Two weeks into a 30-day daily YouTube experiment, a coach admits he built a worse version of his weekly show and explains the reset.
Posted
today
Duration
Format
Talking Head
sincere
Views
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57 · 43
Big Idea
The argument in one line.
A daily video only stays sustainable if it is treated as a rough daily demo, not a polished single, so keep the process easy enough that you never have to edit.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
A coach or consultant who started, or is thinking about starting, a daily video habit and is already dreading the workload.
A creator who keeps rebuilding a polished weekly process every day and wonders why content stopped being fun.
Someone who hates editing and is tempted to hand it to AI tools or hire help rather than simplify the format.
SKIP IF…
You want a step-by-step YouTube growth or algorithm tutorial; this is a personal debrief, not a how-to.
You already ship daily content without strain and need advanced optimization tactics.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
Taki Moore started a 30-day daily YouTube experiment and two weeks in found he had simply made a worse daily copy of his polished weekly show. Using a skill-versus-difficulty chart, he explains he took on too much with too little skill, over-engineered his before, during and after process, and ended up spending five hours getting AI to edit one video. His fix is the music metaphor: dailies are demos, weekly videos and emails are singles, and workshops are the album. He resets with three moves: experiment with different inputs, treat each video like a daily email, and publish raw with no edit.
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Inspired by Dean Jackson and another daily creator, Taki started a 30-day experiment meant to loosen up his YouTube habit and instead made a worse daily version of his weekly videos.
01:52 – 04:50
02 · Skill versus difficulty, and fun versus useful
He draws the flow zone model and a fun-versus-useful grid, admitting he has been stuck in useful-but-not-fun with level 10 taste and low execution skill.
04:50 – 07:42
03 · Over-engineered and under-estimated
A session with Boardroom clients, prompted by a client's flow work, leads him to the before, during and after view of making a video.
07:42 – 10:39
04 · Before: ideas, outline and format
A weekly process cannot run daily. He wants an idea-to-live video in 30 minutes and still has no format for a daily.
10:39 – 15:27
05 · During and after: the drawing rig and editing pain
Wanting to draw while filming led to a swing-arm phone rig, upside-down notebook shots, and a five-hour AI-assisted edit that he hated.
15:27 – 18:23
06 · Singles, albums and daily demos
Using a band metaphor, he realises he treated dailies like singles and forgot the demo stage that his daily email already fills.
18:23 – 20:43
07 · The reset: three changes
He will experiment with inputs, treat each video like a daily email with black and white thumbnails, and publish with no edit.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
Daily content fails when you copy your polished weekly process every day, because the care that makes a weekly good is exactly what makes a daily unsustainable.
Frustration comes from a hard task at a low skill level and boredom from an easy one, so the aim is the flow zone between them.
Good content for a business sits where it is fun for you, useful for the audience, and useful for the business, and losing the fun makes the habit collapse.
Taste can run far ahead of skill: level 10 taste with level 2 execution skill makes every attempt feel like failure.
Needing to edit turns a fast, fun shoot into a punishment, so design the shoot so no editing is required.
Spending five hours directing an AI editor on a 20-minute video is a sign the format is wrong, not that the tool needs better prompting.
Thinking in before, during and after phases shows where a daily video process is leaking time.
A coaching business can sell like a band: free singles build the earworm, a workshop is the album, and the program is the tour.
A daily demo is a rough expression you publish to see if anything is there, and success is just whether it was fun and useful.
Sending a daily email for two and a half years works because the email feels easy, while a YouTube video feels like a big serious thing.
Changing a thumbnail to black and white is a cheap reminder to yourself that this upload is a demo, not a single.
If you only trust yourself to cut the start and end off a clip, design every video to need nothing more than that.
Takeaway
Make daily content a demo, not a single
WHAT TO LEARN
A daily content habit survives only when it is easy, fun and rough, so treat each upload as a demo and design out anything, like editing, that turns it into a chore.
01The daily video isn't going well
Do not copy your polished weekly process into a daily habit; the same care that makes the weekly good makes the daily unsustainable.
02Skill versus difficulty, and fun versus useful
Match difficulty to your current skill: a task far above your skill brings frustration, and one far below it brings boredom.
Check whether your content is fun for you, useful to your audience, and useful to your business; losing the fun is what ends the habit.
