Kallaway’s EXACT System For Going Viral (Over and Over)

0:00I'm trying to derisk my effort slashin increase my hit rate. So I was like, how do I use data but not make myself a clone that's copy pasting everyone else's stuff. And that's basically why I built Sand Castle's movie. That's Callaway. He started four businesses that were all killed by the same problem. No one cared. He had no audience, which meant he had no customers. So he made it his mission to crack audience growth. and now he has over a billion views, a 50% viral hit rate, and he created a tool called Sand Castles that helps other creators do the same. In this episode, you'll learn the

0:34exact system he uses to find and validate viral video topics before he ever hits record. My framework for content is I call it the modern content stack. The metrics you need to obsess over so that your content grows your business. Views are not the right metric to study. Use our A metric to study and I would say the third most important when I look

0:53at the stack. And if you stick around long enough, Callaway will show you exactly how you can build your own content research system from scratch. Thank you to one of 10 for sponsoring this video. There's kind of a fallacy between like views equals money. It's really like views does not equal money. You want density around one ICP as many times as

1:13you can possibly get it in a given week. So like my framework on this is called content minutes. So essentially like you could imagine your offer ladder or whatever your offer stack at certain price points. So I don't know what you're like running right now, but I know you have the lab which is probably one of your higher ticket things. And then as you go down you've got like

1:29course bundles, individual courses. Maybe you have something at $47. So essentially like imagine you took that ladder from low to high and you overlaid an amount of minutes that someone would have to watch your content and trust you for those minutes. That's like pretty critical. And at the $47, maybe it's like 20 minutes worth of content. And at 20 minutes, they'd trust you enough to buy it if it fit their problem. And then one one rung upg like to get into the lab, they probably would have to have watched hundreds of minutes. But like once they cross that threshold, then they'll convert. So if you think about it, most people are

2:02like, "Well, I should just do YouTube." Because every YouTube video, if it's 20, and yours or podcasts, like 60 minutes long, the average watch time, let's say, is 20 to 30 minutes. You're getting a lot of those blocks in one shot. And so you can scale someone up that ladder of trust pretty quick, which is why you've

2:17had so much success with YouTube, right? Because somebody watches five episodes, that might happen in a single night. Boom, you hit 200 minutes, and then they'll they'll be willing to buy anything. My framework for content is I call it the modern content stack, which is a basically a triangle. You've got short form, long form, both going into email. That's like the golden goose. If you if you could do anything, it would be one short form platform. I think Instagram is the most valuable or LinkedIn depending on the audience. for you is probably Instagram, YouTube for long form, both into email and you you pretty much can't lose. Now, from a

2:47content man perspective, you may think if I had to make a tradeoff of YouTube verse short form, you're going to want YouTube. And I agree with that, right? The reason most people want to start with short form is because YouTube's so difficult, like so many moving parts, you've already cracked it. However, once you're getting what you're getting from YouTube and you kind of have a formula, that's when you look to expand the universe into short form to kind of get more uh breadth of the minutes to bring it all back to what I was starting with in terms of the narrow ICP. The minutes don't acrue unless the person who

3:16watched the video trust you and actually have the problem you're talking about. So if you broadened or you know made more generic the topic you're talking about yeah maybe it gets 100,000 views instead of 20 but actually none of those 100,000 blocks hit because no trust was acred because the topic you had to talk about was so generic and like surface level that it didn't actually acrue trust. So for me it's like what I try to get people to do is very narrowly define your ICP. I like to think of it as an audience of one. So like if there was just one person in a chair in front of

3:46you that's like probably somebody in the lab. You can just picture them right now. It's like if I could give value on every single piece of content to that person, there's a lot more people like that and it would scale accordingly. The algorithms in the last like one to two years have gotten so good at targeting the exact type of person you want that you don't actually need more than like 10 to 20,000 views per post on Instagram other than for ego reasons. You can drive a ton of email lead genen from that. So I would say like the first thing is narrow is good. You can there's

4:16things we can talk about in terms of how to expand the saturation within that narrow slice like the way you frame the hooks and the topics but like you want narrow. If our ICP are other creators who are educational in nature for their audiences, my perspective has been that education has been harder to do well on uh especially Instagram and Tik Tok. But that might be a limiting belief too when you see people who are doing education

