram, what worked for him, why he ultimately says he wouldn't do it again, and why he believes his Ex audience of 20,000 may be more valuable. If you enjoyed this episode, tag Meklaus and let me know. But now let's talk to Yoni.

Yoni Smolyar [00:01:57]:
I did post a video on Instagram every single day for 508 days in a row. I didn't intend that that was what was going to happen when I started, but it's what ended up happening, and I learned so much from it. Ultimately, I think the core reason why I started was because it was scary and difficult. I've always considered what would it be like to be in front of a camera. I know through experience it's always been a bit cringe and uncomfortable for me, and I thought maybe there's something good on the other side of that cringe and discomfort, and there's simply no way to find out other than to do it. So I made an account with zero followers, didn't tell anybody, didn't tell my friends, didn't tell my girlfriend, and just Started posting into the ether unedited videos in the little Instagram camera recording feature, just to begin flexing that muscle, figuring out what is it to post videos of yourself onto the Internet. And one thing turned to the other. Eventually, maybe after a few weeks, some random video started picking up traction.

Yoni Smolyar [00:03:04]:
I think truthfully, the reason was because the videos were pretty raw and unedited and amateur. And there's something that's relatable in that, you know, it wasn't a high production quality. I wasn't filming on a set. I wasn't some uniquely visionary creator. I was just a guy who was trying to post videos online and learn incrementally every day through the process. So slowly started to pick up traction. So I continued doing it through many small steps. You end up 508 days into the future.

Yoni Smolyar [00:03:36]:
So that's kind of the high level, I imagine.

Jay Clouse [00:03:39]:
You didn't set out with a goal of 508 days being the number. Did you have any specific goal for how many days in a row you're going to do this?

Yoni Smolyar [00:03:48]:
Truthfully, no. I didn't know how far it would go or what it would look like. I just needed this forcing function of daily posting in order to put in the reps. Because frankly, it was extremely cringe and extremely uncomfortable and extremely foreign for me. And if I waited until it felt right, it would have never happened. I would have never posted a single video. If I waited till I was ready, it would have never happened. So I think the daily posting is a very, very good way to start flexing the muscle of learning what it is to post, how to post.

Yoni Smolyar [00:04:28]:
What types of content styles do you like? What types of stories do you like to tell? What videos perform better than others? To some degree, it is a volume game, at least to getting into the habit of it. And so the daily posting was that forcing function for me.

Jay Clouse [00:04:43]:
Do you remember a moment or a video or a day where it felt like this was no longer a weird, cringy, foreign thing, but it just felt natural? Because I imagine in the beginning, if you didn't have a specific goal for the number of days you were going to do this, you must have been negotiating, am I going to keep doing this? Why keep going? And at what point did it become not a question that, okay, I'm definitely going to keep going.

Yoni Smolyar [00:05:08]:
So there's two things there. It's like, when did it stop being so foreign and uncomfortable? And when did I decide I'm just going to keep going? I think it took something around a month, maybe 30 days, plus or minus, you know, a couple weeks, something around 20, 30, 40 posts in. And you've done this now dozens of times. You know, you're familiar with the process and you've looked at yourself through the Instagram camera reticle dozens of times. So it's not like this foreign, weird, crazy thing anymore. I don't know what the gurus say is how long it takes to build a habit, but something around this time of when it stopped being so foreign and scary. Maybe a month in. It's part of my daily routine.

Yoni Smolyar [00:05:56]:
I did it every day for a month. You look back and think, what do you do every day without exception, for weeks or months or years? There's not many things you know that you do every single day. Certainly not habits or hobbies. That every single day without an exception. No days off, no weekends off, nothing. So after 30 days, it becomes ingrained into your daily routine. It's like, I did this. 30 days, 31 is not so hard.

Yoni Smolyar [00:06:22]:
The hardest thing by far is day one. You know, where you go from somebody who has never posted anything and is not in the habit of creating any content to somebody who's now making an account online and posting. So that's by far. It probably took me 10 years to make that one post. And then after that it's off to the races.

