Nikole and Matt are back with an update on their journey. HealthNut Nutrition started out as a YouTube channel and now it’s a full on rocketing business with an online store full of amazing products and Nikole just launched her own book: The HealthNut Cookbook. On this episode of The Your Life! Your Terms! Show, we go behind the scenes to check in on how their doing, learn about the book launching process and chat about what they’re up to next. Enjoy the show!!
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Transcript
Okay guys, we’re going to get started. Abby, am I good? Yeah, yeah. Okay, so we are really these guys have accomplished something that is really really difficult to do. So, Nikole I don’t want to butcher your last name here and
pronounce this see as an S, the CNS gun sell this
one sell and sell this Hey, Nikole Gonsalves and Matthew Varga have I don’t know if any, does anyone anyone here know about health and nutrition yet? Yeah. Okay, a few a few people. You’re gonna get some more subscribers than today. Not that you need just like a handful more. Yeah, so these guys have done the impossible. You live in Toronto? downtown.
We just moved up north about three
four months ago. Oh, did you? Yeah.
Okay, so we’re up north bout secret Bradford? Awesome. So I live in Bradford. They have over half a million YouTube subscribers on there. You YouTube channel, half a million. So remember we talked about building an audience. Remember that whole equation, build the audience offer value and have a conversion process. The building the audience part is like a really hard part of that whole equation. They have 500,000 subscribers on their YouTube channel. So we are just thankful that you agreed to come up here and do this and we’re going to talk about their story. But before we begin to give you some context, we tracked down this little video that you guys haven’t really shared yet but it just it’s 20 seconds 25 seconds
to show. So this is actually it’s not our channel trailer. It’s actually just an intro we blog every Friday. So this is just a short little video that we just recently created for the login.
Cool. So Abby, do you think the volume will work? I’m I will try it if I have to stop it and retry started. I will.
Oh, thank you. The obvious
So we’ve got food experts and vocalists here.
Yay. So this is gonna be the start of the vlog.
Correct?
Yes.
Okay. And then now I just want to put this up here in case you haven’t seen their YouTube channel. Yeah, here it is. I’ll flip back and forth, but it’s health and nutrition. What are you at right now? You probably know in real time, but you’re a 540,000 subscribers. So I just want to talk about this a little bit on how you guys were able to get to this point. So can you just walk us through? First of all, what health and nutrition YouTube channel is all about? And then I’ll ask you some questions on how you started to build it.
Cool. Sounds good.
So I guess I’ll talk about the channels about mainly if you’re just a stumbled upon health nutrition, my face is plastered all over I would say I’m the main person for the channel. Although, in the last couple of years Matt has really kind of shown his face a little bit more but basically what I tell people every day it’s a healthy food and lifestyle YouTube channel. We post three videos a week, we do Monday recipe Mondays, wellness Wednesdays and Fridays and that’s where Matt really comes into play a lot is on the Friday blogs because we call it the neck and Matt blogs, which is what that little teaser was for. And then
so how did you guys get to the point of start because I think everyone here should start like a you if there’s something you haven’t started yet of all the media online media YouTube is the hardest one to get subscribers for like versus like a Facebook like or an Instagram follower. YouTube subscribers are very difficult to earn. But if there’s one media platform that we think it might be worth exploring, it’s definitely YouTube and I just cure Like, so how did you get started developing this YouTube channel? Because I imagine you started from zero. Can you just walk us like where were you out in your life? How did you do that?
Yeah, so it originally started about six years ago, we mean, Nikole both quit our full time jobs. And we went traveling around the world for two years. And like, during that time, we want to keep in touch with our family, because they’re very important to us. So we started a little website and we started filming our, our journey as we were traveling around, and it was really just a private link for our family and our friends to be able to keep track of like, where we were in the world and what we were doing, and then kind of from there, Nikole.
Yesterday, basically we I mean, we knew it was called blogging at the time, but we were just like Matt said, just doing it for friends and family. We had like a separate website that just they knew the URL of this was not a public thing. And I was awful in front of the camera. It was Matt who was like the he was so comfortable and I’d have a little like point and shoot Sony camera and I’m like, okay, you talk I don’t know what to say anymore. And we were just Basically vlog our adventures in Australia. We ended up going to be a year and we ended up being there for two years. Yeah. And so we were just like yeah, living, traveling, working. And that is leading up to when we left for Australia is kind of when I really kind of discovered the world of YouTube. I don’t know when you really started watching YouTube, but I don’t know if it’s because like, of me, probably. And I was just like, absorbing it, loving it. And I just kept thinking, I can do this, like, I want to do YouTube. So, you know, the blogging for friends and family was really the gateway to it. And then we started thinking like, Let’s film some stuff for a main public channel. And that’s when we just started filming on our like, iPhone or iPad, like really bad like the iPhone and iPad wasn’t what it is today. It was really bad quality. It was like blurry and shaky, no stabilization and we were filming like random fitness videos, food videos, not consistent at all just kind of randomly and it was Yeah, it was very idea
why we’re doing this while you were working?
We were doing this in Australia, like some of our first or that was still Australia. Yes. Okay. Got it. Yeah. So our first videos were filmed in like the outback on a fire. We were living there. So
got it. Okay, so then you come home and you continue this.
