Just Hit Record

0:00I'm still feeling slightly under the weather, but if you can hear it in my voice, I probably sound a little bit better today because I think I'm kind of on the, I mean, I've, it's just been getting better each day. I don't know what the heck it was, but all right, we're in the clear, I think. Today I want to talk about a topic that I've been thinking a lot about, had a meeting with my brother today and one of the, the loose ends that I had talked about in the previous episodes was creating some space for myself to edit, to do like video editing for our courses to create a style. And I kind of just said to myself, after talking with him, I'm like, you know, I don't really have any good ideas for, for designing the edit, I mean, I have a few things, but like, do I really need to be the person who designs this? And I asked him, I said, look, I know I'm, I know I'm a bottleneck right now, I know that

1:05I could hand these videos off to you and just have you edit them, like edit them and come back to me with a style, you know, I'll give you a few pointers, we can go back and forth on frame to kind of figure out, you know, how we want to design this, but we have a storyboard like let's go, let's just, let's just, let me just hand this off, I'll give you a few notes, I'll give you a few ideas and we'll run with it. And that way, I'm not a bottleneck and I'm just passing it off to somebody who's very capable of doing this and yet here I am thinking like, well, I, you know, let me, let me take a crack at it. It's like, Matt, you always want to take a crack at it, it's like, let's someone else take a crack at it, which is interesting because it's like, I tend to be a bottleneck a lot because I usually have to figure it out, create the SOP and it's like, why not just work

2:08with someone, have them do the work, have them figure it out, have them create the style and then you can critique and go, okay, I like what you did there. I would have never thought of that. Let's, let's build on that and then you can have ideas and then you can, you know, collaborate is the word. So I, yeah, that's what I'm doing. I'm, like I said, I have a lot of, you know, kind of internal goals this year and I wouldn't say they're like anything I would accomplish, but just kind of, just thoughts and feelings that I'm having, you know, that I'm like, just trying to be more conscious of. One of those things is becoming a better manager, becoming a better leader, we'll call it that because manager is like, feels, I'm Mr. Manager. Leader sounds cooler, you know, and, and one of those things, you know, it's like, Matt,

3:09yeah, you might be the best, but you might think you're the best, but, you know, you're also a bottleneck. So stop being that, lead. Anyway, I just wanted to get that out there because I was telling my brother in our conversation I said, I'm trying to get to one goal, I'm trying to get to one phrase, which I'm not there yet, but the, but the phrase is just hit record. There used to be a post-it note on my computer that I recently just threw out. The post-it note said, make fucking content. I thought, oh, that's bad ass, that's because that's really like, I was trying to think if anything is true in my business, that if I did anything in my business, what grows it? Well, it's making content, of course, you know, it's making a course, it's making videos

4:10for a course, it's writing for a book, it's making graphics for a book, it's publishing articles, it's publishing podcasts, it's publishing, you long form YouTube videos, short form, Instagram videos, every single thing in my business is, we're a content, we're a media company, we're an education media company. So if we just did all of those things, then we'd be fine, like our business would grow. And the more I can do, the better. The problem with that phrase, though, is it's very vague, it's very okay, what is content. And I'm specifically talking about my company, Swimming University, I'm not talking about this podcast, I'm not talking about the newsletter or anything, which you can find at jivanesi.com, not that, it's not even brew cabin videos that I'm also doing as sort of my side project.

5:13The content that I'm talking about is Swimming University, but what is content is making one graphic content, technically, yeah, is that a high leverage activity? Definitely not, definitely not. I did an episode recently where I said, I can do anything, but I can't do everything. And in that episode, I explored this idea of like, okay, yes, I can do anything I put my mind to. And I tend to be good at a lot of things, including like video editing, things like that. But when I look at my process, all my processes, I've been able to completely outsource a lot of it. I'm almost completely outsourced, like I say this a lot, you're going to hear me talk about this all year. My business basically runs on six SOPs.

6:16We have like six departments of the business. And those are, you know, articles, email marketing, videos, customer service, development. And or I should say, and social, excuse me. Those are the six departments. And I've completely outsourced, at this point, I've outsourced email marketing completely. I don't do it. I don't really do it anymore. I have, like I just review, but I don't come up with the ideas. I don't come up with the content and I don't create the emails. I just review them for literally just for accurate or I'm just like another set of eyeballs to look at it to make sure the links are right. You know, there's no, there's no visual mistakes, things like that.

7:17I've completely outsourced customer service. I have somebody doing that. I've outsourced, we were doing bookshipping and all that, outsource that. And when it comes to creating, when we do, for social media, for long-form videos and for, social media, and for articles, I'm still a part of those processes. I know that I can completely outsource article writing. One, the only thing I'm doing right now is publishing those articles in WordPress. But I have such a specific SOP for that, which I've shared on my newsletter, which if you know if you sign up, you should be able, I think you should be able to see my old videos. If not, I'll make that happen. You can see my whole process for creating an article. It takes me about 15 minutes to publish an article.

