w/ "Disney" Dan Becker
Sit down with YouTube content creator Dan Becker (AKA Disney Dan) to discuss the power of storytelling in content marketing, tips for creating engaging social media content, and how to build a strong personal brand that resonates with your audience. Whether you're just starting out or looking to take your content marketing strategy to the next level, this episode is packed with practical advice and real-world examples from someone who's been there, and grown YouTube channel to 300K subscribers.
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
3/14/2023
Dan Becker: Are there any whistles or sound effects, or is this one of those silly sound podcasts?
Kurt Elster: Look, I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Sound Board: PARTY HORNS
Dan Becker: Okay, okay, okay. Someone take those buttons away from him.
Kurt Elster: You’ve got this same soundboard Rodecaster setup, don’t you?
Dan Becker: Yeah, I’ve got the Class A Servo thing.
Kurt Elster: But you don’t abuse yours like me?
Dan Becker: No. I just like the buttons. They’re colorful. And for whatever reason, there’s two color schemes. It’s either rainbow or Christmas, and so I keep it rainbow.
Kurt Elster: Wait. Hold on. I have an intro to record.
Dan Becker: I don’t even know what my buttons do. Did that make a noise?
Kurt Elster: It did.
Dan Becker: I can’t hear it, so enjoy that.
Kurt Elster: This is going off the rails fast. I haven’t even gotten to the intro. Here we go.
Hello, my friends. Welcome back to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast. Today we have a special guest, Dan Becker, AKA Disney Dan. Yes, Disney Dan is here. A successful YouTuber and content creator who’s built a strong personal brand, you know, with a name like that, through compelling storytelling and engaging social media content. It’s a lot of YouTube. We’re talking YouTube today. But it’s niche, as you may have guessed. He’s a Disney vlogger, hence the name Disney Dan. It’s not like Disney Dan and then he reviews dishwashers.
So, why would I bring a vlogger on this show about eCommerce? Well, two reasons. People buy from people, not brands. You know this. I’ve said it 100 times on this show. And Dan has built a strong personal brand here. We’re gonna pick his brain about it. And content marketing is a fundamentally powerful skill for eCom entrepreneurs. You don’t want to spend more money on Facebook ads trying to figure things out. You know you need to engage in SEO. You need to master content marketing as one of those skills or higher it out. Whatever works.
So, today we are gonna discuss with Dan his journey as a creator, tips for crafting great content because that’s all the man knows, and strategies for building an authentic personal brand that resonates with your audience. I’m your host, Kurt Elster.
Ezra Firestone Sound Board Clip: Tech Nasty!
Kurt Elster: And this is The Unofficial Shopify Podcast.
Sound Board:
Kurt Elster: Dan, welcome.
Dan Becker: Just for clarification, I don’t like the phrase vlogger, Disney vlogger for me. I’m more of a Disney… I’m more of a theme park comedian over a vlogger because I’m not actually like… The idea of holding a camera pointed at my own face while I talk repulses me. I just can’t… I don’t have whatever, and no offense to any vloggers out there who have that shameless ability to just yell into their own phone for other people to hear, but I… And I do that, I just do it differently, but not vlogging. I just know vlogging is just not my cup of tea. I’m more of a lunatic. I’m just a theme park lunatic.
Kurt Elster: Well, actually that brings up an interesting point. You said, “Hey, I can’t be standing around yelling into a phone,” and I’ve heard other people say similar things. There is a natural resistance to creating face-to-camera content, myself included. It’s just a weird thing to do to have an animated conversation with your phone.
Dan Becker: With yourself. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And now it’s important, and it’s crazy, because here we are. We’re on this. We’re talking about content strategies and whatnot. It’s important that the audience feel like they are talking to you. You know, and that goes all the way back to just plain old radio. You don’t be like, “Hey, what’s going on you guys?” We’re like, “Hey, what’s going on?” Because you don’t want to be listening to something that sounds like you’re talking to a crowd when you’re having an intimate conversation with somebody. They’re sitting on the toilet, they’re sitting in their living room, they’re riding the bus, they’re driving, whatever is going on, they’re engaged one to one with you and your content.
And so, I don’t know the point I was making, but to say that… Oh, to make people feel like you’re talking to them. That is something that I try very hard to do.
Kurt Elster: So, you’re creating one-to-many content but you want to treat it like it’s one on one.
Dan Becker: Right. Yeah. You definitely… I mean, and that just goes… I feel like that’s just the oldest rule in the content book.
Kurt Elster: So, I want the Dan media empire by the numbers. How much content are we producing, what’s our subscriber count here?
Dan Becker: I’m close to 300,000 subscribers on YouTube. I have about-
Kurt Elster: Holy crap.
Dan Becker: I have about 50,000 on TikTok, 20 on Instagram, 27-30,000 on Twitter. And the numbers just… I can’t even believe how the numbers just keep growing. I just blink my eyes and it’s another thousand there, or 500 there, and I don’t even know what I’m doing other than just being an idiot on the internet. But I guess that’s why I’m here. I guess that’s why you want to talk to me.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Well, we’re gonna try and figure this out together. Well, is this a situation of right place, right time?
Dan Becker: Well, it was a situation of right place, right time. What’s interesting is that I actually have a foundation of Disney merchandising fans. I started with a video game called Disney Infinity, which was a toys-to-life video game that required an entry point of buying physical media in order to play in a digital space. So, you’d have to buy physical characters, physical little power-up disks, and then you would put them on a portal that allowed you to interact with them in the real world, in the video game world, so you had a toy that was a cool display, but then you also had like a playable thing.
And so, off the bat, some of my earliest YouTube videos are unboxings of Disney Infinity stuff, Disney Infinity play throughs, gameplay, and just walking you through that whole… a video game that came with a huge merchandising component. Because Disney fans love to collect. We love to accumulate the franchise, the brand, because being a Disney fan at its core is consuming, because that’s what Disney does. It makes material for you to consume, for you to develop a personalized relationship with, and then have a great deal of ownership of, and then suddenly you need every Winnie the Pooh backpack. You don’t wear backpacks, but you need them.
