Content creation as a career path for developers

About Florin Pop
Florin is a web developer that started building websites in 2013 and worked many years as a successful freelancer.

Read the whole episode "Content creation as a career path for developers" (Transcript)

[If you want, you can help make the transcript better, and improve the podcast’s accessibility via Github. I’m happy to lend a hand to help you get started with pull requests, and open source work.]

[00:00:00] Michaela: Hello and welcome to the software engineering unlocked podcast. I’m your host, dr. mackalya and today I have to pleasure to talk to Florin Pop.

But before I start, let us talk about this extremly long, and very unexpected break. You must have believed that I might never come back. But thankfully, that’s not the case.

In fact, I actually came back bigger and multiplied… Yeah, from today on, I’m not doing those interviews alone anymore, but I have a little intern for the next couple of months - which is sitting right in my belly. So far, the intern has not been very helpful I have to say - instead, I got horrible morning sickness, which is also called hyperemesis. Well, that’s also the reason why there was this long, unannounced and unexpected break. But I had a good talk with the intern and put it right on a performance improvement plan, and yeah, it seems we are slowly getting better.

So, we both started working on new episodes for you again. During this break, I also decided that it is time to shake things up a little bit. I will start to experiment with the format and content of the podcast.

I have a couple of ideas that I will try out and see how you like them. So, stay tuned for new episodes! But now back to Florin and his insight into content creation.

Florin is a web developer that started building websites in 2013 and worked many years as a successful freelancer. I know Florin from his super popular YouTube channel, and he's funny and inspiring on the stream. He's dedicated to grow and learn in public. And what fascinates me the most is this Florin always is humble, honest, and very, very kind. So I can't be happier to have Florin here with me. Florin, welcome to the show.

[00:00:34]

Florin: Thank you very much. And thank you very much for the kind words that oh [00:00:39]

Michaela: yeah. I've been following for, for quite some time and I'm really always impressed , . It feels very authentic. If you do a YouTube channel, if you do your challenges and how you share what you're learning. And also sometimes you're vulnerable, right? If people, you know, online can be a rough place, you probably know that. And, and I think it's really important to also show that, you know, words can harm and can. Yeah, you can feel it. And I like that, that you shared that. Like, if, if you are deep down, you're sharing it. If you have like success, you're sharing it. And I always feel like you're very, very honest with your journey and not everything is like super fine. And, you know, I'm writing three blog posts and now I'm famous and make the most money or something. Right. So yeah, I always say, give and take, [00:01:29]

Florin: right? Yeah, exactly. So this is how life works. You have successes and failures and some days you're doing great and other days it's not so great. And I like to share that and to, because. I always, I'm thinking of people who are following me. I want them to learn the most after my experience. This is one of my values to share what I'm learning and alongside my journey. There are also failures and I'm messed up a lot of things. Usually people are kind of afraid to share that because you have to be vulnerable about those. But if you don't do that, especially as a influencer quote it just sends the wrong message that everything's perfect, but in reality, not everything is perfect all the time. It's just a continue grind of doing your best every day. And sometimes you mess up things and that's okay because that's how we learn by messing things up and. [00:02:34]

Michaela: Yeah, it's true. Like, it's really easy to say for others always. Oh, it's, it's totally fine. It, I think they are. They're also forgiving for artists very much, but not so much for ourselves if you're messing up. Right. And you're afraid to, to show that things are not. Not going as well, or, you know, we made this big goal. You make this big goal, right? You said like 100 K you didn't say many how many days. Right. But you said 100 K so it's a list, but you know, like, can you fail with that? How would you say it? Would you say, oh, it didn't work out or, you know, and actually. [00:03:09]

