How to Build a Content System That Makes $1M a Month

0:00Right now I'm making six figures a month in profit. Your total following is around 1.3 million. I went from 0 to 300,000 total followers in like the first 6 to 8 months. Walk me through the process of how you're [music] putting content out right now. Everything is art and science. If you were to approach organic content like a

0:15scientist, what would that look like? The content workflow for short form is [music] idea, research, script, record, edit, [music] post. So at every stage, how can you use data to derisk [music] your failure? You did not set out to become a YouTuber. You set out to create a distribution engine that you owned. I wanted to figure out how to build a machine that could [music] print a

0:37million dollars a month in net profit. Welcome back to the Creator Spotlight podcast. My name is Francis Zer and today we're speaking with Callaway, a creator and entrepreneur whose specialization is in helping other creators produce high performing video. He recently released an app called [music] Sand Castles that helps other creators research what types of videos are performing well in their niche. Pretty interesting app. I had a good conversation with him. I think you'll

1:03enjoy it. What I understand you make money in three broad ways right now, which are your creator income, which is mainly brand partnerships, your academy product, and then your short form video research tool, sand castles. That's the three buckets. Exactly. Yep. And I can kind of break that. You want me to break down like the logic behind

1:22it? Yeah, please go ahead. Yeah. So, basically when I first started out making content, I knew I didn't want to be like a famous influencer. That was never the goal, right? So, I I often say like the only reason I started making content is because I knew that attention is the new oil and my cars need gas. I said that to you before and like cars cars being businesses, right? So like I had to learn how to make content and I knew that if you make content in a highv value niche eventually there is brand deal money there to what degree varies depending on the niche the type of

1:54content long versus short but ultimately like I wanted to funnel that traffic to offers because that gives you a lot more leverage and you can scale uncapped. So my whole vision was learn how to make content, build an audience, figure out what that audience wants, build an offer around that audience. So I started down this like tech path. I picked tech for two reasons. One, I was interested in tech. Two, I knew the brand deals would be as lucrative as possible. So, I knew that would be like cash flow to fund other things. And as I started going down that route and getting brand deals, I quickly realized I couldn't build a

2:28product or service for that audience. And we can talk about like how I came to that conclusion, but this is a very common creator trap, which is you build an audience towards towards an area you're interested in, but you don't really want to play in forever and you can't figure out how to build a product or service for that audience because the audience is super fragmented. Uh [clears throat] like they they they encompass a lot of different domains, demographics. And so you realize, shoot, I'm kind of stuck on this media treadmill where I can monetize fine for brand deals and affiliates, but I really

2:58can't build my own products and offers. So I realized that. So I had to start from scratch and think, okay, where would the highest value audience be? That's typically business owners. And then what do I have from a skill perspective that I can package and monetize in a product or service that a business owner would buy. So I started down that road. And that's ultimately where we got to software is is what I want. the kind of the business model and the the kind of skill set that we could package. So then I worked backwards from there to build a new audience. But just to like kind of make it crystal clear,

3:28yeah, I've got three buckets. Media, info, we'll say, which is like this membership slash uh curriculum model, and then software. Let's let's talk about the numbers, though. So, you don't have to tell me precisely how much money you make. Um I know you used to do a bit of that in your blueprint newsletter. Maybe maybe you still want to get into it. Maybe you don't. Um, but between Sand Castles Academy, the creator stuff, I would love to hear how much money you think you're going to make this year, but if you don't want to say that, you can tell me maybe like the comparable how it compares to your previous salary

4:00when you were working in consulting. Yeah. So, right now I'm making six figures a month in profit. We can we can leave the uh degree of to which that is open a bit in terms of how how big or small on the six figures. We'll we'll leave that. It's a bit fluid. Mhm. Um it's probably in the 5 to 10x range of my previous

4:21salary is where I'll end up this year. Um and I was a management consultant. So the goal kind of like to set the stage, the game I set for myself was could I figure out how to build a machine that could print a million dollars a month in net profit. Right? So I was saying like 10 million a year, but we'll say 12 for legit math. And so as I started down the journey, right, because you have all the puzzle piece options in front of you, you can play any game you want in any way. I was just like, "All right, let's

4:51start at the end. What's the objective? A million a month in net profit and let's work backwards." And I I wanted to give myself I'll play the game forever. Like the whole the whole point is a forever game, but I wanted to give myself 10 years. So basically like in year 10, could I build a machine that would print a million dollars a month net profit for me? That was where I kind of started. And so [clears throat] when I the reason I say that is cuz when you think in terms of salary, it's like not even it's it's it's almost like not even comparable, right? It's apples to

5:18business owner. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So I'm in year I'm just I just started year three of this path. So I wrote this down last night. So as we record your total following is around 1.3 million. You've got 40K on one dormant YouTube channel, 288,000 on your main channel, 394,000 on Tik Tok, 398,000 on your primary Instagram, 111,000 on your separate tech Instagram, 29,000 on LinkedIn, a measly 10,000 on Twitter, and undisclosed amount across your two newsletters, one of which is dormant. Um, so that's a lot. Tell me a little bit about your channel mix and

5:56how these work together for you. Yeah. Yeah. So to give to give the arc, I started with tech short form. Tech because I wanted the brand deals and I was interested in it. Short form because I could learn the fastest. Okay, cool. That was like pod number one. So I had like Instagram tech and Tik Tok. Brand deals started coming in and after five or six months or whatever. I kind of I think I went from zero to 300,000 total followers across those two, mostly Tik Tok in like the first six to eight months. And again, it was easier then because there were so few people. So if

