A 72-minute interview mapping the exact hires and metrics that take a content operation from $0 to $100K a month.
Posted
3 days ago
Duration
Format
Interview
educational
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9.2K
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57 · 43
Big Idea
The argument in one line.
Building a content engine is a five-level ladder from $0 to $100K a month, and at every rung the single biggest mistake is sitting down to write a strategy instead of testing and reading the data.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
A founder or creator with zero content budget who wants a concrete testing-and-analytics system instead of a strategy deck.
Someone about to make their first content hire and unsure whether to hire a videographer, an editor, or a creative director first.
A brand operator scaling past $10K a month who needs to know when hybrid roles split into specialists.
Anyone building a team past $50K a month who wants the actual org chart: creative director, DP, producer/set designer, in-house account creator, analyst.
SKIP IF…
You already run a functioning in-house content team and org chart. This is a hiring roadmap, not an advanced growth-ops framework.
You want paid-ads or performance-marketing tactics. This is entirely about organic content structure.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
Alex Garcia lays out a five-level system for building a content engine from $0 to $100K a month. At $0, skip strategy and become a ferocious tester: track skip rate (aim under 50% at the three-second mark), like-to-share ratio (roughly one share for every two likes), and average watch time (the 12-second trap). At $5K, hire one hybrid videographer-editor and mentor them with your own analytics playbook. At $10K, add an editor and shift from quality to scaling output, using a rule that a 33% twist on a format makes it feel new. At $50K, hire a creative director, hybrid DP, producer/set designer, and a dedicated in-house creator for narrative and world-building. At $100K, specialize every role, add a screenwriter and a growth analyst, and run content like a TV network. The through-line: organic content is the nucleus every other channel should feed from.
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01 · Level 1: Building a Personal Brand With No Budget
Skip a formal strategy and become a ferocious tester instead; format and packaging beat raw creativity.
03:35 – 07:31
02 · Skip Rate Is Your Most Important Metric
Skip rate is measured at three seconds; hook types differ for personal brands versus bigger budget brands.
07:31 – 10:13
03 · How to Read Your Retention Graph
The 12-second average watch time trap, and mapping the first 12 seconds in 3-second increments.
10:13 – 13:39
04 · The Best Formats to Test When You Have No Budget
One-shot videos and eight-second reels as testing mechanisms; the Graza olive oil B-roll example.
13:39 – 16:15
05 · How to Find a Story in Your Everyday Life
Reframing a boring day (eight meetings) into a relatable story arc.
16:15 – 18:58
06 · Why You Should Post Even When You Feel Embarrassed
The Dwyane Wade Osmo Pocket anecdote; every favorite creator's first video was bad.
18:58 – 23:35
07 · Level 2: Your First $5K Content Hire
Hiring a hybrid videographer at $5K, sourced from film school or bigger-set PAs, paid with milestone incentives.
23:35 – 29:31
08 · How to Train a Creator When You Are Not Creative
Hand over the analytics playbook and let the hire's composition skills extend the founder's range.
29:31 – 33:16
09 · Every Moment Can Be a Story if You Shoot It Right
Unstaged shots made cinematic through composition; raising the bar means scrapping footage that doesn't meet it.
33:16 – 35:54
10 · Content for Followers, Not Just New Followers
A separate content track for the existing fan base, optimized for depth of relationship over reach.
35:54 – 40:02
11 · Level 3: Scaling Content With a $10K Budget
Add an editor and shift focus from quality to multiplying output at the same quality bar.
40:02 – 45:24
12 · Why Aesthetics Matter More Than You Think
The 33% novelty rule, and how visual quality expands a brand's addressable market.
45:24 – 47:19
13 · How to Make Great Content With a Small Budget
Cheap, repeatable concepts like the classic-car match-cut lookbook and the prop-phone voicemail rig.
47:19 – 49:17
14 · The $10K Budget Test and Scale System
Everyday Better Club's 110,000-follower run off one tested one-shot format.
49:17 – 55:46
15 · Level 4: World Building With a $50K Budget
The creative director hire; taste has to match the lead cinematographer's exactly.
55:46 – 1:02:30
16 · The $50K Team: Producer, Set Designer, and Customer Accounts
Producers who assemble the world, and dedicated in-house creators running segment-specific accounts.
1:02:30 – 1:05:49
17 · Organic Content Is the Nucleus of Your Brand
60 touchpoints a month, and reusing winning organic angles as ad copy and email subject lines.
