I’m Struggling

0:00I'm struggling. I gotta be honest. I don't know what to talk about. The reason is because I have not been podcasting because I have injured myself. I was sick before that. I had chest cold and I just like and this this year, 2026, early 2026 just not just kind of like there's a feels like a little bit of a pile on if I'm being honest and I have jury duty tomorrow. I'm like give me a break. I was supposed to record videos tomorrow. Now I'm going to I've never been I've never been summoned. I've been no that's not true. I've been summoned once and I called and they said my number wasn't you know called but in this time my number is called who knows what's going to happen but you know I was supposed to take

1:03stuff to the airport tomorrow. I can't do that because I gotta be a I gotta my civic duty you know whatever. I yeah I don't really have anything to talk about because at well you know what I need your help. Do me a favor. He listen and you can take a spare moment if you have anything you want me to talk about or have any ideas friggin just shoot me an email. I haven't I haven't emailed you in a while because again I don't know I don't know. I'm like this is the first time in like two years I've been kind of behind on the podcast mainly because I had a hard time recording and I don't really have much to talk about but I'm gonna try. Shoot me an email Matt at jivinesi.com G-I-O-V-A-N-I-S-C-I.com. If you got anything I'm all yours man. If there's anything you want me to talk about I'm I'm happy to talk about the boring shit

2:05that I've been doing and stuff that I'm thinking about but you know there was some some some exciting news right like we did the pivot on the course. There's some stuff happening with the app that's very exciting that again I'm not I can't talk about yet but I'm excited about it and you know I think a lot of what I do at my job is boring and that's the good thing I do think this year is gonna be a pivotal year for my company but it's because of this show and getting super clear on what it is that we do and the pro and just and just developing the process and just repeating the process over and over and over and over again and that's boring you know we're writing articles again guess what they're fucking ranking all right we're getting traffic it's still slow but it's

3:10happening we're we're publishing videos we got 24 videos uploaded to the app we got five new app update videos to the website we're I'm working on a programmatic SEO thing that again can't really talk about yet it's kind it's not exciting it's a little boring but it's like hey we're doing SEO and we pivot it from doing the course videos to going into YouTube because you know it's we're heading into margin it's time for YouTube videos and so that's kind of what I'm going to talk about today because I maybe it's maybe interesting but again I'm still I'm struggling I need your help so if you got questions if you got things you want my take on if you if you're struggling with something that maybe I can help talk through I'm happy to do it because I do think that the stuff that I'm doing is just monotonous and I have really nothing new to share

4:11but I will give you just a quick update on what's going on so we are heading into season marches just around the corner I'm recording this February 25th and you know marches not really the beginning it's sort of like build up month and but we're getting into YouTube videos and that's exciting so staff has written two short sorry two long-form videos for me that I was supposed to record tomorrow but I'll be in the courtroom so I can't hopefully I don't hopefully they you know I get sent home and I'll be able to do it but the one interesting thing is she and if you have a YouTube channel you may already know this but she's like I haven't been in YouTube analytics in a while because we take the winner

5:14we take the winter off and she's like they got this AI built in where you can like ask the AI in YouTube studio questions about your channel and strategies because it can read all of your data like it can read it knows every single comment that you got so you go hey you know what are the top 10 comments that people are saying that we can make videos on boom tells you it's like where can we focus our time so she found this like all right our strategy which is the strategy we've always been doing which is probably why the data shows this and why the AI is like you should do this and we're like how revolutionary no it's because we've been doing it which is focusing on keywords that's how we do YouTube we very rarely if at all do any algorithmic stuff because we are a specific education channel you know we're a how-to channel so yeah people are

6:17searching for shit like very rarely are we gonna do like something that like goes viral but in what I was telling Steph was okay I do think we might see some success with longer form content meaning longer than our longer form content which is about you know usually ranges between like five and ten minutes is usually where our videos fall they're highly scripted you know they're super educational but they're you know they're not that not that long which is great if you're searching for stuff now what about all the people who follow us what about you know maybe doing something for the algorithm every once in a while just seeing how it plays there was an idea I talked about in the show before how I was like well it would be cool be hard to do to ask people in our audience to send this videos and we would watch them like I would record it