8:18And we produce about one to two articles per week. Now I don't even have to do that part. I have it so dialed in that I could hand that off to somebody else. So really, it leaves me down to basically just doing videos. So when it comes to the content, the quote unquote content, that's the type of content I'm talking about is making videos. Because we make videos, like I mentioned, for our course, for our app, for social media, for YouTube, those YouTube videos get embedded on our articles. We make them for customer service. We make them for, like it's everything. Now if I look at the video process, if we drill down even further, right? So I could change that post a note to say, make fucking videos, right?

9:21So okay, what does that mean? Still a little too vague. Am I coming up with ideas for videos? There's our videos, we do a five-step process for this. It's ideation, scripting, filming, editing, and publishing. Now, which part am I involved in? Currently, I'm involved in one of the five processes, which is filming. That's it. And honestly, that's very hard for me to do. I'm not a big fan of filming. But it is the highest, I've determined, I've figured out, it is the highest leverage activity that I can do, personally, within my business, because I'm the guy on camera.

10:23And the more I'm on camera, the more content we put out. Because the system just works that way. I can create app videos like a ton of them. So adding more exclusive content into the app, creating content for YouTube, creating content for social media, creating content for our video course, which is what we're working on right now. But let's think about it this way. If I change that post-it note to just hit record, and I'm specifically thinking like a video record button, that that is my highest leverage activity. There is a problem. There are constraints to that.

11:23Because if I spent four hours a day, let's just say four hours a day, so we're talking 20 hours a week, I'm in front of that goddamn camera. I think that's almost impossible to do physically. I think that would be impossible. But if I were to do that, one, there wouldn't be enough scripts for me to read in order to do that. And my brother would not be able to keep up with the editing for that. And before I get to my solution here, or an idea, I actually was watching this video. It was a Mr. Beast was talking, was on stage, I think, for the New York Times talking to some guy, and he said, I heard him say something like, I'm on camera, 28 out of the 30 days of the month. So almost for the entire month, he's on camera. Because he figured out that that's his highest leverage activity in the business is being

12:28on camera. Because if he's on camera, videos are being made. His whole business is video dependent. And it's unfortunately, it's dependent on him specifically. Now that is, that's kind of my business, except I do think I'm replaceable. I think somebody could come into my business, get in front of the camera and do the same thing I'm doing. And I don't think people would really care. I could be wrong about that. I could be wrong. But he figured that out. So I was like, huh, and I had already figured out this idea before I watched that video. I'm like, oh, interesting. So he obviously has an entire team, a very large team. I think he said 300 employees around him to make these videos. So he's just the guy on, you know, I'm sure he's the one having ideas.

13:32I know he looks at thumbnails. And I know he's on camera. But I would assume he's, you know, he's obviously not designing his own thumbnails. He's not editing his own videos clearly. He's not, you know, he's not doing any of these low, I get, not low level, but like he's not doing these like time consuming tasks to finish a video. Because I think ideation and scripting and editing, these are all time consuming. But filming takes as long as it takes to film, which is also can be time consuming if you're trying to get something right. But the more you film, the more content you can put out. So the more times you can just hit record, the more you can put out again, the problem that we have is that our process is constrained because we only have one person who scripts,

14:35which is my wife, staff, and we only have one editor, which is Chris. Now of course, I can also script and I can also edit, like I know how to do those things. But then I'd be consumed with doing those things instead of filming, right? So here's my idea. And I've been, I talked to my brother about this and he's like, yeah, I know we've been saying this, which is how do I remove the, how do I remove steps in the process? And I can't do this for every video, but it's definitely worth experimenting. Then we make videos of a different format where it doesn't require a script and it doesn't really require editing. So before the idea that I was talking about earlier in 2025 was, and I tried this for a month,

15:40was I just got in front of my iPhone with a microphone and answered questions about a pool care and then posted them on TikTok. And some of those videos did pretty well, okay. So that's just the scripting part. Now those videos weren't edited, but I'm like, they still didn't have, they didn't, while they were like fairly easy to make and they kind of weren't, but let's just say they were, you know, they only really worked on TikTok and they weren't a part of any process. So it was really kind of like, I was just trying this out to see if this format would work for us. So here's what happened.

16:41I am, I was working with my brother and I was working with my developer. I said, look, you know, as you're developing stuff for the app that we're working on, I want to create help guides within the app. These are video guides, you know, basic little things, how to test your water, how to get a good water sample, how to read your treatment, how to enter your test results, you know, how to set up your pool profile, how to, you know, how to salt water pools work. Little, like, little videos. Now for the ones that required, like, how does a salt water pool work requires a little bit of a script, right? These are not hard. These are like one minute, two minute videos that the script I don't mind putting together, little help from Claude, get a script going, light editing for my brother, easy stuff, right? So what about how to use the app?

