Tomorrow, March 1st marks the first official day of Talkin’ Yanks. It’s been going on for a little bit now. It’s been growing nicely for a while, but it has been my hobby. Tomorrow it is my life.
If you don’t know anything about me here are the bullet points. My name is Jimmy, I just turned 29 years old, and I love talking about the Yankees.
Last year when the season started I had around 300 followers on Twitter. Most of them were dead accounts from old college acquaintances. I was living with my girlfriends family and had no one to talk about the Yankees with. I remember the day I told my girlfriend, Kaity, “I think I’m gonna try and live tweet games and gain some followers to talk Yanks with”.
So I started tweeting to no one.
To speed things up. People started enjoying the jokes. I taught myself how to make gifs. I started doing video recaps. People enjoyed them so I kept going. I started a little video podcast where people asked me questions.
My goal was to get 1,000 followers by the end of the season. I reached that in a couple weeks. The podcast started getting a lot of downloads as well.
At the end of the season, I teamed up with Affordable Jerseys and ran a promotion. 10 dollars off a 90 dollar jersey. If 100 people used the code, we would get sent to spring training. Well in just under a month over 200 people purchased a jersey using the code JOMBOY. It was awesome.
I thought maybe we have something here. Then Greg Bird reached out and said he was enjoying what we were doing. The ratings, reviews, and downloads kept coming strong (even in the offseason) and everything was going well. I got a small investment to go full time with it and now here I am.
The first full day is tomorrow and I’m scared as fuck. Super nervous. If it fails well then it fails but I gave it a shot. Either way, it’s going to be so much better than editing weddings. When you film and edit a wedding you spend a lot of time working really hard on a video that in the end will only be seen by a handful of people. Those people rarely like the first draft and almost always want some changes.
With Yankees stuff, I spend a couple hours making a video that I thought up on my own. It gets seen by 100,000 people in two days and I get feedback from tons of them saying they enjoyed it.
That’s a big difference in return.
The Plan
The plan is to keep finding people to talk about the Yankees with. Maybe down the road, they’ll want to talk about movies, TV shows, the Knicks or any other topic with us as well. For now… it’s all Yankees though.
The podcast. The tweets. The blogs. The breakdowns. The recaps. The shirts. Everything.
Baseball is fun. It’s a sport with a ton of tiny little intricacies that I love picking up on. Like Boone yelling encouragement at his batters after every pitch. Or the fact that Gary Sanchez usually hits a home run with-in two at-bats after a hard hit foul ball. I like making jokes and I like finding the little things. I want to share those things with everyone.
The more people listen to the podcast more advertisements we receive. The more t-shirts we sell the more I can put back into hosting events, going to games and making videos.
I like being open and honest with everyone. If you listen to Talkin’ Yanks you should feel like you know me, because you basically do. So this is just a little introduction. A little hello and insight into my brain. Maybe I will check back in with updates every once in a while.
To everyone who is already on board and supporting us, thank you so much. Really, I mean it. Thank you for listenings, laughing and talking with me. It means a lot and it’s a ton of fun. Let’s keep going. Let’s build this thing together.
P.S. After Spring Training I’m changing my stupid twitter avatar. I hate that thing but you cant be changing your avatar all the time so I’m waiting for after we go to Tampa.