Five years ago, I hit “upload” for the very first time. I had no idea what this channel would be about; I just knew I wanted to create something like a show that included our family. I was obsessed with the idea of YouTube and just enjoyed the process of putting footage together. Back then, I was recording on my phone and editing on an app called PowerDirector. Let’s just say there weren’t a lot of good affordable options then. For the first 20 videos, I spent a lot of time experimenting. The videos were shorter and I was able to put one out every week. But everything changed in December of 2020. During the pandemic, we went on a vacation to the RIU Palace Peninsula in Cancun, and that became our very first travel series. It was also the first time we started getting any real viewership. I’ll never forget how hard it was to get to 100 subscribers, especially since I never told anyone outside of our family that I even had a YouTube channel.
That RIU Palace Peninsula series changed everything. It was like a lightbulb went off. This was our niche! I wouldn’t have to scramble for video ideas anymore. We could just record more of our vacations, and that would be the channel. It made perfect sense, since we were already traveling. By then we had done our 1st cruise and we’re vacationing at all-inclusive resorts every year. We didn’t have a lot of friends who did the same (other than our friends Matt and April, of course). Looking back, it probably wasn’t the best idea to start a travel channel during the pandemic when nobody was cruising and few were traveling. But for others, maybe it was. Less competition, right? The best part for me was that I could get really creative with this niche and do something different. I would just go on vacation and document the entire experience trying to make it as entertaining as I could (travel entertainment). At first, though, I had no system. The sheer amount of footage was becoming impossible to edit on my phone, and my quality demands were increasing. In the middle of that first big series, I bought a new computer capable of handling video editing. This was a game-changer but also something I had to get used to. Editing on the go was no longer simple, and the videos were taking longer and longer to put out. I was getting obsessed with quality, and quantity became less of a concern.
This is where the algorithm and I started our complicated relationship. The algorithm doesn’t care about the hours you put in; it only cares about the hours your viewers spend on the platform. It took us two years to get to 1,000 subscribers, and then YouTube Shorts exploded, which I feel like just ruined everyone’s metrics. Fast-forward to today, five years in, and we’re sitting around 7,000 subscribers. Most channels that started when we did are way bigger than us, but it’s been a learning curve. It’s amazing how much titles and thumbnails matter. Clickability is everything, and it’s something I didn’t put enough thought into before. I always loved designing them and considered myself a perfectionist, but I thought if I just made a good enough design, people would click. That’s not true…simpler is better with thumbnails. I used to cram little details into a thumbnail or title that no one would notice, and it just ended up crowding everything.
The biggest learning lesson was recording way too much footage in the beginning. I had zero direction, no plan, just a lot of hitting record. I would get home from vacation with a mountain of footage and have to comb through it all, and that took up so much of my time. It took years to figure out a process that works, mostly because we only shoot about four times a year, so we weren’t learning as fast as we could have. Our process takes longer than most because of the dynamics involved. The channel is called Famable for a reason, and I want everyone involved, not just me. It would be easier if it were just me the whole time, but let’s be real….I’m boring. Brandy is the star, and we all know it! She even told me the other day, “I am sooo funny,” so she knows it too, haha. That’s why editing takes so long; I have all of us talking about the same subject or incident, and I have to weave it all together to tell the story the best way I can. I’m also not a huge fan of jump cuts. I know they’re so common on YouTube, but as an editor, they drive me nuts. I try to cover them up as much as possible because I’d rather tell the story as visually as I can, not just with a stuttering talking head. On a personal note, I’m terrible in front of the camera, and doing narrations to intervene and guide the story was really bad at first. Brandy is great at it, but I find myself going on rants that last for minutes and jumping around subjects. It’s why I usually don’t answer comments, I’ll spend way too long trying to get the answer just right.
After five years, though, I finally feel like I’ve got a system that works. I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to upload a weekly video, but maybe a consistent bi-weekly schedule is possible. I’m experimenting with that now, trying to be more consistent. So anyway, happy anniversary to Famable! It’s been fun, and we’re only just getting started.
Cheers,
James
FamAbLE 