RVE 297: Lessons Learned From Bringing Paid Community Groups In-House

Today we have the pleasure of talking with Kyle & Jenn Bethune. Jenn & Kyle are full-time BusLifers and Content Creators. They have been fulltime for 3.5 years in their vintage bus with three kids and four dogs!

Lessons Learned From Bringing Paid Community Groups In-House

With Kyle and Jenn Bethune

Your Host: Joshua Sheehan

Connect with Kyle & Jenn:

 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@yourhypecouple Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/yourhypecouple Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yourhypecouple Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@red.white.and.bethune
 Website: https://www.redwhiteandbethune.com/ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ THE RV ENTREPRENEUR ⁠therventrepreneur.com ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Join the RVE community on Facebook! ⁠facebook.com/groups/therventrepreneurcommunity Connect with RVE on all your favorite socials therventrepreneur.com/connect⁠ Got questions or comments for our hosts? Leave us a voice message! ⁠therventrepreneur.com/voicemail⁠ (NOTE: Audio submitted may be published on the podcast unless specifically requested otherwise.) Got a great story or tips to share with RVE Listeners? Complete our Guest Intake Form: ⁠therventrepreneur.com/guestform

Listen to The RV Entrepreneur Episode #297

Listen and subscribe to The RV Entrepreneur on Spotify or in your favorite podcast app. Or, read the full episode transcript below. Leave a comment, or contact us with any questions. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ THE RV ENTREPRENEUR ⁠https://therventrepreneur.com ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Join the RVE community on Facebook! ⁠https://www.facebook.com/groups/therventrepreneurcommunity Connect with RVE on all your favorite socials https://therventrepreneur.com/connect⁠ Got questions or comments for our hosts? Leave us a voice message! ⁠https://therventrepreneur.com/voicemail⁠ (NOTE: Audio submitted may be published on the podcast unless specifically requested otherwise.) Got a great story or tips to share with RVE Listeners? Complete our Guest Intake Form: ⁠https://therventrepreneur.com/guestform

The RV Entrepreneur #297 Full Episode Transcript:

Lessons Learned From Bringing Paid Community Groups In-House Versus Utilizing Services Like Patreon RV LIFE: Welcome to the RV Entrepreneur podcast. The weekly show for Nomads, Work campers, RV ers and entrepreneurs looking to earn a living or build a business while enjoying the RV lifestyle. This week’s host is Joshua Sheehan. Let’s settle in and enjoy the RV Entrepreneur podcast brought to you by RV Life. This episode is sponsored by wholesale warranties. SPONSOR: Protecting your investment means being ready for anything and extended warranty from wholesale warranties is the best way to make sure that if an RV failure happens, you can afford to get back to enjoying the RV life as soon as possible. Rv warranties are available for motorhomes, fifth wheels and travel trailers new and used across the US. Visit wholesale warranties.com for a free personalized RV warranty quote today and hit the road with peace of mind tomorrow. RV LIFE: This episode is sponsored by RV Flex Repair. Don’t let a damaged RV roof keep you from hitting the open road. Rv Flex repair by Zillow is the perfect solution for RV owners who want to keep their vehicles in top condition. Our easy to use complete RV roofing system can be applied in just one coat and is compatible with other products for added flexibility. Plus, with a lifetime warranty and free shipping, you can have peace of mind knowing your RV roof will last as long as your own vehicle. Visit rvusa.com today and join the thousands of other satisfied RV owners who have already restored their roofs with RV flex repair. JOSHUA: Hey there. Rv Entrepreneurs. Welcome to the RV Engineer podcast. I’m Joshua Sheehan, your host for this week’s episode. Today we have a really awesome interview with Kyle and Jen Bethune. I originally reached out to them. I’m in the same content creator space as they are. They are most well known at the moment for Red, White and Bethune, their YouTube channel, social media, and they have been doing something cool. They’ve kind of decided that they were going to bring their community membership in-house. They weren’t going to use a third party app, Patreon, YouTube join, and they were going to own the membership, the community aspect of it. And I see a lot of value in that. And I wanted to pick their brains about how to do it and what they learned from it and what they, you know, roadblocks. And then right between me reaching out to them and then us getting on the call, they also announced that they’re doing a rebrand, that they’re kind of switching and pivoting the focus of their social media content going from or from travel vlogging to hype couple your hype couple is the new brand name. So they’re coming from Red, White and Bethune to your hype couple. And it was really cool in this conversation to just talk to them about one, the community aspect and owning that and learning from bringing all of that in-house. I think there’s a lot of value there and a lot of tidbits that you guys are going to pick up, but also then talking about how it is to morph and rebrand from one thing to another and how it’s a pivot, but it isn’t necessarily like a pivot that is going to alienate anyone in their community. JOSHUA: So it’s a really cool conversation. There’s a lot of tidbits to pick up in here, and Kyle and Jen are some of the most authentic people that I have met and that I know and is an absolute joy talking to them. So without further ado, let’s jump into the episode. Awesome. Kyle and Jen, welcome to the RV Entrepreneur podcast. I’m really excited to talk to you guys today. I reached out with an idea and wanted to pick your brain about one aspect of your business and what