1:05:49 – 1:12:07
18 · Building an Entertainment Studio at $100K
Full role specialization, a TV-poached screenwriter, and a growth analyst who bridges data across teams.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
A video's skip rate is measured at exactly three seconds; keeping it under 50% means the hook, title, visual, or verbal, worked.
12 seconds of average watch time is where good videos stop climbing and stay merely good instead of going viral.
A healthy like-to-share ratio is roughly one share for every two likes; shares are the strongest signal a platform uses to push content wider.
One creator's video about his dad's onion company kept 83% of viewers past the three-second mark and hit 4 million views.
The rule that changing a design by 33%, not 30%, makes it feel like a new product applies directly to reworking a tired content format.
At a $5,000 budget, hire one hybrid videographer-editor from a film school program or a bigger set's PA pool rather than building a full team.
One brand gained 110,000 followers in three months from a single tested one-shot ASMR-style running format, scaled through relentless iteration.
At $50,000, the key hire is a creative director whose taste has to match the lead cinematographer's, or the two visions collide.
Publishing 60 pieces of content a month gives a brand 60 touchpoints, more contact volume than email or paid ads typically provide.
An in-house creator can run a second account dedicated to one customer segment, like marathon runners, feeding a segment-specific ad funnel.
At $100,000, brands hire a screenwriter, usually poached from TV, because writing structured social formats is closer to TV writing than to typical creator content.
The most common growth ceiling isn't creative talent, it's teams operating in data silos that never share what's actually working with each other.
Takeaway
Five budget levels, one hiring playbook
CONTENT TEAM LADDER
Every budget level from $0 to $100K has one correct next hire and one set of metrics to obsess over, and skipping straight to strategy wastes both.
01Level 1: Building a Personal Brand With No Budget
Building a content strategy first is a mistake. Start by testing constantly and analyzing results, like getting up reps before worrying about technique.
Any category, even something as dry as an accountant's hourly rate, can be reframed as a $100-versus-$1,000 comparison the way food creators contrast a $1 and a $10 cookie.
Format and packaging, taking an idea that already works on another platform or niche and repositioning it, matters more than raw creativity.
02Skip Rate Is Your Most Important Metric
Skip rate is measured at the three-second mark; keeping it under 50% means the hook, whether title, visual, or verbal, is working.
Brands often can't use a verbal or title hook without looking like an ad, so they win almost entirely on the visual hook: camera angle, framing, and pattern disruption.
A like-to-share ratio near one share for every two likes is a strong signal a video is shareable, not just watchable.
03How to Read Your Retention Graph
A 12-second average watch time is where most videos stall. If it climbs toward 20-plus seconds over the following hours, the video is becoming a hit.
Video planning should map the first three seconds second by second, then continue in three-second increments (3-6s, 6-9s, 9-12s) to avoid the 12-second trap.
Going from a 12-second to a 15-second average watch time can add tens of thousands of followers a month for a brand.
04The Best Formats to Test When You Have No Budget
A one-shot video, a single scene with one action and on-screen text, is the cheapest reliable format to test an idea before scaling it.
An eight-second reel that pops proves the idea, not the execution. The on-screen text usually did the work, so the winning idea can then scale into a series, a carousel, or a green-screen video.
A concept can outperform a production budget: a dropped jar of olive oil with the right on-screen line is a $0 idea a bigger brand could scale into an ad campaign.
05How to Find a Story in Your Everyday Life
The most mundane day becomes content by finding the real tension inside it, like reframing eight boring meetings as the specific fight to land a manufacturer on a tight budget.
The best storytellers take something mundane and simply ask how to make it interesting, rather than waiting for an exciting moment to film.
06Why You Should Post Even When You Feel Embarrassed
A famous, wealthy athlete still films his own handheld B-roll on a cheap pocket camera rather than waiting for a professional crew, because starting imperfect beats not starting.
Every creator's first videos were bad. The fear of an ugly video is disproportionate, since a bad post can just be deleted, unlike a real failure like getting cut from a team.
07Level 2: Your First $5K Content Hire
At $5K, hire one hybrid videographer-editor rather than a full team. The founder still has to mentor them using their own analytics playbook.
The best hires at this budget come from film school programs or as production assistants on bigger sets, people already immersed in filming and hungry for a real opportunity.
Compensation at this level should lean on milestone-based incentives, since the hire will be working long hours to prove themselves.