And so, and that’s just kind of like the culture, because you have to… Disney provides this dictionary of characters, adventures, stories that you can advertise your own personal brand with even if you’re not looking to advertise your brand. You see a couple walking around cosplaying as the Up characters, you know that they’re hopeless romantics. You see people super into Finding Nemo, well, you know that they want to be a veterinarian one day. You know, it’s like… Or maybe not. Maybe they grew up loving the ocean, or maybe they grew up with a fish tank, or maybe they grew up going to the dentist a lot. Whatever their story is that they love Finding Nemo, Disney offers you a path of least resistance to whatever thing you want to tell your story.
Kurt Elster: So, it’s an active… It’s storytelling but it’s niche, where we have just like so many stories that will relate to different people in different ways.
Dan Becker: Right, right, right, right, right. It’s a massive market that covers… that has tiny little morsels that allow so many people to be seen. Which is… It’s just so fascinating to see how now we’re finally diversifying. We’re expanding. We’re adding more stories for more cultures and more places. And it’s just like this massive umbrella where Disney just kind of like owns your nostalgia. It owns your memories.
Kurt Elster: Disney owns our stories.
Dan Becker: Yeah. Disney 1,000% owns your stories. Yes.
Kurt Elster: It’s a strange thing to think about sometimes. And so, you get started as a content creator, so the first thing you’re doing is unboxing videos for Disney merch?
Dan Becker: So, the first thing I’m doing, I’m searching… For this Disney video game. I’m going through a lot of retail spaces. I’m gathering every one of their weekly deals, like every Sunday the flyers would drop for Best Buy, Toys ‘R Us, Radio Shack, I don’t know, whatever these companies were, and I would go through and be like, “Oh, right. Figures are 2 for 14 here. Power-up disks are 3 for 10 here,” and I had a website where I’d just compile all the deals for this very specific niche video game.
And then that grew into me making YouTube content and me unboxing the stuff, and playing through the game, and then eventually that game went away, and I was just left with nothing. I was left with… The game got canceled out of nowhere. Literally out of nowhere they just stopped making it and I was just like… And I had massive growth. I remember the first time I made a dollar on YouTube for the day. I was like, “I can’t believe this is happening. If I make a dollar every day for 30 days, that’s like $30.”
And so, I built my brand around this big thing that I had no control over and then it disappeared, and so I was kind of left with like, “Oh no. What am I gonna do?”
Kurt Elster: All right, as a content creator you were kind of playing in someone else’s sandbox a little bit.
Dan Becker: For sure. For sure. I still am in a way.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. They could always send you a cease and desist and be like, “Look, you’re not Disney Dan anymore, buddy.”
Dan Becker: Right, right, right.
Kurt Elster: Now, is it Mr. Dan or Sir Disney? Which do we prefer?
Dan Becker: It’s so fascinating, Kurt, and maybe you’re one of the first people that I kind of like… Well, you are. I’m in the midst of a mega rebrand. I’m about to shift to DIStory Dan as my exclusive brand on everything, so I can copyright it, and so I can get the blue checkmarks where I need, and all that kind of stuff, because Disney… I can’t have Disney in the name of my brand, you know?
Yeah. I’m definitely in someone else’s sandbox, for sure.
Kurt Elster: And so, for personal branding, was this intentional where you said, “All right, I’m gonna pair niche keyword plus first name with a little alliteration in there.” Was this intentional or happenstance?
Dan Becker: Okay, this is what’s crazy about it. Facebook, my biggest group at the time was my Facebook group, which was Disney Infinity Codes. But Facebook is really tricky about changing the names of something that already has a foundational base, so for instance, you can’t make Sunday School Is Cool group, have 100,000 people join, and then turn it into like, “We love the devil.” They have rules against that kind of stuff.
And so, I had to submit a change name request to a committee to change my Facebook group that had like 12,000 people in it or something like that, to change the name, and one of the clearest paths to doing that was to maintain some of the original name in the title and just retool it to something that was closely related to me. So, I’m applying to this on Facebook. My name is clearly Dan Becker, the user making this application, and my group that I’m trying to change the name from, Disney Infinity Codes, it’s just to Disney Dan. And that, after a lot of back and forth, that finally went through.
I had to change it to Disney Dan Codes for a while. They’re like, “No, you can’t change more than two words at the same time.” I’m like, “Okay.” And then eventually I was able to remove codes from the end of it, but it was just like a machine of necessity to keep my brand attached to that Disney Infinity group, and then it just snowballed out of control once I got on YouTube.
Kurt Elster: We’ve married Dan into this personal brand. What role does authenticity play here? This is the buzzword we hear over and over with content marketing. It’s like, “It has to be authentic.” How much Dan is in Disney Dan, really? How much of this is real?
Dan Becker: Oh, my God, Kurt. You know what? I talk to my therapist about this all the time because what is authenticity in a space of general audience? Because you have to know what your audience is. And you know, I often feel like Bob Saget from Full House. You know, he was America’s dad on Full House, and if you went to see him to standup comedy, he was quite the different character. He was raunchy, he was weird, he was silly. He was not that guy. And I currently feel like Bob on Full House.
And so, I have to really manage a lot of my authenticity, and not have some of my craziness come out, but instead lean more on being a dad of two daughters, being a Disney fan, and so I have to… I really struggle on being like, “Oh, you can’t be authentic all around, but you can be authentic to the specific group that you’re marketing to or the specific audience that you have.” And so, while everyone doesn’t need to necessarily know how much of a lunatic I am in my day-to-day life, and how many bad words I say, I present this, what I believe to be a very authentic version of me that leans more into my joy of the family community park that is Disney, that leans more into the content that I am covering, which is mostly G, PG, and PG-13-related material, you know what I mean? I’m not leaning into a lot of R-rated stuff, so I try to be authentic to the version of myself that enjoys the content, but I struggle a lot with what it means to be fully authentic to your audience and your brand. And I feel like if you have a personal brand, if you’ve got like a personal… you were a tattoo artist or whatever, and you’re making shirts, and you’re doing cool tattoos, and piercings, my God. Be as authentic as humanly possible because the world is your oyster. There’s no one editing any of that kind of material, you know what I mean?
