This Week:
- How well my first (new) YouTube video performed!
- Pics from a week in Porto.
- My restaurant rotation for living in Porto.
January 2025
| Su | M | T | W | Th | F | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 29 | 30 | 31 | 1/1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
| 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 |
| 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 2/1 |
Where In The World Was I?
- 🇵🇹 Porto, Portugal
Metrics From The Week
Getting back into the routine here.
Business Update
This week I made a couple UI tweaks and worked on the transition of my all my free users to paid.
In terms of the UI, I had gotten some messages about the titles being cutoff from video ideas, so I tweaked the media breakpoints and changed the title font to use the same Roboto font as native YouTube. While I can’t say my format is an exact 1:1 of native YouTube, it’s pretty dang close now.
But the bigger thing from this week was beginning my transition of my free users. With enough validation from all the feedback I’ve gotten, the testimonials and reviews, and even some pricing validation from conversations I’ve had with people, I figured it was time to start focusing on improving the quality of my users.
Back in Budapest I had a chat with one of the guys who essentially said that one paying user is going to be a lot more valuable than X free users, because they’re actually valuing it with their dollars.
My strategy here has been to not just throw out a “surprise! now you need to pay” message, but rather, focus on showing improvements. Early in the week I sent out an email highlighting the new Hot Videos tab on the Video Explorer page and made a demo video showing some lesser known tips and tricks to using the platform.
Then I announced the transition, gave everyone 2 weeks, and an exclusive discount they can use as a thank you. My plan over the next two weeks is to add some nice improvements to the site before the transition day.
Quota Update
I also reached out to the YouTube API team again. Fortunately they responded pretty quickly which was nice. Unfortunately though, they just basically told me “we’re having longer than normal processing times” and that they have no timeline they can provide.
Honestly I’m past my frustrated stage. It’s whatever, I’ll figure it out. At this point it’s just about adapting to the constraints.
Probably unrelated, but it was interesting that I noticed a new (maybe within the last month) feature on YouTube Studio, this “Inspiration” tab. It generates a couple video ideas for your channel with titles and AI-generated thumbnails.
You might see this and think “oh no he’s toast! they built exactly what Peter did!” But I disagree.
It’s kinda cool, but the longer I look at this the less I’m impressed. I can see they’re using my channel’s keywords and the images are nice but they don’t have any text which is where image generation currently struggles.
But there’s this whole underlayer that’s missing… Why?
Why should I make this video? How do I know this video/title/thumbnail will perform well?
And I put in the brainstorm box “building a saas from my van” and oh my lord I think they’re using GPT for these titles. The colons in titles are such a dead giveaway for AI-generated titles 😂 I know this because I spent hours and hours working on my own title algorithm.
Just as a comparison, this is what my software shows you:
- Each video idea is directly based on a video that outperformed.
- Each video idea is given a % similarity to videos you normally make.
- Then within each video idea, you can see the video it was inspired from and how well it outperformed.
- And then you can see comments from this video and across your entire watchlist that are asking questions and have video ideas similar to that particular video idea title.
- The goal is giving more depth to the recommendation and real insights into your audience, not just “here’s a video idea”
And I actually removed the thumbnail generation feature for now because I thought it detracted from the experience more than it added. IMO I need to make the algorithm really good or else it’s just not worth it.
So anyways, I think I still have a moat here and I’m starting to head in a direction that gives even more and better insights to creators instead of creating yet another AI-generated video brainstorming tool. But at the end of the day, I can say whatever I want, the dollars are the decider.
YouTube Update
Smashing It
Well, well, well. The time has come.
This week my first new video went live. The first of this new chapter of videos.
I had a feeling it would smash so I was very interested to see how well it did.
In the first day and a half it got up to about 70 views, which would be considered pretty good for the last couple months of DailyV videos, but nothing out of the ordinary.
But THEN the algorithm picked it up and started serving it to people on the homepage.
The next morning, 275 views, then 500 views, then 700 views. It was basically just a linear increase.
Today (Sunday) I noticed it started to plateau out and it looks like it stopped being recommended on the homepage (or at least not as much).
It was actually kind of interesting to see a glimpse into how the algorithm worked in real time.
I don’t know how many views I expected it to get, but I’ll take it for a first video.
Analytics
This was honestly the first time I’ve looked at a video’s performance in MONTHS, maybe years. I decided a while ago that looking at video analytics was only going to negatively impact my mental health, so I stopped doing it.
