Everything I Learned Growing From 0 to 2M+ Followers in 3 Years

0:00Three years ago today, I quit my job to go full-time as an entrepreneur. And I really only had one goal. I wanted to become insanely good at making content and eventually build a super valuable personal brand. Now, my highest conviction bet back then was that personal brands would become the single greatest business moat you could possibly build. And so far, that's turned out to be right. Now, over those last a thousand days, those three years, I've grown to over two million followers, generated billions of views on my content, built two top personal brands for myself across two different categories, tech and marketing, and I've grown three different businesses from

0:35zero to millions in revenue. Now, I say all this because in order to get those results that fast, I had to approach the content and personal brand building game a little bit different than everyone else I studied when I started. So, in this video, I'm going to do something a little bit different. I want to share the eight most valuable lessons that were critical to that rapid growth and success. And like always, a lot of these are non-obvious and the opposite of what you might think. All right, lesson number one that was critical to my success thus far is called bottleneck theory. This is a principle that comes

1:03from Elon. Hormosi talks a lot about this as well, and this is something I've been ruthlessly implementing myself since day one. If I could boil down my entire approach to content and business into one single principle, it would be this. Whenever you're working on something, you want to break the workflow down into individual component parts and then prioritize the majority of your time on the one that's the highest leverage or the biggest bottleneck. Because the truth is, and this was very hard for me to accept at the beginning, there are only a couple things that actually move the needle towards the results you want. 95% of

1:35what you think matters is actually a distraction and a much lower leverage activity. And so what I realized is that the whole game of business and content is just time allocation towards your biggest bottlenecks. Now you may have heard this from Elon or Hormosi before, but let me just explain what this means in practice with a few examples. Let's say my goal was to grow 100,000 followers as fast as I could. Well, the number one input to make that happen would be posting videos. Now, in the workflow of making a video, if you break it into component parts, you have these pieces. the [music] topic, the angle,

2:06the format, the hook, the substance, the CTA, the story structure, the visual layout, the visuals, and the audio. Those are the blocks or what I call Lego bricks that stack together to make a video. Now, most beginners would think, okay, cool. Those are the blocks. I just need to work on those in order as fast as possible and post as many times as I can and I'll get to 100K. And so most people would kind of linearly allocate their time across that flow, spending the most time on whatever pieces took them the longest to do. So things like the idea, the angle, the hook, the

2:36format, that would be done really quick. But then the script writing or the editing, that's where most of their time would go cuz those are longer tasks. The problem is that is the suboptimal way to prioritize your time if you're trying to make better content faster. Because it turns out the only components that really have high leverage that can create a h 100 times the views with just a little bit more effort are the topic and the angle which make up the idea. If you have a winning idea in content, you can pretty much use any format, any script structure, any editing style, and for the most part it'll be a banger. But

3:07if you have a losing idea, even if you execute perfectly on the hook, the format, the storytelling structure, and the edit, it's likely not going to do that well. That's how you know ideas are the highest point of leverage in the content workflow. So for content, it turns out the optimal way to allocate your time is to spend most of your time working on the idea and making the topic and angle that much better and then evenly distribute the rest of your time on everything else. That is how you grow way faster to 100k. Now you might be listening and think this is a little nerdy. Like why am I even paying

3:38attention [music] to this? But this way of thinking, breaking down workflows into component parts and then ruthlessly prioritizing your time towards the highest leveraged stuff, that is the single greatest productivity hack in business, in content, in anything you work on. This single principle is literally why Elon is worth a trillion dollars. It's why Horoszi has grown so fast over the last 10 years. Now, here's the issue that most people don't talk about. Often times, identifying which piece is the highest leverage is hard to do. And even if you do identify it, it's usually not the most fun thing to work on. And so most people, even if they

4:10know what they should be doing, they don't do it because it's just not that fun. But the people you watch that can force themselves to work on the highest leverage thing, even if they're not enjoying it the most, those are the ones that win the fastest. Now, just hit the nail on the head. This is how I would approach building a personal brand using the bottleneck framework that I just walked through. If you define a personal brand, it's just expertise or