7:23you know so I have a YouTube studio and I'm using a software called ecam live to record that's what I do for all of our videos so I do have the ability to like create scenes and do things in real time like reaction stuff so I had this idea for like the rescue my pool idea where the show would be a customer you know sends in a video where they show me their pool they show me what the problem is they tell me what the problem is I watch the video I react to the video and then I give them a custom game plan on how to solve the problem the problem is I don't know how to get people to send me videos now as I'm saying that I'm like yeah do you tell them to like you know I cut to me I'm like you know these are older people you know they know how to record videos on their phone right like my dad my dad 70 something years old right he knows how to record a video on his

8:25phone does he know how to send it to me like can I can I shoot like is he gonna get on his computer and upload it to a Google Drive link or something or like how is this gonna work I you know it's like we could do it through social media but then it's like yeah but which social media we talk and take talk we talk Instagram like where we talking and then I got a monitor those platforms like no I want to be able to send an email out say hey this is what we're doing let me know if you're interested if you're interested send a video here have them send the video be done with it maybe I got a film a video that I don't know there's something to do there but that the only that's the biggest hurdle is that there's like a big set up to this there's a big like walk them through and then who knows if anyone's gonna send a video and who knows that this will even be a good idea so to set all of that up only to you know for it not to work is

9:25like is the juice worth the squeeze I don't know but the point of doing it would be to you know answer someone's very specific problem with context with no script so I would watch the video right down on my thoughts you know study it you know and then hit record and just kind of launch into a game plan and then you know and just kind of like let the cameras roll sort of thing edit that down into something you know if I make mistakes or I you know linger too long on something I can just kind of edit it down like tighten it up a bit and then present that to Steph and say hey do you think there's something here is this worth publishing so that's an idea it's called rescue my pool it's a it's a format now I had another idea I was watching a I was watching a video on

10:29gym equipment and I think I had mentioned this before but I was like it was this long 17 minute video where the guy reviews a piece of gym equipment yeah because I was talking about this in the affiliate marketing one and at the end of the video he like launches into a tier list and I was like yeah you know you obviously I've been on I mean I'm on YouTube right I see these tier lists all the time like it's up it's a thing but I'm like God how easy would it be to just do that like to just sit there and debate the and rank things you know but I'm like what the fuck am I gonna do and then I had a thought which was I'm gonna rank pool chemicals you know and I have all these images of pool chemicals that I designed so there's no so it's like brand agnostic and I'm like well I mean man I could probably do that with like almost no

11:32preparation besides knowing which chemicals I was gonna rank so I was like okay it's worth that one requires like very little you know walk them through setup whatever I can record that I can do some light editing work and basically you know call it done show that the staff and be like is this worth something and just kind of like pitch format ideas because one of the things I've noticed or one of the things that I'm trying to do in 2026 is scaling content I think that in order for us to really grow as a company we have a we have two I would say we have two really good products and one product that's decent and

12:32we'll get better with time which is our course and the one thing we're pivoting on because we're focusing on the app this year but between the app and the book we're like this is these are this is a good one to punch we're not gonna promote the course as much this year we're saving it for next year because we don't even know like the course could take over everything and we're like oh let's just put all our effort into that who knows so we're kind of like letting this year show us where our effort has the most leverage and what I'm trying to do is go look the high the highest leverage activity for me as the as the CEO of the company is being on camera and the more often I can get in front of that camera I mean it means that we can publish more short form more long form we can publish you know more content for the app itself even the course itself