But for this one I couldn’t help it 🙂
I just don’t want to get into a habit of constantly looking at analytics. It’ll be fun for the first couple videos, but unless it’s for a specific purpose (how to improve my watch time or scripts) then I think it’s just a cheap dopamine hit.
Onto The Next
So with that, it was on to editing the next video this week. I spent a lot of time editing this week (again). The next video is a vlog, which I thought would be easier to edit since it’s largely sequential, but it ended up taking about the same amount of time. I’ll leave the stats for next week if it also smashes (which I know it will).
I ended up spending the most time on music and syncing my clips to the music, but MAN did I have fun with this video. I found some absolute bangin’ songs and I added a bunch of little cool transitions to go along with the music.
There were so many times I’d be sitting there editing, moving clips around, have a creative idea, sync it up with the music, rewind, play it, and break out into a huge smile and think “oh helllll yeah that’s so cool.”
And I’ll be honest, I think I rewatched the intro for this video maybe 50 times, it’s hilarious. I feel like I just need a sitcom title screen at the end. Very proud of it.
Set your alarms for Wednesday at noon eastern 🙂
Life In Porto
It’s been a bit of a rainy one this week: cloudy, lots of sprinkles, couple showers.
My routine:
- 7:40am – Wake up
- 8:00am – Walk to coffee shop
- ~8:10am~9am – Read, post to Instagram stories, check messages
- 9:30am~12pm/1230pm/1pm – Work at hostel
- 1230pm~130pm – Lunch
- ~130pm~430pm – Afternoon work, at cafe, coffee shop, or back at hostel
- ~5pm~7pm – Metro/run to gym, workout, metro back
- ~730pm – Dinner
- ~830pm/9pm – Bedtime routine
- ~930pm/10pm – Sleep
I would be waking up earlier but the only coffee shops open before 8am are Starbucks and some random bakeries 😡😂
I’ll share my restaurants in the food section below, but I’ve been basically just rotating between Honest Greens, some coffee shops, poke bowls, Indian, a pad thai noodle place, mexican burritos, and acai bowls.
Some nice snaps I liked:
Porto has this kind of authentic, “real” feel to it. It’s not pristine. You turn a corner and go down a little side street and you see paint that hasn’t been updated in years, moss growing out of rocks, tarps over windows, clothes out to dry, etc. It’s interesting. It’s got character to it.
I’ve been running down by the water lately. Beautiful!
You ever been walking down the street and see a grown-a** man eating a pack of blueberries?
Yeah I got some weird looks but hey, ya gotta get your antioxidants somehow 🤷♂️
Goals
So on my way to Porto I did a 2024 annual review and threw out some goals for 2025. This has given me a bit of direction to break down into 12-Week Year blocks.
I’ve been now doing a bit of weekly planning, creating weekly notes in my Obsidian.md workspace/second-brain with a todo-list like list of goals I want to achieve for the week (tied back to my 12-Week Year goals).
Weekly note template:
Daily note template:
Well, I wanted to share that I hit every single item on my weekly goals list this past week.
It’s honestly not THAT big of an accomplishment, but it was just kind of a cool moment 🙂 After so many times trying to estimate how long something takes and then being vastly underestimated 😄, it was nice to actually accurately estimate how much I could do in one week.
Food From The Week
I didn’t post the duplicates, but this is pretty much what my week of food looked like.
- Bowls – Honest Greens; been adding the sweet potato fries for 4.95€ recently, feels like a VERY solid value play. I usually get a bowl+protein if I go for lunch, and a bowl+protein+sweet potato fries if I go for dinner.
- Poke bowls – Honu Poke (pictured), Poke House
- Pad Thai – Nood (pictured); such a good pad thai and massive portion
- Indian – The Maharaja (pictured), Turmeric, Green Diamond
- Acai – Oakberry (pictured), also Esquires Coffee
And despite what I feel like is eating a lot, I’ve been watching my weight tick slooooooooowly down day by day, so I’m back to buying nuts to snack on in the afternoon. Throwback to The Week Of Routine, Thai Food, And Tangible MVP Progress
Come back and work a bit more in the afternoon (~2pm-4pm) while snacking on my nuts (macadamia, walnut, cashews, almonds, peanuts) and sipping on a protein shake (I found this “supershake” powder drink mix at the grocery store that I’ve been adding to my protein shakes).
What’s Next?
More filming 🎥 Gotta keep the people happy, ya know?