Give Me 24 Minutes, I'll Give You 10,000 Hours of Content Strategy

0:00In this video, I'm going to break down eight tips for growing faster on social media that work surprisingly well. But the trick is all of these are very unpopular and not what you typically hear. The truth is the easiest way to stand out right now is to do the opposite of what everyone else is saying to do, especially when the opposite is already proven to work way better. So all these tips will give you a new way to beat your competition and a fresh perspective on how to look at your content strategy. By the way, I know these work because content is all I do all day long. I have 2 million

0:31followers, I've done billions of views, and I've built three different seven-figure businesses in just 3 years all from my own organic content. Everything I say and do is backed by data and my own experiments, which often go against the conventional wisdom. All right, tip number one is about picking formats and visual styles. Now, the popular advice is that you need your content to be made in a bunch of different formats and layouts. And this is so you can always keep your stuff fresh so that your viewers don't get bored. Well, here's the actual truth and the non-obvious reality. Most people following those instructions, hunting for all these outlier formats, are

1:05actually just wasting their time and playing the game suboptimally. The unpopular tip that works way better is just to find one or two content formulas that work and then hammer them over and over and over. And if your content is actually good, these formats will keep working for hundreds of reps in a row.

1:21Now, here's why this is the case. Viewers don't get bored when they see you make the same type of video. And that's because they're seeing hundreds of other different videos between each of your reps. When your similar style comes up for a second or third time, the familiarity actually makes them lock in, not turn away. What's actually happening is that you're getting bored making the same thing over and over, and you're telling yourself a false narrative that the viewer is probably bored, too. Think about all the biggest creators you love or the ones that have been popping lately. I think about people like Nate Gaffney or Jesse Gene or my homie

1:52Roberto, or you could even think of my marketing channel over the last 6 months. For all those channels many of the biggest ones you follow, every single video they're making is following one or maybe two formats and layouts. And they act a lot more like an episode in a series. And that's really the secret inside here. What you want to do is treat your social channel like a TV show. Think about something like The Office or Friends. The reason people love these cult TV shows is because they get the familiarity of the scene, the setting, context, and characters, but in each episode, they get the difference in

2:23the substance and plotline. Or think of the show Survivor. It's been on for 51 seasons, literally 730 episodes. The consistency and redundancy of the format of that show is the feature. It's not the bug. The truth is viewers' brains like the redundancy and the consistency of formats if the substance is actually worth continuing to watch. And so if you treat your social content in the same way, where you find a format and style combo that just works, you want to hammer it over and over and over. And the beauty is this becomes way more efficient for you to make, much stickier for the viewer, and it'll help your

2:57channel grow way faster. Now I will say finding your formula is something that'll take a little bit of iteration, but I actually have a system for figuring that out. That's one of the things I teach in my new short-form launch program. It's a four-week live cohort program where I break down everything I know about content systems and strategy into super digestible bite-size chunks. And I cover formats and layouts as well as ideas, scripting, storytelling, and hooks. Everything you would need to rev up your content system, and a lot of it I've never covered before publicly. The program is 28 days long and has five live calls

3:30with me, and you'll make your next 10 videos using my content systems. You also get to keep all of the AI workflows and skills that I use, as well as any of the information that I share. Doors for the program close Sunday, October 25th, and I may never run this again. And if I do, the price will never be this low. If you've ever wanted to really learn my short-form systems in depth and have me teach it to you, this is the one you don't want to miss. I'll drop the link below if you want to join. All right, non-obvious unpopular tip number two is

3:57about using AI in your content workflow. The common advice and really the ultimate desire for everyone is to have the automated AI content machine where you don't have to touch social media, you barely have to even log in, you press a couple buttons, and then money comes out the other side. And while I am working on making this a reality in the future, spoiler alert, today that doesn't [music] exist. And so the unpopular right answer tip today is to use AI for the input, not for the output of your content. And let me explain what I mean. The proper workflow for using AI today is something like this. You use AI

4:30for the strategy, ideas, analysis, and research. You use human-driven insight for the take or substance perspective. [music] And then you get to the scripting, recording, and editing workflow. Now today, there are some people that are doing those three steps manually. Scripting manually, recording manually, editing manually. There are other people that are doing all three of