Florin: I like to create big goals for myself. This is probably the first challenge where I didn't have a deadline for, for it. For example, 365 years days of running everyday, I did 100 projects in 100 days. I did, when I started my YouTube journey, the first challenge was 31 videos in 31 days. Then I did the frequent camp curriculum in a month. So everything kind of was kind of had a deadline because. Those are called smart goals. They have that deadline aspect of it. The reason why I didn't add the deadline to this new challenge, which I'm currently working on going from zero to 100 K I mean revenue is because I wanted, I, I just feel that there are so many variables. I don't know. And I didn't want to put a lot of pressure on myself, although I kind of have a deadline of one year, 1.5 years, roughly, I don't want to go 10 years with it. And I'm sure that I, so I have kind of a hidden deadline for myself. Oh, I don't make it public. Although in some of the streams, we talked about it when we kind of decided, okay, how many projects I should work on? What should they do? And what are kind of the deadlines just to see, just to keep track of what's happening. And I think that's, for me, that's highly motivating because this is how I worked in the past couple of years. I just. These kinds of challenges got me out of my comfort zone. Also the public aspect where I share on, in public, what I'm doing is what makes me kind of have to do it because now people watch me and, you know, I, I it's okay to fail. But like, The challenges, which I'm doing. I try not to make them super, super hard. Like, I don't know, make 10,000 pushups in a day for 100 days, you know? But rather make 10 pushups every day. For one of the days, it's more about the consistency aspect than having crazy, crazy, crazy goals. I might do that, but like with shorter, like 10 days or something, Yeah. So it's going [00:05:31]

Michaela: into the building. I have it building thing, right? So I say tiny habits are actually better for, in the long run. [00:05:37]

Florin: Right? Exactly. So it's not about doing super, extremely hard things, but then just doing something which is relatively easy to do, it's just a matter of being consistent with it. And it will over time change. Change an area of your life. Like when it was for running, I lost weight that period, then I felt much energized and yeah, building the projects have learned stuff along the way. So it's just being the consistency. Yeah. [00:06:08]

Michaela: Yeah. And so, for example, we're coming back to the running because I also follow that one. I'm following a lot of things, but so you lost weight and then after the challenge, do you keep up with the things, do you still run daily or several times a week? And did you know, did the, the way you go up again or, and you share that as well? Like if it's setbacks, for example, [00:06:31]

Florin: Yeah. So when it comes to weight, my weight journey II, it's kind of rough because I did this like several times in my life so far, I would lost the way doing a challenge. Then when I kind of gave up on being public about it, I started to go back to my old habits and I got some of it back. So right now I'm. Doing on tick-tock I'm doing this weight loss challenge again and I'm sharing what exercises I'm doing, what I meeting everyday, just to, again, hold myself accountable. And what I'm trying is to, which is really tough. This is one part of my love with my life, which is tough for me is to not only lose the weight because that's relatively. it's just the map. If you have ambition, you can get it done. You just said, okay, for the next three months, I want eat and healthy. I will do these exercises. And it's that the most challenging part is afterwards, like keeping the weight off and keeping the habits. So that's where I'm a. Kind of going now is to build a healthy lifestyle, which can continue after I lose the weight. So I want to keep it off for good. And it's still a challenge for me. It's been going on for a couple of years now. But yeah. Yeah, I think a little learning and [00:07:55]

Michaela: yeah, I think having a healthy lifestyle is a challenge for, for many, many, many people. Right. Be it sleeping enough, eating healthy, you know, don't not gaining weight. I think also sport, like sport is something. I have a lot of friends that don't do any sport and I'm like always, I'm always amazed. I also have two. Struggled quite a bit to make enough place and space in my life to do sport, but I always do some kind. I mean, there are always like weeks you know, where I didn't do it or sickness, for example, I was very sick at that time. I didn't do sport for a really long time or what I wouldn't consider sport that the, you know, the doctor would consider it even sport like walking and things like this. But in general, I try really to make sure. You know, I also needed, it's also for my health, for example, for mental health. I always feel much better if I, if I do, if I do sport, but yeah, it's, there are people that don't do any sport and I'm always amazed. Like how, how are you doing it? Like, I really feel completely. And ease and very unhappy. So yeah, maybe everybody is different. Right. But I think a lot of, yeah, [00:09:06]

Florin: yeah. He's like, so we are different and some people can just have a great body and all of that without doing any exercises. With eating like junk food and all that. For me, you can quickly see that. So if I don't take care of myself for a couple of weeks and I start eating junk food and stuff, it just, you can clearly say not only that my mood is going down, I don't have energy. And part of my reason why I'm doing I'm working out and all that is because of that energy, I need a. What I'm doing now as a content creator, making videos, live streams and all of that, I need energy and I need a clear mind to be able to do that. And for that, I need to take care of my health. I need to go to sleep early. I need to eat healthy exercise and follow the. I mean, I guess everyone knows what are the good habits to do in this area. It's just sometimes we, we mess up and it's okay. So if we mess up once it's okay. It's not the end of the world. It's just, the problem is when we do it through Peter Lee for weeks, that's one, that's when sort of say that our lives. Yeah. [00:10:24]

