Pushing all the envelopes with ambitious content

I've become YouTube-obsessed. It's perhaps the most exciting platform for content creators, and the bar of content production is continuously being raised. The biggest creators on YouTube aren't solo operators. They may have teams of up to 100 or more in the chase for more subscribers and views.

This week's guest on the Code & Content Podcast, Jason Lengstorf, is at the pinnacle of content creation in our industry, producing programs under the banner of CodeTV. Sanity sponsored an episode of the popular Web Dev Challenge in 2024, and the portfolio expanded late last year to include the game show Leet Heat.

What I love most about this content is that it represents my industry and my peers in a way I've never seen before. I've seen great conference talks, and people do their very best to create content from their desks at home, but the production value and scale of Jason's programs are unlike anything else. They give the work we do the look of legitimacy, and they get us closer to the real people behind the avatars that you typically see on Twitter.

And longer form content lends itself to better authenticity. This has been proven time and time again with podcasts. And long form video content does the same. If any of these episodes featured a bad product, there'd be nowhere for it to hide. So not only are you entertained while watching an episode of Web Dev Challenge, you're getting to see in real time experienced developers interact with a tool that they've never used before.

Authenticity in sponsored content is not always an easy task to deliver on.

So, I wanted to talk to Jason about how he went from making basic content to becoming a commercial-grade content producer. It's a story of incremental improvement and stick-to-itiveness.

No one gave me permission to do this

I really enjoyed this conversation because it demonstrates where a relentless focus on improvement will take you. It's easy to set the bar too high and never start.