But here, in my space at least, I feel very edited but authentic at the same…
Kurt Elster: It’s a good question and good discussion because where’s the line? A lot of advice is, “Hey, people want to buy from brands that have their same values.” And our position has been what those values are are entirely up to you. It’s yours. And yeah, by sharing them you are going to alienate some people, but that’s okay because now the people who agree with you become even bigger fans.
Dan Becker: Right. Yes. Yes. People who agree with you, they become stronger supporters of you, and that’s definitely huge. That’s so huge. Right. And I think that it’s important. I think just being Disney Dan is such an interesting… This conversation’s so fascinating because I have to be aware of what is the generalized, acceptable brand appearance for my niche. You know, I’m not a sports guy, so I don’t have to be all Barstool Sports toxic masculine. I don’t have to do any of that kind of stuff. I’m not a fisher, I don’t hunt, so I don’t have to lift weights, and pose in camo, and do slow-mos of me shooting a bow and arrow. But I am a Disney fan, so you want to see me go to Disney on Ice stuff? You want to see me going to the parks? You want to see me… I don’t know, wearing Mickey t-shirts and eating churros, and making Disney food out of cookbooks at home? You want to see me really engage authentically in the brand. But you don’t… Some people don’t want you to go outside of that.
But to your point, if you have a niche and that niche already has an established, expected brand and persona, as long as your own values agree with it, be authentic and lean into those things as best you can. Because the more generalized you can be, the more of an audience you can take in.
Kurt Elster: It sounds like you’ve got some experience here. How do you handle negative comments or feedback on your content?
Dan Becker: So much therapy.
Kurt Elster: My solution is to ignore it.
Dan Becker: I often found that the people who want to speak up and say something hurtful about me, or about other people, are usually hurting themselves, and usually are in a lot of pain, and they’re dealing with things, and usually a lot of the stuff that they’re dealing with and a lot of the pain that they’re feeling is on an unconscious level. People have a lot of unconscious bias and conscious bias, and a lot of their unconscious, internalized fears, and angers, it just oozes out of them when they’re unregulated and uncomfortable. And I’m a little bit of an asshole, so I don’t have any problem laughing at them, being like, “Ha, ha, ha. You have feelings inside that you can’t get out. But I could get my feelings out and that makes me feel sad for you.” So, that’s how I handle it, because people tend to shut up when they realize that someone sees them for being so damaged and hurt, but some people don’t.
But what I do is I work really hard not to internalize, and I throw them in a bucket of, “Oh, you’re hurt.” And then I will leave them alone. But then if they keep going, I’ll be like, “All right, let’s talk about how hurt you are, but I’m gonna be silly. You’re poking a silly weirdo and telling him that he’s wrong. Just be careful. You don’t know what’s gonna come out of that silly weirdo when he fights back.”
But to your point, Kurt, the best is to just not engage. You know, you’re running a sticker store or something. You’re not a full-time comedian whose literal hobby it is to build up chops talking to lunatics, so if someone’s gonna be all harsh and negative to you, they are literally screaming out, “I am uncomfortable. I am in pain. I am hurting. I am sad. I am anxious. But I don’t know that and so all I know how to do is hate. All I know how to do is vocalize externally that I’m not comfortable with something because something inside me is uncomfortable and I don’t know how to deal with that.”
All I’m saying is that when people are unhappy on the internet, they’re not okay, and they’re searching for attention. They’re reaching out. And it’s really hard to contextualize people like that, but it’s truth for every single one of them. It’s hard to pity people who are mean, but you should pity them is what you should do.
Kurt Elster: Also, the people who are getting mad about Disney stuff, you need better problems. Truly.
Dan Becker: Well, but Kurt, like I said, we all own Disney. Disney owns us and so we own Disney. What we believe our experiences to be, our authentic experiences with the products Disney has made, we have incredible ownership of. And so, when something goes wrong with it that doesn’t align with our worldview, oh my gosh, people really lose it.
Kurt Elster: You had a channel that was going, you had an audience, you have to pivot because Disney said, “Look, that product you were building on, that’s not a thing anymore.” That’s the danger of playing in someone else’s sandbox. Acceptable risk. So, you switch to Disney Parks.
Dan Becker: No, there’s actually one more step in between. I switched to a wide swath of Disney Digital. Anything Disney Digital, I’ll touch into, and I will engage in. Disney mobile games. Disney online… Whatever Disney’s doing that was in a digital space, I would jump in, like Oh My Disney. All those kinds of things. Disney Crossy Road was my biggest one. And so, I just started making content adjacent to my original content to continue spreading that net open, because I’m like, “Oh, well, if you like Disney video games, and you like spending money on Disney video games, I’m certain you probably also like Disney mobile games that are free to play that you also drop money into to collect all your characters inside that game.”
And it turned out to be true. Turned out to be 1,000% true is that Disney collectors are collectors at their heart, and so that translated one to one, and then I started to realize that one of the big things universally about me that I really loved, and I loved collecting, were all those character meet and greet experiences as a kid. And I started realizing, “Oh, theme park is just an extension of Disney merchandising.” It’s an extension of, “Oh, I’m a Disney fan. Oh, I’m gonna give money to receive Disney joy.” That’s what Disney Infinity was. It’s what Disney freemium games were. It’s what Disney Parks are. It’s a pay-to-play. It’s a pay-to-joy is what it is.
And so, I just kind of continued down that path and I realized that there was a little bit of a niche developing with theme park history videos. And I’m like, “Well, no one’s talking about the stuff I like, so I’ll talk about the stuff I like.” It turns out other people like to listen to that stuff, like costume characters, specifically.
Kurt Elster: So, how much research goes into deciding? Are you just like, “This is the thing I’m gonna try. Let’s make one video and see what happens?”