Yeah. So we were like I said, we’re there a little bit longer than we originally thought. And then when we came back to Canada, you know, I came back a little bit earlier than I did, but I didn’t want to just jump back into the workforce, like my my background is in business marketing. And so you know, kind of like it helps a little bit. But really, I had no production experience, no filming, no, nothing. I just kind of learned there’s no guide for how to make a YouTube channel. Now you can find so many resources, like you said, even on business, you can find so many resources, but at the time, some people were making a full time thing out of YouTube, but I didn’t even know what it could be. And I instead of going straight to work, I thought I’m going to take a few months I think I took around seven months. And I just thought I’m going to be consistent about This is really go for it. And every single week, I was just posting once, once a week. And Matt was kind of helping like behind the scenes at that point. There was a lot of stuff that it just technical, I’m not touching you
were just posting some health update some nutrition thing that you were experiencing or enjoying, and you posted it on YouTube. And that was it.
Yeah, I think the idea of it was even though I went to school for marketing, I thought I took a couple of nutrition courses and I was very interested in wellness and nutrition and recipes and food. And I thought like the end goal for me, I thought I was building an audience to then be a nutritionist, I thought it was gonna that’s why I was like health, nutrition. I thought I’m going to go to school, go back to school, be a nutritionist and have clients and do consulting and stuff, which like now that the kind of things have changed. But I was really just sharing my own personal health journey and all these things I was learning because I could only bug like my friends and family so much before they’re like, Okay, enough of the healthy stuff like I’m gonna bug the internet instead. So that’s where it was just me sharing my passion online
and it was just once a week you’re posting this thing on Yeah, how long was the video?
How long did it
Yeah. How long was the video that you took?
Oh, I mean, like filming takes like a long time. But I would say the videos would probably be around like 10, seven minutes. And the
start they were they were shorter on the start. And then
how do you get over because I’m sure there’s some people listening here who have a business, we’re like, I’m never going to post on YouTube ever, because my videos are going to look like crap and they’re not going to be good enough. I’m sure you guys face that. How do you overcome that fear? Because I’m sure someone here has that fear, right? Like you’re like, I’m never going to post because my stuff’s not going to look that good. So I’m just never going to do it. How did you must have had that? How did you overcome it?
I think really is just just starting just acting on it. I mean, you don’t have to tell everyone that you’re putting a video up. I think some of the first videos that Nikole put up like she didn’t tell any of our family and friends is just sort of she did put it up and like I can’t tell I can’t let anyone know. I think it was probably like six months to a year before she really started telling like family and friends like oh, by the way, I’m doing this as well because there’s that A little bit of fear of like people judging you or maybe shouldn’t be
from school, you know, on Facebook, some people from high school will see you. Close friends and family knew we’re doing it. But that’s it. Yeah, we were holding out on all these like other viewers that we could have been getting.
And then how so how do you go from posting once a week to where you’re getting subscribers to your YouTube channel even from that? Very little, but yeah, so how do you go to school because to get 500,000 Plus, because when we first started talking to you, like last year, you were like, 400 and something thousand now you’re like, 540, like, one year from today? How many subscribers? Do you think you’re gonna get? A million? A million? Really? Yeah, you think you’re on trend for a million in a year?
Yeah, that’s the goal.
It just snowballs. It’s crazy. Like, we just hit half a million and you just checked out like 540 and I’m sure like in the next month or so it’s going to be passed like by 50. It’s, it’s crazy. So you can’t really you can try to guess what you’re going to be at you know, we do productions to see what we think will be at this time next year, but you really don’t know when video could go viral. And then before you know it you’re like oh wow
we’re gonna play a little bit of one video just to give everybody an idea of one of these videos but I’m curious like what are so now that you’ve done this is there a moment that really started getting subscribers where it’s kind of like the the audience size just started blowing up Can you pinpoint it to something that you did?
Yeah exactly we can pinpoint it to there was one video we did so kind of a trend on on YouTube still now but back then there was a big trend to is like what I eat today it’s common trend right? And we did a video and it was what I even a day at work because we were kind of noticing that a lot of people who are doing these what I in a days they were you know full time YouTubers and they live at home is very different lifestyle than like what most people who work a nine to five job actually do every day. So
but that just blows my mind. Like what I eat in a day. It was your turning point video. We really stumbled onto this brilliant concept. It’s like here’s what I eat in a day and we filmed it and it just that’s the turning point.
Is it like what you’re saying? It was just like Young youtubers in their pajamas making these disciples like all pretty and this is what I eat at work and here like we’re both working like nine to five jobs I’m doing a site for like side hustling this YouTube channel. I’m like, that is not what I’d be at work all day you know and like it’s just crazy that it was so unrealistic and, and I think I just had this crazy idea let’s actually film a wedding a day but like, let’s take like I don’t know how I got permission I was working at RBC at the time so I don’t know how I got permission. I went on the weekend we worked at it. I worked a very like pretty new corporate office like white up right on the waterfront. And I just like we had a filming crew on the weekend. We went in and we filmed this video and you could see it you would see my old like work and stuff and we filmed like
a second so you hired a filming crew to do this.
Nobody filming crew she means her sister with
big time. So
even family slave labor so like I know. That’s great.