4:44in short form video and doing it well. What is true about those folks that they're being successful in a world where there's a lot of just like great pure entertainment that is probably more engaging? Yeah. How do you define doing it well? Are you talking about views? That's a good question. I would say doing it well in terms of uh they are

5:08making Instagram worthwhile for them. [laughter] Guess is like the ultimate answer. I would say that probably in the back of my mind when I asked that question was like okay yes they're they're doing good views. They're doing views on par with people who aren't doing education. You know the target market for this is actually fairly large. So if if views are in the singledigit thousands, it feels like there's just a lot being left on the table. So views as a metric doesn't matter in an absolute sense, but it feels like we are really barely scratching the surface 100%. So I would say views are not the

5:43right metric to study. Views are a metric to study and I would say the third most important when I look at the stack. I also think not all views are created equal, right? So an entertainment video that has a million views is not getting the trust accumulation the same way an education video it's 40,000 views. It's super

6:00dense. So that that does make it hard. The hard part is this decoupling from like the thing you can see from other people which is views and your own like all of our brains are like see number num want number bigger compare number right and so it can cause a lot of people to stop or to go down the wrong path when they're anchoring views as the number one metric. And here here's what I mean by that. If you know professional creators are the number one target audience and you know all you have to do is get them to trust you and they will ascend down the funnel because you have

6:29all that dialed. You just got to get their email and you know that you can monetize them. If you know that's true and you know that education content is the best way to get trust at scale. Let's just hold those things constant. Then you studying an entertainment video from someone else is actually distracting you from like the right benchmark. Right? the right benchmark is am I making a a high trust high value video educationally to get one more content minute on the stack like in a vacuum right looking me looking at Logan Paul does nothing for me right me looking at I'm just thinking of like

7:02random entertainment names and so the number one thing I think to to go through is what what are the best metrics to track and maybe I could just share like how I'm approaching this on my channels cuz I basically solve short form in like a pseudo entertainment niche you could say like I was doing tech, which sounds educational, but really it's like entertainment. And I was doing that for a brand deal strategy. So like that was a game to play. The game you're playing and the game I'm now playing on my Callway

7:26marketing, completely different game. And so even me, like I can't really look at tech as a proxy for marketing because it's completely different. So maybe I can explain like what I'm doing on Callaway Marketing and how I'm looking at it. The three metrics that I think matter most, number one is conversions per video. And conversions measured as emails collected per video. That means every video I have a CTA. Every CTA is driving to a lead magnet where I can capture emails and I'm measuring all of those in many chat and I can go through

7:53like this batch process that I run. That's number one. Number two is followers gained per video. That is more valuable than views because a follow when someone goes to follow it's like five to 10x more powerful because they're like that was so good I can't miss it again. So before I looked at total views I would look at followers gained and just say which one is driving more followers. Last I would look at total views. Now, the reason why total views is helpful when you're looking at competition is because you don't you don't have insight really into how many email subscribers their videos are

8:22driving or how many followers gain. Those are like private metrics behind the wall. But you could look at someone else's and see views. So, if you're looking at like what's working for others, you have to settle for views for others cuz you can't see the other two. Something I admire about Callaway is his willingness to invest in experts to help him skip the learning curve. That's what he did when he hired the one of 10 team to help with his YouTube channel. You probably know the one of 10 team as the leading tool for researching viral ideas, titles, and thumbnails. It's what I use the most on my channel. The reason

8:51the tool works so well is that the team is full of YouTube strategists who really know their stuff. What you may not know is that they also have a consulting arm that's not only worked with Callaway, but Olly Abdal, Will Tennyson, Mike Shake, and a bunch of others, too. Collectively, they've helped generate over 2 billion views for their clients. The one of 10 team helped Callaway grow a new channel from zero to over 250,000 subscribers in just one year. They helped with this video, this video, and this video, too. One video alone brought in over 2 million views and generated more than $100,000 in revenue. If you want to work with the

9:26same team that took Callaway from zero subscribers to where he is now, that's the one of 10 strategy team. They are very selective with who they work with and only take on about five new clients per month. They focus on the things that actually move the needle, ideas, titles, thumbnails, and positioning. You get a dedicated Slack channel and regular one-on-one calls to communicate with their team to ensure each video is set up for success. This is not a course, and it's not a one-time solution. It's [music] direct ongoing support from a real YouTube expert who has done this