Jay Clouse [00:06:40]:
What were the early days of your videos about? How did you decide what you would create content about?

Yoni Smolyar [00:06:46]:
So my first maybe 10 videos were about nothing. I didn't think anybody was watching this. Maybe it would get 112views and 4 likes and so that's functionally zero. So really my objective was to get over the fear and sort of self judgment and all this. So I just wanted to do it more for that than for telling beautiful stories and for changing people's lives. I just wanted to desensitize myself to this feeling of posting online. So my first video, I said, today is day one of doing nothing for every follower I gain. Follow me to find out.

Yoni Smolyar [00:07:26]:
And I said that because I found somebody who, you know, made some similar videos. I think some creator who had already a sizable audience who was kind of riffing or parodying people who do these, you know, run a mile or do a jumping jack or whatever video series that, that people come up with. To me, it wasn't about what I was saying or the objective of the video. It was just to record something and put it on the timeline. So that was probably my first 10 videos. Whereas today's day seven of doing nothing for every follower I gain. And it was much more just to learn to flex the muscle, to post online, to stop such critical, harsh self judgment and just to allow yourself to post some silly nonsense like let it be low stakes, you have no followers after all. So you might as well be recording and saving it to your camera roll and not uploading it anywhere.

Yoni Smolyar [00:08:19]:
Instead you just make an account with 0 followers and post it there.

Jay Clouse [00:08:24]:
I have to think at some point when you started getting some views, you started getting some feedback and interaction, that you started thinking at least a little bit about making decisions in those videos to try to create more of that. When did that happen? When did you start thinking more critically about how you produce the video, not just simply posting a video?

Yoni Smolyar [00:08:49]:
Probably something like a week in.

Jay Clouse [00:08:54]:
So pretty quickly.

Yoni Smolyar [00:08:55]:
Pretty quickly, yeah. I mean, I wasn't interested in posting day 147 of doing nothing for every follower I gain at some point it's not so uncomfortable to post anymore. And now that I'm posting and now that I'm going to take the time out of my day to create something, maybe I can try to create different things. Maybe it doesn't just need to be talking head with no microphone. Eventually maybe you get a microphone, but maybe you can have a B roll overlays and maybe there can be a story that you tell. It was maybe three weeks in that I told a story of how I put an offer on a house and I've never bought a house before and I didn't know what I was doing, but there's only one way to find out. And I told some story in 40 seconds along these lines. And this video went viral, right? This video got 50,000 views, which to me was like, you know, 50 million views.

Yoni Smolyar [00:09:49]:
Instagram algorithm served it to a population of 65 and up women. It was all older women for whatever reason. So I went from having 20 followers to having 500 followers. And they were all older women. And all the comments in this post were. You remind me of my grandson. Oh, you bought your first house. Very cute.

Yoni Smolyar [00:10:09]:
You know, for whatever reason, the algorithm is funny in these ways and it serves it to older women. That was like a crazy sort of ridiculous. I think the algorithm has a lot of randomness. That was my first taste of randomness. And now suddenly I have hundreds of followers and hundreds of comments and all this stuff. The next day when I posted, there's a little bit of pressure right there. Now I have hundreds of followers. There's going to be hundreds of people who see tomorrow's video, whereas yesterday's Video by comparison, you know, had no views.

Yoni Smolyar [00:10:40]:
So now I started being a little bit more thoughtful. It's like, oh, I can tell stories. It was also with B roll overlays. It was like a little bit more produced of a video. It took me not two minutes, but maybe 45 minutes to make. And so now I started thinking, what are the stories I want to tell? What do I want to tell? Things about my life, about current events, about my opinions on the world. And so it was probably around that point, three weeks in, where I started being a little bit more thoughtful and I started being a bit more intentional about what type of content do I want to make, what formats, all this stuff.