Michaela: Yeah. I think can even, you know, mess up for several years and still start today and say, well, today's a different day. Right. So yeah, exactly. Yeah. I have two little kids and I have to say it's so much more challenging to do all those nice things with little kids, because like, for example, sleep. I mean, you can, it actually messes you up. If you have like this goal of having a healthy sleep habits and you have like a newborn, I mean, it's just two competing goals that are not, you know, you can't, you can't do them at the same time. And I think it took. It took almost three years that, you know, each of my kids, you know, we're able to slip through. And so until that time, there is no healthy sleep you know, balance, for example, for yourself and with the sleep thing, you know, a lot of other things deteriorate because you don't sleep, you don't eat healthy because you're like just not, you know, really awake and not clearly thinking and so on. Right. So that's, I think, and the same for sickness or other things, right. Just struggles in your life. And I think that's okay. Yeah. Whenever you wake up and you can try again and maybe you fail and you know, don't give up. I think this is probably the most. [00:11:32]

Florin: Yeah. Yeah. This is something I like about what I'm doing now is that I'm okay with failing for me every day is a new day to do things. If I mess up, for example, last week for a couple of days, I felt unproductive and that and that for me was okay. I accepted that, that it was okay for me to be unproductive because now it's a new week. It's a new day and I can pick up things which were not done last week. So it's okay to always like, give yourself this. Boost of all right. I messed up, but it's okay. I can start over and I can do it right to this time. [00:12:19]

Michaela: Yeah. And so content creation, this is really the big thing now in your life, right. It's also where you build your business around and how did that come about and how do you, how does the monitorization work? Can you live from it or, you know, how long did it take you to live from it? I think content creation. A dream of, from many people. And then the question is, you know, is it really working out or is it not working out? Do you think that you can sustainably do that for a long time? [00:12:50]

Florin: Yeah, so I expected as a content creator on my blog writing articles. This was in 2019, I think in February or March, I posted my, I restarted blogging because I had like seven articles. But they at least started logging in. I did it sort of consistently three blog posts, two or three blog posts per week. I had a job back then. And it just said, okay, after my day job, I'll just write something because it felt like something fun to do. And they always wanted to get down this path of blogging and creating content. So I started blogging and at the same time I picked up a Twitter and I started sharing on Twitter. I started to be active on Twitter, really. I think I spent hours and hours per day on Twitter, interacting with people, with people, replying to them and all that. And it took like six months. Well, the, the plan was actually to leave my job. Next year. So in 2020 January, that was the plan they need for plan. So I'll just try these for 10 months and see how it works. And then if it's all good, I'll just quit my job and do this full time. But then on June in 2019, so six months prior to my actual deadline, I was like, I told my wife, you know what I just, I want to do this now. I mean, we had some money saved up from the job. And I was like, you know, let's, let's do it earlier. I mean, if it failed, I failed in six months, I'll get the new job and it should be okay. We use the savings and it was an interesting journey. I can say that it was tough because my focus wasn't. Monetization. So just imagine, like in the first month I gave up my job, I made 150 bucks. So yeah, it went down for several K two to 150 bucks. But for me, that was okay because I never. I didn't chase money in the first year or so of concentration. Right. I liked what I was doing. I wanted to grow my reach to grow my audience, to get in front of multiple people. And I knew that it will pay off one day. And they did that for, so basically I was blogging for six months or so. And then in November, that year I started my YouTube channel. And in 2020, my main goal for the year was to get 100,000 subscribers in a year. And they started working really, really hard on that, I think in six months or so I published over 200 videos and livestreams on my channel. Yeah. I was in the crazy, crazy mode where I was putting out content like crazy. Of course it wasn't like. Highest quality and all that. But for me it was a great practice. I, I know people say quality over quantity, but for me it was quantity brings quality. So I was pushing out a lot of content and see what works and then doubled down on that and made it better and better. And I got monetized in February 18th or March. No, it was in March. 2030. I was monetized. Quickly compared to other YouTubers. And probably because I also had an audience on Twitter, so that helped. And then the amount of content I was putting off out was was a lot. So that helped as well. But from the YouTube revenue side, it wasn't a lot, it was like probably $400 a month or so. Yeah. After two months or so, I don't, I don't remember now exactly the numbers, but the peak on my YouTube channel. Was it September where, when I did a live stream, another challenge, 10 pro 10 JavaScript projects in 10 hours. I just got the idea that morning and it was like, okay, I'm going to go home prepared. These inches go live for 10 hours to do 10 projects. Wow. And that turned out to be great. That video now has over a million views. Wow. And brought in like three or four K sense. But like when it comes to YouTube, the trick is that YouTube revenue from ads is oh, okay. It really depends from which, what, which part you're saying now is roughly seven, $800 per month. So it's okay. It's probably not lots of people can live off of that, but the, the main source of income from YouTube is that the audience, where if you create a digital product, you can sell that digital product and you can also have sponsors. So those two combined will bring in more revenue. Yeah. That combined with some, I think I had a couple of projects for someone I managed to get past to that period of low-income and now the digital products are making good income. Roughly 3, 4, 5 came depends on the month just from digital products, which is mostly passive. So there, the products are out there. And they're just selling on their own, I guess that's your book, for example. Yeah, so I have my ebook and I have a course on you than me, and they're both both doing this. Like [00:18:27]