Dan Becker: At the point in time at which I had made the Disney Park history video, I was making things likes… Marvel and Disney and Star Wars had just partnered up with Loot Crate, and so tons of Loot Crates were full of Disney stuff, so I was doing Loot Crate reviews. I was just trying to get anything that was Disney merchandise adjacent on board, and so I just was like… It’s insane how I made the video. I literally went into iMovie on my laptop and just made a glorified slideshow. It was essentially a PowerPoint. There was one video clip in it. Otherwise, it was just photos slowly Ken Burnings. It was just Ken Burn in, Ken Burn out. Ken Burn left, Ken Burn right. And it was just photos of Mickey Mouse.
And then, this is the most insane thing I’ve ever done. I didn’t have a script or anything like that, so iMovie had this ability that you could dub over video that you were watching. In the corner there was just a red record button, so I would click it, it would catch on 3, 2, 1, and the video would start, and then I would try my best to do a clean 18-minute take of me talking through this presentation, and I would mess up all the time, and I would stop.
Kurt Elster: With no script?
Dan Becker: With no script. I was just improving. It’s still how I make videos today. I don’t write scripts. I just write outlines and then I just improv all the bits in between. And so, it probably took me like seven or eight times to finally get all the way through it without making a mistake, and then I uploaded it, and it got… It was huge. It got huge. Websites picked it up and all kinds of people started watching it, and it continues to be my most viewed video I have to this day.
Kurt Elster: So, you go through the effort, you’re like, “I’m just gonna see what happens here, because I see this, a similar genre of video. It’s adjacent to what I’m doing.”
Dan Becker: Yeah. I’m watching Defunctland. I’m watching Yesterworld. I’m watching Bright Sun Films. They’re talking about big pop culture, cultural touchstone things that we all have in our hearts, and that have gone away, or that we don’t remember, and then I peel that back.
Kurt Elster: Well, I think there’s a lot of wisdom and magic in that, in saying like, “Look at these cultural touchstones to immediately have a point of reference that makes you relatable to the audience.” And it’s an SEO play. It’s a thing that people are looking for. And so, you go about making this video in all the wrong ways, right? It’s like a slide show that you dub over with a monologue, an improv monologue, and then get… what? 100,000 views?
Dan Becker: Yeah. Yeah. I used to be excited if a video would get like 1,000, 10,000 views.
Kurt Elster: I’d be excited.
Dan Becker: In the first month. You know what I mean? I always feel like, “Yeah! It’s successful!” And then that thing just didn’t stop. And then a couple Disney websites picked it up, and did articles about it, and then boom, it was a million. It was just a million. And subscribers were just pouring in, like just pouring in, and I was just like, “I don’t know what to do now.” I didn’t know what to do. And so, for a long time my YouTube channel had a big identity crisis. For at least two years, I think, where I was making video game content, I was making theme park content, I was making merchandise content, I was just like… I was making content in any corner that I could.
And maybe one out of 10 things would pop off and get views, you know?
Kurt Elster: There’s a trial and error approach, a shotgun approach there.
Dan Becker: Yes. Very much so.
Kurt Elster: One of the things I’ve always wondered from other content creators is like I’m terrible at predicting which episodes will and won’t be big. Often, the ones that are my favorites, no one cares about.
Dan Becker: Yes.
Kurt Elster: And the ones that are like… I’m like, “Well, that’s a throwaway. Do we even publish it?” People are like, “That’s the best thing I’ve heard in six months.” I’m terrible at it. Okay, so I think the takeaway there is like… All right, even if you hate it, or you’re like, “Look, this is soggy, and gross, and limp, and I don’t love it,” you still should probably just ship it and see what happens.
Dan Becker: Yes. Yeah. I’ve actually learned to stop perfecting, which is maybe not good advice for people who are running stores and stuff, for like, “Oh, my product. It’s almost there. Oh, let’s just sell it.” Digital goods aren’t the same. Make sure your physical goods are great and that you love them. You can stand by them.
Kurt Elster: Just ship it.
Dan Becker: But digital media exists in a way… Specifically social media, let me say, because I, on YouTube, have inadvertently stumbled into making consistent evergreen content, but social media is a really great place where just make it and dump it. Post it and dump it. Post it and dump it. Just because it will be gone. Even if it’s good, if it’s bad, if you piss people off, if you don’t, if people love it or they don’t, in five days they’re not even gonna remember the thing you made, you know what I mean?
Because they will have consumed another 30,000 pieces of media between your five-second TikTok to where they’re at now, you know what I mean? And the chances of you making something silly, that you don’t even have the context for how great it is, and then posting it… The audience will find it, man. If it’s good, your audience will find it.
Kurt Elster: It’s freeing advice. And it’s true, like I think people won’t post, publish, ship, send things, because they’re fearful of the reaction and like, “Well, this will just… If I send this, this ends my career.” And the reality is like the most screwed up thing you could do is gonna disappear in 48 hours tops anyway in most cases.
Dan Becker: Right, right, right. Right. And failure is good. Failure highlights what you shouldn’t do anymore. You know, and if you don’t have that awareness, start. Do it. Do. And then do, and then do, and then do, and then gather, and make sure you look back at what you’ve done. Just because the Instagram stories have all disappeared and the TikToks are now buried, you still have access to your analytics. You can see what people clicked on, what people didn’t. You know, and there’s no one watching you. Even me, there’s no… I don’t have a supervisor. I don’t have somebody who’s just like, “Oh, you shouldn’t be doing this,” or, “You should do this,” or, “You should do this differently.” And so, just spreading your wings and blowing the dandelion of content out into the world of you… just take a breath, and push, and get it out there, and then go to the next thing.
Kurt Elster: Such-
Dan Becker: Because twiddling your thumbs and stewing on something is time you’re wasting on the next great thing you’re gonna make.
Kurt Elster: Man, that’s advice I need to hear right now in my personal life. I appreciate you, Disney Dan.
Dan Becker: Don’t let perfect get in the way of good is something that my girlfriend says to me all the time. Don’t let perfect get in the way of good. Don’t let perfect get in the way of done.