9:57for some of YouTube's largest creators. [music] book a free discovery call with the one of 10 team today with the link in the description and let them know that Jay sent you. But when you look at your own channel, the biggest trap I find is only relying on views from your own channel because obviously if the TAM is bigger on a topic, you're going to get more views. And so if you expand the TAM beyond the trust zone, those views are actually empty calories. And so that's like just one anchoring methodology that I think about is can we have enough lead magnets in the ecosystem that we can

10:29drive to a lead magnet on every video and then evaluate emails collected per video. So I the Callaway marketing channel I've been running for I think I'm 35 videos in and the goal is to get to 2x per day. We're doing one per day, seven per week right now. Every single one of them I have a CTA. Every single one of them I'm measuring. And what's funny is not always are the highest view ones driving the most emails, which which is like you would you would probably accept that to be true and same as me, but the average person would be like, "Wa, I'd expect views equal

10:57emails." It's not the case, right? It's all about what's acrewing trust, what's what's targeting a painoint people really have a need for, and then you have a lead magnet complimenting. So, when you're doing these CTAs with these lead magnets, are you reverse engineering a video topic based on a lead magnet you made? Do you have an idea for a video you love and then you create a lead magnet for that and now that's just in the bank and maybe we'll use it again when it makes sense in the

11:17future. What's your order of operations? Yeah, so I've done it both ways. So I have an academy where I like teach my whole system to people and what I've done is I've taken pieces of the academy, extracted them out and turned it into a lead magnet. So then I'm just like I have that lead magnet made. If

11:32the topic suits it, I'll pull from it. So I guess like step one is you have a couple that you believe in. Right now, when if I were going to like what videos do you make, I wouldn't make them based on the lead magnet. I would make them based on what I can talk about next, which is like how you actually identify which topics are working. I would say it's probably maybe we can get into this now in terms of like topics because one of the questions you asked is like what's the most important thing to to to look for to to focus on? By far and

11:57away, it's the idea of the video. Like you can use almost any hook, any storytelling structure, any editing, any format. If you have a bad topic, and I can talk about what bad and good looks like, the video will fail. it'll it'll be medium at best, but if you have a great topic, you can plug in almost any of those other things and it will almost always work. So all like the 8020 9010 is can I pick topics that are validated, relevant to pain points they want and that I have a non-obvious contrarian take about. So for me like if I had a pie chart of where topics come from, I

12:28would say like at the beginning 70 to 80% comes from data for what other creators topically have talked about that have worked. and I'm looking at views because that's all I have access to. And so I'm informing my first couple batches of content based on that 20% comes one out of every five comes from like an original idea where I'm just like let's just test this. That first

12:47couple batches and I do batches of 10. So let's say like 20 to 30 videos is all about testing. I'm basically just trying to validate which topics work best for me. Once I then know that we we could talk about like downstream, but you know topics are the most important thing. And what I'll do is based on the topic that I choose, I'll then plug in whatever the closest lead magnet would be to that topic. The way I think of it is I don't really want to spend every hour making content. Like I'd rather live my life, right? And so I'm trying to like increase I'm trying to derisk my effort

13:18slash increase my hit rate. So every time I sit down, I want it to bang so that I get the result so I don't have to spend more hours doing it. That's kind of like how I think of it. So it's the measure twice, cut once. Like what would be the way to derisk? The way to derisk is to use data on the topics and then

13:34creativity on the contrarian insights. That combo is like that's what all the goat creators are doing. I mean on I would say on YouTube and that's what I do on YouTube too on YouTube and short form. Uh and it makes it so much easier and that that's basically why I built sand castles, right? So like for anyone who knows Sandcastle.ai that's like my software tool AI tool that does a lot of this for me. The reason why I built that is because I went data first from the beginning because I really did not enjoy the process of spending 10 hours on a video and it failing. I like hated that

14:02a lot. So I was which I'm sure everyone does obviously but I was like I can't do this forever. Like I can't do the guessing. So I was like how do I use data but not make myself a clone that's copy pasting everyone else's stuff because I also think that's where you lose too. If you're a derivative you're going to lose. So you have to be original but you have to fish in the right ponds. That's that's the key thing. If you're fishing in every pond, some ponds don't have fish. So, it's like, how do we figure out where to fish and then use our own technique, our own

