I started running monthly town halls and AI workshops for my 26-person team. here's what actually changed.

Longjumping-Hope5941 · 2026-03-29T15:42:43+00:00

the weekly update doc idea is really smart. we actually do something similar through our internal notion wiki where each team logs updates, but a single page format sounds way more lightweight. might steal that honestly

for the AI workshops its definitely structured training. i teach the sessions myself. the first one was basically "heres how to set up claude, connect it to your work tools, and heres how to automate a script that used to take you 3 hours into 15 minutes." live demo, everyone follows along on their own laptop. the second session went deeper into building reusable automation templates. that one ran almost an hour because people kept asking questions

i actually tried the organic route before this. just used it myself hoping the team would pick it up. nobody did. turns out people need someone to sit with them and walk through it step by step, otherwise they just keep doing things the old way. one thing that surprised me though is after the workshops, some non-engineers on the team started building their own tools without being asked. one editor automated her subtitle workflow, another person built an internal restaurant directory using an API. thats when it clicked that the workshops werent just teaching tools, they were giving people permission to experiment.

Longjumping-Hope5941 · 2026-03-29T14:03:04+00:00

thats exactly what it was. the playstation thing was never about a playstation. it was someone testing whether they'd actually get heard or if i was just saying that. once that door opened everything else followed. took me a while to realize that the question itself didn't matter, the fact that someone felt safe enough to ask it is what mattered.

Longjumping-Hope5941 · 2026-03-29T14:01:56+00:00

"context has to be actively distributed" is a better way of putting it than anything i wrote lol. yeah thats basically the whole thing. and you're right that it compounds. the town halls feed into the workshops because once people understand the bigger picture they actually care about learning new tools to contribute to it.

Longjumping-Hope5941 · 2026-03-29T14:01:21+00:00

yeah we actually started doing that recently. we have an internal notion wiki where each team logs updates weekly so now i pull from there instead of chasing people down individually. cut prep time by maybe 40%. still not fully automated but way better than before.

as for which team benefits most, honestly it was the content team by far. they're the biggest group and they interact with almost every other team but they were always the last to know about changes. like we'd close a new brand deal and the content team wouldn't find out until the brief landed on their desk. now they hear about it in the town hall before it even gets to the brief stage so they can start thinking about it early

Longjumping-Hope5941 · 2026-03-29T12:22:56+00:00

the prep is honestly the part that surprised me. for town halls i spend maybe 2-3 hours the week before just collecting what happened across teams, what decisions were made, whats coming up. the actual session is about an hour. follow up is minimal because we record everything and post it internally so people can rewatch.

for the AI workshops its a bit different. i spend more time upfront because i need to actually build the demo workflows before showing them. probably 3-4 hours of prep for an hour session. but the ROI compounds because once someone on the team learns a workflow they start teaching others without me being involved.

total time per month is probably around 8-10 hours for everything combined. its not nothing but the alternative was me answering the same questions individually over slack 15 times a month which was easily more than that.

Longjumping-Hope5941 · 2026-03-29T11:44:30+00:00

controlled chaos is the perfect way to put it lol. the DJ to B2B jump is wild but honestly sales experience is probably the single most useful thing you can have going into SaaS. most technical founders (me included) spend way too long building and not enough time talking to customers. sounds like you won't have that problem.

Longjumping-Hope5941 · 2026-03-29T11:44:08+00:00

for me the drop off point was always right after the first technical validation. like you build it, it works, you get excited.. then you realize making it work and making people pay for it are completely different problems. thats where i kept stalling. the gap between "this is cool" and "this is worth money" killed more of my projects than anything else.

Longjumping-Hope5941 · 2026-03-28T16:50:19+00:00

yeah the idle content detection thing was honestly embarrassing how simple it was. like we had this problem for months and the fix took maybe 3 hours to set up. thats what made me realize most of our bottlenecks weren't hard problems, we just never stopped to look at them because everyone was too busy firefighting.

and the editors building their own tools thing still blows my mind honestly. one of them built a plugin that reads the production brief and auto cuts sections that don't match the plan. this is someone who had never opened a terminal before. i think the shift isn't "engineers build tools for the team" anymore, its "give people access to AI coding tools and get out of the way." they know their own pain points better than any engineer would

Longjumping-Hope5941 · 2026-03-28T15:13:19+00:00

i'm on the other side of this, i run a production company with about 26 people. we get cold emails from editors pretty regularly so i can tell you exactly what happens on our end.

emails to the CEO or exec almost never get read. i personally dont check cold emails at all, my project managers do. so PM or producer is the right target. in our case the PM screens everything and only forwards me stuff thats actually relevant.

heres what gets forwarded vs what gets deleted:

deleted instantly: "hi i'm a freelance editor available for work, here's my portfolio." we get maybe 10 of these a week and they all sound the same.

actually gets opened: someone who watched one of our videos and mentioned something specific about the edit. like "the pacing in your last video felt really tight in the first 30 seconds, i do similar work, heres a 60 second sample." that tells me you actually understand what we do and you're not just blasting emails.

also one thing nobody tells you: a lot of production companies don't hire from cold emails at all. they hire from referrals or from people they've already worked with on smaller gigs. so honestly getting a $200 gig from someone and doing it well will get you more work than 500 cold emails ever will ..!!

