Why a good title and thumbnail image can make all the difference

By Jack Conte

In this episode of Digital Spaghetti, musician and Patreon founder Jack Conte talks business and creativity with YouTuber Sabrina Cruz from Answer in Progress.


Sabrina Cruz makes learning fun through her lively videos that dive deep into niche and nerdy subjects. Her channel Answer in Progress, made with collaborators Taha Khan and Melissa Fernandes, has had explosive growth since launching just two years ago. Their wide-ranging videos cover topics like olive oil fraud, mechanical keyboards, and why it took 200 years to invent the wheel.

In this conversation, Sabrina talks with Patreon founder Jack Conte about her team's approach to producing high-quality, thoroughly researched videos on a schedule; their principle for making each video at least 1% better than the last; and how starting each video with a strong title and thumbnail image has been a game changer.

Transcript:

Sabrina Cruz:

We all have this philosophy where what is good rises to the top. Frequency, regularity didn't matter as much as quality and a good title and thumbnail. What should this video be about? What is the conclusion? Who are we making this for? What is the overall message? What is Answer in Progress trying to do?

Jack Conte:

It's not to answer the question, it's —

Sabrina Cruz:

It's an answer in progress. Hello, we are back.

Jack Conte:

Since high school, Sabrina Cruz has been making educational videos for YouTube. She even hosted a show for Crash Course when she was 16.

Video clip:

Welcome to Crash Course Kids. I'll be your host as we explore the incredible world of science.

Jack Conte:

Sabrina is an absolute master of storytelling and animation and editing to combine them all and make a video that is incredible to watch.

Video clip:

I am really bad at dressing for the weather and I blame Celsius.

Jack Conte:

Her new YouTube channel Answer in Progress, which she makes with her friends Taha and Melissa, has gotten over a million subscribers in just the two years since they started. I sat down with Sabrina to talk about how she and her team keep up with regularly posting videos that have such a high bar for research and storytelling. And bonus: She has an awesome take on titles and thumbnails.

Yo.

Sabrina Cruz:

Hello.

Jack Conte:

Welcome.

Sabrina Cruz:

I don't know why I'm doing this, but we're going for it.

Jack Conte:

Welcome to the fight today.

Sabrina Cruz:

Let's go.

Jack Conte:

We're gonna punch each other.

Sabrina Cruz:

Oh! Creator clash.

Jack Conte:

Just metaphorically. Okay, so where I wanna start is first of all, like, congrats. You're freaking crushing it. The channel is so good!

Sabrina Cruz:

It's terrifying.

Jack Conte:

Is it? Is that what it feels like right now?

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah, yeah, I think so because like, just recently, our video hit the trending pages for the first time, and our team's reaction was just like, "Oh!" Like, I feel like we celebrate milestones incorrectly at Answer in Progress. We hit a million subscribers and we just like, tried to FaceTime each other, couldn't get the audio working, hit each other with a thumbs up. We're like, "We did it. Now what?" And then our video hit trending, and it was like, I don't know how to describe it. It's terrifying, it's like —

Jack Conte:

What's terrifying about it? Is it the scale, is it like, oh my God, there's so many people now looking at this thing that we made? I wonder if the thing is worthy of that or correct or is it that it's influencing people?

Sabrina Cruz:

I think that's it. I think it's the pressure of just like, because when you're a smaller creator, you almost get like, more opportunities to stumble a bit. You have a small community who can like help shape where you're going. They could say like, "Hey, I think you got this wrong, or you could have made this clearer," but suddenly you land on trending — it's exponential. You don't really have that much room to like, stumble around and play in it. And that is a lot of pressure. I hope that we're like, living up to that pressure and like, reacting correctly, but it's scary.

Jack Conte:

Do you feel your creative process changing at all now that you have so much reach and that you've got a million subscribers? Do you feel a sense of weight or responsibility?

Sabrina Cruz:

We always thought we felt that weight. We've always cared quite a bit about like, being accurate, doing our research, citing our sources from the beginning. But until now it's kind of felt like, yeah, we're doing this just because like, we care about this. And now it's like, you need to do this.

Jack Conte:

So I guess the question for you is, by the way, musicians have this too, right? It's like, oh my god, I put out a... or at least I have this, and I know other musicians who have it too. It's like, I made a thing, people like it. Then there's like, it's sophomore album syndrome, right? It's like, oh my God, I gotta make another thing that that's as good as my last thing. The trouble that I've experienced with that, and I know a lot of people who have too, is that weight and pressure changes the creative process and then I find myself self-editing more, being a little less flippant or silly or fun, which is what attracted people to the thing in the first place. Are you seeing your creative process change to the point where you're worried that it's gonna affect the quality of the work?

Sabrina Cruz:

Oh, that's a tough one. I wanna say no because we're currently at this stage where like, this growth has been propelled by this intentional decision for two, these two intentional decisions. One, let's make everything at least 1% better than anything we've ever made before.

Jack Conte:

I love that.

Sabrina Cruz:

The original plan was, is this the best thing you ever made? That was like the tagline and then we were like, that is so much pressure, so we just shifted it to like 1% better in any way, so —

Jack Conte:

Why 1%? Where does that philosophy come from?

Sabrina Cruz:

It seems achievable, right? But yeah, I think it's just 1% felt like an achievable goal, but it also felt like, really tangible. Like, our goal is to get 1% better at anything on any given day.

Jack Conte:

So, I love that and I talk about that all the time. I think the thing that makes 1% so special is on the one hand, yes, it's super achievable, but also, if you make a lot of things and they keep getting 1% better, a year later, you look up and it's 50% better than it was 12 months ago.

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah, it's amazing.

Jack Conte:

It's so good!

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah.

Jack Conte:

And so if you just focus on that 1%, like, even in any given day, if you're looking around or you know you're bored or you don't know what to do or like, I'm feeling like I'm not being super creative, I'm like, how can I make things 1% better right now? And it doesn't have to be like, ground... I just wanna make it 1% better. And if I do that every day, I'm gonna make a bunch of cool shit!

Sabrina Cruz:

Exactly. And the other thing is that it like, really helps you focus on what you should be training because like, if your only goal is, I want to be better... be better at what? It almost feels overwhelming, and you don't even know where to start. But if it's 1% better, you could just say like, I wanna get 1% better at production. I wanna care more about my lighting. I wanna care more about my editing. And then, it's like these tangible goals that you can actually effectively work on.

Jack Conte:

So, take us back to before Answer in Progress started working. You were in college.

Sabrina Cruz:

Yep.

Jack Conte:

I'm curious to hear how it started and what that transition was like from doing something else full-time to being a creator full-time. Because that's the transition that I think is probably the hardest bit for most creators.

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah. So, I was making a lot of nerd culture videos. I'd been vlogging on the internet for like 10 years, eight years prior. I started basically the moment I could legally hit yeah, I'm of the right age to use youtube.com.

Jack Conte:

So like when you were 13 is when you started using YouTube?

Sabrina Cruz:

Yep, I started uploading then.

Jack Conte:

How old are you now?

Sabrina Cruz:

Good question. 24?

Jack Conte:

Okay.

Sabrina Cruz:

Question mark. Also needs a fact check.

Jack Conte:

So, you started YouTube 11 years ago.

Sabrina Cruz:

Well, now when you say that, that's upsetting.

Jack Conte:

Why? 'Cause that sounds like a long time?

Sabrina Cruz:

Yes.

Jack Conte:

But you're crushing it. It takes 10 years to crush.