you’re doing. And now there’s another aspect that I want to kind of touch on too. So we’re just going to get a two for one here and two major things in the content creator space. People talk about consider and you guys have actually done both. But before we dive into that, give me a a brief background. How about a brief background, a brief background of who you are, what you’re doing, and kind of an elevator pitch more than 30s. But like where did you start? Where did you come from and where are you now? JEN: All right. So thank you, Josh, for having us. We are Jenn and Kyle Bethune. Originally we are from the Tampa Bay area, but we have been living and traveling in our 1983 Eagle bus for over three years now with our three kids and four dogs. We also just rebranded You may Remember Us as Red, White and Bethune, and we rebranded into your hype couple. So we did a lot of travel content for those three and a half years. And now we’re excited to see where this new journey is taking us. JOSHUA: Super cool. So a little bit of background. How did you guys decide you were going to get on the road? And, you know, since this is the RV entrepreneur, how did you set out plans to be able to finance travel? Because a lot of people, you know, I’d love to travel, but how am I going to take my job with me? What were you doing and what did you have as a plan to get on the road and be able to do that and continue traveling? KYLE: Well, I think, you know, this full time travel was always the goal. You know, not in our 30s. That wasn’t our original thoughts as with a lot of people. But, you know, there’s a lot of resources now with remote work. Jen actually owned a stick and bricks type business. She owned a dog grooming salon that was hugely successful. She had several hundred clients. You know, we had a shop set up at our home in Florida. But on the flip side of that, we also had a some rental property, some residential long term rentals. And we knew, you know, cutting the expense of a traditional household in Florida we were going to be able to save, you know, or not be required to make near as much money. So we ended up actually she ended up just closing the salon, slowly phasing it out. And we kept our best property. We have eight units, eight doors, as they say, in the investment world, and that’s pretty much the bulk of our income. And that when we started, that was all of our income. So they’re located in central Florida. You know, we have a YouTube channel that we’ve been working on since we started and it’s supplied a little bit of income along the way. But, you know, we’re constantly working on it. JOSHUA: Why jump into YouTube? Why take that on as a part of adding to daily life and traveling, knowing a little bit about content creation and YouTube like it definitely is a is another entity into a family dynamic. What excited you guys about making content and deciding that it was worth all of the sacrifice that would be coming along with that to try and give this a go? Because obviously you don’t start YouTube knowing that it’s going to turn into something you hope it does and you can work towards that. But it’s a long game, right? It’s not something that you can typically start and within six months be making enough money to live off of. So what was your motivation in in making your travels public? JEN: Well, Kyle, he came up with this idea that he wanted a family YouTube channel. And we actually recorded a few things, did a few videos before we went into travel content. And when we decided to go full time, we just for some reason we were like, This is what we’re doing. We want to show this to people because at the time there wasn’t a ton of people doing this. I mean, you had your top bigger channels that were out there doing some travel content, but it wasn’t like what it is today. I mean, there are there are people doing travel content everywhere on every platform. Right? And we really just wanted to give a behind the scenes look of growing with us and see what this adventure was going to be. There’s a lot of mixed emotions now that we’ve kind of let the sun set on the travel content, but it really it inspired us to get out more. You know, when you’re creating travel content, you got to get out there, you got to film, you got to do stuff. And it led us to some pretty incredible places, some wonderful things that we caught on camera. And I think we just initially wanted to inspire others that they could live a life they love. If we could do it with this dumpster fire of three kids and four dogs and 320ft². Other people could go live their dreams as well. JOSHUA: Okay. So I was interested in having you guys on to talk about the community aspect and how you guys took your red, white and buffoon community and you brought it in-house, meaning that you weren’t using a third party platform. Now, with the rebrand, I’m curious to know and you guys can help guide this conversation, what’s the best way for us to talk about this? Because I think they’re interrelated. I want to learn lessons from what you learned, but I also want to focus on the rebranding. So what are your thoughts on how best should we talk about one and then the other, or should we intersperse and just ping pong back and forth between questions? What do you guys think? JEN: We can totally ping pong back and forth, maybe just starting out with why we decided to go in house and then it can kind of lead into what it’s transformed into. Perfect. JOSHUA: Yeah. So let’s do that. Why did you guys decide to jump into it and bring some sort of membership in house? Because there’s a lot of ways to monetize content, but there’s a lot of ways that people think of that are not your own right. Your digital sharecropping. You’re jumping on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and you’re making money off these platforms and even brand deals. You don’t own any of that, right? You’re at the whim and the will of someone else to get paid for that. But bringing a membership