4:48those steps fully AI automated. Personally, on my content, we're doing all three of those steps, scripting, recording, editing, human-driven manually today, and that's what's outperforming for us. And the reason is because of the rapid commoditization that you see with AI outputs. When you have AI writing your scripts, unless you have an extremely dialed AI script writing flow, your scripts will become generic very quickly. When you have AI build avatars to record for you, unless you have a very dialed workflow, the avatar doesn't really look convincing enough, and you can see in the mouth that it's off. When you have AI edit your videos like we're seeing lately,

5:20either through GPT-6 Astra and DaVinci or letting Claude edit directly with computer use in Premiere Pro, you can tell that these videos were edited by Claude. Now eventually, especially the editing workflows, they will be indistinguishable and perfect. But today, you can kind of tell for the people that are doing it. So I believe right now the perfect flow for using AI is to let it drive your inputs, the strategy, the research, the topics, the ideas, [music] and then use human curated outputs, script writing, recording, and editing. If you have a very simple editing format, you're doing yaps, or even graphic style yaps, you can get away with the AI editing

5:57workflows today. But, if you're doing something super cinematic or with tons of custom graphics and motion, you don't want to use the AI editing today because it will still look generic and sloppy. The point very simply is this, you don't want to try to rig up the auto AI output machine until the workflow is there, or you will commoditize any advantage that you've built. So, keep this in mind, AI is the input, not the output, until we cross the threshold. All right, tip number three is called be better, stay better. And this is probably the most unpopular social media growth tip or advice I could give, but it really is

6:30the secret to success. Just being better than everyone else in your niche is the thing that's going to drive you the best results. Now, nobody wants to hear this. Everybody wants the one quick tip that'll let them circumvent all the effort. But, let me just explain this concept around being the best in your niche, and why your content has stopped

6:48working in the last three to six months. This will be a light bulb for you if you've made content that worked, and now it's no longer working. In my paid programs, I have a bunch of people come on one-on-one calls that break down the same story for me. Three to six months ago, they were crushing, they were making content, it was driving views, it was driving leads, they were printing, and then all of a sudden, without changing anything, their leads dried up, the business froze, and they don't know what to do. So, let me explain exactly what has happened, and how this maps back to this premise of be better, stay

7:16better. Imagine your niche is like a pyramid. You've got level zero on the bottom, in the fat part, and then you've got level 10 at the top, in the skinny part. 12 months ago, let's say the average content quality in your niche was like a three out of 10, and you can see the line drawn at three out of 10. And roughly, let's just say this is the value, the packaging, the delivery, the ideas, everything packaged into one was

7:37this three out of 10 level, on average. Now, the top creators in in niche, they're operating at a nine or 10 out of 10. And so, they were obviously crushing. But, the average person, let's say you watching this, was operating at about a five out of 10. Not amazing, but still decent, and it was crushing for you at that time. You were getting views, you were getting leads, maybe you're even posting and you're like, I don't know how this is working. I feel like my content is way worse than the top people in my niche, but it's working, so I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing. Well, what ended up happening

8:03over the last 12 months is that that three out of 10 average has now drifted up to about a six out of 10, and even higher in some of the more crowded categories. And you are still doing what you were doing before at around a five out of 10, cuz it was working, so why stop what was working before? Well, as you can obviously see by the visual, you are now performing lower than the baseline. The top creators are still crushing, cuz they're still way above it, but you are now below it. And this shift up in average quality happens in every niche. It's at different speeds

8:31and to different degrees, depending on how competitive it is, but this slow drift up is a constant everywhere. So, what do you do to solve this? Well, if you want to keep winning and you want to get your business back on track, you need to find a way to jump over the average up to a seven or eight out of 10. Now, it's very easy to hear this and feel bad about yourself, cuz you put in so much work to go from a zero to a five out of 10, and it was working, and you thought you were going to be set. But,

8:54this is what happens in fluid markets. Any easy money gets eventually competed away by the competition, and you have to raise your execution level to constantly be beating the average, or you will get destroyed. So, the easiest way to solve this problem forever is to just become better than everyone in your category. And what that really means is you investing in yourself, time or money, to bring your skills up to a seven, eight,

9:18and maybe eventually a 10 out of 10. Now, if you're able to do this, especially to a 10 out of 10, that means you'll be able to maintain that advantage for the long term, and you'll never have to face this problem again. [music] So, to continue going down the logic tree, how do we actually close this gap? Well, to become a 10 out of 10 at content, you need to actually master the fundamental strategies and systems that the best people are doing. And this means going well beyond the slot BS that everyone at the seven out of 10 is preaching down to you. You need to go to

