Kallaway’s Genius 100k Subscriber Strategy (Copy This)

0:00This is the biggest mistake people on YouTube make. They make a variety of different types of videos for different types of audience avatars. Took the medicine and just started from scratch and said, "I'm only posting videos for this specific audience." I think the fifth video got a million views. Sixth video was like 200k and then it was just straight up from there. So, if somebody wants to start a YouTube channel and see the type of success you did, what would be those first few steps you would tell them? Step four is really the key. What solution for those pain points do you have that is contrary to the common

0:29belief. So if you just do those four steps and then do it consistently, I guarantee you will build a six-figure audience in any niche. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to episode 156 of the 505 podcast. Today we got Kane Callaway on the show. Now he hit 100,000 subscribers on YouTube in under five months. Previously though, he had a failed YouTube channel and he took all of his learnings, implemented into this second channel, and it just absolutely exploded with growth. And we go super deep. It's not surface level advice. We go into the nuances of like really what it takes to build a successful YouTube channel, how to craft titles, how to

1:04come up with ideas, how to create a hook, how to keep a viewer's attention throughout the whole video. I mean, we really go into it and he breaks down how he's building out his business as a creator. In this episode, Kane is going to reveal to you everything that you're going to need to know to be successful on the platform. He's one of these people that just shares everything. He's not someone that's holding back 10% of the information. It's a gold mine. Lock in. Get your pen and paper. Let's get into it. Kane, give me the one-handed crack. Let's go. Oh [ __ ] Oh [ __ ] You

1:32dented the [ __ ] out of it, dude. Did I? Oh my god. This is a 29. I'm going to show you how to do it. Terrible, dude. I'm just I think I grabbed it. Absolutely on fire. So, do you pinch it or do you grab the whole thing? Subtle. Very soft hand. See, I went way too hard, I think. Koshi, come on. Now, now I'm focused. I'm going to do something we haven't done before, but because we're really good friends and we're

1:49having you on again. You get another shot. Oh. Oh, I just sip this one. No, it's fine. It's fine. All right. So, wait, hold on. Don't put the Don't put your finger under the tab. Yeah, you just got to go. Like, you got to pick it up and then go. Yep. Jeez, it's still dented, but but it dented out but better. 5.2. Cheers, boys. Kane, so good to have you on. Thank you. Thank you. That was a generous score. That was tough. Kane, zero to 100K on YouTube in 5 months, but that came after your first channel failed. What clicked? True story. Tell me. Well, I had it poorly

2:22positioned. So, the first channel, this is the biggest mistake I think people on YouTube make. They make a variety of different types of videos for different types of audience avatars. Because the problem is when you first start, you don't know what's going to work. You don't know what to make. And so, you're playing all over the place. The problem is you're playing with formats and with avatars. So people will be like they'll vlog, they'll make a tech breakdown or like whatever topic breakdown, they'll do an instructional video, a tutorial, but there are four different types of people. And so basically what happens is the algorithm targets like you post

2:54video one, it creates a lookalike audience of who who resonated with it. When video two comes, the very first thing it does is take that data and go to that same audience. So if you if you make a sports video and then you're like, "Ah, I didn't really like making that. I'm going to make a science video." the science video is being targeted to the sports fans who don't give a [ __ ] about science. And so that video will flop. And so then the algor the data coming back on the second video, the algorithm is like, "What do we do? I'm confused." Video three, it's

3:20confused. So that's not going to work. So what you really need to do is be super precise with the audience over and over and over and like hone in the audience avatar. I think of it like kind of like a dart board, right? The more you hit the same dart board, the bigger the bullseye gets on on the algorithm with YouTube. But the more you throw at different dart boards, all the boards shrink because the algorithm doesn't want to put videos that are bad fits in front of the wrong people. So basically what I did is the very first channel I had, I started out, I think I made like

3:47a an AI tutorial, then I tried doing vlogs, then I tried doing like content breakdowns, then I did this like blueprint series, then I had an interview with Zuck, which popped, but all the audience that I had before that weren't like the tech audience. It was super confusing. So, I basically once I started posting the videos I wanted to post on that channel, they weren't working and I was pretty pissed because I knew they were good videos. They weren't packaged well, but I I knew they were good videos. And so, what I did is I I took the medicine and just started from scratch and said, "I'm only posting

4:15videos for this specific audience," which for me is like business owners that want to use content to grow their business. And then I think the fifth video got a million views. Sixth video was like 200k. And then it was just straight up from there because all those people came, saw the bio, saw the historical videos, and then every video since then has just been for them. So if somebody wants to start a YouTube channel and see the type of success you did, what would be those first few steps you would tell them to get off to a great start? Yeah. So the number one critical thing is to identify the ideal

4:44viewer avatar is what I call it. And the way to find that out is if you have a product or service already, you probably know who the buyer is. So like that's easy. If you don't have a product or service, you need to think really hard about who is the audience I want to serve. That's either going to be someone you are or used to be like an audience profile. You used to be someone that you want to spend a decade in that community like talking to uh or someone that's going to end up buying directionally the type of product you want to build. You kind of have to spend a lot of time

5:12figuring out who that ideal avatar is. Based on that, you can then mindful. So that's like step one. The second step is then you have to find out what surface they're on. We're going to assume it's YouTube here, but like I make content everywhere. It depends. Let's just say YouTube. Number three is you have to mine for their pain points. So like figure out what does that person have a problem with? And this is for like educational type content, which is what I focus on because that's that's how you really make money with content. If you're doing entertainment, it's a complete completely different game, which I would ignore for listening to me

5:41because I don't have the advice tailored for that. Next thing is you're going to map their workflow and their pain points. So if it's an audience that's looking for tax help, you got to map the entire tax like process and then find micro pain points within that process. The best type of person to make tax content is a former accountant because they know the process so intimately. So it's not work to figure out what the workflow is. If you're not an accountant, but you want to sell tax stuff, you're going to have to go interview people that struggle with their taxes and go super deep. So step

6:11step one is the avatar. Step two is kind of the formats and services, which let's say YouTube. Step three is the pain points. And then step four, I guess we're like giving the whole sauce in the first five minutes, but come on, dude. Give it to them. Step four is really the key. Step four is the gold where the golden goose really is, which is what solution for those pain points do you have that is contrary to the common belief. So let's say the tax example, you've mapped the workflow. It's like,

6:35yeah, tax is blow. Here's the 15 steps. The number one thing people struggle with is like deducting their itemizing their expenses, let's say. Now, typically people that have have no idea about how to do that, you can give them anything. But most people have some sense that's the common belief. So they're like, "Okay, I could do it for

6:51my meals and my travel, but whatever." So what do you know that is different from that common belief that you can then put in a video to give value? The contrast, the difference between what they believe and what you know, that is where the kind of like interest curve spikes. That's why people associate value with you. That's why they trust you. So, if you just do those four steps and then do it consistently weekly for a year, I guarantee you will build an a six-figure audience in any niche, that's all you have to do. But if you get on the wrong track or you don't have actual

7:21value for those solutions, it's not going to work. Flag on the play. What's going on? Got to let him know because as we get deeper into this episode, you will understand that Kane has a very awesome team around him. And I know that you're probably out there wondering like, how can you do this on a smaller scale? And I think an amazing asset that you can immediately plug in is our good friends at Motion Ray. Today I was

7:39literally making a short form video. Okay. I'm not a I'm not a graphics person. I don't know how to even open up those platforms, but I went on there because I needed a follower count going up or down. I saw that. Yes. Okay. And I literally went on there, downloaded it, threw it into the video. It took me 3 seconds. And it's like those little assets that you get access to make your life so much easier. And that is priceless. Well, we all can't outsource everything, but we can have Motion Ray that helps us with graphics. They have

8:05AI voiceovers. They have stock footage. They have music. They really have the works to help you take your content to the next level. And it's all about these little fine details that speed up your workflow, right? Like we're all in the game of trying to buy back our time. And this is such an easy way to get really high quality assets, implement them into your videos so you can worry about coming up with your best ideas and keep creating. I mean, we also talked about the example uh on the phone with Darvis CEO having you have a health expert on that's known for sleep and their take is

8:33wildly different than anything else that is traditional in the space. And those videos are booming because everyone that sees that thumbnail goes [ __ ] I want to I want to see what this person has to say. And I'll say that the diary of CEO is an interesting case study against what I'm saying in not not in the solution piece. The thing you you said was dead on. It's more in the audience avatar, right? Cuz he's coming out with episodes that are like the health expert, the dating expert, the finance expert. So he's kind of violating the the like super single audience avatar thing, but it works for

9:04him because he's already an outlier. If you scroll all the way back down, he was much more targeted in terms of like business type audiences. Once he once he got over 1 to two million in subscribers, he started expanding and broadening it cuz he ran out of like the business owner audience essentially. So if you're if you're listening to this and you're like, "Okay, I thought you just said pick one profile. If I look at Dire the CEO, he's targeting all these

9:25different videos." That's the nuance. But the thing you said is dead on, which is when he brings the guest on, the reason you click and why it's so compelling is because of the contrast between what they're saying and what you typically believe. Now, was it not until video five or six that took off that you knew you were doing well on this new channel? Or were there some key metrics that you were looking at on the new channel where you were like, "This is performing well comparatively to my other channel." It just so happens that video five or six took off and you're like, "All right, now we're on to the

9:53race." Off to the races. So, I had less than 1,000 subscribers when the that banger when the fifth one hit. So, I the only thing you can really look at when the metrics are not there is just like the quality of the input. And if you're a brand new beginner, you're not really going to know what good looks like. I'd been making so many short form videos that like and studying like a real student of YouTube to be like, "Okay, I kind of you can see like a good video and then see yours and be like, "My shit's bad." But if you look at yours

10:18and you're like, "This is actually good. I don't know why it's not working." That's a good sign that your results are just lagging your skills and just stay the course. So, there wasn't like I I think the maybe the second or third video got like 3,000 views. It was more than a couple hundred like you typically

10:33see, but nothing nothing outsized. Packaging matters a ton, right? Packaging is everything. If they don't click, they don't watch. And so, you might have incredible content, but the packaging is off. We noticed that for ourselves. Like feel like we just started to dial in our packaging and we are noticing a significant like increase in the average of what all of our videos are performing. That million view video it's like how to ma how to become a master storyteller. That video I filmed 6 months before the exact same video. The only thing we changed was the thumbnail and then me posting it on an audience matched channel. On the previous

11:06channel, the Zuck channel, it topped out at 1,700 views and it's at 1.2 million now. And all we changed was the thumbnail and the channel. So that just shows YouTube is not a it's it's this sucks to hear, but YouTube is not a video platform. It's a packaging platform. Can you get the person to click and then can you give them enough in the first 30 seconds to like sat confirm the click is the colloquial

11:29term, but like satisfy the curiosity. From there, it's just like are you interesting, entertaining, providing value, right? A combination of those things. We talked about this before, but you said that viewers scroll with their subconscious, not with their eyes. What are the six psychology checkpoints that a viewer goes through when they're looking for a video to click on? Oh, you're going to test me here. Did I say this in a previous video? We talked about this on the phone, but you can

11:51take your time. We can cut it up. Yeah. Well, one thing I was I was actually making a video or I was writing a video earlier about thumbnails, like how to how to make the best thumbnails. And everything I do, I try to break down into like the psychology for figuring out why somebody does the thing so that I can manipulate that psychology the you