Michaela: that's not counting them for the zero to 100 K. No that's so exactly. [00:18:35]

Florin: Exactly. So those projects I bead last week last year, and I'm not comping for challenge for, for this challenge, which has started. Two months ago or one and a half months ago. I started from zero. So everything I'm monetizing in, the challenge is built during the live streams. I go live every day from Monday to Friday and I build something and the things I'm monetizing then are the things which come for the challenge. Because right now I also have some sponsors on my YouTube channel. And they can't add that too. I don't feel like it will be okay to add that to the challenge because it kind of uses my audience before the challenge. Right. There's just some extra income which I have. And it's not for the challenge. The challenge is something else in it. [00:19:26]

Michaela: Yeah. And so today I went on YouTube and to your profile, and then I saw that now you can not only subscribe, but it seems like there's a membership thing on YouTube. Now, is that something that you offer and you see that it's working already? Or how does that work? Yeah. [00:19:42]

Florin: Yeah. I offered this for quite, I think over a year now. And it's. It worked out well at the beginning, when I started to promote that I had, I mean, well, I had several people who subscribed who became members, but it's. I don't know if people can rely that maybe if you offer something valuable, it can work out. Well, it's sort of like a Patrion, but it's built into YouTube. So if you have something to offer you might get more people to become members. For me, it was just like, Hey, if you want to support, become a member. So that's not like a high incentive to people. To become a member. Yeah. I still get one. She remembers every now and then, but it's not something you can at least not for me because probably I haven't laboratories date to the maximum. [00:20:35]

Michaela: And so what do you do members get? Do they get something else or is it just really that, you know, they, they get the same public videos and it's just like, they support you and they want to be. [00:20:46]

Florin: Yeah, so you can do like sky's the limit through that? For me right now is you get the special badge and you get your name collar to the live streams. You get some special emotes who can use. A lot, a lot of value there. That's why probably I don't have a lot of members, but you can do that. So you can have specialty videos for those members. You can offer them a one-on-one consulting or coaching, or you can send them a discounts on your products and like the sky's the limit to. What you can use it for. I'm just yeah. I even forgot. I have that enabled. And now you also have a button, a YouTube. They added it recently where people can thank you. So they click the button and they can donate you. If they liked your video, they can donate a, I'm not sure if anyone used that button so far on. I'm not sure if where I can see that. So, and people also can donate through the livestreams. And I got a couple of those along the year or so I've been streaming probably for streaming. I'm still debating, which is best YouTube or Twitch, because I noticed that on Twitch people are more likely to support creating. And like donate more become members and all that. It's just the communities built around, you know, supporting creators on YouTube is more like people come to watch polished videos, which are edited and all that it's nicely placed. So they're not that popular right now with streaming. So probably that's why. People, at least in my niche, people are not. Likely to donate, [00:22:36]

Michaela: but how many people do have on your life? Coding streams onto it? [00:22:40]