Sabrina Cruz:

Yes. That is the other thing. Like, it feels like we've put in our time, so I was making a lot of nerd culture videos. Taha was across the ocean. He was making like, a lot more comedy videos. But the two of us had these aspirations to make like, educational content for people like us, people who were like, burnt out in college, real tired of everything, but we just weren't able to really do it. And then I started working with my long-term collaborator from high school; she sat next to me in film class, and I always forced her to do things with me. Started working with her and we realized like, this process really works, this collaborative process of like, having somebody who's by your side, helps you fact check, like you could bounce ideas off them. It works, it makes better videos. So, we're like, okay, let's start this channel together, just me and her. And then we were like, wait, Taha's trying to do the exact same thing across the ocean. Why don't we just all do it together because collaboration is so important. It's like the fun of a group project brought to our twenties. So we made the channel, with the same goals that we had from the beginning. And yeah, did that answer your question at all?

Jack Conte:

I guess, so making a channel, right? Millions of people have made channels and they don't get on trending and get a million subscribers.

Sabrina Cruz:

Right.

Jack Conte:

So I — like, what did you do differently? How did you get it to start working, and how did you know when it was starting to work?

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah, so I think we had the benefit of like the team collectively had like 20 years of experience making content, making personality-based content, working with a little bit of EDU stuff. So, we had that foundation. And then Answer in Progress really helped us out because it had a very clear mission. We knew what we wanted to make, we knew who we wanted to make it for. It was just a matter of making it. And I think knowing what you wanna say is really important online, when if you have an unclear message, one, algorithms have no idea where to place you, 'cause you could be making vlogs one day, then you're doing like a really intense tutorial the other day, it's unclear and that's unfortunately, not super successful online. So having that kind of clear, directed purpose not only helped us produce things and give us focus for all this energy we had, but it also helped us like, shape our strategy and how to post online.

Jack Conte:

Did you start with that purpose before making individual videos or did you start making videos and then learn kind of what the strategy was?

Sabrina Cruz:

It's a little bit of both. I think we had that intent. I think it's like the lag between "I want to do this thing" and then actually doing that thing, and it's been like three years and we're still working on like, are we actually achieving our message? Is our message still aligned with what we want to do? So yeah, I think that at the start, we knew what we wanted to say, and it was kind of like, this voice in our head when we ever reached a crossroad of like, what should this video be about? What is the conclusion? Who are we making this for? What's the tone? We think about like, what is the overall message? What is Answer in Progress trying to do? And that kind of helps that decision.

Jack Conte:

Makes sense. Was there like one video when it kind of clicked and it worked and it kind of went viral and you all kind of looked around and said, "Oh man, we can do this"? Or was it like a slow burn where each one started to get a little bit more, like... what was the shape of the trajectory? Do you know what I mean?

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah, I think that it, okay... If you wanna talk about the slow burn of it all, it was our most recent video. That was kind of it. It's been three years.

Jack Conte:

But wait, but you hit a million subs before that, right?

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah. I think part of it is just like, if you do have like, a clear message, and you're working on it, and you are trying to improve that 1% per day, you will get somewhere. But sometimes, that process externally might seem really successful, but internally we still kind of felt really lost. We weren't quite sure what we were doing. We were just kind of like, throwing stuff at the wall, and we were throwing in the right direction, but it still felt unsatisfying.

Jack Conte:

Wait a minute. 2021, 500,000 subscribers. I'm not sure if that's when you had, 500,000.

Sabrina Cruz:

I'm not sure, either.

Jack Conte:

Okay, but suppose it's like, you know, you had to get there at some point. You still feel like, well, we're just throwing stuff at the wall when we release a video, it gets, you know, half a million views, a million views, but like, we feel lost, and we're just throwing stuff against the wall? Like it didn't feel like something was working?

Sabrina Cruz:

The other two might be mad at me for saying this, but I think we were all in agreement. Yeah. Like literally up until two weeks ago, we felt that way. Like, how it works at Answer in Progress is that at the end of the year, we kind of look back on the year, see what went wrong, see what our issues were, and then decide to take those learnings into the next year. Then we follow through on those learnings throughout the whole year, but we never have enough time to like, reevaluate throughout the months, so then by the end of that year we're like, "Oh my god, there were so many more problems that built up." And I think this year was kind of the year where we were like, "What are we doing? What are we making? Who are we making this for?" It really came back down to that original, "What's the message?" You know when you're like, I know what I'm doing, I know what I'm gonna write. You're sitting down, you have this essay that you need to write, it's due in like five hours, and you're like, you procrastinated that long because you're like, I know exactly what I'm gonna write. And then it's time to write and you're like, how do I make the things in my brain become words? That's kind of been our situation for the past three years, and it might still be our situation going forward. I think it's a learning process.

Jack Conte:

So, I mean, which is perfect for the channel. Does that ever get tiring? Because like, the way you're describing, and by the way, I'm not saying that it's unusual, right? I mean —

Sabrina Cruz:

Have you ever experienced this? Do you know what you're doing?

Jack Conte:

Are you kidding me? The truth is I feel that all the time, right? And I don't think people look at Patreon or me from the outside and ever think that someone in my position would feel lost or insecure or anything like that. But the truth is, everybody's a human being, right? And everybody has those sorts of feelings. I guess the question for you is like feeling lost, not knowing what you're doing, feeling like you're just, you know, a paramecium turning 15 degrees each time, bumping into a wall, you know, slowly finding your way blind through the maze. Has it ever felt like that is making you unhappy? And does it ever feel like maybe it's not what you wanna do?

Sabrina Cruz:

I don't think so. I think that like, there's a way to phrase it, like feeling lost, throwing stuff at the wall. It sounds very frustrating, but the actual act of throwing stuff at the wall is very fun. Like, if this thing doesn't work, you've thrown it at the wall, throw another thing at the wall, throw it in a different place, like you get to experiment, and that's something that we really wanted to build into the company, that we have this room to follow what we want to do. Because I think we all have this philosophy where what is good rises to the top. It might take a really long time to get there, but it rises. So, our focus is making what is good and in order to make something good, we have to love it first.

Jack Conte:

Yep. About eight months ago, you made a video for the Google channel about quitting your job.

Sabrina Cruz:

Yes.

Jack Conte:

Two things stood out to me in that video. Three things. One was despite the fact that you are your own boss, you didn't feel like you had a lot of autonomy because like, there's always a million problems and you gotta tackle them. And at the end of the day, the accountability rests on you, and so at least that's how it landed on me in terms of your explanation for not feeling like you had autonomy. The second thing that was interesting about that video was the question, "Do you look forward to your work?" You ranked a two out of five.

Sabrina Cruz:

What did I rank the most important? I have no idea.

Jack Conte:

Community.

Sabrina Cruz:

Oh!

Jack Conte:

Loving your coworkers.

Sabrina Cruz:

Yes.

Jack Conte:

But then, do you like doing the work? Do you look forward to your work? You said, "Ugh, if I'm being honest, I'm gonna give that a two outta five." Do you still feel that way? Is the actual work itself a two out of five for you? Or where do you think your head was eight months ago when you answered two out of five for your work?

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah, so I'll answer that question first then. Fortunately, no, I love my job. I love working on it now. I think that we were in a place where we were like cramming as many things as we could into any given day. We didn't have weekends, we barely had evenings. It was really tiring. And like sometimes, that's like, the sprint that you need to go through for a bit in order to like get the rewards. Now, something that we never wanted to lose sight of was like, we are fighting for our weekends. We are fighting for our evenings. We are fighting for this time back. 'Cause it is really tempting when you have control over all hours of your day to just replace one work, if it's done, start more work. And we had to intentionally make the choice like, no, you finished your work, sign off, leave. We do not wanna talk to each other outside of work hours. So, we were actively fighting for that. We're still actively fighting to make sure that we get work-life balance.