08How to Train a Creator When You Are Not Creative
A founder's job isn't to be the best creative, it's to hand over the analytics-backed playbook of what has already worked and let the hire build on it.
A cinematographer trained in composition and the rule of thirds adds visual range, gimbal work, framing, captions as hooks, that a founder shooting on a phone alone can't reach.
Give a new hire real creative runway and increasing responsibility. Confidence and skill grow together once someone is trusted to direct rather than just execute.
09Every Moment Can Be a Story if You Shoot It Right
Two of a creator's best-performing shots were unstaged: framing a magazine rack while genuinely browsing, and an overhead angle of two friends in a store, both made cinematic purely through composition.
Raising the visual standard is a deliberate choice. Dozens of usable clips got scrapped from a big trip because they didn't meet the bar, even though posting anything would have provided social proof.
10Content for Followers, Not Just New Followers
A separate content track exists purely for the existing fan base, showing personal life like marriage, kids, and hobbies rather than optimizing for new-follower reach.
The goal of fan-only content is deeper comment engagement from the people who already comment on top-of-funnel videos, not view count.
11Level 3: Scaling Content With a $10K Budget
At $10K, the only added hire is an editor. The job shifts from proving quality to multiplying output while holding the same quality bar.
Doubling publishing frequency on a format that's already working is usually a bigger lever than making the content itself better.
12Why Aesthetics Matter More Than You Think
A rule that changing something by 33% rather than 30% is why a small deliberate twist, a crash zoom, a prop swap, can make a familiar format feel new.
Visual quality directly expands a brand's addressable market. Strong aesthetic execution can make a low-demand product, like a new candle line, feel essential.
Studying fast-moving categories like fashion, rather than a creator's own niche, is where the best new formats and concepts get discovered first.
13How to Make Great Content With a Small Budget
A cheap, repeatable concept, like a classic car with a mounted camera and outfit match-cuts, can turn a boring subject into hundreds of thousands of views.
A single simple rig, like an old prop phone wired for voicemail, generated a brand's most viral content for around $100, because the emotional concept carried it, not the budget.
14The $10K Budget Test and Scale System
One brand gained 110,000 followers in three months from one tested one-shot format, scaled through iteration and trial-reel testing of hooks, not new ideas.
The core discipline at every budget is to test, find the winner, then scale that exact winner relentlessly rather than chasing constant novelty.
15Level 4: World Building With a $50K Budget
At $50K, the key hire is a creative director or strategist responsible for narrative and cohesion. Their taste has to match the lead cinematographer's or the two visions collide.
A creative director should already be established elsewhere, not built in-house, since the brand's entire creative direction now depends on their judgment from day one.
16The $50K Team: Producer, Set Designer, and Customer Accounts
A producer or set designer at this level has to assemble locations that match the brand's narrative exactly, since the wrong gym or backdrop breaks the story being told.
A dedicated in-house creator can run a second account built around one customer segment, like marathon runners, feeding millions of monthly views into a segment-specific ad funnel.
Handing a talented creator a separate branded account carries retention risk if their personal following outgrows the brand's ownership of that account.
17Organic Content Is the Nucleus of Your Brand
Publishing 60 pieces of content a month gives a brand 60 monthly touchpoints, more contact volume than email, SMS, or paid ads typically provide.
A winning organic post's angle or headline should get reused as ad copy, email subject lines, and landing-page content instead of dying on one platform.
18Building an Entertainment Studio at $100K
At $100K, roles fully specialize, screenwriter, dedicated set designer, producer, instead of staying hybrid, because a person operating at their strongest single skill can be a 100x contributor, not just a 10x one.
A screenwriter is typically poached from TV or film rather than trained internally, since writing structured, repeatable social formats is closer to TV writing than to typical creator content.
A dedicated growth analyst who reviews every piece of content across platforms and shares findings between teams prevents the most common growth ceiling: departments that never share what's working.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
Skip rate
The percentage of viewers who swipe away from a video within its first three seconds. Under 50% signals a strong hook.
One-shot video
A single continuous scene with one action and on-screen text, the cheapest testable content format with no edit points.
Hybrid videographer
A single hire who can both shoot and edit, used at low budgets before a team splits into specialized roles.
World building
Using consistent visual direction, narrative, and cohesion across a brand's content so it reads as one recognizable universe rather than disconnected posts.
