About me
👋 Hey, I’m Calum.
I’m a video marketing specialist and YouTube consultant based out of Berlin.
I help businesses create impactful and rewarding educational content for audiences turning cold leads into avid fans and customers by activating YouTube as an integral part of paid and organic marketing efforts.
If you want to elevate your business on YouTube, book a quick discovery call to discuss your ambitions for the platform, and where I can help.
Interested in more of my backstory? Here we go…
Having (at the time) next to zero experience with Camera and Video productions I moved to Berlin from the UK in late 2018 to work at AJ&Smart GmbH as a ‘Social Video Producer’.
I’d just retrained in a loosely UX design based college course in Edinburgh, and had dabbled with some lite editing and motion graphics work as part of the curriculum.
AJ&Smart (AJS) were looking to double down on their content efforts, expanding their audience and reach as well as building a machine around consistently released documentary-esque video content.
The brief was fairly simple – Set up a means to produce and sustain a weekly video on YouTube.
The scope was broad.
Our audience is out there.
I had near unparalleled freedom to produce whatever I saw fit to attract attention to the company.
The first video I recorded was (humbly) a train-wreck. The second attempt however was better.
We hit gold with our first proper UX (User Experience Design) title about 3 videos into my 6 week trial period…
Honing in on the cross-over between UX and Design Sprint practices, I went on to scale AJ&Smart’s channel from around 18K to well over 155K subscribers by the time of my departure.
In the process I helped build out a ring-fence around Design Sprint topics, inline with their main consulting and educational product offerings at that time.
Crossing over to UX related topics and explainers to greatly expand the reach of the channel and engage a new audience base which still operated in the Design and Product niches.
AJ&Smart 10x’d their channel under my tenure there, and along the way we built out a highly engaged and expectant audience.
It was an incredibly fun and rewarding role that afforded me the opportunity to experiment and go deep with YouTube as a platform, as well as honing my skills with video production and editing, which were all still fairly new to me at that point, as well as an understanding of the impact social video can have on a company’s bottom line and brand.
After two years at AJ&Smart, I was recruited by CareerFoundry GmbH to affect a similar growth trajectory on their channel. Like AJS they also had a small established channel however they were struggling to build a cohesive process around YouTube, and a consistent release schedule to support it.Â
Incidentally, they had seen significant traffic coming from an AJS video on how to ‘Get Started’ in UX design, which linked out to both their free short course (a well developed lead magnet) and their B2G Job Centre program.Â
As such they’d already seen a huge upsurge in the weeks and months following AJS’s UX video coming out, and were interested in replicating similar successes in house.Â
Joining the CareerFoundry team in late 2020, I led the Video Team and developed a comprehensive release strategy of weekly long-form content that started in early 2021.
Fast forward 2 years and the channel is now sitting comfortably on 240K subscribers at the time of writing, and has contributed significantly to key metrics, including:
🧲 32,000+ Attributed Leads from organic YouTube content to date.
📈 11.5M+ Views / 720,000+ Hours of WatchTime / 202,000+ Subscribers (and counting).
📺 Scaled Subscriber base by a factor of 12 between 2021-23 (18K to 220K+).
👀 Average of 422.5K total channel views per month in 2023.Â