in house one, you take on all the responsibility, but you also reap all the benefits. So what tipped you guys into making that big leap? And you can tell me, but I’m sure there’s a lot of work in going into establishing it and then also exuding confidence enough that people are going to want to do that versus stay on some of these other platforms. KYLE: Well, I think for us, you know, we you know, the brand Deal Avenue is obviously a huge part of content creation. But I think we learned pretty early on it really wasn’t we didn’t really get much joy out of it. And it’s just something we really didn’t like doing, not really any particular reason. We just didn’t really fit with the way we filmed and our personalities. And, you know, if you’re in content creation, you don’t own anything. You’re playing in everybody else’s sandbox. Youtube runs the show, Facebook runs the show, you know, and so on and so on. So this was really Jen’s idea. She’s like, you know, we had had some people say, Hey, why don’t you start a Patreon? We want to help fund your journey. We want to help, you know, support what you’re doing. And, you know, we bounce back and forth for a while. And it actually took us a while to find someone that wanted to or that would willing to take on that type of project, you know, because we wanted to add a membership service like a Patreon, but we wanted to do it in a way that we could have. The only asset, Jen was able to eventually find someone and it. JEN: Was actually another full time family. Stephen Connell He has net guava and he was like, Yes, I will absolutely do this with you. My initial reasoning for doing it was so that we could own it. These platforms could shut down any day. You know, you’ve got stuff happening with TikTok right now, you know, and things become up. In the air. But when it’s your website, as long as you retain that domain name and pay your hosting, you own that stuff. And so we wanted to curate it how we felt like it needed to be. And when you are playing these other platforms, games, you have to play by their rules and post what they want you to post and how you want to post it and chasing an algorithm. And we have always been people over profits. Not to say we don’t want to make money, but to say that our decisions that we make are based for the good of our community. And we just felt like we could create a beautiful space for people to be themselves, to be weirdos, and just to, you know, curate our own family in a sense. JOSHUA: Nice for Emily. I like that. How much extra work did it add, right? Because if I’m going to join a membership, I’m hopefully going to gain more than I would get for free. But at the same time, you still have to be creating those funnels into the membership by creating the YouTube content, the Instagram content to get people to be aware of your membership. So if you were to give it A1X2X3X, how much extra work is the membership on top of creating awareness for your brands to funnel into that? JEN: Well, it really depends, you know, and it depends on your membership levels because that’s how much extra work you’re having to put into it because you’re promising these members X amount of stuff. And when you have three, four, five, six, seven different levels that you have to keep track of, that adds a lot more work into it. Ours is one level $5 a month. That way it keeps it easy on that end for like our deliverables to our people. And then as far as you know, we don’t do a whole lot in terms of like marketing and advertising it. We want it to be organic. So like during our live streams we’ll say, Oh, Bethany’s don’t forget you’ve got your monthly members only live stream. Like with the rebranding that we’ve had come up, we heavily relied on our Bethany’s and went to the group for their input. So in the post that I made, I said, You know, we won’t be posting for two weeks, but we’ll be posting in the Bethany’s. And that day we had three or 4 or 5 people join. So I feel like for us, what fits, you know, how we are just putting it out there organically is how we want to grow? KYLE: Yeah, I mean, I definitely, you know, the point, you know, funneling people there is definitely, I think something we want to do more of. It was a lot of work though. I mean, like you said, we outsourced the building of the addition to the website. We did start a Facebook group, which is we try to stay pretty active. And but overall, I mean, I think it’s been great. You know, we did actually start out with membership levels and I think we learned pretty quick. You know, I think we had three it was quite a bit more work than I feel like it was worth because everybody kind of seemed to sign up in one area. They favored one of the membership levels. So we got to thinking, you know, would cut our workload back quite a good deal to just make it one price that pretty much anybody that really cares enough about us to want extra, you know, most people should be able to afford $5 a month. And I think it was a good move. I think it’s since we’ve done that, it’s been much smoother. We’ve seen steady growth and I’m pretty pleased with where we’re headed with it. JOSHUA: Are there any financial benefits to owning it in so much as, you know, $5 a month coming in directly to you, I’m assuming has different processing fees than $5 a month going to Patreon or to YouTube memberships? JEN: Yeah. I mean, when you own it, you’re always going to get more of the pie as opposed to having to paying the fees. Now we do use Stripe to process all of our credit cards, so that is a fee that we have to incur, but we’re not giving another percentage on top of that. So we are getting to retain that. And I also think that people genuinely like to support the creator. You know, YouTube takes so much of your super chats that you get so much of your memberships, and when members know that their money’s going directly to the creator, there’s no middleman. They’re not giving it to somebody else. I think they’re more apt