04Before: ideas, outline and format
Audit a video in three phases, before, during and after, to find the one that is adding the most friction.
05During and after: the drawing rig and editing pain
Choose a recording setup that needs no editing, because even a simple extra step like flipping footage can turn a fun shoot into a punishment.
06Singles, albums and daily demos
Treat the free content like singles, a workshop like the album and the program like the tour, so each piece of content has a clear job.
07The reset: three changes
Publish rough daily demos and judge them only by whether they were fun and useful, and use visible reminders like black and white thumbnails to keep that mindset.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
Daily demo
A rough, unpolished piece of content published every day just to test an idea, judged only by whether it was fun to make and useful to someone.
Single
A polished, high-effort piece of content meant to spread widely and live in people's heads, the way a hit song works for a band.
Flow zone
The band where a task's difficulty matches your skill, so it is neither frustrating nor boring.
Vibe editing
Having an AI model operate video editing software such as DaVinci Resolve for you through conversation instead of editing by hand.
Quotables
Lines you could clip.
00:00
“About two weeks ago, I decided to do a daily video and I wish I hadn't.”
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Hey dude, about two weeks ago, I decided to do a daily video and I wish I hadn't. Frankly, it's not going great at all. And this video, I'm going to tell you what I've learned, what's working, what's not, what I'm going to do about it in case you've been a little bit inspired or been wondering like I have, what the hell is this guy doing with his life?
I got inspired a couple of weeks ago. by Dean Jackson and a cat called Fred in Denmark who are doing daily videos and making it look easy. I was like, dude, that's great.
I enjoy YouTube. I love teaching. I'm going to do the same.
I figured out a few things I could learn from them and then promptly ignored all of the smart decisions I'd made. So to be honest, I've thought about stopping pretty much every single day since I started. And I know I have permission to.
But if I did stop, I would lose the real benefit of this 30 -day experiment, which is like learning the lessons and seeing if there's a way that I can, you know, I can learn, I can get better, da -da -da. The whole goal of this was like, can we, can I create a video that is, can I kind of reframe my relationship with YouTube so it's a little bit looser, a little bit more unhinged, a little bit more raw dog.
And instead, I've managed to like basically replicate. my weekly videos, which are a bit more polished and hopefully better and try to do that every day. And so I think, yeah, I've basically done a shit daily version of what I've been doing a good weekly version of for ages.
And that's not, that's not ideal. So here's kind of what's been in my head about, actually, let me, let me see if I can, yeah, darken up the screen so it's easy to draw. If you think about, think about any skill, There's like the difficulty of the skill, like how hard it is compared to the skill level you've got and the skill set you've got.
And like I'm pretty good at this stuff. I've been doing it for a little while. But like if we break this into like a couple of zones, how do I do that?
Let me, yeah, let me do this. Break it into a couple of zones. Oops.
Clearly I'm a pro here.
Marker, fat, yellow. Let's do that. Yeah, that's what we want.
We've got kind of three zones. And if you do something that you're not that great at and you make it really, really hard, you get frustrated and you give up or at least want to give up. That's been me the last little while.
If you do something that's too easy, you get a bit bored or at least I do. and you quit. And I've been on this kind of elusive search for the flow zone.
And I haven't nailed it. I've got like level 10 taste about what a YouTube video could be. And frankly, level two, level two is generous, level minus 58 skills at like actually pulling it off solo without help.
So let me show you what the goal was. and kind of where I'm at, what I've learned. Maybe this is useful.
I just got it off my chest. If it's useful for you too, bonus points to you and me. Cool.
So my goal with this YouTube thing was to create content that was fun for me and useful for both of us. Like it was ideally in a sweet spot, it's fun for... Taki, because then it's sustainable and I'll keep going and fun for you to watch and follow along.
And then useful for you and your coaching business, but also useful for me and mine, because when I do stuff like this, it grows the biz. So that was the idea. Here's where I've ended up.
I really desperately, actually, let me put that back on. I really desperately wanted to be up here in the Taki's doing fun and useful stuff mode. But over the last little while, I think the videos have been useful, but it's been so far from fun.