This is now Okay, okay, so
you had your family come back and does she she’s knows how to film stuff like
I yes, I guess like that’s a like to back it up my sister when she was in high school she had Co Op and basically shoot at the time I was like editing my own videos and stuff Those were the dark days. And she was like hey, like do you think I could do cool but to she was interested in film and production Got it? Okay. Okay so and then now she’s our full time okay
production Okay, so you film this thing at the RBC offices illegally it sounds like what I eat in a day and this goes on YouTube and that gets like a lot of us yeah what’s a lot of years like how many views as again how many
is it now is 3.1 million 3.1 million? Yeah, as of today? Yeah.
It is the video that brought us from I still remember because I was like at work I really I don’t know how I did work at RBC But anyways, I was like, it was like me and and a bunch of employees all on one like row and we’re all just watching like the live subscriber count and I
was really getting production. All the employees are watching the counter on the YouTube video.
went from like, it was like 80,000 to it, that’s a video that brought us to 100,000 were lower. I think
we’re around like 7050 or something because it was a huge growth.
But that last It was like the last like, I feel like within a week we’ve jumped Yes, like must have been 20,000 so that’s what really helped to snowball us.
I don’t even know what it is. Okay, so I found one but what are you doing today? So it’s a different one. So now you do regularly what I even a day videos. Yeah, people
love it. I love watching them to they’re addicted.
So you’re currently at 544 652 subscribers, just just so you know. But here I want to play one of these. So we get an idea what to
do if you can filter to like most viewed and then you can see see that one.
So who’s doing
Oh
today’s video We are I am sharing what I eat in a day. You guys seem to love these types of videos. I actually have a few on my channel. I’m gonna have a full playlist.
Sorry, you didn’t know I was gonna do you ever have an idea? Was it
all
the things I make Matt do
a few weeks ago prepped and ready to go the fridge so I’m just gonna put it all together. Wow.
Okay, so
that’s it type of video is are you scripting it out now?
Now put it together okay,
yeah, we don’t do any scripting
okay so three times a week you do it. So if you were to tell everyone you were kind enough to give me this. What are the tips for like your YouTube channel the channel? I know one of them is consistency, right?
Yeah, cuz that’s like when people say what was the turning point? Yeah, that video did well but it was the consistency of And I always relate it back to like, if you have your favorite show on TV, and you know it plays every Thursday night at 8pm, you’re going to tune in at 8pm on Thursday. And so it’s one of those things like if I want our viewers to show up at a certain time each week, like I need to be making sure that I’m there as well. So that’s
came Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays for you guys.
Yeah, the three days a week was more so we started to do what beginning of last year, and then it wasn’t always three times a week.
Okay. And then you guys seem to like the relationship building what’s what how do you handle the comments on your on your channel?
Yeah, so I mean, Matt reads all the comments, but
he reads the good and the bad.
He’s like, you see, this person said, we I think relationship building both with, like other youtubers in the industry, as well as your viewers is so important. Like, we reply to as many comments as we can dm emails, we go to networking events, we go to YouTube events, like
okay, so you’re treating comments really actively. You’re in there and gauging with everybody on the comments and then branding the content. What do you mean by that? How do you? What do you mean when you say branding your content? I just
think like, if you have a platform, like having a consistent theme throughout, it’s very important, right? So if you look at really big Instagram or whatever, like, all of their videos are very curated
very specifically, on video, they know it’s you got got it,
they’re scrolling through Pinterest, they’ll be like, oh, like, they don’t even need to see that. It’s health and nutrition, like tagged at the bottom, they’re like, oh, that I know that I got it makes
sense. Okay. And then what do you mean, not all platforms are created equal?
Yeah. So I mean, not every platform that you have the same, the same, people aren’t going to view your content on each platform. So certain people will come to our YouTube channel. So we’re curating our, our content for people who are coming to our YouTube channel and then Instagram, you know, you’re gonna have a slightly different type of person who’s going to come, you know, for the content there. Same with Facebook, very different demographic of people who are going to Facebook to consumers,
you’re consciously thinking about Smart, you’re consciously
thinking platform has a unique feature. And like I think I said this before on the podcast, like when we create a video, that’s a lot of work. And so we’re going to like squeeze out as much juice of that video as we can. So we do cut down so we do, you know, Instagram Stories is a vertical cut down, it’s only Well now that you can do it more than 15 seconds. But like there’s certain like you don’t use hashtags on Facebook, there’s certain things that if you were just to go share all two platforms, it’s going to be a weird user experience.
So you’re curating it properly. Okay. I want to show everyone because we have a bunch of slides up here. I want to show everyone just to give context, that pie chart you shared of today where some of your revenues coming from and then we can work some of this backwards. Yeah. Cool. So I have that up here somewhere. So this is smart that I can’t even see this. So your revenues coming 40% from brain deals what so now how is that working? brands are approaching you to mention their product on your YouTube channel?
Yeah, so we have we have brands that will reach out to us directly and we also have like a brand management company. Now who deals specifically with our our branded content. So sometimes they will bring deals to us like so if we do something with Walmart Home Depot, you know, usually they’ll go through like a bigger agency and they’ll go through our brand management company but sometimes companies will just reach directly out to us via email and then either will will work with them ourselves depending on like what kind of content they’re looking for or we’ll just forward it on to our mental got
it so you’ll make some content specifically for something if it makes sense for your channel.
Yes, and sometimes we do reach out to brands and for example, can you an example Yeah. for reaching out to
your have one?
what’s what’s a recent one that I’m trying to think of? For brand
reaching out to us
know, like a brand with a brand?
Oh, well, we did the Home Depot one.
