Streamlined Solopreneur: Tips to Help Solopreneurs Automate Their Business

Joe Casabona: Alright. Welcome back to Part 2 of my interview with Stephen Robles. If you missed Part 1, check out Episode 462 of Streamlined Solopreneur. In that episode, we talk about automating with Apple shortcuts. I wanted to talk about that first because that's the kind of stuff that Steven talks about on his YouTube channel.

So, in this episode, we're really gonna dive into how he grew his YouTube channel, even though talking about Apple and Apple tech is a pretty crowded field. I also asked him some pointed questions about what I should be doing on YouTube to benefit of being the podcast host, I guess, but he offers a lot of amazing advice if you are looking to grow on YouTube this year. So, check it out. All of the links for all of the resources that Steven mentioned will be in the show notes and over at [streamlined.fm/463]. But for now, let's get into Part 2 of my interview with Stephen Robles.

Welcome to the Streamlined Solopreneur, a show for busy solopreneurs to help you improve your systems and processes so you can build a business while spending your time the way you want. I know you're busy, so let's get started.

Let's switch gears. But you mentioned your YouTube channel, and you gave a great talk at Podfest this year. We were both speakers at Podfest this year.

Stephen Robles: Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Casabona: But you gave a great talk about your YouTube channel and growth. And I'm kinda rolling it into this conversation because it sounds like shortcuts was kinda one of the reasons, or at least the iPhone was one of the reasons why your content started to take off. Is that an accurate characterization?

Stephen Robles: Yeah. It was a couple of things. You know, shortcuts- I've always been passionate about it, and I followed guys like Matthew Cassinelli and Federico Viticci. They're really the shortcuts Jedis that I look to.

But one of the things that I wanted to try is let me do a really educational style showcasing of shortcuts to really help people learn how to build these and show them what's possible and started doing that. It became really resonated when the action button came on the iPhone 15 Pro because now people realized, oh, I can have I can run a shortcut from this physical button, and they can find, they realize how useful it could be.

And so one of the things that has helped grow my channel is finding that kind of content bucket where a large portion of my audience has subscribed to my channel and are specifically looking for that kind of content, and it's a self generating content machine because now I've long enough done I'm on my 19th shortcuts request specific video where I basically go to the YouTube comments, I'll go to my community, and I'll just build the shortcuts that people are asking for. That's like a twenty-minute video piece of content right there. Great retention on that video because people you know, I'm talking about fifteen, twenty different shortcuts. People stick around to see if there's something that is useful to them.

But now, that is a piece of content that I can keep returning to even weekly that I know my audience is interested in, and I'm doing their request, and so there's our automatic buy-in. And so that's been the backbone of my channel for the last couple of years, building that in addition to all the other things.

And, you know, I don't... There are a few shortcut videos that got, like, hundreds of thousands of views, but most of them don't. Most of them get between like, 20-50,000 views, which is still great. But the other thing to build a channel was to find out how to cover Apple and technology slightly differently or from a different angle. And I hit a couple of moments like that over the last couple of years where it really helped the channel accelerate growth.

When the iPhone 15 came out, USB C was the newest feature. It was the one thing that everybody was probably curious about, and when the iPhone 15 came out, I did not get early access to the device. I didn't have an early review. So doing just a simple iPhone 15 review video, I knew would not do very well because my channel was not very big at the time and it was not differentiated enough. So I went in the opposite direction. I said I'm just gonna hyper-focus on this one change, the USB C port. I'm gonna connect as many things as I can to it: monitors, keyboards, SSDs, whatever. Make a video about that and see how it does. That video blew up. It's still one of my most-viewed videos. I think it has like 500-400,000 thousand views.

And so I turned right around and made a second one just like it and connected video game controllers. I tried all the suggestions from the first video in the comments. I tried them in the second video, and that video did get several hundred thousand views.

And in that one month, September 2022, when the iPhone 15 came out or was it…yeah, 2023. I got 10,000 subscribers in that one month from those two videos. Really, from the first video and then the rest, after that.

So one video can really accelerate your growth, and it proved to me that you don't need to have a million subscribers to get that many views. What you need is a unique idea packaged well and executed well, and people will respond and people will comment and engage, and you'll find an audience that way.