I've lived a bunch of time down here, maybe a little bit of time down there, and a lot of time bottom right. I've probably spent more time here, if I'm honest, than I wanted to. And so this video, I've successfully proved a bunch of things which haven't worked, and I just want to get myself...
I just want to get myself back into the fun zone.
So let me, wait, what's going on there? That's what I want. Let me show you a couple of things that I've learned.
The first thing I've realized that I've like completely over -engineered this process and also underestimated what it took. And if we think about that difficulty and skill model from before, I've definitely, while my skills were low, I've tried to bite off more than I could chew. And I've been, over attempting hard things instead of making it really freaking easy.
So let's not do that ever again.
The way that, you know, it's hilarious. I started this, I'm making this video right now because about 10 minutes ago, I got off a, what's going on? That's what I want.
I'm making this video right now because 29 minutes ago, I hung up from a Zoom call with our crew at Boardroom. And this is what you need to know.
Three weeks ago, I was like on fire with vids, super inspired. Things were going great. And that's when I made this stupid decision to do dailies.
It's not stupid. I've just approached it wrong. And I'd helped out one of my clients, Tom Nosky, who's amazing here on YouTube, with finding more flow for him.
And together, we decided, Tony and I decided to do a... a session for boardroom out high -level clients on making youtube easy and kind of share some of what we've learned me and tom and then dean jackson who's crushing his daily vids as well i think it's like 129 days straight super good so i like i planned this session for our clients in a moment of like victory and everything's epic and then proceeded to like dig myself a freaking hole so today's session with boardroom started a lot like the start of this video i'm like frankly I booked this session when I was on a high, but I need it more than anybody else here.
So I took it as like input, like I got heaps out of this session. Anyway, when I started the process, I thought a little bit about kind of the three phases of making a video. You know, there's the before, the during, and the after.
Like before is coming up with the... you know, the idea for what's the video going to be about and a little bit of prep. And then during is like recording it.
That's a pretty old school camera, but you know, recording the thing. And then afterwards is like all the things that you need to do to take the video from here and get it to land on YouTube. I've made this way harder than it needs to be.
And so before, during and after is completely the way to think about it. But let me show you some of the mistakes so that you can please don't make these mistakes.
Some of these will apply to you more than others, but I just wanted to share, get this kind of off my chest. The first thing that I realized is the stuff that makes making a daily YouTube vid easy, I'm trying to figure out how to get a black pen and I've completely forgotten how to do that. It's got to be a way to get a black pen.
Fuck it. I haven't got time to learn that live. Let's just put that back and white will be completely okay.
Some of the things that make it easy is when you get like the ideas like fed to you instead of having to invent stuff. So coming up with the idea is the first thing and then like figuring out an outline. And for my weekly YouTube videos, I've got like a process for that.
But I didn't, because I wanted this to be daily, I don't want to put the same level of like care and love and craft. I'm probably making this sound like I want it to be shit. I'm probably, this needs to be easy.
And the goal is I want to go from, I've got an idea to there's a video live on the internet in 30 minutes. And I can't put the same level of like attention to like, what do we call it? And what's the outline and the structure and the strategy of it for the other stuff?
Hey, Ethan's walking in. Ethan, do you need a hand? No, he's good.
So it needs to be much, much faster. And I just want to be able to go from an idea to a vid quicker. And that means because I'm not going to put the same level of care and love and mostly time into a daily, it can't be the same format.
And so I've like really struggled to like, okay, I've got some ideas, but like, what's the... What's the framework for a daily vid like this? I'm still figuring that out to be super honest.
So that was the before. In terms of the during, the actual shoot itself, like in terms of before, I think the thing I really need to work on is like, what's the format? And I don't mean that in some like TV show formula, but like it can't just be a teach because if it wants to be a teach, I've got a process for that.
It's good, but I can't go from, like that needs some, that needs time. In terms of the during, in terms of the during, the big issue really, actually the most, to be, can I be honest? The big issue happened right here.
And it started with how I like to do the during. So let me, let me just explain.
The first video I shot, I'm like, I'm just gonna shoot it on my phone. And so I got my phone, that's cool. The challenge I've got is I like to draw stuff.
I think best with a pen in my hand. Maybe it's just like, I've got a friend who makes YouTube videos and he's always got a coffee cup in his hand. And it's kind of, I guess it's a little bit of a trademark signature thing.