Kurt Elster: Perfect is the enemy of good I think is the Voltaire quote, but it always… It becomes perfect is the enemy of done. All right, there’s a delightful saying we have in our office and home. The content hole must be filled. The catch to content marketing is like, “Wow, I got this video.” Shit, no one cared. And I post, post, post, and I get one that’s successful, and now I have this evergreen video out there. The problem is that’s not enough. I gotta keep going. For me, I’m closing in on 500 episodes here, and every three months I go, “I think I just figured out what I’m doing.” So, there’s the advantage to that practice.
Dan Becker: I’m the same way, Kurt. I’m the same way.
Kurt Elster: You just gotta keep publishing. The tough part, especially for you, like for me, I interview people. It’s a skill. I can sit down, I can bang out 10 questions pretty easily, and then have a conversation. That’s an easier content format than what you’re doing, and an easier content format than I think a lot of eCommerce brands are gonna be able to do.
So, how do you keep coming up with ideas for new videos?
Dan Becker: Consumption, I guess, is the best answer for that, is that I… My girlfriend is amazing, and she used to be a magazine editor, and before, back when magazines existed. They don’t anymore, especially jobs working on magazines. Those definitely don’t exist. And so, one of the things that she would do, the beginning of her day, every day, was read five magazines and consume what other people are doing. And I’ve been on such a journey with this where I have stopped doing it, I start doing it, and I stop doing it, because I’m paranoid that I’m absorbing the wrong… and I’m just copying instead of creating.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, me too.
Dan Becker: But in reality, everything is a copy of something else. Nothing is original. There are only five magic tricks and three stories. You know, and everything is just an iteration of those things.
Kurt Elster: Everything is a remake.
Dan Becker: So, it really is. Everything is a remake. Exactly. Nothing is original. Everything is a remake. So, forgive yourself that you’ve copied because you’ve already done it. You will do it. You’ve done it. You’ll do it again. But you have your authentic voice. You have your authentic style, your authentic vision, and so you consuming and bringing in a lot of stuff, and then letting it stew around in that bubble, bubble, toil and trouble of your brain, you know, like some interesting potions are gonna come out that aren’t the original thing. They might look a little bit like the original thing, smell like the original thing, taste like the original thing, but they won’t be the original thing, and you will have iterated, and grown, and then you’ll be off to the next thing.
So, consuming is like… I think the biggest task to… Consumption and community. Let me make it two things. Consumption and community. Engage and know the community that you’re in and continue to consume the products that your community puts out. And those two things will help you understand what the community wants from you and what the content is doing successfully, and then just allow those things, just draw dots. Draw lines between those two sides of your mind and connect things. You know, like a placemat in a diner. You know, like kids’ placemats have like a, “What silhouette matches up with the character on the other side of the page?” People who have kids probably get this. People who don’t, I don’t… Maybe not.
Hey, but you’re… So, you’re doing pretty good, so if you don’t get this analogy, tough, but you know, just draw the lines. Make the connections between, and it requires multitasking, and I know they say we can’t do that, and maybe because I have ADD I’m better at it, but it’s all about drawing connections. It’s string theory. It’s about making webs where there weren’t before. It’s about connecting things that haven’t been.
Kurt Elster: How much content do you produce and do you have any free time at all?
Dan Becker: I’m plagued with free time. I have a pretty bad anxiety disorder, so I get locked into myself a lot, and I kind of don’t have the ability to do, and then I stew for a long time in that, and then I break away from it, and then I will have… And I’m lucky, because I’m a YouTuber, so I can, in theory, and I have an amazing editor and producer, Kenny. He’s amazing. And so, I can in theory work for a week a month, and write three, four videos, sit down with Kenny over a couple of days, record all the raw footage, hand him my scripts, hand him the reference, and then I can spend the rest of the month off doing whatever I’m doing. And I guess I ultimately do that in a way, but it’s back to that consumption thing. Then I get to start watching things, and absorbing things, and taking things in.
But I try to get at least two, three videos out a month. It’s a hard rule for me. I try to make at least 40 to 60 minutes of content a month for YouTube.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Dan Becker: Is what I try.
Kurt Elster: And if I’m putting that process together, it’s like there’s three weeks of Dan cruising YouTube and social media, and you’re hoping for ideas, you’re jotting ideas down. Once we’ve got some ideas, those become outlines and then…
Dan Becker: Yeah. Those become Google slides. Yep.
Kurt Elster: Okay, and then you’ve got three, four ideas in Google slides. You sit down, you’ve got a guy. You’ve got Kenny who’s gonna work with you to film it, edit it, direct, produce, and so he films you monologuing through these outlines, and then you add all the B roll over it, and that’s kind of our format.
Dan Becker: You got it.
Kurt Elster: Well, that makes it sound very easy, but if someone watches one of your videos, there’s so much that goes into it.
Dan Becker: They would never know. They would never know. And you know, Kenny has an artistic voice that he puts on the videos in his editing that I really appreciate, and my fans are becoming fans of Kenny because Kenny is a character that exists in my videos as an editor. And it’s really cool and fun. But I will spend, you know, three to four days just writing a concept, finding a thing, and the thing I’ve kind of left out of the process is when I decide I’m gonna do a video on the history of X, I will consume the full history of that thing three or four times so it’s just in my head. It just lives in my head, like all that content’s there, so that when I then turn around and go to give a college professor lecture on it out of nowhere, all the information’s there.
And occasionally when you do a pickup, or I forgot this or that, but ultimately it’s all just there and then I just brain dump it onto the table. But each video, I would say yes, it has like a week of prep, and then we film, and then it’s off in Kenny’s hands, and then I don’t really come back around to touch it until I’m thinking about the YouTube title and thumbnail once Kenny’s done producing it.
Kurt Elster: You upload it to YouTube and put the description and that stuff into it?
Dan Becker: Yep. Yep, yep, yep. I put the thumbnail, the title, I write the description, that kind of nonsense.
Kurt Elster: Certainly, you’ve got experience here. Any tips on what helps to drive clickthrough rate? Some of the tactical stuff on YouTube success?