Jack Conte:

And so what does that look like for you now? How do you achieve that?

Sabrina Cruz:

Worst person to ask out of everyone.

Jack Conte:

Why?

Sabrina Cruz:

I love working. 'Cause I get the joy of like being able to focus on creating stuff, right? So then, my brain's always shooting back and forth, like, I wanna make this thing, I wanna make this thing. And it's so tempting to like ignore your friends or your family or like lose... not be present in any given moment. But I think that the way that I'm starting to see it is like, I'm starting to just see... This is the most psychotic I've ever sounded.

Jack Conte:

No! This is the real goods! This is what I'm talking about because honestly, I'm very similar, and I think there's a very popular conversation around work-life balance right now that is aspirational and exciting to think about and something we all strive for and also totally fucking unrealistic!

Sabrina Cruz:

Right.

Jack Conte:

Like if you ask me, like I've not been able to achieve what everybody's talking about is the right thing to do, but like, I guess the... I don't know, like, I don't wanna set a bad example, but also it doesn't make me sad that I don't have that because I love what I do. Like I suffer-love it, if that makes sense.

Sabrina Cruz:

Yes, it makes total sense!

Jack Conte:

It's like a friend of mine calls it type two joy. It's the joy you feel from being six feet under trying to solve a problem, and it's so hard, and you don't know if you can make it, but it's so engaging, and you're so focused. And like ,I get that from all of the work that I do. And so for me, it's not that I can't switch off, it's that I don't really want to entirely switch off. And I realize not everybody is like that, right? Everybody's brain works differently, everybody's work habits are different. But I guess what I hear you saying is that maybe you really love the work, and so you end up spending a lot of time doing it.


"We all have this philosophy where what is good rises to the top. Frequency, regularity didn't matter as much as quality and a good title and thumbnail."


Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah, that's the thing. Like I think we also talked about this in our Google series actually, about like, work-life balance and what it is, because I think some of the popular narratives around it is like, it's almost the complete 180 of hustle culture, right? Like hustle culture, work 24/7, grind. I don't love that. I do not enjoy that. But then like the 180 feels like, very rigid. It's like you work your eight hours, then you live your life in eight hours and then you sleep for eight hours, and it's just like, listen, I'm gonna play it by ear. If I'm passionate about this project now, I'm gonna be passionate about it, and that's okay, but I don't wanna forget my loved ones. And I think it's really easy to fall into this cycle of like, creative project. I'm getting a lot of like short-term satisfaction at completing all of these difficult tasks, but I think it's important to reevaluate your priorities like, pretty regularly of just like the people in my life, they're really important to me, and it is really easy to fall out of connection with them, fall out of step, stop hanging out with them because you're like project, work, work, work!

Jack Conte:

I have an hour every morning with my wife where we make coffee and eat breakfast and go on a walk.

Sabrina Cruz:

That's lovely.

Jack Conte:

I have an hour at lunch with her where we have lunch together and hang out and talk and take a break in our day and then we do date night once or twice a week. And that's like, really important time to me and to her because there's a lot going on.

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah.

Jack Conte:

And so, I want to have those moments set aside to be a human being and not be trying to achieve outcomes, but instead be here with a person that I love. So okay, you mentioned the team. I wanna dig in a little bit to the collaboration and what that's like. And also some of the like, technicalities of it 'cause it looks like it's three kind of full-time people and then several contractors. Is that right?

Sabrina Cruz:

Not quite.

Jack Conte:

Okay.

Sabrina Cruz:

So it's shifted a lot over the years as we've tried to figure out like, what rhythm works best for us. So when we're working on a really big project, yes, it's like primarily the three of us, Taha, Melissa, and I, and then like whatever contractors we've brought on for the gig. But for the most part for the YouTube channel, it's the three of us and then our incredible editor Joe. Joe brings so much life to the team. He's so great because he adds like almost a different voice, because the three of us, we're always like so heads down in the project, running the business, but he gets to just like see the project as a whole. He builds it out on the timeline. He's able to point out this doesn't make any sense to somebody who hasn't been deep inside this project for two weeks. Please add something else. And that's really important.

Jack Conte:

Where did you find Joe?

Sabrina Cruz:

Twitter.

Jack Conte:

You're kidding!

Sabrina Cruz:

Hope Twitter doesn't die.

Jack Conte:

Seriously, how did you... ? You just tweeted, "Hey, we need an editor"?

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah.

Jack Conte:

And Joe responded to you?

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah.

Jack Conte:

And how did you know Joe was good?

Sabrina Cruz:

So the way that we do it is that we'll run like a couple of like, trial edits, like short-term contracts, paid work but we're like, can you edit this video? So it's a pretty low-stress process, right? And then we quite quickly figure out like, do we enjoy working with this person? Do we think that they get the vibe of what we're trying to make? Do they make our work better just by being a part of it? And for Joe, resounding yes. Incredible yes.

Jack Conte:

So was there like, an interview process, or was it super... was it just like, "Okay, Joe, here's a video, like, edit it, let's see what you do."

Sabrina Cruz:

It took an astounding amount of time for us to get on a call with Joe, although Taha did. So Taha is primarily the one who like, speaks to third parties because I am just the least social person that you could ever meet, but —

Jack Conte:

Which is true for a lot of YouTubers by the way.

Sabrina Cruz:

That's why we decided to talk to a camera instead of people. We as a team primarily communicate through like, Slack messages, emails, just to catch each other up, because like there's a lot of times, we're strong believers in "This could have been an email," we don't wanna spend an hour on a call when it could have been 10 minutes. But then, we're also very quick to be like, "This is going to be cleared up faster in a 10-minute call rather than me writing you an essay." So we're very intentional about how we communicate with each other because we are a fully remote team. We're working with people in the UK, Melissa and I, we're in Toronto, Eastern time. There's a five-hour difference. So we wanna be very careful to like, try and protect people's time in their respective time zones.

Jack Conte:

Makes sense. So how do you divide up responsibilities between you and Taha and Melissa? Like who does what?

Sabrina Cruz:

Good question. So I get the joy of being a primarily creative person. I kind of was like, don't ask me to answer emails. I'm going to miss them. They're not going to get answered 'cause I'm just that type of person. Melissa primarily handles like, the logistics. She makes sure that internally, everybody knows what they need, everybody has the contracts that they're doing, and she also handles like, a lot of the accounting and lawyers, like those very essential communications that keep a business running and make sure we're not getting sued, et cetera. And Taha, on the other hand, he does a lot of like, the business development stuff. He's like, reaching out to people who could like, sponsor videos. He's making like, connections with other YouTubers, all of that stuff. So, it kind of like, plays all of our individual strengths. Taha is the kind of guy who just will randomly start chatting to a stranger in an elevator, which is how we met. This is absolutely wild. So yeah, and Melissa's just incredibly reliable, incredible communicator. She just stays on top of things. And I think that the three of us, we're really like solutions-oriented. We own what we do right, what we do wrong. We're just aware of like, let's make sure that this business keeps running. Let's not care about like, ego or anything.

Jack Conte:

I love that. What are your other superpowers, do you think? I have my own opinions about this, but like, what are you really good at?

Sabrina Cruz:

What a question, what are your superpowers?

Jack Conte:

Well, I'm gonna ask the other question, too. So, you get a chance to be humble in a second.

Sabrina Cruz:

Okay. Okay.

Jack Conte:

But right now, I want you to be an egomaniac. I don't want you to be, you know what I mean. Like what are you good at?

Sabrina Cruz:

I think I'm really good at obsessing. Like I don't know if that's —

Jack Conte:

That's what Hank Green says.

Sabrina Cruz:

Oh really?