6:24you just hammered volume, you could grow faster. So that's what I started with. Then I tried to do tech YouTube but YouTube was super hard. The a lot of it was editing which I didn't want to do. I didn't understand thumbnails. I didn't understand the packaging. So I was just like bad at YouTube. So I had short form working but like long form tech was not working. So I kind of just like abandoned that. I had like a rogue interview with Zuck uh that I put on the channel which like grew a lot of

6:47as well. Right. Yeah. And Daniel X. So like that was my my two episode interview era was those two. So like I had that right. But then to the point before I wanted to build proper businesses and when I looked at the landscape I was like oh shoot I'm kind of capped with respect to what I can do with this tech audience. So the way I look at it is like it's a house on

7:08the beach. I make organic videos which increases the property value. Occasionally I have a tenant come in that's a brand deal. They'll pay me for a video. They rent they rent the house for the weekend and that's like a good property that spits off uh you know one to two million a year in revenue. that's great, but like I'm capped there because there's only so

7:27high you can go with these brand deals. There's only so much that a brand is willing to risk on a single video. And so I'm I'm pretty much at that cap, you know? So I could always increase volume, but the pricing power is like limited. You're capped out. So that's where I was like, okay, I need to build a second audience, but this time I need to build it where I could actually sell a product or service that I want to build. So I knew I kind of started with the business models. I knew the two business models that I was interested in most were like

7:53a premium membership, premium academy and a software. Those are the two things that I wanted to build the most, but I wanted to build them for people like me, business owners, entrepreneurs. And so what I'm uniquely gifted at better than most people I've come across is taking a complex thing, distilling it down, and explaining it into terms where people can apply it. And what what what the truth is is like every business needs more lead genen. The most important thing for a business is leads. Content is the best way, the easiest way, the

8:24cheapest way to get high quality leads. So that's the number one thing they're all focused on. The most important thing happens to be the thing that I'm world class at and I'm really good at explaining. It's like it's a perfect fit for what I'm good at. And so that's why I started down this path of like, all right, I don't want to do a course. I don't want to do the info thing. I just want to build software for these people because I want to I love product. I want to like get really good at product. So at first it was just like I need an

8:52audience of that I can attract business owners. I'm going to build software for them. I'm starting at scratch. What do I do? I could either do another Instagram Tik Tok thing or I could try YouTube. So I was like well I think YouTube is more valuable and I haven't learned that skill yet. So let's go YouTube. So that's why I started building the Cala marketing channel on YouTube. A because I wanted I thought it'd be more valuable and you just have more sell throughability to the software and B that was a skill I didn't have yet in the content repertoire and so I wanted both. So I started down that path pretty

9:21quickly. I was like oh we could just build a software that you know productizes the my full short form sauce like the Lego bricks essentially. We can build a software for that. So, we started working on the software and obviously that takes time to build, but what I realized is it's really hard to build software in a vacuum when you're not talking to the customers every single day. So, like me as a creator, I'm customer number one, but us building software just based on me alone is not fully derisked. A better way would be to get a group of people that would pay for the software to test iteratively on the

9:57way and verify that everything you're building works obviously, right? like you want to test it. So that's where that's when I added the academy layer in the middle. Wait, wait. So the academy layer because I I haven't been able to find as much information on on this publicly, right? So the academy layer is really just a focus group for the software where you're probably providing hands-on, you know, services and like like coaching

10:18people a little bit. I don't know. You'll get into it. But the academy layer was a solution to building the software, not just people demanding that you educate them in a different way than just content. Exactly. So, the reason you don't see it anywhere is because I don't push it anywhere. Nobody knows I have this. Like, the only way you would know is we launch it a couple times a year via my email list only. I never post publicly about it. And that's because I'm very conscious that I don't want to be branded as like the course guy. I don't

10:45want that to negatively taint my brand. And so, however, I had a YouTube audience of business owners. I had a software for business owners. But to make sure the software was built for what they need, I added a focus group layer in the middle. Now, instead of me paying to get that focus group, I'm having the focus group pay me so that I'm double dipping, right? So, you turn your cost center into into a profit center. So, what would I have to offer that focus group to make them pay me and it be a win-win? Well, I could give them the full system that I have codified in

11:23notes slashvide. That's basically a course. I can give them real-time feedback. I can give them access to me one-on-one to help with their problems. I can also give them free access to the beta versions of the software to like get their feedback. And so when you start to put it together, you're like, "Oh, any company building software would love to have a group of 100 to 200 people that are paying them to give them feedback." And that's that's effectively what it is. And so that's how I got to oh, I have content YouTube. I have the academy which I take all of my formulas and I test them via info to people to

11:57make sure they work and then we take that and put it into software and so that works it works pretty well. Yeah. One thing kind of as an aside that I'm seeing here, there's this pattern. You're I don't know maybe third, fourth or fifth person I've had on who is a creator who's really kind of entrepreneur first who comes from a consulting background, whether it's Deote or whatever. And there's a very clear pattern. You were just saying, you know, a few minutes ago that a a big strength of yours is articulating these ideas and presenting them, right? Which to me from what I've seen of creators who come

12:29from a consulting background, like that's the skill. They're really good at building these systems that are focused on the monetization before the content. You you have the spectrum. You've talked about the the artist to engineer spectrum. I've called it the artist to business person spectrum. But it's basically the person who it's all about the idea and making the thing versus reverse engineering the thing basically to make money. Um but it's it's all coming across and the way that you're articulating this and your skill in articulating it, right? I I kind of see this is kind of like a subgenre of creator that I'm I'm making this up kind