4:30association at scale shared via content. So you have to ask yourself what is the bigger bottleneck? Actually developing the expertise or making the content. The biggest bottleneck, the higher leverage of the two is building the expertise because you can't have a personal brand without expertise in something. You could make the content but it will fall flat if you don't have the expertise. So if I were building a personal brand from scratch before I spend even a minute on content, I would first develop my expertise in something that I can build the personal brand around. Now, if you're watching this and you're an accountant and you've been for 15 years

5:00and you have legitimate expertise, accounting sauce, but you know nothing about content. Awesome. The expertise bottleneck has been solved and you can go to the next thing. Okay, so now what would be the bottleneck in the content? Well, like I said before, you would explode content out into that workflow and you'd realize the highest leverage thing to focus on are ideas. And you say, okay, let's zoom into ideas. What is the workflow to come up with better ideas? What does that mean? Well, great ideas are based on a lot of things. The most important one is contrast which

5:27comes from a contrarian insight. Okay. So zooming in how do we come up with contrarian insights. Okay. Well to do that the workflow is first we identify the common beliefs that a core viewer has and then we write down all the reasons why we don't think those beliefs are true and what we think is true instead. And then bam you have a contrarian insight. Now you take that insight ideas are solved and then boom you move on to formats and hooks and so on. So that means the formula or order of operations for how you should work on building a personal brand starts with expertise. Then once you have that

5:56expertise, you build contrarian insights. Then once you have those contrarian insights, the idea or angle is solved. Then you move on to formats. Then attention grabbing hooks and so on. Now I'll admit as I talk about this, I know that this way of thinking, it's kind of like more engineering, emotionless, processoriented, is not natural for most people. But learning how to think in this way and apply this to any problem you're working on, business, content, or otherwise, is the single greatest productivity lift you could have because it means you're not wasting your time on things that don't matter. Now, if you want to learn how to

6:28approach content and personal branding using this way of thinking, I've spent a long time cottifying this system. So, like prioritizing which thing matters and then building a system for how you figure out how to solve it. If you want, I've got a link below where you can work with me. It's the best way to kind of apply this framework. All right, lesson number two that's been huge for my success over the last few years is

6:46called avoiding the smart kid problem. Have you ever heard how people always say like, "Oh, the best entrepreneurs are D and F students and how the A students work for the B people and the B people work for the C executives and the C's work for the D owners." Have you ever heard that? To be honest, I always thought that was nonsense. It is way more helpful to be smart than dumb in almost every scenario when it comes to business content or anything. What I will say though is that smarter people have a much harder time getting out of their own way. I call this the smart kid

7:13problem. Smarter people tend to believe in their own head that they're good at thinking. And so they like to spend way more time thinking than actually doing. And this is why a students typically make bad entrepreneurs. That doesn't mean it's better to be dumb than smart. It means if you have the gift of being smart, you have to put in guard rails to prevent yourself from overthinking. Now, here's how I recommend you do this. If you're listening to this and it's

7:33resonating, this is what you should do. Most people, all the gurus advise you to spend a lot of time thinking about decisions before you make them. And in my view, that only applies when you've already made a lot of money and the absolute dollar value magnitude of those decisions is in the six or seven figures. If you're a beginner, that's not you. And so, the actual magnitude of your decisions is much smaller than you think. So, you should use a shot clock for all your decision-m. Anytime you make a decision, you only have 5 minutes to deliberate that in your head. At the end of those 5 minutes, you make a

8:03decision and you start acting. The worst thing that could happen if you make the wrong choice is that you retrace a couple steps and you go down the other path. But that is way better than not acting at all. Now, the thing is, if you're not that books smart, typically you lack the capacity to overthink. And so, whatever pops in your head, you usually start working on. And that's not an insult. Because of this, you get way more done. It's actually a superpower when it comes to business. So, if you're books smart or intelligent, whatever that means, you have to put in protections around your own

8:29overthinking. For me personally, I do not spend more than 15 minutes on any one decision. [music] And I do this, like I said, because most decisions are actually not that important, and I'm just wasting time delaying the action that needs to happen. Now, here's the other part of the smart kid problem. Smart kids were trained and rewarded for learning how to follow the rules. That's what teachers build the entire structure of school around. It's all rule following. Those rules were designed to keep you from breaking them. But the problem is in the business and entrepreneurship world, there are no rules. There are laws that you cannot

