Back to Square One
Discover more from Oren Cohen
Back to Square One
I'm glad to be back on Substack! Here's what's been going on, and expectations for the future.
Hey! Thanks for visiting this little Substack of mine! By the end of this post, you’ll realize why I’m starting to write here (again, if you stuck with me)! To understand the journey, we must begin at the beginning!
It’s December 2009. My best friend and I arrived at the theatre to watch this movie that all our friends wouldn’t shut up about called ‘Avatar.’
We bought last-minute tickets and had to sit in the front row, looking up most of the time at the screen instead of sitting in a logical row like seven or eight.
But as soon as I experienced Pandora for the first time through my early-twenties brain, I knew I wanted to be as free as Jake Sully.
A couple of years passed, and in January 2011, I launched “Alive2Play,” my first gaming news website. I didn't know what I was doing at 24 years old and without a college degree. It was all self-taught.
By the end of the first year, I had a lead writer and ten other writers, all writing for the site voluntarily. Fast forward to 2013, I started my college degree in Computer Science, and we had to shut it all down because we didn’t know anything about SEO and how to make money from this.
A handful of readers visited the site each month, which is way less than the number of people visiting my current blog Nerdy Modern Blog every month.
Although we were small and insignificant in online publishing - I still found that experience course-altering. I knew that I wanted this part of my life to persist no matter what job I would work at. But it didn’t. After we shut it all down, I tried to continue writing on my own on a little website I called Geekosmos that never really blossomed into anything.
The Medium Discovery
It’s February 2019. I had just taken an online writing course on CreativeLive and discovered Jeff Goins from
. At the time, I hopped from resource to resource, trying to find the one thing that felt right for me. And I stuck with his course for a while. Through the course, he brought in a guest called . Hers was the first newsletter I signed up for that I really found valuable. Such a matter-of-fact type of writing. Every article felt like I was sitting for coffee with her as she told the exciting new thing.Back in February 2019, that exciting thing was a website I did not know called Medium.com. Signing up for that website changed the way I write online forever.
So, after reading Shaunta’s newsletter, I figured out what to write. At the time, I was struggling with some software at work, and it clicked in my head that if I had problems with it, many other people must also face those struggles. So I wrote a comprehensive guide on installing that software and published it on Medium.
Fast forward a day, and an email in my inbox told me my story had been “recommended” across Medium. What’s this surge of dopamine that I never knew I needed? From that point onwards, I started writing more and more on Medium. I saw mild success at best, but the feedback from Medium’s curators telling me my story was worth curating on their homepage meant a lot to my inexperienced writer’s mind.
Then in July 2019, something magical happened. I published a story on Medium about a show I had been watching called Dimension 20. Medium’s curators curated that article about The Unsleeping City for the homepage. So I wrote about it on Twitter and received a DM from CollegeHumor’s PR person at the time, asking me if I would like to interview Brennan Lee Mulligan - the DM of that campaign. I said Hell Yes, and the result of that meeting was a written interview with Brennan but also a relationship that persists to this day where now Dimension 20 has 17 seasons, and I had interviewed Brennan and other DMs and production people for 12 of them.
And then 2020 hit.
Losing Myself to Loneliness
Before the pandemic hit, I wasn’t all that connected with my friends. They all live across the country, and we weren’t in the habit of making Zoom calls even after the pandemic hit.
Frankly, I don’t remember much of 2020 aside from being stuck in my room for most of the time and eroding away. I’m astonished we’re in 2023 already.
The one good thing that came out of 2020 was my YouTube Channel, where things really started to take off for me.
Becoming a YouTuber
So, in September 2020, I decided to give myself the birthday present of a YouTube channel. At first, nobody saw what I was posting. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to post about, to begin with.
It really clicked when I interviewed Brennan for the second time about Pirates of Leviathan when I said to myself, hey, why not post this to YouTube, actually?
So, I did, and it was the first video where people started finding my channel and subscribing.
Was I going to become a D20 YouTuber? I guess I was. But over the years, I became a D&D YouTuber more than anything else based on the interviews I did. And now, with my latest interviews, I’m becoming more of a Nerdy YouTuber, which I initially wanted. One fun fact about doing interviews on YouTube is that it’s really easy to repurpose them into a podcast which I did, and I can now call myself a podcaster as well.
Many of my interviews with lesser-known people barely get any views, and that’s OK. I’m not chasing the views, I’m chasing substance. I still need to pay the bills, so I work full-time.
When I realized YouTube would need to grow to become a source of income, I started to dabble in other venues to make additional income.
That’s where Etsy comes in.
Starting an Etsy Store
In 2021, I started my first Etsy shop. I decided to focus on Print on Demand and see where that would take me. The problem was that I did not calculate my profits right and barely made any money with that store. It was a good learning experience.
In 2023, I started a new Etsy shop for digital prints only. That shop is a good avenue for passive income if I can make it work. No shipping costs as Etsy handles delivery straight to the customer.
More on that shop in future issues. Now let’s talk about why I am back here.
Understanding My Writing Journey
I’ve always been the kind of person who spreads himself over many directions. I wanted to write about coding, content creation, and nerdy TV shows simultaneously, but I realized it’s not a good fit for one website. I’ve been doing many blog hops over the years, and now, back on Substack, it feels like this is where I should choose to grow my audience.
I have my Nerdy Modern Blog, where I post reviews, and this newsletter is where I can talk to you like I’m talking to a friend.
So that’s what I intend to do. I also have Oren Codes, but I will occasionally post on it.
What Will You See Going Forward?
I intend to share how my journey is going and document it here. Whenever I have new interviews on YouTube, I will share those with you as well.
The topics I will cover could range from self-improvement to content creation or other things.
My podcast Geek Peek is a good source of material about content creation, and I’m excited to bring you blog posts about those conversations and what I’m learning from them.
Conclusion
It’s good to be back on Substack. I’ll be writing here in my personal voice. I will keep writing reviews on Nerdy Modern Blog, but this is where I’ll talk to you personally and share valuable lessons or even cool things that happened in my life. The frequency will probably be weekly, but I’m an agent of chaos, so don’t count on it.
Thank you for reading! I’m excited about what comes next.