13:00of as I go, but that that I've noticed like people like you who really who really know how to build the skill. You're talking about de-risking. You're talking about double dipping, right? Like this is all very like this is how you see the world as a consultant and you're applying these principles to the creator economy with content as the tip of the spear. It's like how do we build

13:17a system around this? It's a huge it's to be honest it's a huge advantage. Like Hormosi was a management consultant. Cody Sanchez was an investment banker. [clears throat] If you're if the people with backgrounds in investment banking or management consulting who end up going into this like online business creator world, they have a huge advantage. A the raw horsepower like those jobs require 70 to 80 hours minimum. And so you're just like trained to work more and get more done in less time. You're just trained to do that. B like you said, my brain works top down. Like I think in frameworks and systems and so

13:51I think some of the articulation you're you're forced to learn in that job which is which is helpful. Some of that like is is more nature like just fortunate. However, I'm not an artist. So like the this vibe you see if you like it like some people may look at this and be like that dude's a douchebag. But you

14:08you you can see the vibe. Like it takes a lot of work for me to get the art side of it to look good. like fonts and colors and like uh sets and aesthetics like my taste comes natural but I cannot execute that with my own hands. So it's it takes a lot of work for me to get that to the point where I'm proud of but the other stuff comes supernaturally the frameworks and the systems and like how one thing connects to the other how to explain stuff with metaphors. So yeah, I I think those those those typical corporate track is like the Ivy League into

14:42investment banker consulting that gets a bad a bad uh a bad rep. But is it bad rap or bad rep? I can see both. You know, I' i've heard I've heard it both. I think this is different than like a should have versus should have situation where it's should have. I think this you could say rap or reps.

14:59They both work. Maybe it's bad like a Yeah, I think it could be either. The point is those get hate on. Uh those get a lot of hate, but huge advantage. Yeah. Okay. Well, there's some other things I want to talk about before we get too deep into sand castles, but this is I I do want to mention it briefly because the way I see sand castles, your tool is that it's essentially the kind of tool that I imagine a consultant would, you know, let's say some media business hires a consultant. We want to get better at short form video. And this is the kind of tool, an internal tool

15:29that maybe they would build, right? Uh I there's this 44-minute walkthrough video you have and I wrote down something you say right at the beginning that I think articulates this really well. You say um regarding successful short form content creators that they're I'm quoting you here now. They're all building a system where they study the winners, what has worked either in their previous videos or in the category. They study what works, extract those components, the title, the hook, the concept, the idea, the storytelling. They're extracting components and then they're using them in future videos to try to derisk their effort so that they win more which is

16:03real consultant speak at the end there right but um but that's what this is like I mean you know if if people want they can go and watch this full 44minute video but it's basically this machine that let's say you're studying short form what you're going to do is you're going to have your list of traders that you admire that you want to mimic and learn from right and you're going to have a spreadsheet of like oh this is the hook they did and this is that like if you're smart about it that's what you're going to be doing and this basically automates that. So, it's like instead

16:27of, you know, going to the Goodwill bins to dig for vintage clothing or whatever, you're just going to the vintage boutique. You're paying more. But the good thing is right there and you can just do it a lot faster. Um, that's kind of my version of what the tool is is it's it just helps you study short form video and then make your own from it much more quickly. Um, maybe you

16:48can explain a little more. Yeah. Yeah, that was a the vintage boutique to Goodwill is a good metaphor. I like that a lot. Yeah. Basically the on the everything is art and science. So what does the artist do? The artist wakes up and they're like, "What am I going to make a video about today?" And they like come up with an idea and they just let it rip. Like everything is from their brain original. They shoot it original. They're not looking at inspiration. They're not looking at like references. They're just going. That is amazing. Like if you're an artist, it's a it's it's magic. Like it's modern

17:18magic. But the reality is ancient even. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 99.9% of people cannot do that. They don't have the taste or the raw creative horsepower to be able to do that. So the other end of the spectrum is more science, which is what most other facets of marketing do. Like paid ads, this is what they do. They're putting money at stake. So they go and they look at the data, what's performing better, and they double down on the winners. And so for me, it's like organic content just lags the like science adoption. But if you were to approach organic content like a

17:51scientist, what would that look like? Well, you would look at the people in your category that are already winning. You would study the videos that outperformed because everything's 8020. You would take the 20% that are doing 80% of the views. You would reverse engineer those winners and then you would figure out which ones you have to tweak to make it more uniquely you or improve upon their rep, but hold everything else constant. That's that is the science-based workflow for how you'd approach content. That is what all the the gurus that is what all the people that are good at this are doing. And so my thought was sand castles is a

18:23workflow to do that process faster, right? So if you go through every stage like the the content workflow for short form is idea, research, script, record, edit, post. That's like the six-step workflow. Every video you got to run through that loop. So at every stage, how can you use data to speed to derisk your failure? Right? So, it's like what's idea? Finding the list of creators that are already doing well in your space. How do you do that? Well, right now we're building a feature in Sand Castles where all you have to do is type in a couple words to describe your niche and we will give you the list of

18:59creators that you should follow. Boom. We derisk that like searching process. Not even d-risk, we just took the effort away from a couple hours down to zero. Okay, perfect. Then once you have that list, what do you do next? Well, you need to look at all the videos that those people have made, either as a cohort or like one by one, channel by channel, and figure out which ones outperformed. So, that would be outlier score. If you go on Instagram, you can't resort the videos in order by performance. You can only