So, just starting from scratch, not having an audience is not a roadblock. It is not an obstacle. The way the YouTube algorithm works today, you really can start from nothing today, which I'm actually planning on doing soon. I'm actually gonna start another channel, not tech-related, and see if I can challenge myself to reach an audience. But you can do that if you make great content, you package it well, and you provide value to people.

Joe Casabona: I love that. So, I should, I need to revise my comment from Part 1 of this interview because of the USB C video; you jogged my memory. That was the first one I found. Right? Because I was like, oh, can I connect an external hard drive to my iPhone now? I think the answer then was no, but it is yes now, or did it that worked back then.

Stephen Robles: It was, yes. I think the ProRes recording was still unclear at the time, but you could stick a flash drive in and access the files. Release it. You can connect USB microphones to the iPhone, and that was another series of videos I did on the Riverside channel of, like, you can connect USB mics, you can connect audio interfaces, you can connect all kinds of stuff to the iPhone, and it's pretty wild. So, yeah, that's what I did.

Joe Casabona: Yes. Related, at Podfest. Right? Because they didn't have Wi Fi, and they had an HDMI connector. Right?

Stephen Robles: Right.

Joe Casabona: So I let… the room I was speaking and use my dongle the whole time. I was right before lunch. I did something to the display, and my laptop, my Mac, was not projecting to the projector. Right?

Stephen Robles: Oh, man.

Joe Casabona: And so I was using Canva for my slides, and I plugged the dongle into my iPhone, and I ran my presentation from my iPhone.

Stephen Robles: That was wild.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. I was like, God. I hope I don't get a notification or so, like, a dumb notification.

Stephen Robles: That's awesome, though.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. It worked out pretty well. I didn't, I forgot to turn it off, like, sleep, so it would, like, turn off. Right. But, you know, at the end of the talk, when people are just asking questions, that doesn't matter that much. So…

Stephen Robles: Just a callback to the other part of your show, that's one of the shortcuts I have when I record a video, and I'm gonna be using my iPhone in the video. The shortcut lowers the brightness of my screen, turns on dark mode, and then sends me over to the settings pane for auto lock, and so I can set it to never, waits two seconds so I can actually make that change, and then sends me over to the accessibility display settings where I can toggle off auto brightness so it stays at the brightness that I set in the shortcut.

And then I have another shortcut that I run when I'm done recording where I go enable auto brightness, put the auto lock back on thirty seconds, set my brightness back to what it was, and then it turns off do not disturb. So, yeah, useful shortcuts there.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. That's great. It would be slightly more useful if Apple let us like, actually change those. Right?

Stephen Robles: Yes. It would be nice if there were just straight toggles which I understand if you had a toggle for every setting, that would be a lot of toggles, but I would love for those two to have a toggle, please. That'd be nice.

Joe Casabona: I know one for me, not to go back to the shortcuts talk, but my yearly theme this year is the year of being present. And so I want to track my screen time week to week. And so I have a shortcut that runs every Sunday at noon. So, the phone has to be unlocked for this, first of all. Right? That opens up the screen time, takes a screenshot, and then gets, like I think it's, like, the eleventh line, like, converts the screenshot to text and then gets, like, the eleventh line, which is usually the time of my screen time for the week, and then it saves it to a note because you only get, like, a month worth of history, I think, in the screen time app or something. It's like, it was, like, shockingly little time. So…

Stephen Robles: So what, well, that's really good. One thing I would recommend, I've been using ChatGPT to parse images in shortcuts because I find that to be more reliable than using OCR and split text commands.

And so I'll take a screenshot. Then you have to use the AI actions app. It's a third-party app. You need a ChatGPT API, but you can send an image to ChatGPT with a prompt and tell it, Here's an image of my screen time settings. find this number, and then output just this. Then you can take that output, convert it to text, and add it to a note, and I find that to be pretty reliable.

Joe Casabona: Yes. That's so much better. Because let me tell you, like, if the scroll is off just a little bit

Stephen Robles: Exactly.

Joe Casabona: I get the wrong thing. Right?

Stephen Robles: Right. So, asking ChatGPT for stuff like that is really useful.

Joe Casabona: That's awesome. And to add to that, I just started working with the ChatGPT API, and it's, like, stupidly cheap. Like, stupid cheap.

Stephen Robles: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. I thought, like, sending transcripts to it would cost me, like I thought I would blow to through, like, $10 a month pretty quickly. It's, like, 6¢ for a transcript. Yeah.