Jack Conte:

And it's what I think I do well, too. Go ahead. Keep going.

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah, but it's just like, give me any problem. Give me anything, and I will manage to like, dive in, think about it deeply, and I will care to the point that like, even if it's late, even if it upsets people, I'm like, this needs to be in a way that I am happy with it. Obviously I need a lot of reality checks. I can't work on a video in perpetuity, I can't work on anything in perpetuity. But I think that that allows me to like, tunnel and focus my energy on whatever I really need to.

Jack Conte:

It's that sort of obsessive, detail-oriented, can't-let this-go-until-I-get-to-the-bottom-of-it kind-of-quality that I think you have and Hank has, which it's just so fun to watch because you get to have that without doing all the work, right? It's like, what's so appealing about your channel is getting to the root cause of something and the absolute bottom of something without having to work for 16 hours a day. Okay, so that's your superpower. What's the other side of the coin? Like, what are you not good at?

Sabrina Cruz:

Watch me do like, the whole business interview thing. Like, oh yeah. It's also obsessing. I'm really honestly... it is kind of obsessing and specifically like, I'm really bad at moderation, and that leads to like, maybe really great videos, but I am exhausted, I'm burnt out at the end of it. I can't think of making anything else. And luckily, like I seem to always bounce back quickly right now. Like, I think like, give me a week or two, I'm like, let's go, let's do it again! But maybe I won't bounce back one day and that terrifies me. It also makes me a terrible team player.

Jack Conte:

Wow! Do you take like a week off between videos?

Sabrina Cruz:

Do I? Well, I'm here and I just uploaded the video, so that's one case. I think "I don't know" is the answer. I don't know. It's not a formalized process. Sometimes the video goes live, and you get to just do like, busy work after an upload. You're not expected to just go straight into your next video. But we never formally say it anywhere.

Jack Conte:

Right. I heard, maybe this is wrong, but I heard that the original Radiolab team would literally stay up till like 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. the night before a delivery. Don't know how long that was true for or when that was true, but the idea of like, cramming to get something published over the line, I think is often more true than not for a lot of creative people that I know.

Sabrina Cruz:

We are trying to get to the position where we don't have to rush towards a deadline. We wanna get to the point where it's just like, I wanna release the best video. I don't care if we miss the deadline. It might make a sponsor upset, but like, we wanna make sure that we are making the best thing possible. But how does that kind of obsessiveness around making the best thing possible make me a bad team player? I think it's just one, you stop communicating a lot when you're really deep in it and sometimes it's just like, it makes problems harder to solve because like, you've been tunneling and focusing on it for ages. Third party walks in, second set of eyes, outsider, just like, this is what you're doing wrong. This is the problem with it, solves it in two seconds. Like, that's happened once or twice in our videos. And so like, it's an inefficient thing to do, to tunnel in to the point where you're not communicating with others. And also when you're just so emotionally tired, exhausted mentally from like, making this big old sprint to a massive video that you put everything into. It's just this... you're less pleasant to be around. You're just like, we get it. You're tired, you just worked on this thing. We don't wanna hear about the Japanese internet anymore, Sabrina.

Jack Conte:

Taha, Melissa, Jo,e and you.

Sabrina Cruz:

Yes.

Jack Conte:

Are you all full-time on Answer in Progress?

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah.

Jack Conte:

Congrats!

Sabrina Cruz:

Thank you.

Jack Conte:

That is so sick!

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah! We're very excited about it.

Jack Conte:

That's amazing. So, gear. Gear. So you used to film on...

Sabrina Cruz:

My first camera or like just my recent upgrade?

Jack Conte:

Yeah, your old camera. What was that?

Sabrina Cruz:

Okay, so I used to film using a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K. It's a beautiful camera. I love using it. I love being behind it. Unfortunately, my job requires me being in front of it.

Jack Conte:

Why did you choose a Pocket Cinema if you were selfie-ing?

Sabrina Cruz:

Because I'm stupid.

Jack Conte:

How long were you using that camera?

Sabrina Cruz:

Years.

Jack Conte:

Really?

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah.

Jack Conte:

Pulling focus manually?

Sabrina Cruz:

Yep!

Jack Conte:

Oh my gosh!

Sabrina Cruz:

Both Taha and Melissa are just like, "You really should have consulted us more before you decided to go buy this camera," because like, I just care so much about creating the thing, I don't care too much about like what is necessary to create that thing. That's probably another one of my big weaknesses. Luckily both Taha and Melissa, gear heads, they do all the research for me and then I just text them now.

Jack Conte:

So you're not like a gearhead, you don't like obsess over gear and like that microphone thing that you have with the thing on top. Is that like a little RODE microphone or something?

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah, yeah.

Jack Conte:

Okay.

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah, all of my gear at this point has just been things that, I find people who are really good at stuff and I'm just like, "What should I buy?" And then they tell me, and then I do it.

Jack Conte:

Is it Premiere? Do you use Adobe Premiere?

Sabrina Cruz:

Yes, yes. So like our workflow is basically, we have our whole pre-production process. We've like, greenlit the video, we start working, we do our research, we're vlogging throughout it, et cetera. Then once we have our footage — it's usually in 4K — we generate the proxies on whoever made the videos in, so like, let's say it's my video, I have these 4K files, I put them into Media Encoder, turn them into proxies. Sometimes you'll put them in the project and sort it out already and get the proxies linked up, but now our production process is just so lengthy that we kind of just like, hand the proxies over to Joe through Google Drive, syncs on his end, he edits it down, all well and good. He exports like drafts and then uploads it to Frame.io. We put in our little comments we're like, "Oh, can you do this?" I'm so terrible 'cause I'm like very specific 'cause I'm like, I think I'm an editor at heart, so I'm like, this is one frame too long. Please move this over very slightly.

Jack Conte:

Do you give that detailed feedback?

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah.

Jack Conte:

So how many comments do you leave in Frame.io?

Sabrina Cruz:

Too many.

Jack Conte:

How many?

Sabrina Cruz:

I think it's like, it could be 50. I'll leave comments on my own comments. I'll reply to them tracking my thought process. 'Cause one thing, when I do give notes, I want to like, explain why this note is there, because I think that's how you also develop as an editor, you develop as a team, yeah.

Jack Conte:

So, you ask for something specific and then you explain why you want that.

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah, because also if you explain your reasoning, then like, Joe will be able to be like, "I don't think that is doing what you think it's doing." And then I could be like, "You're right." I galaxy-brain this. So yeah, so then we go through that process. It could be as many as like, 10 back and forths depending on how it goes, because the nature of our videos is almost like, you get act one shot, you get act two shot. It's over time. You don't just get to block shoot things out. So we get through that editing process, and then eventually, he sends over a draft where I'm like, all of my remaining comments are too niche and too silly to write down, so I'll just be like, project handover, send it my way, bud. And then I take it back, I'll relink all the footage to their full res files, and then I'll just do any final little edits that I wanted to do.

Jack Conte:

Okay, be honest. How much little final edits do you actually end up doing? How much polishing and chiseling is there after you get the edit back?

Sabrina Cruz:

It used to be a lot but as like, Joe has gotten a sense of our vibes as individuals, barely any. The recent video, the one I made about Japanese internet, I basically only added one little animation. That was it.

Jack Conte:

Because he's learned over time what it is that you like and how and want and —

Sabrina Cruz:

Correct, yeah.

Jack Conte:

Cool. Maybe a way to frame it is like he's —

Sabrina Cruz:

A genius!

Jack Conte:

A genius.

Sabrina Cruz:

Sorry.

Jack Conte:

And has learned your taste, has learned like the what you like.

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah.