19:25sort them by by post date. Yeah. In the videos tab, you can go and you can sort by outlier score, by views, by post date, by a bunch of other metrics that you can't get access to. And so, what that what does that do? It bubbles up the winners right to the top. So again, instead of you scrolling and scrolling and being like, what were the winners? We took all the effort away. So then from there, it's like, okay, well, how do you look at a video and dissect it, that's what we're building now as well. We're trying to build like an automated process for you to press one

19:51button and we just go do that discovery for you. Okay, nice. What do you do from now? Well, if you want to actually make a video on your own, you need to go to the scripts tab and then write in the oneliner of your idea. So like if a hook is working for someone else in your niche, could you save that hook as a

20:08template and then use it in the scripts? Yes, you can. We have like a vault feature that allows you to do that. Same thing with the story structure. So really what we're doing and yeah, it is kind of like a a consultant would approach productizing organic content. Yeah. Is taking those Lego bricks and then allowing you to get through that

20:26workflow as fast as possible. Okay. I I want to go get back into this in a little bit, but I do want to talk more about your specific process for making videos right now, which I I understand that basically what you just described, what sand castles is is kind of productizing your research process. Um, but tell me a bit more about your like I don't know if a week in the a week in the life or a month in the life here is is a better is a better frame, but for you from ideiation to postmortem on video performance, like walk me through the process of how you're

20:54putting content out right now for short form or long form. Let's start with long form. Let's start with long form and then we'll do short form. Yeah. So for long form, YouTube is a monster. Like it it is really really hard to produce one quality YouTube video per week. It's very hard. And so you either have to spend literally 30 to 40 hours a week yourself or you need a team. And so for YouTube, I kind of approached these differently. Like short form, I I did all myself and then I slowly hired myself out. YouTube from day one I started with the the A team. I like was

21:28not willing to do it myself because I knew it would be too much. This is what you said this is what you said like 20 minutes ago is that the whole time you just didn't want to become a YouTube video editor. You wanted to make put the content out there but you just it's just not what you were interested in to make to do to edit the

21:38videos for 30 hours or whatever. Yeah. And so the reason I I start with that on the long form is as I walk through the workflow, I'll call out like who on my team does which pieces and it's helpful to understand like how much or little I do in that workflow personally. Yeah. So YouTube is kind of a different beast where it's mostly a packaging platform. It's not really a video platform. The the title, the thumbnail, the actual premise, the idea, the click confirmation in the intro, that matters a hundred times more than the actual video itself. And so right away, most people are like, "Oh,

22:11YouTube, the people that make the best videos win." It's like, that's not actually true. Well, then we get to the difference between the engineer and the artist again. Mhm. Exactly. Yeah. So, and that's the thing. An artist will make an amazing elaborate video and then throw away a random thumbnail and their videos do poorly on YouTube. And they're like, "What? It

22:25doesn't make sense. My video is amazing. YouTube doesn't actually reward amazing videos. It rewards amazing packaging where the intro of the video supports whatever the psychological expectation would be in the package." But, you know, we we we can go down that rabbit hole as far as you want. But the point is, I have an ideas guy or like an ideas team. This guy goes out and canvases the social media growth space is like the niche that I have on YouTube. He figures out the titles, the thumbnails, basically the ideas that will work well from a packaging perspective. This is agnostic of like me, what I know, what I

22:59think would be good. Like he's doing this independently. Once a month we have a call where he basically goes down the list and says, "Okay, this would be a really good package, very clickable package on YouTube. Do you have something to say for this that would be compelling or not?" So I then can say yes or no. Like

23:13I have kind of have like a veto power. If I don't have something useful to say, we'll kill it. But the ones that I do have something good for, we'll keep. He organizes that list for me. And then that's what I use to decide which ideas I actually make on YouTube. So that that whole first part of like researching, coming up with the idea, coming up with a title, I don't personally do any work in that. This guy does it. And and and it sounds counterintuitive because you'd be like, well, if YouTube is your perspective, why are you not coming up with the ideas and the titles, and that

23:44should just click in your mind of how important the packaging is for YouTube? Like this guy and the team I work with, they live and breathe YouTube 24/7. So, they just they see the patterns that are working. It's it's more of like a psychological Again, going back to the very beginning, you did not set out to become a YouTuber. You set out to create a

24:03distribution engine that you owned. That's the goal here. The goal here is not for you to get 500,000 views on a YouTube video that you put your, you know, blood, sweat, and tears into. It's to get 500,000 views on a YouTube video on a topic that's related to what you want to sell. I would say I I I do put my blood, sweat, and tears. Yeah. Not not to say that fully, but the point the point your point is is right, which is basically like I'm divorcing my hours spent from like the self value, the self-reward that I extract from is like my goal is to spend the minimum amount of time to

24:35get the output, not the maximum. I don't I don't value the time in as like the the metric that matters. So yeah, so so he does all the idea stuff. When it comes time to make a new video, like I got to make one a week. I pull up this document we have. I go to the top idea on the on the page. I look at the title and I'm like, "Okay, what should I make this video?" Like, like, "What should I say in the video that would map to this title?" Most people would think it's the other way around, but that that this is how pro YouTubers do it. So, then I just

25:01open a script doc. I've got intro, outline, outro is like the three sections. So, I start with the outline. Every YouTube video really is a listical to some extent. It's just breaking down things in a list. People, humans perceive information or comprehend information in chunks. And so whether you're saying here's the five steps to do something, here's the six ways to do something. Hey, I I'm going to go on this trip and here are the five things we did. It's all a list, right? It's all just like a list of things. So the outline in the video is me coming up with what are the five to eight things

