Matthew Hughes - King of Video: Hello and welcome to today's episode.

Thanks so much for joining me.

My name is Matt Hughes - King of Video.

If you've not been here before and this is your first episode, if this is your

first episode you've missed so many good things but one of the things you haven't

missed is that I've talked about this on this podcast about the YouTube Community.

A few people have come along and joined and I assumed you joined via the podcast

of course, but we've actually closed the YouTube Community and I'll tell you

why and I'll tell you what replaces it.

The simple reason why is because what I realised is, I think what

I really cared about is not just YouTube, but creators in general.

If you think about TubeFest, the conference I've been banging on about in

the last few episodes, TubeFest is there to bring together creators and business

owners and give them an environment to network with other creators.

And I was sitting there and I was thinking to myself, you know, it's great that we

can do this and maybe we'll do it once or maybe twice a year, who knows, but

we'll, we'll do this conference and we'll get all these people together in

this big environment, but actually what if you're not ready for that yet?

What if you're not ready to join 300 people in a room or as we get

bigger, it'll be more and more people.

What if you just, if you're just testing the waters and you're just

thinking, I'm thinking about coming, becoming a creator, I need to know

what's involved, I wanna get started.

All that kind of good stuff.

And what if you can't even travel to Birmingham?

Maybe you want to travel a little bit low car, low..

I can't, I cannot speak.

I dunno why I do podcasts.

I cannot speak on these things.

It seems to, word seems to escape me at the moment I hit record.

If you're part of that and you understand that you'll know exactly what I mean.

If you've not started recording yet, you'll know what I mean

as soon as you get there.

So I got that in mind and I thought how can I create community around that?

What I realised with YouTube Community, we had that open for

free for a good 4 or 5 months.

And I did get a couple of hundred people in there, there

was about 300 people in there.

But the engagement was really well, they weren't really committed to that cause.

And so, and maybe we weren't as well to be fair, you know, I try to take personal

responsibility with a lot of this stuff.

So maybe we weren't as well.

But what I thought to myself is, let's create something where we can meet up,

maybe even as often as once a month.

And with that, The Creator Meetup was born and actually I'll

tell you the truth around this.

I went to speak at an event called The Marketing Meetup in Reading a couple

of weeks ago now and as I was trying to think what we're gonna do with

the community, the YouTube community, I've kind of come up with the idea of

this Creator Meetup, but it was called something else I think at the time and

then I went to The Marketing Meetup, and I was like, oh my god, this is it.

This is the Format and everything.

Everything about this I love, but what I found at those events was it was very

agency-led, you know, it was like business permanent employees in businesses.

They weren't necessarily creators, a very different audience.

So it didn't feel appropriate for me to just become one of their..

They have like local leaders to start groups and stuff.

I thought I needed to do something myself and so The Creator Meetup was born.

But it was definitely, they gave me some inspiration in the format and

everything that we can run with this.

What's included with The Creator Meetup, and I'm going to just give you some

background with it all, is that it's an online community, so just like the

YouTube Community, in fact we've replaced the YouTube Community, we're using the

same software and everything, we've replaced that with The Creator Meetup.

We're going to have the Shorts Challenge.

So I've spoke about the Shorts Challenge on this podcast.

This is a 28 day challenge for you to create short-form content every day.

I think that's really important to have something to keep

us all motivated through.

So we're going to keep, make the Shorts Challenge included.

It was previously a purchasable product.

So it's something you could buy off the shelf.

Evergreen in nature so you could buy anytime and just start it whenever you

want But we're going to do the Shorts Challenge and we'll start it at the start

of every month so that anyone that comes into that community can just get involved

in that challenge if they want to or halfway through the month, they can jump

in and get involved, but we'll run it as a group sort of collectively together.

That keeps us well motivated and accountable, right?

If there's a bunch of people doing it, that's really good to see other

people take off and gives you a bit of inspiration and then there's a bit

of like competition that happens when you're doing it in a group as well.

We're going to have weekly creator training.

