My dad's first job in Canada was washing dishes night shift in a casino.
And after like the first week of working there, I remember my old man coming home at like 7 a.m.
And my mom had told me that he lost like five pounds after one week.
That's when I told my parents, give me 10 years.
I'm going to retire you guys.
My name is Thuan Le.
I'm 25 years old and I support my parents with $5,000 every month.
Right now we're hovering between 10 to 12 clients.
We have anywhere from like a pet food client to tech companies.
So in Vietnam, we study a lot.
And when I say a lot, I'm saying like school start at 7am.
It would end at 5pm.
And then you go to another two hours of tutors.
And this is a lot of studying to eventually go to university, grab a degree.
And that degree is literally useless in Vietnam.
That's just not enough opportunities.
And it's different here in the Western world.
It's different here in Canada.
Canada was expensive.
Before we left Vietnam, my parents literally had like a house.
They were doing really well.
Like if they would have to stay in Vietnam, they honestly wouldn't have to worry about money.
They gave up everything.
They sold everything.
It was a lot of anger seeing like that because we were extremely comfortable in Vietnam.
Like my parents didn't have to make that sacrifice, but they did.
So it was like a lot of anger.
I blame my parents.
Like, why did we do this?
Like you guys didn't have to.
I couldn't make friends.
I barely spoke English and it was just very lonely.
Every time I get home from school, I've just told my backpack in a corner and I would just play a lot of video games.
That translated to me making video montage of my own gameplay.
So that's how I got into like video editing and everything.
From then I started editing video for like League of Legends YouTubers and then finance YouTubers, some dropship YouTubers.
I would edit like a 20 minute long video for $20.
And after I graduated, I wanted to make video for a living.
One of the first project we made at film school was called meaningful thing project.
You're supposed to make a two minute long video about something meaningful to you.
And I made a video about my parents and that video ended up getting into the hall of fame of the school.
And to me, it was like, wow, that's sick.
But at the same time, it's like, if you're the best in the room, then you're in the wrong room.
They couldn't afford to help themselves.
We were struggling.
It was COVID too, so I was on my own financially.
How I survived was just I was doing videos on the side.
I had DM every single restaurant in Toronto and I was like hey, can I shoot you guys a video in exchange for the best item on your menu?
And that would be my meal every single day.
I was shooting like really, really high production food porn, basically.
But whenever my client would post these videos, I would notice like nobody really really care about these videos on social media.
So I told all my client at the time, give me like $2,000, I'll make you like 10 TikToks.
If it doesn't work, if it doesn't get any views, I will give you your money back.
The first TikTok I made for that client got 700,000 views.
The very next one, it got 300,000 views.
So after that, and I was like, wow, I think I got something here.
I think a lot more business could use this, and that's how Shortcut was born.
Taking a format that's already working and recreating it for our client.
That has been the formula ever since.
We have made over 2,000, 3,000 videos at this point, and we have done over 3 billion views.
To get attention online, you have to do one of two things.
You have to either entertain or educate people.
And the first step to doing that is to figure out who are you making video for?
Take an entrepreneur that want to build their personal brand online, for example.
The audience that would want his knowledge are someone who is 18 to 25, doesn't know if you're going to college or not, has some money saved up, but they don't know what to do with it.
So what do we do?
We make videos that solve these exact issues that this ideal viewer persona is dealing with, and what that would mean is we make one video.
It's like i have ten thousand dollars.
What should i do with my money?
Oh, easy answer put it into an s p 500 index fund and leave it there for the next 50 years.
The whole formula is just basically, you know, take something that's already viral, but you want to make it to where you're making content that solve an issue or entertain people in your very, very specific knowledge, like realm, the retainer model, every month.
Initially, I would just have like three to five clients and I would charge like $2,000 each client.
And then eventually I got too busy.
We got bigger client and we just slowly and slowly raised our price to like 4000.
So now like $10,000, $16,000.
Some clients are paying us upward of $50,000 at this point.
For example, there's some videos that are really, really easy to make.
Then we charge like $10,000 a month for that.
But some videos are like very, very high effort.
For example, last month we jumped out of a plane for one of our video.
So we charge a lot more than that.
We have like content creators local here in Toronto and we have like script writer, video editor, project managers.
They're overseas.
Some are in my hometown, Vietnam.
Some's in Philippines, India, Argentina.
Yeah.
We're Obeys everywhere.
Hello.
When I told my mom, I was like hey mom, I'm going to start sending you money so you don't have to work anymore.
And she's like, oh my god, really?
And I was like, yeah.
And then we just hugged it out.
It was a very mild reaction, but it was sweet.
My dad had no reaction to it.
He was like, OK, cool.
Sick.
But I know deep down, he's proud.
He doesn't react to a lot of things.
In terms of revenue, I want it to be doing $100 million in about five years.
It's a bit delusional, but you've got to be a little bit delusional to play this game.
I wanna eventually give away 49% of my company to the key team members of Shortcut.
And my goal for everybody that works at Shortcut is that I wanna pay them extremely well.
That's my whole thesis of like oh, I just wanna pay people very well and do good work and live a good life.
I have an advice to creative out there.
It's like you need to learn how to communicate your values.
I would say, like my skill as a videographer, as a content creator, I don't think it have changed the last five years, even.
But the only thing that changed is that I learned how to sell.
I learned how to communicate my values and that have made me more money than making a better videos.