Jay Clouse [00:11:10]:
What do you think is the most time you spent making one of these videos?

Yoni Smolyar [00:11:14]:
Probably four or five hours.

Jay Clouse [00:11:17]:
And were you doing that all on your phone?

Yoni Smolyar [00:11:19]:
All on my phone, yeah, for the first many months. And I know creators now with hundreds of millions of views, hundreds of thousands of followers, very well produced piece of content. They're still edit on their phone. They are adamant Cap Cut Mobile is the way to edit videos. At some point I started using the laptop and doing a little bit of desktop editing. But yeah, it was on my phone.

Jay Clouse [00:11:44]:
Did you see a correlation between how much time you spent making a video and how it performed?

Yoni Smolyar [00:11:48]:
No. Probably no. If you look at my account now and you look at the videos that have performed the best and how much time I spent on them relative to the videos where I spent the most time, the videos with the most views in many cases are just this like very silly little meme. Afterthought, 8 second video ends up with 10 million views. Whereas you spend 5 hours on a video and you know, it has a very kind of average or baseline performance. So I would say very low correlation between the amount of time spent editing in my case and the views.

Jay Clouse [00:12:24]:
So if you were going to make day 509 tomorrow, talk to me about your thought process, how you would go through thinking about what that video is and how you would make it.

Yoni Smolyar [00:12:35]:
What my creator journey evolved into was me painting a picture and telling the story of myself. It wasn't trying to make relatable content or social trends or any of this stuff memes. It was me telling the story of myself as a kind of scrappy entrepreneur and telling of my ups and my downs and my challenges and. And I told over 508 days, this was kind of the series that I built was trials and tribulations of kind of a relatable middling successful entrepreneur. So if I were to continue Posting. If I did 509 tomorrow, I would probably give some form of status update on what's the progress, the progressions of my business, what are my priorities from this kind of entrepreneurial angle that just me personally is what through 508 Days, my content turned into. And I think the story that I'm interested to tell it would probably be something to that effect.

Jay Clouse [00:13:36]:
That's so interesting. And it's also really encouraging because that feels very attainable for anybody watching this to basically say, take your story and tell it. I mean, it's. You and I both spend a lot of time on X. It's kind of the old billed in public but brought to Instagram. And instead of it sounds like every video being like, here's an update on the business. There's a lot more personal reflection than just pure business economics. Business wins, but I'm sure it's really intricately linked.

Jay Clouse [00:14:06]:
Am I hearing that right?

Yoni Smolyar [00:14:07]:
Totally. And I think if you're doing a daily posting thing and if tomorrow your objective is to post a video to maintain this streak, you're on day 400 something. This is sort of a forcing function to just say what's on top of mind. Maybe if somebody was a much more intentional architect of their timeline of their feedback, then maybe they would incorporate current events in some very intentional way and, you know, script this video relative to what's going on in the world. But for me, I oftentimes would sit down in front of a camera, click, record, and not know what's about to happen. And my objective is to tell the story of myself in this point in time. And so I think that's like a much easier hurdle to clear, is just like, what's on your mind, Hit record and start talking. Anybody can do it.

Yoni Smolyar [00:14:59]:
So I think that's why I had the success that I had through social media.

Jay Clouse [00:15:04]:
After a quick break, Yoni and I chat about what makes the audiences on Instagram and X so different. He also shares how he built an iPhone app to help you use social media less and the $10,000 launch fueled by, you guessed it, his Instagram followers. So stick around. We'll be right back. And now back to my conversation with Yoni Smolyar. Were you using Instagram a lot before you started this challenge?

Yoni Smolyar [00:15:35]:
I was, but I was using Instagram a lot more throughout this challenge, for sure. I think once you're in this cycle of posting and you're a creator now, then this is your creator hub. Your work product is delivered on this platform. Your peers work product is delivered on this platform. So I definitely spent more and more time on my phone, for better or worse, the more I was posting.