12:06know, for good, but the way I want to. Absolutely. That sounded super take over the world. That sounded super evil, but basically I was I was like I can manipulate. Yeah, that sounded pretty evil. But basically, like take thumbnails for a very very small piece or important for YouTube, but like seemingly small piece. When you think about how you consume YouTube, really what you do is you're scrolling. The first thing you're looking at is the thumbnail catching your eye visually. So like, is there high color contrast? Does it stand out from the grid? Are there noticeable things that you lock onto like a person's face or like words? The

12:39second thing you do is you look then at the title. You haven't actually digested what's in the thumbnail, but it just grabbed you for a second. You're like, "What is that?" Boom. You look at the title and you read the title. And the title really does three things. It opens what I call a desire loop. So for educational content, it's like what is the desire the person wants? So for me, it's like if you want more views, the desire is more views. And then the title typically talks about a specific pain point you have and proposes a potential solution for that painoint. So, if I had

13:06a video that's like how to write killer scripts to keep viewers hooked, the desire is you want to keep them hooked. The pain point is you you write shitty scripts and the solution is I have some method or formula for writing better scripts. All that is kind of in the title immediately. What then happens is you go back to the thumbnail to corroborate that desire loop just to just to reinforce it to be like, am I sure this guy or this girl is gonna is going to satisfy this curiosity? And so then they look in the thumbnail for like what does the text say? What is the what

13:34is the if it's a face, what is the fa what does em motion is the face making? What does the graphic say? And then they click. So ju just at that level, it's like okay, you look at thumbnails and everyone's like, I want color. But no, it's like break down the psychology of what someone's doing. Just observe yourself. You look for color or for some weird thing. You read the title, you think about what you want, and then you go back and reinforce the thumbnail, and then you click. So knowing that, you can kind of work backwards, kind of reverse engineer the rule set for how you should

14:01make thumbnails in this case. And so I I think of everything in these terms. And so I mean maybe maybe feed me feed me a couple of these six things if you have them written and I'll I can react to them. I don't think we I don't think we have them written. I just remember you said there's six checkpoints. We can take we can take it out. In No, in in a video I made it was all about like these different psychology thing. It was like 18 psychology triggers that I used to manipulate viewers to like my videos or something. And there were six main steps

14:27you had to go through. The first main step, we'll see if I can get this off the top of my head. First main step is you have to get them to acknowledge the pain point, right? Which is what we talked about already. So right away you're trying to create this context clarity. What is the video about? And is that is that triggering some pain point for them? Then you're you're going into this like solution kind of contrast piece, right? So teasing what I know that they don't know, which is what I was saying. That creates the contrast that creates curiosity loop. What do I know? Makes you want to go down the

14:54rabbit hole. So we can we can circle back on the on the full six things. Maybe they should watch the video. They should watch the video. We'll link it. Okay. You get someone to to be interested in the thumbnail, interested in the in the title, they click the video. Y explain to us how important the the first 30 seconds are and what do you need to make sure to do in those first 30 seconds to keep the viewers attention throughout the whole video. Yeah. So, the way YouTube works is and and the reason I I say this so matter of factly is because I'm I was never trying to be

15:22a YouTuber and I'm not I'm not like a YouTuber. I approached this from like a science perspective. So, I was thinking about this on the way over here. When people watch this, I want them to think like content fits into two buckets. There's art and there's science. Art is like legit. Like you guys legit cinematographers can like make art. I cannot make art. I'm I I have like good taste in certain areas, but I don't I don't have the skills, the craft to be

15:46able to like go make a cinematic vlog. That's art. I figured it out. You're literally Bryson Dambo of YouTube. Do you know about this? No. Bryson Dshambo's driver swing is scient his His clubs are scientifically for him. It is like the exact way that he hits the ball, the way that he pivots. It's the perfect angle and it's different than any other PGA golfer. And he's like I have and his swing looks not the prettiest as opposed to like another like a Tiger Woods. His swing is like gorgeous. And Bryson Bryson is there

16:13like to rip the [ __ ] out of the ball. And it's very similar to how you approach YouTube. He's like, I have a scientifically perfect driver swing and you all will think whatever you think about it, but it goes as far as as the as the eye can see. Exactly. So that that's how I approach everything in life, but specifically content. So like the reason I've I wouldn't say I'm like the fastest growing person ever on YouTube, but my shit's cooking right now. And the reason why is cuz I approached it differently. I didn't look at all the conventional advice. I was just like, let's break down how this

16:41actually works from a psychological perspective, build up the building blocks, and like try to approach it with science. So the point is when I speak matterof factly of like the way to win YouTube, it's not just my way. It's like the way for educational stuff. It'll work for any type of educational content, but it will not work for entertainment like the art stuff. Mr. Beast is putting together art. Like he is he is approaching it with a scientific perspective, but it's more it's more artistic, right? And like if you do cinematic vlogs, I don't want someone to watch this and be like, "Damn, I got to I got to throw away

17:10everything." It's like that's a different category of stuff. So, for educational, it's really like the idea, which is the title, thumbnail, and then essentially the intro, the first 30 to 60 seconds. And I can I'll break down exactly. There's like a five-step formula works for that. And then you have the body of the video, which is just an ordered list. You can have a lot of sophisticated stuff in there to get people to pay attention. And then you have the outro. It's very simple. Uh when you when you break it down like that, the the intro is five steps. The first thing is the context lean, which

17:39is in the first two sentences or one sentence, give somebody clarity on what the video is going to be about. Don't dick around with like, you know, fluff that's unnecessary. And that's because when people watch videos, they're opting in with their feet, with their eyes to stay. And so, you want to get them to a point where they can decide, should I stay? And so, context is critical for that. So, if I'm making a video about script writing, I don't want to say like, this next thing I talk about is going to be the craziest thing. Like, that that's a fluff line. I should be like, "Today I'm talking about script

18:08writing or like if you want to write better scripts, this is going to be the best video you ever watch." It's like right away make them know, make them vote to be in. So that's number one. Number two is you want to create this contrast. And I've said this a couple times because it's so critical is reiterate the common baseline belief they have about the thing and then explain that you have something else to create that curiosity loop. So, for example, with the script writing one, it would basically say, you know, a lot of people take two hours to write scripts, but the truth is the best people write

18:38them in 15 minutes. There's a much faster way, right? So, but just by doing that contrast, you're like, "Oh [ __ ] I kind of want to know the the other way." And that's because I I reagravated the pain of the two hours, right? So, it's it's context, lean, baseline, and then the contrarian flip or whatever you say it. Those are the first three. Four and five is just proof and plan. So proof is what is the proof that they should trust

19:00you. So I always say like I'm Callaway. I have a million views or I have a million followers. I've done a billion views and I study content all day long. Just like quick proof and then plan is like and this is my eightstep formula for writing better scripts. The brain consumes information in ordered lists mostly. So if you just frame what you're about to talk about in a list, it crushes. So that five steps, if you write every single in YouTube intro for educational content like that, murders guaranteed. Well, we also try to incorporate that, I feel like, into the podcast, too. When we were first

19:28starting out, we were just like no intro, like not even explaining who the guest is. We kind of just context, just start talking about random [ __ ] And then as soon as we started incorporating that stuff, I look back at old episodes, I was like, well, no wonder we weren't successful. It's like we kind of just assumed everybody knew us, everybody knew the guest we had on and that they were just interested in hearing their story from like when did you pick up a camera? And it's like we got to switch that. This is a this is the common path, right, with with content is like you have to go through

20:01the path of I want to make what I want to make. Then you have to go through the I want to make what I want to make because I think people want it or they're here for me. And then you're like, oh [ __ ] people are actually just here for them. What do they want to hear? And then you're like, "This is the formula to get." It's like the arc,

20:15right? You have to go through that arc. So, it makes sense. I even go back and look at the videos that I made in college when we were on like a friend's trip. We like put them up on the screen and I'm like, "Dude, I made 100 videos while we were in school. Not one of them

20:27cracked like a couple thousand views." And the same thing cuz you were making them for you. None of them make any sense. If you came back week to week, it'd be a totally different thing. Totally different talking points, totally different format. And it was just random uploads, no rhyme nor reason, random thumbnail, random title. But that and that's because So, and this

20:45is what I mean by the art vers science. Like you were making those for you. Yeah. And if and if someone's out there is like, I don't give a [ __ ] about making money. I just want to make dope [ __ ] Don't listen to what I'm saying. Make those cinematic vlogs. They're dope. Like they're really cool. But when someone hits on that video, if you're not manipulating their psychology to to show them a reason to be there, and it's never been more competitive on the like entertainment side, they're not going to stick. They just won't. People People are in it to improve some problem they have in their

21:11life is what they're looking for. It's a value transfer happening. Yeah, exactly. Every time. And I even mean, think about our listening habits or viewing habits on YouTube. It's like I'm either watching something for myself personally. It's either business. I'm learning how to make my business better. I'm learning how to film make better, how to make my lighting better. Uh, and that's damn near it. It's like three little subcategories, but they are all for me. And you're hunting the like you're not letting the videos come to you, you're hunting those because you need to solve those problems, right? So, it's which is kind of if you're if

21:41you're trying to build a business online, you need people to hunt for your stuff. It's so hard to try to me like it's hard to stick out, right? And so I mean the thing like we'll probably we'll have you guys do a proper intro for this episode following that format. I guarantee if some there's going to be a lot of viewers to this point that are going to stick and that's because we just compressed so much value in the first like 10 minutes. If you have YouTube as a problem where you're trying to improve it, you're going to listen, right? Because we've now validated that there's value here that we're going to

22:09extract over the next hour and a half. So that's that's all you have to do. Last time we had you on, you were very deep in the trenches on short form. still are, but like you've really expanded to long form as well. What did you learn from creating so much short form content that you were able to bring in to your long form? And how did the how does the game differ short form versus long form? Well, the game is the

22:30game is completely different for sure. We can we can go through those those details. I actually think one of the reasons why I've had a lot of quick success on YouTube is because I did short form first. And the reason why is I have this analogy in one of my videos, but every every format of content,

22:47imagine it's like a car on a highway. It's drive and I think you you text me about this. It's driving at a certain speed, right? So email is like 20 m hour. Pretty slow like people meandering through email. YouTube, let's say, is like 40 miles an hour. Short form, let's say, is like 80 miles an hour. It's like the cocaine of the internet, right? So

23:03when you start the autobond. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The auto speed limit. Yeah. The autobond. No, Twitter is like the auto. Yeah. Yeah. Twitter is the autobon. So, so actually though like if you start out making YouTube content or like making long form videos and you're like a [ __ ] short form, you everything in your life has been clocked for like 40 miles an hour, whatever YouTube is. And that means you consume stuff at 40, your brain works at 40, you talk at 40, you you edit at 40. When you start with

23:30short form, everything goes much faster. It's like it's like YouTube would be like swinging a baseball bat with a donut on it. You take the donut off, you go up to short form, right? That's how I think of it. So because I learned everything at 80 coming down I was I'm able to make YouTube videos at like 50 miles an hour like slightly quicker and my hypothesis is that so many people consume so much short form that the average baseline consumption speed is like 41 42 it's like slowly drifting higher and so when you can make slightly quicker content you get people in the comments that are like yo this is too

24:01cracked out I can't follow it but act but then they watch it and they watch it because they're addicted to that speed so I actually think there's a benefit in going from short to long and it's harder. You see like a lot of people make long form and they try to go to short form and they're like I can't figure it out. It's way too fast. That's because their brain has been clocked at this comfortable speed of 40. So that's that's one of the reasons why I think I've had so much success. If you study if you took my video and you extracted it and put on Premiere and you chopped