17:43My thought process there was I could script it, but I mean, I'm showing people how to use the app and I know how to use the app, but you know, I designed it. So I'm like, and plus, we're going to make updates. So if I have to, if the app gets updated, I need to be able to crank out a video fast to be like, hey, here are the new features of the, you know, here are the new features. Or hey, we changed the way that we, you know, we create your pool profile, I have to completely re-record that video and replace it. Now if I go through and script that, well, first of all, I'm reading a teleprompter which kind of sucks because I also have to look at my phone to walk through the process. So I decided to just sit down in my studio and figure out a way to do it without a script and without any editing. And of course, like I've done this before with MoneyLab Live, I sat down and I created

18:47a bunch of scenes in ECAM. I have a stream deck to switch streams or to switch scenes, I should say. I realized I could hook my phone up right to the computer and it'll display on a scene. So I'm like, oh, well, shit, I was editing that. I would record my phone screen separately and then have to sync that up and post and have such a pain in the ass. So I ended up like building this little scene. I think I did two scenes. A scene with just me and a scene with me on one side and the phone on the other side. And I just shot the video. I hit record. I just went. Mistakes and all. If I fumbled, I called it out. But within two minutes, I had a complete video required no editing. I could just upload it directly to WordPress's worry host or stuff. And it appears in the app within five minutes.

19:50And I was like, oh, okay, hold on a second. Now of course, that one's easy because I'm not giving out advice. I'm just, you know, I'm just looking at my phone. I'm just telling you how to use the app, simple. But with that format, can I do other stuff? Like, can I do reaction videos? Because now I could just pull my phone up and watch a video. And you can see that on screen. And I could design a scene in vertical format, which I didn't know I could do, by the way. I didn't know I could, I didn't know I could record things vertically, which I can, which is awesome. So I'm like, oh, I could set up vertical scenes. So can I do this, can I, can I basically do unedited shorts? Short form videos where I'm reacting to other people's videos or, you know, and this

20:53is the tough part about that is there's not that many pool videos to react to. You know, it's not like I'm reacting to food videos or things like that or whatever. It's like, I just, can I do that? It's like, yeah, we used it, we've done react videos in the past. They were scripted. So we were kind of faking it. In this case, I wouldn't be scripting it. Now another thing we could do is we could, we could have my brother still edit it. Even though I have it set up that way, he could just do cuts. And then maybe add B roll here and there. But if we were to do that, it would completely cut out scripting. It would just be ideation, filming, light editing, and then publishing. Which means, yeah, we could probably get to, you know, however many videos a week that

21:57we said we were going to get to. Now I could do the question, right, that we were answering questions from people. I was doing that on TikTok. And those got pretty good, you know, they got responses, right, like people liked them. And they got views. Those were off the cuff. I didn't have a script for those. I just read the question and then I would answer the question. I could do that too. Could I do it as a, as a scene? I don't think I would need to that one. I could just record, have it as a short. And then, yeah, just kind of try to figure it out. But I would have to go, in order to do that, I would have to have some type of process for mining the content, so I have to go find the questions.

22:59Not that hard to do. Take them into, you know, the same process that we have for ideation. And then, record them and bake them into the pipeline, but the editing would be lighter. But I'm like, I feel like this is a good move. And the question, and so like, I don't know if I'm going to be able to do this. But I'm curious, can I sit down at that computer, the studio computer, and just hit record, and get content out? And just put it in the pipeline. To the point where, hey, maybe we need two editors. Hey, maybe we need to hire a scriptwriter. Because we can crank this shit out, or, or, you know, yes, I, yeah, I just think we

24:03could also focus, you know, it's like, somebody's like, I can hear myself going, well, you know, you could focus on quality, right? It's not just about getting in front of the, getting in front of the screen, you know, the camera and recording, and I'm like, yeah, but the thing is, like, I'm, I'm an expert. So like, you know, put me in front of the camera. Get me talking. Like that's where I'm the, that's where I'm good. That's where I'm the best. I'm not going to be the best prep. I'm not going to be the best editor, even though I can do those things. I really don't think editing needs to be that crazy, and it can always get crazier, but I don't have to be the one to do it. And yeah, it means I have to get better at ideas. I think, I think those are the areas I need to spend time on, which is having video ideas

25:09with thumbnails with, you know, and titles and hooks, and then coming up with ideas for shorts that are of high quality and hitting record, because it is about making more videos, but I want to make them better. And it's, and it may just be, it may just be something we have to scale, but that's kind of where I'm at. I'm headed toward this North Star of like, just get on camera more, just hit record. Let me know what you think of this, shoot me an email, matatjivinesi.com, or just go to jivinesi.com, subscribe to the newsletter, and just reply to any of the emails I send you. And I can tell my voice is, is getting worse throughout this podcast. All right, talking next time. All right, talking next time. All right, talking next time. All right, talking next time. All right, talking next time. All right, talking next time. All right, talking next time. All right, talking next time.

26:09All right, talking next time. All right, talking next time. All right, talking next time. All right, talking next time. All right, talking next time.