Enjoy the Process

Edit Video Calls Stats:

🗓️ Monthly Subscription Clients - 4
🎥 Paid videos completed - 12
đź’° Revenue to date - $1653

A while ago I heard a story about comedian Jeffrey Ross. He has a big sign in his office that says Enjoy The Process. I need one. I’ve been knee deep in the PROCESS all week. For basketball fans, I feel like Sam Hinkie…

I’ve never had an outsource-first mindset but I realize that’s exactly what I need to do for Edit Video Calls.

I’ve had great success outsourcing the video editing part of the process. On the first few client projects, I found the sharable clips from the full Zoom recordings, laid them up in Final Cut Pro X (my favorite video editing software) and passed them off to someone to finish. They actually ended up being pretty great!

So over the past week and a half I’ve been trying to figure out how to outsource the clip hunting.

It’s kind of a weird job and request! It requires strategy AND marketing AND I guess you can call it journalism AND copyediting. Lots of ANDs.

But I realized this is my secret sauce of this business. We are the anti-timestamp solution. No one wants to watch their hour long Zoom recording and tell a video editor what clip to use. This is our killer feature.

Jaclyn from PodReacher has been a great resource. For this role, she said I should try using VAs from Horkey Handbook.

I got a handful of responses to my Google form and sent all of them a “dogfood” project - a video call of ME that I want to use for my own social media and EVC promotion.

I took my Zoom recordings and dropped them into Otter to create transcriptions. I created a new email address for VAs and set up a team account in Otter which I gave the VAs access to.

I hoped the instructions were thorough:

Go through this Zoom call and find one or two 1-3 minute sharable pieces. I’m looking for hacks/tips, “a ha” or “what I learned” moments, anything you think would make for a good social video.

This task requires going through the transcript, highlighting the parts that would make for a good social video, and copyediting that portion of the transcript. As a low-cost tool, Otter does a fantastic job and is 80-90% accurate. But I know that last 10% is really important and is going to set us apart from other services so I need copyediting and correct grammar.

At first glance I thought the results were pretty good! They all did a decent to great job of finding clips and copyediting.

The problem was, I was left with these 7,000 word transcripts with some highlights…but nothing else. HOW DO I TURN THIS INTO A VIDEO??

I realized that I assigned the wrong task. I just said, “highlight interesting parts” but in reality I need more than that.

Luckily I found this mistake in a week with an internal project and it cost me less than $100.

So I thought “OK, next time, I assign the transcript AND send a Word doc template that lays out the extra stuff I need.” This would include:

  • Headline - the text at the top of the video
  • Teaser - the first 10-15 seconds of the video before the intro animation that sets up the video and entices the viewer to keep watching
  • Body - 1-3 minute segment

But as I was working on this I saw someone recommend a few other transcription tools in the Productize Community facebook group.

After doing a little bit of research, I had a huge revelation… I was using the wrong tool.

I paid for the annual Otter team plan and they were gracious enough to refund me and switch to month to month.

The truth is, I will probably completely switch from Otter to DESCRIPT.

Otter is awesome for what it does - an inexpensive way to get transcripts.

Descript is a game changer.

I feel like fundamentally Descript can best be described as a podcast production tool.

You have the auto generated transcript a la Otter… but then you have this huge suite of audio and video editing capability in a deceivingly simple app that’s just mind blowing.

Delete some filler words (um, yeah, uh huh)… and IT MAKES A CUT IN THE VIDEO TOO. It’s insane.

Also because it’s a media editing tool instead of a transcription tool, it’s much easier to create new projects and copy/paste from the full transcription.

I’m also doing some really advanced stuff like replacing and mixing audio right inside of it!

You can also export XML to Final Cut and Premiere! This makes the video editing portion so much easier.

It’s going to be a bit of a steeper learning curve but I did some Loom videos of myself working in Descript and I think it’s going to greatly improve results. I can now assign the correct task.

The only downside to Descript over Otter is the cost. For my use, Otter is around $60/mo for 100 hours of transcription per month. Descript’s base cost is $14/mo but the transcription default is only 1/10th of Otter’s - just 10 hours a month. Each extra hour is $2. Am I going to lose sleep over this? Of course not, but once I ramp up we’ll see how many hours we need. I think it’s fair to budget 3 hours per client per month.

Focusing on process = not focusing on sales

As described in The Road Less Stupid, each business has 4 hats:

  • Artist (Creator)
  • Operator (Technician)
  • Owner (Business)
  • Board (Investor)

As a solopreneur, you’re constantly switching hats. Each of us is most comfortable with one hat. For me, that’s the Operator. I’d argue this is a better place to be than Artist, but I feel like it’s a long way to wearing the Owner hat most of the time.

To me, getting the process correct out of the gate gets me out of the Operator role the fastest. Operator = Final Cut Pro X. And while that’s my happy place, it’s not the most profitable and it’s not what my business needs. Owner Me is telling Operator Me: “Stop editing videos!”

Descript is the perfect balance between having video editing tools, but focusing on content. And unlike FCPX (a $300 app), I can absolutely teach VAs to use Descript.

But I’m focusing on this process stuff at the expense of SALES….(pun intended)

My goal is 2 new subscribers per week. I haven’t added one in 2 weeks. Next week I fix that.

Enjoy the process!