Something I constantly need to remind myself of is even if conditions are not perfect, it’s always a good time to record your best idea.
Here are five times where shooting conditions were far from ideal and the videos still went viral.
1.5 million views on IG
Recorded in my echoey office. I once tried putting acoustic panels in here, but all the panels fell off the walls, and I didn’t care enough to try again.
As a result, I mostly stopped recording in my office, except when I was feeling lazy. This video is one of those times. The audio sounds terrible, and the background is boring.
Didn’t matter. The subject was interesting, so the video popped off.
@build_in_public This guy saw some dude wearing an NVIDIA hoodie at a party in San Francisco. He says, it’s a better way to say I'm rich than wearing an AP. But it actually is crazy. A June poll of over 3,000 NVIDIA employees showed that 76% of them were millionaires, with 37% being worth over $20 million. #startups #buildinpublic #nvidia #ycombinator ♬ original sound - Build in Public
I had to leave the city I was in because everybody thought it would get a few feet of flooding like it did in the nineties.
I got a same-day flight to Warsaw, where I have a bunch of friends. I even got to visit the ElevenLabs offices.
But on one of my days there, it was late, I was with a friend who I hadn’t seen in a long time, and I hadn’t recorded my daily video yet.
At that point, I was on day 688 of making at least one video a day (now I’m on 755), and I wasn’t about to miss a day.
I was exhausted from traveling, it was highly inconvenient, but I had to post.
I literally put that video up in under 15 minutes.
Subject matter was good. Video continues to get views months later.
I wrote the script for this one a few days before shooting. It’s an affiliate video for a content repurposing tool I’ve been using daily since starting videos Nov 1 2022.
I recorded my script in a crowded hotel lobby coworking space. There were strangers to my left, right, and behind me. There was music playing in the lobby.
I needed a video for the day. “No time like the present,” I said.
I read my script and did my best to make it look authentic.
The link above is a repost. The video is so continuously high-performing that I’m able to repost it every couple of months without it getting stale.
The best part – the product it’s for is SaaS, with recurring customer charges, and a recurring affiliate program. I get 25% recurring commission for every sale I refer.
That single imperfect video got so many sales I literally broke the product’s affiliate dashboard. It made me the product’s biggest affiliate, and now I routinely talk with the founder about how to improve the product.
@build_in_public Reading Bing AI’s explanation of the SVB collapse in “monkey banana terms.” Cred to Skirano. #svb #siliconvalleybank #technews #bingai ♬ Lo-Fi analog beat - Gloveity
I think this video is still the most viewed video on the Silicon Valley Bank Collapse.
I made it in March, 2023.
I filmed it on the selfie camera of an iPhone 8 – it looks like it was shot on a potato. In fact, by this time I was routinely getting complaints from friends about how my video quality was sooooo bad and how I needed crispier footage.
I told them what I’m reminding myself of in this article – it’s all about the subject matter.
This was my first viral TikTok. I now repost it every few months across IG, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts. Normally it gets millions of views each time.
They say the photography student who takes 100 photos will always take a better photo than the student who tries to take just one great photo.
The day I made this, I made a total of 9 videos – in that single day.
This video was #6 or #7.
By making so many videos, I had stopped caring about perfection.
I was in a very loud café when I made this. I had to talk loudly over the ambient sound.
I’m also shooting with potato quality on that iPhone 8.
The subject matter was good, and this became my first viral short-form video.
Even if conditions are not perfect, it’s always a good time to record your best idea.
