I'm on my own again.

So for the first time in the past four years, I'm on my own. I don't have any employees, I don't have any editors, no social media managers or team. There's so much that's changed over the past year and so much more that's going to change next year that I wanted to talk about all the things that have been happening behind the scenes for me. My struggle to find purpose again and to be transparent about some of the difficult decisions I've had to make. I never thought I could turn YouTube into a business, but then people started watching my videos. Like, way more people than I ever thought possible. There it is. One million. That's fucking crazy. Once I started making money from my videos, I did what all successful creators do. I hired employees. I brought on Oscar to help edit my videos and Tyga to film social content. I hired my brother Mark to manage projects and enlisted my wife to help with brand strategy. You can't sit on me. This is sexual harassment. No, I can't say that. In the beginning, it was exciting, if not a little bit terrifying. So I guess I'm just like a little bit nervous that people won't like it or go through the site. Each success encouraged me to push things a little bit further. Best course sold. So exciting. The business was doing well. My YouTube channel was growing. And so I did what all successful creators do. I hired more employees. Over the period of a couple months, I hired 10 full-time employees and a half a dozen freelancers. I brought on writers, researchers, editors, social media experts, and community managers. I remember at one point in time, I logged onto a team call to see eight people in square tiles looking back at me. And it was in that moment that I realized that shit had gotten serious. What I didn't realize at the time was that I was turning something that I loved into a job. There's no one else that I know that knows what I'm going through quite like Jason Zook. Jason was an online creator before YouTube was a job title. His first business went viral in 2008 during the global financial crisis. It was called I Wear Your Shirt. And finally tonight, if you're having trouble finding a job, you might consider inventing one. The man you're about to meet did just that. Every day, companies would pay him to wear their branded t-shirts. The first day of the year cost a dollar, the second day cost $2, and so on. Not a bad way to make a bag. He pursued his million dollar goal, scaled up his team, chased after the magazine covers, and wound up broke, unhappy, and uncertain about his future. As a close friend, he was the first person I wanted to talk to when I started having doubts about the path I was on. When you look online at the creator economy today, it seems like everybody's obsessed with scaling and growing, making as much money as possible. Why do you think that is the status quo today? We don't see anybody really talking about growing sustainably and growing slowly and maybe not trying to hire an employee as quickly as you can. Why are people obsessed with growth? Yeah, I think a lot of it comes down to just these like super arbitrary milestones that have been set. Making a million dollars, having a team, having these like big successful sales or launches or releases. And I think that's what gets talked about, right? The Twitter threads of like, oh, here's how I did this in like 63 days and made blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Like that goes viral. And so people are like, oh, well, that looks good. No one wants to talk about the people that are just striving for enough. The people that are just striving for calm businesses. The people that are just striving to like wake up every day. not hate whatever work they're doing and not have to pretend that they like it. I don't need to do what Ali Abdel does or I don't need to do what any of these other amazing entrepreneurs do that to their credit are very good at what they do and they accomplish a lot that looks great on paper. Are they happy? Do they really like that work? Do they like having a big team, managing people? There's this idea of that's what things should look like. But then in the reality when you actually go through that in your business or in your life. it's not that much fun and it's not that rewarding. And you kind of go, I wish things were just like a little bit simpler and quieter. And like, I didn't have all these like gigantic goals that I don't even really want for my life. Jason mentioned Ali Abdaal. I'm sure you've heard of him before, but if you haven't, he's one of the most successful self-development creators on the internet. Ali and I started making YouTube videos around the same time. We both made a YouTube course around the same time. And we both started scaling our businesses a few months apart, except... We both ended up in very different places. Ali still runs a team with 10 employees and I'm going back to being a solo creator again. Based on my own experience, I had to wonder whether he was genuinely happy running such a large team. So I asked him. Okay, cool. We've got audio running through here. I'm recording over there. So we should be good. Are you happier now than when you were doing things by yourself? Yeah, massively. It's so nice to work with a team and it's actually way more fun than the alternative, which was, you know, for the first two years of the journey, doing it by myself. And for me, part of the point of doing a business like this is to have fun. And I realized that I much prefer working with people, but like working with people in a way that I can still do my creative work. And then I work with people when I want to, rather than feeling I had to do like regular one-on-ones and check-ins and team meetings and all that kind of stuff. For me, scaling the business has been very worth it, but... I have not enjoyed the process of hiring and managing employees. The place I've gotten to now is that I don't actually manage anyone. The only person I manage is Angus, who is my general manager. And I don't really manage him. He's like the CEO of the company, so he manages himself. But Angus manages everyone else in the team. So this is amazing because now I can spend all of my time focusing on creating content, which is the thing that I enjoy, reading, writing, learning and teaching. And I spend literally 0% of my time, maybe like 1% of