BlampCo Monthly Debrief - Feb 2025

Hello employees!

Welcome to your first monthly debrief, where I tell you everything we’ve gotten up to with your lovely MONEY over the past billing cycle because BlampCo strives for transparency. I started this Patreon as a way to generate funds and provide a relatively kind training level for my editing skills, and I want you to know how I’ve been using your money to build whatever this is that we’re building here.

Personnel:

At the moment, the only full-time employee is me, writing the scripts, filming it all, sourcing the graphics and editing the shows together. My salary currently includes my mortgage payment, bills, living costs, NI contributions, income tax, and pension deposits.

In the next month I plan to add another full time member of staff at the same pay as myself to handle excess edits, as well as produce all the shoots, and manage the admin side of the channel. It’s not quite ready to be announced yet, but I’m looking forward to letting you know!

Equipment:

Black Magic 6K Pro Camera - did the Fantasy Booking video look considerably nicer than the rest of the videos on the channel? Good, because that camera cost a wee bit, but was chosen as it’s a) mint, and b) will be part of a studio I’m building in the coming months and has enough resolution for things like, oh I dunno, game boards, and cards, and the like. More cameras will join the collection in time, but for now, the one should be enough.

Sigma 18-35mm lens - pretty lens for a pretty camera for a pretty boy.

Neewer tripod - got a nice one, not only so that it supports both the camera and the teleprompter, which straps onto the lens, but also to make panning super smooth for future board game list shoots. 

Neewer RBG Panel Lights x 2 - one for lighting my big dumb face, one for backlight. That’s all I should need right now, but as the studio build continues (looks like it’ll be May when that’s complete - we need the GeeknSon table to arrive before we can shoot there) we’ll be adding more.

Elgato Teleprompter - genius bit of kit, this. Not only does it let me screen share my booking, list and predictions scripts to the prompter, but also lets me put the live chat for the Watchalongs on the screen so I can easily look at you sods as I talk to ya!

Elgato Facecam - for all the livestreaming goodness, I picked this because it pairs really well with the prompter, and comes with the Camera Hub app that gives me a greater deal of control over the camera’s framing than most other webcams.

Blue Yeti Stereo Mic - got this for recording audio for all my videos, as it’s directional enough to hide out of shot and still cut out a lot of roominess from my audio track, but also the two-sided mic made it seem good for podcasting. Ultimately, I’m not FULLY happy with the audio quality of A Rad Time ep 1, so we’ll be investing in more mics for a cleaner audio setup in the future. For studio shoots, we’ll need proper lav mics, but this covers pretty much everything I’m filming at the moment

Drives - Samsung & Lucie - Bought two drives, one 5TB drive to act as a backup archive of the final drafts of all my videos, the second, a drive to film all the Black Magic footage directly onto. As the studio is built, we’ll need many more of these

A goddamn Michael Cole WM27 costume - clearly the most important expense of the month, fucks sake.

Freelancers:

Paid lovely Pete to appear on the podcast, as well as our lovely mods for their moderation work, and a freelance graphic designer who’s knocked up the BlampCo and Rad Time logos. Money well spent on all fronts, especially Lisa. But especially Bart. 

As time goes on, I’m hoping to have 2-4 freelancers for shoots at a time, adding people to watchalongs, the monthly podcast, and future studio shoots

Subscriptions:

Epidemic Sound - royalty free music for the videos

Adobe - Premiere Pro costs money, the arseholes

Netflix - thanks, WWE, for moving to Netflix so I can expense this every month!

Zoom Pro - so I can organise all my rewards that involve fan interaction

—

Grand total for February: roughly £7500

So, as you can see, there’s been a butt-ton of money spent this month to try and build this into something that’s going to stand the test of time. As we grow, those expenses hopefully won’t rise TOO much, but I’ll let you know in March’s debrief how it transpires. Any money that isn’t spent on purchases or payroll will get invested back into the company’s savings. Not a huge amount of savings this month, but hopefully that’ll build over the months to the point where we have a comfortable enough base to launch on YouTube, with the potential shakeup to the Patreon’s profitability that might follow going public.

—

Future needs: 

We’ll need a much more powerful editing computer, as this poor laptop has been THROUGH IT the last month. We also need more mics, furniture for the studio inc soundproofing, and the extra lights/cameras that will come with the requirements for the studio. Add to that expanded staffing costs and we still have a little way to go before BlampCo is operating at MAXIMUM EFFICIENCY, but it’s been a heck of a productive first month!

I know a lot of people would be happy if I just shot board game playthroughs on a phone with a few mates all crammed onto a single sofa, but I’ll only get one chance to properly launch this new channel when it comes time to take it to public YouTube, and I really want it to hit the ground running in terms of professional quality.

I’ll definitely try and add some more low-fi gaming content for you all to enjoy in March, though.

—

If you have any questions about the above, let me know, but otherwise I hope you all have a great month ahead. I appreciate all the support no matter how big, small, regular or one-off!

Now get back to work

x