Dan Becker: Boy, clickthrough rate is interesting. I think about it all the time. It gives me metrics of it. And my clickthrough rate, what do you think my clickthrough rate is on a thumbnail?
Kurt Elster: I’m going to arbitrarily guess 8%. I made this number up.
Dan Becker: That’s close. That’s close. It averages between 4 and 7% on my clickthrough rate. And almost all of my content is found through browse feature, and people aren’t… While I have maybe I’d say 20% of my views come from subscribers. That’s probably more now. Probably 30% now. The other 70% come exclusively from people just bored, scrolling YouTube, and then they see something, and so my clickthrough rate, the clickthrough… I do a couple things to mess with it.
I will not be settled on a title of a video or a thumbnail of a video until it has at least 50,000 views. If I’m not seeing progressive enough growth, I will go back in and I will change the thumbnail, I will tweak the title, I will rewrite the first 140 characters of the description of the video to try to find more buzz worthy or correct SEO terms that will get that clickthrough, get it in front of the right eyes, but the biggest thing, and I wish YouTube would do it, and Netflix does this. Netflix is the king doing this, is with the A/B approach. So, you’re scrolling through Netflix and you don’t want to watch, and you’re gonna scroll past like St. Johnny’s Murders, and Billy Got Murdered, and All These Ladies Got Murdered, and This Grandpa Got Murdered, and if you don’t click on any of those things, Netflix knows you didn’t click on those things, so the next time you come to visit Billy Got Murdered, Grandpa Got Murdered, These Ladies, all those murder videos all have a different thumbnail now. They all have a different still.
I have probably… I am a big fan of Shrek: The Musical. It’s on Netflix. I have it saved in my favorites. And so, every time… It’s the first thing I put on my favorites list back when I got a Netflix digital account. And so, it’s always on My List as the first thumbnail, and I have probably seen in the amount of time I’ve used Netflix over the past two, three years, that Shrek: The Musical has had at least a dozen different thumbnails on Netflix alone, just because you never know what right combination of colors and words and shapes is going to be the thing that causes that person to click. You don’t know.
And if you’re not getting the clicks, change it. So, I do. I change my titles. I change my thumbnails. I wish YouTube would allow me to upload two thumbnails, that if someone already scrolls by the video once, it would switch to the B thumbnail for the next time they scroll through.
Kurt Elster: It’s a pretty good feature request. I like that. I’ve noticed that Netflix does that, flips through them, but I had never bothered to research it.
Dan Becker: Psychological tool. So, like on your Shopify, here’s a great example. On your Shopify, if you’re not getting the clickthroughs on the product, make a better splash image. Make a better thing. Because people are just gonna scroll by it.
Kurt Elster: And this, unlike YouTube, we have the tools to do these things.
Dan Becker: Right. You guys do. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kurt Elster: So, once you’ve created the… You’ve got your video. It’s up there. People are hitting it. How do we promote it, right? Some process of revision using that all-important metric, clickthrough rate, where you have a sense of if it’s below 4%, this isn’t working and start tweaking. But-
Dan Becker: Oh, this is good. This is good. How do we promote it?
Kurt Elster: How do you promote it?
Dan Becker: We make the audience aware of the idea from the moment of its inception.
Kurt Elster: Oh, so you’re hyping it in past videos.
Dan Becker: No, no, no. But we’re using our social media. Well, yes. A, yes. There will be teases for future videos in videos all the time, and I engage. I’m like, “Do you guys want this? Leave a comment. Let me know if you want this video.” And I will, and then I’ll make that thing, but to say like, “Okay, I’m making an hour-long Figment documentary,” so for the two months that lead up to it, as I’m researching Figment, I’m gonna share almost everything I’m gonna put in this video on Instagram, on Twitter, on TikTok, in some way or another. This fun fact I learned, this thing I found, I’m looking for this, I’m currently designing this. I’m letting the audience know that I’m working on something so that by the time the product comes out, the anticipation is there for whatever I’m about to release, because the people who want this Figment thing, now they’re waiting for it. They’re looking for it. They’re waiting for me to drop it so that they can click on it as soon as possible.
And so, to promote it in a big way is to let people know that it’s happening before it even happens. And then when it comes out, I have a social media guy who will post things. I find that carousels work better than just a single image or reel on Instagram because Instagram’s feeds… If you don’t have a strong enough internet connection, Instagram as you’re scrolling through it will repopulate the same carousel back into your home feed just on a different slide.
Kurt Elster: Oh, that’s very clever of them and of you to figure that out as a marketing tactic.
Dan Becker: Right. Yeah. So, but if I just have a static single image saying, “New video today,” and people scroll past it, well, that post is gone now. They didn’t engage with it. I personally have had Instagram give me the third or fourth slide. That’s how many times I’m scrolling past, like I’ve scrolled past the same thing, but it’s regenerated back into the home feed because other people are engaging with it, and it wants me to engage with this thing.
Kurt Elster: That’s good advice. The other way I have seen you both cross-pollinate, promote your stuff, and monetize your stuff, is through collabs. And for an eCommerce merchant, very likely that in your career in the near future you will have to reach out to or be contacted by a content creator. And so, who’s reaching out here? Are you reaching out to people to work with? Are they reaching out to you? And what does a good pitch look like?
Dan Becker: So, there are some… I have an agency now that handles all my ad placements in my videos for ad collaborations, and I really… I mean, it’s hard to pick and choose when you’re small and you’re still getting eyes on you, and I still consider myself small potatoes on YouTube. I won’t consider myself legitimate until I get like 500,000 subscribers, like in order to be like, “No, I want this,” when I’m in conversations. I know my place in terms of what I can offer and how I can offer it.