But I also learned that when you've got something in your hand, it takes the pressure off. So maybe it's a little bit of that. But for me, I'm quite visual.
And I think best when I've got a pen. When I'm coaching a client, I'm never just like this. I'm always talking and drawing because then I can get an idea and explain something pretty clearly with a visual model or a circle or a triangle or a square or whatever to map out the thing.
I was like, okay, so I want to do these vids, but I love to draw. How the hell do I do that all by myself without having two cameras? Because if I have two cameras, that means I'm going to need to edit afterwards.
I don't want to edit. So the solution I came up with is...
Actually, I'll show you. Have you ever seen a podcast and they've got those big like podcast boom microphone? This is a camera lens, but let's pretend that's a podcast mic.
And so they have those like these things and the podcast mic is right there. I've never done that because having a large phallic object in my mouth kind of puts me off, if I'm honest. But I do have like the swing arm thing, like the thing that the microphone would sit on.
But instead of a microphone, I just put my phone on it. And so... I did that.
And this is how I shot my first vid. And I like to draw. So I'm like, okay, well, I could just like have the camera here and talk to it.
And then I've got my notepad down here and just like flip the camera down and scribble some stuff and then flip the camera up and just do that kind of rotation thing. And that was pretty good, except, by the way, the other weird thing about shooting at your house is your kids walk past when they're not supposed to, but that's all right.
Except the problem was this. If you think about this camera, that's the top of the, phone and that's the top of this shot.
But when I flip it down, the top of the phone now becomes the bottom of the notebook. And so I had this thing where it ended up looking like this. There'd be two shots, you know, there's Taki talks and that's great.
And then there'd be another shot with my notebook.
And it should say like, it should look like that. But instead it, I can't draw my name upside down, but you get the idea. Actually, it wasn't as hard as I thought.
Instead, everything was like that. And I needed a way after I'd shot it to flip it back around the right way, or the video would be upside down and weird, which meant that all of a sudden this thing, which went from like, I could shoot it fast and it was a great fun video to shoot, but then I needed to. freaking edit the video.
And I hate, I didn't get into this thing to be the editor. It's got to be loose. And so I ended up having to like, ended up having to edit vids and I didn't, oops, I didn't know how to do it.
And a friend told me about like vibe editing, like where you get like Claude or GPT to like log into DaVinci Resolve or whatever.
And this was the single most most frustrating thing I've done in my business in the last... It sucked, dude.
I had a 20 -minute video and it took five freaking hours of talking to a robot to... Not fun. It took five hours to edit a fucking video.
I think the most editing I really am comfortable doing is if I've got a video clip that looks like this, I'm okay if we just have to like cut the start off and cut the end off, but I don't want to do anything more than that.
Because if I do, it's a punishment. I just won't do it. It's not fun anymore.
So that's that. So lesson one, it stopped being fun and useful and just started being useful and not fun. Lesson two, I overcomplicated the process because I like to draw.
And now all of a sudden I'm like editing videos. And so if you've watched any of my videos and the color's been shit, or you can tell that AI has like... Edited the video.
That's because AI freaking edited the video because I don't want to learn to become a video editor.
And it did a shit job. I'm responsible for that. Don't blame the robots.
They're learning. They weren't well trained by the talkster. And so the simple answer is it isn't get better at editing or get somebody else to edit.
It's just like, can we just not edit, please? That's why this video is going to be a little bit crap in the best possible way. Last, last thing.
I've been thinking a lot and talking a lot lately about this idea of we've all got a coaching program we want to sell, which is like, if you think about, yeah, most of us market our coaching business like a marketer, like a marketer in a coaching business. But we've done really, really well selling out our stuff, not by thinking like a marketer at all, but by thinking like a musician or a band.
And you think about like, if you're a musician, you're not like running pay -per -click campaigns or anything like that. The way they sell out their tour, in this metaphor, the tour is your coaching program. The way we sell out the tour is by releasing epic singles that live rent -free in, you know, you play them for free on Spotify, on the radio, whatever.
People get them in their head like an earworm. They can't get rid of them. If somebody loves the singles, they are way more likely to buy your album and those people are way more likely to come on the tour.
And so that's how we've been running the coaching business. We release great singles on Instagram and with my weekly YouTube vids. Each month we run a workshop and the workshops are super dope.