Jay Clouse [00:16:03]:
You have about 19,000 followers on X, 188,000 followers on Instagram. Which of these do you value more?

Yoni Smolyar [00:16:11]:
So I'm a techie, I'm into AI tools, I'm into software, businesses, technologies. Like I love this stuff. X is where this kind of is upstream of everything, as they say. X is where the new AI tools get launched, the company's funding announcements are announced. X is sort of the first place where tech news hits the Internet and then it percolates slowly through everything else. It ends up on TikTok, ends up on Reddit, it ends up on Instagram. So to me, I have a particular affinity to X to Twitter, just because I'm a techie. But I completely understand why for other people it would be Instagram or it would be TikTok or it would be YouTube.

Yoni Smolyar [00:16:57]:
But for me, I have a kind of a unique love for X. I.

Jay Clouse [00:17:00]:
Think they're so different.

Yoni Smolyar [00:17:02]:
So different.

Jay Clouse [00:17:03]:
I've been spending a little bit more time on Instagram, which is part of the reason why I was interested in talking to you. Because I don't think I've really gotten a ton of traction there and I wanted to learn what you had to share. X I've had a lot more history and traction on, but what I notice as I'm doing more Instagram, there's so much more churn. It feels like people are much faster to follow you there and also much faster to unfollow you there. Whereas on X I may not get a very high performing post, but it's not going to trigger a bunch of unfollows unless I'm saying something outrageous. But Instagram, it just seems to come with the territory. It seems like you just hope to have more follows than unfollows on a monthly basis and that's how you grow. But it's not this incremental.

Jay Clouse [00:17:51]:
Every new follower is with you for a very long time. At least that's been my experience. What was your experience?

Yoni Smolyar [00:17:56]:
I feel the same way. It may also be some bias in that Instagram shows you a line of how many people are following you and unfollowing you. In my case, on instagram I have 200 people unfollow me every day, but 300 people follow me every day. So there's a net growth or something like this on X it's yeah, to your point, I think there's not a lot of unfollowing going on. It could be something in the psychology of short form reels in that everything is very ephemeral on this platform. TikTok Instagram, where you can scroll for an hour and not even remember what just happened. So X feels a little bit more intentional in that way. Maybe there's a little bit more thought goes into a tweet or a story that's told over text versus a video that as you scroll through, maybe it immediately it goes in one ear and out the other.

Yoni Smolyar [00:18:49]:
So maybe people have this bias towards clicking around following unfollowing, perhaps more on.

Jay Clouse [00:18:54]:
Instagram, at some point you developed an app, which I think happened within this journey. Can you talk about why that happened, how that happened?

Yoni Smolyar [00:19:04]:
For sure. So I'm lifelong entrepreneur. Many small businesses that have mild success or fail or peter out one way or another. And part of my interest in posting on social media was selfish in nature, that I wanted to build some audience that I could monetize. Right. I have all these businesses and when one fails and the next one begins, you start from scratch. Nobody knows who you are, Nobody knows the story of the entrepreneur behind the scenes. You start some new business, you need to completely build it up from zero.

Yoni Smolyar [00:19:38]:
And so my thesis was that if I had some following, if some people related to and were interested in the story of myself as an entrepreneur and they watched as I build whatever businesses I build, maybe it can in turn feedback into the business or sustain the business. So earlier in my 500 day stretch, I had actually an e commerce business where I was selling products on Amazon and I told the story of that business and it grew to something like $130,000 in sales before a unfortunate cease and desist, some kind of patent landmine that I stepped on in the E commerce ecosystem, shut down that business. And I told that story in full transparency. And I think people really relate to full transparency where it's like business has ups and downs and awesome things and ugly things. And I just fully told that story. And so I built some of the audience through that. And then there was this period of introspection where I was thinking about what's next. And I'm a software engineer, so I'm a techie by trade.

