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SOLO | Make Money by Creating Your Own Opportunities - Lessons from Nikki Howard
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You're listening to the Travis Makes Money podcast presented by gohighlevel.com for a free 30 day trial of the best all in one digital marketing software tool on the planet, just go to gohighlevel.com travis what's going on everybody? Welcome back to the show. On this episode, it is just me, you and the mic and we're continuing along our series of things that I've learned from people who've been on the show in the past. Today's episode is all about my time with my friend Nikki Howard. If you don't know Nikki, Nikki is a sketch comic over on YouTube. She's putting out sketch comedy for years over there. She's an actor, producer, director, really, really funny. She also writes the majority of her material. She self funded a sitcom that she puts out on YouTube. Her and her business partner and comic friend Brent Pella, who's also been on the show recently did their own movie. They self funded a film project actually, which was like a buddy comedy about a like going to a music festival. So I'm looking forward to that coming out as well. But Nikki, like I said, very, very intelligent, very savvy from the business side, but then also just downright hilarious. And I just love spending time with her. So this, these are some of my lessons and takeaways from my episode with Nikki Howard. Number one, when the gatekeepers tell you that you quote unquote, don't look funny, build your own door, she was told literally from casting directors as a note from when she would audition for different roles where they said you just don't look funny. And she didn't argue, she didn't try to convince anybody. She just went and started making her own content. She got around other creators like Stevie Emerson, who's a sketch comic who does a lot of really great sketches. Nikki's in a lot of those. And then Brent Pella, who I already mentioned started her own channel and she decided basically like, okay, well I don't let my look is not of somebody who looks funny, but let me just start my own stuff and prove it to you by showing you that I can be funny. So now she's where she is now fully autonomous, not subject to anyone else's casting decisions. You know, the gatekeep said no, but she found a gate that they didn't control. And that's the cool thing now about the YouTube world, is that, you know, 20 years ago, if Hollywood said no, you're just out of luck. There's just, no, there's no alternative path forward. You just don't get the opportunity. So the. In the creator and, and by the way, for somebody like this, it would have been really easy for her just to be like, look, I tried the acting thing, it didn't work out, and now I'm going to do this other thing. But she also did not allow it to persuade her away from the thing that really lights her up. So instead of, she just took it to YouTube and started making her own stuff, started funding her own project, started getting some people, some financiers to put some money behind this thing and that thing, and then has fully embraced the version of herself that she is now, which is now like creator, writer, director, producer, actor, like all these different roles that she's owned top to bottom. And I personally believe she's just at the beginning of her career because a lot of her stuff is starting to take off more. And I think the, the line between Hollywood and YouTube is continuing to be blurred more and more and more. Like we saw with this movie obsession that Curry Barker made recently. He was a YouTube sketch comic, just like Nikki, just like Brent, just like Stevie Emerson, Making short films, short comedy sketches, writing, directing, acting, filming, producing, editing, all those things. Made his own horror film that was an hour long that he threw up on YouTube because nobody would pick it up. And then enough people watched it, had enough success where the second horror film that he wanted to do got funded. And he got a $750,000 budget, took it to a film festival, sold it for $15 million to a distributor. That movie came out, it is now done over, I believe the number, the current number is $250 million in the box office, beating out, you know, massive projects like Mandalorian and Grogu in, in direct competition with those things. And that's somebody who is a sketch comic from YouTube. So I think that, that that line is continuing to be blurred more and more. And so I have nothing but hope and optimism for Nikki, if that's the direct wants to continue going in. So when the gatekeepers tell you no, just build your own gate and walk through it. Number two, make the thing that you think is funny, not the thing that you think will perform. We're talking about this just from a creator perspective. She talked about not looking at the analytics, not tracking how a video does. The second that she starts making decisions based on what worked instead of what she finds genuinely funny, that's when she said she'd just lose her mind. And I, I've seen this happen with a bunch of creators over the years. And look, do what you gotta do, right? Make, make the decisions that are gonna be best for you and your family. Because sometimes it's like, sometimes that is what you should do because you're in a, you know, you work A, a 9 to 5 that you hate and you're using your spare time to make YouTube videos and you've done it for two and a half years. Then you finally, you know, let's say you, you made a channel to talk about these, you know, this, other topics, you know, sports or whatever. And then you make one video that's about your gear list for shooting the videos that you've made for the past two and a half years and that video ends up going viral. And then you're just kind of like, ooh, well I, I actually made like three grand on affiliate commissions talking about this high priced camera gear. And I made, you know, four grand from YouTube monetization and then I got a couple sponsorship offers or brand deals from this