How To Start a Yoga Channel
“Consistency is key. You gotta show up for your friends. You can’t just put something out there and not have their back.” - Adriene Mishler
This is part six of a series of extended posts updating my no-longer-available YouTube Book. For the first installment, click here.
At this stage in the story, Hilah Cooking is working and I decide that I should start a second YouTube channel to see if my strategy can work twice.
TLDR: Short on time. Scroll to the end for a great video from YouTube Creators where Adriene gives her perspective on starting the channel.
By 2012, Hilah Cooking had gone from being a fun hobby to an actual business. It was still small-scale, but Hilah had quit her day job and was now working on it full-time. It was getting bigger every day.
A few years earlier, I never could have predicted that I would be spending almost all my time creating educational “lifestyle” content.
Learning how to make a web series was fun, and I was now obsessed with YouTube. I felt like I had found the perfect combination of filmmaking, publishing, marketing, and the geeky search engine stuff I had spent so much time studying.
Perhaps the most gratifying part was that a lot of people actually wanted to watch what we were making.
To my surprise, I discovered that I liked making creative, educational content. I also loved the entrepreneurial aspect of it.
I wanted to see if I could repeat the success in a different niche. I also thought that if I had TWO successful channels, I could also go full-time.
Starting a Second Channel
Looking for a new niche, I found an article (on Business Insider or Facebook) about the ten fastest-growing industries. Two of them—hot sauce and yoga—caught my eye.
I got excited about building a hot-sauce company. I love hot sauce, and was confident that Hilah and I could sell it under the show’s brand. I did a lot of research, created a business plan, and even had a co-packer selected. But I realized I just didn’t have the enthusiasm I felt was necessary to launch a physical product company. I wanted to spend as much time as possible making videos and getting better at YouTube.
So my thoughts turned to yoga.
At the time, I wasn’t a practitioner… or a fan. Every time I’d tried it, something about it had always turned me off. The teachers didn’t connect with me (in-person or on YouTube), and the class styles seemed dated. Maybe there was room to do something different.
I immediately thought about Adriene Mishler. I loved working with her on The Spider Babies. No matter how terrible things got on set, she was always a happy and positive presence. I also felt I owed her a favor for being such a good sport.
She was already a yoga teacher and had an extensive background in theater and film.
I also thought she might be available.
At the time, she was working odd jobs, auditioning for and booking acting jobs, and teaching donation-based yoga classes at a local theater.
So I approached her with my idea for a YouTube yoga channel.
She didn’t immediately jump at my awesome idea.
It took many conversations—spread out over a year—for her to warm up to the idea of teaching yoga on YouTube. Among the downsides, one was putting herself and her body out in front of all these people.
In 2012, there weren’t a lot of good yoga videos on YouTube. The production quality was low. The teachers weren’t that great. And a lot of it was presented in a sleazy way (lots of focus on cleavage and butts). That was precisely what I did not want to do.
But Adriene and I kept kicking around the idea. Eventually, we started talking about what we did want to do: creatively and sensitively present yoga in a way that would feel authentic to us and to the foundations and spirit of yoga.
I also felt like there was an opportunity to reach an audience that wasn’t being served by the yoga available at the time. Yoga was expensive and felt a little elitist. It was for rich ladies in Santa Monica who strolled the Promenade with yoga mats on their way to hot yoga classes. I had a vision of reaching the people in flyover country with busy lives, jobs, kids, and little time to for health and wellness. I knew a lot of these people were curious about yoga but wouldn’t go to an actual yoga class for a variety of reasons (cost, body-image, tight schedules, their pastor told them it was satanic, etc.).
These were my people and I was confident we could speak their language.
Testing…
Whether it’s a creative project or a business venture, I believe in the power of getting started as quickly as possible. Once we were aligned with what we wanted to do, we got to work.
To figure out our tone, Adriene and I shot two videos that were just for us. We had no intention of releasing them, so the pressure was off, and we were free to experiment and play around.
I edited the videos fast. We could see a few problems right away. They weren’t working.
In these videos, there was an invisible wall between Adriene and the audience. It felt like she was an actor on a TV show. It felt like a performance by someone professionally trained to talk in front of a camera.
My camera angles and on-screen graphics also got in the way. Once again, my cinematic ambitions were getting in the way of building an actual connection.
We didn’t have what we wanted: the feeling of Adriene talking to friends from her yoga room.
Even though we never released them, those videos were incredibly valuable. They changed our direction. We stripped everything down to basics.
Our first official video couldn’t have been more basic, both in presentation and content: It teaches Sukhasana (the easy pose.)
It wasn’t very exciting, but it showcased Adriene’s yoga knowledge, compassionate teaching style, and actual personality.
We hoped we would start to build a connection with people.
How would we know if we did?
We uploaded it and clicked publish.
To be continued…
As promised, here’s a video from YouTube Creators in which Adriene talks about getting started on YouTube. A lot of the B-roll in this video is from that very first photo shoot mentioned above.
Keep creating!
Chris