Oh, yeah. Okay. So it’s funny sometimes when you’re trying to go back to think of them like all right, well, I can do it an easy one. So like the non the yogurt company. We worked with them and we created three breakfast recipes using yogurt, but not just like everyone knows, like yogurt parfait is, you know, yogurt bowls and all that we did unique breakfast recipes. So basically, we took a product and we integrated it into our channel and our video. And it’s still like if our viewers are coming to that, that video, they’re not like being sold yogurt. They’re like, um, I just have three awesome recipes and they really could use whatever yogurt they want. But I’m highlighting John’s new yogurt which actually has like no added sugar. It’s really good like it and and that would be like that’s an easy integration. The Home Depot one that Matt is talking about we actually got extols from Home Depot is a beautiful LG stove. We still have it in our new place. And we filmed some content of we did a dessert and like a pot pie casserole.
Yeah. So Home Depot just gives you this stove and they paid for it. Yeah, pay for the content. Okay, 40% of your revenue from brand stuff. How big do you think you have to I guess no, there’s no answer for that. Right? Like it did. It just started happening at a certain point, I guess where brands started reaching out to you guys. I
mean, like the first brand new reach out to us was a style company and they sent us a glass straw. And that was like, at that point, we were so excited that someone sent us something for free.
It was for a giveaway actually. And I actually reached out to them because I said, Would you like Do you think you could give us a straw is like a really cool straws wins last straw spring and yet but like, I was like, I don’t even know glass drawers we’re in now.
Yeah. So.
But I remember like we asked them like, do you think this company will just send us a straw and like we were living in Australia at the time and they mailed us a straw to do a giveaway with and I was just like,
yeah, those those. Those little moments are so cool. Yeah. Okay. And so now you have a brand manager handles, nessa for you. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. And what’s the next thing so e commerce that you now started an online store? Okay.
Yeah. So
do a lot of the comments and stuff people always are asking like, oh, like Where did you get this like, Oh, I see that. That shirt you have or I see this bracelet that you’re wearing and at first we were just sort of referring to To You know, just here’s the company, here’s where we got it from, or maybe we’d use an Amazon link, an affiliate link and kind of send them through that. And we get a little bit of commission from it. And then as we kept growing and like more and more questions kept coming in and more and more demands for like, what we were, what we were using, were coming in, we thought, Okay, well, why don’t we bring this in house? Why don’t we start making our own shop where we can kind of curate specific products that we really, really like? And and from that we created our own health net shop.com.
Okay, and so that is a shot. So can you tell us about that? Like, what’s the product? Is it Shopify? And how’s that working? You source the products, you inventory the products, like how does this working? How’s the setup?
Yeah, so our platform of choice is Shopify, highly recommend Shopify. If you’re starting a like an online store, just the customer services great. The back end youth is very easy getting set up. I mean, they have an app on your phone so you can run your store from your phone. Very, very, very good platform. So originally, we kind of started by we were looking At Alibaba, and now the express to sort of find products that we would like to put on our shop, we kind of started with Ollie Express, which I don’t know if a lot of people know but instead of Alibaba where you’re buying and maybe like larger quantities like thousands of products we started with Ollie Express where you could buy like one or two or three, I mean the cost of the product is a bit higher so your markup is lower, but that’s kind of where we started because we just didn’t know what people were going to buy. So we kind of started with smaller smaller quantities of stuff and then we moved into buying like larger and larger quantities is there is there shop kept rolling
Are you Does everyone know drop shipping the constant okay are you guys drop shipping or do you inventory the product somewhere? We
Yeah, we have everything housed in our in our
basement now. We’re gonna run to that and then we thought now we’re just going to turn it into the house let’s
go Okay, so your inventory everything you don’t drop ship purposely you take it in and then you send it out.
Yeah, we we decided to do everything in house is just because for us like all the people coming to buy from our shopper all all of our audience are there people who know Nikole And watch her and you know, respect what she says. So we really want to make sure that the experience that people are getting was going to be very specific and very engaging. So for every order that we get, like we can write, like we’ve literally handwritten thousands of thousands of handwritten thank you cards, like into each order that we
read about it, so that’s smart. Okay, and then how do you transition people from your YouTube channel to the store? Like are you just mentioning that you have an online store
kind of through your channel? Yeah, that’s one thing that I was very I was looking at some other business models that people that I really admire on on the YouTube world and how they sell their products and you know, similar to what you’re talking about, about like selling the philosophy I always say sell the lifestyle not the product and I didn’t want to be like, hey guys like fire straws by or bento boxes by these by these on and like, just sell to people on our channel because at the end the day people come to the channel for like free content, and they don’t necessarily want to be so sold to but I really want to make sure like if we’re doing this side shop that We were to integrate the products naturally into the video. So in the beginning, we were selling like Matt said, products that we were using anyways. But instead of like sending it out to someone else, we’re like, oh, we sell them. So I wouldn’t even say that we we told people we had a shop, but it was more so like, I would just link the products in the info box in when people would ask in the comments. Hey, where’d you get those bento boxes? We actually sell them. Here’s the link to our shop. Someone would I would wait for people to ask us before
I would even mention this being a nice Canadian. Basically. Yeah, you’re not pushing it. Okay, got it. Okay. So it’s, it’s growing organically. Yes, you could, you could push that harder and stronger. Well, we have like,
our Instagram shop has its own social platforms, which we push. Like, if you go to the Instagram for health nut shop, like, you’re going to be sold to like, hey, but even still, we try to make it more like fun facts about drinking water. And it’s like, oh, yeah, here’s our glass straws. And it’s more about providing value first and then being like, by the way, we sell these.