8:57break, but there are no rules. So, if you're a smart kid, you have to jailbreak your mind and unwind the decades of rewarding behavior around following rules. And you have to realize there's so many more ways to play the game. This is really hard for people that are super smart. It's easier for people that never followed the rules in the first place. This is why it's the smart kid problem. All right, lesson number three is about core business fundamentals. If you're building a personal brand in the hopes of one day monetizing and ideally building a viable business where you funnel that traffic into dollars for yourself, this will be

9:26helpful for you. An aspect of personal branding that most people ignore is what I call business design. And this doesn't come natural to people that didn't go to business school or haven't thought about business. Luckily, I did, so I had this kind of background. This is really critical you think about this. Business design is the answer to these three questions. Number one, what is the average price and margin profile of your products and services? Number two, what is the business model of the offer or product or service that you sell? And number three, what is the market that you're selling into? like who is the buyer demographically and what is the

9:58industry are you B toC B2B what industry are you selling into for margin price and business model you could either be low ticket which means low price or high ticket which means higher priced you could be low margin which means you keep not that many dollars or high margin you keep a lot of the dollars you could be one-time meaning they pay you once and never again unless you resell them or you could be recurring which is a subscriptionbased product you could be high fulfillment complexity a lot of work is required to get them the product or service they paid for or low fulfillment complexity. And there are

10:28variety of trade-offs like this, but those four are the most important. Life gets much easier when you build a business that is high ticket, high margin, recurring, and low fulfillment complexity. That is like the magical four horsemen characteristics of the best businesses. Now, there are only a few types of business models that fit these conditions. I would strongly encourage you if you're building a personal brand and trying to plug in an offer at the back end, you build one of these business models or else your life will be much harder. Agency services, for example, can be high ticket. You could sell 510K. Could be high margin,

11:0050, 60, 70% margin. Could be recurring, 5K every month. But typically agency services are higher fulfillment complexity. It requires multiple people and handoffs to deliver that service. It's an ARB on the hours of the fulfillment. Now with AI, you might be able to drop the fulfillment complexity down and make this an amazing business. And that's why agencies are very interesting service-based agencies in this AI era. Now, B2B software, especially sold to businesses, not like consumer bottoms up software, was the holy grail. High ticket, high margin, recurring, and almost zero fulfillment complexity. They buy, they get the software immediately, requires almost nothing besides sales. Of course, AI is

11:36commoditizing that away, so it's not the golden darling that it was preai, but it's still amazing. info coaching or memberships that can be super high ticket, high margin, recurring and low fulfillment complexity as well. Again, AI is starting to commoditize info away, but because of the personality modes that come from content and personal brands, there's still a viable path there. Now, on the opposite side, selling something like a soda that is low ticket, people buy it for $2. It is low margin, very competitive, 10 20% profit margins max. It is one time. You don't sell recurring subscriptions to soda typically. And it's pretty high fulfillment complexity. Obviously, once

12:10it's in the store, they just take it and buy it. But to get it in the store, the can has to be made and shipped and fulfilled, etc. It's pretty high fulfillment complexity. Now, are there huge soda companies? Of course, there are. But are you going to build a soda company from scratch on your own with no unfair advantage? Probably not. The truth is most of the personal brand driven businesses that you see are either dead or zombie companies that were built under bad business conditions where the personal brand traffic just couldn't outrun the low ticket, low margin, high fulfillment complexity problems. Now, the other side of

12:42business design is what market you pick and who you sell into. You can win in almost any market with almost any offer, but I recommend picking B2B and a rich customer, somebody who can spend a lot of money. This goes back to the high price point. Horoszi says this all the time and I agree based on what I've seen. It's so much easier to sell to a wealthy customer, high ticket, high margin than a broke customer, low ticket, low margin. Now, these things sound pretty obvious when I lay them out this way. Like if you had to pick the trade, you're like, "Yeah, I'll take the

13:08high price versus the low." But a lot of people don't think about this before they build an audience that they eventually want to sell something into. They pick a category that is not conducive to selling a business model that fits those conditions. Now, one of the other principles around business design is called the one by one by one rule. And I'm not the one who made this up. I actually forget where I heard it, but this is like a great pathy way to describe the way you should approach the funnel from traffic, funnel, and offers to have alignment. Now, this is one that I should have followed. I learned it too

