RA by Day, Youtuber by Night: an Interview with Youtuber Nicole Rafiee
[UNPUBLISHED:] Tell us about yourself.
[NICOLE:] I consider myself a content creator all across the board, specifically I’m a YouTuber. I hate the term influencer but I would call myself a content creator, mainly on YouTube and branching out on other platforms like podcasting and the occasional Tik Tok. I mainly make content about my lifestyle. I try to never make it too serious. I try to give a little Mr. Rodgers moment at the end of every video. That’s my whole goal – to make a video, have it be fun, and have a little message at the end.
[UNPUBLISHED:] How long have you been doing YouTube?
[NICOLE:] I originally started when I was in the fifth grade – which was way too young, I was definitely breaking some laws – I had a Webkinz channel where I would talk about my stuffed animals. I deleted it because people found it and I was embarrassed. Then in middle school, I made a channel inspired by JennxPenn and Supermac18 where I would do music videos, stop motion, and skits. Then people found it and I got embarrassed so I deleted it again. Then right before my freshman year of high school, I uploaded two videos I made on my webcam. They were called something like “10 Types of Selfies” and “What Not to Say to People who are Allergic to a lot of Foods”. It was cringe and the entire football team found it and I got embarrassed so I deleted that as well. I officially restarted again two years ago but I didn’t actually start taking it seriously until about a year ago. I was posting one video a week, then last winter I started doing two a week and I’ve been pretty consistent.
[UNPUBLISHED:] What inspired you to restart your channel?
[NICOLE:] I had just gotten to college and I hated all my majors. I just made a video today about how if I could go back, I don’t think I would have gone to college, or maybe I would have gone to community college instead because I just don’t have any connection to my university. I was every major under the sun. I thought I had to be a STEM major and I was so miserable in all my classes. I was a Health Profession major and I would be in class learning about epidemiology and I would be thinking about the next video I wanted to make when I got home. I was lacking creativity in my life because nothing was creative in school and I was a ball of creativity. There was another Youtuber who I went to temple with, her name is Hannah Elise and we met through a mutual friend. One day, we were in the dining hall together and found out we both used to have YouTube channels when we were little and we bonded over that. She told me she was going to start a YouTube channel over winter break and I met up with her nine months later and she was killing it. Her videos were getting hundreds of thousands of views and she told me how it was the best decision ever and she had never been happier. I had been putting off making a channel again but I just did it and once I edited the video, I was obsessed with it again. I felt like I was in the right place again and college felt so wrong. I didn’t get a lot of views at first but I kept doing it because it was fun and I was committed to it.
[UNPUBLISHED:] How would you describe the kind of content you make?
[NICOLE:] At first I would take trendy topics and recreate them. I had a list of ideas but once I was out I started doing trendy things that everyone else was doing. It took me about a year to get into the mojo of the kind of content I like to do now. The best way to describe it is a satirical lifestyle but in the sense that I like to give advice. I’m still struggling to find a genre for myself but I guess it’s just personality-based.
[UNPUBLISHED:] How do you come up with ideas for your videos?
[NICOLE:] I could be in a drought of not having video ideas and that used to happen very often. Luckily, for the past few months, I’ve been good. The idea of making two videos a week really helped. A lot of my ideas stem from Tik Tok. For example, my biggest video was a guy answering questions girls are too afraid to ask and that was 100% from Tik Tok. I also did “Rating my Subscriber’s Dads” and “Rating my Subscriber’s boyfriends”. That idea stemmed from me wanting to do a video rating men from the ’80s but I didn’t like it and it didn’t work out. Then I thought, “what does everyone identify me as?” and everyone always says “Nicole has daddy issues.” Then I knew I should rate people’s dads. A lot of people are liking what I call “unhinged content” where I just talk and go on rants and they’re not structured at all.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Do you do YouTube full time?
[NICOLE:] Yeah, I do. I always get confused because when I say I do YouTube full time I mean I do it 35-45 hours a week. When I tell people at school they say, “You do it part-time because you’re in school” but I don’t think so. The hours definitely add up, especially in the summer. I’m in school full time and I do YouTube full time.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Do you have a favorite video that you’ve made.
