We were lucky to catch up with John Shin recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, John thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Often the greatest growth and the biggest wins come right after a defeat. ther times the failure serves as a lesson that’s helpful later in your journey. We’d appreciate if you could open up about a time you’ve failed.

Without trying to sound cliche, I felt that I was a total failure for the longest time.

My passion has always been around two things: creativity, and making people happy. But as the son of a hard-working immigrant family, the very idea of telling my parents that I’d be pursuing anything other than a stable, well-paying job was the biggest obstacle that I could not overcome. I couldn’t muster up the courage to tell them that I wanted to chase my dreams. I couldn’t look away from all the years of struggle that we faced as a family, and all the relentless hours of hard work they endured to provide for my family.

As a result, after graduating college, I decided to find and work a full-time job, all the while creating content as a side-hustle. It was fun, but it was exhausting. After work I’d go straight into content creating mode, but with my lack in experience and inability to fully commit to content creating, my growth felt quite staggered and slow. However, I was so determined and passionate about chasing my dream and pleasing my parents that I pushed onwards on two fronts at half-capacity.

I lived that way for 8 years, until I could no more. I felt completely burnt out, depressed and at a loss for words. By that point I had abandoned my attempts at attending either a medical school or a law school. For a brief moment I stepped away and tried looking at myself from a wider scope, only to realize that success as a content creator was nowhere in sight. 8 years after graduation, I looked back and felt that I had disappointed both my parents and myself. The word “failure” couldn’t fully encapsulate how pathetic I felt.

After weeks of drowning in my own sadness, I decided to give up on content creation, and thought about a way to perhaps reset my state of affairs. But when I shared this despairing situation with my friend, he offered to help me on my journey – to perhaps save me a bit of time and energy, to be an extra set of hands to be able to expand a bit more on my creative “limitations”.

That was 4 years ago. Since then, we as a team, have been able to work with sporting organizations like Manchester United and Juventus, as well as work with big brands like Adidas and DirecTV. We’ve built a big community of soccer/football fans who share their passion for the Beautiful Game with us. Don’t get me wrong, we’re still “failing” as we go along, but it’s been quite the journey.

John, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

In the beginning of my content journey, I thought about different ways of entering the space through different angles. In addition to uploading YouTube videos consistently, I also became a junior staff writer at a small online soccer publication based in England. My first “big break” was in 2016 when I was selected as the winner of an online soccer pundit for a large media company, being the winner of the competition to represent the Manchester United fan base.

The soccer industry is growing and expanding at a very fast rate here in the United States. In many ways we serve two clients: 1, our community or followers and subscribers, and 2, the brands and companies looking to work with us. Because of our experience as veterans in the space we are able to provide a perspective from a US-based fan of soccer for anyone.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

For me, the most rewarding feeling is the appreciation of our content from our community. Interacting with followers and subscribers through the comments section is always important, but seeing our community in person at events and hearing from them their joy of finding value, and at times, laughs in our videos is especially fulfilling.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

11 years ago, I set out on starting content initially with the purpose of an end goal: Meet my soccer hero Park Ji Sung. Many years have passed since then, and while the dream of meeting Park is still in my list of goals to achieve, I now want to accomplish so much more. I want to be able to continue to help forge our deep community of fans from around the world. I also want to be able to commit to content creation on a full-time basis, being able to generate significant revenue, to be able to pay wages to both myself and my partner. These are just a few of many dreams I have.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goodvibesjohn/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GoodVibesJohn
• Twitter: https://x.com/GoodVibesJohn
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@GoodVibesJohn

Image Credits

Club Eleven