When I read that 86% conversion rate boost statistic for landing pages with video, I immediately thought about my upcoming Google Ads campaign. Here I was, ready to pay for traffic to send to a landing page that was missing what could be the most important element for actually converting visitors.

There was only one small problem. I'd never made a video in my life.

Drowning in Solutions

This is the reality of being early in your solopreneur journey: you have no idea where your audience actually is. Are they scrolling LinkedIn? Watching TikTok videos? Reading long-form blog posts? A little bit of each?

You're throwing content into the void, hoping something sticks, while feeling like you should be experimenting with every platform and format just to figure out what works.

The pressure is real. You see other creators crushing it on video platforms while you're still crafting Twitter threads. You know you should probably be on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube but that means learning entirely new skills and content formats.

It's overwhelming when you're already stretched thin just trying to build your business.

But here's the trap: you can't know if something's worth your time until you actually try it. Yet you also can't afford to chase every shiny new platform or tactic that promises to be “the one.”

You need blind faith to take the leap into unfamiliar territory, but you also need the discipline to avoid falling down every rabbit hole that presents itself.

It's a near impossible balance. Take enough risks to find what works, but don't waste so much time exploring that you never actually build anything.

So when I realized I needed to figure how to do it, I did what any reasonable person would do: I Googled "how to social media videos."

Big mistake.

Within minutes, I was drowning in a sea of sponsored content. YouTube videos littered with in-video ads (or "sponsors," as they cheekily put it). Social media feeds suddenly flooded with targeted ads for video creation tools, courses, and services.

Every platform seemed to know exactly what problem I was trying to solve, and they all had the perfect solution.

For a price.

The irony wasn't lost on me. I had a real problem to solve: learning video creation. But now I had to navigate through a marketplace designed to separate me from my money while potentially never actually learning the skill I needed.

Why I Went DIY

Staring at this flood of sponsored solutions, I realized I was looking at a classic signal-to-noise problem. There was definitely signal buried in all this noise. There were real tools and knowledge that could help me. But the noise was almost overwhelming.

Still, I knew what I wanted: to learn how to do this myself. Not just pay for a service.

The reasoning was pretty straightforward. First, I frankly don't have the money to throw at video services right now. But more importantly, I wanted to learn because I find it more empowering. I'm always looking to invest in myself first and I'll settle for paying for a solution only if I don't have the time or knowledge required.

So I committed to doing the research. I knew this signal-to-noise problem was essentially a weird test of my endurance. I had to have enough patience to sift through all the noise to find the actual knowledge I wanted.

In the beginning, it was frustrating and felt helpless. Every search led to more ads, more paid courses, more "easy solutions." But as I doubled down and kept digging, I started to see light at the end of the tunnel. I found videos that actually helped. I discovered industry-standard tools like OBS and DaVinci Resolve. I learned how to use them.

If I had given up early and let that initial frustration win, I never would have gotten there. That's the thing about this process, you have to get through the bullshit before you can find what you're looking for.

And that's exactly what happened. I found OBS for recording, DaVinci Resolve for editing, and resources f or royalty-free music.

More importantly, I proved to myself that investing the time to learn was worth it, even when the marketplace was trying to convince me otherwise.

"But here's the trap: you can't know if something's worth your time until you actually try it. Yet you also can't afford to chase every shiny new platform or tactic that promises to be 'the one.'"

Good Enough Gets Results

When it came time to actually make my first video, I was surrounded by examples of super slick editing, awesome technologies, and an insane amount of experience guiding people to create fantastic content. But I immediately recognized something important: these people already have the experience I'm looking to gain.

It would be insane for me to expect that my first video would be on par with their output. That would be like comparing a local high school soccer team to the World Cup champions. The comparison doesn't make sense.

So the end result was never about needing perfection, it just had to be good enough. I kept thinking back to that 86% conversion rate statistic. I just needed a video on my landing page. I could always fix it later, but I had to take that first uncomfortable step.

If I had the expectation that my output needed to match these super experienced professionals, it would give me more reason not to do it than to do it.

Here's what I ended up creating:

To be brutally honest, it's not the greatest video in the world. But it was never meant to be. It's good, and good is good enough.

This combination of committing to learn despite the noise, pushing through the initial frustration, and setting a "good enough" bar got me from zero video skills to a shipped product demo in just a few days.

More importantly, it left me in a position where I can see what the real results are and make quick adjustments if needed. Because now I actually have the skills to do it.

That's the power of investing in yourself early on. You don't just get a deliverable when you invest in yourself, you get the capability.

And that capability compounds in ways that paying for a one-off service never could.