24:25every time something happened, you chopped it and laid it over someone else who's like a native YouTuber, you would see way more chops in mine. And it's because I'm I'm specifically doing it slightly faster. I'm like pulling people forward. It's interesting because we just had Tis on the pod and he was like, I can't make I can't script out a long form video and a short form video in the

24:45same day. It's like two different minds. Do you feel that same way? Are you built different? I'm I'm built built different. I can I can context switch, but it's it's a completely different thing, right? You have to like you definitely can't switch between them back and forth. Like if I'm doing a long form video, I'm locked in until it's done and then I Yeah, I need to reset and then do because it's it's a So this is your point about like what's the differences? There's everything is

25:08different. Short form has no packaging. So there's no title. There's no thumbnail. The hook is the package, right? The fi first five seconds. Every word matters with short form because you have so few. Long form, the words don't really matter as much. If you nail the intro, like we talked about, you can kind of dick around with like the stuff you say in the video. It's fine. The visual the visual hook matters so much for short form. You have to align and we can we can go down this rabbit hole, but the spoken hook, the visual hook, the the the written hook, you have to align

25:33those critically in the first 5 seconds. Again, YouTube basically YouTube, you have way more grace for the editing and packaging or for the the way you speak the video, way way you deliver it. However, YouTube's way more competitive because the rewards are so much higher. I think a YouTube audience is probably 10 to 100 times more valuable than a short form audience like follower to subscriber. So, if you have 10K on YouTube, I think that's the equivalent

25:59of like at least 100,000 on short form. And that's just because although the although the speed of my YouTube videos is high, people are consuming for 8 10 minutes at a time. And that's a lot of trust you build up in one shot. So, the reason I did both is because I think the I call it the modern content stack. The dream for all businesses is short plus long, both funneling to email, and then you sell whatever you want via email. If you can have all three of those pieces of the triangle, you're going to win. With just short form, you're vulnerable because

26:29you're not building that deep trust. With just YouTube, it takes forever to get enough critical mass. So, you kind of want both. Kind of want both firing at once. So, I mean, it's really interesting because I think the people that are building the most powerful businesses right now uh are are doing exactly what you're saying. And you have to sell something. We're either going to work for somebody or you're going to sell something. whether it's a brand deal partnership or you're going to sell your own product. So, you kind of have to pick what is the thing that you want

26:56to provide value with to your audience. Was that a conscious decision before this second channel thinking about like okay if I actually I mean we work jobs like we worked jobs before. Yeah. It's not as fun as working for yourself, you know, like this is a this is a way more fun thing to do. Was that conscious or did that come after the fact like chicken before the egg? What I would say is this like every single thing I do is intentional everything. And that's because my art expression is going to come is really through like business models. Like I'm not like an artist, right? So I'm trying to manufacture a

27:29cash machine like and when that cash machine gets to a certain level, I'll be able to like I'm not going to retire, but I could retire. So every single decision I'm making is like how can I provide the most value in exchange for the most dollars so that everybody wins. That's my whole goal. So when I made that second channel, it was like, so I mean to back up, I started out making tech and AI short form content. I did that because I knew the tech companies had the most amount of money with the highest margin and would pay the most for the biggest brand deals soonest. I

27:57was naive at that time because I didn't know anything and assumed I could make a ton of money from brand deals. There is a cap with how much you can make. You can make a lot probably like I don't know 500 to a 500k to a million a year at the top end but you you you run up against a ceiling where the brands can't pay you more because it's too risky per rep if if I mean if you were if they own the full channel and every single video was for them maybe they could pay you more in the long term but for a single

28:21video which is what I was doing for short form they there's a cap no matter how big you are so right away I was like all right when you make content essentially you're manufacturing ad slots you can either rent those ad slots slots or you can own them. If you want a lot of money, you need to own the ad

28:37slots. So, you have to own the back end. If you want good money that's predictable but like has a cap, you can rent them and that's way faster. So, I started out doing the brand deals and right away I was like, "Oh [ __ ] I need to I need to build an owned product or service." So then to to loop all the way back to what I said at the beginning, I looked at that audience avatar I had which let's say is like entrepreneurs that are interested in tech and AI or like tech and AI enthusiasts and I was like what what pain point do these

29:02people have that I can sell something to? And the truth is it's so many different small pocket pain points with nothing with critical mass. The only thing you can do for a news-based tech audience to sell them a paid thing would be more paid media. So like a paid newsletter or like a paid YouTube subscription or a paid podcast. I didn't want to do more media because more media means more rentals I wanted to own. So I was like, "Okay, I need to I you know, it was spitting off cash. So I didn't want to like shut it down, but I was like, I need to now go build a second

29:30audience where I can actually sell a product or service that I would own." So then I was like, what do I know different than everyone else? To go back to the solution thing. And and it turned out to be content. This is a bit meta obviously because like I'm making content about making content selling to how to make content but in the process of doing that tech and I asked I got good at content and so I was like I now know this so how could I sell it? I could sell a service doing it for people. I could sell some sort of

29:54educational thing teaching it to people. I could sell tools that allow them to do it. All of those need a content buyer. So I have to go build an audience of business owners. That's not who I have today. Most people try to like take the cruise ship they have and turn it and they actually just sacrifice what was

30:09working and then it never ends up work. Like they can't turn it. So I was like, "All right, this is gonna suck, but I'm just gonna build two things at once." And that's why I started on cuz and I just went straight to YouTube because I was like, "I know YouTube is better. If I can crack it, it'd be perfect." So that essentially what I've had the last six months is tech and AI short form that's just brand deal cash flow and then long form content marketing and and

30:30content strategy for business owners. And I was I've just been playing those two at the same time. That allowed me to learn short form and learn long form. But yeah, it's it's been a it's been a lot. It's hard to do two things at once. So I I wouldn't recommend I would recommend just picking the right thing

30:43the first time. Game. The sentiment in your comments, I've noticed, is pretty incredible. People are hyped. People are really hyped. They're like, "You're giving away so much actual game that's like more in depth." How conscious are you of the of the comment sentiment and how your viewers are actually resonating with the content? It feels good to get them. I mean I there's a lot of people hating in the comments that are like there's no way this is real. He's paying for comments cuz it's too positive. Like that's which is pretty wild to see. But if you looked at the metrics like it's like 99% like the likes all the way

31:19down. So it's pretty sick. I will say the way it could backfire is as AI gets better, people can just download my videos, upload them into an like an AI, trained AI, and then all of a sudden they have Callaway AI that just they don't need to pay for my [ __ ] That will happen. So that that I that will backfire. What I'm doing will backfire unless I like dellist videos. But let's just assume that's a couple couple years away. The reason I'm doing it is because I just think the pie of potential winners is so big that I'd rather just like I can get mine and help everyone

31:53get theirs that I don't need to be like keep all the sauce. So I I and I guess I'm unique in that way. Most people would protect the sauce. So I just give it. I'd argue though that even on the AI topic like Alex Ramoszi gives away everything, right? Gives it literally gives it all away. I could feed everything Alex has done on YouTube into chat and I could have Alex Hermosi at your disposal, right? But I'd argue that because Alex himself has helped me so much, I would pay five grand to go to the scaling workshop in Vegas even

32:20though I could get it on chat GPT. Yeah. And it's because the personal brand is so strong and I feel like you are building that. Yeah. On on a different scale, but like you are building that exact thing where it's like if I wanted to help with content, I want you to look at it. I would I would want to call you and say I want you to look at this, not talk to a robot. And I feel like the flip is it's going to flip where we are going to see people supporting the creators rather than like these huge corpse cuz it's going to turn into just

32:47open AI, Amazon, Facebook, and those are the people that we're going to have to pay for all of these things. But it's like, oh, I can support this guy who I know is actually going to help me. You know, the and the interesting thing is because I've been playing out I like playing out the like game theory of what could happen in my head like this then this then this and like where does it go once everyone started using calculators people stopped learning how to do math by hand right and so as the calculators got better people could do more computation but let's say like all the

33:15calculators in the world broke and died who's left to do math and I think that's like a crude example of one potential downside of this like AI reliance is over time less and less people actually know the craft and just rely on the AI to kind of regurgitate the craft. As the craft and the demands for the craft change, if AI is not if the AI you're using is not adaptable, you won't have the muscle to go figure it out. The figure out ability is going to atrophy because nobody's going to have to figure [ __ ] out. So that's that's the counterpoint to what I was

33:49saying and to say to support what you were saying which is like even if people took and I'm giving it like they took it and put it in an AI and they were able to like execute content when [ __ ] changes because it always will they won't have the they'll have to wait until I make another video figuring that out. Humans are also lazy though. People are extremely lazy and people don't keep their word. So like even though everything exists right now and you could even argue that like three or four years ago everything was out there, everything's done. People don't take action. People don't take action. And I

34:19always think about the the speed. It's it's interesting interesting topic because I could say, you know, back in the day I paid three grand or five grand or something like that to learn how to build the back end of a program. Okay. I could probably do that now with chat for 30 bucks. And it's interesting though because it with that guy that I paid, it was it was like a week process for 10 years. 10 years of information that took

34:43him to find. I found it out in a week. And it's like, man, it's going to be crazy. So that's that's how I kind of think about my whole ecosystem right now is most people will give 85% 90% of the sauce, keep the best 10%. Try to bait you into selling selling something. When the person buys the $2,000 course, the thing that they kept is actually [ __ ] And so that's that's where the clickbait the the like core scammer narrative comes from. How I'm thinking about it is I'm going to give you 100%. The best [ __ ] I have, I'm giving it. A because I

35:14think it's dope. B, I want to help as many people as possible. The 5% of people that have the agency to go act on it. Go get yours. Like, they were going to get it anyway. But for the 95% of people that are either too lazy or too confused, I will I will sell speed and

35:28compression on top of the stuff I know. Now, the the reason why it's beneficial to do it the way I'm doing it is because, you know, I know my [ __ ] because I'm giving it all away for free, right? And so, and that builds more trust. So, I wish more people even if I sold a course, I think I'm warranted to do it because I've already given away the answers. And so, if you're buying it, you're like, I got the answers, but I need help with the implementation, right? So, I I I wish more people approach it that way. I mean, Danco talks about synthesiz synthesization, I

35:55believe, is the word I'm looking for, where you have I think it's a word. Sounds good, right? You have these people in like fitness space, for example, and it's like they're selling you're selling speed. It's like I can if I want this body or I want to look like you or whatever I want to learn how to build this content machine. Someone has already done it. I'm always going to buy from that person, you know, or like I'm going to I'm going to learn how to shoot sports from the Lakers guy. Yeah% that's who I want. That's why people go on podcast for free, right? It's because

36:18they can they can demonstrate their understanding of topics so that you come into their ecosystem. So people approach podcast that way, but then they don't approach their own content that way. They like gate everything. Are you familiar with Caleb Brast? Uh I've heard the name. Did he make is that the guy that make the backpacks? Haven back or uh no different guy. He he used to work for he was Alex Heroszy's right hand and he worked for Gary Vee before but he's a he's a buddy of ours. He just put out a completely free 6-hour course of like everything he learned about building a brand over the past like 15 years. He's

36:51like I'm just me and Braden talked to him on the phone. He's like I'm trying something crazy. I'm giving away all of my sauce for free. Something that I could probably charge a lot of money for. And he's starting a consulting firm. So, he's like, "I'm just going to see what happens." Yeah. And I asked him the other day, I was like, "How's it been?" Like, "Your video is doing great." Sold out, dude. He's like, "You wouldn't even believe some of these clients that are like coming to me to work with me. It it's work. It worked so much so much better than I thought it

