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I got an email a couple of weeks ago, asking:

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how do you get started making stuff online?

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If you’re starting from scratch,

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if you have zero followers, zero subscribers, zero anything,

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how do you get an audience?

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How do you get popular on the internet?

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The first time I tried to answer that question,

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it was more than ten years ago.

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YouTube didn’t even exist back then,

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and I thought I knew it all.

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I didn’t, and I probably still don’t.

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But with another decade and a million subscribers
under my belt since then,

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I can at least tell you the rules that
I’ve worked by for the last 15 years or so,

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not just for YouTube, but for anywhere online.

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The short answer is: you just make stuff.

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The long answer… well,

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the best way to tell that does not start
on an incredibly rainy Scottish island.

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It starts down in London.

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Right.

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I’ve been making stuff for the internet
pretty much all my adult life.

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I had a few decent hits when I was younger,

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viral web pages and games and short videos

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that were forwarded on through email in the
days before social media.

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But those were one-off bolts from the blue,

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they were nothing you could base
any sort of career on.

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When I was 19, the British government mailed
a leaflet out to every home in the country.

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It was called Preparing for Emergencies,

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and it gave some pretty obvious advice on
what to do in the event of a disaster.

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There was a lot of cynicism about that leaflet,

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and while the intentions were good,

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it was mostly seen as a waste
of the taxpayers' money.

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The government also put up preparingforemergencies.gov.uk.

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They forgot to register preparingforemergencies.co.uk,

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so I bought the domain, copied their web site,

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changed all the text to be really sarcastic,

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sent it off to a few friends,
and went to bed.

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That sort of joke was still
new and exciting in 2004.

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I’ll be honest,
it hasn’t aged well since then.

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This was before social media,
way before smartphones.

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Facebook had only just got its first round
of investment,

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and it was only open to a few US colleges.

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That joke was being forwarded by email from
person to person to person,

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because that’s how it worked back then.

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And the feedback that I was getting
was by email.

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Anyway, when I woke up the morning after,

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okay, I was a student, so it was
probably the afternoon after, but,

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I had some emails from friends saying
‘that’s quite funny’.

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And so I had some messages from people
I didn’t know saying ‘that’s quite funny’.

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And then there were some messages from
people whose email addresses ended in .gov.uk,

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saying, ‘that’s quite funny,
it’s doing the rounds of the civil servants’.

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And then there was a message from someone in

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the government department responsible
for the original leaflet,

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saying ‘take it down’.

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And I said no.

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And it turns out that while mocking
the government is a reasonably good gag,

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mocking the government and then
having the government not find it funny,

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that is a really good gag.

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At least in countries where
you can get away with it.

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That takedown request meant that
the news got interested,

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and this went all over the country, as in,

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national newspapers and local television coverage.

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And it was just a quick joke that I’d put
together in an hour or so because… well,

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because the alternative was not doing it.

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Preparing for Emergencies was the first
demonstration I had

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of a principle I now know and
have worked with for years:

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that the chances of a project succeeding
aren’t really coupled

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to how much time, effort and money
you’ve spent on it.

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And it can often seem like the opposite
is true. You’ll see people complain

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that the thing they’ve poured all their
heart and soul and effort and time into,

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that thing sank,

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but something quick and dirty that they
slapped together has become popular.

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And maybe that’s true,
maybe that is how it works sometimes.

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But I would bet that, like me,
anyone with that complaint

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has made loads and loads of
quick and dirty things.

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And most of those will have failed.

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It’s just that they didn’t care as much
about those quick and dirty things,

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they just don’t remember them as much,

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compared to that One Big Project.

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If you spent ten dollars and one hour
on an idea, it is likely to fail.

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But if you spend a million dollars and a year
on an idea, it is still likely to fail.

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There’s an old adage called Sturgeon’s Law:
“90% of everything is crap”.

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I realise that isn’t what Theodore Sturgeon
actually said,

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it’s been cut down a bit over the years,
but the idea holds.

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Sturgeon was a science fiction author,

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and his reply to the idea that “90% of science
fiction is crap”, was yes, it is,

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but only because
90% of everything is crap.

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Most things fail.

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And sure, something that’s spent
months being polished

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might have a slightly better
chance of survival:

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but the odds are still against you.
Instead of polishing,

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you could spend those months shoving out ten
or twenty or a hundred ideas,

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and each one of those projects is
a new roll of the dice.

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And each one of those projects is
something you learn from,

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something that helps make the next roll of
the dice just a little more likely to succeed.

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Of course, this is all assuming that your
definition of success involves being popular

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or getting paid for it.

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These days, I know that I could
probably make a lot more money

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and save a lot of effort if I just
stood in front of a green screen

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and monologued about “Incredible Facts
About Cartoon Series You Won’t Believe”

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or “Ancient Mysteries
‘They’ Don’t Want You To Know About”.

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But then, I wouldn’t be travelling so much,

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I wouldn’t be having so much fun

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and maybe I wouldn’t have kept going through
rough times.

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There are other definitions of success that
aren’t just about the numbers.

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More than a decade ago,
I came up with this graph.

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Across the bottom is effort,
and across the side is awesome.

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This is still the guiding principle
that I use to determine

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whether I’m going to do a project or not.

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And sure,what I consider ‘effort’ and
‘awesome’ have changed over the years,

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both in definition and in scale.

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Awesome doesn’t have to mean money,
or viewcount,

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it can mean getting to do something really cool
or working with someone you admire.

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You define your own success.

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Anyway. Naive me, at 19, thought
there was a chance

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of going right from Preparing for Emergencies
to a full-time job

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making weird stuff for a living.

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There wasn’t any chance of that.

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Obviously, in hindsight.

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Because the people looking at the site weren’t
going “oh, he’s good”,

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they were going “oh, that’s good”.

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There was no reason to stick around,

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no reason to do the 2004 equivalent to clicking
the subscribe button,

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which was clicking a subscribe button,
it just added an RSS feed to your reader.

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I miss RSS.

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Anyway, I got lots of lovely emails about
Preparing for Emergencies,

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I made a couple of contacts from it,
but that was all.

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I’d taken only the first step up the ladder,

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and I had no idea how long
that ladder would be.

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So I kept making stuff.

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But back then, I was missing a piece of the puzzle,

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and it's a really important piece.

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But to explain that,
I need to start heading north.