Also, check out:
More with Doug:
Contact me. Ask Questions!
- Send me an email here: feedback@doug.show
- Leave a voicemail: (406) 813-0613
Intro
Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug Show. I’m Doug Cunnington, and today we’re going back to the roots of the show, which is me rambling on telling some hopefully interesting stories. About things that have been going on with me and maybe a little bit about the show, kind of behind the scenes. I mean, it’s not like I’m trying to not share the behind the scenes stuff, but it’s kind of, I don’t know, every fourth or 10th episode or so.
I’ll let you know what’s going on. So part of that will be around the YouTube side, which is kind of a. And air quotes and pretty important side of the podcast, but also not important at all, but analytically, it’ll be a little bit interesting. Maybe so, like I said, kind of rambling on, it’s a departure from the last few episodes because I was trying to focus a little bit on some practical topics.
I’m using air quotes a lot, but, uh, practical topics around project management that might be helpful. The origin of the show was around working online and niche sites, which have gone away mostly, and a lot of the stuff that I was focusing on before, I’m not really focusing on, I’m not selling courses.
This is more of a hobby than anything else. However, there’s uh, still some audience out there. You find people that want to hear stories, but also you, I mean, I know you want to hear useful things that might be practical. So I’m trying to, to bring some of that. And I received some nice comments, uh, and emails saying, Hey, I like the topics that you covered, blah, blah, blah.
So anyway, I was like, oh, I’ll lean into it. There’s some ideas around. Uh, project management and success and some other pieces where I could hopefully, you know, bring some information to you. But I didn’t wanna forget about the rambling part of the show where maybe you’re not gonna learn anything directly, but there’s no harm in that.
Doug’s Coffee Journey
So, number one, I have talked about. Drinking a lot of coffee in the past, I think I would say I, I drink coffee like a monster and I would drink like huge amounts of coffee. And over time I realized, hey, that makes you jittery and a little crazy sometimes great for productivity. But if that’s not your ultimate goal, then.
You know, it’s not super helpful to be jittery and amped up all the time. I also enjoy, I mean, I like caffeine and I like the taste of coffee and other caffeinated beverages. One of my friends told me about. The monster energy drinks zero, right? With zero sugar. So it’s not a huge amount of caffeine. I think 140 milligrams, which, uh, you know, sort of a normal cup of coffee is gonna be about a hundred, but it depends on the strength of the coffee and how big of a coffee you have and all that kind of thing.
But anyway, 140 grams isn’t crazy. However, I was still drinking coffee in the morning. That said, over time I realized, Hey, I’m drinking too much coffee. Cut back a little bit. And typically I would say over the past three years, we’re drinking 50% or so de decaffeinated coffee and then caffeinated coffee for the other 50%.
So I just mixed the beans together. And it works out well. So I could drink a lot of coffee, which I enjoy, but not get as much caffeine. So for a little while, I was drinking like two of those Monster energy drinks. And long story short, the half life of caffeine, it’s about six hours. So if you do the math, and I was like, ah, maybe I’m having like three or 400 milligrams of caffeine per day by the, even if I don’t drink anything afternoon.
At midnight, it’s still like I drink, you know, a Coke or some tea or something like that, which doesn’t really help my sleeping. And I, I mean, I used to say, oh, you know what? I could drink a coffee and then go to bed. It still fucks up your sleep. You know, even if you could drink a coffee at night, it’s gonna mess up your sleep.
You’re not gonna get as much deep sleep. And it’s, it’s just not the same. You cut back. So I was chatting with my friend Rusty a couple weeks ago, and he reminded me about the half-life thing. And he was like, yeah, if you’re drinking that much coffee, then you’re gonna have a little trouble sleeping. He used to be, um, just really, uh, heavy consumer of caffeine.
So anyway. He’s cut back. He, he, he likes coffee and he’ll have decaf and he’ll have like a little chocolate, chocolate, but overall, he’s not really consuming coffee or any caffeinated beverages on a regular basis. So I was like, Hey, I’m gonna cut back a little bit and I’m not gonna come back completely.
But I was like, get rid of the Monster energy drinks for now, even though I just bought a new case. So I have like. 22 of them sitting right over there, but only for special occasions, like if I do need to focus and I really do want the rush of caffeine. The other is just like I. Putting more of the decaf into our normal routine and to do this in a gradual way.
I’ve done this before where I’ve cut back, uh, gradually over, I don’t know, three weeks to a month or so, where I went from like full caffeinated coffee to decaf. And if you do it gradually, you’re not gonna have the withdrawal symptoms of headaches and irritability and all that kind of thing. Or at least minimized ’cause you’re slowly stepping down your caffeine intake.