Stephen Robles: Now for transcripts, though, I use a transcriptionist, the app, and I really like that one. It's on the Mac and the iPhone. And you can just give it audio files, and it transcribes it. So I really like that.

Joe Casabona: Oh, that's amazing.

Stephen Robles: Yeah. Because that's, like, that's one thing if I like. I've been using Whisper Memos to record my solo episodes, so, like, I defacto get a transcript. Right. But if I need to try to transcribe something from my phone, it's like, it's a pain in the back. With transcription, it's got a I have right on your phone.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. Transcripts, okay. So, I'm getting, I knew this would happen. Transcriptionist. And then, during your YouTube talk, you mentioned one that I wrote down, but I don't have it immediately in front of me. Editing for Gling.ai? Right?

Stephen Robles: Gling.ai is the website. Yeah.

Joe Casabona: Okay. Sweet. Yeah. So, again, rich show notes for this two-parter. All of the links will be at [streamlined.fm/462], despite this technically being Episode 463 now. So, everything will be in the description anyway. But, yeah, that one sounds like a game-changer to me because, like, I do you know, I'll do a bunch of takes, and I'll usually use, like, recut to get, like, long silences, but the the bad takes manual process usually. So that's why I'm really excited to do that, to try that one.

Stephen Robles: Gling.ai is the only way I can produce as many videos as I do. Even if I just record something for two minutes, I just get irritated if I have to edit it manually. And so even if it's a two-minute video, I will put it through Gling.ai so it can cut the silences, cut the bad takes, and it just expedites all of the video workflows. So it makes a huge difference.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. And this is kind of a good segue into another thing that you mentioned in your talk, right, is that you produced pretty consistently as part of that growth. Right? And, like, part of that is, yeah, you need a good, like, having ideas, which it sounds like you have a pretty good I feel like Flywheel was a buzzword in, like, ‘23-’24. But, like, you have a good Flywheel for getting content ideas.

But then it's like the actual production side of it is really important. So, like, what is your Cadence? What's your recording and editing process like? And because you're also a one-man band. Right? You don't have a team of people.

Stephen Robles: No. It is not set in stone at all. I will try. I was a few minutes late to our recording because I saw an hour gap in my schedule just earlier today, and I was like, I think I could record a video in that hour. And so I did. And that was my recording thing. And so as soon as we're done here, I'm gonna put that through Gling.ai. And the way I record, you know, I have my top-down camera. I might have a third angle, my screen grab. I record everything at the same time. So, like, while I'm recording my roll, if I'm talking about the iPhone or whatever, I'm doing it all at the same time.

So when I go into Final Cut to edit it, I'm just changing angles, and a lot of times it's like I just change all the angles at once because it's just all focused on the device I'm talking about. And so I kind of edit in my recording. You know, as I record, I'm capturing the b-roll. As I'm recording, I'm doing the screen grab. And it makes the editing process way faster.

And so I will have, I have a reminders list with video ideas. It's actually in the Kanban view. That was a recent iOS 18 change. And so I have a row of in progress, so the videos I'm kind of working on immediately either recorded and need to edit or need to record. And then I have an entire list of just ideas. Some of them are evergreen, so I can go back and make that video whenever, if there's ever a lull. Some are slightly timely, but, you know, they can be anytime in the next couple of months. And so I just constantly add to those lists.

Shortcuts is always on there somewhere as a video I'm gonna do. Smart home-type videos. I'll always have a couple of those at the ready.

So just having that ongoing list and being able to pull from it at any time means that when I have a couple hours that open up or if I see in my week, oh, this is an open afternoon, I'm gonna jump in there and try to make a video real quick.

Joe Casabona: Nice. I love that. And then so what do you use for your, you have, like, a dedicated overhead camera?

Stephen Robles: Yep. I have a, my main camera is a Sony A74. My top-down is a Sony A6400, and those just never move. I just never take them out of here. Those are my two cameras.

If I needed a third angle, I was using an iPhone. I had an iPhone 14 around here, and so I would set that up on a tripod. Kinda have, like, that third angle looking at my desk if I'm doing, like, an accessories video.

But I recently got the Osmo Pocket 3and I absolutely love that thing. And so that's my third camera. If I want a third angle or if I'm gonna film at any time outside the studio, I was using my iPhone before, but now I just really love the Osmo, so I just use that.