14:28contrarian insight, our own, you know, whatever the metaphor, our own boat to go get more fish, right? So, the way I do it with sand castles, which I think is the best way right now is, can you show us this? So, this is sand castles in the upper left, you can build like separate workspaces for different niches. So, like you might want to say, okay, professional creators is like my main one, but you might have other like verticals you want to test if you want to if you want to partition them separately, right? So, this is my marketing workspace. Basically, the first thing you want to do is build this

14:54channel list. So, if you go to the channels tab, I've got this list here of like all the top creators that I've come across or that I know of in my category. And like you, like I said, you can either build this one time or like over time. But how you would do it is maybe let's just delete all of these so I can show you uh kind of the process from scratch. So, typically you would come in here and you'd be like, I don't know who to add at all. So you go to describe and let's just say you're looking for like for me social media marketing and growth

15:22content and I can say I only want people from Instagram or I only want people from micro and small cat which is like 10k followers to 250k. Now I'll go up to medium. The reason you want this micro to medium range is because typically, and this is like not intuitive, but if you track videos from massive people like Horosi, let's say, who has like four or five million followers, typically when he has an outlier, it's not necessarily just because the idea did so well. It's because he's so famous and has so much uh built-in like brand equity that people will like anything he does. So, it's actually a counter signal

15:56to study the huge people. You just won't find the best ideas. Conversely, let's say you're not wellknown at all. If you have a banger, that means the idea, the concept, the substance was the reason why. It's not because of your face because nobody knows you, right? So, you want to study people that are slightly smaller in the that's where really the golden ideas come from. So, let's just do like these three and we'll press search. So, what Sand Castle does is it breaks whatever you gave it into three different buckets. So, in this case, social media marketing, social media growth, marketing and growth strategies, like they're all kind of derivatives of

16:25this. And this will give you the best ranked channels that we have on our in our database. We have like 100,000 channels or so. And if you want to see more, you can just load more. And the goal is you just highlight that or you you you hover over these. And you if you want to investigate these, you can just

16:40click and open it in a new tab. Boom. This person's in a new tab. I don't know if it's sh it's probably not sharing, but like I open it. Boom. I see her channel. Here it is. And what you want to do is build out your list. So I could say like social with Philip. Boom. Press the plus and I build him out here. Now you can do this quickly by just pressing add all. And what we do in the onboarding is like automatically build a list of 20 for you. But I find like most people want to tailor this pretty tightly. Now the cool the cool thing

17:05about a few like hidden features we have here is like let's say so uh Jaden is really dope. Like he's dope in the space. I've seen his stuff. So like I'm I'm going to add him. Now what's cool is I can hit this little double arrows here. And what we'll do is make him the anchor. And now these are all the best fits based on like closest to him. So if you let's say you're not good at describing what you want to do, but you f you know there's one anchor person that you love, you can just go to him, press this, boom, now this list is like

17:31the closest possible thing to him. So I would just like add all these people in. Right? So that's how that's one way to do it. The other way is if you know someone's good, like this girl Ava is really good in the space. I'll just search her name, personal brand launch, and if you just wait a second, it will find her. So she's right here. Now, like

17:48I said, we only have 100,000 channels. like these are top curated channels and our users every time a user adds one it gets added to the database. But if there's somebody that exists that you know should be there and they're not, it just means nobody has ever added them to Sandcastle. So you can actually do it for free. You just go to add URL and you can type it in. So we have this. I'll go to parse. If we have you, the picture

18:06shows up. Boom. I add you. No problem. If we didn't have you, it would be like new channel and you can import it. And then when you import it, we'll take in your full backlog, right? And so th this process of building out your list is super valuable because now you can focus your attention, you can focus your research attention on these channels which you know to be good. So what I recommend for people is like almost everybody knows at least one name of someone that's pretty pretty good in their niche. Start with that person, search them or add them and then just go to this kind of refactor. And then once

18:36you hit this refactor, you can just be like, "Okay, boom. These are all the people that are really close to this person." So we'll add a bunch in there. One thing that's interesting about this approach that's a little bit counter to like the YouTube advice in a similar fashion is a lot of times the advice on

18:50YouTube is like get outside your niche. Find somebody who's doing something in finance or gaming that's interesting and try to pull from their video ideas which I think makes sense but I don't know it doesn't seem like it would translate exactly to Instagram but I having a hard time articulating why that's true. Yeah. So I think there's there's like different buckets right. So when you do the YouTube research, if you're looking for topic inspiration or interest topics on YouTube, you need to have people that are in your space or like very close adjacent. But if you're looking for title formats or thumbnail inspiration or series ideas, you can go broader,