13:37late. I'm paying for dearly. You'll notice in my ecosystem, I've got tech stuff. And then I've got marketing stuff. I make tech shorts. I had some tech longs. I interviewed Zuck. That's kind of my tech world. But now I also have marketing stuff. I've got marketing shorts. I've got marketing longs. I have marketing academy. I have marketing software. I've more vertically integrated on the marketing side, but I'm running two different things, two

13:54islands that are not bridged together. This is not what you want to do. One by one by one means one traffic source for one ideal customer avatar with one offer. And the reason why you don't want to do 222 is because 1* 1* 1 is one. 2 * 2 * 2 is 8. It's not two times the complexity. It's eight times the complexity with all of the different things that you're running. So, you really want to be as crystal clear as

14:17possible down one single through line. content, audience, product fit is ideally what you're going for. One content source, one [music] product, one audience avatar. Now, over time, you can add other content sources. You can add short form and long form, but you really want to build the ecosystem, the infrastructure around that core scaffolding on one by one by one. Of course, this is something I learned sooner. I'm split across multiple fields. I'm fighting battles on multiple fronts. That's not what you want to be doing. All right, lesson number four is more of a mindset mentality thing, and it is become the gold standard. This applies to content and personal

14:47branding, but it also applies to just like how you approach the business game as a whole. If you want to win fast and you're entering a crowded niche late, like there's other people with advantages, all you have to do to beat them is just become the gold standard in that space. And obviously, that's way easier said than done, but this is how you close ground on people fast. For example, I entered the social media growth space on YouTube like 18 months ago. This channel 18 months ago was a zero. There were probably a couple dozen people playing in social media growth before me that have been doing it for

15:15years. Many of them are probably watching this now. Now, 18 months later, I am the one with the most authority in this space. And if you don't think I'm the one, I'm definitely one of them. I don't say this to brag at all. I'm just saying this mindset of being the gold standard really works to close gap when

15:28you're entering a crowded category late. Now, I'm doing the exact same thing on my short form channel right now. If you go to Callaway Marketing on Instagram, I've gone from 0 to 50,000 followers in less than 90 days. That's a very crowded space with extremely big hitters because it's social media growth on social media. But I expect to own a good portion of the distribution of that niche by the end of 2027. Now, the way I close these gaps when I enter a crowded category super late, even though they have compounding advantage and I don't, is that I become the gold standard in the category. I obsess over becoming the

15:59best. And that means I want better ideas, better titles, better thumbnails, better edits, better substance in my stories, better articulation in my stories, better flow, better premium animations on the screen. I want better everything. I call it everything gold. That's my mindset. Number one for every category. I of course start with the highest lever ones. I don't focus on becoming the best on the lowest leverage. I start high leverage with ideas, titles, thumbnails in YouTube's case or ideas and short form case and then I work my way down. But I work my way down to become best at every single function as I can. Now to do this,

16:31especially when you don't have the skills, you want to hire the best possible people you can. If you don't have money, you pay with time. So you'll learn the skills. I didn't have money at the beginning. I had to become as good as I could in the tech short form space and I painstakingly obsessed over every single piece that I could. Eventually I got cash flow. I hired an A tier team and so then I attack in that way. This is something people don't tell you in the content world. Learning from experts in every facet or the people that are the best at content that you know is the

16:59biggest cheat code that you could unlock. That is how you get time compression and you close the gap. you're paying to close the skill deficiency because the truth is it feels like when you're a beginner looking at the expert or looking at the people in the top of the category, it feels like that distance is small, but that's only because you're looking up and you can't have perspective at how big the gap really is. The gap is much bigger than you think. And you don't realize that until you work with an expert. [music] So, if you want to accelerate the closing of the distance, the fastest way

17:28is just to pay an expert to extract everything they know and then apply that to yourself. Now, what I do is that every time I hire someone, I put them through a system that I've built around short form and long form to compress any skill deficiency they have left. I try to hire experts, but if they're still not the number one in the category, I try to compress that as much as possible. That is the cheat code for kind of building a team that can close the gap on anyone. Again, if you want those systems for content, you can work with me below. I've got them for short

