Moving To New York City

New York City. The Big Apple. The Nexus of the Universe. Whatever you call it, it is one of the most unique places on earth and 8.4 Million people call it home. Many of those people moved here from other places in order to pursue their dream. New York City is the promise land of opportunity in the United States. Moving here however is no easy task. Getting a job in New York City without living here makes it next to impossible to get called in for an interview and securing an apartment in the cities crazy real estate market is a whole new world within itself. The city is expensive, the city is unforgiving, and the city is challenging. 

While living in Buffalo I knew that I wanted to move to New York City and that I wanted to get involved with startups there. I applied to jobs for months before actually moving to New York City. The call's I got back for an interview were to come into the office in a day or two, but I was still 600 miles away in Buffalo. I needed to be closer if I was going to make any progress. I flew to New York City on a day in July with Colleen to try and get us an apartment, but we quickly learned we couldn't get approved in a nice building without a job. After viewing a dozen apartments with a broker we finally got approved by a building. We were quickly educated that being as this was July, where apartments can come on the market in the morning and be immediately off the market after lunch we had to decide fast if we wanted an apartment or not. We took it; real estate broker fee, deposit and all. 

A month later we moved to New York City. After struggling just to get into the city I still had to find a job though. I ran out of money shortly after moving to New York City and ended up having to sell my car, which I had payed off while working bartending jobs during college. That only bought me a few more months of runway though. So I took a bartending job that I was able to get through a friend of a friend in Buffalo who happened to do some business in New York City (See Buffalo really is the "The City of Good Neighbors"). The bartending job was part time and still wasn't enough. Again, I was slightly better off than before but not by much. So I took a second job freelancing and working remotely online in the early mornings, writing for a tech website. I was still applying to potential full time jobs and taking interviews in my spare time. The cycle became that I would work bright an early in the morning, then apply to jobs and interview during the day, and finally bartend at night. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

I remember distinctly getting down to $20 in my bank account at this time while I would be waiting for my next paycheck to come in from either of the jobs. I was very close to having to move back to Buffalo. After months of this I finally got a full time job offer out of one of the interviews. I still remember being out to lunch. Colleen and I had company in town visiting us. We were talking about how life in New York has been treating us so far while eating cheeseburgers and I got a phone call. It was my future boss saying that the company would love to hire me and asked when I could start. It was an entry level job but it was enough that I could break even, pay my full rent, student loans, and live in New York City. Since that day, there have been hardships and challenges of course, but I am here. I live in New York City. Casey Neistat last year told a very similar story of his struggle in moving to New York City. How moving here can eat you alive and strip you of all your resources in the process. That even just getting set up to live in New York City is one of the greatest challenges people face. 

He explains at the end of the video how it has all been worth it though. How for him the opportunity has out weighed the tremendous cost of moving to New York City in the first place. I have to agree. The opportunities the city has afforded me since then have been tremendous. I get to experience new products, stores, movies, foods, services, and crazes in New York City long before people in other parts of the country. So many experiences. I am always surrounded by ambitious and motivated people here. I feel privileged and love what I get to do now with startups. It was not easy though. So as you can see there is a reason Sinatra once said if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. 

This Is How To Overcome Self Doubt

This is the face of self doubt. This is what it looks like in real time. You only have to watch up until the first minute in the video below to know what I am talking about.

This is Filmmaker and now also Youtuber Casey Neistat on March 30th, 2015. He had just come back from vacation and during that time made the decision to start vlogging everyday. Coming up with vlog content was not much of a challenge on the exciting tropical island this adventure started on, as it was upon his return to New York City. Being back home in New York he was realizing the commitment to himself would have to now work into his existing day to day of 8 hours at a desk, reading e-mail, and sitting in meetings. 

I have been thinking about this moment more and more recently. Especially as I work to make Siskar.co a consistent flow of insight into startups, ambition, and life growth. I have considered forcing myself to release content everyday. Watching that video you can see the moment in time, right there where a person doubts they can achieve the goal they promised themselves. It can feel almost like staring the mirror. So what do you do.

"So I can make today interesting and maybe even tomorrow interesting, but I do have some general concerns about sustainability. Anyways, here is my first vlog from New York City." - Casey Neistat

This is what you do. You put your head down and you make today interesting. And tomorrow you make tomorrow interesting. The day after that, you make it interesting too. And you keep going, and going, and going. You work. Then you work more. Some days are harder than others, but regardless you keep working. You just do it. The first step to greatness is taking the first step. 

Fast forward 200 days and vlogs later, Casey is still vlogging every day. It has paid off. The result of him putting his head down and fulfilling his commitment to himself has been incredible. His Youtube subscribers have increased over 1,000,000 since starting and his daily videos get over 500,000 views every day within hours of him posting them.

So in conclusion, I am going to just do it. Let's go make today more interesting. Hope to see you tomorrow. 

All of Casey Neistat's Vlogs since March 2015.

