A week ago, we made eight Tubby Nugget animations in eight days. I called it a content speedrun. Initially, I wanted to do thirty videos in thirty days, but it would’ve been at the cost of my sleeping schedule. I worked until 6am and went to bed at 3pm every night during the content speedrun. Hey, I’m technically still getting good sleep. I’m just sleeping when everyone else is awake.

I’mma be honest, Jenine and I had so much fun doing a content speedrun. We made some of our favorite videos this past week, specifically the one where Tubby sings about all the mugs at his desk. That video took two days to animate, so we also made a few shorter, simpler videos that I could animate in an hour. Jenine was eating dried mangos while recording, so I offhandedly pitched a video where Tubby eats a mango. That’s it. No clever writing, no rhyming, no iteration. Tubby just eats a mango.

You can guess where this is going. The mango video vastly outperformed all our other videos on Instagram. Half a million views on a video we barely spent two braincells on.

Do I like the mango video? I mean, yeah it’s cute. It’s very shareable, which is probably why it performed so well on social media. And hey, the mug song video also performed really well. It just took TWELVE TIMES as much effort. But also…I like it more. Just personally. I like the way Tubby moves when he sings, because I’m imitating the way Jenine moves when she sings. I like the “I’m so done” expression that I drew on my own face, because I make that expression all the time watching Jenine’s shenanigans.

There’s also the financial aspect of it all. Full transparency, neither of these videos make us money directly. It’s all about “building the brand” blah blah blah. We make money when people go “aww this video is so cute - oh, they have a plush toy!” and then choose to buy it. But that metric’s hard to track. Theoretically, the mango video probably made us more money because more people saw it, and it took less effort which means I have more time to make more videos for more people to see so they buy more stuff…ugh everything’s more, more, more.

Sometimes I get lost in the business sauce. I’m an entrepreneur, just like my grandpa before me. There’s a lot I would ask him if he were still alive. But he died in 2017, two years before we started Tubby Nugget. He once told me that “if someone’s rich, they’re smart. It doesn’t matter how they became rich.” I don’t know if I believe that, or if anyone believes that nowadays. But money was really important to him, so it feels important to me. And it’s so easily to lose vision of what Tubby Nugget actually is when I think of it as just content. Who cares if the mug song or the mango video got more views or made more money? It made people happy. It made Jenine happy. It made me happy. Isn’t that what it’s all about?

It is what it’s all about. I’m really lucky to have this job. Sure, it’s stressful being my own boss sometimes, but it’s honestly a great gig. Saying it out loud reminds me to appreciate it.

Also, this is officially my first blog post. I love writing just for fun, but never didn’t want a public blog because it felt self-indulgent. But now that half the internet is bots and AI-generated content, I felt like it wouldn’t hurt to have a tiny bit more human writing online. And it’s fun! Which is what it’s all about. I’m lowkey hoping that I’ll actually lower the quality of ChatGPT’s writing ability when it scans mine.