Joe Casabona: Oh, that's great. That's good to know. Because, like, I usually, you know, I have my iPhone 16 Pro. I'll usually record on that with the DJI mic when I'm out of the house or I want another angle. But, you know, I like having something else on my phone instead of, like, making it a dedicated camera. Yeah. So we're like…

Stephen Robles: You know, If you wanna record with the rear camera, which is the best camera, you immediately have the how do I monitor myself

Joe Casabona: Right.

Stephen Robles: Problem. And you can use your iPad with Final Cut camera, but now you have a second device, and you have to figure out where do I prop up my iPad. And it's just like when I got the Osmo Pocket 3, I was like, oh, I can just flip this camera around, and I got a preview screen right here. Like, it's a no-brainer.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Plus, like, I mean, I don't know how you're managing, well, you usually when you do your shortcut, like, build shortcut videos, are you using the iPhone mirroring now, or are you, do you have, like, a camera on your iPhone and you're just, like, kinda showing that?

Stephen Robles: Yeah. It's my top-down camera pointed at my iPhone, and I just do it all here. You know, I look like this usually. I'm doing the shortcut over here, and I'm looking this way, like, while I'm recording. And, yeah. I just do it all here.

Joe Casabona: Nice. That's probably better because people can actually see what you're tapping. Right?

Stephen Robles: Yeah. And that's one of the reasons why I try to whether it's tip videos or shortcuts, I try to do it live on camera rather than a screen recording because I find, like, even just the abstraction of, like, where is the finger, like, where are you tapping is enough of a break in the continuity where people might not understand how to do the thing.

And so I just resolved that if I'm gonna do a how to, tips, shortcuts, or whatever, I'm just gonna do it on my phone physically with my finger, and the camera's gonna capture that because I think that's the easiest, most digestible way for someone unfamiliar with the topic to be able to understand it.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. I think that's right. Right? Because I mean, it's like, a screen recording, what you press is not always clear. It's like pretty ambiguous a lot of the time. So, i's certainly not good for learners. Right? And if you're even if you're narrating, right, the combination of hearing and seeing is really what makes a lesson stick.

Stephen Robles: Right. For sure.

Joe Casabona: So how do you record all of these camera angles at once? We'll disclose here that you work for Riverside, but I'm wondering if there are other apps that you use for that sort of stuff.

Stephen Robles: Well, I use Riverside for my video podcast every week, Primary Technology, and that's a % that makes that process incredibly easy. I edit that show in less than an hour, and it's like, we're done recording and it's published within two hours. And that's me making the thumbnails, the artwork, the bonus episodes, everything.

But when I record my YouTube videos, I just record everything with the SD cards on all the cameras. I can't record all the footage. And then in Gling.ai, I give it my a roll file where I'm talking. That's so it does all the removing of silences and bad takes. And then I can export from Gling a multicam clip. And so when I import that XML into Final Cut, it actually is a multicam clip with all the cuts, removing silences, and bad takes.

And then I can add my b-roll camera, my screen grab, my audio track. I sync it all via audio, and then when I go back to the project it still retains all the edits but now I can switch between the angles in the timeline and my process is basically like, you know, I can tell when I'm in Final Cut looking at the footage if I'm doing this, I'm doing something on my phone. And so that's a b-roll shot.

If I look like this and I'm looking this way, I know it's a screen grab shot. And so I can visually just scrub along the timeline and say, okay B-rolll screen grab b roll screen grab. I'll just select all the clips, and then I go into the info tab and change the angle, see all the other kinds of clips, change that angle. I'm almost done editing. I mean, I'll add the chapters. I might add some text overlays just to emphasize points, and then I'm done. That's it.

Joe Casabona: Oh, that's awesome. That's to provide, maybe, like, a secondary workflow. Right? Because this sounds good.

I hate editing. I use Ecamm Live for recording. Especially with my Stream Deck, it's really easy for me to add overlays kinda while I'm talking. But, like, side is not something I really cracked. With Ecamm Live, it does treat each camera feed differently, and so you get the combined when you switch scenes, but you can also get just the full roll, b-roll, and separate audio. And so all that stuff combined with Glings sounds like it's definitely something I'm excited to try.