Jack Conte:

Okay. I've not heard many creators kind of have that collaborative of a relationship with an editor.

Sabrina Cruz:

Huh!

Jack Conte:

And I think it's super healthy and awesome, and I want more creators to hear about this, 'cause it's really a great idea where like, somebody does a lot of the editing work, passes it to you, you kind of take it over the line with your tastes and style and passion and things that you care about and do and then you kind of hone that relationship over the time to the point where they deeply understand it. Did you plan that out? Is that just how it happened? Is that —

Sabrina Cruz:

I'm not gonna lie to you, I didn't know there was any other way. Like all of us kind of assumed like, okay, there's definitely going to be a couple of speed bumps in the beginning, because you can't just transplant your brain into somebody else. You have to like work together, communicate openly to figure out like, what do I want from this video as like, the lead creative on it? And he learns from it, he makes it better because he has his own creative vision and we love him for it. And then together, we get to create this whole new editing style that like, almost shaped what an Answer in Progress video is, which is like very punchy. I love funky music, and it's just like, that's kind of, that wouldn't have been possible if I was just editing my videos alone. And when we went into getting an editor, we knew like, we don't want just an editor who will follow whatever we say and just do the most basic edit. We want to work with people who make our work better just by being there.

Jack Conte:

Love that, yeah. I've talked to a lot of creators where the struggle is giving creative feedback. Sometimes creators feel guilty about giving feedback to somebody else, or they're kind of conflict avoidant and don't wanna like, ask for something or feel bad saying, "Ah, that's not how I want it." Did you ever struggle with that at all? Was it hard for you to give creative feedback at the beginning? Was that a skill you had to learn, or were you just good at it from the beginning?

Sabrina Cruz:

I think our intuition, like the three of us, we have strong opinions about things and fortunately, we also have like, the ability to know what we do want. And I think that might be a struggle for a lot of people where they're like, I don't like this, but they can't offer an alternative and that's really terrible as an editor to receive this feedback of "Change it," and you're like, change it into what? So I think that we knew from our own experiences working as like contractors, as editors, as like various creative roles that like the quality of your feedback is really important. So that's one thing we prioritized and we were willing to protect our creative vision while also like, telling people like, "Hey, you did this good, you did this bad," et cetera. We never said, "You did this bad" — we don't say that —but we're like, "Could you change it, please?" So productive feedback was really important for us. I think that the one thing is sometimes if somebody is struggling to really turn around on that feedback, to lik,e implement it, that can get quite difficult because it seems like the language needs to get stronger. 'Cause initially you could just like, throw in a little suggestion, maybe do this. But if you're not seeing those follow through, then you're just like, "I need you to change this." But I think the one bright side is like, our core team, we all have like, a very unified creative vision. We are all in agreement, so we never really run into the issue of like, this needs to change dramatically. And I think that's just like the benefit of choosing who you work with. Like any hiring process, you wanna make sure that people are like, down for what you're making.

Jack Conte:

Was Joe the first editor that you worked with, or did you work with other editors that maybe it just, for whatever reason, didn't click as much as it clicked with Joe?

Sabrina Cruz:

We've actually had like, the fortune of working with some really great editors. I think some of them scooped other people. Other people, they were more excited to work with. They got the job there, and we were like, "No, come back, but good for you, actually." Other times, it's just like, people just aren't as free, people aren't too interested in it. So Joe was the one who had like, this perfect culmination of everything like availability, interest, and just like, fit.

Jack Conte:

Now you're at the point where you're producing what? Almost two videos a month?

Sabrina Cruz:

Sure.

Jack Conte:

One and a half videos a month?

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah, it's quite difficult because like, our goal is to post two videos a month, but then our other goal, our bigger goal is to produce the best video possible. So sometimes, the best video isn't made in like a month and a half. So while our intent is to make two videos a month, we still definitely have like, we're still dancing around like, what's the best production workflow to make the videos we wanna make? Any input? How do you do it? How do you do good things?

Jack Conte:

I don't know that I'm qualified to give advice on that. It's probably the struggle for me as an artist is, I mean, I remember learning that like, frequency of upload in this day and age of democratized media tools is like a strategy, like it's a thing that works.

Sabrina Cruz:

That I disagree with!

Jack Conte:

Talk to me, tell me.

Sabrina Cruz:

Well, here's the thing. I think frequency of touchpoint is really important because it familiarizes the audience with you, right? But ultimately, the goal isn't I need to upload a lot. It's like, I need to have meaningful like, relationships with my audience. I want every time they see my face, for them to think awesome, great. And sometimes creators can do that every single day. Other times, probably more often than not, you can't do that every single day. You can't do that on a schedule. So even though quantity can definitely help because it's just pure frequency... Like you get to watch it in the morning, you're eating your breakfast, and you're watching your internet friends, your favorite pair of social relationship happen. That's fine. I have no issues with creators like that. Kudos to them for being able to do that. But for us at Answer in Progress, we were just like, "Listen, if we're not gonna upload super regularly, if we're not gonna get it every other week, let's make sure that every time they see our videos, they're like, 'That is a good video!'"

Jack Conte:

So, okay, couple things about that. You said the goal is not frequency, the goal is quality relationships with your audience. Is that how you think about media-making, it's relationships with the audience? I mean, 'cause "build a strong relationship with my audience" is slightly different than "make great videos." I'm not saying they're like antithetical to each other, it's just, it's different ways to think about the problem. And I much prefer thinking of a YouTube channel not as a video-making repository, but as a relationship-building tool with other humans. Not everybody thinks about it that way. Is that a deliberate like, choice that you're making? It's to like, think of the goal as relationships with the audience? Or are you sort of using that synonymously with making great videos?

Sabrina Cruz:

They're definitely not synonymous. I think that like it's a Venn diagram, right? Like you can either orient yourself to like, make all of the content that is like, the best possible where best is defined as like, commercially successful or likely to go viral. And then there's the videos that like, let you create like, a thoughtful emotional connection with like your audience. You want to make them understand your message. I think what we're trying to do is like, hit that sweet spot in the middle and certainly, we might be less successful, it might take longer to grow. Certainly some people will be like, "This was clickbait, I did not enjoy this." Like we'll have a lot of people in our comments because the Answer in Progress format is like, I'm gonna show you all of the research, all of my wasted time, and then I'll tell you the answer at the end, right? People are just like, "The video starts at the end," and I'm like, "No, the video starts at the beginning." And that's just like, an audience member that we will lose because they don't care for the message we are trying to send, the thing that we really care about. So we're trying to target like, hopefully, the intersection of those circles is large enough to support our business.

Jack Conte:

I love that. Okay, so why set two videos a month as a goal at all?

Sabrina Cruz:

Money. Sorry, is that depressing?

Jack Conte:

No! This is what I mean by frequency is a strategy or a lever. Call it money, call it audience, call it whatever. Anyway, go ahead.

Sabrina Cruz:

So I think the biggest thing was just like, we understand that we need to make frequently. The business reason is that we need a certain amount of sponsorships. We need a certain amount of revenue every month or like, average throughout the year to make sure that people get paid a living wage. We care deeply about that. But on the flip side of it, we also realize within ourselves that when you're given a lot of time, we're the types of people who will still just kind of —

Jack Conte:

Fill it.

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah, we'll fill that time.

Jack Conte:

Yeah.

Sabrina Cruz:

So we found that like two videos a month like across the three of us was the perfect amount of time where it's just like, you can't just waste it. You will need to make something. And I think that also feeds back into like our 1% per day where it's just like, you always need to be working on something 'cause if you don't, you're gonna miss your deadline.

Jack Conte:

That insight, I think, is so valuable, that like, projects stretch to fill the time in which they're allotted.