to join that. JOSHUA: To Kyle, you mentioned not wanting to promote it as much just because it doesn’t fit your vibe of, you know, you don’t want to be preachy of like, Hey, come here and hang out at the same time. I think it’s also that’s the fine line of content creation, right? Because as a consumer and a watcher and a follower, I want to know about these things. But as the creator, you’re like, I don’t want to push this. I don’t want to push this. But if you don’t push it, unless someone’s watching every single piece of content every single day, they may not hear about it. So I feel like that’s a that’s a very fine line to walk down. Have you guys talked about it and figured out a plan of, you know, how we’re going to do this, to be able to let people know in a way that’s authentic but also not shove it down and make it an infomercial. KYLE: Well, I think, like Jen touched on, you know, especially because we’ve done live streams since basically day one. I think the subtle messages in the live stream is good because we’ve learned that people that are going to attend your live streams and sit there and watch you talk on screen for an hour are pretty dedicated followers or whatever you want to call it. So I feel like, you know, we have moderators in our live streams that, you know, are good about putting it in the live stream and talking about it. She does a at the end of every video, every Bethany and even before at whatever level is have a mention in the credits like you said, you do walk a fine line in content creation of versus being a salesman versus being an authentic. I think just our personality and the way we do things. We’re just very, you know, organic. Like she said, we like to fit it in where we feel like it’s going to where it’s going to come across as a benefit. If you want this access, you’re going to have to do this type of thing. But it’s not to say we definitely shouldn’t or will definitely try other avenues to funnel more people to it. JEN: Yeah, I think another thing was that when you’re developing your own, it’s a long process. Not only is YouTube a marathon, not a sprint, but having your own membership site and doing something that nobody else is doing, you’re kind of paving the path for that. It’s difficult. You’re always learning stuff and this past year or six months has been really difficult on on us. We’ve had a lot of personal things going on. And so I feel like we didn’t want to overpromise and underdeliver and a lot of the reason why we were subtle in talking about the Bethany’s our membership page was because we didn’t want to take on more than what we could chew, we didn’t want to put out there, you know, Hey, come to the Bethany’s in every episode and then get a rush of Bethany’s and not be able to care for them the way that we want to care for them with having so many other things going on. JOSHUA: Yeah. Which you guys have experienced in. Right? Like the exponential growth and the growing pains that come with that. JEN: Yeah, there’s a lot. But I think when you grow so quickly, like a lot of people don’t understand when you have like 5 or 6 videos going viral at the same time on four different platforms, that is a lot. It’s a lot coming in, it’s a lot to adjust to. And so we take a lot of breaks like we will pump the breaks when we need to and say, okay, hang on, let’s slow down. Let’s take a couple weeks off here. Let’s regroup because burnout is so real. And when we went really viral, we were like, Oh, we got to post, we got to post, we got to post. And what happened was we were overwhelmed and we got burnt out. And that led to a spiral of our mental health. And so we took a break. And so different creators do different things. For us, mental health is huge, especially our own. And so we pace ourselves, we listen to our body. And when we need a break, when we don’t need a break. And that’s helped us tremendously with the growth and growing pains. JOSHUA: So with the membership, you said you started out with different levels. How long did that last? KYLE: Um, we did it for a few months. Okay. We did it for a few months because when we were developing everything, we were going back and forth, like, what do we want to do? We figure people like options, so we wanted to give more the different levels. And not to say that’s a bad idea because I definitely think you could make more money that way. But knowing us and the way we do things, I just think it was a weight off of us just to have the one to have the expectations across the board of the deliverables. And what we’re bringing to the table, I think was just the right move. JOSHUA: Yeah, I totally get that from the simplification standpoint of being like, Hey, this is what we owe them and our community. Like the deliverables are easy. I’ve heard some other membership groups where there’s kind of some interpersonal dynamics that end up having to be moderated because people are contributing at different levels and therefore have these covert expectations that they are have more influence in what goes on in the community. Did you guys experience any of that? No. JEN: The people that are in our community, we have family rules. And so when you sign up, you have to agree to these family rules. And they’re the same family rules that we have in our bus. And so the expectation was set in the beginning. But the people that we have in our community are just such heartfelt, wonderful, down to earth people. We didn’t change the membership levels because of that. However, I can see where in some groups having different levels, people think, Oh well, I pay X amount, I should get this say or I should get this say. And we kind of circumvented that in the beginning of changing the levels because we wanted everybody to feel equal. We didn’t want anyone to feel above another person. So that’s why we made it kind of all one level. So everybody felt a part of it. JOSHUA: Yeah, sitting at a round table instead of a square one. Right. Total sense. Yeah. So