But I reach out to brands all the time. I reach out to brands I like all the time. I am shameless in that. What’s the worst that’s gonna happen? They’re gonna say no? Okay, so you don’t have an influencer program. You don’t have an affiliate program. You don’t have any product to send me. Okay. I just wanted to let you know that, and I start every communication and every bit with like, “Hey, I am crazy about this.” I will share and engage with that brand’s content material leading up to me. I don’t cold call anybody. I make sure that they see me and they’re in their notifications. I make sure that they know that I’m hitting the heart buttons on their stuff. I’m sharing their things on my story. I’m like, “Oh, check out this cool print, this cool design,” so that when I finally circle back around to slide into their DMs on Instagram, they can scroll up and see 12 times I’ve mentioned them in my story, and they’ve seen all the times I’ve hearted on their content, and so they know that I’m not just somebody who’s just appeared out of nowhere and looking for something from them.
Because I cannot stand the cold email from agencies and firms that are like, “Hey, I just…” It’s like it’s just a blank form and it has a spot where they put in the most recent YouTube video you’ve released.
Kurt Elster: Like the font doesn’t match. I loved it when you said-
Dan Becker: Yeah. I love going to theme parks. It was just like, “You didn’t watch that video. I know you didn’t watch that video.” And so, I find that-
Kurt Elster: They’d be better off if they just went like, “Hey, I didn’t watch any of your stuff, but clearly you have an audience and you seem interesting.” That would be a better approach.
Dan Becker: Yep. I would respect that so much more. And then I also have to remember that on the other side of these brands is just a human. It’s just their social media manager. It’s just their whatever it is for that company. It could be someone who’s wearing seven hats. It could be the social media manager, copywriter, HR person. You don’t know, but I really, really understand that on the other side of that DM is a person who’s writing it, and so even if they say no, I still say, “Oh, thanks. I appreciate that.” Even if they give me a copy and pasted response, I’m like, “Ooh, I like this. I like this standard response. Make sure the copywriter who wrote this knows that it’s really polished and looks good.”
Because even a negative experience doesn’t have to be a negative experience, because it could circle back around eventually. You never know. You never know.
Kurt Elster: Well, that’s all good advice. So, you run sponsored commercials in your video, like I watch your video and you’ll be like, “Hey, this one’s brought to you by Magic Candle Company.”
Dan Becker: Squarespace.
Kurt Elster: Squarespace.
Dan Becker: Blueland. Yeah. All the things. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Okay. And it works because you present it. I call my ads host read. It’s host read. It’s not… You didn’t stick their content in. It’s your content for them, which I think adds a lot of authenticity and helps it feel less interruptive. How do you… I think the fear that people have is balancing it. How do you balance that non-sales content and the sales content?
Dan Becker: I always try to make fun of the sales content in my main content. I try to find something niche, or weird, or different about the content, about what… I’m trying to think here. Oh, a wine company reached out to me recently and they’re like, “We really want to sponsor you with our wine sales.” And I’m like, “Do you understand my brand? Do you understand anything about me?”
Kurt Elster: Hey, I’ve been to Food & Wine Festival at Epcot and that’s like the drunkest thing I’ve ever seen.
Dan Becker: But right, they’ve pushed, they push, they push, and so I’m like, “Okay, if you want to sponsor me, I cannot stick a wine sales ad in the middle of the Evolution of Winnie the Pooh. Just wouldn’t make any sense. But I will go to Epcot, and I will do something stupid in the confines of Epcot, and then pair that with a wine ad because the context of the content allows the ads to not feel out of place. It doesn’t feel weird. You know what I mean? If you cut to me at a restaurant in Epcot drinking a glass of wine and being like, “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Oh, wine.” It suddenly doesn’t feel so abrupt, you know?
And so, I try to… and it’s hard. It’s not always doable. Not always doable at all. But when possible, I try very hard to… And then also make… I also try to make the ad read content itself, like the ad read’s gonna be the ad read, but I’m gonna have at least two jokes put in there that are making fun of myself in the middle of the ad read, and if you like me then you’re still gonna watch the ad read because I’m still being silly and weird inside of it. You don’t have to skip it. So, you know, my ads sometimes, you could see in the analytics like when my ad’s playing, 20 to 30 people just dip out and fast forward. But a bunch of the audience will just persist through because it’s still me doing it. It’s still me.
And I’m not just like, “This video was brought to you by this and I’m going to give you a boring 60-seconds.” I make it weird. I make it fun. At least I try to.
Kurt Elster: I like that advice. Really, it’s like as long as it… Again, it goes back to authenticity, but it’s like as long as it works within context and it still is your brand voice, then you shouldn’t have an issue with it. And the people who want to skip it are gonna skip it, but they still like you.
Dan Becker: Right. Right, right, right. A great example of it, and I’m almost… I almost don’t want to talk about it, but I will, is Established Titles. Remember that company that got huge flak a couple months ago because people were like, “When you buy this, you’re not really a lord in Scotland.” You know?
Kurt Elster: No, I’m not familiar with this.
Dan Becker: Okay, so there’s a company that allows you to buy a plot of land in Scotland. Then you can call yourself a lord, like you can literally put on your plane tickets and your driver license if you want.
Kurt Elster: Did you do this? Are you Lord Dan?
Dan Becker: Technically, I am. I have the placard around here somewhere.
Kurt Elster: I knew it.
Dan Becker: I didn’t buy it myself. That was part of the sponsorship deal. But then slowly it came out, people were like, “This is a scam! You’re not really a Scottish lord! We’re gonna unmask Established Titles.” And a lot of content creators got in trouble for partnering with them and whatnot. I didn’t, because if you watch my ad, you know that it’s all a joke to begin with. You know that it’s all a bit. It’s like buying a star back in the ‘90s. No one thought they were actually buying a star, and anybody who advertised it as like you honestly will have ownership of a star, like the naming rights of a star, those people were idiots. And I don’t try to… I’m not a snake oil salesman. I’m marching around in my parking lot and holding a Lord of the Rings sword, getting knighted by the highway out back of my apartment complex. You could see the cars zooming and my buddy’s knighting me.
I didn’t take the ad seriously because I took the tone of the product and I carried it through the ad spot, and it’s not a serious product. It’s a gag gift. It’s always been a gag gift. No one ever thought they were honestly a lord that deserved a crown, or a ring, or whatever the heck any of that happens or comes along with it. It was a gag. And so, I knew that and I treated it as such.