Florin: It depends on if I like, for example, last week I had a special livestream where I announced it two days prior to the event and I had over a hundred people joining me, but in the day day by day-by-day stream, I gets 30, 40. Tomorrow or less that [00:22:59]

Michaela: are, that are following you and your [00:23:02]

Florin: staff. Yeah, but I mean maybe some of them leave and others join, but like an average of 30, 40 people tuning date. I mean, that's the number I see of viewers at the moment, but who knows how many people show tonight? [00:23:20]

Michaela: And so you, do you use restream Dan too, or something like that, the platform stream your Stritch video also on YouTube and the other way around or? [00:23:28]

Florin: No. So right now I'm only streaming on YouTube. So I'm using just OBS to stream directly to YouTube last year I streamed. So I started streaming on YouTube last year, then I moved to Twitch and now I'm back on YouTube because I just felt like I have a big audience here. And I don't know. I was thinking that I'll get more viewers over time. I still don't know. I might have to test multiple times to see all right, which is best Twitch or a year to maybe just keep Twitch for streaming and a YouTube for videos. But I found myself that that was too lazy to just take the videos from Twitch and upload them again on YouTube. So I I'm just dreaming now because. Easier for an hour. The goal is not necessarily to have the streams go out to thousands and thousands of people because I only see them after a day or so. They're not very polished. So the goal is to have a place where those who are interested to follow. Day by day didn't know that, okay. Flooring is life this hour everyday. Let me check what is day. And I'm also doing recap videos every week. Now I messed up a couple of weeks, but the goal of the recap videos is shorter videos, which kind of describe what I did in the past week. And those should like push out the challenge idea to more people and get more people. To eventually join me. [00:24:56]

Michaela: Yeah. So I have been streaming on Twitch for, I was 2019 a long time ago. I actually almost said, no, it wasn't. 2010 days, sorry, 2020 last year for a month. And also for like my challenge of building, you know, building a tool within 30 days. And I also went live every day was very, very nice. I was a little bit exhausted to be honest, after 30 days with like, oh my God. And it was fun, but I also feel like it's really hard to do something meaningful in an hour. Without really preparing for it. Right. So this was also always like great, just jumping in and doing it on the spot. And, and then even talking with people, like if people are coming you're a little bit chit-chatting and then really getting something done, I feel it's very, very challenging is it's something that you felt you grew into and you just got some more, you know, some muscle memory to do it better. Or do you prepare before the stream or how, how do you. [00:25:58]

Florin: Yeah. So I have to agree, like it's very exhausting. For me, I just, I kind of noticed that after two hours of going live, building, researching, brainstorming, chatting with the people from the chat for two hours, I'm just dead. Like it just can't function anymore. I need an app very bad. It's just, that's how it is. I mean, I can think on my head hurts from after two hours, because I think. Too much going on because I'm also coding and thinking at the same time, because it's not something I know by heart. So I have to research it. I have to think about the things I'm doing. And at the same time, people from the chat are talking with me. I have to interact with them. So it it's, it's tiring. But I liked the, I liked the fact that I do this every, every day and the, it just. To be honest, some of some days, this is the highlight of the productive part of the day for me. So if I didn't have this, I wouldn't do anything that they, so for me, it's. Motivating to keep doing something, even if it's just for 30 minutes or an hour, it's doing something towards the goal of what are a cake. And like the money aspect is nice. It's kind of intriguing for people to join and see, let's see how much money flooring made. But for me, the real goal is not necessarily the 100 K in revenue. I could make that it don't have to make it public. I almost did that in a year, so it's not the, I it's it's possible, but for me, it's just who I have to become, what skills they have to learn and develop and what knowledge I need to learn along the way to be able to do this. And I also do it publicly. So it's, it's more about my personal growth than it is the money aspect. That's what motivates me. So the money goal is nice. We could public people like to chase those things. But yeah, it's more about, because I'm also going out my comfort zone because I'm building projects to monetize them. So I need to maybe learn new skills of how to develop a proper database and how to get that education and how to design well and market and all that. So there are new skills I have to learn along the way. And that's, that's motivating for me and hopefully inspiring for others to get out of your comfort zone and money is just a return of the value you bring and grow to have. So it's just a matter of time afterwards. [00:28:35]