That's like our album, a chance for people to pay a little bit of money and spend a little bit of time. And they come on the tour. So that's the idea.
But what I completely forgot is I've been treating daily videos like they're a single. And I forgot the step that comes before it, which takes all the pressure off. This is like my mate Dan gave me this feedback yesterday.
I was like, oh, that's it.
Before you can create a great single, what we do is we create a daily demo. In other words, something that's a little bit raw, a little bit rough, just to see if there's anything there.
And I've been publishing like daily demos for like two and a half years now. In my email, I like find an idea that I'm excited about. I write something about it.
I hit send and it blams out to like thousands upon thousands and thousands of people. And I don't care how it goes. It's a daily demo.
It's just an expression. And if it does well, cool. If it doesn't do well, cool.
Did I have fun? Was it useful? That's the benchmark.
But I've made YouTube this whole other thing trying to create singles when a daily vid should just be a daily demo in my head. So they're the three big lessons. Sorry, this is taking so long, but I feel it's cathartic.
Thanks for listening.
Here's what I'm going to do about it. Three things. Number one, I'm going to experiment.
with different inputs. In other words, I don't want to just do a teach like I've been doing before. It could be a Q &A.
It could be take an email or tell a story, a little bit of an update from life. I'm going to experiment with different inputs to see if I can make it more fun and then figure out like what's the format for these vids.
I'm going to keep going because otherwise I don't learn the stuff. Number two.
I'm going to treat it like a daily demo.
And part of the problem was in my head, a YouTube video was this big serious thing, but an email is easy. And so I'm just going to treat them like I treat my emails. Partly that's in my head.
And I'm also like, frankly, a little bit worried that you'll see these vids and be like, oh, this isn't as polished or as good or as whatever and hate it. And it'll fuck up my other vids. That's possible, but I don't think it will.
But as part of like tricking myself into remembering that it's a daily demo. I'm going to change the, I'm going to put, you know, the thumbnails. On YouTube, you've got like a description, like a title, and then a thumbnail with some words or whatever.
I'm going to make the thumbnails for these, I think, black and white for a bit, just as a reminder to myself that it's a daily demo. It doesn't matter. But the most important thing is that in my head, it's a daily demo.
It's not a single. And then number three, there's going to be no edit, and I'm just going to raw dog this motherfucker.
I don't know if this is helpful for you. I feel great having said it. Now you know what's going on with the daily vids.
Thank you for all the comments about your editing sucks. It has. That problem is going to be fixed because I'm not going to edit.
I'm just going to upload these things raw. I'm still not sure if I'm going to shoot on my phone or here at my desk. Anyway, let me know in the comments what you think.
If this is helpful for you, tell me, tell me, tell me. And as always, if you want to find out how to work with me, there's links in the description below. If you're under 10K or if you're over 10K, I'll show you how to do.
How to do that. By the way, if you want to see the video that kicked off this whole like daily fiasco, it's actually a great vid. You can watch that one up here.
Tell you what inspired me and some of the lessons I've learned from my buddy, Dean Jackson. And where's the other one? And what's it?
Regis Philbin.
Watch that if you're interested.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Taki Moore opens by saying his daily video experiment is going badly and he thinks about quitting every day. The rest is a candid debrief that ends with a plan to stop editing altogether.
Frameworks
Named ideas worth stealing.
01:53model
Skill versus difficulty flow zone
Too hard: frustration
Too easy: boredom
Flow zone between them
Matching task difficulty to current skill keeps a habit enjoyable; a task much harder than your skill level makes you want to quit.
Steal forany creator or coach setting up a new recurring content habit
03:23model
Fun and useful grid
Fun for me
Useful for the audience
Useful for my business
Sustainable content sits where it is fun for the maker and useful for both audience and business.
Steal forchoosing what content to keep making
06:42list
Before, during, after
Before: idea and prep
During: recording
After: everything to get it live
Three phases of making a video, used to find which phase is making the process too hard.
Steal forauditing any content workflow
15:27model
Singles, album, tour
Singles: free content that becomes an earworm
Album: a paid workshop
Tour: the coaching program
A coaching business can sell like a band by releasing free content people love first, then a low-cost workshop, then the full program.
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