My 1,000 Day Pursuit of Success

Our First Blog: How to Fail Well

A letter from CEO, Nuseir Yassin

If you’re reading this, it means we have already succeeded.

This is the first blog post of Nas Academy. It’s the place where we will be sharing our thoughts on the world of content creation (and beyond) as we build this company.

If you’re building a company, family, blog, or career… this post is for you.

Today, I want to share with you the arduous, long, miserable journey of Nas Daily. And, through this story, I want to answer one question:

How Does One Fail Well?

In the last 5 years, Nas Daily has grown beyond my wildest imagination. We average 10 million views per day. We grow by a million followers per month. We have a total of 34 million followers on the Internet at the time of publishing this.

6 months ago, we founded a new startup, this company: Nas Academy. It is a platform to create creators. And to be honest, our numbers are nowhere near 34 million. In fact, we barely average 30 students per day. We have many dark days. And we are at break-even levels financially.

So the question is:
When you’re just starting…
How do you keep going?

If you would please allow me, let me explain How To Fail Well.

After making 1,000 videos in 1,000 days, I guess you can call me an Expert on Failure. Because I have failed roughly 600 times.

Here is the background story:
On April 8th, 2016, I quit my Engineering job in New York. I had the best job ever at Venmo. Great product. Free breakfast. Free lunch. Many friends.

And the pay?

I was making more money than my parents combined. I was underworked and overpaid. But I had to let that job go because deep down, I was unsatisfied. Instead, I bought a basic DSLR camera and a one-way ticket to Kenya to start making videos on the Internet.

When I started Nas Daily, I was not a video maker. I was not a TV Host. And I was not a creator.

But I was confident of a few things:

• In the future, Brown People like me will have a bigger voice.
• In the future, Facebook Videos will explode in usage.
• In the future, the Passion Economy will grow like crazy.

So, I took a major leap of faith and started a Facebook Page called “Nas Daily.”

Nas in Arabic means People. So it would be the stories of people every day. Luckily, my name was Nuseir. So Nas made for a perfect nickname. Win-win!

I wanted my product, or the video, to be slightly different.

• It had to be short.
• It cannot exceed roughly 1 minute in length.
• And it had to be energetic, and full of humans.
• And I had to create a video every day. Every single day. Rain or Shine. Sick or Healthy. Dead or Alive. A 1 minute video needed to be made and uploaded.

I started Nas Daily with the hope of improving my life. But little did I know…that I had just signed up for the worst time of my life.

The videos simply… did not work.

Day 1: I made the video. Uploaded. Congrats! A few likes and views from my friends and parents. And that’s it.
Day 2: Video tanked.
Day 3: Video tanked.
Day 40: Video tanked.
Day 60: My friends stopped watching.
Day 89: Video tanked
…
…
Day 103: I almost quit.
Day 150: My other friends stopped watching.
Day 160: I almost quit again.
Day 170: I wanted to go back to engineering.

Every day, you wake up to make a video. You put your heart and soul. You work 14 hours per day. You research. You shoot. You edit. You publish. You miss out on holidays and weekends. You do the impossible every single day.

And no one cares.

You are averaging 3,000 views. Many of them are fake views. You can’t sustain yourself on 3,000 views. And you certainly can’t change the world on 3,000 views. These are truly the darkest days of any new project.

On Day 70, things became even worse. I assumed Facebook videos will explode. But the algorithm changed, and all of a sudden: Friend Content was prioritized, and Page content was deprioritized.
And sadly, Nas Daily was a Page. Not a friend.

Overnight, I disappeared from the News Feed.
Overnight, I lost 30% of my reach.
Overnight, I went from 3,000 views to 2,000 views.

These are crushing defeats. I started to question my assumptions. Is the world gonna be different from what I had imagined? Will Facebook just become a Private Social Network? Are Pages dead? This can’t be.

I remember it like yesterday…one day I woke up with 20,000 followers or so. And I ended the day with 19,950 followers. I’d been working my ass off for 70 days – never took a weekend off – and I’m losing followers?