37:18could." Yeah. And the reason why is cuz it's because of the contrast against your what someone would expect. Most people expect to get average information. If you give them amazing information, they're like, "There's something different here. I should go pay for more." Right? People will always pay for speed because people are busy and so you can always do it that way and it will always work and how to implement

37:36it into their specific customization. Yeah, speed and speed and customization are the two things you can always sell. I mean, which is even why we made the pod. People weren't giving away creative advice for this field. It was like if you DM someone, it was gate cap. They weren't going to DM you back. It felt like, yo, this is my meal, like you can't also eat. Everyone can eat. The amount of trust transferred when you give the full package for free is insane. Like pe when people DM or they comment or they DM and they're like there are people charging so much for information worse than yours. What that

38:07really means is in their head I just lodged and they're like if I need to know anything about this [ __ ] he's my guy, right? And so nine times out of 10 they'll get the free stuff. The 10th one where I don't have a personalized use case that applies to them, they're going to they're going to whatever book a whatever the whatever the backend

38:23product is, they'll check it out 100%. Okay. I have a few of the tricks that you've talked about. All right. uh when it comes to a hook for a video, one is twisting the knife, another is one standard deviation away and then another one is audience of one. I'd love to break those down. So, can we start with you explaining what twisting the knife is? Yeah, twisting the knife is basically the painoint aggravation thing. It's just like another word for that. So, essentially, let's say you Yeah. You want to grow on YouTube. If I remind you how hard it is to grow on YouTube, I'm aggravating that pain and

38:56you're like, "God damn, man, it is hard to grow on YouTube." And so you're you're just going to like lodge down more and try to wait for to hear what I say. So that it it all I sound repetitive, but it all goes back to what does someone already think in their head that you just bring to the surface and then immediately say, "I have a different way to approach this than what you've tried before." That combo just works every time because people are in their own head all the time. They're like, "I just had an easier way to grow on YouTube." was like, "Yeah, you know

39:21how hard YouTube is. I have a better way." And they're like, "All right, I'll listen." And then the thing is, your [ __ ] has to actually be good. Like, you have to actually go into a solution that's different. Shout out New York. Let's go. We love the New York sirens and honking. It's awesome. I wish we had more in LA. Honestly, I really miss

39:36this. One standard deviation away. Yeah. So, okay. So, one standard deviation away is is it's a little bit more of an advanced thing. And so, if you're a beginner, don't worry about this. But essentially the idea is content has gotten so noisy that if you tell the person you're going to do the thing you're going to do and it's too close to what they actually want their BS meter goes off. Right? So for example if you say if you guys are like I want to make a million bucks and I have a video title that's like here's the eightstep system to make a million bucks. Immediately in your head you're

40:05like I want this to be true but this is probably [ __ ] Right? That's the BS detector. So what you do is go one standard deviation away from the thing they actually want which is money. So one standard deviation away could be content, right? You think if I make content, I get money. Or it could be how to grow an ecom brand. If I grow an ecom brand, I get money. I go one standard deviation away and instead I make the video about that thing. So here's how to make content. And let you make the jump to the thing you want automatically. So you're like, "Oh yeah, I'm going." It's

40:31kind of like a secret thing. You're because you'll you'll think in your head, "Oh, perfect. If I learn this, like then I'm going to make money and no one will know, right?" It's it you're you're you're purposely You're purposely manipulating them. Oh [ __ ] Audience of one. Yeah. So well audience of one is it's a big it's a kind of a broader approach or layer on content but it's essentially like what I said before about how if you give away all your sauce you implant in someone's brain as that person right Dan Co I think is famous for this where he's like you want to be the the guy or girl for something

41:00so like the systems guy the when someone says entrepreneurship who do you think of I think of Horoszi and Gary Vee those two and that's like a really it's almost like a Google adword of personal branding in a way right so it's like who owns owns the keyword entrepreneurship in people's brains. It's Gary Vee and Alex Hormosi. They paid millions in personal branding to own that own that word. So when you think audience of one, it's like what content can you make around some topic that no one else really can replicate because of a weird combination of your skills, your interests, your habits, and like the

41:30positioning. So for me, I'm trying to be like the way I talked about this in in Callum's pod, but basically like business boils down to just three things. It's attention, funnels, and offers. Can you get someone to pay attention? How do you ramp that attention to a thing? What is the thing they're buying? Hormosi is like the god at funnels and offers and he's really good at attention on his own stuff. I'm trying to be the attention guy. And whether or not the word is attention or content, I want any business owner to come into my ecosystem and be like that's the guy that can crack my content

42:00problem, my attention problem immediately. So that's like and and I wasn't really I didn't really start from scratch trying to do that. I just took a step step and then realized what was resonating with people. But that's my goal. And so the audience of one thing is like what type of content can I make that most people can't make in that direction. And for me, like I'm pretty good with like metaphors and breaking

42:22down complex things into simple terms. So that's why my YouTube videos are like that. They're made in a way that like suits me specifically and it's easy to digest. Easy. Yeah. It's easy to digest. Another thing you talk about is quality shock. How important is quality in the videos that you make? And if someone doesn't have a ton of money to spend on super expensive equipment, can they

42:43still deliver highquality videos? Yeah. And quality quality is like uh it's like fugazi. It's like it's like quality is like Yeah. It's like subjective, right? Cuz what is quality? It could be good visuals. It could be good storytelling. It could be clarity. It could be the your voice tone is dope, right? It's it's kind of like in the eye of the beholder. But quality, what I said, quality shock is like when you're a small channel and really all you have to do as a small channel is stay in the game long enough to get one banger, that banger will bring your subs above the minimum viable credibility line where

43:16once somebody then sees a video from you and they're like, "Oh, this person has 10 10k subs. I'll give it a chance." When you have 200 subs, people see the video and they look at your thing and it looks small, they'll ignore it. So, which sucks, but it's true. So the quality shock is when you're small, can you actually create something of such quality that when they see you have 200 subs and watch it, they're like, "Holy [ __ ] I discovered a diamond in the rough." And then your [ __ ] would just pop. You're so right. There was a filmmaker that I just saw and he posted

43:41his like first video and he's like, "I'm going to totally redesign this pasta shop." Or like there there's thing on the outside of, you know, and the video was literally a movie, Netflix level quality, great B-roll, great voiceover. And he had 200 subs overnight. 15,000. Yeah. Overnight. biggest people on all the comments. This is unbelievable for how small you are. For how small you are. For how small you are. That's what they all said. And that's the contrast, right? The expected belief is someone with 200 will be shitty. The truth is he was amazing. And so the bigger that contrast, the bigger the quality shock, the more people will tip the cap, give

44:11you the subscribe. What is the psychology behind the way I scroll on Tik Tok and I might come across a video and I look at like the the likes and the amount of comments and I'll almost determine if I want to stay watching the video if it's past a certain line. Yes. Because I'm like because I'm like if it has this amount of likes and comments this must be funny and it went viral for a reason I should stay. Well, it's the it's the Harvard stamp. It's the it's

44:38like it's everything in life, right? It's like if somebody if there's enough cosiness on a thing, you'll give it more grace. And then typically those things that have a lot of cosigns are good because they're like reinforcing. But but that's what I mean by like it's a little fugazi. Like if if every person could just buy enough likes and shares and views up to that line, their stuff would pop quicker the same exact stuff because more of the group think would like buy into it. So when you're starting out that the reason it's so hard is you have to outrun the people that would look at it and be like I'm

45:08not giving this a chance. It has to be that good or you just have to do it so long that you pick up 10 20 pe 20 subscribers every single follower subscribers every single week. Just keep climbing, keep climbing and eventually you're going to have a breakout because you're going to get past that line. It's frustrating though the fact that that's true. The reality is if you're a beginner and you've never made stuff, your skills are going to be so bad that

45:28you're not going to have that quality. So, you just got to get started and just build the skills up. I've also I mean Ryan Tran literally makes his videos with an iPhone and a crappy mic from Amazon. Well, the equipment the equipment is not necessarily indicative of the quality, right? Totally. Which is what I originally thought you meant by quality shock. Yeah. I I mean, one aspect is like the visual. Like I like the animation on my videos. I think it's dope. My my editors are insane, but all that is just like they're using like colors that are soothing and like blurry. Like it's not that crazy [ __ ] So visuals is one, but

46:00quality could be the idea is like you've compressed the idea to the clearest form. you speak in a clear tone that doesn't require any skills besides all the skills of articulation, storytelling, like like so it's like everything really breaks down to like these base skills, but yeah, it's not all like I don't even know how to use a camera really. Like I h I have an FX3 and I don't even use it because I can't get the color to be what I want. So I just use like an A7 III mounted on my desk. It's like that just Yeah, you the quality of the or the the cost of the

46:30equipment is not the indicator of quality. How do you come up with the title and the thumbnail? How I have a team. Okay. I I offload the whole thing. So So basically, and I can go Maybe that's helpful for people. I think it is. Yeah. Yeah. So what I would say, so for YouTube, YouTube is a full-time job. If you're doing it on your own, it's 40 hours plus per week. I didn't have that bandwidth, nor am I an artist enough to want to run through that wall. I did it with short form because I was like, I have to get good at something. But once

46:56I had that skill, I was like, I'm not doing this for YouTube. So immediately I was like, I got to outsource and build a team. Right now my team is like runs about 7K a month and it's I have an ideas team that is responsible for once a month I get on a call. This guy is absolutely cracked. He gives me 20 ideas that are validated in my niche. Titles done and then a bunch of not a bunch but one to three thumbnail ideas. He gives

47:20that to me on the call. We go over it. He pitches me the idea. I say like, "Oh, I have something for that. Maybe not. If I don't," he cut crosses it off. He organizes the list for me. So literally when it every week when I have to make two videos, I open that doc, pick the top idea, that's my idea. I don't think at all about the title, at all about, you know, like obviously over time we've like hashed out why we do certain things, but now this guy's I mean this guy's cracked. So he they do that for me. Hand me the hand me the the ideas

47:48doc. I then film the video. I record I script on my own, which our software sandcastle.ai soon will have long form scripting. So you'll just be able to like describe your video, put in the outline, we'll write the whole thing for you. For now, it sucks to write a YouTube video as you guys probably know. So I do that on my own and then I record

48:05it. I hand that recording to an editor. The editor fully turnkey. I don't have any notes for them. They just bring it back to me. And then my thumbnail guy takes the whole package and then makes the thumbnail based on the title and also the kind of like inspiration that the ideas team pulled in the dock. So ideas team, thumbnail designer, editor, that's my squad. And squad, that's my squad. And it's it's the A team honestly like the Avengers. Yeah, that's that's without that I couldn't do YouTube because it's too I can't I don't want to edit for 20 hours a week. It's just too hard to edit. Now if someone doesn't

48:37have the seven grand to spend I'll give you the brute force cheap way to do each piece. Okay, give me like for editing. Let's talk about ideas though because if you can't think of an idea, you don't have a video. But also sometimes people are like, I have all the ideas in the world, but I don't really know what to make or which ideas are worth pursuing. Yeah. So, we're building that into sand castles.ai as well eventually. It'll be a couple months before we have that for long form, but this is your company, right, Kane? Yeah. S castles Sassles is our software. So, my my whole mission with

49:08that is and I have like a my co-founder is insane developer. Uh he's built the entire thing from scratch. The whole vision is I want to mechanize content fully. So like all you have to do let's say film making is the niche come in film making we give you ideas for what to make short form long form press one button we script it automatically for you done everything validated everything I believe in there immediately and then maybe eventually we'll like suggest visuals for you to put in the video we'll hook you up with editors or whatever but uh that's that's kind of what we're building. So, right now we