Yoni Smolyar [00:20:38]:
And I've always wanted to have some sort of software business or to create some technology that improves people's lives. And through all this social media creation was a corresponding amount of social media consumption. And I was always on my phone and I was always scrolling these feeds. And as a consumer of social media, it's like a random rewards mechanism. You're scrolling and you're going to get maybe some really funny video or really cool video or really interesting video. That's why you keep scrolling. But as a creator, you get likes and comments and notifications and follows. And maybe somebody interesting is going to like your video, or maybe somebody's going to repost it, or somebody's going to DM you or whatever.

Yoni Smolyar [00:21:19]:
And so it also keeps the creators really sucked into these platforms. And I just felt the effects on my life that I was increasingly looking down on my phone and I was looking for a next business or a next project to both build and share on my platform. And so I built a screen time app called Brainrot that shows a cute little avatar of your brain rot the more time you spend on your phone. And I built this to solve a problem that I was very genuinely having in my life, which was that I was totally brain rotting on my phone all the time. And I was growing an audience over here and I was growing an audience over there and I was tweeting and I was posting and I was making videos and I was always on my phone. So of course screen Time apps already exist and I could have just found one in the app store, but I was kind of itching for a project and to build something and to build some software that I would write the code for. So I built this app, Brainrot, and then I launched it to my audience and it had, you know, a great successful launch thanks to the audience and traction that I was able to build throughout that 300 something days of storytelling up to that point.

Jay Clouse [00:22:27]:
How successful are we talking? Can you share any numbers?

Yoni Smolyar [00:22:30]:
Yeah. So Brainrot, in its launch debut, I made a video where I said, today I'm officially announcing my app, Brainrot. That video got a million views, which turned into maybe $10,000 of revenue in a weekend, right? A few thousand dollars per day in revenue, which to me is like completely mind blowing sums of money. Then I launched on a platform called Product Hunt, which is for sort of software techie products that are launching every day. There's a new launch leaderboard of who has the most upvotes in the world on this platform. Product Hunt. I launched Brainrott the next day on this Product Hunt and it got number one in the world, which was just a totally crazy moment that generated probably another 20, $30,000 of revenue in a day. Something like this, These kind of crazy sums.

Yoni Smolyar [00:23:21]:
And so you can imagine the excitement, the euphoria, all this tension that had built up over 300 days of telling different stories, of saying today's day one of doing nothing, starting an E commerce business, ending an E commerce business, all of this. And then here I come up with an idea for an app. I write the code for that app. I was sharing the App Store rejections that I was getting. Apple is very particular with how they approve and reject apps for various reasons. So I had to go through five or six or seven rejections for small things that I had to tweak before it was ultimately approved and released and all this. And I built up this tension in the storyline and this tension in myself that, you know, I'm really anxious to see. What's the result? The culmination of all this and then sort of this big launch and Brainrot is still out there to this day, over 100,000 users.

Yoni Smolyar [00:24:09]:
It's one of the screen time apps, you know, it's totally punching above its weight. So it's been amazingly fun. And I still operate the business today.

Jay Clouse [00:24:17]:
So I imagine you're probably constantly thinking about, should I be making more videos as a distribution mechanism for this app. And yet we have this post of I wouldn't do that 500 day challenge again. So talk to me about where you've landed here and why you've taken a break on Instagram and what the plan is as far as content goes for the future.

Yoni Smolyar [00:24:42]:
I think that daily posting is an amazing forcing function to get your feet wet into social media to start posting. If you're afraid of posting, you don't know what to post. Just make a video that says, I don't know what to post. And then tomorrow say, okay, well, yesterday I didn't know what to post, but today I'm thinking about this and just start making videos and start flexing that muscle and start overcoming what they call cringe mountain, which is that it just feels insurmountably cringe. Your friends are going to see it and they're going to send it to your other friends and they're going to laugh at you, I promise. Guaranteed. Like, people are going to clown you for it, but you reach this state, you overcome it and you realize that it doesn't matter and you become like a much more strong, durable person. It's like it's the journey and it's not the outcome, it's the person who you become along the journey.

