In this very first episode of the podcast, you will meet your host. Me. I will tell you my background story, where I come from and how I ended up where I am today. So let's dive in. Welcome, content creators kickstart. Hello. Nice to meet you. My name is Rued Caspar Riis I am 31 years old and I am born and raised in Copenhagen Denmark.
If you don't know where Denmark is located, it is a super small. Actually a tiny country in the Nordics in Scandinavia. It's an independent country. Some think it's the capital of Ikea. That's not true. Ikea is a company. So a Denmark has a population of five or 6 million people. And the capital is about like 1.5 million people.
And that's where I am born and raised. So as a child, I really loved to play video games. I love to skate and roller blade, and that was pretty much what the, my entire childhood was about. Hanging out with friends, playing basketball, playing video games and the escaping. So later on when I was about 14, 15 years old, I started playing guitar and that really caught my interest.
First. I thought it was a really cool way to impress girls. That was actually the reason why I started, I wanted to be able to do something that would get the girls, you know, but I actually found out that this is a pretty interesting. Interest a pretty awesome hobby in itself. So it quickly became a passion of mine for the sake of it, like for the, for the actual thing itself and not for what it could, could lead to later on.
But yeah, this interest in the guitar was actually, I think that evolved into a dream of mine. I wanted to become a professional guitarist. So when I finished my. Like a elementary school. I went all in and I really tried to get as good as possible because I thought that I would go to the conservatory and study music.
I didn't have the bravery to actually. Sorry to say, but I never really handed in the application. So instead of going to the conservatory of music, I decided to study business. That's what you study when you don't know what else to study, right? It has to. It's probably a good general education that you can use for a lot of things.
So my focus was communication, corporate communication, strategic communication called what you want. And on top of that, on top of the bachelor's degree, I have a master's degree in organizational innovation and entrepreneurship. So that sparked my interest in entrepreneurship. And during the studies I started as.
Video agency, small kind of freelance sidekick project that I called cheap animation video. Pretty good. A name. If you want to be found in the search results. So when I finished my studies, I got my master's degree. I slid into a full-time mode with this agency and started to hire a first freelancer, a second freelancer, and eventually full-time employees to help me scale this little agency.
We. Scale it to seven, seven or eight people. And at that point I couldn't see a way to scale it any further. I didn't have the experience, the knowledge, the skills to take it any further. So. I was just running super fast, trying to sell as many videos as possible. And it seemed like it was just, you know, there, the hamster wheel running faster and faster going nowhere.
So when I got the job offer to become the CMO, the chief marketing officer of the use of tribe, I said, yes, please. I want to try something new. I want to learn something new. I want a new meet people. I want to be inspired and take my, my mindsets and my skillsets to the next. Use a trap does user testing quantitative qualitative analysis of user behavior, preferences, testing, new apps, testing new websites and getting feedback from customers.
And then we delivered that to the clients so they could understand how to design better, how to convert better, how to do everything better in accordance with user. After a little over a year, I got a new job offer and that was from something called graduate lands, which is kind of a LinkedIn for students here.
I was not so much of a marketing man. I transitioned slowly into. Product design product development. I was the CPO this time, the chief product officer. So that was about deciding nice products with together with an awesome team of both designers and developers. And there, that was really cool to try out and learn a lot about product design.
I did that for about one and a half years before I came to the conclusion that employment just wasn't. The true life path that I have to follow. And what really lights me up is entrepreneurship in one shape or form. So I was super inspired by the book company. It's the idea of solar partnership, running a business by yourself.
Everything is automated. Everything is as passive as can be. You don't have that much overhead you're working from home. You don't hire people so you don't spend so much money while. 90% of your revenue is pretty much profit, right? You only have to pay yourself and pay for a little bit of software here, here and there.
So that's what I did. I already had this kind of side gig going on with a video course. I created together with one of the employees in the video animation agency. We put that on you to me and Skillshare and see how that would perform. And it actually went pretty well with that. So I started to kind of.
Make that better answer. Self-host the course. See if I could charge a little more for the course. And also I had a side hustle going on with an affiliate. It's called tulsan.com and it's about tall people's clothing. I'm six foot eight myself. So I'm super tall and tall and slim, not big and tall, which is something the Americans know everything about.
But the clothing offer for tall and slim men is limited. So I have a side where I review all the brands that create clothes for tall. And when people click my links and buy something, I get a small commission, small kickback from whatever they buy. So I already had like a small revenue stream going on of about a thousand dollars a month.
It's not much, but it was enough for me to kind of go all in and bet on that. So I wanted to scale that and see if I could make that a full-time income instead of just a thousand. What happens is that now one and a half years into that setup and the revenue has tripled or quadrupled. So now I'm in a much better place than when I began.
And I believe that this can continue this development. So yeah, I'm working full time on the course business and also keeping the affiliate side alive. Of course, supplementing a little bit with freelance work, like helping people. Voiceovers and giving them some guidance on how to create their videos and stuff like that.
Right now, I teach Vyond primarily people come from my YouTube channel and into my site, route reese.com to get better at Viansa this animation software. That's a pretty niche focus, as you can say. And I kind of, I'm transitioning into talking more about education online. Targeting an audience of educators who use not only to create animations, but also teach them how to write scripts, how to do the voiceover correctly, how to get a faster process around the video creation and ultimately how to use beyond in the best way.
Right. So expanding the focus a little bit, and I'm actually thinking about expanding it even further from educators. Content creators in general, people who want to create content and have a career around content creation, either as a corporate employee who wants to kind of level up their, their career by being able to offer more, maybe they can learn something about video, or they can create a podcast like this one.
But in particular, it's, it's aimed towards business owners, freelancers. . People who wants to start a YouTube channel. For example, you need a skillset around content creation and it's such an enabler of future success. If you know, just the basics of how to write good texts, how to narrate a voiceover, how to design well, how to create basic animations, how to record video footage with a camera and how to combine all these formats into cool.
So that's what I am going to teach on this podcast. We're going to talk a lot about all these different formats and how to combine them well until next time, I think you should go ahead and subscribe to the podcast here and go and sign up for the newsletter on rude, reece.com. If you also want to kind of get a heads-up when there's a new episode or you want to kind of.
A heads-up when I launch a new course, stuff like that. If you just want to follow along, I think the newsletter lists is a really good way to kind of get the, get the heads up when stuff is happening. Thanks you. Thank you. Thanks. And thank you for tuning into this podcast and giving it a spin and listen until next time.
Remember to take good care of yourself and those around you. Bye.