[NICOLE:] One that really sticks out to me is my video called “I Quit My Job Today”. That was when I quit my Chipotle job and I was so excited about it. That was the start of being open to youTube being my source of income. I had just gotten monetized but I didn’t have many subscribers, maybe 2,000. For the video, I went to Party City and bought balloons and streamers and had a little celebration in my car and told Chipotle stories. I really like that video because it felt like a coming-of-age moment for me. I got to quit my job and do something I’ve always wanted to.
[UNPUBLISHED:] How has being a YouTuber affected your life?
[NICOLE:] It’s definitely affected my life positively. I feel more confident in myself and I feel more like myself than ever before. I’ve had some friends tell me I don’t act like myself in my videos and I’m like, “Maybe I just don’t act like myself around you.” The way I act in videos is how I act when I’m alone and I get to just being myself and make something out of it. It’s also cool because I can make it my job. My parents are really proud of me because they realized I’m very hardworking when I actually want something.
[UNPUBLISHED:] What has been your experience gaining a large following?
[NICOLE:] I’m trying this new thing where I try to see the positive more than the negative because the negative always stands out way more. It’s been really good. There’s a lot of really nice people in the world. I love when I get messages from girls my age saying, “I can see us being best friends” or “You remind me so much of me! We’re the same person”. I find this really cool because I don’t know what aspect of me they really relate to but it’s nice to know just me sharing my thoughts and little moments of my life is “relatable”. When it comes to hate comments and people being mean, I’ve just become a lot more aware. Even in my hometown, there are people who want to use me which is strange because I’ve never had anything for people to use me for before. Even people who were mean to me in high school are apologizing out of nowhere. I try to take it a lot less to heart because at the end of the day, people don’t know me personally and it’s not my character they are attacking, it’s the image they have in their head of me. When someone is mean to me I think, “I feel bad for you because if you knew me in real life I don’t think you’d be saying this to me and this is just a reflection of you, not me.”
[UNPUBLISHED:] Do you have any stories from people recognizing you in public?
[NICOLE:] When I lived in the dorms I tried to be as private as possible about where I live. I get scared about those kinds of things because if my favorite YouTuber went to my school I would want to know where they lived, to be honest. I would get bothered when I would post vlogs and people would ask, “What dorm is this?” and people would actually respond and tell them. That bothered me and I would have to delete those comments. I was an RA and I got recognized like three times during RA training which I did not expect at all. Throughout the school year, some people would come up to me at the library and ask if I was a YouTuber. Now in zoom classes, some people will message me on zoom. For the most part, nothing too bad has happened so I’m crossing my fingers.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Have you become friends with other YouTubers since making your channel?
[NICOLE:] Yeah, I don’t have many YouTube friends but one girl is Alexis Sunshine. She’s a really sweet girl. Another is LindseyRem, she’s really sweet too. Tiffany Ferg has been such a cool person I've gotten to become friends with because she's almost like a mentor since she's been in this game way longer than I have. I feel like I can always turn to her for advice or help-and amazing content. I’m trying really hard to become friends with ur mom ashley, I think she’s the coolest person ever.
[UNPUBLISHED:] When did your friends and family find out about your YouTube channel?
[NICOLE:] I told everyone immediately, I wasn’t really about hiding it. All of my friends were really supportive. No one really had anything negative to say at all. A lot of my close friends don’t watch my videos which used to bother me when I needed all of the views I could get but now I’m not bothered by it.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Did the students who you were an RA for know you talked about them in videos?
[NICOLE:] I made a video called, “Stories From Being an RA” where I mentioned some stories about the experience. Some of my friends watched it and were cracking up and saying “I remember when that happened”. It was hilarious. In the video, I talked about a huge 60 person party that happened. The guy who started the party commented on the video, “Anytime you want to come through to the next party, just let me know” and he posted about it on his Instagram story. I gave that a hard pass. That was pretty much the only thing that happened.
[UNPUBLISHED:] How do you balance school, relationships, and uploading two videos a week?