So, I think it’s important to treat the context of the ad… Be authentic to the content. Be authentic to the audience. Understand your audience and make sure that that’s what they… they’re gonna respond to this thing well and in its right space.
Kurt Elster: So, you’re big enough now. I have to imagine if you go to the parks, to Disney World, and you’re filming there, there’s no way you could do that without people recognizing you, right?
Dan Becker: Yeah. Yeah. It’s not just Disney Parks anymore, actually, it’s kind of gotten out of control.
Kurt Elster: Whoa. Okay.
Dan Becker: It’s my hometown now, so it’s crazy.
Kurt Elster: What are some of the common misconceptions people have about being a content creator? Are they like, “Why do the doors on your car not go up?” Do they just assume you’re like… Do you just get immediately handed a plaque from YouTube and a million dollars?
Dan Becker: The common misconception is that I am not Disney Dan. Disney Dan is a character. Disney Dan is a persona. You’re talking to Disney Dan right now. You are talking to Dan Becker, because we’re having an honest, authentic conversation, but Disney Dan is here, present with you in the room. He’s possessed. I’m possessed by him, you know? Like Beetlejuice in a way. And God, this has really affected my mental health in a big, broader sense in that the expectation for me to be my video character is prevalent. People see me and they’re like… and this is where vlogging, where I kind of have a hard line against being called a vlogger, because vloggers really develop that parasocial relationship where they’re really like, “This is me. This is all me. You’re seeing my real life.” And it is so not the case. So not who they actually are. It’s a manufactured persona they’re presenting to you on the vlog.
And so, I guess that is the biggest misconception. But to clarify, I am not unhappy to take a photo, to give someone a high five, to learn their name, to apologize for constantly screaming in their living room. I love it because those people are the reason why I’m successful. I don’t have a problem with an audience whatsoever. Come up to me. As long as I’m not eating with my kids… My kids, it’s a hard boundary. If I’m having time with my family, leave me alone. But if it’s just me, you see me roaming around like a dope, by all means, attack me, and say hi, and get a picture, because I love it. I love it. I love it. But I am not Disney Dan I guess is the biggest misconception. Because people think that I am that.
Kurt Elster: When you get on camera, when you get in front of a mic, it really… It compresses your life force, right? You have to be… The advice I got years ago was like, “You gotta be 10% more you for the final recording to just sound like normal you.” And very quickly you figure that out, and then you get better at it over time, but really it’s like it's a persona based in part on you, because that’s where it starts. That’s where it comes from. But you’re doing schtick.
All right, Mr. DIStory Dan Becker. Coming to the end of our time together. I want to know. What advice do you have for people who they’re just starting out, creating content, posting podcasts or videos?
Dan Becker: I already had this locked and loaded. I give this advice all the time.
Kurt Elster: Let’s hear it.
Dan Becker: Your opinion is worthless without substance. You need to build trust in your brand before you can branch out into thrusting your opinion forward. You have to educate the audience in a way that they trust you. You don’t walk into the class and trust the teacher in the same way you do the last day of class as you’re leaving. And a lot of people, they start their content creation path thinking that it’s the last day of class, but it’s the first day of class. People don’t know you. They don’t know anything about you. And more importantly, they don’t care, which is the harder to swallow pill, is that people just don’t care unless you give them a reason to care.
And the best way to do that is to find something. Something specific. Something so ungodly specific that no one else has thought about it. And then start to educate people on that thing, because what it does is it drives the stake for your great, big circus tent of content. It makes a foundation. It’s like it proves that you have a wealth of factual, grounded, well-researched knowledge on an interesting topic that people can rely on that when they hear your voice about that topic, it’s pretty true.
And then, once they learn that you are an expert on something, then you can divert and begin to expand, and explore, and create. But it’s important to build that foundation of trust with at least the very core of your audience with some useful, actual, meaningful content, and not just like, “Oh, the new trailer dropped. Here’s what I think. Ha, ha, ha.” Or, “Oh, here’s a new smoothie. I’m gonna sip it. Here’s what I think.” I don’t care. Build a channel that takes me through the entire history of every smoothie that’s ever been blended, and why smoothies were smoothies, and where smoothies took off, and who was the most famous person to drink a smoothie first, and why are we all drinking smoothies now, and what’s the most expensive smoothie you can get, and what’s the most expensive smoothie ingredients? Where’s the coolest place to go and drink a smoothie?
If you are the smoothie guy and everyone knows that you know everything about smoothies, then you can go to Epcot and go, “Oh, smoothie. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Here’s what I think.” And people actually now have a reason to listen to you.
Kurt Elster: That’s fantastic advice. It’s really… It was like, “Hey, you gotta walk before you could run.” So, you think-
Dan Becker: Yeah, and so many people want to just start running.
Kurt Elster: You know, when you see the end result and you haven’t made the product, I could see where you’d make that mistake. I think the other one is the inverse of this is hey, don’t get so caught up in giving yourself permission. Because earlier, the advice was like, “Oh man, just publish it. Just hit send.” All right, so I think the answer lies somewhere in the middle there, so I want-
Dan Becker: Yeah. Yeah, for sure.
Kurt Elster: I need this niche thing that I’m passionate about. I gotta go deep on it. And I gotta research it. I gotta put that together. Establish my authority by educating people on this thing that I care deeply about.
Dan Becker: Exactly. Establishing authority is a great way to say it. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: That’s fantastic. Disney Dan, I gotta watch some Dan videos here. Where can people go to learn more about you?
Dan Becker: You can head on over to thedisneydan.com to find all of my links and information, and you can find me across all of the holy social medias, such as Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Patreon, YouTube, just type in Disney Dan.
Kurt Elster: Like, comment, subscribe.
Dan Becker: It’s my number one analytic search term thing. It astonishes me that people search for Disney Dan as much as they do.
Kurt Elster: We’ll end it there. Dan, DIStory Dan, Disney Dan, Dan Becker, thank you so much.
Dan Becker: Thanks, Kurt. It’s been amazing.