thinking back about since you started bringing this all in house and up until now, what are some of the roadblocks that you’ve overcome? And or maybe a better way to rephrase this question is what would you do differently if you were to redo it again, starting from scratch? KYLE: It’s a tough one. You know, going back to the membership, you know, for us, definitely starting with the one line of membership. But, I mean, the process was smooth. I mean, overall, I mean, it cost obviously there was an expense incurred there. So if we would have tried to do it ourselves, obviously it would have been substantially harder. But the people we worked with was great. You know, the website portion of it to me is the, you know, we tend to do more in the Facebook group, the private Facebook group. Maybe if we could have simplified the website a little more where it was a little bit user friendly, more user friendly, which is something I think we want to do at some point or continue improving that. But I mean, other than that, it was a relatively smooth process. I mean, we we didn’t give it a timeline. We’re like, we’ll get it done. We’ll roll it out when we roll it out, you know? And I’m glad we didn’t rush it. We didn’t push it. You know, like I say, the people we worked with were amazing. And it just worked out. I mean, I really have no complaints with the way things have gone. JOSHUA: Did you guys have membership on another platform before this one launched? JEN: We did not. JOSHUA: Okay. So you started from total scratch? JEN: Yeah, We didn’t want to have to transfer that over because then that’s one more hurdle because Kyle’s like, Well, what if you start a Patreon now? Then transfer everybody over, but then everybody gets used to that and then you’re moving them over to something else. And so we just wanted to start fresh with this, not have any biases and kind of just pull from our own hearts and brains of what we wanted to see. JOSHUA: Yeah, that makes sense. So I do know that one of the hard things about getting people to be active in a membership is getting them to be in the space and location. And so what it sounds like you’re telling me that you guys have done is the membership is all processed and hosted on your website, but then from there, majority of your your community is active on Facebook. So you’ve created the Facebook playground for everyone to come and join in. However, you’ve also got the back end. Everything information wise on the community can be accessed through email lists and stuff that you own. But instead of trying to force people to play on the website, you’re going to where they are on Facebook. Is that accurate? KYLE: Yeah. The demographic that we have for the most part hangs out on Facebook. You know, it didn’t take us long to figure that out. We definitely, you know, we played with a little bit to see and the interaction was just not even comparable in the Facebook group. Yeah, we’re kind of taking the website portion more of just, you know, like I have recipes that I do a lot of cooking and I put a lot of that on there. Travel destination. We’re kind of making it, you know, almost more like a blog per se for the membership because the Facebook group just has really worked pretty good. So yeah, I think for us it’s a demographic thing. You know, they just prefer Facebook. They’re familiar with it and comfortable with it. JOSHUA: Yeah, that makes total sense. And then you’ve got the email list of what they signed up through to get to that Facebook group as the backup plan if anything goes catastrophic like that. All right. So let’s switch a little bit. Talk to me about getting to the point of even considering a rebrand and where that idea came from, what the emotions and the thoughts were behind it. And then we can walk through the process of tactically doing it. JEN: Yeah, we filmed our lives. We had a camera in our hand, which felt like 24 over seven for over three years. And our intentions of that were to show people that they could live a life they love. You know, with children, without children, with pets, whatever the case may be, you could do it. You could live your dream. And so when we went really viral, the worst of the Internet comes out and they were horrific, like a lot of these comments in the Hidden because I have keywords that if they type in that gets hidden, you can’t see that comment when you go in this section. That is where the scum of the earth hangs out in the held for review section. And so many people were criticizing our children. Some of them even called our daughter fat. One was like sexually explicit toward one of the kids. And what we realized, we looked at all of these videos that went viral. And the common denominator was that our children were in it. But our purpose of putting them in it was to show people with families that, Hey, we’ve got kids, we can do this. This is how we homeschool, this is how they do chores, you know, to show people how it’s done. And we quickly realize that that is not how we want to gain subscribers. That’s not how we want to get views. It just didn’t fit what we wanted to do. And so for the past several months, we lost our spark for creating content. We burnt ourselves out. You know, when you’re doing short form and long form, you have to create every day and it just wears your brain out. And so we decided to take a three week hiatus. During this three week hiatus, we talked about what if we rebranded into something that we’re very passionate about that we love. We can still somewhat incorporate travel in it, and that’s what we did. Kyle actually came up with the idea to move red, white and Buffoon to your hype couple. You know where we lead with love and encourage the kindness in you by videos and different posts and stuff. KYLE: Well, you know, and like she said, I think we wanted to take our travel back for ourselves. You know, we set out we love travel, obviously. That’s why we do this, you know, And it seemed like the videos, the