19:24right? For example, if you were doing creator stuff, you typically wouldn't look in the ecom niche for like interest topics, but you could find a title format that's crushing and then translate it over. It's kind of similar here where if you're looking for topics, you need the topics to be within niche. But if you want to look for formats or you want to look at editing styles or you want to look at hook hook, you know, hook formats, you could do that outside the niche as well. So what we found is like most people have trouble building a list outside of their core niche. Like most people are not aware of like who's

19:54good, what's good, even like this databacked process. So we try to keep it in niche and then you can I'll show you a couple things we have where you can stumble across new stuff that's like outside the niche. But this is this is what I like to start with. So this is my list. You can see I just I had a list on Excel. I just pasted all the URLs in. I added them super quick. So this is the list that like I I like. So once you have this, then you go to the videos

20:15tab. And so this is the to to zoom out. What we're doing here is we're breaking down how do you find the best performing topics in your niche so that you know which ponds to fish in. So if you go to the videos tab, what you now see are these are all the videos from just those channels. And you know that because if you click the channels filter, you can see the channels in here. So, if I wanted to look at like just my channel, I would click my channel and then I've got boom, I got all the videos from just my channel in here. Now, the difference

20:41between this and like Instagram or Tik Tok proper is that I can filter and cut this data however I want. So, what I like to do is I'll go posted in the last two months. I like to set engagement rate at 2% because that filters out the brand deals. Typically, if you have videos with super high views, but they have 0% engagement, it's because people paid to boost the views. I don't want to look at the brand deals because those are that give me a that gives me a false sense of what topics worked. So I just

21:06set this bottom engagement at 2%. Anything below that filters out. And then what I do is I go to sort and I'll go either outlier score or views. Slightly different ways of calculating it, but let's just do outlier score. So the outlier score, which is this green badge here, you can see like this one is 8.2x. This means that the views of this video were 8.2x 2x higher or above the average views in the rolling 3 months before this video was posted. We do rolling three months so that if the channel's dying, the outlier score kind of gets recalculated. You don't get punished for like super fast or super

21:38slow growth. But so an outlier score is like a better apples to apples comparison across multiple channels. So the beauty of this is like let's say I clear uh just this and I look at the whole cohort. Now, this is in the last 2 months sorted by outlier score across all these channels, the top performing videos. So, like this is the the wise investor. I don't even know maybe that maybe he's on the channel, but there's Ganon, uh, Peter Visuals, etc. So, you go through. So, now what you can do, there's a few things that are like super helpful. Let me let me go by newest so I

22:10can show you this. When you see these videos, the very first thing you're you're probably wanting to do is either play it in a new tab, so you can just watch it. So you can just hover over and play a new tab like this. Or you want to get deep analysis on this video, like what is the transcript? How can I understand like what this video was about? Right? And so if you just press this analyze button, we will actually do a deep analysis on this video. And if I'll just go back to one that I've

22:33already analyzed. So like this one by Ganon, I can press into it. You get the transcript, the caption if you wanted is here. But then all this like deep analysis, right? So what is the topic? What was the the seed of the idea? The topic is like a 3 to five word kind of description. This is

22:49more like a single sentence description. What is the unique angle of this video? What is the common belief versus contrarian reality? This is like really where curiosity comes from right here. What kind of like core facts or evidence did he put in this video? Then we go to the hook. What was the formula for the hook? What was the exact hook? What was

23:04the analysis of why this hooked work? What is the category of the hook? Storytelling, same thing. Category, what what the storytelling structure was? Visuals as well. So the whole point is like now you're getting all of the deep analysis on this video. We're both taking the transcript and literally watching it with a vision model and giving you insights on this. Now at an individual level, you could be like, "Oh, cool." Like I'm just going to A lot of people just use sand castles like this. They come in, they filter, they sort by outlier score, and literally they just watch each one. They're just like, "Watch, watch, watch." And and

23:35they like watching it themselves. They don't even want the detailed analysis. This alone prevents you from having to scroll to find ideas and now you can see the best performers. I'll I'll expand on what I would look what I would take from this verse not to keep it original, but like that's that's like the lightest weight way to do it. The more advanced way is once you analyze a bunch of these and you can go one at a time or you can press bulk analyze like you know let's