49:39have short form script writing in there. It's good. Long form script writing is coming and then we're we're going to work on the ideas. But until then, the best thing to do for ideas is just to look at what other people that are winning in your space are doing and then remix off their winners. So, essenti one of 10 in Vid IQ and uh view stats, all they do is find outliers, which is relative winners based on someone's channel size. So, if their average views is 2,000 views and they have a video get 60,000, that's a 30x outlier. They'll surface that for you and then you can

50:10say, "Okay, interesting. That idea was about this kind of thing. Here's what they did for the thumbnail. Here's what they did for the title. Do I have," and this is key, something differentiated to say about this topic that wouldn't just be regurgitating what they say. If you don't, it's going to be hard to break through. If you do, and you're just like, I'm struggling to kind of package it. Just do that. Just like, and not copy word for word, but look, you got to This takes work, right? If if you don't want to Everything that I outsource, it's cuz I'm trading time for money. So if you don't have money, you got to put

50:38the time in and you have to pay with your time. And so you want to go on one of 10 and just scour that thing for hours and just be like, "What is winning in my niche? What can I remix?" Yeah. So that's how you do ideas. I want to get into the business stuff. Let's get into

50:50the business. Taking it back to a year when you first had you on. You were like, I'm doing the brand deals. I'm trying to figure out the other [ __ ] You've since cracked your like the educational side of stuff. You're also building a [ __ ] software platform. It's too much. It's too much. But it's fun. Talk to us about like the funnel, how it's been building uh your different platform or your different like pillars of business, uh mistakes you've made and how that's been going. And a lot of this is really just experimentation and then whatever doesn't work, you just kill it. So, of

51:23the three stages, attention, funnels, offers, I would say funnels is where I'm the worst. And I've got a a co-founder in one of my ventures that's like a legit funnel guy. So he's he always tries stuff and then we essentially I have a ton of firepower on the audience side. Like I have a free community with like 19,000 people. I've got the YouTube. I have the short form. I have uh an email list with like 44,000. Like I have a lot of dry powder but we haven't yet dialed the exact like I'm not extracting as much juice as possible. So on the funnel side it's like I can talk about what we're doing

51:53but we're experimenting. On the offer side essentially business just comes down to people give you money in exchange for value. The best type of business model is when they give you money recurring that you get to keep a lot of, right? And so that's high margin recurring. And the best two business and so really business just comes down to business models. And there's a few different business models you can pick from. The best ones are high margin recurring, which is either some sort of membership, academy, education. People pay for membership like a country club or SAS. And you can you can go down the list. Hormosi has a really good frame

52:28for this. I I can't reg [ __ ] off the top of my head, but it's essentially like at the very top you've got high ticket, recurring, high margin. Amazing. Then you've got high ticket, non-recurring, high margin. So that would be like I deliver a service for you for 20K. It only cost me 10K to fulfill. So I keep 10K profit, but I got to go get you to

52:48pay again later and you probably won't. So I have to go find new customers. Then it's like lower ticket recurring. And you could argue these middle two could be switched like lower ticket recurring. So, I have a software. It's 20 bucks a month, but it only cost us $1 a month to make. So, we keep 19. You pay every month. Da da da. Then the bottom is low ticket, non-recurring. You buy my digital download for 20 bucks, but

53:07you're not going to buy it ever again. So, I got to go get more people. And if you look, and again, this is like the this is not rocket science, but it's like breaking down business into the atomic units and then trying to feel like where do I want to play? So, brand deals is high ticket, but non-recurring. So, if I do a brand deal, maybe the brand comes back in 3 to six months, but probably not. So, I got to go get another brand deal. It's kind of annoying. It is high margin though, which which is good. What I wanted was high margin, high ticket, recurring. The

53:34best thing for that is going to be some sort of membership model. Like, it just is. And so, courses are not recurring. Courses are one-time. Memberships are recurring, high ticket, and if you can trade time, if you can trade value for money, uh, yeah, it's the best. So, I was kind of like, I want to try that and I want to try software, which is lower ticket recurring, and I just want to I love product. Like, my brain is really I'm more of like a product guy than than content to be honest. And so software is a product game. And so, I was kind of like, all right, I have the brand deals

54:05that's kind of like keeping me alive. Let's try the most efficient possible business model, this membership thing, and then let's try software because it's the most durable. Yeah. And so, I could talk about our experience, but that's that's how I picked those. How conscious were you of making the software align with the audience that you've already built? Very conscious. I specifically picked this a Well, I picked this audience because I knew business owners that need to drive traffic is like the best audience because it's so big. Every business owner has this problem. So, I was just like, I want to pick an audience that's I'll never run out of

54:37people that need help. And then I was like, okay, if I were to productize something, what could I do? I could do a done for you service like agency but I did consulting like for a job and I hate service so I I didn't want to do that and then I and then the other two options were membership or software with the software what goes in to making something like that I think SAS is like a big buzzword right now a lot of people are trying to make something like that what has been some of your biggest learnings well product like software is is the product game the same thing like

55:06clothing brands are the product game and so clothing brands are both marketing and product but if you're If your clothes are [ __ ] you're probably not going to cut through. Same thing with software. Like if your if your software actually sucks or is buggy, the user experience is not good, it doesn't fulfill a need, you lose. Like even if you have a huge audience, people will not stick on the product. So the thing we've learned is I tried to we we tried to build something that was for me as user number one. That way we didn't have to take a big swing, spend a bunch of time

55:36building, find out that the people didn't actually want it. if I wanted it and it worked for me, I'm just selling to a bunch of mini mi, right? So that that was helpful. However, what we failed to understand is that I'm at a different point in the journey than a beginner. And so the the preconceived understanding for something so we're

55:55we're doing content a content workflow. So you come in, describe your video, we take you through an outline process, and then write the script for you for short form, like super simple. The reason we showed the outline and like the research is because we thought the beginner would want to see the process because that's what I would want to see. But it turns out the beginner doesn't even know that is the right process or that that's what they want to see. The beginner just wants the answer without anything in between. So we like created these stupid steps in between that beginners were like well I'm confused. And so that

56:24that's a perfect example of like we overengineered the design because that's what I would have wanted but it's not what the beginner wants. And so software really is just like a million iterations to try to get to the right thing. And then once you get to the right thing, you need that you need that audience to really rev it. So we we we're just getting to kind of like the right thing now. I think it's the smartest thing for any business to do is to create have content that gets you an audience of people and then figure out something that would provide value to them. I was

56:51watching a pod with a guy who I really like. His name's Christian Guzman. You know this guy, fitness guy. So he was talking about he's he has 3D energy. He has Alfallet at the gym. the clothing line and the he's selling or he's doing a summer shredding thing which is like events. Every single one of the businesses was created off of him the problem he was facing. This thing sucked. How do I make something better for it? He drank White Monster, didn't like feeling bloated, made a juice-like energy drink with a little bit more caffeine. And it's like you keep solving problems for the things that you're

57:19doing or like there's a group of people out there. So you're selling to the older version of yourself. It's just you you solve it. You do a thing, solve the problem for yourself. you're user number one productize that solve and then how well the business does is based on the model that you use for the product productization product I like productization we'll say and iterating on it yeah so so if you do a clothing brand it's like okay if you have a $50 t-shirt I mean now with tariffs that shit's going to cost 40 bucks to get over here $190 t-shirt yeah $190 t-shirt so that's high margin but like typically

57:50a beginner would be like $50 t-shirt cost them 25 landed you're working with you already lost half the margin you're going to have to probably if you have an audience, you don't have to run ads, but you're going to have to ship it, deal with returns, deal with warehousing, 3PL. You have nothing left at the end. So, that's just like an inefficient business model. It's still fun. Like again, art versus science. Like the art of that's fun as hell. But like I'm a scientist right now. I'm trying to like make money. So, you don't want to pick a model where you have no cash left at the

58:16end. Unless you're fine with that and you're more doing it for the art. So, if you want the cash left at the end, you need high margin. High margin is typically things that come with leverage which is either you do a talent arbitrage like you hire low lowc cost talent and then sell them high. So like you have a video editor from the Philippines that cost you a thousand a month and you charge six or it's software leverage so you can build one sell a million times. On the topic of software too you're so right. I when I was picking the newsletter software we used I downloaded three immediately

58:44tried all three. They're really expensive. Whoever had customer support that I could immediately talk to is what I landed with. Yeah. And like I tried all three and the I was on hold for 3 hours with one, immediately cancelceled it, disputed it on the credit card and like that is just it's just the price of rice. And that's the kind of thing that if you're the builder, especially if you're a developer, you would never think that the differentiator is the customer service. Like anyone can turn that on as a feature, but they don't

59:07even know that that's what you want. That's what I mean by like the product intuition of the builder may not match the buyer even if they're it's their audience, right? So that's that's been a huge learning for us is you got to take all the feedback with a grain of salt. Like a lot of times people are bitching and like some of what they're saying is what they want, some of it's just they need a person to vent to. And so you have to like sift through that at scale plus my intuition and figure out how to build a product. So it just takes a lot

59:33of a lot of reps to do it. You brought up email and you also talk about how important it is. You have the attention and then you're trying to get them to email. I'd love to talk about email, how that's been, how you've been able to build up 19,000 email subscribers and how valuable it is to have an email list

59:51and quote unquote own your audience. Yeah, email. Email is so so important. It's so boring, too. Like when I was starting, I was like, h like I don't really want to do email. I don't want to worry about it. But it's so critical. And so if whoever's listening to this point, I want to make sure I didn't unplug this. Whoever's listening to this point, this is probably going to be the most valuable like five minute takeaway so far is what to do to get people from the rented platforms, YouTube, social

1:00:16media to an owned platform, email list. And the reason it's owned is because if Beehive or ConvertKit or Mailchimp goes down, you can just export that list and take it to another one. So you own that list. You own the asset. If Instagram goes down and you lose your account, you're done. So, you really want to get people from rented to owned and and that's that's only one reason why is the like flight the failure risk. The other reason is email has way higher open rates. So, if you make an Instagram reel, probably only 1% of your followers are going to see that. Email is 40 50%

1:00:45open rate. That's huge. Uh and then people are more in a buying state. Remember what I said about the miles per hour thing? Email is slow. So, people can like sit there and read it and take action and buy. They're typically not going to do that on on social media. So, for all those reasons, you need to build an email list. You can either funnel to a list and then not really send on it, or you can send on it consistently with value, which is what I would recommend to keep it warm. And I can the the key though, this is like the number one tip

1:01:12for email. It doesn't matter what platform you use. I use Beehive, no free ads. I don't know what you guys use. I use Active Campaigns. Active Campaigns. Yeah. So, either way, and they all work the same. Like, they're bastards with pricing though, dude. [ __ ] Behive is flat. I think I think Beehive's a thousand a year period. And it's like 99 a month or something. I tried Beehive. I don't remember what pissed me off about Beehive. Yeah, they have good support though. They have active support. Some dude some there's there's just something

1:01:36about all of them that kind of suck. They're all pretty mid. I think I think Talk about making an email [ __ ] thing, dude. We can make a sick If you amplify email Yeah. Yeah. So that's what Beehive was trying to started doing and then there was just so much opportunity they just started bolting on. I think the more you add the less clear you get on the one problem that people actually

1:01:53have. So, but but but the key is lead magnets. Free lead magnets is is the sauce. So, you should look at content as a way to get someone to the lead magnet as easy as possible. It's like the rice is in the bowl, the serving spoon in my mouth. It's like the sp the sp the spoon. Yeah. This Superman, Ant-Man, Lakers in five. No, the the spoon is the content. The rice is the value and the lead magnet can wrap the value. So take the content, get them to the lead magnet, boom, they're going to buy in. And so what is a lead magnet? A lead magnet is a free email. It doesn't