OK, and then so the other revenue so e commerce, what’s the next Biggest one You seem to have so I’m just gonna read off your revenue source affiliate marketing that’s when you’re just linking out what Who are you linking out to?
It’s it’s a combination of Amazon so we do like we have an Amazon affiliate that we we put four products that we’re probably not going to sell in our store maybe like larger products that we we have no interest in keeping or shipping vacuum. Okay,
yeah, got it. Okay, so your sources of revenue here Can I read some of this stuff off here? Sure. So the sources of revenue are branded YouTube videos, Walmart, tangerine, Home Depot, silk Maple Lodge, NW affiliate marketing Amazon and other retailers monthly ad revenue from YouTube I forgot I forgot about that. But I guess YouTube pays you because of the views
of the main one I would say when people are like oh, you make you make money off the ads. That’s how you make all your money. And it’s actually not like forgetting like what the percentages on that pie chart but it’s not the majority of how you make money through a channel. Got it?
Yeah, cuz everybody I think thinks that so monthly website ad revenue, okay. You have ads on which website, the store on
Health and Nutrition that’s a drug.
We’re all the recipes are housed.
Okay, got it smart. Okay and then you have your e commerce you’re helping us shop branded Instagram posts branded Instagram stories. So your people are branding paying to brand your Instagram posts. Okay, you’re following on Instagram is large two or is that silver? 53,000 Okay, got it. Instagram takeovers, what’s an Instagram takeover?
It’s It’s when
this guy that
Does everybody know what Instagram takeover is? No, I don’t know. So I know I know email.
So I’m actually going to be like we’re working on a campaign right now with silver hills which is that slice bread company they make awesome bread Steve and
I only we’re very good brand ambassador.
We only work with brands but like we truly love and use in our everyday life. So when I talk about like the yogurt like my so good, I got my whole family on it. So silver hills one of the
personality profile in yourself.
No Okay got it. So because I was gonna say she’s in that Nikole is a natural promoter and Alex you naturally because you’re sincerely talking about stuff I mean that in a very out of integrity you like your shirt
when you believe it yeah totally we always say that if there’s a product that we’re trying out for the shop if I’m like I really love it, Matt right away we right away will be like, okay, maybe let’s not do it because if I don’t love it, I can’t lie. Like and be like, Yeah, I love it. Oh, come on.
So, okay, so Instagram takeover.
Yeah. So with silver hills, basically, I would be say they’re looking to grow their Instagram. I would literally pre film some Instagram stories and take some photos and I would be posting it on their channel and then I would tell so like throughout the day, it would look like I’m on I’m posting on their Instagram, but they’re posting it for me got it and then on my channel like hey, go over to silver hills. I’m going to be sharing my really delicious avocado toast using their bread or whatever.
Like I basically to post on their channel. Yeah, yeah. Wow. That’s amazing. TV TV commercials.
Yeah, so we did that was. So it’s Eve’s cuisine, it’s like, they do like waffles, they, they’re a plant based company, but they have lots of products even if you’re not vegan or plant based. And I did my first commercial with them that aired like across TV and stuff. And it was a very fancy photoshoot or in this like white box with like, someone was there just to fluff the pillow. And I was sitting on the couch messing it up. She’s like, Oh, it’s just my job to pluck these pillows. So that was, that was a cool thing to do. Okay, and
then, so that’s all Yeah. Oh, good. And then you’ve gotten free products. You sent a free stove, electric toothbrushes, food, food delivery service, gift cards, laptops, somebody sent you laptops?
Yeah, Google, Google chrome.
google chrome. Makes sense that products for giveaways and events, Perrier, Walmart, little lemon and Google
and we don’t have it on there. But we were talking about in the car this morning. Like we’ve even been flown VI Philadelphia tourism the Tourism Board, like flew us out. That was last year we think to Philadelphia. Yeah, it was like all expenses paid just to go brings like it was actually we loved the trip. It was a great city. But sometimes that will happen to if a company wants you to like, come to the event and the city or something, then they’ll pay for you to go up there.
Got it. I didn’t even ask Is this a full time thing for both of you or Nikole you something you guys do full time and you
know, it could be full time for both of us, but it’s definitely full time for me. We have a staff of staff of like, okay, six, like in house and then we have teams like our book team, our agency team, our PR team. Okay, um, but Matt is just still
five yet. Got it. Okay. And then the staff in house. Well, who are they like, what are their titles of the crew do you have in house?
We have a full time videographer and editor we have another part time video editor. We have our office manager.
So now that you move to Bradford, they’re up there with you.
Yeah, so her sisters, our videographer, okay, and editor and then we have a Part time editor this in Peterborough and then our office manager this out in Peterborough as well. And then we also have someone who helps with like copywriting and like recipe testing and she lives in Guelph. Our
actual assistant lives out in California.
Okay. And so when you’re taking the video now in Bradford most of the videos that are out of your house, right? Yeah. Okay, who’s who’s in the house filming? That’s your sister.
