The Platinum Horde

If you are wondering what Flam Plum means, let me tell you. Flam is a drum pattern, and Plum is the fruit. Very cool, right? It was generated by some online business name generator. Flam Plum is one of my big money move ventures. It started as a tie-dye shirt business. The shirts were pretty cool, if I do say so myself. My friend and I would dye the shirts, and then we tried selling them at a flea market. We did that a total of two times and made about $50 in profit. We had no start-up costs because I had won some Amazon gift cards at work in a weekly lottery. That gave us the cash we needed to buy the supplies.

Making them was pretty fun; it was a whole process where you had to soak the shirts in soda ash so the dye would take better. The majority of the shirts are sitting in a box in my closet, not doing anything. I have even more shirts in a box in my garage waiting to be dyed. We sold the shirts cheap too, but at the one flea market we went to twice, we weren’t getting the sales we were looking for. It was still a lot of fun and a cool experience. Hopefully something we can go back to one day and try again.

Flam Plum is now the name of my YouTube channel, where I try to draw something daily, sticking with the art theme. The idea was to draw something, anything at all, each day and turn it into a YouTube short, then get monetized and profit. Another big money move, also a creative outlet.

The idea for making YouTube shorts came from a video I watched about how to churn out 100s of videos easily with Canva and ChatGPT. With a little work, you could make a 15-second “fact” video where there was a single background and text on the screen. So I decided to give that a go, and PrezzFacts was born. My goal was to make fact videos for every president. The facts were generated with ChatGPT, and the video was made in Canva. The goal was to get monetized and then sell shirts with a president’s face on them. I still think shirts with just the president’s face on them are a good idea. The president fact videos, but not so much. One video got just under 2k views, which surprised me, and I thought I was on to something. Let me tell you, I was not on to anything. YouTube was testing the short to see if people liked it, and they didn’t.

That did not deter me. I figured I would have to make something people wanted to see, which is where the art video idea came from. It started as Doodle Draw Daily, where we would draw something daily. It was, and still is, a lot of fun to make the videos. At first, we would draw something random and hope to get suggestions from the audience for what to draw next. Also giving them a reason to keep watching. A few videos got a couple thousand views, and it was awesome. We had one dedicated fan who would comment on all the videos, and still does for the most part. They have become integral to the semi-success the channel has now.

Realizing Doodle Draw Daily wasn’t a unique name and there were a lot of similar-named channels, we decided to switch it to Flam Plum, the tie-dye business we gave up on. This way, we had a unique name that wouldn’t be like any other channel. October rolled around, and we were getting a little more views making Halloween-themed drawings. Everything changed when our number one fan asked us to draw their profile picture. Which was just an ‘i’ in a green circle, the default YouTube profile picture based on your username.

This video got a bunch of views and a lot of comments from others asking for theirs to be drawn; the subscriber count started to go up as well. I was unaware that there was a much larger channel, RomansArt, that did this with a lot of success. There was also a channel that was able to monetize that was an exact copy of RomansArt, down to the format and songs used. If it works, it works. I can’t find that channel as of writing this, but if I do, I will add a link. I like to think mine is a little different because it is sped up recordings of me drawing the picture, but it has the same concept.

I ended up getting over 1,000 subscribers quickly, meeting one of the requirements needed for YouTube monetization. The next hurdle was getting 10 million shorts views in 90 days, or 4,000 watch hours on a long-form video in a year. I am nowhere close to the 10 million views needed; I am lucky if a short gets around 5,000 views. I haven’t made a long-form video yet, but I have been meaning to, just to see if it can get the watch hours needed.

I really enjoy drawing something each day. I moved away from doing profile pictures with letters and tried to draw profile pictures that are actually something, in hopes of improving my art abilities. Having the channel was really eye-opening; for one, it seemed to be mostly children who were watching, demanding they be drawn next. Most of the comments just say “mine pls” or some variation of that, typically riddled with typos and bad grammar. It does not paint the next generation in a positive light, but I do not mind. It is also fun to see the creator side of YouTube, trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t. I still haven’t figured it out yet, but consistency is key.

I am not sure how long I will do this for; the goal is to get monetized, and I think that is possible. That is not the only way to make money from this channel, though. It could be leveraged to point the subscribers to another venture, or perhaps create a Patreon where they can subscribe and have their picture guaranteed to be drawn. It is hard to tell if that would work out. It seems the audience that Flam Plum attracts on YouTube has a shorter attention span and wants instant gratification, but you never know. The channel is still growing at a decent rate as long as I churn out the videos daily. I want to give it a full year, which will be in September 2024. I will assess the progress then and see if it is worth my time. We will have to wait and see if this will be a big money move.