The 33% rule
The idea, credited to designer Virgil Abloh, that changing something by a third rather than a smaller amount is what makes it read as a genuinely new product or format.
TAM
Total addressable market, the full size of the potential customer base a brand could reach. Aesthetic execution is framed here as something that can expand it, not just product positioning.
28:20channelVintage Modern (formerly Vintage Broncos)
41:40channelShinzo
48:20channelEveryday Better Club
55:50channelBPN
1:11:40productHouse of Distribution
1:11:50productSweat Equity podcast
Quotables
Lines you could clip.
04:20
“Your skip rate is literally just how good is your hook.”
one-line definition that works as a text-on-screen hook itself→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
08:00
“The skip rate was still like 83% of people were still there. That is crazy.”
concrete benchmark number creators can compare themselves against→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
08:40
“12 second average watch time is usually like where good videos die.”
specific, memorable threshold with a stakes-raising verb→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
17:30
“Some of the most influential and inspirational individuals failed miserably. It doesn't hurt that bad when it's a shitty video and all you have to do is archive it.”
resolves the fear-of-posting objection in one line→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
41:00
“Virgil Abloh says you can make anything novel if you just twist it by 33%, not 30%.”
See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.
17px
metaphoranalogystory
Alex, I need to start a personal brand. I need you to walk me through the whole process of building my team from $0 all the way to $100 ,000 a month. You're an expert in this field.
You've done it for yourself. You've done it for clients. And you're an expert in the new age of marketing.
Starting at level one where we have $0 and I just need to get started and I need to do it on a budget, but I need to make money from this. What are things I should be avoiding? Yep.
So I'll start with this. The first thing you should be avoiding is sitting down and building out a strategy. That is the last thing that you should do.
And the reality is a lot of creating content that's going to work on the internet is a skill set. It's something, it's like shooting a free throw. If I need to make 10 free throws, I'm not going to plan and think about how I'm going to make free throws.
I'm not going to sit down and be like, my feet are going to be angled this way. They're going to be this way. My shoulders are going to be squared.
I'm going to bend at this degrees. No, I'm going to start shooting. I'm going to start getting up as many reps as possible.
Creating content is the same thing. And so when we talk about developing a strategy at the beginning, we're missing the boat there. Instead, you need to be two things.
You need to be a ferocious tester and a ferocious analyst. And so what I always tell everybody is you need to start with a testing strategy. Just map out, hey, this week, this is everything that's going to go out.
And you can do that in a day. Look at other things that are working in other platforms, in other categories. Bring that over to what you want to talk about and start testing.
You're going to start testing different content ideas. You're going to be testing different concepts, different formats, different packaging. You're going to be testing as much until you start finding micro wins.
What about this? What if I don't appreciate myself to be extremely creative? You don't need to be.
Give me any category and I'll give something. a way to be able to turn it into like a good content idea let's do like a cpa okay so with a cpa you can you can almost take the same angle of like a youtuber who would do one dollar cookie versus ten dollar cookie you can go and be like hey this is the difference between hiring an online accountant versus which may cost you a hundred dollars versus hiring an accountant that's going to cost you a thousand dollars an hour versus kind of yeah yeah all of a sudden That's super interesting because you got a lot of people that are like, okay, like I want to do the a hundred dollars, like the a hundred dollars service, but a hundred dollars service is just going to get my shit done.
Versus if I spend a thousand dollars and I pay a thousand dollars an hour, I might make money back. Right. And so that contrast and good by bringing the CPA into it.
Cause I was, I was, I didn't, I wasn't expecting that, but that contrast right there is what's, what's extremely interesting, but you could look legitimately, you could look at cooking and cooking does. comparisons all the time like that of like $1 versus $10, you know, $100 versus $1 ,000. And so you just have to be able to understand.
But that right there is just like format and packaging, how you take an idea and you make it, you position it in a way that's already working on a completely different channel. And then once you start publishing that content, now it's like you have to be this ruthless analyst where you have to be trying to find all the micro wins inside of this content.
So you got to be looking at your skip rate. You have to be looking at your like to share ratio. You have to be looking at the retention graph.
If you'd be looking at the average watch time skip rate, the goal is to always be under 50 % on your skip rate. If it's, if you, there's two parts. Can you define what a skip rate actually is?
Yeah. So a skip rate is basically, is your hook interesting? And if not, I'm going to continue swiping.
What's the, do you know the data point? I actually don't know this. So do you know the data point that they track to factor in whether the skip rate is actually happening?