Yoni Smolyar [00:25:31]:
And so you become a different person. And so for that it was tremendously successful and obviously it created a successful launch of a successful business. So why would I ever stop? I think at Some point, there's diminishing returns. And I would also say there's different ways that you can approach content creation. What I was doing was not batch recording anything. I wasn't batch editing, I didn't have editors, it was all me. And I didn't have a content day where I would generate a hundred pieces of content which would fuel the next weeks and months. Every single day I sat in front of a camera, I clicked record, I talked into it, and then I edited it and then I posted it, which over time began to eat into my ability to just be present in the world.

Yoni Smolyar [00:26:19]:
Because I would put it off until the evening. I naturally procrastinate everything. And then at 8pm it's like, oh man, let me drop what I'm doing and I need to go edit, record and post a video. Over time, that slowly wears at you. And as Brain Rod began to do well as a business, I, as the sole developer of that app, I want to sit down and I want to write some code, I want to, you know, make some features, I want to do something. And every evening I have a full time job, by the way. So this is what I'm doing in the evening. And it would just break my focus every evening that I need to go record, edit and post.

Yoni Smolyar [00:26:56]:
And I kind of gotten to this place with my content where I was getting some predictable number of views for most of my videos. Maybe around 30, 50, 70,000 views. And you can always post a video and maybe it'll go viral and maybe you'll get a thousand new followers or maybe you'll get a million views, or maybe you'll make a thousand dollars or whatever it might be. But over time, I think the significance of those potential accolades you can get from tomorrow's video kind of diminished, where Now I have 180,000 followers. The incremental thousand followers is less meaningful. The incremental thousand views, 100,000 views, whatever is less meaningful. So over time I did ultimately decide to get out of this daily streak. Not to say that I am done as a creator.

Yoni Smolyar [00:27:42]:
I will certainly continue posting content and I just had to kind of step back, this was only a few weeks ago and regroup. So I will totally be back, just probably not in a daily video capacity.

Jay Clouse [00:27:55]:
I found that you were posting to TikTok and YouTube as well, though I don't know if it was each daily video. But those platforms did not seem to have the same result as Instagram. What do you think the difference is?

Yoni Smolyar [00:28:10]:
They are different platforms and they are tailored towards different types of content and different types of consumers of that content. So YouTube shorts, I think is a younger audience base. And if you want to do well in YouTube shorts, to my understanding, you need to have videos that a 13 year old wants to consume or a 17 year old wants to. My videos are storytelling of the life of a entrepreneur in his mid to late twenties. It's maybe not so interesting to the average YouTube shorts consumer. And so my videos never really performed well on YouTube shorts. TikTok, I think, likes less edited content, may be shot raw on a phone or even in the TikTok camera. My videos were recorded on this thing for the most part, for most of the videos.

Yoni Smolyar [00:29:07]:
This is a DJI OSMO pocket. It's a nice little camera. You know, it can shoot horizontal video or vertical video. And I would just use it for vertical video. Put it right up here where you're looking at me now from. And I would just talk into that camera. So it's a 4K camera. It's a little bit higher quality video, I think it just didn't perform as well on TikTok.

Yoni Smolyar [00:29:28]:
So there's these kind of nuances of what the different platforms like I just happened to start on Instagram, things went okay for me there and that's just sort of. My content style seems to have found its niche over there more than it did on the others.

Jay Clouse [00:29:44]:
After one more quick break, Yoni helps me think through what my game plan should be if I were to follow in his daily posting Instagram footsteps. So if you're thinking about taking on Yoni's challenge, and maybe you should, you won't want to miss this part of the conversation. And now please enjoy the rest of my conversation with Yoni Smolyar. Let's turn this into like a hypothetical exercise. Let's say that I wanted tomorrow to start an Instagram posting streak. How would you encourage me to start that process? And I'm talking me specifically, and then maybe we can extrapolate to whoever. But if it makes it easier to say you specifically, feel free to do that.

