How Azzyland Went From Being The ‘Poor Kid’ In School To One Of YouTube’s Top Female Creators

[Music] i grew up below the poverty line my parents were lucky enough though to get into government housing which is kind of like the projects in the us and we were able to because of that get me into a better school and i was able to get better education which i was so blessed for that but the downside to that was that i was going to school where like some people had better situations living situations than me and i grew up kind of bullied because of that and wanting to fit in and always kind of wanting to pretend i wasn't like the poor kid at school and because of that i think i was always like had this ambition to like want to achieve success and this ambition to work and i started working as soon as i was able to i started at a movie theater and i then went to a bar and i worked in a lab a hospital like all these places and i put myself through university i'm kind of a people pleaser and i really wanted to make my parents proud so i was mainly only doing that because they said the only way for me to ever make it in life was either to be a doctor or a lawyer but i was a little unhappy because i wasn't following my dreams i was following the dreams of my parents when i was taking a year off from going into med school before my mcats i started making cosplay i would spend like a month sometimes on one costume and they were like these detailed intricate armored pieces and i would use this material called warbler to it's like a thermogenic plastic you would heat it up and then you could mold it into like any shape you wanted if you like so i could like show these crazy characters um i started getting recognized and flown all around the world because of these cosplays and because of something that was like all passion based through that a lot of people were like you should do youtube you should do youtube and i was like okay sure you created this world as you land your your real name is azera people know you as azzy can you talk about how you created that vision for this world or this content that has engaged millions and millions of people over the years of course so ozzie was my nickname growing up uh so i went with that online but mainly for like kind of to protect my family for privacy which also because my friends actually didn't call me ozzy so i did feel connected to that and then as you land was this place in my mind that i had created because video games for me and art were always an escape from when i felt like i was being bullied uh i would lose myself i would forget about my real world problems so i kind of wanted to create this world where other people who maybe had were dealing with hard things at home or at school or maybe they didn't fit in a place where like everyone is welcome if this content is a way to be an escape or a way to really you know have this this convening power for this audience how though do you think about the creative process walk me through sort of a life a day in your life as it relates to building out such a huge body of content over the years the first thing that happens is i need to come up with the content and the idea and the thumbnail so i think an advantage that i have is i'm i am very empath i consider myself to be a very empathetic person and because i have a tight bond with my fans i'm able to i guess someone predicts what they're going to enjoy predict what they're going to want to click on and that helps me decide on that and that from there from with idea i find all the material i want to use in the videos and everybody knows different like sometimes we do reaction content sometimes we do eye rolls and that's the beauty of it like i can fully be creative and just do whatever i want at any time uh and and then after that it goes through an editing process and then i we double check it and usually i will re-edit it like 10 times myself and then the thumbnail will go i'll make a bunch of thumbnails and we'll a b test the thumbnails so see which one works better and then the content goes up and it's up forever what advice would you give to others in terms of what it takes to produce content at scale but also what it takes to really invest and understand what your audience wants or what as you said to predict what your audience may want so another thing that i have to my advantage is i think helped me become as big as i am is that i do have a bachelor of science so i'm able to look at my contact in a very analytical point i'm able to look at the graphs and you can see where the videos drop off and you can be like why did people leave there what did what caused them to leave and you could see like maybe it was like something maybe i went on too big of a tangent and i lost people maybe uh there was like a like a blank screen for a bit and it just visually didn't catch people and it was a way to exit or maybe the flow and the rhythm dropped off so i'm able to study that and figure out why so like i guess scientifically why people might leave and at the end of the day there's like two things that make a video go viral and that's abd which is the average view duration and click through rate which is the percentage of people who click on your video if you could have both those numbers high then that's almost guarantees a viral video mathematically and i don't know this again algorithm is a breathing living organism pretty much it will change every day by the time he watches who knows i might have changed but at the moment that's how i think it works so much of the the business of youtube is working with partners or creating different collaborations what advice do you have for others around how you choose and think about collaborations based on the experiences you've had with brand deals um i am very picky i'm sure it annoys my agent he actually tells me like like you need to stop being so picky you're like you take the least amount of brands out of all my clients but i i believe that i have to do that because my fans love me they trust me and i don't want to sell them something that i don't believe in myself that's taking advantage of their trust and their love and especially some of them are younger than me it's an advantage of power dynamic so that is why i always say yes to but one percent of brand deals like no amount of money is worth like your integrity what's been the biggest lesson you've learned around creating a business through youtube i started off on an iphone again one of those like old iphones that suck and you can see that my first video looks terrible i look terrible because the lighting's terrible i'm using the lighting for my monitor so my point though is none of that matters if you just gotta be consistent you have to your fans have to see if you're passionate because i never thought i could make money off of this this was a passion hobby and i think that shows and don't let these little things hold you back just start that's the most important thing start be consistent work hard i believe that anybody can achie