9:47the masters and actually get pulled up to the top. Now, there are really two ways you can do this. Number one, you can just post hundreds of reps on your own and try to rely on your own pattern matching ability to figure out what is not working, what do I improve, and then run that over and over. That's what I had to do. It takes forever. But if you're not good at spotting patterns and you can't rely on your own ability to suss this out, you need to work with someone who's at a 10 out of 10 that can just pull you up to that level. I didn't

10:14really appreciate this in my early career, but working with coaches that are the best in class is the fastest way to solve this problem. This is why all the people like Hormozi constantly preach how much they've spent in coaches in areas that they didn't have advanced expertise. They want to close that gap as fast as possible, and the best way, instead of relying on yourself making hundreds of reps and failing, is to just pay someone to bring you up. Cuz the problem with looking at your own data in a vacuum, even if you are good at spotting patterns, you don't know what good looks like. So, if you spot bad,

10:44you don't have a reference to know how to solve bad to get to good. This is the honest reason why I built Short Form Academy and why we're coming out with Short Form Launch. I spent three years doing the pattern match data option for myself. I got to a 10 out of 10 and I realized how difficult that hill was to climb. So, I packaged up the way to pull someone from a five to a 10, and that's what's in these programs. Now, whether you work with me or someone else, that's up to you based on who you like and who you trust, but don't pick anyone that's

11:12not a 10 out of 10 and doesn't have extremely atypical proof. There are a lot of people masquerading around in this space that actually under the hood are like a seven out of 10, have no clue what they're really doing, and just repeating these generic diluted frameworks from other people they stole from. Just be wary of that. There's a lot of that going on. All right, tip number four is about how to frame the substance in your videos. There's a lot of people on the internet right now that are preaching the need for this

11:37personality-led or connection content. And they're basically saying that you should use a lot of your content to try to get people to like you, and that if they like you, they will buy from you. Now, for certain types of businesses, consumer products, faceless products, e-com, this is of course correct. But, for most of the people I'm talking to on this channel that are trying to accrue authority to themselves as a personal brand to then sell things based on that authority, this is incorrect and bad advice. The unpopular truth is that all you need to do in your content is agitate a pain point, offer a solution,

12:10and then get out of the way. You can of course present that information with a little bit of personality in your delivery, but this is all you need to do to drive sales. And let me just explain the logic on this personality content versus value content thing. If there was a tie between you and someone selling the exact same offer, and you had the same proof, the same credibility, the same skills, the same content, then yes, the thing that would break the tie is whoever the buyer liked most. But, the reality is the comparison between you and another seller is almost never a tie. Buyers buy from people that have

12:40proof of results at scale from a near identical avatar that the buyer is. That's it. The more proof, or the more proof with that same avatar, the higher the conversion. It really is as simple as that. All people want is an aligned offer to a pain point they have, and they want to de-risk the decision so they can trust that if they pay you, they will get the result you're promising. So, my big point here is that all you have to do to drive sales with your content is provide value directionally towards the thing they're struggling with. All right, tip number five is a simple one, but this will also

13:12help you a ton. And this has to do with studying other creators for inspiration. The popular opinion online is to study the biggest channels in your niche and reverse engineer what's working for them. And this is half correct. The unpopular truth is that you don't want to study the biggest accounts in your niche. Ideally, you only want to study channels between 10 and about 250,000 followers or subscribers. Anybody above that, the large accounts with millions millions of followers, they don't actually provide good data signal in

13:40what's working for them. And here's why. Those accounts have such a big pool of fans that will love anything they'll do that sometimes bad video ideas get boosted because of the person that made them. Said another way, a big reason why big accounts have huge videos partially is because of their face, name, and existing brand. What you actually want to do when you do content research is look for the opposite. You want to find the 12,000 follower account that nobody's ever heard of but has an 86X outlier. And the reason is that any outlier video that comes from that account will have been primarily based on the idea and the hook itself. They

14:14got no lift from their face or name because nobody knows who they are. I kind of think of it as like these are the most pure validated winners you could find with data. Again, this is very simple reframe, but it will dramatically increase the hit rate of the research that you do. And by the way, if you want an easier way to actually run that research where you can find channels based on the amount of followers they have, I'm happy to say that Sandcastles is now an officially approved plugin and connector in Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor Grok. Now, all you have to do is go into any of those