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah.

Jack Conte:

I certainly have that for myself. And I think where I struggle as a creative person is figuring out just the right amount of time.

Sabrina Cruz:

It is difficult because also like, just given the nature of our videos, sometimes it's like, okay, I get that this deadline exists, but I was working every day, but I need to sit in it longer 'cause I really wanna explore this place. Like Taha made a video about mechanical keyboards, and he really dove into that community. He really understood it. He now is constantly like, "Look at my key cap. Look at it, isn't it so nice?"

Jack Conte:

So this is the Cherry MX Brown. I think the thing that I'm most impressed with by is just the space buzz and these are switches that don't exist anymore? Oh, these are really nice for like, the secretary in "Monsters Inc." Every time one of the switches is pressed down, it completes a small electronic circuit which sends a signal to your computer to let it know that one of the keys has been pressed.

Sabrina Cruz:

He was only able to do that because we understood that in order to make that video good, he needed to like exist in that space for a really long time.

Jack Conte:

And that's the thing, is the set amount of time, at least I've found, not only like changes for the types of projects that you're doing, but for me, it changes literally for each individual thing that I make. For some videos, the right amount of time is two days. For some videos, the right amount of time is five minutes.

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah.

Jack Conte:

And I think that flexibility is just, I've found that it's intention with the format-driven, frequency-driven, regularity-driven expectations of social media. And maybe one of the questions that I hear a lot of creators ask, I'd be curious your take on is, if you consult the YouTube Playbook, the YouTube handbooks, the TikTok handbooks, the platforms talk about the importance of regularity. The importance of regularity, which to me feels mechanical. Actually, I don't know if most people know this. Patreon, when we launched, we did not have a monthly option.

Sabrina Cruz:

I know this.

Jack Conte:

I deeply believe that like, creativity can't be put on a schedule and you should make your thing when you're damn well ready to publish your thing.

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah.

Jack Conte:

Not when the first of the month is and time to cha-ching. It felt out of touch with how humans work. And so, it wasn't until like, people kind of hacked the system and started saying "I wanna be paid per month" that we created this monthly feature and then like, now nine years later, Patreon is 93% monthly. But I guess do you feel tension between what the platforms expect of you as a creator versus what feels good to you as a human to create? Does that create tension for you in your life? Or are you just over that?

Sabrina Cruz:

Yes, but not in terms of frequency because we've kind of realized, we've tested this out with our audience... Maybe it's different for other audiences, but frequency, regularity didn't matter as much as quality and a good title and thumbnail. Although, we do put a lot of time into what the platform expects of us. We don't focus on like, the quantity game. We focus on what is going to get clicks.

Jack Conte:

And let's talk about that, title and thumb. What have you learned?

Sabrina Cruz:

What have I learned? Well, it's like it should always come first. I think that this is becoming a growing ethos, everyone's kind of saying it. Not a lot of people are doing it.

Jack Conte :

Do you start with title and thumb?

Sabrina Cruz:

As of the last video, the Japanese internet video and 2023 onwards, we are truly starting with title and thumbnail first.

Jack Conte:

Why did you decide to focus on thumb and title first?

Sabrina Cruz:

It's because we were gonna have to quit otherwise. So basically, like at the start of 2020, we had this grant that let us focus on making something really good, like making really good videos, so that was our focus. We got to experiment a lot. We figured out like, what formats, what things that we enjoyed doing. The problem was come the end of the year, we had these videos that we loved. Nobody was watching it, and we needed to start making money so we needed views. That's just kind of how it works on the platform. And so we were like, "How do you get views?" And then Taha was just like, "Well, I've known the answer for a while, but I understood what we were doing, which was making good videos." And I think that we were really smart to prioritize that. We were really lucky to be able to prioritize that. But at the end of the day, you need people to watch the cool thing that you make. But yeah, title and thumbnail first. Some examples of those instances... "I taught an AI to solve the trolley problem" was a video that we were like, will anyone care about this? It's so niche. Turned out to be one of our most successful videos to date, and it's kind of kicked off like, this go-to safe concept on the channel where we're like, "Let's just get an AI to do something." So, I'm currently trying to work on a video about ice skating and I was like, ice skating has been done to death, so I'm gonna just try and race an AI to learn how to ice skate. So like, we can get a title and thumbnail that works, but also, it's only to enable us to make the video we wanna make.

Jack Conte:

When you say you start with title and thumbnail, do you know what the title is gonna be before you actually shoot anything? And then second question, do you sketch out the thumbnails? Do you shoot the thumbnails with the photograph? Do you make the thumbnails in Photoshop first before you make the video? Like how far do you go title and thumbnail first?

Sabrina Cruz:

Okay, I'm going to answer this with like our recent process, but just know, this answer would not have applied like three months ago.

Jack Conte:

Okay, great.

Sabrina Cruz:

Title and thumbnail. So, we enter a call. We're like, "This is the video I wanna make." As a group, we decide title and thumbnail, and we ask ourselves, "Is this going to get a million views? Could this get a million views?" 'Cause if you shoot for a million views, you might end up in like the 500 thousands and that's a good place to be still. We ask ourselves that. If the answer's no, maybe work a little bit longer on your video concept. If the answer's yes, let's go for it. What's step two? Actually starting the video. And as you work on that video, we have regular check-ins where it's just like, does this title and thumbnail still fit? Because you still need a really good content fit or else people call it clickbait, and that ruins your relationship with your audience, right? So we just keep going back and forth. And then eventually, if that process works, if we actually commit to these regular chickens, we get a title and thumbnail that we are very happy with and a video that is good.

Jack Conte:

One of the frustrating things for me is I start with title and thumbnail, and then I make a different video, and then I'm like, "Ah, fuck!"

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah, and that's happened to us.

Jack Conte:

Does it? Okay.

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah.

Jack Conte:

So how often is that happening versus like, ah, this initial concept for title and thumb is what? Stuck.

Sabrina Cruz:

It can easily happen without those regular check-ins. We still have videos on the channel that have those situations. I'm not gonna call them out though, but that's when those videos came out and we got called out on it, and we watched the videos and considered the title and thumbnail and we were like, "Darn it, they're right." We realized we needed to update our process to account for like regular check-ins where it's just like, "Okay, you're a week into your video. Is the video you wanna make still fit this title and thumbnail?" And we will take the approach of, "Okay, so this new video that you're trying to make, this updated video, let's get a title and thumbnail for that rather than forcing somebody to fit into the title and thumbnail." 'Cause again, we are just hedonistic creators. We wanna make the thing we wanna make.

Jack Conte:

And how has your titling and thumbnailing changed as you've explored this process and gotten better at it and learned about it? What's actually changed? Can you point to a few specific examples or choices that you've made that you wouldn't have made six months ago or two years ago as you're designing titles and thumbs?

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah, so the bright side is, is that this is one instance of you throw stuff at a wall and see what sticks. You actually have like, a tangible like, measurement of what sticks, you get to see click-through rate. You get to see which videos like, do really well. And so, as we've uploaded more videos, we have a larger bit of information to then base future video titles off of. So we have a couple of like title formats that we know will work. Like we know if we get an AI to do something, people are usually around for that. If we make a video title that's like, going in depth on a subject that we know our audience cares about, we know that that'll do well.

Jack Conte:

What subjects do your audience care about?

Sabrina Cruz:

There's a lot of, I don't know why I acted so exhausted, but it's kind of like this... I don't know how to quite describe it, but it's like tech lifestyle but not that kind of tech lifestyle. You know what I mean?

Jack Conte:

Not the "day in the life of an engineer in San Francisco"-type video.