Because otherwise, I use ScreenFlow. I'm just really used to using ScreenFlow for editing. My audio, I'll put through Logic Pro, and then I'll spit that out, and I'll put it in ScreenFlow. But I'm just watching myself on two x, and I kinda know generally where I wanna make edits based on that.

Stephen Robles: Right. For sure. So I do all my audio through iZotope, RX 10 for what it's worth. I do Debreath and sometimes a couple of things. But, yeah, I do that round trip also.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. Yeah. I have the iZotope plugins in Logic Pro. I was just using the native app. I don't know. There was something about the integration in Logic Pro that felt nicer to me for whatever reason.

Stephen Robles: I use the native app only because in Final Cut, for some reason, if I apply like a debreather, it will just cut off the ends of audio clips randomly. And I don't know what that bug is, and so I just, like, forget it. So I just process the audio in iZotope and then bring it over.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. I know that, like if I try to use iZotope,

Stephen Robles: You could use it in ScreenFlow, too. But, like, ScreenFlow just, like, chokes on that.

Joe Casabona: Screen, Like, I'm really used to ScreenFlow, but if you deviate from, like, the core mission of ScreenFlow, which is, like, record the screen, it, like, it doesn't, it's not always the best.

Stephen Robles: I see. I use CleanShot X for my screen grabs.

Joe Casabona: Yes. Which is so good. Such a great app. Yeah. That's like I'm not even using ScreenFlow to record anymore. I just again, I do everything in Ecamm Live and just bring it in the ScreenFlow because that is where my muscle memory is the fastest. And they have, like, stream deck buttons for, like, scrubbing through and cutting and things like that, which shout out to David Sparks again for those.

This is great. Okay. So I wanna wrap up with two questions. I'm gonna ask this one and get it out of the way because I think the next question is gonna give a longer answer. But a question that you got at Podfest predictably was, should I have my podcast on the same as my main YouTube channel? I'm gonna ask you something in a similar vein for me personally because what else is a podcast for it?

But I, my show is currently, this show is currently on its own channel, and I have changed the scope of both my channel and this show so that they are much closer together. Like, my channel used to be just like, well, WordPress stuff originally, then podcast stuff, which I know now I should have just started another channel, but that one's monetized, and I didn't wanna do that. And, like, this show was always, like, focused on solopreneurs, and now, again, they're kinda smashing together.

My question is, based on what you know about the YouTube algorithm, which I know could be a black box, should I combine these channels? Is it worth the work? Because, like, my VA is gonna have to reupload everything. Right? Like, I'll have it upload, I'll have it ingest the RSS, but then I'm gonna have my VA reupload any videos. Right?

Stephen Robles: I don't know about that in that particular situation. I was growing my YouTube channel and then started my podcast, Primary Technology, a year ago. And I could have had the podcast be on my main channel, but I decided not to.

One, because my main channel I purposely wanted to have it more represent me as a creator, and I wanted to talk about multiple things. I wanted to talk about smart home, shortcuts, iPhone tips, whatever. And so I purposely separated it and said, alright, I'm gonna make a channel for my podcast, and it's just gonna be that, and I wanted to post shorts and maybe even, like, 8-10 minute clips of the full hour-long episodes. And, like, I just want that to be its own channel.

And also, I have a co-host, and so as we are monetized and all that, it's then easier to see revenue-wise wise like, okay. Every, all the views here are not.

And, honestly, I've had several episodes of that my Primertek podcast hit, like, 15,000 views, 17,000 views, and that's with, like, 500 to a thousand subscribers.

So again, just because it's a newer channel with less subscribers doesn't mean it won't get the views. Again, that's kind of what we all have to come to terms with is, like, what do people actually wanna watch, and is the content worthwhile?

So, you know, if someone's podcast is very tightly integrated with the content that they're producing just solo and videos, sure. Do that. I think especially if it is a less frequent podcast, like once a month or sporadically, sure. Put that on the channel that has the same kind of content.

You know, I imagine, like, if it's a family travel vlog channel and every video is the family traveling, doing stuff, and then the husband and wife are gonna do a podcast, or the partner's gonna do a podcast, and it's, again, about the traveling and the family and all that, then, yeah, put that on the same channel. I think so.