my time on things that look like management. So we're now at a point. many years into this where all that stuff is off of my calendar, which makes the whole process of running this business feel really good. Okay, so Ali figured out a way to enjoy having a team, but I don't think I ever could. To be fair, I got to work with some incredibly talented people who became really great friends. There was so much that I loved about collaborating, mentoring and working with them. It was truly an exciting time as we built the team. But I found out that when you scale your business, a lot of other unintended things scale. Things like Emails, tasks, obligations, expenses, calls, problems, difficult conversations, meetings, stress. So much stress. Last week I got on about 25 phone calls. This week you can see I've got about nine or ten. It took a good year after our big hiring sprint before the excitement of it all started to fade and was replaced by dread. I remember one night in particular a tightness started to build in my chest and it wasn't a metaphorical tightness either. This felt like my heart was covered in cling wrap and pulled tightly. I told myself at the time that this is what I had to go through to make it to the other side, that this was just a temporary side effect of running a business and eventually things would get easier, but they didn't. So Matt's having a breakdown which happens. 4 o'clock every day. This is normal. This is normal for us. Jason talked about a lot of the big reasons why people want to grow a business and scale up their team. And for me personally, I wasn't doing it to keep up with the Joneses or to try to get rich. I think you guys know me well enough at this point to know that that's not the case. I personally grew my team because I wanted to make more videos. I wanted to fund bigger projects and I wanted to work less. The irony was that I was creating less, making less money, and I was working more than I ever had. before. You know we're talking about like oh you're scaling this business and you're making less money. I was also making worse videos because I'm pulled in a million directions. Like I was making I think better videos most of the time by myself when I was just like I was shooting, writing, editing. I was like a part of the entire process from beginning to end. It really becomes this thing where your creativity and the energy you have for creativity kind of gets like sucked out of you because it has to be replaced with well now i'm managing people and you have to manage all of the ups and downs of what that means all of their needs all of the things that happens when like oh like hey they didn't submit this on time what does that mean that's like a ripple effect of all this stuff there's this glorification of growing a team and i would just say if anybody listening to this is Thinking about doing it, just try your hardest to figure out how can I just outsource the things that really I don't want to do or shouldn't be doing with my time, but keep all the things that really make my business, you know, what it is and make it special. And for you, you know, that's definitely like outsourcing your editing, outsourcing things like that. Like it seems good on paper and it seems good when other people do it, but like most of the magic of what you create is in the edit. And so when you kind of move that away and give it to someone else. All of your content then loses that luster, that specialness that you used to have. And I felt that too. I wasn't doing anything interesting for two or three years because I just had no creative juice left. It was all given to trying to manage employees. I think the biggest problem that I had with outsourcing my work wasn't just that it was hiding my greatest strengths. It also robbed me of the one thing that I love most about making videos, editing. I know most people hate editing, but honestly, ever since I started making videos nearly 10 or 15 years ago, it was the one place where I could get totally lost for hours. And so in my pursuit of doing more of the thing that I loved, I ended up with the opposite. As it turns out, this is a very common experience. Some of the biggest creators from Emma Chamberlain to Mark Rober and Ali Abdaal have all realized that there are certain aspects of their creativity that they just can't scale. How hard can this be? Because I kind of thought, oh, we just add another team member and another team member. And, you know, at one point we hired four writers for the YouTube channel because I was thinking, well, what's the bottleneck for us making more YouTube videos? And my theory was that if we just had more scripts written, then we would just make more YouTube videos. So we hired four writers in one go. This was a terrible idea because what I thought was going to 4x our output of YouTube videos ended up actually like halving the output of YouTube videos. I was making more videos when I was by myself working a full-time job as a doctor and doing videos on the side than I was when I had four writers and a producer and a bunch of editors and a videographer all working on the YouTube channel. And what I realized is that, oh wow, hiring people is not just about hiring people. It's also about the random complexities of communication and friction and all of this stuff that makes everything way slower. So the way I think about the business really is how can I focus on just doing the things that I really enjoy and how can I use the team? and their input to do all the stuff I don't enjoy and to be able to leverage up the output of the stuff that I do enjoy. One question I kept asking myself during this time was, are you doing it because you want to or because you feel like you have to? I started out with the freedom to make videos about whatever I wanted to, but more and more I felt like I had to do it. I had to create videos every month. I had to fill the feed. I had to make another course. I eventually had the courage to face the reality and be honest with myself that I was no longer happy. I wasn't fulfilled with my work anymore, and with a baby on the way, I knew that I'd likely need to step away from my work and slow down significantly. But how do I do that when I have rising expenses and a payroll to cover? So that's when I decided to do what few creators do. I started to simplify. I had some really difficult