Well, yeah, so Okay, sometimes, sometimes not actually shooting the but if, if it’s like on the weekend and I’m like, Hey, man, I need to like film this whatever. Because really, like, when you’re a YouTuber, it’s not a Monday to Friday nine to five job. So it’ll either be like, I’m more than capable to film video videos by myself. So sometimes it’s me doing it. Ideally, it’s me and Chloe, my sister. And then sometimes it’s Matt as well or all three of us just bouncing around.
Got it? And we’re, where do you guys are? Where are you taking this thing? Do you know? Like, where does this go? Because you didn’t know you were going to make money this way. So like, What’s your plan?
Well, I always say with YouTube like you really don’t know know what’s going to happen. Like when I left RBC, basically, my contract ended and it was like ended November 2017, I think. And it was like, February of 2018. I got a call or got an email from Penguin Random House being like, Hey, we want we want you to write a book for us. Yeah. So I didn’t even know that was going to happen. I always wanted to write. Yeah, do you have to have that? Yeah, there’s a book. So we wrote our first cookbook it comes it’s available for pre order right now. It’s, it’s a real book it’s going to be in because we’ve done ebooks before. It’s going to be everywhere. books are sold in bookstores, indigo, Barnes and Noble Amazon, and it’s coming out September 3, but like, that’s something we didn’t know. Yeah, I thought I would have had to pitch a book and to be asked to write like that it was just like a dream come true. And it’s been a like a two year journey. We’re actually documenting it. We’re doing the cook Health Net cookbook diaries. So last Friday of every month, we’re documenting the whole behind the scenes of how we created the book like start to finish
There’s so much going through my head on this stuff, the apps that you use, what are some you’ve listed some of them off? Actually, I document can you share some of those just so that we all know what you’re using? I just listed them off.
Yeah, just for our online store, I just sort of listed some of the apps that would that we’re using in case anyone here decides to set up an online store. These are just ones that we’ve, that we’ve used that have been like, really, really instrumental. So like one thing that we we realized was pretty important, because we have a bit of a global audience and following is that we really need to sell them multiple currencies. It’s hard to sell multiple currencies in Shopify, unless you have different apps that you add to to allow you to do that. One thing that we realized really, really important as well as like shipping, the cost of shipping because of Amazon, free shipping for people with prime, it becomes hard to be like, Okay, well your shipping costs is going to be $15 because we’re going to Canada Post, which is really expensive. So we actually ended up finding another company called chit chat to chat Express chat. So basically, they will instead of going through Canada Post, they’ll take your packages and they’ll drive it across the border to the US and then ship it via United States Postal Service and its cutter shipping costs in half.
So they’ll pick it up from Bradford.
If you have a big enough orders, they’ll pick it up from you. But we usually have we just drop it off at their they have a few different locations around. I think they have one in Oakville and Burlington as well.
Well, they do the reverse buy stuff in the US and drive it up into Canada.
I don’t think they do that. Oh, no, but there’s service I was just selfishly thinking
for myself. Okay, yeah. Cool. What else we have ever back in stock? What’s back in stock?
Yeah. So back in stock is if we if we run out of a product, we don’t want people to just come see that it’s sold out and then you know, leave. We want them to say Oh, okay, like notify me when this is available. And then when it becomes available, they get an email saying hey, that product you wanted us in and it drives them back to the shop to make the purchase from us.
And so many people have signed up for that when we were out of those silicone Ziploc bags that you have there. vape are one of our top sellers. We were there on back order. I think we’re the ones that sold them out as their own quarter. And we had so many people asking about that. And I think that was the main driver were like, anytime there’s a problem, there’s an app for it.
They’re my family loves that product, that Ziploc Ziploc bags that you reuse over and over bundles. What’s that?
bundles is just, you can link different products, different things and sort of create create bundles. So that way, you can kind of sync up your inventory which is which is important as well,
what and smile at the bottom
smile. So we wanted to you know, the great thing with Shopify and all these apps is that you can really for very low cost you can sort of mimic these like big huge companies that have like so smile is our rewards program. So we have a rewards program called a corn points goes off kind of our branding. And really it just allows you to create like a point system where people can get points for signing up they get points for adding their email address, they get points for liking the gram awesome. So this kind of drives that engages.
Great Okay, cool. What about this? what’s what’s happening here? This is the
cashew follow her on Instagram cashew, the boxer she
has her own Instagram
it was actually not idea I hate myself for those parents like the for those parents but I never thought I’d Yeah, that’s us now
and so what’s what’s next with her? So it’s just we’re setting up another online store so we got our new puppy cashew and we thought like wow, I mean like anything in the world like how can we monetize? Dogs are expensive so we thought like okay can we monetize this puppy baby? You know and like there we have some friends that have Instagram’s for their dogs and they’re like 80 90,000 people following sounds. It’s
crazy. It’s crazy. It’s
crazy, but
then one month she’s gotten 2000 followers.
Alec Where’s Alex? Alex? Where is Alex? She has more Instagram, or Instagram followers on the Rockstar inner circle and are like what is it 4300 this dogs gonna pass us by next week. I know yourself stuck with me and Nick, we need to get a rock star doc. That’s what we need. You need a rock star dog yank your family has to get a dog I don’t want one.
It’s a business expense man. We can write off all the expenses. This is brilliant.