How To Be As Famous As Taylor Swift, Casey Neistat, and Tim Ferriss

I would like to thank Michal Sadowski, a mentor for the Founder Institute New York and the founder of Brand 24. Michal was kind enough to show me how to use his Brand 24's platform for monitoring your online presence.

How many online mentions do you need everyday to achieve fame? How can you be as famous as Taylor Swift. Lets find out how to be famous.

To start analyzing this I used Brand 24's platform to start monitoring the online presence of a few celebrities which were at different stages of fame. I first looked at Tim Ferriss, a 3x New York Times best selling author, famous blogger, and podcaster. Second I analyzed Casey Neistat, a HBO and mainstream film maker who is recently working on a daily vlogging project he publishes to YouTube. Last but not least I looked at the data for Taylor Swift, one of the most famous musicians and people on the planet. 

The key metric in determining popularity and fame we will be using is "daily mentions" when looking at the Brand 24 data. This data includes mentions on the open internet across blogs, forums, news, video, photo, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and more. So lets look at each of these celebrities to see their number of daily mentions in the last 30 days and estimated social reach. 

Tim Ferriss - 1,311 mentions across 30 days

How famous is Tim Ferriss? The case of Tim Ferriss is interesting because he has such a unique and loyal fan following as a New York Times bestseller, blogger, and podcaster. Tim Averaged between 25-75 mentions on the open web per day which creates in the tens of thousands for estimated audience size. Comparing the blue scale bar of mentions on the left, 0 - 100, to the green scale bar on the right of estimated social reach, 0 - 600k, it is very interesting to see how a small number of mentions can quickly multiply to a large audience. 

Casey Neistat - 3,237 mentions across 30 days

How famous is Casey Neistat? Casey's main platform is YouTube. He is also an avid SnapChatter, which unfortunately this analysis does not account for as it is privately scene in app on mobile devices. Across the open internet though Casey averaged about 50-100 mentions per day. These mentions generate an average estimated audience of 30 to 40 thousand people. This is on top of the almost 400,000 people who watch his new vlog everyday on YouTube. 

Taylor Swift - 122,647 mentions across 30 days

How famous is Taylor Swift?  In order to be as famous as Taylor Swift you would need 122,647 mentions in 30 days. See that spike in the number of mentions for Taylor around August 30th. That was the day after the MTV Video Music Awards. Between the awards she won, her crew that she brought along with her, and Kanye West eccentric acceptance speech the amount of people talking about Taylor Swift on a daily basis shot up to 6,000 mentions per day with an estimated social reach of 155,837,304 people. 

So in conclusion you can see that in order to be a famous as Taylor Swift you need to have on average about 4,000 online mentions every single day, which will generate you on average around 40 million person audience. Pretty incredible when you think about it. When is the last time that many people mentioned you on the internet in one day?

Why You Should Guest Vlog

If you are a blogger then you know one of the top ways to grow your audience is exposure on other blogs. Everyone tries to do it and it works in a very symbiotic way. Person one gains some followers from person two's audience and then vice versa person two gains some followers from person ones audience. 

This doesn't only work for blogs though and there is a new medium growing in the world right now. Thanks to the increase and accessibility to bandwidth more and more people are consuming video through the day. This has led to the rise of the daily video blog, hence forth referred to as the vlog. 

Vlogging is growing in frequency as many content creators realize the high value of having consistent content and it's ability to repeatedly bring the same users back for more.  This is opposed to creating one hit wonder viral videos. With a consistent flow of content that can be found in the same spot the audience seeks you out more often. They know they can count on new fresh content every time they visit. 

So as vlogging grows we are going to see some interesting strategies to grow these new video audiences. One of those happened recently and is a great example of collaborative guest vlogging.  Last week Casey Neistat, a vlogger residing in NYC, flew out to Ohio to hang out with Roman Atwood. Casey currently averages about 300 thousand views per daily vlog, while Roman Atwood currently averages around 1 million views. 

This is the end result below and it is pretty cool in a sort of Bill Murray Groundhog Day kind of way. Watch the same day, from two different camera angles, two different approaches to editing, and two different audiences.

The Day From Casey Neistat's Perspective: 

 

The Day From Roman Atwood's Perspective: 

Make It Count

This is a brief post but I still feel it is worth sharing. I am a big fan of Casey Neistat and all things motivational. Both of which are in this video. Take a few minutes and watch the "Make It Count" video Casey produced for Nike below. Surprisingly you can see a lot of the world when you blow an entire marketing budget in 10 days. And you have to love the "Do More" tattoo.

Casey Neistat's Startup Lesson

If you know Casey Neistat then you know in 2015 he has started doing a vlog a day. In vlog #112 Casey shares his new startup story about BeMe Inc. and how he was in the middle of fundraising at the same time his child was being born. Check it out below and in my opinion if you want to consume the most important piece of advice Casey gives, go ahead and skip to 2 minutes 10 seconds. 

The only thing in life that stands between you and everything you have ever wanted to do, is doing it -  Casey Neistat