Maybe you’re about to start your first job or you’d like to finally launch that side hustle you’ve been thinking about. With this series, our Squarespace YouTube creators share their own stories and tell you how to get started. It’s time to embrace this next chapter and run with it.
Levi Allen thought that making outdoor adventure videos—and getting paid for it—was too good to be true. He got a few jobs making wedding videos that helped him learn his craft before he leaned into one of his passions as a filmmaking subject: biking. He created some videos about biking and built a site to host them. “I just thought I thought that's what I was supposed to do,” says Allen. “What I learned later is when you make a website for your videos or for your work or whatever thing you're trying to do next... you're kind of putting a signpost in the ground and saying to other people, ‘Hey, I'm open for business! This is the thing that I'm legitimately doing...it's not just an idea, it's not just a nice thought, I've got a webpage. That to me felt very official when I was starting out.”
It also led directly to his first gig: while a cousin recommended Allen to an acquaintance in need of abn adventurous filmmaker, that acquaintance found his website and sent him an email. “I was like, how did this happen? Next thing you know, I was on a boat to film some mountain biking… that was the first time I ever got paid to do anything outdoor-related.” Now, with Squarespace, he runs an online store and is able to create password-protected hidden pages to deliver proposals directly to clients. “It feels really custom...don't underestimate the role that a website could play and getting you to where you want to go.”
For Allen, a sense of purpose is essential for any business’s digital experience: “it's one thing to just open up the social media account on whatever platform is popping off, but I think it's really powerful to do that extra work and have a website that’s specifically about what you want to make and who you want to make it for or what type of person you are and what type of opportunities you're looking for and what types of companies you want to be partnered with.”
“We can get a little caught up in just waiting for someone to give us permission,” says Allen. “That permission might never have come if I didn’t take ownership over saying, this is who I want to be, this is the kind of work that I want to do. Put that out there, boldly state it and see what happens.”
To see the beautiful British Columbia landscape where Allen works and hear his key tips for launching your own site, watch the video above.
To learn more about Levi’s work, visit leftcoast.co or check out his YouTube channel.
To launch your own new adventure, visit squarespace.com to get started.