Yoni Smolyar [00:30:30]:
I think the first question I would ask is why? What do you want from it?

Jay Clouse [00:30:37]:
I like the game of it. I've actually been thinking about this where I think as creators, we have seasons of steak and we have seasons of sizzle. And we all know people that are all sizzle. No steak. But you can't win that game forever. And short form content to me is more of like a sizzle game. And for people who spend all their time making steak, they look around at all these people who have mastered the sizzle and they say, what's going on? You don't even have any steak over there. And so I think it's fun to try to flip the season from time to time and say, what if I actually did just focus on this? What could I do to make this better? But what I think I have is the curse of knowledge to a degree where I've talked to so many creators and I see what people are doing and it comes from years of practice.

Jay Clouse [00:31:29]:
And what I haven't done is say, I'm going to start account from zero like you did. I'm going to start an account from zero and I'm just going to post and see what happens. I feel pressure of people already know my stuff to a degree. Is there a lower threshold that I don't want to go below of cringiness to put that at risk? So what I'm inspired by your story. What I'm curious to hear if this is something you would recommend is should I just remove all expectations and pretense and just go back to straight up documenting just in the phone like I've done. Forgo the studio experience here and just talk straight to the camera.

Yoni Smolyar [00:32:12]:
It's funny, the first social media platforms were, I mean, Facebook, obviously, MySpace were just about sharing with your friends, right? And like maybe posting a picture from a party this weekend or from your vacation or whatever. The first video platform, YouTube was just about recording on your camcorder and uploading it. And it was like very much tailored towards this kind of raw home footage. And over time, as creator economy blossoms, I mean, it's hard to go back from what, you know, look at your studio. It's beautiful. You've talked to some of the biggest creators in the world. You know exactly what this kind of ecosystem looks like. But to go back to what was the point of all this in the first place? It was just recording on your phone and posting it.

Yoni Smolyar [00:33:02]:
And these phones, I mean, these are amazing cameras. Like, these are amazing microphones. So it's, you know, it's not a camcorder anymore. It's like a 4K HD, whatever. These new phones are amazing. So, yeah, probably ditch the mic, ditch the, you know, 4K camera, ditch the studio setup and just go back to what it feels like to FaceTime your friend. And I think that there's something that's like very nice and wholesome and comforting in that. And you'll get 112 views and nobody will know who you are because you'll Put a different name on your profile or whatever it is.

Yoni Smolyar [00:33:37]:
Instagram will serve it to strangers. It's a kind of lower stakes and you can experiment and play with different things. And, you know, I made a video, one of my last videos, which was this is my impression of a 27 year old who doesn't know what they're doing with their life. And I said, hey, everyone, thanks for joining. Like, you know, pretending to be on a zoom meeting at work. Are we waiting for anybody? Jim? All right, we'll give him a few minutes. Very silly video. You know, it took me all of four minutes to make and it gets 6 million views.

Yoni Smolyar [00:34:09]:
And so it's like these funny little experiments that are low stakes because you're recording with your phone. It's fun. I mean, it's nice, it's wholesome. So I would say, yeah, ditch all the equipment, make an account that nobody knows. Put a new name on it. Maybe there's something to be learned there.

Jay Clouse [00:34:26]:
That's interesting. It's an interesting challenge to say, what if I was starting from zero and just tried going at it from there? The example of that kind of joke video you just described. Sometimes I talk myself out of posting things because it seems so out of the ordinary for what people would know me for. That is like, what's the point if that's not aligned with what I make, what I sell most of the time? Is that counterproductive to post that? What's your take?