conversations with my team. I reduced my expenses as much as I could. I stopped making videos to fill a feed or hit an arbitrary cadence. I stopped selling my habits course because I wasn't excited about it anymore, even though it meant that I'd make less money. As I took steps towards simplifying my life again, the tightness in my chest started to release. I started to feel less pressure and less stress. I had less calls and meetings and emails. I found my own solution to the problem that Ollie had. How do I spend more time on the things I love and less time on the things that are distracting me? So I'm cutting down as many expenses as I possibly can, but one that is non-negotiable for me is Squarespace. They're my sponsor for this video, but they're also a really amazing platform that helps me run my business. As a solo creator, again, the most important things for me when picking a website hosting platform are that I need to be able to do it myself, make quick changes, and easily scale without breaking the bank. One of the best things about Squarespace is that you don't need a designer or developer to build your site. You can pick one of their beautiful templates to get started, customize as you'd like, and publish it without writing a single line of code. And since you can do it all yourself, you don't need to wait around for a designer, copywriter, or developer to make a change. All you need to do is click, drag, and drop to make an update. From there, Squarespace allows you to scale your business by helping manage your domain, host your site without worrying about bandwidth usage, and also access built-in tools for e-commerce, blogging, and analytics. Visit squarespace.com today for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash mattdiavella to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. I genuinely can't recommend Squarespace enough. They helped me to run my business, and they might help you as well. Even with all these changes that I've been making, I realized I couldn't fully go back to the way things were. And that's because I couldn't lie to myself about the fact that something had changed. I've gone through this process of scaling this team and then the painful process of scaling back. And now I'm by myself again for the first time in four years. And I think what I'm struggling with now is I don't... love what I'm doing. Like, I'm bored by the things that I'm making. I feel more and more like it's a job, like I'm showing up and I have to do it. And that was like, certainly having employees made that 10 times worse, because I'm like, I have to create 10x if I have 10x the employees like I need to pay everybody's salary and so I'm forced to work and now as I'm like scaling back I'm like it still feels like a job it still doesn't feel as fun and exciting as when I started like when I got started on YouTube it was like every day I woke up I can't say every day you know I think sometimes it's like rose-colored glasses but like you like I look back and I'm like I genuinely was fired up and excited to create most days and now I do it because I feel like I have to. And so what should I do, Jason? I mean, like, you know, I know you've been here in my position before, but it's like I am feeling quite stuck creatively and feeling less passionate about my work. I'm really curious to know, like, what do you want to say to the world? You know, because I think that's why you started your YouTube channel was like, I want to say that, like, you know, I love filmmaking and I want to say that I love productivity and I want to say that I'm curious about all these different things in life like why we sleep or you know how to manage money and and you kind of went through all these things and I think the interesting arc of all that is like, okay great, you did all of those things. It'd be like if I started doing like my t-shirt business again, it's like you already did that bro, you know, like just do something new and I think for you it's got to be something new, like there's got to be something where you go, okay great, like the gear gets the story told in like the camera and the editing and whatever but like what is the story i want to tell there's no one who can give you the right answer it's only the kind of motivation to say but like you know inside you there's something that you are probably pushing to the side or that you're not letting come out because you think you have to keep doing things the way that they've been working as opposed to like, yeah, but you kind of have made it to this mountain top. So like now it's time to look for a new mountain and go, that one's probably going to be like starting over, but I'm actually really excited about that. And I want to try that as a challenge. The biggest question for me now is what do I want to create? What kind of life do I want to build? And the honest answer to that question is, I don't know. But. That honestly doesn't seem as scary anymore. I need to give a huge thanks to Jason Zook for being an amazing friend and mentor. Go subscribe to his newsletter for more awesome advice every week. Thanks to Ali for always inspiring me and proving that there are many different paths to finding success. Let's help his new book, Feel Good Productivity, become a bestseller. Thanks to my brother, Mark, who's been by my side throughout this entire journey. I spent more time working with Mark than I did as a solo YouTuber. Thank you for everything you've done. And finally, I want to thank every single person who joined my team over the past four years. I don't look back on this time as a failure because of everything that I learned from you. I only hope that you got as much in return. You have eyelashes all over your eyes. What did you wish for? A better life.

Hey go visit https://www.squarespace.com/mattdavella to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code MATTDAVELLA  🙌


Jason's stuff: https://wanderingaimfully.com/
Ali's book: https://feelgoodproductivity.com/

Hi there 👋 If you're new to my videos my name is Matt D'Avella.

I'm a documentary filmmaker, entrepreneur and YouTuber. I've made a couple documentaries for Netflix. I also teach courses on everything from filmmaking to habit change. If you like to nerd out about self-development as much as I do, you can subscribe for weekly videos.

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