Like, is it how many seconds? Is it a split second? Is it?
Three seconds? It's three seconds. It's three seconds.
And if somebody can swipes past it within the first three seconds. And so your skip rate is literally just how good is your hook? Your hook in this case has to be your title hook, your visual hook and your verbal hook.
Now you play a different game when you're a brand a lot of times. And especially when you're playing in like these like 50K, 100K budget type of brands where I would say like 50 % of them are going to have a verbal hook, right? The other 50, they don't want somebody talking in their content now.
And then on the other end, most don't want a title hook. And a lot of times a title hook for a brand is not going to work well because it's going to be perceived as an ad, even if it's something native to the platform. And a lot of times even brands don't want to use native tech.
So it's like you're playing, dancing these games that are very hard. And so when you start playing that game, you have to be the best at understanding visual hooks. And in this case with a visual hook, you should look at three things.
You should look at the angle, the angle that it's shot at. So let's say we wanted to disrupt a pattern or we wanted to create some pattern disruption here. It's like we could have an overhead shot right here and like text on screen that could be extremely interesting, but it's not what's typically shown or done with a podcast.
You know what I'm saying? And so like changing the angle is a great way to pattern disrupt on feed. Can I ask a question in between this?
Because I want to dive into the tactical of like what you'd recommend in terms of optimizing for the hook. Can you give me just a breakdown though of when you say looking at the analytics, what analytics, like what should I be looking for when it comes to, you said under 50 % for the skip rate. What should I be looking for for the three second watch time?
What should I be looking for the average view duration? What should I be looking for for the share ratio? What's like a good metric to chase?
Let me go back to it. So skip rate, you want under 50%. Yep.
What I found is if it's under 50%, which means less than 50 % of people are skipping at the three second mark, it means you have a good hook. Yeah. Right.
The smaller that number is, obviously the better. I was looking at, um, I mean, this is more personal brand side, but I was at, I was just at Sam Parr's office in New York and he was showing me one of the videos that he just, that he just posted, got like 4 million views where he's talking about his dad and his dad having like an onion company that does 10 million and in revenue, the skip rate.
Um, the skip rate was sorry, the, where people dropped off on the retention graph at three seconds, it was still like 83 % of people were still there. That is crazy. You know, like that, that is an amazing, amazing, uh, number.
And so you do want to be legitimate, like obsessive and addicted to your analytics, which is not the norm for creators or creators. But the best creatives are the ones that are obsessed over the data, right? Like you could easily throw Mr.
Beast into this conversation where if you hear him talk, he never really talks from like the most creative perspective. He really talks from an analytical perspective. Like to share ratio.
If you can get two likes. for every one share, one share for every two likes. That's a good ballpark to play.
I've never heard that. That's really cool. That's a very, very strong metric to look at to know you have something valuable, have something shareable, which is like the strongest signal to Instagram to say, hey, we need to share this with other people.
Because if it's worth sharing privately, it's worth sharing publicly via Instagram. You get what I'm saying? It's good for them to put on the Explore feed or in the Reels tab.
It's also an indication that your stuff is relatable. Yes. The next thing I'm looking at is the retention graph.
I'm looking at my ability to tell stories and keep someone hooked and keep someone engaged. And what's interesting about the retention graph is yes, of course you can measure your hook, but you could also measure like, damn, why does everyone always drop off at the eighth second mark? This goes into the, actually the next analytic, the next metric is average watch time.
12 second average watch time is usually like where good videos die. What I found is if it gets stuck at 12 seconds, it's not going to pop. It'll be a good video, but it's not a great video, but it has the potential to be a great video.
What I have found is if a video gets a 12 second average watch time, and now you start paying attention to your watch time, what you'll notice is over the next few hours, your average watch time should climb from like 12 seconds to 13 seconds, 13 to 14. And it'll keep going until like maybe 22, 23, 24 seconds. If it stays stagnant 12 seconds, You have a good video, but it's not going to be a hundred thousand plus million plus video.
Yeah. If it starts to regress and go from 12 seconds to 11 seconds, even over time, you're, you're basically you're, you're cooked. Now, what I have told brands to do and what we do internally is we look at the first 12 seconds of a video, the first three seconds when we're playing in a video, we map out, um, second by second.
Because the hook is the most important part. You don't get to 12 seconds if the first three seconds don't matter. So we're breaking it down by the first three seconds, by every second.