1:02:34even have it's driven by email, but it could be a PDF. It could be another video that you get for free. It's some locked value that you extend the content beyond the YouTube video or social media to get them to go to a lead magnet. They trade their email for that thing. You would then have their email and then you can email them, sell them, whatever you want. So, what we have, if you look at my YouTube, the top two lines in the description are always lead magnets because that's what's above the fold. We

1:02:59also pin those in the pinned comment. And every single person who's trying to ramp people from YouTube to actually buy something should have a lead magnet. We can maybe talk about that, too, to get people to email. You also changed our perspective on how to use the description on YouTube. You were like, "There's so much valuable real estate in those first two lines. Why aren't you having a subscription to your newsletter or a lead magnet in those first two lines?" So, I started doing that because most people are like, they'll they'll watch your stuff. If your stuff is shitty, they're going to stop. But if your stuff is good, and everyone here is

1:03:32like trying to make good stuff, immediately in their brain, they're like, "How can I get more from these people?" And when they want to look for more, they want to look as close as they're already and they're watching the videos. It's like, "What's the closest thing right there?" And so, it's like they'll click and they'll convert. If you if you hide it from them and abstract it beneath a click like to see more, then it's just more people that won't see it. So, anytime you have an opportunity to bring something up in the

1:03:55fold, like above the fold, you should. You also talk about not linking YouTube and like crosspromoting a YouTube video on Instagram. This is key. This is this is a this is a good pro tip. But you do it on you think it's okay on email. Yeah. So, anytime to go back to the highway thing, anytime someone's going from slow to fast, it's okay to ramp them. You still, it's still I can explain why it's like not great to link out via email, but email would be the only one because somebody's consuming at 20 m hour will hit the YouTube and be like, "Okay, this is a little bit

1:04:29faster. I'm willing to watch it." If you're already at the autobond coming back down to the side street, you're going to be like, "I don't want to drive here." And then you're going to bounce off, right? That kills us. Yeah. Kills it. Kills our watch time. Yeah. And so that's so what you don't want to do. So basically the YouTube algorithm rewards two things. Click-through rate on the thumbnail and then uh like average average watch average viewer duration AVD. So if you're linking on an

1:04:52Instagram story, they click that link. It opens the video automatically. You don't get the clickthrough because they didn't click anything. And then if they're going from the autobond down, they're going to watch for like a minute and they're gonna be like too slow and bounce. So it actually hurts both metrics. It's better off for you either not to link it anywhere or if you're going to link it, make a story and put the picture of the thumbnail and be

1:05:11like, "Hey, we just dropped a new video. Go search 505 pod and look for this thumbnail and click it." That way you at least get the click. You're that you solve the autobond problem if you're linking it, but at least you get the click. So via email, I would do the same thing. I would not link here's the YouTube video, here's the link, go click it. What I do is I link to my profile so then they have to click the thumbnail, you know? Yeah. They link on channel pages. And I noticed when we did that, the first few times we were linking from stories, it was hammering our

1:05:40clickthrough rate and just the view average view duration. Everything was ruined until we started doing what you told us to do. And now they it's like way longer. It's crazy. It's so interesting, too, because yeah, you you're dealing with the attention span of like a baby squirrel on speed. And all that goes back to the psychology, right? you you kind of have to like gut every single flow in your business in the content every you have to gut check what what is the like this is something I asked myself a lot I was like if I was way dumber how would I think about this thing and I'm not and I'm not even

1:06:10saying that like in a mean way it's just like sometimes sometime sometimes we sometimes like that's what we say with the product I talk to my my my CTO all the time and we're like all right wait if we were way dumber how would we do this and we're like we would just put a blue button on the page and then and

1:06:25that's that's what we do always works. And so I'm you kind of have to ask yourself like bring yourself out of the because what happens is you get obsessed with the details and get so far down the rabbit hole that it makes you in this advanced mode. And when I when I say yeah it sounds mean like what would I do if I was dumber but you could also say like what would I do if I never cared about this before is like another way to say it. Or for us we've been making content and using cameras for the past decade. Exactly. there's certain nuances or certain things that we understand and

1:06:52we think everybody understands. But if you take it back to where you were at 10 years ago, just starting out that the information you think everybody knows, you actually don't know. That's and like another way to say what how would I think if I was less advanced? I don't want to end this too harshly cuz I feel like it sounds bad, but yeah, ask yourself what would I do if I was a beginner? And what that will do is it'll reframe your assumption for what a beginner would think. And then you can you can gut check the psychology. That's how I came up with the like, oh [ __ ] if

1:07:19you link in the story, nobody's clicking. If nobody's clicking, the click-through rate is low. That's a problem. We should not link in the story. And it's like you see everyone linking in the story, so it violates what you would expect, but that's where all the juice is. It's like figuring out something people don't realize. Those are like the small little details though that they add up. They add up. And also

1:07:39like you don't know what you don't know. And like I don't think we would have figured that out if we hadn't hired somebody who knows YouTube super well or we met you to tell us all this stuff. One of my favorite pastimes and I think Fig you would agree with this. I love thinking about all the [ __ ] we [ __ ] up in the beginning and thinking about how much farther ahead we would have been if we had start if we had known what we know now when we first started out. I mean I I [ __ ] up everything. Yeah. The thing is you you kind of have to [ __ ] up

1:08:05everything because it goes back to the calculator thing. If you never make the mistake, you don't get the learning. So it's like if you never learn how to do math, you never learn how to do math. If you never make the mistake, you never realize, oh, that's what I should have been doing. And it really locks in, right? It just sucks during the time. I feel like people are going to get so dumb with AI. And that's kind of what I was saying. It's going to be crap especially cuz if you in my opinion in my opinion, I feel like the generations just keep getting softer, right? I feel

1:08:32like our generation's soft as [ __ ] I feel like the generation under us is even worse. It's just going to Exactly. That's funny. Charmin Charminles are soft, dude. It's just every generation under us is just getting softer and softer. And I feel like the generation under us, it's like, dude, they don't want to work. They don't they don't want to put the the ability to know that you have to struggle a little bit or like put in a little bit of work, eat a little bit of [ __ ] is not in their vocab list. And I feel like as AI gets even better in two years from now, chat chat

1:09:01sucks right now compared to 2 years from now, it's going to be ridiculous because you're going to have to make a decision. People are going to be like, "Man, my phone died." Yeah. What do I do? Yeah. What do I do? Have you ever This is a weird tangent, but like when you when people talk about aliens and you like see the alien body and you're they're like, "Oh, they have huge heads and like these little squishy shitty bodies that

1:09:20like can't lift anything, no muscle." And I was like, "That doesn't make any sense. I see the path now. I I like the primate to human. I see how humans get to no muscle. It's like if AI does everything for you, and obviously it's like kind of a joke, but you could see how people would atrophy physically if you don't go outside, mentally if you don't actually solve problems, bro,

1:09:39they're going to Uber eats everything. They're not going to go to the gym ever. They're never going to leave their homes. They're not going to have human interaction. People are going to be stuck inside all day on god knows what. Yeah. I think AI makes I think AI is making people lazy and they're using it

1:09:52as a crutch as opposed to a tool.

1:10:05Yeah. content, we wouldn't understand the nuances that come with film making or photography and someone could essentially learn everything using chatebt and kind of fake it till they make it and create a whole business or personal brand around it, but they don't actually know how to do the thing. And so when [ __ ] hits the fan, they don't know, they don't understand the nuances

1:10:24that like an audience wants to see. Yeah. Do you guys know Jesse James West, the fitness guy? He's partnered with Chris Williamson on that drink new, but he's in fitness. And he said, he posted this video. This kid completely bar for bar, exact video, exact script, posted the same video on YouTube. He goes, "This is actually insane." Like, "Yeah, what is going on?" And the kid made a video. He's like, "Yeah, I copied him bar for bar." And he goes, "This is even

1:10:46worse. You're like admitting to it. Admitting to like copying this video." And he's like, "People just don't think anymore. They don't they they could He's like, "I could have grabbed this, taken three things that I said said I got it from him, made two more takes that are my own." He goes, "It's a totally different feeling." So, it's it's possible that one way I think about this a lot. Like, I think what's going to happen is everything's going to thousand x,000x to products, thousandx to content, thousandx to [ __ ] Way more noise. It's going to be way harder to cut through. It's possible that one

1:11:15outcome is these platforms have like a human-only verified feed where and this is not this is not like copying but it's it's kind of in that same vein where like I don't think it'll be blockchain based but one use one actual use case that isn't monkey pictures for blockchain is verified content that can't be replicated right so like if you guys upload an episode and like do your digital fingerprint if somebody takes that down and like tries to AI it or adjust it and put it back up it will get it will get removed from the human YouTube feed. Like, it's kind of sad, but I see a world where most social

1:11:47media have to have this like human feed, human verified feed. I'm with you, dude. There's because there's an AI short form creator whose stuff I really like. It's crazy. And I hit I got hit with it on Instagram. It was a reals feed. They're motivational. They're great. They're AI scripts. They're AI content. They're AI everything. AI, you know. And I'm like, I actually really like these videos. But then I catch myself like in my head thinking, wow, I love this creator. And

1:12:11it's not a real person. And it's tough. It's weird. It's so weird. And I think you're so right where it's going to be you're going to really want to go towards people one that are being authentic. It's gonna be so weird to go to a page and know, oh, this isn't this is an AI. But I will say like imagine like Scooby-Doo, like Scooby-Doo is not a real person, but if there was an account like Scooby-Doo and you'd be like, I [ __ ] with Scooby-Doo. Like he he has like good memes. That's kind of that's only one degree away, right? The weird thing is the AI they're trying to

1:12:37become they're trying to make it seem like humans. Yeah, exactly. If it was like character based, it makes sense. Yeah. It wouldn't be as weird. It's interesting. I I do think we're in like a generational window right now for the next I want to say two to three years. Maybe it's less maybe five max where AI supercharges people that have taste and skills because it lets you do so much more. But it but not everyone can use it yet. And so the noise hasn't

1:13:01lifted. The noise floor hasn't lifted. So for me it's like I'm trying to compress two decades worth of success into three years right now and just like really take advantage cuz after that I have no clue how the ball is going to bounce. It's possible with AI you're saying? Yeah. Like once everything a thousandxes thousandx the to content who knows if my stuff will still cut through like I'd like to say oh I I know the craft better than anyone but a if AI is recursively learning and training itself and it's ingesting everything. It's possible that like my stuff even becomes rendered obsolete in a certain amount of

1:13:30time. So, I'm trying to bring forward all of that juice. That's why I'm working so hard right now, cuz you know, different eras reward different types of skills. Like, in the early 1900s, if you were like big and strong and could work in the factories, you probably got paid more. Now, in the internet era, strength doesn't [ __ ] matter. Can you type on a computer is all that matters. And like what how do you know? So, that was a complete skill shift. It's possible the next wave is a completely different skill set. I want to think art and craft and taste matters, but we don't really

1:13:59know. We know it matters in this era. So this is a rare opportunity where if you lean in, you can create 10x productivity using these tools, which is insane. Like if it takes you two hours to write a script and the software we built takes you five minutes, in theory, you can make 10x the videos if you know what you're doing. So or if you know about the tools. So yeah, it's a really I think last time we talked like a year