Michaela: So it seems like you never suffer from analysis paralysis, right. Where you're like, oh, what should I do? Oh, this or that? Or they say that, how do you do, do you just do all of that? Or do you feel that [00:28:47]

Florin: something. I feel that probably all the time is just the chat helps. So whenever I don't know what to do, usually what I try to do is to set the side tasks for tomorrow. So whenever I'm live and I have inspiration of how to develop the project to bring it to the next level, I just write down a series of tasks. So then tomorrow, when I'm not that inspired of knowing what to do. I just have the tasks and another thing which really helps is the chat. So I have a couple of people who are joining every day and just having people to bounce off ideas and they give you feedback and their critique, your work is it's a great way to have something to do. But I, yeah, sorry, [00:29:38]

Michaela: man. Do you know how, how old. Audience is, or the background or the new developers or the senior people are they've maybe indie hackers as well, or, [00:29:54]

Florin: yeah, probably those who follow me along everyday are indie hackers or at least want to be in the hackers. The reason why, like I have 115,000 subscribers, but. Dan's joined the live streams and there isn't why is that? Because most people who subscribe to my channel, they subscribed for my tutorial. So like probably they want to learn to code, but what I'm doing now in this challenge, basically it's not necessarily beginner friendly, although I kind of try to make it beginner, flan friendly, where we build a project from scratch, but there are. Some things which go out of that comfort zone is some things which are more of a business related thinking. And not a lot of people are interested in it right now. You know? So most people who follow me day by day they are interested in this like building projects, monetizing them and work for themselves kind of. Entrepreneurial stuff. [00:30:57]

Michaela: So you have actually two, two sort of niches. One is the indie hacker niche where you have, you're building a following and then you have that mixed in with the, I want to be a developer niche. Right? So teaching niche, do you want to have them separated more? Do you feel like. You started off it, for example, teaching development. And now you want to be more in the D you know, indie hacker space, or is that both that represents you? How do you think about that? [00:31:27]

Florin: So throughout my journey, as a content creator, I mostly shared what I was doing. So I started off as a blog. Right. I was posting articles. Then I moved on to YouTube creating YouTube tutorials, and now I'm moving on to being an indie hacker. So I'm kind of doing my own journey and. People who follow some people follow me for me. But then I have separate audiences for those separate stages. As I said, most of the people I most of the subscribers I gathered along the past year or so were those who are interested in learning how to code, but now as I'm approaching like a new direction, some of them will be interested in this too. But I'm also now targeting another audience for me most, most about my own growth. And I know that if I learn stuff and share stuff, people who also want to do the same. The same things they will follow along. I know that with this new indie hacker kind of journey, I'm not targeting my older or my old audience. But that, that's fine because it's, it's a progress in my own life. I'm just, I want to be I feel like I would be starting. In a place if I just don't grow, you know, and I will continue to address that audience as well with tutorials, but my life goes on and I learn your stuff and I, it. Move on, on a, on a new, because at the same time, there are so many YouTube stars out there doing tutorials for beginners and much less of those who just use the skills you're learning. And building stuff, monetizing them, be your own boss. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of thing. I think that [00:33:23]

Michaela: that thinking and those fears around those thinking are very, very similar to those fears that you have. Oh, I studied computer science and now I want to be a writer. Oh my God. You know, my life will end. I'm even allowed to do that. Right. So these growing aspects, I think of people and, you know, whatever you set out to do, and then you grow and you realize actually something else. It's happening in my life. I think this is very important that we acknowledge that and that it's really normal and it's okay. Right. You, I don't know, you studied history and now you want to be a developer, go do it. Right. And now you did those videos and you want to be, you know, want to do other videos that are following along your life. I think that's a super important and we shouldn't be afraid. I think it will work out wonderful. You're very charismatic. So I, I was really happy that you have been on my podcast today and to talk with me about all of those things, content creation, monitorization, building an audience, and I will definitely follow you. I will link everything down in the show notes and yeah, with those words, thank you so much, Lauren, for being on. [00:34:31]

Florin: Thank you very much for having me was very nice step. Yeah. Thank you, [00:34:35]

Michaela: flooring. Bye-bye [00:34:36] Florin: thanks. [00:34:38]

Michaela: I hope you enjoyed another episode of the sup engineering unlocked podcast. Don't forget to subscribe and I'd talk to you again in two weeks. Bye.