So I’m kind of doing that. I’m not gonna cut back completely, but hopefully I’ll have some days where I have like no caffeine or a couple days in a row where there’s no caffeine and I can see how I sleep and see if it gets a lot better.
Moderation and Sleep Improvement
You might be thinking to yourself, Doug, you also mentioned that you drink a lot of beer.
That’s true. However, I’m doing a, what we’re calling a moist January. Now I know moist, uh, for some reason the word moist bothers some folks as a word. Uh, but, but I, I’m not a hundred percent sure why I think they think it sounds gross or something like that. So if you’re offended by the word moist. You could think of it as a damp, so a damp January.
And the thing is, I wasn’t planning on it, but my wife usually does dry January. We had some friends visiting over the New Year’s holiday and a couple days into the new year. So we were like, yeah, we’re drinking, we’re going to places, and, you know, consuming alcohol normally. So I was like, ah, we’ll we will start it later.
And then I had a, a friend passing through town, kind of a special occasion, and he wanted to meet at a grape brewery. Oscar Blues, their tasting room called the Tasty Weasel. So I was like, ah, shoot, okay. I could have the NA beers and just drink water, but I don’t want, uh, basically I, I was like, ah, fuck it, basically.
But also I don’t. Necessarily need or want to completely abstain from alcohol. And I didn’t want it, I mean, I already drank some in January. I’d rather have like a sustainable ongoing, like moderate consumption versus alright, I’m not drinking anything in January, but all other months I’m going to, you know, drink like a monster.
I don’t wanna do that either. So I was like, I’ll have a couple beers, it’ll be cool. Everything will be fine. Had a couple beers. It was fine. Interesting enough though, it did impact my sleep that night, even though, you know, I think we had beers from like, say two to four 30 or something like that, and then I stopped drinking.
But. Anyway, the point is my sleep has improved. So one thing that can be tough is if you’re trying to like cut out two habits at the same time, especially a chemical dependency like I’m talking about. So I didn’t want to try to not drink alcohol and also cut out caffeine all at the same time. So I waited for about a week or so before I tapered down.
And curbed my caffeine consumption. But as you can imagine, cutting out alcohol, which completely screws up your sleep and cutting back on caffeine has indeed helped and. When you’re thinking about it. I mean, I was consuming a stimulant and then a depressant, and I was kind of regulating my energy levels based on that, which is not the most healthy thing to do.
But overall, like I said, moderation is the best approach to this, and that’s my goal overall. Side note, if you haven’t read or. I think it might be an audio book only, but Michael Poland, the food writer, he had a book about caffeine. Check it out. Super interesting. I think it was, it was only like three hours.
I think it was audible, only if I recall. But anyway, you could find it out there. I’m not gonna ruin the whole thing, but one of the, one of the cool points, the overviews, he cut out caffeine for about three months and. He was a daily consumer of a pretty good amount of caffeine. I don’t remember exactly, but he said it was fucking amazing when he had that first cup of coffee after abstaining for like three months.
So kind of a cool idea and. I have heard people say, yeah, I cut back on caffeine just, and, and like stop consuming caffeine just so I could have that first cup. And you don’t have to have that much, right? You could just have like one, um, cup of coffee and it will blow your mind, or just half a cup of coffee.
If you’re used to having a bunch of caffeine, if you cut it out for a while, when you have that first little bit again, it’s intoxicating, apparently. Very good.
Podcast Updates and Listener Support
Another side topic is my. Other podcast, mile High five. I may have mentioned this in passing, but a little update. I had a sponsor. They left, so the, they left maybe, I can’t remember if it was six months ago or a year and a half ago. It’s been a little while. Could have been a year and a half. And I was thinking, all right, this is fine.
We have a few people donating, however. Folks are dropping off and they’re not coming back on, and I never did a really good job and I didn’t have a method to encourage people to check out the Buy me a Coffee or why It’s a reasonably sized show depending on your perspective, but I would say it gets around.
Five to six or 7,000 downloads per episode, and that can include the YouTube side, which is much smaller, the overall audience, because not everyone listens to every episode. There’s no good way to determine this, but I would say it’s probably 10 to 15,000 unique visitors. Or unique listeners and viewers per um, month or so could be much more than that, but maybe people only listen to every third or fourth episode.
Those numbers could be fairly large folks that are interacting periodically once a month with the show, and I get great feedback when I meet people in person. But with a podcast, it’s really hard to hear from your audience, even if there’s many thousands of people downloading it and checking it out, and they really enjoy it.