1:14:19ago, it was just early stages of AI. Like we talked about 11 Labs and like some of those tools. It's now gotten I mean you we see how much better it's gotten like some of these like artless no free ads artless like image to video thing is actually pretty sick. I don't know if you guys have used it but it's they created like filters that you can put on top of AI videos. So like you take a Red Bull can obviously generate a bunch of [ __ ] but then put a filter of like retro and it really does treat it like an animator would. It's wild. Yeah,

1:14:48it's crazy. I I I was playing around with it the other day. It It's just going to get ridiculous. It's going to get ridiculous. Yeah, we're we're we're still not good enough with the video stuff yet. I think taste though, like I think taste will always play a role. We were talking about this for video editing specifically, man. Like, yeah, taste matters a lot. I mean, taste taste is everything. Taste is everything. And I think it will continue to be everything if not be more advanced. like when everyone's kind of doing the same [ __ ] how can you have the taste to make something a little

1:15:22different and and be a little bit more elevated? Here's what I think what's interesting. What AI does is it decreases and I say AI like big AI we're talking like big brother like what AI does is it decreases the time to replicate taste that's working right. So today if let let's say pre- internet somebody does some like a movie that's insane crazy nobody knows how they did it there's no interviews it's like to replicate that takes a decade then in the internet it's like you know let's say Chris Williamson does the pod with like the crazy cinematics you guys could execute that if you had enough money and

1:15:58time you could probably execute it in like a week eventually AI will allow people to replicate stuff in days and hours whatever so the qu so the thing is taste will always ex human taste will always exist this because human taste is just weird [ __ ] that is not cool yet, right? But it's how quickly does the time compress between when something uncool becomes cool and then is replicated that time shrinks as people can like because essentially you'll have all these AI programs that can sense trends or I guess I guess what is what is cool and taste like if it's a piece of content if

1:16:30that thing breaks out immediately you're going to have some AI algorithm that can detect immediately that that's a trend and then something that can replicate it in a day. So the thing is taste will always lead but it's how valuable will that taste be relative to the catchup of the mainstream. I think as technology has advanced that the the the lag time between taste and replication has compressed a lot. And so that's why I mean this rare era. We're in an era where you can't really like snap of a finger replicate some crazy [ __ ] You you can't yet. Will that happen? I don't know. It's it's an interesting thing. I

1:17:04don't really want to have to base my financial prosperity on that not not ever happening. Does it does it scare you these next two to three years or like maybe maybe past that like after seeing what's happening right now? Like say we have a great thriving business, you have a great SAS business coming. It does. It does. It does scare you. I I I mean I like to play the cards as they're dealt. So like whatever the game is, I'm going to try to outrun the rest. But I like I like the game we're playing right now cuz I've cracked it and it would be

1:17:36annoying to have to learn a new game. But I think the real ballers are ones that can adapt and like really learn. That being said, I I'm looking into farmland because I I'm actually very worried and not not actual farmland like in like for example like there's in the metaverse in Dententraland. No, I need I need my

1:17:57physical body to go somewhere as well. Well, the metaverse is cool, but if I'm living in it, if I'm living in like uh se project project project housing, that would not be good. I So, the way I'm thinking of it, and this is a little like doomsdayy, but whatever. I think we're far enough in the pod where people are still vibing with it. Yeah. So, there's an area like So, this is we're in New York. There's an area two hours north called Hudson that's like lush and like outdoors and like you know homes in the forest and there's like some towns up there but it's it's like off the

1:18:26grid. One potential downside of AI that I see if you play the game theory out is like if 30% of white collar workers lose their jobs in the same 12-month period, what happens to a city like New York where all those people are paying for these apartments and this food and their 80% of people are living paycheck to paycheck. What actually happens? Some of those who have rich parents can like proliferate, move home like co, but a lot of those people are going to be [ __ ] And I don't want to live in Gotham when the Joker takes over. And I'm just worried there is there is a

1:19:01path where AI creates abundance, prosperity, you know, maybe it's uh government stimulus to keep people afloat or whatever. There's another path where it gets real scary with a lot of white collar people that were used to a certain quality of life. To our point about like not learning how to adapt and then all their stuff gets taken away. Both people get laid off within a six-month period and they're and they

1:19:21get laid off not as a temporary co blip. It's like, yo, these companies have AI. So, what happens then? I don't want to be trapped in a city around all of that when this happens. So, now to be like clear, I don't think that's going to happen in the next 2 years. But that is a legit concern I have. And so, I'm I'm looking at farmland. God, it's so No, it really it's scary to think about. I think it is. And you have to look at the horizon and kind of try to futureroof yourself or future proof what is your business going to be or how is your

1:19:52brand going to play into what if Yeah. And this this is what I say like generational opportunity right now everybody should hit as hard as possible. Try to compress as much good fortune and and durability in their businesses as you can. But yeah, like because I make the AI tech content, I live at the edges and

1:20:12like shit's pretty crazy. It really is. Is there anything you do with your finances that you'd feel comfortable sharing? Like can can we just pretend you got a 10K check? Yeah. How would you divvy that up in today's landscape? I'm going full S&P 500. I you can't either S&P 500 or real estate is the best way. I don't really want to play the real estate game because I don't want to have to manage property unless till it's the farm. But like S&P 500, no, I'm with you. I do the same thing. Most most hedge funds that are have professional Ivy League gradu I mean Ivy League whatever, but

1:20:45professional people that are dedicated to this can barely beat the S&P 500. So just dump it in the you pay you pay for your base expenses. You try to turn all expenses into a profit center where possible. Put everything else in the S&P 500. If the S&P 500 gets nuked because all these com because the the thing with AI is if everyone loses their jobs it's because the companies are getting more profitable because they can do more with less. So I don't now you could say that means there won't be less buyers for the products and so the companies will also their revenues will come down but all AI

1:21:13will increase the margin of these businesses which increases the value the multiple on the margin. So there should be some durability in in stocks right or in in the market S&P 500. So that that's what I that's what I do is just dump it in S&P 500 dollar cost average as the money comes in and any other money I need to kind of compound the growth of my own business I'll do it but nothing fancy. I was just going to apologize for

1:21:38him lowballing the 10K was a little low. I just said a single. I just a single. Jesus Christ. No I'm kidding. But I don't want to I don't want to end on a sad note like because every time I talk about this especially at like a dinner party people are like God get this guy out of here. No, I mean I think it's having a night. I think it's really you got a dinner after I think it's super interesting though and I feel like if you don't talk about it it potentially something like that could sneak up on you and then people be like oh the best

1:22:05So that's a good a good the how do you future proof right is like the question the best way to future proof is to be on the edges. So play with the tools put them in the work. So now everything I do, I'm like, "Okay, figure it out as the craftsman first." Like try to figure out the work and then it's how can I

1:22:20build a workflow faster with AI tools. If if if they're not good enough yet, I won't do it. But if they are good, I'll start incorporating it. I think that's the best thing you can do right now. Yeah. It's just learn how to play with them. And I think you're naive if you're not. Most people are, you know, like when you learn something new, but it's not what you know, and so you dismiss it

1:22:37and you're like, that must be nothing. You got to unlearn that behav that reflexivity because we're about to enter a time where everything's going to be new and it's going to be dope. So like you got to you got to like be willing to run into those run into that fire. Before we go back, it's funny you bring up the farmland because last week, I'm not even kidding. I was at the gym and I was talking to the trainer and I was like he told me about um what's the

1:22:59[ __ ] guy's name? Who has the farm? Deon Le. Do you know Deon Leves? No. He's like a fitness influencer, but he and he lives in New York. I think he might live in New Jersey now. He created a farm. He has like 20 acres and he has like a retreat business. And I go, Braden, I think that'd be so sick. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, that's I wouldn't even turn it into a business. I'd probably just do set up the retreat. The goal is I just make a ton of money and then set up that stuff and have all my friends and family live there and come there

1:23:23just cuz like the microplastics in the food like [ __ ] is bad. It's it is really eating away at in every aspect. So, it's like I kind of want like farm to table, from my farm to my table. I want no microplastics. I'm with you. I literally want the cows and I want to be buddies with the cows and then have someone come and I think you could get and I've never been like that. I'm not a farm guy. I think you could get a group. No, I just want safety. Like it's like I'm not a

1:23:45YouTuber. I just want I just want leads. It's like I'm not a I'm not a farm guy. I just want safety. That's hilarious. I do think you could get a group of like 8 to 10 people who are all on the same page and it's like let's all go in on this and then we that's how we get our food. I think it lit. Yeah. And and and maybe like things are usually not as extreme as people think, right? So maybe it's it's not Gotham, but it's like you don't want to spend every day here. So we could have both and we could go up to

1:24:09the farm for 4 days and like recharge. I think this like there's a huge opportunity because I was listening to um I was listening to some podcast where or it it was Rogan and Jeremy Rener. Do you know what happened to Jeremy Rener? Didn't he get in a crazy accident? A crazy accident. He was he was saying basically like he was up in Tahoe. He it was they were snowed in. He has this like snow cat thing that basically is like a tank that will clear the driveway

1:24:32and he like slipped and it ran over him. He said it was 16,000 pounds and it went over him. Broke 38 bones. His eye popped out of his head, skull fractured, every rib broken, both ankles, knees, hips, everything. And he he was in like a coma for a long time. And he was just talk it's crazy. You guys got to listen to

1:24:51it. Like him his mindset is so good. Like he basically healed himself. And uh I forget where I was going with that, but what were you saying right before that? Just how we could get a group of people together and do the farm stuff. You want safety? Yeah. He was talking about the way he healed himself after he like had all the the bones heal. He's doing like the red light therapy and the hyperbaric and like the sauna steam room. Like he's really doing the full protocol. And I find myself sometimes being like I just need like a week to run through the protocol of all those

1:25:21things. And so what I was what I was thinking is there's a huge opportunity for this hybrid like med spa meets, you know, longevity center where you can subscribe. It's like an Equinox membership and you can just get the full treatment for like four hours once a month or something and just run through it. That's a huge O. So it's the same kind of idea like the communal farm that type of thing. I want that so bad. It just doesn't exist. God. Yeah. We'll make it. We'll get it. We'll if you come to LA and visit us, we'll take you to Monarch. Yeah. Oh, you have that? You

1:25:48guys have it? Yeah. pretty I mean on a are you able to do all the services in one day? You Yeah, you could you could do IV, you could do cold press, cold plunge, you could do sauna, you could do leg press hyperbaric chamber. How good do you guys feel? Have you ever run the full gauntlet in one one shot? Yeah, I did. I've done How good do you feel coming off it? It's actually like insane. Have you ever gotten an IV? I've got only necessary ones, not like for funsies. Yeah. If you ever get an IV

1:26:14where you're like like the NAD+ Mhm. Yeah. I've never got that. It's insane, dude. You feel so much better, dude. The the the workout was the craziest workout I've ever had. I hit hyperbaric IV, worked out. They say you're not supposed to cold plunge after. I'm still massive, so it's still it's clearly working. Like, I can still because it shrinks your muscles. Yeah. They're saying it's something about your muscles not being able to repair themselves right after cuz they get frozen or something. That's not the actual scientific data, but that's exactly what I got out of it is like you're freezing. That workout was probably insane. You hit a workout after

1:26:44an IV. It's the craziest thing. Like you feel like 30% strength. I'm like I'm like let's go cuz it hydrates you. Hydrates you. You're so hydrated. We're all walking around dehydrated% all the time. Yeah. I want that. So So you guys have that. So after you do the full gauntlet, you're like So how how frequently can you should you do that? If money was not a factor, would you do it like once a week or is that too frequently? No, I mean I don't do the hyperaric every single time, but I'll do the sonic coal plunge damn near every time I work out. Even though they