25:33that I can say that will most uh transfer the most value and acrue the most trust to me relative to this topic. And we can get into like what that actually means. Like what does value mean and what does trust acrruel mean? Because I can go all the way down to the studs on that. But basically, I write the out I write the outline. I come up with the points. I fill them out with like a specific structure. I write the intro. Then we've got the full script. I record that script. I hand that script off to an editor or I hand the recording off to an editor. He edits it. I don't

26:04touch it. I've got I've got a a team of two editors that are amazing. Uh so they they do it. I'd never touch it again. And then I also hand that raw recording off to my thumbnail designer who comes up with uh three to five different thumbnails and we ABC test three of them. So that's kind of like the flow for a YouTube video uh you know

26:21from idea to post. Okay. Yeah. I one thing I do want to linger on the trust acru bit but maybe the angle into this something I noticed I watched your most recent YouTube video which is titled storytelling is easier than you think. It's 28 minutes long came out a few days ago 14,000 views. and I watched your most popular YouTube video which is how to become a master storyteller 11 minutes long 1.9 million views. They're very similar. And this, you know, there's the similarity in a lot of the videos you make, which is it's it's story. It's it is storytelling advice and it's this list format you're

26:52mentioning. Um, and you know, it's some of the list is different. It's in different orders, etc., which is not a dig, right? Any evergreen topic like this, you're going to be essentially talking about the same thing. On this podcast, very often I'm talking to people who if it's like a local media creator, right? I've talked to a few people like that and we're usually talking about the same topic just a slightly different lens on a slightly different day, right? You end up talking about the same things. But um what I want to ask about here is the kind of reorganization and returning of these evergreen topics and is this just a

27:25matter of your packaging people, your ideas guys like oh here's the title. I know that we can that you have this beat and you can kind of just you know write the script to this beat again but in a slightly different way. You know, people say that every author writes the same book over and over. That's kind of what

27:40I'm asking. Yeah. I mean, the the substance in a lot of the videos does differ, but I can see how from the outside certain videos that are on the same topics could seem repetitive, right? Espec es especially the intros, like the intros are fairly repetitive. So, the reality is the best way to create new winners is to study

28:02your own old winners and replicate them. If you don't have any old winners of your own, then you want to look at competitor channels. So, it's like when I first started out, if you look at those videos on the the bottom of the YouTube channel, we didn't have any of our own winners. So, we're looking at competitors and we're trying to figure out like, okay, how can we pioneer a new lane with but still leveraging what's already been proven to work, but once we have proof of winners, you want to recycle those winners as much as you can from a packaging perspective. The actual meat of the videos are completely

28:30different. Like the the one I just posted was all about this frame this concept of story loops where I explained this like loop concept. I had never talked about that before. The 1.9 million view had like six things about storytelling that I had never talked about before at that time. They're completely different videos, but they're both about storytelling. And so I I think the the first thing is like if you have winners, you want to try to replicate those winners until you have proof that those winners cannot be replicated, which maybe this latest video is proof of of that. But the the reality is for YouTube, you have your

29:00niche. So mine is like social media growth. And then the way you come up with title formats is you derive it's called interest topics in your niche. Interest topics are just like the subbucket of things in the niche that people struggle with if you're doing educational content. So for social media growth, what are the interest topics? You could have scripting, storytelling, editing, uh growth, posting tips, idea tips, the algorithm, right? These are like the core topics within the social

29:28media growth bucket. Things that are always worrying the creator. Yeah. Exactly. And and so within those things, there's a bunch of pain points for each one that people struggle with. So like for scripting, it would be like, "Okay, how do I actually write the script? How do I write the beginning hook of the script so that it actually works? How do I keep attention throughout?" And like you you keep going down. You could have a list of like five to 10 pain points for every single one of these interest topics. And so the the the idea guys job is to figure out what interest topics within the niche work

29:57the best in terms of driving the most views. And then my job is to figure out what are the pain points in those interest topics that people are struggling with and what can I say to close the gap on those pain points. So the reason you're seeing so many storytelling videos or so many hooks videos is because for my niche, what we've gleaned from the data both from my own channel and competitors, those are the interest topics that people watch the most. So, the reason you don't see that editing videos or ideas on my channel is because I've made a couple of those before, but the video the views

30:26weren't that good because those as a percentage of like view share is lower. And so, it see it'll seem repetitive when you analyze it at a at a channel level like you zoom out. But that's why we're we're doing that is cuz like storytelling is a hitter. It's been hitting. No, no, no. Certainly. And I want to say too, it's like I mean the viewer, right, is like this problem never becomes irrelevant. Like I watched both of those back toback last night and I wasn't thinking like oh this is boring like I just heard this. It's what I'm thinking is oh he's right like I need to try

30:55doing that thing and I'm still haven't tried it since the last time I watched that video. Right. And over time, the subscriber to your channel, you know, they they watch this video that maybe has two or three of the same items in a list a couple months ago, and they're watching this video now that has a couple of those items again, but in a different order, and they still have that problem, and they still haven't figured it out, and they still want you to tell them, "Here's the thing, because they forgot what the thing was, and they didn't do their homework." Right? So, that that's what I'm saying. It's like

31:21that's just the nature of this kind of thing. It's it's what I do, too, right? Like a lot of the in the newsletter we do the steal this tactic section at the end where it's like uh what's one thing that's really actionable that we learned from this creator. I've been doing I've done a hundred almost of these and so there's not you know it's there's only so many there's not that many. Yeah. Just different context in a person doing it in a different niche or whatever but there's lead magnet six or seven times just done in a different way. Right. So that's what I'm saying is like that's