Right? So I recorded an episode where I had a little bit of content, but I mostly just asked for support and I told people why. I said, basically, it’s a hobby. Software costs money. It costs me about X amount. I think it’s 13 to $1,500 per year or so, and we’re not covering cost. It’s pretty fun. But I’ve done this for about four years and if it costs me money, while it was a fun hobby and I had some.
You know, novelty at the beginning. It’s not as novel anymore. It is fun, but I also don’t have to do it at all. And it would be very easy for me to quit if I’m paying, you know, $125 a month or whatever, I’ll, I will quit. And it wasn’t, it, it did, it wasn’t down to the bone like that. There was, I think I was still bringing in about a hundred bucks, but I recorded this episode, explained why, and I said, if you want the show to stick around with no ads, then.
Donate in some capacity. And I gave a specific example, let them know what they got as well. Turns out a lot of people do not like ads. And I did notice on other podcasts that I listen to a lot of ads, like ad breaks every 15 minutes, like a radio show and multiple, you know, ads per break as well. And the shows are probably making a pretty good amount of money.
And those are bigger shows. So I, I realize like. If I had advertisers, I probably wouldn’t be able to have as many ads or that sort of thing, but I mean, I’m putting out a show. So all that to say, a lot of people stepped up. I think I more than doubled the number of people that contribute on a monthly basis.
And typically it’s five to $10, so not a huge amount. And if I’m putting out on average four hours of content per month. Then that’s a reasonable ask of a dollar 25 per episode, basically. And a lot of people stepped up and it’s enough to cover the expenses, which is fantastic. And I kind of decided, I didn’t say it explicitly, but.
I have enough to cover the expenses. That’s good to go. I enjoy doing the show and, you know, for the next year should be good. The plan that I have is to have each episode where I just ask for, uh, you know, donations if they wanna do it. Like, Hey, if you dig the show. Check out the donation options and just one or two sentences and kind of leave it at that.
But once a quarter I will put out the special call for donations with content. So I do want it to be integrated, useful in like entertaining content, plus the ask and the reason why I could probably make it a little bit briefer and I’ll. Try to keep it novel, right? I don’t want people to completely check out, but at the same time, I need to be very direct and specific about what to do if you like the show and why I’m asking for money.
’cause I’m not fucking getting rich over here. Basically, other shows of a comparable size do run ads and they’re like, Hey, buy fucking AG one for, I don’t even know what it is. Uh, $80 a month or what, like whatever absurd price they’re charging for, um, the green powder, by the way. A G one. If you wanna sponsor the show, just gimme a shout.
Love to do it. Just kidding. I don’t want any fucking sponsors. It’s much easier to not have a sponsor and just do it as a hobby. So it worked out well. I was happy and a lot of people, um, commented when they started supporting the show. They were like, really love it. Keep the ads away. Ads really suck. And just by being direct it, it worked well.
And it’s not that I was afraid to do it, but it was just a different audience, right? So when I was selling courses, I didn’t sell too often. But when I did, I was like super direct. I sent one email per day for a week or so in the preceding week. I would send emails as well. I had no major issue with doing that because of the amount of content and information that I was putting out.
Anyway, at the same time, I, I didn’t want to come off like, Hey, I started this financial independence podcast and I wanna earn a lot of money from it. It’s just not what I was trying to do. As I transitioned into this hobby phase, it became very apparent that I don’t want to fucking go back and forth with advertisers and stuff like that and have, you know, I say something that they maybe have an issue with.
I didn’t want any of that. Side note, I started getting a bunch of emails from Temu that went to sponsor Mile Hi-Fi. I guess it has a large enough audience or whatever filter mechanism that they have. They, they were like, Hey, hop on here. Now I’m sure the audience is too small to make an a, a enough money for me to, you know, pander and hawk that kinda stuff.
But. At the same time, it was like there’s valid, they’re sending a fuck load of, I’m getting a lot of emails from those guys, um, for different, uh, I guess. Sign up opportunities, and again, I’m sure whatever they’re listing as how much I could get paid is not accurate. Uh, it’s probably the the highest amount that I could possibly earn that people are earning if they’re getting whatever millions of views or interactions or whatever on their platforms, which I’m not
YouTube Ads and Subscriber Insights
I almost forgot as we wrap up, one thing that was going on on the YouTube side is some ads, and I have mentioned ads in the past, and that was one way that I built up. My number of subscribers. So if you, if you check out the number of subscribers I have currently, it doesn’t make sense to have that many subscribers in the number of views that I have, especially if you look at channels that are actively growing.
I will say the topic area that I covered for several years in the way that I grew the show, well, I don’t talk about it too much anymore, and the whole industry changed. So SEO changed, niche sites changed, the whole thing dropped out. Not nearly as many people interested in the topic area, and then I don’t even produce content in that area anymore.