Okay, so we're looking at, okay, what did we do? And what did we show? And what did we say in the first second, in the second second, in the third second?
And we plan those, whether it's the shot list, whether it's the words, whether it's the angles, the aesthetics, the actions, all of those things are getting planned out. Then we continue to break things down into. three second increments.
So here we're really looking at one second, one second, one second. I love that. Now we're going three, the third second to the six second, six second to the nine second, nine second to the 12 second.
Yeah. Reason for that is we don't want to get stuck by the 12 second trap. Yeah.
Right. And so if you can avoid that, then, or get past that going from legitimately going from 12 second average watch time to a 15 second average watch time for a brand. can be adding tens of thousands of followers yeah every month that difference because that difference is you getting shown to again and this is subjective to like the majority of videos are living within that 45 second to two minute uh range and so that metric is for that specifically most brands aren't making minute and a half videos you know what i mean so yeah And those are the metrics that I'm looking at.
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I thought that it was just set up a couple cameras and talk to someone for a couple hours. And then suddenly you have a great conversation that's heard by a lot of people. that's not true there's so much that goes into it and it can feel overwhelming because we'd have a conversation and then i don't know how to get it to the people so they actually hear it and it's something that they enjoy that's where riverside comes in riverside allows you to record content and then upload it within the platform and make all the edits within there including fixing the sound fixing the video making short form clips making medium form clips and even making newsletter content it is a one -stop shop including hosting and distributing it across all platforms i cannot encourage people using this platform enough it has made my life so much easier and I'm so grateful to have them as a partner.
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Now let's get back to the episode. For formats they should test, and again, this is the individual with no budget. For formats that you should test, you should be looking at one -shot videos, okay?
And there's levels to a one -shot video, but specifically for... specifically for somebody that has no budget, like you're probably not playing in the territory of like a company like About Blank who's doing beautiful vignettes where... I ride a bike in front of a cafe.
I park my bike. I walk inside. I dap my friend up and it's like beautifully locked off.
Like we're not playing in that territory. We're playing on the territory of like phone on a, on a tripod. Yeah.
I take a step back. I do something, some kind of action. There's text on screen.
That is a one shot video. A one shot video is a single scene where I do some kind of action and I put text on the video. Are you not, are you not anti like the eight second reel type of thing?
I talk to most people in our space and they're anti it. They hate it. Anti eight second rule.
Yeah. Like no eight second reel where it's like text on screen, you know, rest of the stuff is in caption and it's some kind of B roll thing. Am I against it?
Yeah. No. And I'll tell you why that is a testing mechanism for anything else.
Let's say I'm, I want to make a video a week from now all about, I think I have a good idea. That's, you know, this is why branches start a social show. Cool.
Well, guess what? I can, I can set up my phone on a tripod. I can do some kind of B roll and I could put text on screen that says the biggest marketing prediction of 2026 is launching a social show and Brian should do it now.
And that's my text on screen at seven seconds. Let's say that pops. That's just not, that's not me just saying, Oh wow.
Like we had a video get 250 ,000 views. Holy shit. People found that interesting.
People found the text interesting, texted all the heavy lifting there. Yeah. Therefore I know, I should take this video and I should now scale that idea into, I could scale it into a series.
I could scale it into a carousel, a green screen video, a yap, right? I can scale it because I have a data point that says people are interested in this topic. Let's say Graza as an example.
Imagine the B -roll is like, I get a glass olive oil container or jar or whatever. And I just like drop it. right and it shatters and then the text on screen is like no one understands the pain of having a two -year -old grab the olive oil when they're trying to cook with you and it shatters all over the floor and you know and you say something else about like how shitty it is to clean olive oil right or clean oil off the floor if i'm grazing and i put that as my as my text in my b -roll and all of a sudden like now And that video pops off.
Now, all of a sudden, I'm Graz. I'm like, oh, we have such an interesting angle here for ads. Yeah.
Where we can start targeting mothers. With a phone and a bottle. You see how you could actually get nasty.
The concept is so much more important. Yes. Yeah.
You don't need money to do that. You don't need money to do that. Yeah.
You do need to be creative. And I think there's an aspect of what you're saying that might feel overwhelming just because it comes so naturally to you. Do you have any advice on someone that might be overanalyzing how much, like they're scrolling.
They understand that concept. They'll be saying, sweet, I'm going to scroll. I'm going to see.