31:49the nature of making this kind of educational content is you often are saying the same things time and time again just in a new moment with a different context and it doesn't decrease the value if if the audience is is receiving it well. Right. Right. And the reason the reason why it it can seem repetitive is because like I've gleaned in my own worldview that like to solve X problem you need to

32:15do A B C and D. If I believe that to be true today and then six months from now after everything I've done, I still believe those four things to be the solve, then it would be it would be uh injustice of me to make up EFG and H when that EFG and H is not what you need. You need ABCD. It's like the people haven't learned ABCD. So it's like me saying ABCD again with different examples is more me trying to improve the absorption rate but not needing but I don't need to substitute the actual meat of it because

32:44I still believe that to be the answer. So that is to your point that's something that I've struggled with on YouTube is like it's not that I've said everything there is to say but like the answers are there. If you want to win with content there is no better place than just binging my channel. Like all the answers are right there but people still struggle because the absorption rate of those answers

33:06varies depending on watching on 2x. I mean you having like the uh the academy product too, right? That's then where people that's where the absorption rate is much higher because I imagine there's you know some kind of cohort or community thing going on. A classic example of this. I had Matt McGary on almost a year ago. Um he's you know the newsletter guys is his his thing and he has his newsletter where he tells people how to grow a newsletter. He has his I

33:29think it's like 800 bucks or something. I don't know his course where he people can join and it's a higher ticket and you know a little more of their time and there's more accountability. And then he has his agency, right? And it's just how much of your own time versus your money are you willing to trade to get the results. And usually if you give the money, then you have access to a group

33:47of people. There's more accountability. The absorption rate is higher. Uh but so I mean so much of like watching educational content comes down to sort of like entertainment and like just kind of dreaming and fantasizing about doing the thing as opposed to doing it, right? Which is uh but we we should move on from this topic. One thing I I do want to talk about briefly is the the voice that you do. you're really good at this voice and talking right now. Sometimes when I when I'm podcasting with people and they haven't really done it before, I feel like I'm so pro and you know, my

34:14voice is is great. You right now I'm like, man, you're like you're running circles around me. You're so good at articulating, saying your words very clearly, which I'm now trying to do and focusing to break the fourth wall a little bit, but um I know you used to be a rapper and we were talking when we started, I think before we started recording about how you do put this on and your brain was trained on on making all the short form. So now even in the long form you have this voice that you

34:38do which we could call it video voice. We could call it creator voice. It's not just you. It's it's it's a norm in the space. You know that I've seen like SNL skits making fun of people doing it in various ways. Tell me a bit about video voice and how you got good at it because you didn't have it in that Figma design

34:53tip video I brought up. To be to be fair, I I hate that I h I hate that I have the video voice. So, I I I think there's a difference between enunciating your syllables and then performing with like a performative tone. I hate that I do the [clears throat] performative tone to be honest. Most of the performative tone thing is just uh like being self-conscious that my average my average vocal energy is pretty low. Like this this is how I actually talk, right? So, if you listen to this, you're like, "Oh, that guy's pretty chill." Like, I sound very chill but the reality is re relaxed doesn't

35:24cut through when people are watching a bunch of performers. So, I have to elevate my or I thought I needed to elevate my like delivery to be a little bit more energy. So, like if you were imagining blowing a certain amount of air through a a fixed hole, I'm just blowing more air through it, which is creating like a little bit of a louder,

35:42more punchy delivery. But to be honest, I I really don't like that I do that because when I watch it back, it seems one click disingenuous a little bit if you don't know that that's not how I normally talk. So, or if you know if you know that's how I don't normally talk. So, yeah, it is what it is. I think the real skill is the enunciation and the rhythmic flow of the words, but you can, like you said, you can hear that in my voice now and I'm not doing the performative vocal tone. And so, how do I get better at that? I think you know that video Steve Jobs where

36:11he's like he talks about the calligraphy and then how you can only connect the dots looking backwards. That's like a big a big thing he talked about is like he did all these weird things that don't make sense, but then they all led him to be able to make the Mac. And when you look backwards, him dropping in on a calligraphy class at Reed College taught him about led him to be able to make fonts that were like not the typical one. I have I have a similar I think most people have similar things in their life where they don't really make sense from their childhood or or

36:40early like college years, but then they actually do influence their ability to perform well or progress in their career. One of those is rapping for me is like I just for whatever reason we started freestyling in college. I kept doing it. People would come to parties and like write down a list of topics and I would just like freestyle off the top and I would do that and then I I was in consulting. I hated my job so much. And like when I was traveling I'd be alone in the hotel rooms after work and I would just like write raps because that

37:07was the only thing I looked forward to. And like doing that so much trained my brain to be able to annun a think in metaphors cuz that's how raps work, but b like train my voice to be able to articulate quickly and clearly. So yeah, it's tough. I don't have a good like uh tactic for training that into someone besides just start rapping would be I

37:29guess the tactic. Well, I mean it's like we were saying even even in those early videos you didn't necessarily have it. you well you you still have the annunciation in this but you had this really relaxed tone that it does pop so much more when you do the voice and the tone right like it's it's just like a higher saturated image or you know higher saturated sound specifically yeah more vivid and so that's it's just what stops the scroll and it's like yeah we can we can say like oh it's a shame that you have to do that and maybe you feel you look in the

37:58mirror you're like why do I talk like that but uh but it's it's I mean it's just the name of the game and if you're engineering the game you have to play Let's talk about short form though. We walked through the uh the long form, the YouTube process. Walk me through the short form production process as of now. Yeah. So with short form, I'm making short form tech videos breaking down mostly new tech and AI AI models, AI tools. And so a lot of the short form game, you either have to be first to cover something or you have to be extremely unique in the way you cover it