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah, it's more just like, I listen to a "Dungeons and Dragons" podcast, I will obsess into this very niche subculture. I'm really into speed cubing, like that type of person who is like always being a little bit too into something. You know?

Jack Conte:

Yeah.

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah.

Jack Conte:

I love that video on speed cubing.

Sabrina Cruz:

Oh. That was actually the video that made us realize Answer in Progress could work.

Jack Conte:

Really?

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah.

Jack Conte:

It was one video.

Sabrina Cruz:

It was one video. The Red Bull Rubik's Cube World Championship finals were happening in Boston, and I was competing. I was never supposed to be in the competition. I was making a video about speed cubing and then I was gonna go to a competition and interview people in the speed cubing world, speak to Erno Rubik, the guy who invented the Rubik's cube. Then the day of, they were like, there are extra slots in the competition. Do you wanna just be in it? So like, I had been like fiddling around, trying to like, speed cube a little bit. I got it down to like a humble time of like, 40 seconds. I need you to know that that is nothing to speed cubers.

Jack Conte:

It's better than mine. Never, so you know —

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. But they were like, "Hey, you've been practicing. Why not just try out the competition?" So I entered the competition and even though I truly had the worst time in the competition, like, I asked somebody playfully, and they were like, "Oh yeah, what did you think?" We watched through the video after the edit, and we were like, this is something. Like the willingness to go out there and try to take it to 11, just try out the thing when people would normally be scared to try it. That works. And then it became what became this thing now.

Jack Conte:

That's one of the things I think is so interesting about the channel, and I wanna get into storytelling. I think unlike a lot of channels on YouTube, you don't cut out the waste.

Sabrina Cruz:

What a compliment.

Jack Conte:

Sorry.

Sabrina Cruz:

Thank you.

Jack Conte:

That was so bad. There's a lot of crap on your channel.

Sabrina Cruz:

Yep.

Jack Conte:

No, but like you will, and I think that's one of the things that makes it so appealing and so human and so personal and also makes me feel closer to the people in the video, 'cause I'm like, ah, I see myself in that, 'cause I do a lot of shit that doesn't work either. And you show the times where you make the soup-dating algorithm and it just fails.

Sabrina Cruz:

Dating apps are broken and to prove it, I made a dating simulation for soup. It was just so —

Jack Conte:

It's just a bad idea, but you set it up like, for six minutes and you let us get so excited, and you look like a genius, and then it just fucking doesn't work.

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah, people play that game, and they were like, "There's a broken part of this. I say I want vegetable soup, and you give me chicken noodle soup."

Jack Conte:

I mean, but that's what's so incredible about the channel is that you leave in the belly flops. Tell me that clearly is intentional.

Sabrina Cruz:

Yes.

Jack Conte:

You're not trying to make yourself look like you figured it out. You're appealing to something else in people by choosing to leave that in there. It feels strategic. Why are you doing that?

Sabrina Cruz:

Okay. Yes, it is strategic in part because we put all of this work into this thing, why not show it? The actual reason is what Answer in Progress is supposed to be, right? We want to at least show this aspirational lifestyle of, you can do the research if you do have a question, even if that question seems really difficult to answer and almost overwhelming to approach, take it day by day. You'll make mistakes, but you will get there. You will get somewhere at least. And that's kind of like been the ethos of the channel and we've had a lot of people complain like, "Oh, this could have been shorter. You should have just talked about the ending." And we're just like, "No, because the whole point of the thing, the entire purpose of the channel is to show you will make mistakes but you'll get somewhere."

Jack Conte:

It's not to answer the question.

Sabrina Cruz:

It's an Answer in Progress. The other reason that we do it too, because we very much never wanna position ourselves as experts on something.

Jack Conte:

Yeah.

Sabrina Cruz:

Is because we are not experts.

Jack Conte:

Right.

Sabrina Cruz:

You will get so many creators who, even with the best intentions, will accidentally make themselves seem like they know everything. And naturally as if you're on the internet, who doesn't have the time to like fact-check who you are, might take it as if you are correct, that there's no information in the video. Sometimes, there isn't misinformation. So we want our audience to be like, this was wrong, and I want them to call us out on it.

Jack Conte:

How do you respond to that in those moments? What have you done? What's an example where that's happened and you've actually had to, 'cause you don't wanna take down the video, right? Do you leave a comment? What do you actually do about that?

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah, so we had like this, fortunately, we did make mistakes in the past but they were in the past when we didn't have a really large audience. So like, I was making a lot of these nerd culture videos, and I had no formal training, I was literally a teenager. So you make mistakes, you don't cite your sources properly. You accidentally do a little bit of plagiarism, oopsy daisy. But I think that the only appropriate way to respond to that is to acknowledge that you've made that mistake, fix your process going forward, and if it is more harmful to have that content online than not, get rid of it.

Jack Conte:

Which you've done.

Sabrina Cruz:

Yes. I have one video where like, I put in so much work into it, I was so proud of it and somebody was just like, "This is not accurate. You have not looked at all of the sources. You are trying to be an expert when you are not." So then we just cut it. I say we, it was literally just me at the time. This was like, one of my personal videos. So fortunately, us as individuals kind of were able to like, get these experiences and bring them into Answer in Progress so that it never really gets to the point where we're just doing a misinformation or stealing people's work on our channel. Like we understand the importance of like, recognizing who contributed things, making sure that you are extending work rather than just like, saying it in a different way. Pulling from multiple sources rather than just reading somebody's article that they spent years pouring into and you were like, "Yeah, I'm just gonna read it in a video." I sound really bitter right now, but people work hard on things, and they should be recognized for that. There are instances where we will make something, and we don't lend in the nuance that comes with academic writing 'cause like, you read a sentence in academia, and it's truly just like this. If under these very specific assumptions and circumstances, this thing might happen, which makes total sense 'cause that's how the world works... not a great YouTube video. So like, we will one, intentionally in our format, make sure that it's known that, like we aren't experts, there is still room to grow, this isn't all the information you'll ever need on this subject. But also, we will sometimes just say the part that is true without like, having all of the asterisks of the parts that aren't true. And that's usually the comments that we get nowadays where it's just like, "You should have said this as well," and we're like, "We would've loved to, but people would've left the video."

Jack Conte:

I wanna keep digging into storytelling and you've mentioned act one, act two and act three. So I wanna talk about format and structure and pacing. So one thing I noticed watching your videos, which I have binged, is like, it seems like every 60 seconds, there's like a camera swipe. New music, Sabrina's in a new outfit hanging out, it's one o'clock in the morning, and then like, that happens for a minute, we get to see you in that zone, and then whoosh! Camera swipe, it's the next day, the sun is shining, there's different music, everything's nice now. I guess from a pacing perspective, it feels like you give things about 60 to 90 seconds to let them sink in. Is that deliberate? What are you doing with pacing? They're so fast-moving. I guess, is that something that you're... yeah, why are you doing that?

Sabrina Cruz:

Because we don't have good attention spans anymore. That's the honest answer, right? Like the thing is, I am an iPad baby. I need content going on constantly. I didn't bring my headphones here, and I'm horrified of the journey back home. So it really shows up in the editing just because I get bored. So like, sometimes you have this whole paragraph you wanna say, you split it in half, you say one thing at angle A, aside, camera B. There's literally A cams and B cams and I'm choosing to look in the opposite direction. It comes up in the editing intentionally, but intentionally in the way that I'm not trying to like, attention-hack and do all of these life hacks. It's because I'm bored, so I'm just gonna switch it up.

Jack Conte:

And then what's the structure of the videos? Is there a format for an Answer in Progress video that you're roughly crafting towards? Or is every one a bespoke, individually unique snowflake?