Oh, I like this. Yeah. How do you recommend finding a bunch of ideas that they like and then testing or how fast do they go from?
I like this. So I should do a version of this. No, I think first you start with scenarios that are relatable stories that are relatable and things that you have dealt with that are.
If you have kids use that, if you have a wife use that, if you have like, like it depends on the, again, it depends on, on the brand, but like you have to be looking. Most people start brands because they dealt with a specific kind of pain point. Yeah.
Right. Like the CPG brand that I'm working on, I started because of a pain point that I'm experiencing. And so it's very easy for me to then talk about it from my POV because I've dealt with that.
But at the same time, like, yes, you can go down both routes. You can go from one where it depends on the kind of person you are. Some people are very good at looking for stories in specific scenarios.
and being able to take those and package them into content ideas. One of the best things that I ever heard, I forget honestly who it was from, but it was like, some of the best creators are the ones that are able to find the story within each day. Imagine, imagine that I am trying to vlog, right?
And I'm a single individual trying to build my company and I'm trying to vlog. I'm trying to make like amazing day in the life content. If I have eight meetings on my calendar I look at my calendar and I'm like, I can't make a piece of content today.
All I've done is all I've been in is eight meetings, right? Like I've just been sitting behind this computer. It's not that interesting.
If all of a sudden I go, if I frame it and I look at my calendars, I'll be like, okay, four of those meetings are with manufacturers because I can't find the right manufacturer who allows me to get the right MOQ based on the amount of money that I'm in my bank account or that I'm willing to invest in this. You now have a story, right?
So that could go. this is day three of trying to build my cpg brand to 100 million but today i don't think it's ever going to be a hundred million dollar brand because i can't land a manufacturer i've been on calls all day trying to find the right one but all of them want me to invest 250 000 and i can barely afford to get my kid into daycare right like all of a sudden yeah you just made the most boring day.
Yeah. Extremely interesting where you're like, yo, is he going to make, you know what I'm saying? Like, is she going to make it?
You know, Daniel Dallin, Casey Neistat, and I think, but I think Ryan's the best where you take something that's mundane, simple, and you're saying, how can I make this interesting? What's like, he's going to a hotel that is one star and he's saying, and he's looking at bad reviews and he's saying, let me confirm whether these reviews, that is a $0 concept.
You know, like that's like, it doesn't cost anything. It literally costs probably $30. Yeah, with his iPhone.
I love, just to summarize that you were like, these are the analytics to track. That is so important. Can you give me one thing just on the end of this note of like overcoming the fear aspect?
Because I think that's a big objection of putting myself on camera in the first place. That's a big thing that these people with $0 are facing. Yep.
I was just at the Masters. One of my idols growing up was Dwayne Wade. I don't know if you know who Dwayne Wade is.
Yeah, I did. It just depends if you watch basketball or not. One of the events at the Maubin home, which is where we were working on, was a dinner, kind of like a superstar dinner.
Yeah. All of a sudden, van pulls up. I know Dwayne Wade's going to be there.
Dwayne Wade gets out of the van. He pops out with his Osmo pocket. And this guy is worth...
250 you know or not even 200 sorry probably 500 million dollars pops out of his osmo pocket and is like literally the first step out of the car he's like going wide angle on the house he's like pointing down at all the different plates he's one of us like he's one of us he's like getting our screen he walks past me he's like say what's up to the vlog he's like saying all this stuff And he's like, before he walks into the house, he puts his shoes on like the rug.
Cause the rug was a Malvin home rug. He points it down and he's like getting a foot shot. And then he does it.
He pans up like, and I'm sitting here like, yo, if somebody who's worth $500 million that could have right. The team that the best team, the creative directors, the DP, the lead videographer, et cetera, is shooting by himself, handheld doing something that he's. probably not good at and is uncomfortable for he's the like the biggest name here three -time champion biggest name here and he's shooting on an osmo in front of all of these people who we have fucking fx sorry fx sixes and and red komodos and like yeah we have all this and he's shooting on a 400 500 osmo yeah you can make a video your favorite creator the person you admire they had to make their first video yeah They all had to start somewhere.
And those videos probably sucked. Kobe Bryant got cut from basketball teams. Michael Jordan got cut from basketball teams.
They didn't put the basketball down. You know what I'm saying? Some of the most influential and inspirational individuals that have ever graced earth athletically and that have done things in front of millions and millions of people failed miserably.