harder we worked on them, the less views, the less traction we could get. So we’re like, you know, let’s enjoy the travel. You know, we have to work. Obviously, we have a following on social media. We need to use that asset, but we want to take our travel back for us. And when we go out, be present, you know, because, you know, Josh, you’re, you know, you’re filming, you film a lot. JEN: You miss a lot. Yeah. KYLE: And you miss a lot, you know, especially trying, you know, in the last few months we were really trying to make some quality content. We were both very pleased with the content we were making, but the work of it is very, you know, it’s a lot. You know, you’re almost you get done with your day and you’re like, What did we even do today? You had to watch the video to remember what you even did sometimes. So I think that was another layer of it for me is kind of taking back, you know, the travel and keeping it for us. And that’s kind of what we’re doing with the Bethany’s is they still are going to have access to that travel. We’re going to be posting a lot of raw, in-the-moment content of travel still because that’s why they came. And we want to still offer that because I do really love travel content and I want to keep it going. But we have other passions and other drivers that we, you know, other things we want to try to do well. JEN: And I also think like with this with this switch over of your hype couple and we’re focused on hyping people up, giving positivity, you know, to help them grow through life. When people fall in love with you for the videos you make, you know, all the new people that are coming on, they can’t get enough of you. Like once they fall in love with what you have, they want to see the behind the scenes. They want to see where you live. They want to see like when you brush your teeth, like they get obsessed. And so that’s what the membership site is becoming. It’s for all the behind the scenes stuff that you are not going to see on your hype couple. It’s where, you know, we’re going to hang out and spend our most time with our family. And in the Bethany’s, we comment under our social media, our personal social media. So people are getting a real behind the scenes look as opposed to before where you got the travel content on there. And then it was somewhat behind the scenes, but it was already posted somewhere else. So that’s kind of where we’re headed with that. JOSHUA: I’m curious to know what the thought process was and how you decided one way or the other of morphing red, white and buffoon into your hype couple versus starting anew. KYLE: Jen When she makes up her mind like it’s done, you know, I take six months to buy a pair of shoes. Like, I don’t I don’t I don’t make decisions quickly or hastily. But everything clicked with her. I think we were both really burnt out, you know, and we didn’t feel like the creativity was there anymore for that type of content. And it’s just too much work to just go at it haphazardly. So I think for her it was just a, okay, this is what we’re doing now. Buy for Me mean, you know, that was three years of my life. I mean there’s hundreds of videos on there of, you know, we kind of dug in last night a little bit, watched some of the old stuff. And it’s still kind of difficult, you know, that we cut it loose. There are aspects that I’m certainly going to miss, but I think neither one of us wanted to start over from zero again. I don’t think we were just I don’t think we could handle that. I mean, anybody that’s ever started YouTube knows how hard it is to get an account off the ground. It is a lot of work. JEN: Well, and I don’t just make decisions that quickly about anything. No, I like it has to resonate with my soul. And this resonated with my soul. Like he came up with this idea, wrote it down on paper, and then he said, Hey, I have something to show you because, you know, I was still hanging on to R.w.b because I poured a lot into that and I was, you know, having a hard time letting go. And he hands me this paper and I read what’s on the paper and I’m like, okay, this sounds good. Let’s do it. Because everything just clicked. And I was like, This is it. And truth be told, our content wasn’t really far off from what it’s going to be. Okay, We’ve been posting inspirational content for months and months and months. We are big mental health advocates, so it’s really not too much far off from what we were doing. JOSHUA: So you’re feeling like the rebrand is is almost just in letters of a name only and you’re kind of you’re reducing the amount of in life stuff that you’re putting out publicly that’s going to stay behind in the community and you’re just increasing some of the stuff that you had been doing under this new name. JEN: Yeah, pretty much. Okay. JOSHUA: Yeah. I’d be curious to talk to you in a year and see what the how it works out with you because you’re at the whim of the algorithm, Right? And if it’s just like if someone is following you just for the travel stuff, but they’re not interested in the community to see where that goes. And I don’t have an opinion one way or the other. I’m just I’d be curious to see how it plays out. JEN: I will say right off the bat, we haven’t lost a lot of people, okay? We actually the feedback has been tremendous. Like people are writing tons of comments and they’re like, yes, we want a daily dose of Jen back. We’re so excited. Like they are like we are in it for the long haul. And these are people that aren’t even in the Bethany’s community. These are just, you know, followers on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and they’re like, We’re in it. We love you guys. And I think that’s because we connected with people so much as Red, White and Bethune, and we put people first. They feel that love. And so it’s like Ride or die. They’re with us. They said, no matter what you do, you’re you’re stuck with us. So that’s been really good to see. JOSHUA: Do you feel like this switch will instigate