I still remember June 21, 2005.
Instead of following my normal evening routine with Guild Wars, I felt a bit bored of the game and ended up poking around the Internet instead. I saw that timschmoyer.com was available and decided to register it. Why? I don't know.
So I poked around more. "What do I do with this domain now?"
I found WordPress and decided to set that up on the domain because, why not? After learning a bit about FTP, MySQL users, and text editors, I was up and running. Nice!
But then came my next question. "What do I write about?"
At first I wrote about whatever was on my mind: my girlfriend, what I ate for dinner that night, or screenshots of my adventures in Guild Wars.
Over time, however, I wrote more and more about what I was most passionate about, which was youth ministry. Within a few years, it turned into the most-subscribed youth ministry blog on the Internet. In 2011 it became my full-time job. That turned into creating YouTube videos, which turned into my career. In 2013 I started a YouTube growth agency, had a lot of success there, and sold it to vidIQ in 2022, a popular software company in the creator economy space.
Today I work as the Chief Creator Coach at vidIQ where I'm building a 1:1 coaching team for their 3 million weekly active creators. After years of YouTube coaching, scaling it is an amazing new mountain to climb!
But after almost 20 years of growing and monetizing YouTube audiences, I have the itch to get back to my roots: writing about whatever is top-of-mind and seeing where it leads.
Life is a lot different for me now than it was when I first started blogging in 2005. I'm married now, have 7 kids, and hold very different beliefs around ministry, money, business, family, relationships, and faith than I did 20 years ago. What's top-of-mind today is very different than it was 20 years ago (thankfully!), but I'm finding that I still desire a place to wrestle "out loud." Writing forces me to do that on an articulate level.
And who knows where this will lead. Last time it turned into a career, but I think this time I just want it to give me a place to think and subject those thoughts to the critique of others as I pursue the difference between wisdom and folly.
Let's see where this goes...