23:58say you wanted to analyze my channel. You would just search my channel. You could say bulk analyze 50 videos or you know you could look and say okay that looks like there's 25 in the last three weeks. I'm just going to bulk analyze 25. Once you have all these analyzed you can either export the data as a CSV and feed that into Claude or you can use our MCP which connects Sand Castles directly to Claude. You can just install it in like 30 seconds. I can I can link a video if people want. And then in Claude I can say look at the last 30 videos

24:26from Callaway Marketing's channel. Make sure they're all deep analyzed. give me a full report of like a breakdown of the topics, the hooks, etc. Right? So, there's so much you can do with this data individually and as a cohort. So, you're coming in here for Callaway Marketing and you're doing your uh your filtering, your sorting, you have a short list by outlier score. When do you stop and say like, "Yep, that's one I'm going to do." Is it something that like inspiration hits or are you doing a minimum 10 and then saying, "Okay, which

24:56one of these did did I feel best?" What's your process from here? So there's so there's two paths. There's looking at what competitors are doing to get new ideas and then there's looking at your own channel to understand all the other stuff that's working really well. So like which videos did I make that crushed? What hooks are working? What formats are working, right? So I I

25:13kind of like do both separately, per se. So I've got a guy on my team um that literally just does the idea stuff all day long. So, he's looking at all of these competitor channels and he's like trying to like he looks at this this view right here and sometimes he'll go uh last, you know, 30 days. Sometimes he'll go further out. It depends on like for your niche and my niche. This is pretty evergreen. So, you can go back like four four six months and still get good ideas. For newsbased niches where you need more like real-time stuff, he'll do 14 days or seven days like for

25:47tech. So, he'll look at this and he'll open this video and he'll be like, "Okay, is the topic of this interesting to him?" First of all, like because I've kind of trained him on like what interesting looks like just like are you curious about this period? Okay. Number two, do we have something relevant and non-obvious to say about this general topic? So, like let's just look at this one right here. So, we'll open this. So,

26:09let's just watch this. This video got nearly 25 million views. [music] That's over 200 times more views than the creator's regular content. And the reason comes down to one thing. Your brain is always trying to guess what happens [music] next in a So this is basically like a a hook case study where he's explaining the hook or psychology of this, right? So my my guy or you or anyone who's doing this, right, would be like, okay, this is a breakdown of an example video that had a viral hook that had traction that he explained how to do it. So, the close clone, which I don't really like doing close clones, would be

26:44like, let's take this exact same video and make a like this exact same example and make our own spin on it where we break down the hook, but in a different way. We say different stuff. To me, that's still too close. I want to be more unique. So, I would say, okay, interesting. The style that he went through to explain this is he started

26:59with the hook itself of of the example. He played it without saying anything. Then, he introduced what it was and broke it down. Could we run a similar flow like that, a similar story structure, but using a different example? Do we have a different example? Do I have unique insights to say on a different example? That would like start the process. So, if if my uh my like head of content pulled this and he he thought we would have something good, he would put it in the list for us to review. If he thought it was like too junk foody, he would pass, right? But the reason why like that's helpful is

27:28all these are on target and they're the best performers by the people in my niche. So it just focuses your yes no process super dialed. So he'll do this uh daily or every other day and he builds a Google doc that has tabs on the side and every tab is like a separate idea. He's only putting the ones on there that he thinks we have something good to say, right? And it's based on the whole corp like I've just trained him over time like the whole corpus of everything I believe. He's seen all my YouTube videos. He knows kind of like our isms, let's say. Then we get on a

27:56call. I like to do it twice a week where he'll pitch me each one and be like, "Here's what I found. This crushed. Here's what I think we could do. What do you think?" If I don't have something unique to say that's like contrarian and interesting, we kill it. If I do have something unique to say and I'm like, "Ooh, that's cool. We should use this other video as the example." Or, "Ooh, we could bring in this one framework that I talk about and like, you know, I'll I'll construct it." We we green light it and we put it into like approved bucket. We'll go through that

