This sounds quite pretentious, mainly because claiming you watched something “before it was famous” is incredibly hipster, but this isn’t meant to be. I just want to tell you a story…
A few weeks ago I was browsing, /r/travel on reddit and I came across this cute video a guy had made about travelling south east asia with his shoes. The guy was just starting a mini-series called “FollowTheFoot”.
I really enjoy travel videos, I was interested in more details behind the cinematography, so I asked him a few questions and, as is the beauty of reddit, he graciously repeatedly responded, finishing with a:
And best of luck to you! Just keep shooting, keep editing, and keep making new videos
I subscribed to his youtube channel so I’d find out about new videos, but I had no idea there would be anything more to it.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve watched his travel videos [walking through bat caves!], enjoying the editing, posted to facebook but not didn’t get much interest.
Yesterday, I got back from a weekend of work and saw a video he’d posted a few days earlier. It was a bit of a different vibe. This time, using basic CGI and narration, he beautifully explain the games we all played as a child.
I watched it, saw the double digits view count, thought, “ah, reddit might like that”, and posted it with a slightly provocative title to /r/videos.
It started rapidly gaining upvotes. I’ve seen how, on reddit at least, getting inertia, is important and so to be at 3-400 upvotes in less than an hour meant it was going to the front page. I messaged FollowTheFoot to tell him reddit loved him again and went to bed.
When I woke up, youtube was reporting that the video had about 30,000 views. Impressive I thought. Then I realised that that’s a good deal of inertia, and the video was probably going viral.
Waking up somewhere round the globe, FollowTheFoot messaged me:
Hey Tim, are you the Reddit OP? Thanks man! If you want, PM me your address and I’ll send you a unique postcard
A completely unnecessary, but very touching gesture that I’ll be taking him up on – what an amazing lesson in how to be awesome on the internet! 🙂
The video has gone “full viral” now. The last time I checked, about 24 hours after posting, it had 500,000 views, had been covered by The Huffington Post, CBS, Gawker… all because last night, I thought, “ah, reddit might like that”.
Wow.