38:27because of the like halflife of the videos. They just only last 48 hours or so until something has been seen. Let me interrupt you for a second with with something of your own. Another of your videos that I watched on YouTube that I liked was uh I cracked the social media algorithm full formula explained. We got the packaging here, but but it's good, right? You know, the whole it's you can't really reverse engineer a

38:49viral video, but also you can, right? And the things you say, there's six things. You say that you want to have either a common idea and be first to market or you find an uncommon idea, which is what you were just explaining. And then you need a large applicable audience. And then you want to filter that idea through a unique point of view. And then you need a world-class hook, a compelling story, and a bit of

39:09luck. And so maybe maybe I just uh totally said everything you were about to say, but I wanted to give that a little overview. Yeah, there's I mean there's a good video on the channel, that video you're describing. If if anyone wants like a breakdown of how virality works, go watch that video. I think it's one of the earlier ones. It might be Is it the

39:23first one on my channel? It might be. It's one of the first one of the early ones. So go watch that. but uh on the Callaway marketing channel. But yeah, in general, it's like what I describe with long form. It's a similar flow for shorts. You just don't have to do the title and thumbnail, right? So, it's still idea research, which is to find the angle,

39:39scripting, recording, editing, posting. Same deal. You just is it still all the people involved or is it is it more less people on this one? So, I started out doing all of it myself because I wanted to learn the skill. Now, I've got an idea guy for short form as well. Um, but instead of him going and writing titles, he's canvasing all the different pipes where interesting stories could break in my niche. So, it could be other creators like he's he's on sand castles with our list, like we're eating our own dog food, like with our list of 15 to 20 top tech creators. He's on there and

40:11he's looking at all of the videos they're posting and what's outperforming. He's also looking at Twitter, he's looking at Reddit, he's looking at blogs, he's looking at YouTube. He's trying to basically just create a 360 view of all these input pipes for what could be happening. And then he's he has criteria to filter down what would make for a good video based on the way we do it. And so he ultimately comes up with a short list of ideas and then similar to YouTube. We get on a pitch call. Uh YouTube's once a month for shorts we do like a couple times a week where he pitches me the

40:40ideas. So he's like, "Here's what I found. Here's what I think could be interesting. These people have done it already. Here's like a new angle." Or, "Here's what I found. nobody's done it already. We should jump on this right now or whatever. And so then again, like I get veto power of I don't think it's big enough. I don't think it's interesting enough. I don't think it's visual enough. Whatever the criteria or yes, looks good. And so that ultimately leads to a short list of videos that we should make. Similar to YouTube, I guess I go through script those videos, record them, hand them off to an editor. The

41:08editor comes back with the edit. Usually it's like 98% of the way there and then we post. So yeah, I guess if we are auditing the comparison for the workflow, it is pretty similar minus the thumbnail design. Uh cuz I've got like the ideas solved and then the editing solved. Mhm. Um going to Sand Castles now. Let's talk about it a bit. On the website at time of recording, it says that you have 43,157 users. Where did they come from? Did you achieve the goal of building this distribution machine and then building the product that that machine would

41:40serve? Yeah, we're we're on the way for sure. That's every single one of those has come from my content on YouTube. So, it's either it's either we have we have a couple different funnels that we're running. Uh it's either YouTube direct like I guess to to back up the way the way YouTube becomes extremely valuable is when you make the videos and then instead of running midroll ads as a brand deal, you I say you buy your own ads. So, but I don't have to pay any money to myself obviously, but like I'm I buy my own ads. So the ads I run owned media are of sand castles. Yeah, exactly. I

42:13make a video showing how sand castles could be used or not. Honestly, we plug it and then people go and hit the landing page. From from what I've seen of sand castles so far, what I see it as is it's really it's a research tool. It's it's a search engine for like for the structures within videos. I loved how you can kind of save like a Mad Libs version of what's the hook here and then if you save that, it will mad Libsify uh what what that script was. And it's like, oh, you know, X thing, Z thing, Y thing. It extracts that from what I can see pretty

42:43well. Um, exactly. But in current state, it sounds like you've been getting a lot of user feedback. In current state, what are users asking for most? What are the most requested features? Yeah. The biggest thing is on the very front end, a lot of the insights of what's working requires you to know who

42:59to look at to then study those videos. And so the people that already know which creators in their space are crushing, they love sand castles because they can come in, they can build that list and they can look at the like it really is like a marketer's dream from a data perspective. You can look at all the data and immediately the patterns pop out and then if you want to use the script the script writing flow that we have where you like you said you save the hooks and the style the story the writing styles as Mad Libs you can do

43:26it. I think it's super efficient to do. But if you like what you have in a claude project or chat project and you don't want to use sand castles for scripting, that's fine. Like you can just take the insights you've gleaned from what's working on the idea front out and do whatever you want. The people that don't know who to look at for inspiration. That makes it tough to then get inspiration obviously. So like for example, let's say you go on Sand Castles and you're a sewing machine review channel and you make videos reviewing sewing machines. Today, we don't have a way for you to search. I

43:58guess you could in the videos tab, but we don't have a great way for you to search sewing machine and get a list of the creators that we have on there that talk about sewing machines. We will have that very soon, like in the next couple weeks. Well, wait, let me say that. Like, to

44:08me, two things here. One, skill issue. Like, that's the whole point. Like, that's what differentiates somebody who's talented at using this versus somebody who can't really use it is you should know what you're looking for and you should know what you're trying to achieve and you should have already been studying the game a little bit. And two, I think I think uh you know, you don't want to just look at if you're a sewing machine reviewer or whatever, you don't want to look at other sewing machine reviewers. I that's that's kind of my whole thesis with what we do with Creator Spotlight and why I try to