That said, I have experimented with the YouTube promotions tab, which is within your content area, and basically you could run ads, and I’ve tested ads here and there, really just for my experience. And when I tested. The promotion tab, I saw huge numbers of views and growth on the subscriber side. I mean, these completely outperformed any of the ad words ads that I was running before.
’cause I tested those and it was very expensive. It was a huge pain to actually set up ads with AdWords. But then they moved some. Mechanism over to YouTube. So it was right on your dashboard. You just click on the promotions tab, you can. Pick the video. Super easy. Say if you want to get views or if you want to grow your channel.
And there’s some other option too. Maybe get people to visit a webpage, so they give you three different goals and then you could select the geography. They’ve changed it over time, but overall it performed really well. Now the weird thing is you could get. Many thousands of views for super cheap, but it was often in a very, um, inexpensive geography.
An inexpensive country to run ads, and it didn’t necessarily line up with the language that you were publishing videos in, and it didn’t necessarily line up with anyone that really cared about your channel or the video content at all, as far as I could tell. So what would happen is views would go up a ton and I would get a bunch of subscribers if you keep the ads running.
Uh, again, super cheap. I mean, it’s like a penny of you. I, I didn’t do the math, but it’s like on that level. And you could also get SRI subscribers for super cheap too. So I ran ads, and a lot of people don’t talk about this, but if you see a channel where the numbers don’t match up to the subscribers and you’re like, what?
What is going on? Maybe they ran ads to it. There’s a good chance they were running ads to it. So I think I added like. 80,000 subscribers or something like that. I can’t remember exactly. It may not be quite that many, but a lot. I started running these ads when I had about 40,000 subscribers and added a huge number of them over, over a short time.
Again, a lot of people won’t mention this ’cause they, they want you to think they’re really good. I’m not that good. I just ran ads, right? So that said, my views have been dwindling a little bit and I was like, let’s see what’s going on with ads. Let’s check out, um, if they’ve changed anything, how it might go.
So the last, I would say four or five videos. Not all of them, but if you look, you can see some have a lot of views. And instead of getting, you know, couple hundred views, it’s like a couple thousand views. So I’m testing that out. However, the episode that I published recently, maybe last week, I think it was last week, on risk management, that one I ran ads, but only to US, Canada, UK and Australia.
Interesting enough. Hardly any views. Very expensive by the way, and hardly any views, and it made me think, is YouTube not even showing this video to my normal subscribers at all? Like. I mean, it only has like, I think maybe 40 views or something like that. And even if I just, if I, if I throw up a video, it should get more than that just from normal subscribers clicking through.
So I wonder if YouTube is like throttling, like they’re like, Hey, you’re running ads. We wanna train you to run ads. We’re not even gonna let your audience see this video. So I’m super interested to see how it’s gonna play out. There could be some other, you know, secondary mechanism that’s making it like.
Not get views, but it could be, um, like a downstream effect from me running ads versus something like so direct. Like if I’m running ads, YouTube is not gonna show my video and not gonna suggest it. If you have any insight on this, let me know. Super curious. Um, and I’ll test it out. I may, I thought the video that I published, the risk management one, I thought it was actually pretty good.
So it was like, ah, shit. It’s never the ones you think, right? So anyway, the other side note with the ads and the growth that I had, you know, whatever co few years ago when I was running the ads to grow over a hundred thousand subs, the weird thing was, or maybe not weird, I stopped running ads completely and then.
I was losing subscribers each day. So the people that did subscribe from the ads, they would slowly leave over time, not as fast as they hopped on, but it would be, you know, whatever, 10. 15, 20, um, loss subscribers per day. Maybe not that many. I, I don’t remember. I don’t look at the analytics too much, but people were leaving and they were like, ah, I’m unsubscribing.
So slowly over time, it was, um, you know, several hundred or maybe a couple thousand subscribers left. That were obtained through ads. So kind of a curious thing, and I’m not sure the mechanism or who the ads were shown to or who subscribed, but they definitely didn’t watch any other videos and they definitely, it seems, did not give a shit about the content at all.
Conclusion and Teaser for Next Episode
Alright, I’m not gonna make this last longer than it should. However, I will mention I have this cool new coffee mug from Casa Bonita. And if you know what Casa Bonita is, it’s a magical place. Maybe in an upcoming episode, a little teaser, I’ll tell you about my recent visit to Casa Bonita. Very fun. I even got my picture taken in the jail there.
If you know what I’m talking about, uh, leave a comment or shoot me an email. Really fun place. So thanks a lot. We’ll catch you on the next episode.