Sabrina Cruz:

Every Answer in Progress video has two components. An explainer and a quest. So it took us a while to realize how these two things fit together. But basically the quest is something that is really engaging, it gets people to go out there and try and do something. The explainer exists to like complement that. What is the thing that people need to know in order to understand this quest? Now, that quest can be like, hey, I'm trying to fact check this thing. And so then the explainer is just naturally the results of the fact check. But in other cases, it can be like, I wanted to fix my glasses from constantly slipping down my nose, so I just read 700 years of glasses history to figure out why glasses are designed like this. The answer was actually just you could get little hooks, or turns out, you could just go to an optician, and they'll just fix your glasses and bend them for you. That I only learned in the comment section of the video. But we realized like, just due to the nature of the variety of things we wanna make, a single rigid format doesn't work. So instead we kind of focus more on the pacing and the tone. Like, if I am an audience member watching this, what keeps me engaged throughout? And then we just go through each process. So we start off really high energy, exciting, this is what you're gonna get at the end because sometimes the video's 18 minutes long and people need to know that something cool happens in that 18th minute. Then, we like, take this opportunity to make sure everybody's on the same page of what to expect in this video. We try and keep this quite short, but we are basically saying like this is actually what you're gonna get. Let's remove all of the action, the flashy drama of the hook, just say like, "This is what you're gonna get. Now let's go do it." And so then, we actually just show the process of going to do things.

Jack Conte:

And is that the quest?

Sabrina Cruz:

That's kind of the quest, that's kind of the research explainer. We just realize like, those components kind of like, fit together in different ways, maybe have to do it more than once in a video. And then that's the part where it's like, we have to make sure that it stays exciting but it usually only comes together in the edit. So, really how we edit it is just like, "What are the stakes? What is happening right now? Does this need to be here? Is every sentence serving a purpose either in helping people understand or keeping them engaged?" Then we reach the end of the video. People have understood the point. Now the thing that a lot of creators will do is that they'll kind of belabor the point. They'll just say it again repeatedly, but this time longer. They'll ask you to go watch this video. Sometimes they'll do an ad read and it's just like no. End the video. People get it. If they wanna re-understand, they'll rewind. That's it. So then that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to get to this point where like the ending is as short as possible so people can go watch the next video instead of like losing their interest near the end.

Jack Conte:

That's such a great point. It's also what ... I've heard MrBeast talk about that. He tries to end the video as quickly as possible.

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah, people get the point.

Jack Conte:

So that once you get the thing, you just go on to the next thing, otherwise people stop watching and —

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah, it's also because like, that is the cut that we're willing to make because it's not at the sacrifice of a good story, 'cause this story has ended. We don't need to give you a whole pitch. People are signed off, like, at least for the audience that we are like, cultivating, especially like, younger generations. You swipe away, you leave. So, why expect them to stay?

Jack Conte:

Is the ending to the video just the answer to the question? Is that how the video always ends? Is that how you know when it's over?

Sabrina Cruz:

It's not quite the answer to the question. The last sentence isn't. I think that what we try and do at the end of our videos is also try and like, explain how this impacts you personally if you did not care about anything prior. So for example, with this Japanese internet video, we have all of this information now. We know that web design is just like, different in different places. Most people don't care about that, so then like I was like, here's how it impacts you. Now I want you to think about today's web technologies. Infinite scrolling, algorithmically-selected content, cuts every two seconds. I'm not saying it's good or bad, but it sure as heck seems like it can impact us and with the internet constantly in our pockets or our hands, it can shape the way we see the world. This is the fundamental point of this video. And so we try and wrap it up in a way so that there's a takeaway outside of just the neat information you learned.

Jack Conte:

Where is Answer in Progress going and how much do you think about that? Are you like, building a five-year plan in Google Docs? Or are you taking it one year at a time and asking yourself, "Should we still do this?" Like, how do you think about the future of the channel?

Sabrina Cruz:

I think that we have stopped asking the question of "Should we do this?" fortunately, because it seems like the finances are going well, the videos are doing good, what we're doing seems to be working. Now in terms of like, what the far-out future looks like, I think it's kind of still up in the air. We have a bunch of different ideas that we have going on, but we also know that like, things can change. As you reach like, a certain level of regular viewers, things can grow exponentially fast, and it unlocks a bunch of doors very quickly, and like your job is to hold onto the reins. But other times, like, you need to like, steer the horse, you need to figure out where you're going. So we don't know quite sure where we're gonna be in five years. We kind of have an idea, but I'm not sure I'm gonna tell you.

Jack Conte:

Whoa! Okay. What about 2023? Is there a goal for 2023? Are there several goals for 2023? What's the plan?

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah, so the goals for 2023 is to apply all of the learnings. All of the things we messed up in 2022, do it better in 2023. We're still developing our creative process. We're still trying to figure out what is a good title and thumbnail. How do we make that title and thumbnail fit to the video? How do we make this video something that we love? And I think that we've spent the year kind of learning just through trial and error. And now the goal is in 2023, make it so that every single video like, checks all of the boxes and that we love it because it also works well on the platform. So that's goal number one, and that's a big goal. Smaller goals are just like maybe working a little bit on merchandise, figure out how we can make cool things, like make a physical thing that like, is up to the standard of our YouTube video. We have already released merch, the Curiosity Journal Version 0, but we released it in a way that we were just like this, like everything else, is a process. So this is the first batch, it's a limited run. We wanna know what you think of this before we do it again. So hopefully, next year, we can actually make it better, like we wanna do with everything else, 1% better.

Jack Conte :

Okay, last question for you. Who's crushing it right now? Who's a creator that you think is doing something really special that you wish more people knew about or not enough people know about? Somebody who's like, making stuff. It could be a podcast, it could be the podcast you mentioned earlier. It could be a creater on YouTube who's just nailing it. It could be a couple folks.

Sabrina Cruz:

Two people that I really, really respect that you've probably already heard of. Cleo Abram and Johnny Harris. And I really just respect where they're coming from because they go from these like, institutions, right? They come from these really professional, rigorous backgrounds, and then they're making it work as individuals on YouTube, and I just really respect how they're kind of coming at it from the opposite way Answer in Progress is. Where we're just a bunch of scrubs, we don't know what we are doing, and we're figuring it out. So I think that I really enjoy watching them because I get to see like, okay, this is the other end of the spectrum. What can I learn from this? I view content very selfishly. I'm very much like, what can I learn from this?

Jack Conte:

I think that's how a lot of people view stuff online. There's very much a utility component, at least to my consumption. It's just like, "Oh, how can this make me better? What can I learn from this? How can this help me develop as a creator?" I don't know, I find a lot of my viewing habits are that kind of stuff.

Sabrina Cruz:

Yeah, like, good artists stale or whatever they say.

Jack Conte:

There you go.

Sabrina Cruz:

And then like, one channel that you might not have heard of, Faultline. Their tagline is understanding humanity through geography. They're a really small channel, but they're growing quite quickly. And I have the fortune of being able to, like, I've talked with them in the past, I've followed like, Andy's work, who's like, the primary host on the channel. I got to see a lot of the stuff that he was making before Faultline, and like, I really respected him, and I'm so glad that he seems to have like, locked into something that he is passionate about and that it is so good. So, you know, cool channel, check that one out.

Jack Conte:

Awesome. Thank you, Sabrina.

Sabrina Cruz:

Thank you.

Jack Conte:

So good hanging out with you. And thank you for coming here. Yeah, just throw the phone on the ground to end the interview. That's like, the 2022 version of dropping the mic. You're like, check out that interview.

Sabrina Cruz:

I was just trying to be polite, and I didn't know where to put it.

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