28:22call like we just did one today for an hour or so. And what that gives us is like eight to 10 approved ideas where they're validated by data. I know we have something interesting. We went back and forth for five minutes on the call for each idea and like kind of brainstorm the best option. And then from there I know I can go into the scripting phase. So that's kind of like the research flow. Now he's most for short form mostly he's using sand castles. Like he doesn't really scroll that much. Uh for YouTube he's looking at uh or like for for tech ideas he's looking at Twitter and other other

28:52things like that like email newsletters around tech. But for like Callaway marketing, the marketing ideas, he's pretty much just looking at this. So that's the how do we get new ideas just on the topic front. How are people doing this before they there was a tool like this? Were they just like manually? Manually with like uh bookmarks and folders and spending a lot of time on their

29:14phone. Yeah. like they either had a person like a social media strategist or them and they were scrolling for like two to three hours a day and they were having to go through all the noise, all the nonsense is not on target and then they'd have to see all the ones that are like mid- performers. Then finally they'd get to some bangers and the ratio from my research was like one out of 10 or one out of 20 would be like even close to potentially relevant and then you'd have to see it. You'd you'd bookmark it or you'd save the link into a notes file. You'd have a bunch and

29:40then you'd go through this process of like is it relevant? Is it not? So, this just speeds up a lot of the research time. So, you don't have to spend all that time doing the the finding. Right now, we also have like this automations feature, which I think is pretty sick. You can set up these rules that will automatically deep analyze whichever

29:57videos you want based on the conditions. Right? So, what I'll do is we have this one on that says for any of the channels in our list, as long as there's a 5x outlier score on the video and it has above 2% engagement, we want you to autoprocess it. So it'll automatically be analyzed. And what that means is when it's analyzed, it's ready to be pulled from in Claude, right? Because we have the MCP set up. So we could just set up a daily scrape that's like, give me the best performing videos of the day today, every day. And we could set that up as a

30:25scheduled task. It can do that. I mean, it could it could just give you the video to like link out without analyzing it. But by analyzing it, we can also have it say, "What are the common topics that are working?" And it can just know because it's already done all this analysis for you automatically. So, this is just like one way to speed it up cuz you you can tell like my whole thing is like how do we speed this up as fast as possible and get as much signal as we

30:46can in the workflow. This clearly solves my topic ideation and even to a degree hook problem because I can see how this is working. The next place where I feel like I would fall down is if the video is too long or in some way like the structure of the whole video goes off the rails. Is the answer to just use this analyze feature and look at the structure of these and make sure I'm following fairly closely to it and then just be relentless in the

31:16edit. Yeah. So, there's two ways. So, when you're when you're first starting and you don't have a ton of your own data, like you don't have a ton of your own videos, the best way would be find a creator that you like, like let's say Ganon, find the a creator where you like the flow of. It's not like you like the look of his stuff cuz that's the visuals. It's more like you like the way he explains stuff, you like the flow of his storytelling. You can use this transcript and you can either look just look at it and be like, "Okay, roughly speaking, these are the sections." We

31:39also have a feature right here that's show sections. You just press this. So, it breaks it down into like the five parts or they're not always five, but this in this case there's five parts. So, you could then say, "Okay, cool." Like, if I'm going to storytell, but I don't want to I don't want to copy his stuff. We need a hook. We need an intro to the series. Then, in this case, he's doing a setup tutorial. There's a live demo and a payoff. So, like at the at the roughest strokes, you could copy that structure. At the most detailed strokes, you could take his exact script

32:05and then try to translate it into your own. Now, you could do this manually or of course you can take a hundred scripts from Ganon, put it into Claude and be like, I want to understand what the best performing structures are storytelling wise from the scripts. Make me a skill file template and then when I jump in a topic, write a script for me in that way. Now, I likely would not just just go with that. Like, I would take that and then I'd tweak it. That's going to be 90% of the way there. But that gets you again like it puts guard rails on what you should do when you don't know

32:33what I recommend doing once you have a minimum amount of videos for yourself like 10 to 20 videos you know let's go to mine I have all of my videos analyzed so of course I can look one by one like if I sort by outlier score my eye is trained on content now where I can see like let me go 60 days so we have all of them in there I can see like okay this was about kind of content strategy this was about AI tools this was about storytelling this was about formats This is about strategy. Strategy. This one I think is storytelling. Storytelling. So

