How do you manage your time and how is a day in your life like?
I have to keep everything in my calendar because there are always so many changes in timings and there’s no one else in the company (just a go pro) at the moment to help me out with everything. So, to answer your question, I always wake up at 6am, then I have around half an hour to myself where I tend to have my coffee and try to stay away from social media as much as possible. I then go to the gym in the club for an hour and then I come back, shower and this is when my day actually starts. At 9 am I have a reminder that tells me to finish my tasks, like emails I have to reply to, or phone calls I have to take, and such. It’s kind of a standard daily thing. After that, I start with my morning video, which is one of the things that actually puts me in a good mood and when I don’t do it, I feel some sort of negative energy that I can’t deal with throughout the day. I’ve recently noticed that the energetic tone I speak within the videos I make gives me good energy for the rest of the day since I don’t always speak like that! When my video is done, I edit and post it, and it is considered for work, as it’s a way that I market for my channel. I then like to finish my meetings early whether it’s online or on grounds, cause as you probably know, Egypt’s traffic is awful so I like to get them done before 5 or 6 pm. Then 6 pm, it’s officially me time! I meet my friends, go to the club, meet my family. I usually go straight to bed at 11 pm like a baby ahahaha, because I’m usually finished by 11 so I just go to sleep.
How did you know that content creation is what you want to do?
It wasn’t something that happened on the spot. As soon as I finished school, I went to work in corporate and continued for a big part of my life up until I was 31 years old. At the time entrepreneurship wasn’t as common and society would look down at people who would start their own businesses because most of them would fail, leading me to work in corporate and climb until I was the regional manager of red bull in north Africa! I thought that I’ve reached such a big place at the company and I can move on to a regional office or maybe headquarters, but as soon as I got there, it became a burden. I wasn’t happy most of the time, I was upset about going to the office, felt like I didn’t have an input in life, and that I wasn’t doing anything beneficial. Exactly two years before I quit my job, I bought the go pro and at the time, we still didn’t really know what it was, it was something new for everyone since it was able to take pics and videos underwater, my friend was in Dubai at the time, so I told him to get it for me as it wasn’t in Egypt yet, as a birthday gift for myself! from the moment I got it, I started taking pictures all the time during my travels! I then started using the video mode but at the time it was absolutely impossible to put me in front of a camera and tell me to speak as I was very camera shy.
One year I was at a Halloween party, so I took my camera with me and a flashlight as it was dark. Everyone there was so caught up in the costumes and stuff and it’s actually one of the very few Halloween parties that people put an effort into the costume in Egypt. So, I filmed it, edited it, I liked it and decided to post it! And for the first time for me, the video went viral, in my world,. It had like 5000 views on Facebook which was jaw-dropping for me. This is when I started getting phone calls and people were telling me I should do this all the time and stuff like that. I started focusing on it a little more and around a year later, I started making promotional videos for red bull and editing them free of charge. Later on, they started paying me then there was a weekend event that they asked me to film. They told me the budget for it and it was almost the same amount as my monthly salary!, so I realized I can make the same amount I make in a month in only two days while being happier and doing what I love! So, I gave in my 6 month’s notice and 6 months later I quit my job at Redbull, opened my company, and it’s been a hell of a journey since!
Tell us more about your company.
So, it’s called Just A Go Proer. Until recently, my only service was to create content for other companies, which is just me going to their events, experiencing and shooting the whole thing from my perspective, and posting it on my account. This didn’t happen very often as there weren’t many good events happening and I didn’t just accept any event! So, I realized that I have to expand on the business a little, and this year, I’m offering different kinds of products and services such as making t-shirts as merch so we’ll still see how that goes. Then I realized that I understand a lot about social media, and I can do two things with that. First being, social media consultancy for companies because there are a lot of start-ups and companies that don’t know what to do with their social media accounts and the first thing that comes to their minds is let’s hire a social media agency which is a big no. Another thing is, a workshop that’s starting by the end of the week. I also started doing something else called value-driven videos so the people watching the video can actually learn something new, so instead of me just sitting here talking about different companies, I take my camera and show you the people in the company and what’s actually going on inside. I also do MCing and voiceovers and that’s pretty much it!
Featuring: MazenYassen // @justagoproer
Interviewed by: Maya Darwish
Written by: Malak El Dawy