17:54form and YouTube dialed completely. You can just have them. All right, lesson number five is called less info, less role models. This one's very simple. Most people think they need to increase the amount of information they're consuming because they're missing some secret hack or tip. And if they just increase the surface area of the information they listen to, they can find out what it is. The truth is there is no hack. There is no secret tip other than identifying the point of highest leverage and then smashing that button until the button stops working. So instead of increasing the amount of people you listen to, I actually

18:24recommend the opposite. You want to reduce your info diet circle as small as possible. less podcasts, less YouTube channels, less scrolling Twitter, less, less, less. Because the thing is, A, very few people actually know what they're doing. A lot of people are commenting on they've never actually done. So that's just polluting your brain with bad [music] information. And B, as I'll get to in a minute, this

18:44clogs up your creative pipes. Personally, I like to limit the amount of people I listen to per category to like two or three max. So that means for business, anything business related, I only listen to two people. For content advice, I only listen to two people. For marketing or paid ads, I only listen to two people. For branding, I only listen to two people. My job when I was a beginner is to prune all of my info diet down to just the high signal people that have actually gotten the outcomes that I want. And that's critical. If you want to grow fast and you want to build

19:14businesses that do millions in profit a year, I'm someone who's done that. You shouldn't listen to someone who hasn't done that in the domain that you're studying them for. See, the main problem with over consuming information is that your production or productivity is a one-way valve. You can either take in information or generate out information.

19:32But you can't do both at the same time. All those podcasts you're listening to, the YouTube videos you're watching, the tweets you're consuming, it's clogging up your ability to push stuff out and get stuff done. So, what I recommend, take your information diet, cut it by 90%, prune all the people that are wannabes that haven't actually done the thing you want to do. reduce that circle down and free up more capacity so you can push production out. Now, my goal with this channel was to become one of those two people, ideally the top, but I'm sure there's always more for content. You're like, "This guy is one

20:02of my, if not the content guy. I go to him for content. I don't go to him for other stuff. That's what I'm trying to become." And that's why I spend so much time in these videos reducing the fluff and really making the tactical takeaways as crystal clear as possible so you can actually apply them and get the result you want. That's my approach. That's been my approach. which is why I've grown so fast. So, whatever your niche is, you kind of want to bring that mindset and approach to it as well. All right, lesson number six is called find the boogeyman. If you're struggling with

20:29motivation in the early stages and you've identified what the highest leverage thing is, but you still can't really bring yourself to do it, I recommend finding the boogeyman. And the boogeyman is a villain. Find a villain. Someone to run from. Something to run from. Something you're competing against that you want to beat. This could be

20:44another person. It could be a movement. It could be a motto. It could be a group of people. It could be your childhood. It could be some scenario. It could be a brand that you feel like poorly treats people. There are a lot of different types of boogeymen, but you need to find one. For me, my boogeyman in the early days was my corporate job. I worked at Deote. I hated it. I hated the way they treated me. I hated the way they approached work. I hated the way they treated other people. I couldn't stand it. My entire goal at the beginning was that I wanted to make my entire annual

21:11salary in one day just to prove it to them that the way they approached things was suboptimal. That is an example of a boogeyman. And this works super well when you're in the beginning of your journey. The truth is hate fuel burns way hotter than aspirational fuel in the early days. Now, once you reach escape velocity and you get momentum, hate fuel stops working. So, you have to switch to a cleaner fuel source. And that clean fuel source could be focusing on a mission, helping other people, this kind of like long-term vision, goalbased thing. But at the beginning, when there are a million things to do and you just

21:38can't get yourself off the mat to get them done, finding the boogeyman, creating that hate fuel source that you're running from can be very powerful. All right, lesson number seven is called belief first, expectations next. And this one is mostly about mindset, but I find this to be extremely helpful. This sounds a little bit woowoo, but what you believe to be true will come true. There's something about the way the mind works where if you can really visualize an outcome that you want, you can pull reality to it if you can apply work accordingly. Like for example, I've known I was going to be successful for a very long time. I just

22:09had to allow reality to catch up to meet the vision that I had in my head. And to be clear, reality doesn't just magically get there. You have to apply a ton of work. But having that belief is critical to making that reality come true. And so what that actually means tactically is that belief has to come before the work. And then the work has to come before the skills. And then the skills has to come before ability. And