So the other the other thing too is that like, just like one of our points was sort of how you know to have different content on different platforms. So another thing that we were aware of is that not everyone likes pets, right? So like everyone that falls in the pool, not all of them are dog lovers or pet lovers. So we kind of thought well if we don’t want to keep branding or like talking about cashew and talking about our pet store to people who may not be interested in turn them off. So we also created this this Instagram for cashew to drive people from our audience over to that platform because if they’re following our puppy like they like dogs, we know they like dogs. So now we can use cashews platform to market. Our online pet store.
cashew is our brand ambassador for our health nut pop Like I always say I cashew is to help that pop what I am to help net shop.
what you guys are doing is really smart because you’re leveraging one audience to build another audience like, we talked about that sometime that like one of our first audiences like Rockstar real estate, we happen to do these entrepreneurs summits, that’s us kind of like a spin off of rock star people trust us in one area, they trust us another same thing happening with you. They trust you in health and nutrition. And now cashew has her own in her own Instagram channel and that kind of thing. So it’s really smart what you’re doing. But if I rewind all of this, it started with your ability to produce these videos and capture people’s attention. So what I just want to kind of begin to wrap up with is how did what goes through your mind when you’re creating your next video? Like how do you come up with the concept or title like, Are you thinking my YouTube audience will like this topic? Are you looking at what’s trending on the internet like you did with what I eat in a day? Like how are you deciding what content to produce?
I think it’s a mixture like I’m very much like we have very different personalities like Matt’s like okay, let’s plan the videos for the next like quarter and stuff and I think sometimes I’ll just think of a video idea like today and film it tomorrow and not sometimes I think some of the best videos to be honest. So I try to do a mixture I try to do some market research, see what’s trending also see what’s trending on our channel because I think as much as a certain video maybe trend trending on like YouTube as a whole, it may not do well or perform as well on our personal channel. So I try to go back into the analytics back into old video see what did really well because sometimes you post a video and usually the lifespan of a video is about I’m going to say like two to three days it will still sometimes I’ll have a second wind and then I’ll like pick up but like for the majority of the views are getting it in the first week for sure. And sometimes like you’ll be like a few weeks will pass and you’ll go back to that video and I’ll be like, oh my god that this video is like 80,000 views. And then I know like okay, that’s popular. We need to do that again. So I try to do a mixture of what know our audience wants and will do well, as well as just things that I want to share. Because at the end the day, YouTube is just a platform to express herself and be creative. And if I’ve only posting things that other people want, like that drive to post videos and share, like my passion love for video creation won’t be there. So I try to do
a mixture. And then how
do you manage that, like everyone in this room, we all have time constraints, I’m sure you have time constraints, and sometimes by getting feedback through comments on stuff that must emotionally be a hit every once in a while and stuff. How are you just managing your week? Like how are you surviving through you’re putting out a lot of content? That takes a lot I don’t know if everyone appreciates how much time that takes. How are you surviving? Like do you have off days throughout the week that you just mentally don’t do anything or just pushing through?
I mean, in theory, yes. But in actuality now we do. We you know, it’s a seven day a week thing for us, but we love it. We love what we do and we love what we’re putting out but like an important thing that we found is like matching. Our work is is very important. So instead of trying to do, you know, social posts every day, like why not? There’s programs out there like later that you can pre program your social media to go out on different days. So why not take an hour and be like, Okay, this hour I’m going to just focus strictly on like putting my social media content together and have it program to go out over the next week. Right.
We do that a lot with Pinterest, too. There’s a platform called tailwind. That’s amazing. And basically a virtual assistant goes in plus you and she goes in UK. So Howard is cashew, I’m sorry. Yeah. We so basically Brittany, our virtual assistant goes in and I don’t know exactly what her schedule is, but she like goes in like once a week or something or Yeah, or every two weeks and she schedules out pins for the next like couple of weeks. Because it looks like if you’re following us online, it looks like we are everywhere all the time, but we’re not like I’ll have a friend go Oh, I saw that recipe you post on Facebook. I don’t know what it is Brittany posted it you know, but I just like, like, we can’t be everywhere at all times. So those set it for It tools are really crucial for helping
got it okay and then and then I guess to wrap this up what’s the next other than cashew what’s the next big push for you guys are there are some opportunities that you guys are looking at or continued obviously continue doing what you’re doing but what’s also next
yeah I mean there’s a great yeah like one thing that we were kind of looking at because we are real estate investors we do love real estate and in it so one thing that we’re kind of looking at from someone that we know who does it is that they they do like Vacation Rentals like Airbnb and say Hawaii and they literally fill their whole Europe which is their audience right so like there are tapping into that for not online stuff which is like pretty so sorry What
did they do and so they’re taking Airbnb trips.
They own say a condo or a rental property in Hawaii or or somewhere nice and then they market to their audience say like, Hey, you know, they branded like cooker condos and people actually will go and just book their whole year up. Just do their Just because they want to put it out there.
You guys could buy a property in Hawaii. Yeah, call it the health and nutrition getaway exactly through your channel just book up that Airbnb. And people are going to love it because it’s your place.
It’s like Oh, if I’m gonna I know. Are you gonna come stay at her house? No,
no, no, this is the world’s changing, man. That’s crazy. I feel like I just feel like I aged 10 years up during this doc. Sorry, Nick. It’s a good thing. It’s a
we talked about I don’t know where you we asked. We did. Yeah. Yeah.
So we get we try to link everything together at the end of beginning of a video on end of the video. We always have some call to actions like hey, go, we’re doing a giveaway on Instagram. The giveaway could be a gift. Recently we did a gift card for the health nut shops. All of a sudden you did a 200 $50 gift gift card giveaway. So not only are we giving away this prize pack to one person, but now everyone’s sharing and taking everyone knows about our store now.
