I first launched my YouTube channel back in 2015. For the first few years of its life, I really didn’t do anything with it. I figured it would be a good place to post some materials for a class I was teaching at Columbia; it’s a free video hosting service, and it was a lot easier to use than the university’s tools.
Then, when the pandemic kicked in, I started to actually care about it. I posted a few more videos, cleaned it up a little, and lo and behold, I’m at 2,000+ subscribers.
This has led to some interesting outcomes. For one, I’ve generated actual consulting work off of it, and it’s been with people that I would have otherwise never met. It’s also given me an outlet for little snippets of Excel code that I thought was interesting, but I didn’t have anyone to share it with. I guess if you’re going to talk to yourself, you might as well record it?
What’s next? My next personal goal is to get it to 10,000 subscribers by the end of 2021. At that point, YouTube allows you to sell merchandise. I don’t know exactly what a commercial real estate finance themed t-shirt will look like but I guess I have the rest of 2021 to figure that out. Until then….