It’s an interesting question, because I don’t know why some of the people come.
I get messaged randomly by this dude who works with Jujimufu and what is, “Oh my God Jujimufu’s that crazy dude on Instagram.” It took a bit for us to be actually known for the YouTube.
It was kind of a progression. We worked with people we were in the same zone as, like Clarence Kennedy. You probably know of him, Olympic weightlifter. He started in tricking. He was on Juji’s message board, so we knew him from that.
We had never met in real life, but it was an easy connection. We started with those and worked our way up with going to gyms. I was obsessed with Fitness YouTube. I have a gigantic document. Juji thought I was crazy. I forgot about this, God.
I had a gigantic spreadsheet. I’ve never talked about this, this is weird. I had like 60 channels on it that I tracked everything they did, based on views, subscribers. I had ratios. I had a quality value of how quality their videos are compared to their subscriber count going up every day.
I was very obsessive with figuring out all the fitness YouTubers that were doing well, and who was doing the videos that would work with us, and who was trending at the time. I tracked that for the first year or so. I’ve used that as a way to structure our channel too, like who is the person to look at.
I would reach out and give them the proposition of what type of videos we’d like to make for them. Unless they’ve insisted, we’ve always paid for their flights and their hotels, and their eating when they come to us. We say, “Hey, we want to make videos with you. We’ll fly you out here and do all these things.”
It’s always mutually beneficial. People started to notice how much value I brought to other people’s channels. I really focus on putting them in front of us in our collaboration videos. They’re the first link in the description to their channel.
I’m always asking them about their stuff, bringing people over to their channel because it doesn’t work by just us gaining. I’ve worked with some people that work that way, and it was always like, “Man, I can’t stand this.”
I always want the other person to gain as much from us because I would feel terrible. Someone like Magnus, Magnus is the perfect example. He came to us. I reached out to him when our rock-climbing video started doing well.
I searched for a bunch of rock climbers. I contacted Eric Honnold, Chris Sharma, all these high-level rock climbers. He was the only who responded. There were a few that responded that were a little tentative. They were confused as to what I was offering, what I was asking.
I remember Alex. I forgot his last name. He was like, “Oh, man. I don’t know if my grip strength is any good.” I was like, “Dude, it’s good man.” I was trying to tell him why we were bringing him, and he was like, “I don’t know, man. I don’t think I’m that great.”
Magnus is the only one who was good with it. At that time, he had a YouTube channel. He just started doing consistent videos on. He had a one-armed muscle-up that went crazy. That was his one big thing. He was at maybe 40,000-35,000 when we worked together.