This is not how it’s supposed to be, I thought.

Sometimes, it takes time to be proven right. But it also feels like forever.

And Failure is Bad. But Loneliness is Worse.

Not enough talk about it, but Loneliness is a real thing. There is nothing lonelier than building something from scratch. I was changing hotels every day. Changing countries every week. Making friends for 1 day. Losing them the next day. Saying no to family gatherings because Video #158 needed to be done. Which, by the way, also failed.

The crushing loneliness of my Facebook journey is not unique. Every founder has it. Every company, every blog, every project must go through the loneliness phase.

If this doesn’t look desperate, I don’t know what does.

Hundreds of videos. Average numbers. Little interest from the world. Losing money. All of this leads to your single biggest fear:

Losing Energy.
This is the hardest one of them all. The difference between a successful company and a failed one is simply the team’s energy. When a car runs out of fuel, no amount of luck can make it move. When a team runs out of energy, you can kiss the company goodbye.

And I was running out of energy.

It’s been 250 days of constant, daily work. Almost a year. And this Facebook page isn’t growing.

(I don’t mean to make this a depressing article. I mean for this to be relatable.)

At the beginning stage of every company, loss of energy, change of algorithms, loneliness, and failure are normal. So the 34 million follower question is: what keeps you going?

That’s a hard question.

See, when I was making daily videos, day in and day out, I was paying attention, not to the failures, but the early signs of success.

There is a huge difference between the two.

Most people look too much into the failures; while I was looking too much for early signs of success. I was looking for anything to prove that I am right. God knows I needed the validation.

It only took me 12 days of Nas Daily to spot the early signs of success. I received a message on my Facebook page. I was in Kenya, at the beginning of my video journey. Out of the blue, a guy messaged me saying:

“Hey, I like your Nairobi visor!”
“I would love to be part of your videos see you patch it up”

Of course, I ignored the typos and grammatical errors. And focused on the big idea.

A random Kenyan 30-something guy wants to do videos with me? Is he out of his mind? Does he not know my videos are shit? Does he not see I have no followers? Does he not realize I’m nothing but an unemployed video hobbyist?

This…blew my mind.

This was truly my first customer. This was my first sign up. My first validation. And on Day 12, my light bulb went out. I ignored all signs of failure and focused only on him. And I verbatim told myself: “If I can find one person like Tim in 12 days, I am pretty sure I can find 100.”

If I can find a 100 people like Tim, I am pretty sure I can find a million.
If I can find a million people like Tim, I am pretty sure I can find a 100 million.
It’s just a matter of time.
It’s just a matter of continuous work.
And now, 4 years later, I have found 34 million people like Tim.

The man himself: Tim Njiru!

For Nas Academy, I am now 100% focused on the early signs of success.

If we can find one student to like Nas Academy, I am pretty sure we can find 100.
If we can find 100 students to like Nas Academy, I am pretty sure we can find a million.
And if we can find a million?

I know we can change the world of content creation, one creator at a time.

Focusing on the early signs of success is crucial. So far, we have found the first 3,000 students. I am confident we’ll find a million more. It’s just a matter of time.

When you get your first customer, you get a wave of energy that lasts you for hundreds of days. It wasn’t just on Day 12.

On Day 58, after exactly 58 videos, something crazy happened. I received another message on my Facebook page. I had made a video about Jerusalem and how much I love that city. And one person near Jerusalem saw it.

She messaged me saying: “Hey, I just saw some of your videos…I am probably going to go to Jerusalem this week or next so if you end up going and we are there at the same time, it would be fun to hang out and talk and explore!”

I am glad I opened my Inbox on that day. Her name was Alyne Tamir.

I checked out her profile. And we met in person the next week.

On Day 64, Day 65, Day 66, and Day 67, we made videos together. For these four days, I found a companion. I found someone to share success and failure with. At the very least, I found someone to hold the camera.

One year later, on Day 405, that person became my girlfriend.

I don’t know how our relationship survived the stress, but I’m glad it did.