14:44connector marketplaces or directories in any of the AIs you use, just search Sandcastles, and you will see the connector plugin there. If you already installed the MCP, you've already got it, but if you haven't, you'll see it and you can easily connect an OAuth in. We've also shipped a ton of invisible updates into the MCP that make it way faster, it visualizes data better, and it's so much smarter. It really is now the data layer for social media like we envisioned the whole time. Now, to run the workflow I just said, you could just go into the MCP and just say, "Find me all the Instagram accounts that are best

15:15fit for my niche," and describe your niche, "that are between 10,000 and 250,000 followers or subscribers," and it will actually pull that up directly in Claude, ChatGPT, or Grok, whichever one you're using. This is the easiest way to find inspiration accounts within those follower bands that you can then study further. If you want a direct link to the plugins in the marketplace, I'll link them below in the description. All right, tip number six is one that will help you drive a lot more leads and sales in your content. Now, the common wisdom when it comes to using CTAs is not to overuse them. And again, the

15:43logic on this makes sense initially. Most people say if you just make content that's 100% great, you don't need a CTA, people will follow you and eventually you can monetize them through a deeper content medium like stories or eventually you'll interact with them through DM. But here's the super unpopular reframe that I believe to be true. You should actually have a value-first CTA in every single piece of content you post. YouTube videos, short-form videos, carousels, everything. I call this type of CTA a native embed. Now, here's why this is the right answer. In 2026 when people watch content, their brains are absolute mashed potatoes. Very few people are

16:18able to watch a video and store even anything in their short-term memory. It's kind of like our brains have been conditioned to be able to watch and entertain but like store nothing. So, what that means is that in the very short term, each video you make is not actually accruing this long-term trust to your profile the way most people think it is. What it actually means that each video should be treated like a single sniper shot that's meant to extract the email or purchase directly from that video. And again, this doesn't sound right when you hear me say it because it goes against all the conventional wisdom that we're used to

16:50hearing from the big marketing gurus over the last 10 years. But if you think about it, the way things have changed, it really makes sense. Each social post or video should be treated as its own container meant to drive leads. When you realize and accept this, you'll understand the need to have a CTA for every single video so you can drive the maximum amount of people from these rented feeds into owned platforms that you control. Now, I will say if all you do in the CTAs is blatantly ask someone to buy your stuff, well, the videos will

17:18flop and the conversion will be trash. It's just too aggressive of a CTA on an organic video. Viewers are just too mature for that now. What you need to do is frame the CTA as a net gift. This is what I call a native embed. The goal really is to frame something of value that aligns with the pain point that was aggravated earlier in the video. So, for example, if I explain a storytelling framework and why I think it's so important to grow, well, then I might want to have a CTA that says, "Hey, comment story and I'll give you this nine-page doc that explains the

17:45framework in more detail with examples that you can use for AI." When you frame it this way, the CTA feels like an embedded value ramp. You're literally ramping the person from the initial video into more value, and so it doesn't feel like an ask. [music] And I found people are more than happy to give their email for whatever that value is. Now, once you start doing this on a few of your videos, you'll realize you need to be doing it on every single video that you make. And whether you actually say the verbal CTA in every video, that's up to you, but you should for sure have a ManyChat flow active and

18:15write it in the caption every single time. Just to give you a sense, I'm collecting between 12 and 15,000 emails per month for free just for my short-form organic videos and carousels. If you want me to show you the full lead magnet strategy I'm using, I've got a link below, you can check it out. All right, tip number seven is probably the

18:31most controversial one on this list. Almost every content coach and guru that you listen to will tell you just get more views and it will solve your problems. And they're kind of taking the venture capital approach to content. Basically, not everybody goes viral, and so if just get a few more viral bangers, it'll make up for all the little losers, and that will drive more leads and drive more followers, and it's really the big bangers that you want. Now again, this sounds right logically, and maybe even mathematically in certain niches this is true. But for most people watching this that have a business they're trying to

19:00scale with content, this is the wrong way to think about content. The unpopular truth is that you'll make way more money not going viral, but instead focusing specifically and consistently on an underserved avatar slice. We've all heard those stories where people talk about, "Oh, I know somebody with 3,000 followers making $4 million from their account and they just get 2,000

19:20views per video." We've all heard that. On the surface, it doesn't really compute in someone's brain how that could be possible because most of those people listening are playing in these big niches. But, let me just explain a real example that I came across recently. I have a guy right now in SFA named Chris. He owns three different restaurants and he loves AI. And he figured out how to use AI to save over