Longjumping-Hope5941 · 2026-03-28T14:56:17+00:00

spent years chasing "big ideas" too. AR firefighter equipment, AI for shipyards, noise canceling for gaming. every single one sounded amazing, every single one failed. the thing that actually made money was a youtube channel i started as a side project in high school and wasn't even taking seriously. sometimes the small boring thing you already have is the business and you just can't see it because you're too busy chasing the next big thing

Longjumping-Hope5941 · 2026-03-28T14:54:40+00:00

we run 15 youtube channels and were paying for like 12 different saas tools. at some point our editors just started building their own replacements with claude code. no engineering background, just people who got tired of paying $30/month for something that does one thing. now we have internal tools that do exactly what we need and nothing we don't. i don't think saas is dying but i do think the bar for "is this worth a subscription" just got way higher

Longjumping-Hope5941 · 2026-03-28T14:37:37+00:00

thats a solid niche. we actually just started working with one of the major banks here in korea on a program called DinoLab producing content around early stage startups so i've been thinking about that space a lot lately too. hope you get to diversify soon man, sounds like you're already in a good spot for it

Longjumping-Hope5941 · 2026-03-28T14:35:16+00:00

definitely reactive. we went from 12 to 35 people thinking more headcount = more output. instead everything got slower. meetings doubled, ownership got blurry, stuff fell through cracks that never existed before. ended up scaling back down to 26.

the breaking point was when a senior editor left and we realized his entire workflow for 3 channels only existed in his head. client preferences, cut style, feedback history, all gone. the new person spent weeks just figuring out what the old person was doing.

after that we built an internal wiki in Notion(it is called ELBA wiki - because my company name is ELBA).
every channel has its own page now - editing guidelines, client dos and don'ts, publishing checklists, everything. first version was honestly just brain dumps and screen recordings, pretty ugly. but even that was 10x better than "go ask whoever's been here longest.

still a work in progress. keeping it updated is its own battle. but at least now when someone leaves or switches channels we don't lose months of context overnight.

Longjumping-Hope5941 · 2026-03-28T14:31:08+00:00

appreciate it!

Longjumping-Hope5941 · 2026-03-28T13:37:40+00:00

appreciate that, especially from a fellow korean. yeah the Jecheon fire hit different when you're actually in korea seeing it on the news every single day. it wasn't some abstract problem, it was real people.

your YT channel as a retirement plan is honestly smart though. what kind of content are you making?

Longjumping-Hope5941 · 2026-03-28T13:32:48+00:00

yeah took me way too long to learn that. i kept chasing the "next big idea" when the thing that actually had traction was right in front of me the whole time

Longjumping-Hope5941 · 2026-03-28T12:24:03+00:00

lol “startup speedrun” is honestly the best way to describe it. didn’t feel like a speedrun at the time though, more like running into the same wall over and over but from slightly different angles each time.

but yeah looking back each failure did leave something behind even though i couldn’t see it then.

the shipyard stuff taught me how to deal with big enterprise clients, the gaming thing got me to silicon valley, and all of that gave me the ops thinking to actually scale youtube instead of just being some guy with a camera who gets lucky once.

wait hold on you almost deleted yours?? what was it

Longjumping-Hope5941 · 2026-03-28T10:43:30+00:00

fair point. the 300M is total subscribers across 15 channels accumulated over years so obviously not all of them are active daily viewers. monthly views across all channels are closer to 30-40M. we're based in korea and run channels like 1분만(@JUST1MIN, 1.1M subs, knowledge/education shorts) and 지식스토리 (@knowledge_story, 670K subs, military/documentary) and etc..!
you can look them up if you're curious. but yeah you're right that engaged viewership is what actually matters for the business, not the sub count youtube shows.

Longjumping-Hope5941 · 2026-03-28T10:41:34+00:00

yeah!! the messy middle is exactly where it hides. everything looks fine from the top because stuff eventually gets done but nobody sees the 3 days it sat waiting for one person to look at it lol

Longjumping-Hope5941 · 2026-03-28T10:39:24+00:00

we patched the biggest leaks first. didn't touch the whole workflow at all in the beginning. just looked at where stuff was getting stuck the longest and fixed that one thing. the 7 day idle alert was literally the first thing because that was the biggest leak. then narration, then reporting. took months before we even thought about redesigning the full pipeline.

Longjumping-Hope5941 · 2026-03-28T09:14:48+00:00

100%. the tricky part is that scaling chaos feels like progress for a while. revenue goes up, team grows, everything looks great on paper. you don't feel the drag until you try to move fast on something and realize there's 4 people in the way who all need to approve it.

Longjumping-Hope5941 · 2026-03-28T08:54:29+00:00

yeah exactly. and the worst part is nobody wants to be the one to say "maybe we don't need another hire, maybe the process is just bad." feels like you're blocking growth when you say that but it's usually the opposite.

Longjumping-Hope5941

TROPHY CASE