Zach King inspires APU students to turn their creativity into a business, a part of Zuventurez
Zach King, the creative mind behind the Final Cut Pro magic videos, was brought in by Zuventurez to shed light on his experience turning a creative project into a full-fledged business. The event drew in a standing-room-only crowd in the Wilden Hall, as King described his journey from creating tutorial videos in his Biola dorm room to having 21.5 million followers on Instagram and becoming one of the biggest content creators on the platform.
King began by describing how he rose to stardom on YouTube, then dove further in depth on how he transitioned his creativity into a workable business model.
“I started out on YouTube and I was teaching Final Cut Pro tutorials and posting them online, and I saw a comment one day that said, ‘hey, you should put a short film to these visual effects that you’re doing,’ and that’s how it all started,” King said. “I started creating these short films that randomly turned into viral videos. When you get a viral video for the first time, you get this bug, like an infection, like ‘I have to make another one. I have to keep going and seeing why people are coming.’ You slowly learn how to grow an audience, and that’s what happened to me.”
King related his creativity and his videos to small business startups by comparing his videos to other physical products and the supply and demand for each. He also gave insight on how to gain and keep what he called “a healthy audience.”
According to the YouTube sensation, a healthy audience is built and maintained by giving your time and resources to those you are able to help, finding the right platform for both your content and your audience and teaching patterns to your audience.
Although King drew audiences from all ages and backgrounds, his message was aimed at students who were currently attending APU. His goal of the night was to inspire students to turn their creative vision into a business.
“My biggest takeaway from tonight would be to think about what future plans I could potentially have, if I wanted to start my own business or maybe my own content and creative videos online,” said Ashley Davidson, a junior public relations major. “I actually have been wanting to make YouTube videos over the last few years, and I have just been too busy to jump on that. But this year, I got some more camera equipment and I’ve been trying to set apart time to make videos.”
Other students wanted to use King as a resource for their own academic and professional careers.
Randall De Chavez, a junior cinematic arts major, was able to meet with King one-on-one after the event to talk about film-making and lessons that he learned through his studies at Biola.
“I’m a film major so I wanted to see what it was like for him to be involved with the media industry and how that could play into my role,” Randall said. “He definitely had a lot of good insight in terms of relating social media and viralness to business. It was really important to see how it takes such a big team business-wise, all these finances, marketing yourself. It takes definitely more than just one person and it was good to see that, especially as a storyteller myself.”
Shortly after the event, Zuventurez hosted pitches from teams looking to grow their brands and products, as well as win a $15,000 prize to help launch their businesses.
“Zuventurez is awesome. I think competition is super healthy and it challenges people, and I’m so glad that there’s an awesome prize of $15,000, which is a ton,” King said. “I think most schools should do it, not even just in the business setting. I think you could have one for music or you could have one for missionaries to learn how to raise money successfully. There’s so many places that should be applied to, so I’d love to see that model grow to different academic areas in the school.”