22:32then ability has to come before results. And then results have to come before success. All those things, those dominoes, all have to happen in order for you to get from belief to success. That's why success lags belief. But I don't want you to mistake this as some like manifestation credo that's giving you the permission to not work. You have to apply obsessive amounts of work to make this compression reality compressing to your vision happen. The truth is I could never have accomplished what I've done so far in just the first 3 years on a 9 to5 40hour per week allocation. Just couldn't do it. There's just way too much work that needs to be

23:05done. I have legit worked 10 am to midnight, six days a week and most of the times on Saturday for the last three years to compress the distance between my belief and the reality I wanted. And that is just what it takes to get the ball rolling. Now, when you do this and you apply this much violent effort, people in society and even some of your friends will say, "Well, he's a workaholic." Or whatever they say because they're trying to justify how you got where you got so much faster than they did. Right? But the point is very simply, if you want atypical results, you have to apply atypical

23:34force in order to get those results. And you can either do this by being better at your 40 hours than everyone else or applying more than 40 hours. The people in the business and the content world are legit savages. So for you to think your 40 hours, you're going to outexecute them, especially at the beginning, that's very arrogant. You won't. Which means you need to apply more than 40 hours to catch up. Now, I will say, and this will be good to hear, this period of crazy work and skill compression doesn't have to last forever. Just like in fitness, it's way easier to maintain muscle than it is to

24:04build from scratch. In business, same thing. It's way easier to maintain momentum than to build it from scratch. So, I like to view this as a 5 to sevenyear sprint in the very beginning, absolute maniac approach. And then at that point, you can downshift and coast or you can double down. But these are the expectations you should set. belief first, then set proper expectations, and then violently attack. All right, last lesson number eight is anything but quitting. And this is pretty straightforward based on the name. The whole game, literally the whole game in content and personal branding is just not quitting. There are way more consumers of content than there are

24:36makers. You have a supply demand mismatch in your favor. You will for a long time. So, all you have to do is just stay in the game and outlast everyone else. Now, the only reason people quit is because of the impatience that comes from warped expectations. They think they should be at a certain point before they are. That dissonance eats at them, creates impatience, and the impatience is why they quit. That expectation you're setting, whatever you're imagining you should be when you're not, that is a mirage. The whole game, the mindset behind business content success, is just figuring out how to drop those expectations to zero

25:09so that you don't have the pressure on yourself and you don't get impatient. For example, when I started on day one, I told myself, and I really believed this. I was like, I'm giving you 10 years before you have to make a single dollar before we'll ever think about re-evaluating entrepreneurship. Now, I knew I would succeed way sooner than that. I made a dollar on the first day, but that forced re-evaluation in my head allowed me to play so much more free because I really believed I was going for 10 years with $0. It is so important that you're able to do this in terms of

25:37setting expectations. All the people that you see on social media that are flexing, 99% of them do not actually have it like that. They don't own the cars. They don't have the cash flow. All of the things that are flexing, they do not have. And so, if your expectations outrun reality because you're seeing fake portrayals of what's not true, you're just doing yourself a disservice, and that will make you quit. Content and personal branding is just an endurance game over everything else. You just have to post, get better, and not stop

26:03posting. That is it. All right, guys. That is all I've got for this video. I know it was a little bit different on this one, a little less tactical. I tried to make it as tactical as I could, but some of this was like business lessons and mindset. I often don't go into this area because it feels a little more fluffy and I'm trying to give you actual tactics you can use. But if you

26:20didn't like this video, don't worry. Next week we'll be back with another tactical banger. If you did like this video and you kind of like seeing this more real, raw kind of off-thecuff style from me where I'm talking about business lessons and mindset, please let me know in the comments. And if a lot of people like this, I'll make more videos like this occasionally. As always guys, I'm just trying to put the non-obvious stuff that pops up in my head that I don't really see everywhere else. I'm trying

26:40to put that out there for you. Hopefully, it'll help someone who's like me at the beginning out there watching this. As always, if you're a creator or an entrepreneur or a business owner and you're trying to use content to grow, you can probably tell just by the way I'm talking. I do kind of know what I'm talking about. And so, I've got a lot of

26:53free stuff in the description below. Feel free to check that out. Grab that. I'm trying to give as much away as I possibly can. All right, we will see you guys on the next one. Peace.