a second community that you’ll have kind of the behind the scenes Kyle and Jen’s life? And then you also have people that are there specifically for the hyping, the motivation and that offering at different a different avenue, a different community feel, I guess, than just behind the scenes. JEN: Yeah. Actually, I was talking to Kyle about this a couple days ago. I was like, you know, we could because we’re not ones for like doing all the things right at once. Like, we like onboarding. So, you know, once we get things leveled out, we’re like, okay, let’s onboard the next thing. And so I think that’s actually the next thing. Once we get leveled out, we’re going to onboard a different community that’s based around affirmations, that’s based around positivity, that’s based around mental health. So that way, you know, like call it the hype crew or the hipsters or something like that to where that is dedicated to hyping you up. And the Bethunes is our family behind the scenes, so for sure, right? JOSHUA: So what does the new structure look like? Because I can see I know from just personal experience interacting with you guys that short form isn’t lighting you up, but I can see short form performing really well with hype content. So what is the structure look like and what are you guys going to be creating to continue this new endeavor? KYLE: Yeah, short form is we have a definite love hate relationship with it. I mean, you know, it’s I think as most content creators probably do that also do YouTube right now we’ve set out we’re going to do short form seven days a week. You know, that is the beauty that we are finding a little bit with this type of content is it can be batch filmed or it can be filmed in a day versus travel content. You actually physically have to go somewhere to film. A lot of what we were trying to do, we’re trying to do a couple short forms a day, seven days a week for at least 30 days, kind of see if we can gain some traction. She’s got one long form video a week planned right now. We’re definitely going to up that to two at some point in the coming weeks. You know, we’re kind of sticking to what we were doing as far as schedule wise with the way we were posting. It kind of worked with our current audience. So we’re just, you know, like I say, this is a whole new thing. You know, it’s definitely a leap of faith a little bit. But I think, you know, we’re just kind of waiting ourselves in and see where it goes. JEN: I will say one thing that I love about this new style of how we are filming is we have a schedule. So one day a week we film, the next day we edit. And that makes my life so easy because when you’re vlogging, you literally have to vlog every day because there’s always something that comes up that, Oh, we’re going to go here and Oh, look at that bird eating out of a milk carton outside. Like things come up and you’ve got to hurry up and grab the camera. This the videos are planned out. It’s not really a script, but there’s definitely a skeletal structure there. And then we sit down, we film, and that’s one day a week, and one day a week is editing. Then you schedule everything and it’s like so much easier than vlogging. It’s really nice. JOSHUA: Yeah, that sounds like it. Very freeing and also much more scalable. Like you can you can accomplish a lot more. That’s not, you know, will of the wisp. And just depending on what’s going on day to day, it’s a little more structured. You can direct it and that’s cool. KYLE: Yeah, I mean there was a point I was trying to put out 4 or 5 short forms a day. Wow. It was insane. Even to get to the point where we were, if we could put out ten a week of travel content, it’s just a lot. JEN: To be. KYLE: Able to kind of make a plan, have a film day, have an edit day, and boom, you know, we’re off to something else is really nice. JOSHUA: So what does long form hype content look like? I can understand that this was part of your prior content, but it was also easy to sprinkle in with the vlog stuff, right? So that, you know, you almost had the majority of it vlogging and traveling and what your family’s doing, sprinkling in these different things. If you’re taking out the vlog portion of it, what is a long form video look for you guys going forward? JEN: So on Wednesday evenings is what’s going to be called hype sessions. And that’s about an 8 to 10 minute video. The first one is actually how to get your summer body in 30 days, just five steps. And so it really focuses on giving people a problem. It’s focused on body positivity and you’ve got to love yourself as you are, and it gives you five steps in order how to do that. And it’s just kind of me sitting on the bed. It’s almost like we’re chilling together as friends. I’m hyping you up saying that you can do this. You’re amazing. And that is the first video that we’re coming out with. We’re toying around with other ideas to incorporate some travel still, but we haven’t really laid out what those are going to look like. Like I said, we like to to get the first thing out first get it going, get a good feel for it, and then add things in because we don’t want to just halfway do it. You know, we really want it to be good when we put it out there. JOSHUA: It’s exciting stuff. You guys are always on the move, always pivoting and keeping everybody on their toes. Love it. JEN: There’s always something new. Always something new. JOSHUA: I think it’s really cool because I was I was super excited to get you guys on. You know, I even reached out early last year when you said, Hey, we’re bringing this in house and you’re like, No, let’s give us some time to go through the growing pains of figuring it out. And you were spot on. I’m glad that we did it. Added Bonus Now that we can talk about rebranding, it’s super cool. I think the different aspects and the multiple opportunities and avenues available to people today just awesome. And I think what you guys embody is just do what works for you until it doesn’t and then