1:27:13say that date of like it's factory muscle mass, I don't need to get much bigger. Like genu, I really just don't need to get that much bigger. I can stay this and I'll be very happy and I feel so much better. I sleep better. I love it. A lot of it I think is like inflammation on the joints and so that helps like the like do you do the red light? You guys do the red light therapy or they don't have that? They they do in in the sauna it is a infrared red light kind of situation. Yeah. It's hard to

1:27:35know what actually moves the needle. Like if you could only do one, what would you do? just the just the sauna probably sa is what I love. Yeah. Yeah. It's honestly very therapeutic. It just feels great. But the fact that those don't exist everywhere the way a Soho house does like yo no one gives a [ __ ] about Soho House. Like give us the wellness center, right? Like that's what we want. They are planning on bringing

1:27:54Monarch though to New York and Miami. And they want to expand and have them all over. It really is dope. It's everything under one roof. I do the content so I get the free like membership. And you you did the thousand pound squat deadlift. You got to come in. Yeah. What is that called? The the thousand club. Yeah. I've been a part of that for since

1:28:15I was like 14. Yeah. Not no more though. Um I want to take it back though real quick to the the traffic funnel product. And let's talk about the back end and when a creator should start thinking about their backend. Do you think it needs to be something they think about right away and have set up? It depends if you if you want income or not. I I here's the thing and we it goes back to the art verse science. It's like everybody's [ __ ] around. It's like we all are doing this to make money. And if you're not, if you're actually doing it for the art, God bless

1:28:45you. Power to you. Yeah. You don't need to listen to anything I'm saying. You're good. Don't ever think about the back end because you don't need but if you actually want income and you want to build a business that you can monetize from, which is what really what everyone wants, you got to start with that in mind because if you build the wrong audience, you're just going to have to retrace. You're going have to go up the mountain, come all the way back down, go to a different mountain, build it up. So that's why it's like who is the audience avatar? What are their pain points? You

1:29:06kind of start getting a sense right away for like what could I sell? The way the way I think of the offer, there's three ways you can build an offer. One is a workflow step that you don't cover in your content. So let's say to go from A to Z, it's 10 steps and you you make videos about 1 to eight and

1:29:21then nine and 10 you just don't cover. You sell a product on nine and 10. No, the second way is you cover all of one to 10, but you go really deep on one of them. So like number two, you go super deep or number three is you sell a implementation or speed to execute one to 10. Those are kind of like three foolproof ways to look for what you what you build and offer. But what I tell people is uh business model lifestyle fit is actually really important. So for me like I'm not trying to build a business with a hundred people. I I worked in a big company before. I don't

1:29:52like managing people. I want high ticket, high revenue, high margin with low maintenance. That's what I want. And so there's only a couple models that fit that, right? And so I re to your point, like if you're trying to build a business, if you're trying to build an online business, you got to pretty much focus on the business part of online

1:30:09business pretty pretty quickly, right? Like you kind of have to have that in mind. Most people just I do think the content is harder to crack than the business. So they start with content, but they get so wrapped up in the views and all the vanity metrics that don't matter, they don't actually turn on the business. And they're just that's where the struggling starving artist thing comes from. So, I just think that's the wrong way to play it. I think at the very least, start building out your email list and have some sort of free lead magnet and a product that's less than $100. Yeah. Because the high ticket

1:30:40stuff can be a little bit harder to figure out like what is the sauce that I'm giving away? What is the what's the structure? What's the business behind that? Pretty easy to create a product that feels worth it for less than $100. $50 download. You need differentiated skills to be able to sell a high ticket. So, at the beginning, you don't have those yet usually. So, what I recommend the the starting playbook for somebody is immediate before you do any content, set up an email newsletter thing. Takes five minutes. You have your little subscribe page. If you don't have a lead, you don't have something that's lead

1:31:18magnetable, fine, but you have that. Start making videos. link that email newsletter in your bios on social media above the fold in the description in YouTube. Start making videos. You'll start building that email list. The very next thing you should do is build a free lead magnet, which is usually something you've learned along the way in the first couple months that you can package up that's just saving people a little bit of time. Swap out your like link of the subscribe page to the lead magnet, which is essentially getting you to the subscribe page. You have that. Then very quickly, first month or two, paid product, 29, 49, 79 bucks depends on

1:31:49like who the buyer is and what the value is. Just with that alone, you'll start to you'll start to train yourself on like, okay, content, funnels, product, like you start to you start to see it. It depends what your goals are for like how much income a month you want. If you only want 20K a month, that might be enough. If you just do that for a year, you might be able to get there pretty quick. If you want a big business, you're going to have to start putting big offers. Like, you got to build high ticket more high ticket stuff. And so,

1:32:13but but but it comes with time, right? Like you listen people listen to these podcasts they get overwhelmed cuz they're like oh [ __ ] this you know like these guys are where I want to be. Yeah, but like we took a hundred micro steps between starting and now. And so you're just trying to take one step tomorrow. You don't have to you don't have to bite the whole elephant off. The amount of [ __ ] that me and Braden messed up the

1:32:33first two times we did our cohort. Think about how much you learn. I could write a book. I could literally I could literally write Think about how much you learn though. So you could package that into a lead magnet or a paid course. Now the entire back end is its own beast and everyone has to just [ __ ] that up and learn that in whatever regard whatever product you sell you have to figure out like uh the littlest things of like when they checked out did their email get to them and like do you have something to follow up with them if that doesn't happen? And it's like all these little

1:33:03things or this person refunded because they didn't get the email and they didn't see a page that said check your spam when they buy and that that little tiny detail of check your spam resulted in losing x amount of dollars and like that person being pissed off and could have all been by three words check your spam. It's just crazy all that little stuff adds up. When you guys built the

1:33:23back end out you use like Kajjabi. Yeah. Kajjabi forever and that's that's what you hosted all the stuff in and then you do like live calls on Zoom or whatever. Yeah, we do the live through Kajjabi. Oh, so Kajjabi's onestop shop and then you do active campaign for the email. Active campaign for the email. Zap year to connect everything. So you just make the content drive to lead magnet. Lead

1:33:39magnet puts them in active campaign. Active campaign you drip them and you guys are running paid ads as well. But yeah, but then you start just nurture. Yeah. Nurture. So and you guys how how big of a So this is the thing where like funnel-wise I'm not a guru at funnels yet. There's so much unmind value that like I kick myself every day for not pausing the content for a week and like actually figuring it out. Do you How long of a nurture sequence do you like is the nurture sequence so dialed to the point where you're like all right for for the next 12 emails? Not yet. It will be in

1:34:09probably like the next two months. Yeah, it'll be super dialed where if someone follows us, they will they will find they will find their way into getting into the email sequence. And so the email sequence is meant to at the end up sells them into No, I think just a 55 or $57 product or $49 $47 product and then eventually it would be to like hey we keep helping you along the path until it's like you're trying to build a sustainable business with this and like this is a great option for you. You don't have to do it. You can do it yourself. Everything is there free. But

1:34:40if you would like help from us, a good example where like you could inject AI into this that would that would help right away is you guys have all the curriculum that you taught for the paid cohort and I'm sure it's in like Google Docs or Slides and then you made videos. You just upload all the Google Docs into ChatBT and say, "Here's the ba here's the basis. Find me a $49 product that I can package out of this for these reasons." Finds it, makes it, spits it out. you still want to probably format it and design it, but like that saved you maybe five to 10 hours. So, it's

1:35:11like those little things. You're not going to replace the whole cohort with CHBT, but you can use little pieces, you know? What would be your message to a creator who's made 10 YouTube videos, zero traction? Like, what do we do? And they're thinking about giving up. They want to give up. Oh, don't give up. Okay. It takes do not give. No, it it takes so many more reps than that. Um, David, hit the little David. What is a number that you realistically think someone's got to put in on YouTube before it's like okay like what what did I do wrong? I would say the the weekly

1:35:39rep for a year. So for YouTube a weekly rep just one rep a week for a year. So 50 videos short form I think the weekly reps is like three for so that's 150. So for YouTube 50 reps like Mr. B says 100. But the reason or 50 it doesn't matter but like let's just say 50 is easier than 100 which it is. The reason you say 50 is because there's so many micro skills you have to learn. Yeah. And if you don't actually learn the skills, your shit's not going to be good. If it's not good, people won't watch. And it's getting increasingly harder to get

1:36:06people to watch if your stuff's not good. Maybe in 20 2006, you could get away with that. But now, you can't. So, if you actually think you have 10 bangers, the only reason you would have 10 bangers for your first 10 videos is if you made a bunch of other videos before, and in that case, you would never quit because you know they're good. So, if you have made bad videos for the first 10 and you're willing to quit, that means you don't actually want to do it. And you have to kind of gut check like winning on YouTube and really in anything takes a lot of effort. And

1:36:35so if you're just doing the effort because you think you're gonna be rich and famous, you're not. It's going to take way longer than you think to do it. It's going to take a decade. So a you kind of have to gut check. Is this what I actually want or am I just doing this because somebody told me to do it. If it's not what you actually want, just stop. Just save your effort. Did you listen to Hermos on Diary of a CEO? I think maybe clips of it. He talked about the difference between a beginner and an expert. And a beginner thinks things are black and white. Either it works or it

1:37:01doesn't. An expert tries something. If it doesn't work, they understand that like what they did it doesn't not work, how they did it doesn't work and they need to iterate. Yeah. Like like I am the problem, right? That's the the benefit of doing things is that you realize that you're the reason they don't work after you do a couple. So what? But let's get back to the optimism. I if if they if they don't actually want to do it, use this time to gut check and be like, "My time would be better spent investing in something else." Awesome. If you really do want to do it, then you probably don't have a

1:37:34problem quitting after 10 videos because you really want to do it. That's the truth. But to get more tactical, the Would you say the re they've made 10 videos, but they're like all over the place with different audiences or let's say it's the same audience? I would say that they're all over the place. Yeah, I'd say I mean that I feel like that is the average person. It's like you try a vlog, you try a cinem like what you're saying earlier, it's like you really have to be crystal clear on who you want to serve. And like if I could draw this person their age, like where they're from, where they

1:38:03live, what they do, what they eat, like that makes your life so much easier. And I don't mean to say do that as a procrastination tactic cuz a lot of people can take that be like, "Okay, cool. I'll research for another 3 weeks." That's not really what I'm saying. But at the beginning, you do need to spend time really identifying who that person is because you're going to build an offer and a product or service for them. So, you need to like have those guard rails. It's like have A and have Z, right? I think I forget who said this, but there's like an ABC framework. A is where I am today. Z is

1:38:31the ultimate goal. B is the next step. All I'm focused on is A to B, but I know what Z is. So, if you're making YouTube videos and you're at A, but you don't actually know what Z is, it's impossible to know who you're making them for, which is a problem. So, you kind of have to think, what do I want to build? And we've talked a lot about different options today. And Hormosia has so much good content where you can like break down different business models. Once you're clear on that, you then have to gut check, are these 10 reps angled at that person? Ideally, yes, if you know

1:38:59who they are before you started making them. If not, I think you need to find a proxy of a different YouTuber, a different creator targeting that audience and try to study what they're doing that you're not doing and just do that AB comparison over and over and over and then make 40 videos. I completely agree. Ladies and gentlemen, this has been episode 156 of the 505 podcast. If you're still here, please hit the subscribe button, leave us a like, drop us a comment. We'll see y'all

1:39:22next week. P.