I Really Like Making Videos

It all started with this idea I developed to raise money for charity. I’d run a 15k race with a camera on a selfie stick and sell sponsorships during the video.

Even though the World’s Longest Commercial raised over $7,000 to fight addiction, I was a little disappointed that the video got less than 300 views on YouTube.

In hindsight, this is completely understandable. It’s a shaky video of an unknown dude running for an hour and talking about a bunch of companies. Even the edited version is almost 30 minutes long. Of course no one’s going to sit through that.

But it was so much fun to make that I started to think about what other kinds of videos I could make.

I got some advice to focus on the things that I’m naturally good at since that comes easy. Since I’m good at carrying on a conversation with different types of people, I started interviewing people and making videos about that.

Here’s the first one I did, which I think is pretty entertaining.

I switched gears a bit here when I realized that San Francisco (where I live) is such an interesting part of the world that people might want to know more about it.

That’s when I made my most popular video:

This video popped. It got picked up by a couple of San Francisco publications which helped it get over 12,000 views in just a couple of days. Even cooler is that people engaged with it (commented and liked/disliked) enough that the video started to rank #1 when you search for “san francisco” on YouTube.

As of now it’s sitting at over 100,000 views, which I’m thrilled about.

That video gave me the validation I needed to keep going, and I’ve been making other videos since then.

None of them have had the same level of success as my SF video has, but honestly I’m enjoying this enough that I think I’ll just keep doing it anyway.

If you want to see my latest work, you can always check out my YouTube channel here: https://youtube.com/c/tomdehnel