But for a lot of people, especially if you already have established multiple channels, maybe just keep them separate, but right size your expectations as far as the podcast channel is not gonna be as big, but that's okay. You know, what is really the purpose of it? Why, you know, how big, am I actually trying to grow it and for what reason? So I think you just have to ask those questions to yourself.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. I guess it's a really good point. Right? Is It's a channel because I wanna have a presence in the YouTube music app. And so, the work probably isn't worth it for me to move everything over to the the main Joe Casabona channel when it's been established for a long time. Like, basically, since Tom Webster gave a talk at like Podcast Movement 2018 or something like that. I was like, oh, I should put my yeah. I'll do, like, audio only to YouTube. Right? So, like, probably doesn't make sense.

Do you change the titles or the podcast feed versus the YouTube, the podcast version of the YouTube? Nope. The YouTube version of the podcast episode.

Stephen Robles: No. Because, honestly, podcast episode titles, even in audio-only format, you really need to be conscious of packaging it well also. So if I'm gonna put a title in YouTube that I think people are gonna click, I want that title in the audio version too.

And this is something where you'll see long-established podcasts be cute with the names of their episodes. You know, maybe it's a funny line from the episode or kind of an inside joke. And so you'll see the episode titles, and you're like, I thought this was a tech podcast. What are these titles about? And, you know, if you already have a huge audience, do whatever you want. You know, who cares?

But if you're trying to grow a podcast or you're launching a new podcast, you need to think of your titles as, like, the first thing someone sees of your show. And so if someone comes across an episode of your show and your title is like, blew my nose yesterday or whatever, like, it might be hilarious to your regular audience, but someone new, that's they're not gonna click. They're not interested.

And so I title both the video and audio versions of my podcast the same way because I want to appeal to that new listener or viewer and make it attractive to them. And so I jam the title with the things that we cover. I try to make it interesting. And if I put that work into it, I want it in both places.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. Which is really good. But this was my follow-up question, right, is, the importance of packaging. Right? I don't think can be understated on YouTube. And so, like, one mistake that I make with this podcast is I have, like, a custom episode artwork thumbnail for the podcast apps, and the YouTube thumbnail is just, like, basically a bigger version of that. And I'm very well aware that that is not a good YouTube thumbnail.

So, like, how much time do you spend on thumbnails? Do you do AB testing? You know, and what kind of impact does it really make for your videos?

Stephen Robles: Well, the impact is potentially huge. For my personal channel, I will do thumbnail A and B testing. I might do three thumbnails altogether with just minor changes. And if I see a video is not performing well, but I know it is a good video that I that people would enjoy, I will change that title four or five, six times, not in rapid succession. I'll change it. Wait a few hours and see how it's performing because that can make a big difference- just the title alone, even if you don't change the thumbnail. But I've also gone back and changed the thumbnail as well.

So definitely experiment. And if you find that something is performing way less than usual, think about tweaking that title, tweaking that thumbnail.

But when it comes to the podcast artwork for the thumbnail, ironically, I do kinda like what you're saying. It's a slightly larger version, but, when I make my square artwork for podcast apps, you know, I put elements of things we talked about in that show that week and I make it visually appealing and then for the YouTube thumbnail, I take those same elements but I superimpose me and my co host's faces from the show on the thumbnail. So if you look on either side of the thumbnail, you're gonna see us, and I typically choose a moment where we're laughing or smiling and things like that.

Because listen, faces do well on YouTube. I mean, that's just bottom line. So if you see our thumbnails, that'll be the biggest difference. You see me and Jason, my co-host, big on the thumbnail. You'll see all the same elements.

And then I also put in the thumbnail for Episode 61 and primary technology, the title. Whether you need to do that or not, maybe not. But because with YouTube, podcast episodes might be right next to a Brian Trahan video or right next to a Verge review, I like people being able to ascertain quickly, like, oh, that's a podcast. So I feel like putting the EP episode with the number right on the thumbnail; it's an immediate, like, oh, that's a podcast. And they're not gonna be surprised by clicking that thumbnail or title and then just seeing two dudes talking. Like, it'll be obvious that that's a show.

Joe Casabona: I like that. I like that a lot.

And, with the title tweaks, it really just takes a couple of hours. ha?

Stephen Robles: Well, you do again. depending on your channel and how much you're reaching, you know, if you were earlier on smaller channel, I would change it once a day at the most and then see what happens.