So this is me finding potential speakers for TubeFest, who maybe they didn't get

a speaking slot this time, but they're still creators and they still got, submit,

had some amazing sessions submitted, but I couldn't quite take those creators on.

It also means that we can do these weekly training sessions from

international speakers that maybe couldn't, we couldn't afford to fly over.

And we can get them to deliver some training for us as well.

So we're going to do weekly training sessions and putting

together the schedule for that.

We're going to have monthly in person and online meetups.

There will be a meet up of some point at least every 2 weeks.

One of them will be online.

Then 2 weeks later, they'll be an in person and then 2 weeks later online.

So it's like every 4 weeks, there's a an in person and an online one and then

as we grow the in person events, I'll look for other locations around the UK.

So right now I'm in Leicester, so in the Midlands and which is why we're doing in

Birmingham, it's a close the major city that's closest to us is where we're

running TubeFest, which is Birmingham.

So we'll start it in Leicester, it's my hometown, so it'll make

it easier for me to run it.

And then I've got a venue, I think, in London.

I've got a venue offered to me yesterday that's in Lincoln.

I know there's people potentially in Leeds that would go to

an event like that as well.

So we're going to start running them around the UK, but that takes

a lot of logistical planning, takes a lot of time from local

organisers and that kind of thing.

But we'll make that happen.

We'll also get software discounts.

So if you're interested in things like Descript, Restream, Opus Clips.

If you want to outsource your editing, we'll come up with some, I'll go and

speak to all these vendors, all these people that are sponsoring TubeFest

and some of the other things that we've got and I'll say give us some special

discounts or special offers just for the people inside of The Creator Meetup.

So that's everything that's in it.

I'm sure more stuff will come along as we build that community.

We've already got 10 people that signed up.

Can you believe that?

I put it out there and told people what I was doing, 10 people signed up.

And by the time this goes out, I'm sure we'll have more and

more people signing up as well.

The investment for this, the cost, is £12 a month or £97 per year.

That's currently the price.

Now if you're watching this in a year's time, it might not be the price anymore.

You may have missed out on the early price, but I think

I want to keep it at that.

The only other investment there will be is if you come to one of the local

events, there will be, the one thing I really liked about The Marketing

Meetup is they make it so it's a pay what you want to attend the event.

So you can attend for free.

This makes it super inclusive for people like part time YouTubers

or for people that are just thinking about getting started.

I was thinking about young adults as well that might be a college and they're

thinking, I really want to add YouTube, I want to be a YouTuber, you know, you've

got a lot of that enthusiasm and stuff.

Don't know if we're going to make it 18 plus as an event, but I don't think so.

I don't like, I know family, people that are parents of kids.

And they've asked me like with TubeFest, can we bring the kids along?

And I'm like, well, I don't see why not.

So I don't see why they wouldn't, we wouldn't do that

at the creator events as well.

So I'm trying to say everyone's welcome is what I'm saying.

It's a creator community for creators, for people thinking about becoming

creators who want to network with other creators, to understand more

about the platforms, the algorithms, to understand how to go viral to

make content that's got better hooks.

All of that good stuff that helps us become better creators.

The website address is the creator, creator say that specifically

like that so, you know to spell it, thecreatormeetup.com.

Okay, so you can go to thecreatormeetup.com and it will be

really straightforward for you to sign up.

Right now it's a waitlist, so if you do get there and the waitlist is still there,

just fill in the details of the waitlist.

As soon as we open the doors officially, because it's invite only right now whilst

I build some interest in it, then you'll get an email to say, the doors are open,

come in and let's crack on and I think we'll start the Shorts

Challenge from the 1st of March.

So we'll get that going in a couple of weeks.

And I think we'll start the in person meetups during that month as well.

So again, you should be able to have some time just to get to know

each other whilst we then launch the first in person and online events.

All right.

Thanks so much for listening.

I hope you're interested in this I know it's a bit of a break from Youtube

Success as a general format next week.

We've got a great interview coming.

I'm really delighted and looking forward to that one, another

one of the TubeFest speakers.

And so I will see you in the next episode.

Bye bye.