So where do you guys you know how we talked earlier about your audience, which you guys obviously have a big audience value, you guys are obviously giving value conversion processes. That’s is that an area where you could do better at then do you feel? You know, we talked about like taking people who are in your audience, converting them into customers? Where do you think out of those three components? Where could you do better? I’m just curious. I guess I’m asking you to open up here. I’m not sure if that’s fair.
I just think like one area that we kind of realized the last year we really need to focus on was growing our email list. It was something that we never really put much effort into. For a long time. We were just so focused on the YouTube channel. And then we we kind of realized, like, oh, like, to your guy’s point earlier, you’re talking about is it on the social platforms, like it’s been great for us, and we’re very grateful, but in the end, like, we don’t own that platform, we don’t own those people. If YouTube changes its algorithm, the next thing you know, you know, we’re getting less views and we’re not, you know, we’re not, maybe not relevant anymore. So for us, trying to drive people more to our email newsletter and getting people signed up, because those people we actually we own, and then we can market to directly, you
know, right from the email list like you got, like, if we were to team up, I’d be like, how do we get all these people and get their email list as step one immediately,
you know, I mean, we had like, one of our, like, a red flag that we just learned was we were selling something on our shop that we purchased. And we thought that the manufacturer had the rights to this product, right? Turns out that they didn’t we were buying it from China, and I guess they don’t respect trademarks. Who knew? And yeah, and then we had this on our Instagram for our shop, we just hit like 5000 followers on our Instagram. And then next thing, you know, Instagram shuts down the shop. So it’s like, oh, you’re selling products that you weren’t allowed to? Yeah.
This happened just a few weeks ago. Shut 5000 followers on Instagram grown in a short period of time gone, and we had to rebuild it.
Remember how we were talking about how we don’t have control? That’s why you got Get if you could start now extracting emails to build your email list now off that YouTube channel, then you’re just the foundation so solid because you have all the subscribers on YouTube, but you have them somewhere else as well. It’s like a solid foundation. Okay, just to wrap up here, the Airbnb play where you say you buy properties and you turn that into so that’s super smart Was there another thing that’s coming down the pipe that we
have, we’re creating our own beauty skincare line Well, I guess like natural beauty products because it kind of goes with the brand. So we’ve been working with a company that’s sort of creating our own branded skincare products like lip balms and natural deodorants and lip scrubs. And we’re also maybe looking at starting up like a second YouTube channel that’s going to be more focused on like the real estate investing side of things because we kind of want to share that journey with people so it’d be kind of how we grew
up. We have like 1450 subscribers on our YouTube channel, you would pass us on the YouTube that took us 10 years by the way to get there. It’s awesome. It’s hard You guys are gonna pass us in 24 hours. Hey guys, here’s the real estate channel and we are boom 80,000 followers.
The nice thing is is like, although it takes when you say like, how did you grow your channel to this, it really just took probably a good like, two to three years of not making that much money just doing it all the time. But then once you have, once you’ve put in that work to grow the audience now when we think, hey, let’s do a skincare line, hey, let’s do a pop shop. We have that audience and it’s like there’s people in that main audience
have been working on your future income, almost exclusively. And now you can just start taking some of that money off the table, which is really cool. As we wrap up anything else to share or say?
Um, I guess just pre order the book.
Cool. I should be that’s a big deal. That’s a big deal. So that book is going to be on Amazon, I assume.
And everywhere books are sold. Yeah.
Cool. Guys, we really appreciate you doing this. Can we get a big round of applause for these guys? Yeah. Thanks, man. Really discount code Rockstar. Sure, absolutely. Absolutely.
And just if you guys want to check out our online wellness shop health shop com or giving a discount to everyone here, it’s just rock star 20 for 20% off. Yeah, very cool
thank you say like will also be here the next two days as well because we’re going to learn a lot of cool stuff. So if anyone has any questions or wants to come up to us and ask us anything like, yeah, feel free we’re not
yeah, I forgot to mention that you guys are here for the full two days. So thank you will send your link to your store with that code to everybody who’s attending today as well. So that you have is the code around for a few days. Okay, awesome. Thank you didn’t have to do that. Really appreciate it, guys. So thank you. So with that. Yeah, so we’ll wrap up at the end of the day as well. But just a reminder, tomorrow we are going to start at 830. So when the Raptors win and the Everyone has their party, remember we’re back here tomorrow at 830 over lunch right now we are going to divide the room into two so we’ve never done this before. Don’t worry, you’re not going to miss anything because we are going to record the other side of the room and share that with everyone. You can also go Get up right in the middle of someone talking. You won’t offend anyone and flip over to the other room and come back and forth. So don’t worry. Okay, this is like basically us trying to jam as much content into here. And this is a bit of an experiment. We’ll see how it goes this year. So as we get his lunch ready, Nick outside, you know, so Lunch is ready outside there. And as you’re getting lunch, they’re going to be working on dividing the room. But you can come in obviously sit down and get a table, but we’re going to start divide the room in half yet Damn. Yeah, so track one is going to be in this room over here. Thank you. Track two will be over here. Cool. And we’ll remind you will mention the names of the talks and that kind of thing. Cool. So for now, we’re going to break for lunch. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, guys. Yeah, you Matt, you survived right to the end.