19:39$100,000 in his own restaurant for cost. And that's a huge deal for a restaurant. They have razor-thin margins. So, he joined SFA because he wanted to learn how to make short-form to attract other restaurant tours that would pay him to help install these AI systems. Now, Chris only has like 2,800 followers or 3,000 followers. And he posted a video the other day that only has like 10,000 views, maybe 12,000 views. He was in his car, it was unscripted, it was grainy footage, and he was just riffing about how he used AI to save money in his restaurant. This video drove so many leads of restaurant tours that he

20:11doesn't have the capacity to fulfill them. Immediate, instant sellout of all his capacity off a single video. Now, again, he didn't need to go viral. It has 10,000 views. He didn't need to be sensationalist. All he had to do was tickle the right pain point for the right avatar based on the proof that he already has. He talked about a very specific slice, restaurant owners looking to use AI. And Meta's targeting is so good, it will find those people without you needing to be crazy performative or sensationalist. So, instead of aiming for virality and these crazy views, what you actually want is

20:42precision of audience offer alignment. Whoever your target customer is, or if you don't have an offer, your target viewer, you want to be very, very rigorous about always providing max value for that person over and over. That consistency is what drives the sales. Now, you can use techniques to try to broaden it slightly to get a little bit more bang for your buck on the reach, but you actually don't want to go super for I've seen it dozens and dozens of times. All right, the last tip, number eight, is about copying other people's work. First of all, I just want to say, if you directly copy

21:13someone's video, you take the video, you download it, and you literally re-upload their video, or you say the exact same words, you're a scumbag. I'm just going to put that out there, full stop. I don't think there's nearly enough accountability for the people that rip and flip existing videos that aren't there. So, stop doing that. Now, if you're trying to take inspiration from other people, and you're trying to use the validated data of a winner to remix on your own, that is not only fair, but that is how you should be playing the game. Now, the conventional wisdom that most of these slop gurus will tell you

21:42is to take the video, and then hold the topic, and the format, and the structure, and the hook, hold it all constant, switch your face in there, switch a couple words, and then rip it. That's what most people will tell you. So, essentially, it's like keep 80% the exact same, and then change 20. And I think if you do this over and over for all of your content, it is the fastest way to become a derivative, and just trend into the mid-slop layer of your niche. Now, maybe 2 years ago, this 80/20 strategy, where you kept 80% the same, worked, but just because of the sheer lack of volume and supply that

22:13existed. But, that does not work anymore. Per what I said before, if you cannot figure out a way to make nine out of 10, or 10 out of 10, top decile content in your niche, you're cooked. So, instead, here's how you should approach looking at other people's videos and remixing them. The unpopular truth about how to use data is to be ruthlessly data-driven on the topics, and then ruthlessly creative on the take and the angle. When you scan for other people's videos, literally, there's only

22:39two things you should be looking for. You should be looking for the topic, and you should be looking for power words, or little messaging phrases that tend to resonate either with you when you watch it, or with the customers, or potential viewers, in the comments. You extract those, and you use them. All the rest of the video, the format, the layout, the hook, all that should need to be done from scratch by you, or you get influenced by other stuff, and bring it in. You don't use the same topic, the same hook, the same script all from the same video, because then you are a clone. And let's bring it all the way

23:10back to what I said at the beginning. If you have a validated format and layout combination, you have a formula. Well, don't take the format from something else you found. You have one that works for you. Take the topic and potentially little power words that you know work, but feed it into the format and layout combo that you know works for you. This is really the sweet spot of using data and creativity. Data for the topics, data for the power phrases, creativity for the take and angle, and then you use your own format, layout, and style combination. That's the mix that tends to work the best. And again, if you want

23:42to learn how to do this process, what to take from where and how to look and how to mix it all in together to create an original banger, this is what I'm walking through in Short Form Launch, and I might not ever run it again. So, if you want to join, the link's below. All right, guys, that is all I wanted to cover in this video. If you're a business owner and you're trying to use your content to grow your business faster, you can probably tell this will be one of the best channels you could ever watch. Please make sure to like and subscribe, so you don't miss the next

24:05video. And I've said it twice already, but Short Form Launch, I put a ton of time into this program. It's very, very affordable. I'll never run it again at this price if I do it. So, if you want to jump in, I've got the link below. All right, we'll see you guys on the next

24:17one. Peace.