pivot, right? Because you had three years of this worked and now it doesn’t. So now you’re going to move to this new thing and your schedule is totally going to change. It sounds like you’re going to be able to have a bit more structure in the business aspect and then just be totally free and be able to, because you’re right, Kyle, you know, having the camera out, you’re there physically, but when you’re looking through the lens, sometimes you’re not there and you do have to go back and look at the footage and be like, What did we do? How did this go through? And so like, then you start thinking about the impact of that on your mental health, your spouse’s mental health, your family. Like you’re always looking through a viewfinder. It changes the experience and it’s nice to have records of that, like being able to go look at family videos and stuff. JOSHUA: But it also changes when you’re on video and you hit record knowing that it’s going to be public public, right? And it’s very cool. I think looking at videos from three months ago now to three months in the future, I’d be curious to know how the vibe is different from what you can perceive as you guys look back on those family videos in two, three, four, five years. It’s going to be a gold mine for sure for your family. And that’s really cool that you found a way to bring the community in to your family and have a safe place that they can be, that they can support you because they’ve asked for it. And that’s what they want to do. But also meeting them where they want to be like still using these main platforms and also just being able to set something down when it’s no longer working, but also understanding that like if we’ve got this suitcase full of stuff that we’re carrying around, sometimes it makes sense to throw the whole suitcase over the bridge. But sometimes, as you guys have done, we set the suitcase down and we pick out the things that still add value. And then we we set the rest of it aside. And like the suitcase analogy, because it’s a journey, it’s an adventure, and you guys are picking up your suitcase and continuing on. JEN: So I love that. I think people are scared to change sometimes, you know, when people are uncomfortable, they see that as a bad thing and it’s listening to your audience and seeing what their feedback is, making them feel a part of your journey, no matter what style of content you create, you know, and to just not be afraid to change things because you can always go back but try stuff new because you never know how it’s going to be. JEN: Absolutely. JOSHUA: Cool. Well, want to be respectful of your time. Give us a rundown. If someone is interested in checking out what you guys have done and what you’re going to be doing and what you’re going to continue doing, where’s the best place for them to connect with you and check out all the things that Jen and Kyle are doing? JEN: Well, currently our website is under it’s still open, but it’s going to be under construction to switch over to your hype couple. But you can find us on YouTube at your hype couple Instagram, your hype couple and Facebook, your hype couple as well. And there’s going to be a lot of cool changes coming up over the next couple of months. We’re rolling new things out. So yeah, we’re really, really excited to have some new people come on board. JOSHUA: Awesome. Thank you guys for taking the time out to discuss and dive into these intricacies and emotions and things that have happened and what worked and what didn’t work and where you’re going. I really appreciate it and I know that the listeners are going to get a lot of value and insight and just be able to learn from your experiences. So thank you. JEN: Thanks, John. Thank you. Josh, you are awesome. We love being on here. JOSHUA: There you go. I hope you guys enjoyed that conversation with Kyle and Jen Bethune. Again, super cool story and how they’ve been able to pivot and go from one thing to another and use it until it doesn’t serve them anymore and then sit down. The parts that don’t add value to their life continue on with the things they do. I’m really excited to see what happens with them in the future and how things morph and grow and lots of opportunities. It seems like they’ve come to not even a fork in the road, but almost a junction point that there’s all these different roads leading off of where they are right now. And I’m curious to watch as a spectator and see from the side what happens over the next period of time. I hope you gained some value in learning a little bit more about bringing a membership and a community in-house and some of the roadblocks and the difficulties that can come with that and also some of the value. I think there’s a lot of value in bringing a community in house. There’s also value in just starting where you’re at and starting with what you have. And sometimes that means using a third party platform and, you know, ultimately not having total control over the members information. And also, you know, paying extra fees or whatever. But there’s value in that, too, right? That’s why those businesses exist. So just want to show you guys a different avenue for membership. Communities kind of pick their brain on the history of that and what worked and what didn’t work for them. And then it was also really cool to be able to jump in and talk about rebranding and how that’s going to change their community, change their content, change their business and impact their life ultimately for the better. So I hope you guys enjoyed that conversation. If you want to talk more about entrepreneurship, head on over to the Facebook group The Entrepreneur. Com slash Facebook group. We’ll take you there. Until next time, happy trails. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The RV Entrepreneur is presented by RV Life – Tools that Make Camping Simple https://rvlife.com You May Also Like: The RV Life Podcast https://podcast.rvlife.com/ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~