But a title makes a huge difference, and I'll, what's a great use of ChatGPT? I will brainstorm with ChatGPT a lot. I'll say from one thing is I transcribe my videos using Transcriptionist, give the entire transcript to ChatGPT, and I ask it for a title and description ideas based on the transcript. It'll give me a title idea, and I can see whether I like it or not. And then in that same conversation, I'll say give me five more title ideas based on this change, or five more title ideas focused on this word, or five more with including these words. It'll give me five more title ideas. I'll see if I lean any which way, and then I'll ask it for five more based on the one that I liked in the previous prompt. And I might do that five or six times.

And it's interesting how you can really get down to a great title that drives curiosity and interest. It's shorter. It could be punchier. Whatever it is, you can really change how a video performs by getting just the right title to accompany the thumbnail and the video itself. So, yeah, I recommend.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. Really good advice to end on, I think. Right? Spend time on your titles and thumbnails. I have a standing to-do item for when I have, like, an afternoon to just go through some videos that I think are good but are underperforming and just change the title and the thumbnails. And, I know, like, CGP Grey mentioned this on Cortex, that one year when he was not producing a lot of videos, changing the title and thumbnails to previous or older videos, like, saved his his income that year because it, like, really boosted those videos.

Stephen Robles: Makes a huge difference.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. So, it's a little frustrating to think that, you know, you might have spent all this time or a couple of hours, right, on a video, and the title and the thumbnail are the things that are gonna drive it, but people need to find it. Right? I mean, the video keeps them watching, but you need to make the packaging appealing so that people want to watch it.

Stephen Robles: And it's, yeah. And it's one of those things where everybody's a salesman in one way or another. And so, if you're trying to create on YouTube, you're selling yourself, and you're selling your content. And, you know, marketing, I know for me and for a lot of people, it kinda feels almost like a dirty word because it's like, oh, marketing, you're, you know, you're just trying to get people to click. It's like, well, if you believe in what you made and you really have you think you've made something of value that people would want to see, then, yeah, marketing that is the answer. You know, packaging it well so that someone actually clicks it and gets through to actually see it, that's a big deal.

So, yeah, spend time doing it. It is worthwhile and really can make all the difference.

Joe Casabona: Yep. And it also signals to be like, there's a reason that Apple or Studio Neat or Twelve South, like, high-end products spend a lot of time on actual packaging. Right? It's because you bought something premium, and you don't wanna feel like it's wrapped in tissue paper. Right?

Stephen Robles: Sure. Sure.

Joe Casabona: And so, like, if you have a crappy thumbnail and just, like, video about shortcuts is the title, like, people won't feel like they you spent a lot of time on the video because you rushed the first thing that they see. Right? It's the first impression.

Stephen Robles: Right. Yeah.

Joe Casabona: So I like, if you're not watching the video, Steven's laughing because that's, like, a little bit of a ridiculous analogy, but long-time listeners know that I'm the king of ridiculous analogies.

Stephen Robles: Very good.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. Well, Steven, this has been an absolute blast. Thanks so much for joining us for a little over an hour over these two episodes.

If people wanna learn more about you, where can they find you?

Stephen Robles: You can go to beard.fm, and that has everything. You know, it's got my links everywhere. So good. You can go directly to my YouTube channel, youtube.com/@beardfm.

My podcast is Primary Technology, also on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts.

And if you wanna learn more about shortcuts and just join my community, you can DM me [create.beard.fm]. I have almost a thousand people there, building shortcuts, talking about automation, and stuff like that. So all those places.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. I will link to that and all of the things that we talked about over at [streamlined.fm/462].

Steven, thanks so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it.

Stephen Robles: Thanks for having me, Joe. It was a pleasure.

Joe Casabona: Thanks again so much to Steven for spending over an hour with us talking about Apple shortcuts and YouTube. I hope you learned a lot. I certainly did. I am buzzing with ideas because I think that YouTube, outside of this podcast or really in conjunction with this podcast, is going to be my best growth lever this year. And so I'm really grateful for Steven spending some extra time with us today.

For everything that we talked about in both parts of the episode, you can go over to [streamlined.fm/463]. If you like these two part episodes, this is the second one I've done this year. Let me know. You can head over to [streamlinedfeedback.com]. That's streamlined with a ‘d’, feedback.com. The link is in the description. I don't know why I'm enunciating so much. And let me know what you think of these two part episodes.

Thanks so much for listening, and until next time, I'll see you out there.