video. What if I just keep making more videos about that and maybe that's a good path for somebody who's trying to get out of this world and there's like, look, somebody's willing to pay me to do this thing. I don't care what the video is, I'm going to make those videos because that's what's working fine, do that. But you can only do that for so long until you start feeling the same way about that then as you did your 9 to 5 job. And I've talked to several creators who feel chained now by the successes they've had in their field. Because it's like, look, I'm making 15 grand a month making videos about whatever tech reviews like I just was mentioning, but that's not at all what I got into this space for. And I'm starting to feel burnt out and starting to feel bogged down. I, and I, and I wish I could make money doing this other thing. So, so have a little bit of self awareness to understand exactly where you are in this. But for her, it's like, look, I'm not looking at the analytics, I'm not going to track how the video does. I, I Don't want videos just because there's an audience for them. I want to make videos that I find funny and that I really want to do. So her, the video that she made on Lancaster, which was fantastic. Her and Brent made a video on Lancaster. And I mean, it's a hyper niche subject, right? Like it's a video in her words. It's a video for us and then for a very specific group of people, just like they were driving through Lancaster, thought it was gross, and then thought it would be funny to make a video about vacationing in Lancaster. For those who don't know, I grew up in Lancaster, which is why I found this video to be hilarious. I think this is actually the first time I saw her stuff. Actually somebody sent me the video because I grew up in Lancaster. So when they made a video making fun of Lancaster, it was like, haha, I get it, hilarious. I sent it a bunch of my friends that grew up there. So that's a deep cut. You know, it's not, there's not a massive audience for that video, but they just thought it was going to be funny and decided to make the video anyway. And it's the one that ended up leading to our conversation and our friendship and things like that. So you just never know, man. Just do build. Like if you're gonna create, create what you want to create, create what feels good to you. And if you do that for long enough, odds are you're gonna find some sort of an audience somewhere who cares about the things that you care about. In her case, people who have a similar sense of humor, you know, and this is the true of all sketch comedy. Like you can go the comments of any sketch comic or standup comic and see people being like, oh, none of this is funny. Oh hey, try being funny next time. Like, oh, did you ever, you should tell some jokes or something. And it's like, look, you're always going to run into that, especially in the creative field. You're going to find people who don't think you're funny. There are people who don't think the most famous comedians on the planet are funny, but apparently millions of other people still do. So just find, you know, find your tribe and you find your tribe by creating stuff that feels authentic and true to yourself, not by just following what the analytics are telling you to make more or less of. So number three, burn the escape plan. Burn the escape plan. So when she first moved, she moved out of Florida and she moved toward New York and then la. She made a decision that if this doesn't work, I'm finished. And then she told me that not once did she consider going home. Not, not once. She said the second that you start thinking about what happens if it doesn't work, you've already started hedging your investment.
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So the, the, the if this doesn't work, I'm done thing like that was never something that was in her, in her mind and I think I said that wrong earlier. She, that was something that she was not willing to go to. The second that you start building in an escape plan, the obstacles that it will inevitably come up along the way will encourage you to just take the exit door because you've already hedged your investment. So she was fully in, she was fully committed. Moving from Florida to New York and then la, going to places where films are being made and, and acting gigs and there were producers and actors and directors at your local coffee shop. That's what she wanted to do. She built that environment and she moved to that environment because that's who she wanted to be. And that level of commitment is what allows you to keep going through the gig economy of trade shows and modeling and food promo work and years and years of auditions that led nowhere and eventually got her to the point where she is now, which is building a successful career as a comedy creator for herself. So burn the escape plan number four. The who and the what are intertwined, but most people ignore the who part entirely. This came out of a long conversation, obviously about networking, making friends, which is what I talk about a lot. And her answer to the who you know versus what you know question was a both and what you know should include knowing that you need people. If you think that it's only about the work or the competence or the skill, you'll be technically excellent but completely isolated. So she said she spent years just working, waking up at 4:30am, not going anywhere, not meeting anyone, and because she thought that that was going to be the path. But she's a better artist now that, that she's actually living a life, going on vacation, saying yes to things, going out with people, letting the experiences that she has in life feed the work that she's doing. And in a creative context that makes a lot, makes a big difference. If you, if you start to lose touch with, with the people you've built an audience with, the audience that you've built, you start to lose touch with like what their day to day lives look like. And you can't, like it's gonna be more difficult for you to write from that perspective because