THE STORY OF DANGERMAN | preface
Buckle up. This isn’t exactly summed up quickly. For instance, what if I told you DangerMan is a moniker I stole from myself in a futile attempt at Internet privacy?
Any attempt to sum up DangerMan opens up more questions.
Where did DangerMan start? Why DangerMan? The answer is in the question of when. You see, DangerMan didn’t begin with the YouTube channel, it actually started earlier in life.

WHO IS DANGERMAN?
Most know DangerMan as a moniker I use on YouTube where I teach people to play paintball. The DangerMan persona is also part of my inline skate videos, and even my man-on-the-street expose videos. Yes, there’s a lot of DangerMan to go around.
Am I DangerMan? Yes, and no. Let’s get to the WHEN.
dangerman begins
DangerMan is a character I created in a thirty-eight page short story, Aeroplane City. I loved the character of Aeroplane City along with my protagonist, DangerMan. Aeroplane City is now a novel in the works.
When I created my first YouTube video to share my expertise in paintball, I foolishly thought I could keep my personal life personal by borrowing my character’s name, DangerMan.
As my channel took off, I hadn’t called myself, DangerMan. That came in time.
Unbeknownst to me, my viewing audience saw my channel name and they knew me as DangerMan. I actually first rejected the idea of being DangerMan. Soon after I recognized I needed to embrace the brand I created. I shouldn’t be dumb. They say play to your strengths. I tempered the visuals with compelling content.
BALANCE
Sports in the summer are best with fewer layers of clothing. Paintball …isn’t so friendly to less clothing. You can get away playing without a shirt if you’re good enough. Couple that with cargo shorts and you end up looking either crazy or badass on camera.
In fact, my then significant other saw the popularity and had concerns. To this day I can recall her saying to me, “Do you want to be that guy?”
She was referring to being thought of as some mindless, shirtless YouTuber. She was right. I made a point to put a shirt on. I did not want to be typecast.
In the end, I realized I may not have hooked so many new curious viewers without the shirtless images. The look helped as an attention-getting visual.
The bottom line. I produced was truly helpful content. My marketing background in ad copy helped me focus my videos where others had failed. I got right to the point. I taught by example. I was concise.

LEVERAGE
Let’s be clear. DangerMan is a brand. You either love him, or hate him. That’s money in the bank if you play it right.
DANGERMAN: PROMOTIONAL ATHLETE
Leveraging DangerMan as a promotional athlete was a natural progression. For years, paintball parks have relied on the name DangerMan to draw players to their events. You come to either play alongside DangerMan, or you come to combat him. The brand draws multiple segments within the vertical.
DANGERMAN: SOCIAL INFLUENCER
This one should have been easier to pull the trigger on, but to be frank, YouTube helped this progress along. As it crafted ways to deprive niche channels out of their income, the need to cover operating costs meant going out in search of sponsors.
As a result, I’ve had over ten sponsors over ten years. I currently have four sponsors with Dye Paintball as my most coveted partner. In fact, when I began, Dye was a goal. I’m very proud to be affiliated with the best brand in paintball.

DANGERMAN MEDIA DIGITAL MAGAZINE
DANGERMAN MEDIA
Grow or die. It makes no sense to rest on laurels. But just as important was filling a very important void in the paintball industry.
Because the DangerMan brand has been involved in other activities, I launched DangerMan Media digital magazine where I could curate my own pop culture archive of articles, re-publish any previous work and showcase my web development skills.

dangerman'S LAIR digital magazine
Once DangerMan Media was up and running the obvious next step was for deliver a focused product to the paintball segment. I learned how to build a digital magazine. Why not do it again?
Here I went back to basics.
I focused on what made DangerMan successful. I not only made instructional videos for beginners, I made them for an underserved community of beginners. In marketing speak, it was an underserved segment (practically virgin). What is the segment I’m speaking of? That segment is woodsball. Think longtail keyword, beginner woodsball, not simply beginner paintball. I carried this over to digital print by creating DangerMan’s Lair digital paintball magazine. DangerMan’s Lair audience is the woodsball community.
There was much to learn through DangerMan’s Lair. I became a managing editor and mentor to an endless stream of contributing writers. To take on this responsibility without carving into other work, I used a kanban workflow in Asana.

dangerman: The book
It was is everything was leading to this. After all, a book is the most logical conclusion. In the spring and summer of 2019, I authored a tactical paintball guide to be published in September of 2019. I planned it to be an authoritative guide — a paintball Bible. Ad some marketing ad copy logic and the result is DangerMan’s Paintball Bible.
DangerMan’s Lair serves as a funnel to sell DangerMan’s Paintball Bible as PDF book.
Amazon enables me to provide DangerMan’s Paintball Bible print-bound.