44:32interview people from so many different niches, subject matters, business models, etc. I think there's more generally to be learned from people in niches adjacent to yours or people who are working in the same medium but in a totally different topic. Whatever it is, I I think I think it's, you know, the point should just be to look at what performs well and then it's going to perform well if you take it from that niche into your niche. It's not necessarily going to perform well if you're just trying to do the same thing that's already been done in that same

44:59niche. Yeah. And I would say that you would be correct but in the minority in terms of what we've seen in terms of user pattern. Like you should be able like we basically built a bazooka and then handed it to people and we're like can you figure out how to load the round or not? It's like the people that figure out how to load the round but they're like firing it all all day. But most people are like what do I do with this bazooka? Like they they don't know. You have to literally put their hand on it like load it for them. So that's what we're trying to do

45:27right now is if you imagine the workflow for short form being like 20 dominoes. We started out let's say scripting is dominoes like five seven and five six and seven. So we laid those first. Then we laid like two four and then a bunch a bunch after scripting. But now we're going back and we're like okay we missed number one. So we got to lay one. We got to lay three. Very soon we'll have the full domino chain where you can just tip it. And where we're going is we will automate the entire flow. So in theory, you will put in your profile or you'll put in whatever topic you make. We will

46:02automatically build the list of creators that are the best in the world at that or adjacent to your point. One click mine for the best ideas and Lego bricks that are working in your niche. One click save those as templates. One click write those as scripts and we would just hand you winning videos in 5 seconds for your niche where the scripts are already

46:22dialed that you can just record and go. So now the only point of friction is just in this in this ideal end state, the only point of friction is me in front of the camera having to make the thing. But the planning and the scripting and the research is productized. Yeah. And then we'll just we'll put in a hey genen avatar uh API in so you can like train yourself on an avatar and that'll feel lifelike and you won't even

46:43have to record it. So eventually it's it's just frictionless creation at the end. Yeah. Distribution in a box. That's that's what we're going for. The the editing really is the last frontier cuz that that cannot be AI fight away. Um eventually maybe through in three to five years there'll be a Premiere Pro type product or plugin where you can literally just have it auto edited but that is that is the last frontier. So well and then but then once that comes it just increases the value of of you

47:07know handmade editing. Exactly. So there I think I think the the visual packaging with the handmade editing will always be the kind of moat. uh because I think it's easier to look at 10,000 videos and identify the script patterns that are best performing at the moment and replicate those via AI than it will be to do that on the editing side. So yeah, the whole goal was like could we build a machine that if a business owner that doesn't know how to make content comes in, presses a couple buttons, content comes out, I guess they in this case they have to record it, so they'll still have to like do some work

47:40from there and then it will just drive leads. Last thing I want to ask about is this tension between working on the distribution and your initial thing. You said this a couple times today as we've been speaking and you said this to me when we first met that you never wanted to be an influencer. You didn't want to be famous but now you have this large audience and you are locked into the content production rhythm. Uh and there's some tension here, right? You also you told me that you you're working

48:05on being kind of a onename guy, right? Callaway and this is this is you're modeling this public facing version of you and it doesn't seem like you're going to be stopping. Stay focused on sand castles. Maybe another product comes later. Uh but I guess what I'm curious about is how you're managing that tension and if the goal is like 5 to 10 years from now you actually don't need the distribution anymore. You're just good or are you just kind of locked into I actually am an influencer. I am famous in this corner of of of the

48:35internet. What? It's tough. I I don't really I don't really think in those terms. Like I I don't I don't really think about too many moves ahead. Yeah. You know, like all I can do is just execute as well as I can on the strategy that I believe in. And right now that strategy is I need to own the distribution and then I need perfect alignment between the

48:58distribution and the products I sell. And then I guess the third thing is I need the products to actually fulfill the promise to the user. And right now that promise is people are not good at short form today and they need their short form to work as easy and quick as possible. So it's like all I can really do is focus as long as that strategically is a mission that I'm willing to embark on, which at this time it is, all I can do is focus on those

49:23three things with laser precision. I think people live in arcs, right? You live in seasons. And so like I'm not gonna be playing this influencer. I don't even consider myself an influencer. Like do I influence people? Yes. Butre Yeah, exactly. I'll always be an entrepreneur. Like that's that is a forever game. And like the the privilege of entrepreneurship is just being able to get to play the game forever. That's the whole point. And so I'll always be playing the entrepreneurship game. But at some point own distribution may go away. Like there might be so much AI content that's so

50:01good that humanmade stuff becomes Etsy. It becomes like the, you know, like as they say. Yeah. Yeah. And so there'll always be like the way we still pay $200 to go see concerts, there will always be the like cream of the crop human artisans that are making videos as their medium. But the the supply demand dynamics where a random person that's not that talented can post a video and get a million free views and drive that anywhere they want, that may not exist forever. And so as and I would be willing to bet that won't exist forever. So as that phases out, everything I'm doing may or may not be

50:40more or less important. Who knows? So, I think there'll be future arcs, but at the end of the day, an entrepreneur's job is to like find the gap and shoot the gap, right? Like, and just and just fill the gap with something. Shoot the gap meaning like go through it, not not destroy it, but like [laughter] and and just find something interesting to work on. So, I'm sure there'll be

50:59there'll be more things. There we go. Well, Cali, thank you for coming on. This was fun. Nice. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it. Of course. And listener, we'll see you next week.