This isn’t supposed to be a love story. This was the cure for my loneliness. I no longer was by myself at a hostel editing a video. Now, I could find someone to vent to.

One of the most important things for building a successful company is finding people to share life with.

Find a companion.
Find a girlfriend. A boyfriend. A wife. A husband.
In non-romantic settings, find a co-founder. Find a team.

Nas Daily started as a solo mission to see the world. But 4 years later, we are 50 people strong. These people aren’t just teammates, they are companions. They know your fears, your worries, and your excitement. They know how to work with you, and how to succeed with you.

They can not let you fail – and you cannot fail them.

And on Day 270… Luck struck.

After 270 videos, with varying levels of success and failure, I struck it big.

I made a video about Thailand. And turns out, many people loved that video. It reached 30 million people within one week.

In one week, I quadrupled my followers.
But unfortunately, that was a one-off event. It was very hard to replicate that level of success.

So, how can you succeed consistently then?!

After 630 days of making videos, you can imagine that you can get pretty tired from playing with the algorithms. The algorithms were my master, and my enemy on every social media platform.

But on Day 609, I woke up in South Africa and saw that my video got a million views. I thought:
“Wow, that must have been a good video. The algorithm approves.”

The next video: another million views.
The next video: another million views.

What’s going on? How did I go from averaging 100,000 views to a million – literally overnight?

Turns out, Facebook changed the algorithms AGAIN. This time, they did it in my favor. They too decided: it’s time to promote short, meaningful social interactions on our platform. It’s time to promote meaningful videos.

And Nas Daily videos were EXACTLY doing that for 609 days.
So there I was, at the right time, at the right place, with the right product.
My prediction was right. I was just 609 days early.

In the next few months, Nas Daily experienced hyper-growth. Going from 4 million followers to 34 million in the span of 2.5 years. Slowly but surely, the world started to notice. And my friends started to notice again: “Wow, my mom shared your videos!”

Slowly but surely, you develop haters and lovers.
Slowly but surely, you start making money.
Slowly but surely, you reach a level where going back to engineering may not be a wise decision.

So, in summary, how do you Fail Well?
It’s simple.

Step 1:
You start with conviction.
I am convinced: the world will look like this in the future. It just can’t be any other way.

Step 2:
You give yourself as many opportunities to fail as possible.
I made a video every day for 1,000 days not because I liked it… but because with every video, I allowed myself.

After every failure, I had 24 hours to fix it with tomorrow’s video. If I had made a video per week, in one year I would make 56 videos only. That’s a crazy slow process to fix mistakes.

Step 3:
You become a hawk.
After every failure, I was scanning the data like a HAWK. I spent hours looking for the faint signs of success: the comments, the views, the messages I receive, the early followers.

I was looking for the faint light at the end of the tunnel. I just needed to muster the energy, tie my shoes, and run towards that light like a cheetah.

With Nas Academy, we are still at Day 200. We still have many bad days. But we spend a LOT of time thinking about our convictions. We spend a lot of time talking to “Tim” from Kenya… And a lot of time building.

I really enjoy failing. And I think you should too.

Because there is nothing more satisfying than failing your way to success.

How do you think the world will look like in the future?
Will TikTok be the next big thing?
Will restaurants go to the cloud?
Will Bitcoin become the next big thing?
Will education get cheaper?

Find your convictions and work towards them. The world is moving fast. That’s why we’re going on another 1,000 Day Journey with Nas Academy.

In the future, a creator will be a lot more powerful.
In the future, a kid from a village can have their own voice.
In the future, MY OPINION and YOURS will matter as much as anyones.

And we’ll work every single day to make that a reality.

P.S.
There is no such thing as a solo success. There is no such thing as an overnight success.

Whoever says that has never worked a day in their life.

Tim from Kenya was my first success. And he gave me the energy to keep going. Alyne gave me the company and the inspiration to keep going even more. My friend Agon gave me the knowledge and the support to keep going even more. My mom and dad, my brother Tarek, and the rest of my family did it too.

Thank you.