Casey Neistat on why your audience literally wants you to sell things to them:
Casey:
The second thing was that I never really did merch.
Towards the end of the vlogging era, I put out a couple sweatshirts, and I was psyched to do that. And when I see them now, I’m psyched.
Jon:
Yeah, the Work Harder ones.
Casey:
Yeah, they were great. And I didn’t do it because I felt like brand deals are very— this is — I don’t believe in this, but I felt this then — I felt like brand deals were a very equitable exchange. Like,
‘Look, I’m going to make a very compelling piece of content that I hope you like. And, within that content, is going to be some sort of sponsorship that I hope to be transparent as possible. And I hope you know it’s an ad. But there’s an exchange of value here. l’m going to make you something good that I hope you’ll like and, in exchange, this brand is going to pay me for having made that.’
That felt fair.
But, for some reason — and I was wrong, I want to be very careful with this — I foolishly thought that it was exploiting my audience to sell merch.
I was wrong.
And I realized I was wrong because when I was a little kid, all I wanted was a Red Hot Chili Peppers sweatshirt.
And I don’t think that the Red Hot— I don’t think Flea — that’s the bassist from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, for anyone under the age of 30 — l don’t think that the Red Hot Chili Peppers were exploiting me by selling me a sweatshirt.
I think what they were doing is giving me an opportunity to, like, show the world that, like, I want to— that I’m a fan and I love the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
So, I regret not working harder to make great merch and like make good income.
You make so much money off of merch if you do it correctly.
At least there’s a big opportunity to make a lot of money. And I think I could have done an awesome job making merch.
I think the one time or two times I did it, they were really great. So, l regret not doing that.
— end of vid clip: @ 1:23:30
At some point, when you’re ready, you must silence the very weird notion in your head that offering your own products to your subscribers is somehow bad.
That mistake is depriving you of well-deserved earnings, and depriving your audience of a lot of vibes and feelings.
You’ll regret nothing, as long as what you decide to sell is good, as Casey points out later in the conversation (▶️ @ 1:24:43).
— Tang
Jon Youshaei’s owned platform is: Created.
Casey Neistat’s owned platform is: CaseyNeistat.com (not active at the time of this posting).
