25 million views

When I Worked At Moshi

I was scrolling through YouTube the other day, and I stumbled across a video I edited almost a decade ago. It now has over 25 million views.

The video is a lullaby, featuring a cartoon koala called SleepyPaws, from the world of Moshi Monsters. I made it during my first proper job as a marketing apprentice at a company called Mind Candy. I had just dropped out of university, filled with that unique combination of terror and bravado, and landed in one of the most interesting creative companies in London.

Mind Candy was founded by Michael Acton Smith, a man with a Midas touch for creating things people love. He started with the gadget and gift site Firebox.com, then launched Moshi Monsters, which became a global phenomenon for kids. After that, he co-founded Calm, the mindfulness app that now helps millions of adults. The company’s motto was "to create worlds that fire the imagination," and for a 20-year-old apprentice, it was an incredibly inspiring place to be.

My job involved a bit of everything, including editing videos like this one. Looking at it now, it’s a simple, charmingly lo-fi animation. A sleepy koala, a gentle song, and some twinkling fireflies. But behind that simplicity was an almost comical amount of manual labour.

I remember transcribing the entire song by hand, typing out each word to create the subtitles that fade in and out. This was before the age of AI transcription; there was no magic button. It was just me, a pair of headphones, and a lot of rewinding. I also created some of the glowing background animations, a task that was my first real foray into video editing and felt like a huge responsibility at the time. Seeing it now, those little moving lights feel like a ghost from my past.

It's strange to think about how many people that video has reached. In the world of marketing, we often talk about impressions and reach in abstract terms. But 25 million views is a concrete, staggering number. If you were to pay for that many impressions through ads, the cost would be astronomical. Yet, this simple piece of free, helpful content did it organically. It’s a powerful reminder that one of the best marketing strategies is to simply make something good and give it away.

More than the numbers, though, is the personal aspect. It’s lovely to think that for years, this silly video I worked on has been part of a bedtime routine for millions of kids, hopefully making life a tiny bit easier for their exhausted parents. For a first job, you can’t really ask for a better outcome than that.