33:04I'm starting to see like common buckets like I can just look at it and see. But on the on the story structure side, the storytelling like with the script, you could just take these and once they're analyzed, you can again like export the data or use claude and just say, "Hey, I've made 20 videos. Can you look at the top the top five performers and just help me understand like what is the common structure or flow of the script that's working well for me? let's turn that into a template or turn that into a skill file and then when I feed you a new topic, can you write the script or

33:32at least guide me into what those buckets should be? To your point, like that'll that'll speed up a lot of the confusion. I still think you need like writing is the number one creative tool. Like I believe writing is the most important skill. I think you believe that as well. So I never want to like fully outsource every word I say to this, but like as a as a 75 85 90% of the way their first draft automatic, it's pretty sick. And then you can tweak from there. Yeah, I agree. Um the the conflicting feelings that I get when I think about processes like this is if

34:03you remove all of your own creative work and writing from it, which you totally could. Like I could make this totally data driven and totally like automated formula from this and it would probably get results and I just know that would be like not satisfying for me either. Like what I like about these this analyze tools and these headers that you have in this transcript, I can teach myself to fish with this tool. I don't have to let

34:29the tool fish for me. Exactly. The way I like to think of it is so in in the content workflow, you've got topic, you've got research or like substance, you've got hook, script, record, edit, post. In each of those little little modules within the flow, you can decide to turn it all the way to 100 on data or all the way to zero on

34:49manual. and you can pick where you want. So like for me, where I'm at right now is I really like using 100% data to guide me on the topic buckets so that I know where to start fishing. Then I look at my own my own data. Like the most valuable thing like just on YouTube, the most valuable data for you on YouTube is your own channel. Same thing here. But until you have your own data, you just guiding on the topics that make the most sense from other people is the best way to do it. For substance, the contrarian

35:13insight, I'm relying on my creativity. I'm not really like taking other people's insights cuz I find that's really like the sauce that makes it unique and that's the creative challenge for me is like okay how do I take this 30 days of content topic and make it unique. So I came up with this new

35:28mechanism and like that did pretty well. So on the substance I'm doing it full creativity on the hooks and the scripting. What exactly what you said is where I'm at which is like the goal is to make your brain full of what works so that when you flow naturally creatively it's already infused in there, right? So like you just when I look at this I'm like okay let me study right here. Let me study what this is. When I make another one I don't copy paste it. I just read it just like copy work or like any form of training yourself on a skill. I'm reading it and I'm like, "Oh,

35:58okay. I see like how that flowed and that didn't. Okay, now I know." So, when I go to write from scratch, it's kind of like in my brain already. The way of doing this, that's the like most manual way to use data, but still be fully creative. You can of course dial that a little bit more where it's like, cool, I'm going to start copy pasting this one that worked. It's my own words, but like I'm going to start here and then edit around it. The the full automated would be like literally just rip this and change a couple words. So to your point, you can season to taste on this

36:25depending on how much creative expression you want. I don't think you can fully build an AI factory pumping it out with zero creativity and cut through. I just think there's too much supply and it's going to trend towards average because most people are doing that and they're coming up with the same stuff. So this is where like I call it data enabled creativity. That's my like big theme or thesis that I believe in is like using the data to guide you and then allowing basically freeing up all of your time to be creative and using data for everything else. What if I took one of your uh one of these videos that

36:57we're looking at on screen right now and I removed all visuals? The cut stayed there, but it was just you and it was just captions. How big of an impact do you think that would make on the performance of that video? A pure yap with zero graphics, which is kind of what you're describing, right? like full A-roll U and captions ba basically the way I the the framework I use to look at this is like a picture is worth a thousand words right so if you have no visuals on the screen you're relying on the viewer's imagination to to come up with if they're a visual

37:26learner like I am they have to imagine what you're saying and try to get comprehension from that more technical or the more complex or the more like out there ideas you're talking about the harder it is for people to imagine it's a spectrum right it's like the more work you the more frontend effort you apply to the production, the le the the easier it is to carve a moat visually because there's just less people putting in that time. However, to your point, the more resource intensive it is. So, you have to just experiment along that spectrum and figure out what you are happy with and then ultimately what converts into

37:58emails. That's that's a really critical thing too. Amazing. Well, I will link sand castles in the description for this. That's fantastic. If you're a business owner, hopefully this is helpful to you. Definitely free stuff below, so feel free to check it out. Now that you've seen exactly how Callaway structures his content research, you'll love seeing behind the

38:15scenes with Riley Brown, too.