Yoni Smolyar [00:34:58]:
This is one of the curses of building an audience or becoming known for something is that you become pigeonholed into what is the public's perception of you. And then you're playing into what is the public's perception of you, rather than just who you are. Because who you are has been shaped through the public lens to be Jay from Creator Science. And so now Jay from Creator Science can't post silly goofy little memes anymore because he has a high polish, high production quality studio. And it's tough because there was a J before Creator Science who was just interested about creators and creating, which is how you ended up. Where you are today is something that all creators have to deal with. Staying in their lane, staying in their niche. Maybe more creators need to make accounts with 0followers and, you know, just play around in there and get back to what started this whole thing in the first place.

Yoni Smolyar [00:35:56]:
You sort of get to this curse of success where Mr. Beast can't make a funny, silly video anymore. He has to make like a Mr. Beast video, you know, $10 million production set. So, yeah, it is funny. This is sort of just the arc of the creator experience.

Jay Clouse [00:36:14]:
What are Yoni's rules for short form? If somebody's getting into this game today, they say, I'm inspired by Yoni's challenge and I want to jump in. What are like the base level facts or understanding that people should go into this knowing?

Yoni Smolyar [00:36:31]:
So I'll preface my answer with saying that Yoni's short form is probably significantly different from another creator short form or even the average creator short form. But my bias towards all of the content that I created was that it's not that deep, it doesn't need to be that nicely polished, it doesn't need to be that well thought through. I posted 500 and something videos, of which probably 99% were unscripted. So I had a unique approach in that the story that you tell when you click record on the camera and start talking free flowing is the story that should be told. And so don't take it too seriously, don't overthink it. I never made a decision matrix of this hook times this story, times this call to action. I never did any of that stuff. I just spoke into the camera the same way that I'm speaking to you now.

Yoni Smolyar [00:37:30]:
If I had a lot of dead space, I would clip that out. But for the most part, minimally edited, as close to raw as possible. Authentic storytelling. It resonates with people in a world where there's more and more highly edited, high retention baiting, crazy hooks. This stuff, just a nice, calm, authentic story told on a feed, I think has its place. So that's my advice.

Jay Clouse [00:37:56]:
Do you identify as a creator?

Yoni Smolyar [00:38:01]:
I think so. I mean, I posted 500 plus videos onto social media. I want to say that that gives me the right to call myself a creator. Probably as I go to the grocery store and to the gym and through my daily life, I don't so much identify as a creator. Probably because it's not my primary source of income. If it were my primary source of income, maybe I would be more inclined to perceive myself with this label in the world. But I'm just a guy who likes to make videos online sometimes.

Jay Clouse [00:38:38]:
Do you have anything you believe to be true about short form video? We'll say, but you don't have enough evidence to prove it.

Yoni Smolyar [00:38:48]:
I think that short form video is likely a net negative on its consumers. I think that YouTube is one thing. You can tell long, intricate stories, you can give substance, you can give detail on longer form video. I think that the short formization of content as it's come over the last five to 10 years has caused our attention spans to contract with the length of the content has created incentives that the more rage bait that you can produce in the shortest amount of time, the highest yield you'll get from your videos. I think that probably short form video on average is not good for people to consume. And so I think that people should curb their consumption of these things. Like, you know how you feel on a day that you spent six hours consuming short form versus six minutes. Like you don't feel good after consuming a lot of short form content.

Yoni Smolyar [00:39:52]:
So maybe the existence of short form content is okay, but I think that definitely people should minimize the amount that they allow themselves to consume it because it's digital crack. I mean it is just so addicting and easy to scroll your life away. And I think over the coming 5, 10, 20 years, there will be more and more and more conversations about how we're just losing our lives to our phones. You know, what does it mean to spend six hours on your phone in a day? Well, you're only awake for 18 hours, so that's a third of your life. So if the life expectancy is 75 years old, it's like a meaningful contraction of the amount of time that you spend in the real world.

Jay Clouse [00:40:39]:
If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and letting me know I'm back on the reviews grind. Thank you. They go a long way to help us grow the show. And if you want to learn more about Yoni, you can visit his website and his social media accounts. There are links in the show notes. Thank you for listening and I'll talk to you next week.

Yoni Smolyar [00:41:02]:
It.