[NICOLE:] It’s tough, it’s really hard. I just became a Google Calendar girl which has saved me. Before, I wasn’t good at planning whatsoever. When it comes to school if I’m being 100% honest, I do work like answering emails or editing during class. It’s not that good of a balance when it comes to friends. I’ve had a few friends who were against me uploading twice a week because they were like, “You barely have any time to hang out with us.” But the greatest thing is I get to incorporate my friends into my videos. During school, it’s a lot of late nights. Family takes priority then it’s everything else. I’ve been with my boyfriend since before we started college so he’s been with me through all of this and he’s very supportive. He completely gets it because he’s a busy student himself. The busier I am, the happier I am.
[UNPUBLISHED:] What inspired you to start a podcast?
[NICOLE:] There are topics I would love to talk about in YouTube videos but I feel like not many people would be interested in it and it probably wouldn’t go down well if it was an hour. I love podcasts like David Dobrik and Jason Nash’s but I realized there aren’t a lot of women in the podcasting space. I really like Emma Chamberlain’s Anything Goes podcast. I also love Extra Dynamic by ur mom ashley.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Do you have a favorite podcast episode you’ve made?
[NICOLE:] I just did one which was about my past roommate experiences called “The Roommate and the Rotisserie Chicken” because my roommate left a rotisserie chicken in the pantry to rot. I thought that was a pretty fun episode because I’ve never been able to talk about my shitty roommate experiences and I’m so excited to graduate so I can officially share them because they are awful.
[UNPUBLISHED:] How long did it take you to gain a following?
[NICOLE:] I used to beat myself up about that a lot. I used to compare myself to other YouTubers and find out when their breaking point was when they started to reach a lot of subscribers. I would figure out how many months it took them to reach 50,000 subscribers and compare that to how long it took me. It was so silly and anxiety-inducing for no reason. For me, it took about a year until I posted something that started to gain a lot of traction. Around this time last year, I had around 4,000 subscribers and it wasn’t until I posted that “Guys Answering Questions Girls are too Afraid to Ask” video that I grew from 15,000 to 80,000 subscribers within a month. In January I hit 100,000 subscribers, so it went from 15,000 in November to 100,000 in January.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Are there any YouTubers that inspire you?
[NICOLE:] Initially the person who really inspired me was Haley Pham and her old videos. She had a lot of vlog-style videos from when she was in high school. I was inspired by her editing style. It was also how genuine Best Dressed is that inspired me. Chris Klemens inspires me because he will show himself being sad or crying in a video and it just feels real and raw.
[UNPUBLISHED:] What direction do you see your channel going in?
[NICOLE:] I have some exciting work with a jewelry company coming out soon. I’m really excited about that because the piece is so me. I’ve also hinted on my channel about making merch. I’m going to do it in a way that I haven’t seen anyone else do before so I’m really excited about that coming out by the end of the year. I want to do more things in the business realm and create things that are sustainable. I get upset about not seeing many YouTubers working with brands that are sustainable and who pay their workers ethically. I want to make a smart, safe, and ethical business move but I don’t have anything specific in mind. In the future, I don’t plan to take the traditional route because a promise I made to myself was I would never work for anyone else again. I saw my parents doing that as immigrants and see how much they love being self-employed.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Do you have any advice for people who want to start a YouTube channel?
[NICOLE:] Don’t do a Q&A for your first video, come up with something that’s going to make you stand out. It’s also okay to take inspiration from other peoples editing styles because that’s how you learn to develop your own. My biggest advice is to just do it. If you are serious about it, you have to be consistent. It might not be easy and you’re probably going to lose your social life and some hours of sleep but if it’s your passion then you’re going to be excited about it.
[UNPUBLISHED:] How was the switch from being a small YouTuber to now having managers?
[NICOLE:] It’s been the best decision I’ve made for myself. I always envision when people have managers that they do everything from them and they take so much money but my managers are some of my closest friends now. They’re like big sisters to me who just so happen to know about the business world. They help me get brand deals which is good because it turns out I’ve been really selling myself short. It’s been a really good experience to know people who can read over legalities for me, bring offers, and help me whenever I need it.
Stay up to date with everything Nicole is doing:
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NicoleRafiee/featured
Podcast "Talk Nasty To Me": https://open.spotify.com/show/57bGQm6...
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nicolerafiee/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/nicolerafiee