Sleepless (and doubtful) in Seattle
Posted 03-02-2008 11:58 pm by admin admin

I've been trying for two weeks to get people to upload videos. Among other things, I posted several ads on the NYC Craig's List offering to pay people $40 per 10 minute instructional video. In one of the biggest cities in the world, on one of the most popular websites in the world, I am offering to pay people $40 for 10 minutes of their time and I've gotten scarcely any response (OK, the calculus isn't quite that simple, but regardless of how you do the math $40 to create and upload a 10 minute video ain't bad money).

Only a few people have responded to the ad at all and those that have don't usually reply after I send them the details. What are the details? Pretty simple really, I have them electronically sign an agreement that I'll pay $40 if they upload a video of reasonable instructional quality to the site. Then they upload the video and I send them the money. It doesn't seem too hard or unreasonable to me, but so far I've gotten a total of 1 guy to bite. His name is Cliff Brett and he is really intent on teaching people how to circuit bend. What is circuit bending? Well, watch his video and find out. Once it's posted that is. See we've been having all kinds of frustrations with the damn video format and what I call the 100MB wall of death.

10 mintues. All I want is 10 minutes, the time that I've unscientifically determined it takes someone to thoroughly teach most subjects. But, apparently web browsers can only handle 100MB worth of data upload at a time before they time out. That puts a hard limit of 100MB as the largest video anyone can upload. Any format that I've tried so far produces a 10 minute video that is about 150MB - 350MB, far too big to upload to the site. I know there has to be a catch since I've seen decent quality clips on YouTube (which has the same 100MB restriction) that are about 10 minutes. Each format uses a different "codec", a word I just learned yesterday, and the permutations are mind boggling (at least for my simple mind).

So now I've got to spend my days learning about online video formats (which I'd want to not care about if I had the choice) and e-mail YouTube users to figure out what magic combination of video and sound encoding they are using that lets them create 10 minute videos that are under 100MB.

And the whole strategy of tempting would-be SmilingMonk.com users with cash was just a desperate attempt in itself to seed the site and get the ball rolling. People are suppose to upload videos for free! If I can't get them to do it when I offer to pay them, how the hell am I ever going to get them to do it for nothing?!?!

Can I really build a company out of this? Can I create something from nothing? I spend my days dreaming about the day this company will be great. The day it will help people figure out something they've always wanted to learn. The day I'll have problems l can handle like running out of server space from too many videos being uploaded, figuring out which venture capital company to help fund it, or who to give all my money to if I ever make it big.

I've been around long enough to know that this is all part of business. Not just running a business, but business in general. This is suppose to happen. Life is too complicated, business is too complicated, for it not to. And one morning I'll awake to find that a new user posted a great video while I was asleep. Her name will be CookieGirl27 and she'll post a video of how to make spaghetti using a recipe that her grandmother taught her. She'll take the time to get all the right angles, make jokes, teach the subtleties. She'll spend three hours editing the video on her home computer using software that she bought. And finally, after it's just right, after it's perfect, she'll fill out the upload form and hit "submit", not because I promised to pay her $40, but because she loves to teach and wants the world to experience the glory of her grandmother's spaghetti. That will be a very happy day for me. CookieGirl27 where are you?

Until then I will settle for the heros of the day--Tetsu, who spends more time than he should making sure SmilingMonk looks and works great, and Cliff Brett aka The Madnoodler, the site's first user, who has stuck by me so far and who is intent on teaching the world the art of circuit bending.

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