13:35even the you know updates for the like we can just I can just make videos all fucking day right now the the one bottleneck to for me getting in front of the camera is that right now I'm very reliant on scripts for both short form and long form content but recently I've been doing app updates where I don't have a script because I'm literally just showing you a new feature in the app and so I'm like well okay clearly and also by the way I'm doing this like webinar thing every month with this company called Swimpley which is Airbnb for pools and I'm like well clearly I'm good I mean like I do this podcast I'm good on camera like I can riff and I'm like whoa I just got a riff man I just got

14:35to get in front of the camera and riff see what comes out obviously with some preparation with a decent amount of preparation and what another thing we'd like to do is like more another format we like to do is a more presentation style where we do a lot of the pre-work in like creating slides but there is no it's not scripting it's more like slideshow building and and the reason why this makes a lot of sense for us is because our two but two of our most popular videos are exactly that where they're just slideshows and it's just me riffing but it's me riffing like six seven years ago like I've gotten much better at speaking I think so I think I think I would be better and obviously we can edit it you know the other videos that I didn't even edit them I maybe trimmed off the beginning and the ends but like yeah I just kind of ran with it

15:37so I think also there is some like and I've said this on another podcast too like I was watching my video my update videos for the app and I'm going I'm I feel something I even though I'm watching myself I feel like this is genuine because it because I'm literally walking you through a thing I built you know and I'm I'm not being overly hype I'm not putting on air is like I'm just being like what you see is what you get and I go I'm kind of want to app I kind of want to fight a pool man I would download this shit just from watching this one video I don't know why I feel that way but I think it's because it's just me kind of like I just know my shit and I'm in a professional studio and I don't know you

16:43know there's something to it there's light I mean even with some light editing you know light editing can make something feel little like it's scripted but I think there's value to it I also have this theory that YouTube is promoting long-form content like it's it's favoring long form like really long form because obviously the longer you can keep people watching a video on your platform like the more YouTube loves that and so I feel like yeah there's there's some even though like yes we are a keyword centric YouTube channel I think there's some value to that and it's worth testing so what I'm saying or what I'm suggesting in this whole thing in this whole video thing is okay Matt needs to be on camera more that's the leverage point the problem or the bottleneck is scripting because yes I can write scripts not a big deal

17:44Steph can write scripts so between the two of us we can knock out a lot of scripts but like also I can just riff which requires no script and and and maybe a little prep but like not a ton so why not just try it and if it works then fucking go you know what I mean like go hard at it because the goal I think in 2026 is like just put out just put out as many videos as you can in the best quality that you can with good prep and if I just focus on that then that like come on you know what I mean and I was even thinking too I know like I've said in the past I'm not doing ads but I've you know like Facebook's talking about this on and drama like this new algorithm thing or whatever and I'm like what if we just took bangers that already performed well in organic and put

18:48them up as in cheap ass ad no no need to re edit it no need to even talk about the fucking product you know I mean just add the link what I don't know that hurts just increases the reach on a thing that we already know works so like maybe especially if we have a book and an app so we get people to buy the book and then they transition into the app which is a you know subscription model yes we still need to keep our our costs per acquisition low but I don't know maybe I don't know if especially if we can create a ton of organic content then I don't know maybe and yeah I don't know just just thought you know I don't want to go overboard but anyway yeah still struggling still struggling

19:50I don't know if any of this is interesting I don't know if I'm talking about anything new or if it's like yeah Matt we've heard this you know you're doing your thing you know but I need help with email marketing or I need help with affiliate links or I need help with getting traffic or whatever maybe you need help and I just need to help you so do me a favor shoot me an email matatjivinesi.com and right now I'm not on Twitter anymore I'm not doing LinkedIn I'm not doing on threads I'm just kind of off social media right now I might do an app that's maybe an idea for an episode I recently listened to a book called digital minimalism by Cal Newport which by the way I've been I love Cal Newport I thought I had read all those books I did not know about this one and so I devoured it deleted all the social media off my phone except YouTube and yeah it's been good it's been good so but I'm

20:53not tapped it anymore and again I haven't sent out an email because I'm like I don't know what the fuck to talk about so do me a favor shoot me an email help me out and I'll talk to you next time