you're so involved in the way that your life works that you forget how it works for the people who are consuming your stuff and the audience that you built. So it becomes more difficult to make things that, that, that you and the audience are both going to like and that you're going to want to stick to long term. So don't neglect the people part of whatever you're doing. And I would obviously argue that the people part is even more important than even what, what she was hedging about or what she was talking about here. And I, I personally believe too that the who will inform the what to a significantly higher degree than the opposite way around. Like the people that you get around, if they're really good at what they do, then they will just make you a better version of yourself inevitably by being around those people even and especially in a creative space or a comedy space like this one. Number five, rejection is not a matter of if, it's a matter of when and how many times. Obviously I grew up knocking doors as a kid, fundamentalist Baptist church. Then I moved into door to door solar sales and, and then, and then she was talking about it from auditions and stand up comedy. And so I, I've frequently said to especially people when I, when I get a chance to sit down with like a comic like this or an actor, you know, we talk about rejection because I feel that doing like door to door sales or telemarketing, like cold calling, those two things are probably the highest rate of rejection in the business and sales world. But I always frame it like that because when I ask somebody like this I'm like, but if there's one industry where you maybe and probably will experience more rejection than I did as a door to door salesperson, it's acting, it's going to auditions and, or doing standup comedy and things like that, being in this creative endeavor, this field of gatekeepers. So she described it not as resilience building, but as baseline expectation. Rejection is implied in anything unconventional. You're going to get rejected all the way to the top even after you've made it to the top, you're still going to get rejected. It is not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. It should just be a baseline expectation. And the sooner you can get to a place where you don't take those things personally, the better off you're going to be. Be. And I brought up a book by Tim Ferriss. I think this one was Tribe of Mentors. I think the first one was Tools of Titans. And then he did Tribe of Mentors after. And she connected to this example as well. Because when Tim Ferriss wrote this book and he was already Tim Ferriss, right, He already had, you know, however many New York Times bestsellers. He was, you know, the. The oracle essentially of Silicon Valley, investing in a bunch of companies, very successful guy, sort of the first live biohacker. Like somebody who was just like, I tried this experiment on myself, here's how it went. Famous blog, massive newsletter, New York Times. Like, he already had all these accolades. And when he was writing to people to be involved in the Tribe of Mentors project, which is basically like him getting advice from mentors that most people don't have access to, when he wrote that book, he still got a bunch of rejection letters from people who were just like, hey, I don't have time for this. Thank you for reaching out. So what he ended up doing was he included a full chapter in Tribe of Mentors that were all the rejection letters that he got. And the frame of the chapter was, here's how to say no when you're too busy for things, even if it's a good opportunity. And it was like, all the people who said no to him recognized that they were saying no to a good opportunity, but they were just like, I just don't have the time to do it right now. So respectfully, no. And so he ended up just basically replying back to them and saying, great, no worries, you don't have to be involved. But also, you mind if I include this letter in a chapter? So he actually ended up getting them involved even though they said no to being involved. Then it turned into a really helpful chapter. But it was also helpful for me just to hear that because, like, in your mind, you think, once I make it to this stage, then I will no longer have to deal with rejection. It's just going to be yeses and yeses and opportunities and opportunities. And it was helpful for me to see somebody like Tim Ferriss be open and honest about the volume of rejection that he got when he was putting together a project like this. Because it made me just be like. It like, brought him back down to earth. You know what I mean? It brought. It brought him back down to this place of, oh, well, even. Even, I guess it helped me accept reality for as it is that. That there is not going to be a time and a place where this rejection just magically goes away. You're still going to experience rejection regardless of how successful you become. So, again, it made me. It made me even more internalize that lesson of just like, yeah, rejection is it. It's part of the game. And the sooner you can get better at taking rejection, the sooner you can build your confidence to the degree where each individual rejection shakes your confidence a little bit less than the last one did, the better off that you're going to be in life. And she very much resonated with that, coming from the acting world and getting rejected from auditions and things like that. So rejection's not a matter of if. It's a matter of when and how many times. So plenty of great stuff from my conversation with Nikki, not to mention, like, whenever you talk to a comic, it just is. They just have a way of making things fun. So I always enjoy the time that I get to sit down with Nikki and have a conversation because we get into some good stuff. But there's also just a lot of laughs and good times along the way. So I highly recommend checking out the full episode with Nikki Howard over on Travis Makes Friends, but that's it for this one. Thanks so much for tuning in. We'll catch you guys on the next episode. Peace.