When they failed... it hurts 10 times more to get cut from a basketball team when all you want to do is play basketball. It doesn't hurt that bad when it's a shitty video and all you have to do is archive.
You know what I mean? Yeah, I love that. Reality check it.
Let's jump. So I want to move to the next tier, which is 5K. So level two, $5 ,000 budget.
I actually don't even know. I don't know who to hire for this. Who's the person I should hire?
What's the thing I should hire? In order to figure this out, because ideally, this is the first level where we're thinking about outsourcing. Yeah, so it's a difficult hire because 5k is not that much money to play with.
Now, chances are, if you went from no budget to 5k, you as the individual who probably was making good content has now an understanding of what works. what is fitting for the brand what kind of world you're trying to build and now you have to see it from the perspective of like i'm bringing in somebody who now has like a layer up or a level up of skill sets that i don't have yet right or that i'm not willing to uh i'm not willing to develop and so in that case you're hiring like a hybrid videographer typically Which is hard, right?
Like at a 5k, you're like, can you hire a videographer? You can, but you're getting someone young. Yeah.
That's why it's important for you to play a mentor role for that 5k hybrid meaning they, you have to mold them to be multiple roles. Right. And so the thing I'll say here is you'll, you'll mold them to be multiple roles from a pay structure standpoint.
You need to have incentives in there. Because they're going to be working 12 hour days. They're going to be working 15 hour days.
Right. I have somebody now that, that works with me. I will be fully transparent, like in the same ballpark, like annually, uh, figure, but I have, there's a lot of incentives for a lot of realistic milestones.
You know what I'm saying? So he will end up making, you know, as 21 year old, probably make 80 to. potentially $100 ,000 if we hit these milestones, if not more than that.
So you optimize for find one person to kind of partner with you. At 5K. At 5K.
At 5K, it is about... You're not going to agency. You're not going to like, you're not doing all this other stuff.
You need someone locked in. I need somebody locked in who's willing to learn with me and who I'm willing to invest in. Yeah.
How do I find this person? Where I have found a lot of luck is two places. Going to a university is like film school.
So like UT, go to, go to their film program and try to like find individuals through there who, you know, those kids have been filming since they were 10 years old. They've also been consuming probably really good content for a very, for a very long time, you know, where we did it. The others, if you know somebody who is a good DP, typically like a PA.
or someone or like a personal assistant on a set, like a bigger set or an extra, or some of those things are sometimes people that just want to be around the thing. They're not good enough to be a DP yet, which is a director of photography. They're not good enough to be that, but they're, they're good enough.
And they're trying to prove themselves and they're trying to work up the ladder. And so like, you have to figure out where, where do, where do people hang when they're hungry? You know what I mean?
And like, that is. Typically he's out of college. Typically it's like they're the smaller person on a specific set.
One of the guys on my team, um, was usually like an extra or PA or like worked on, on some bigger sets and never really got like the chance. Now he's a lead, you know, he's a lead on my team and he's amazing. But he's like in the last six months, he's gone from quite reserved to, yo, I can be this.
Right. And because you have to be willing to invest in them. from the as a leader and as a company and then also in like you have to give him the more opportunities and chances i give him to prove himself the more confidence he's going to have to say i can do this or i am this question on this though so i do think that there's people that are hiring especially for this role and let's just assume that they're not creative let's just assume that like for example i'm in the space I don't know many DPs.
I don't know, like the concept of going to a college, that makes a lot of sense to me. I can totally do that. I also might not know how to train them because part of it is like, I'm looking for them to tell me.
How do I incubate in a helpful way that gives them like the runway without me being the expert? Yeah. So again, if you were spending all the time looking at your analytics, you're now...
you basically have the mental playbook of like, this is what works and this is what doesn't. And here's what we have found success on. You're right.
It is that individual's job to now make things better. But it is my job to say, here's the playbook for what's worked so far in the past. You know, I talked with the founder of Vintage Modern, which is, it used to be Vintage Broncos.
I don't know if you've ever seen that page. and has 2 million followers, maybe 2 point something million followers. Yeah.
And he's like this like cracked out founder. And I don't mean that in a bad way. He's like this cracked out founder where he's like, yo, everything that we've ever posted, I've done.
Yeah. Everything. He's like, and he like, he's so funny.
He's like, let me just take you on a tour of the, of the facility. He gets on a, like in a, one of those, like those scooters. kind of thing the thing that like mike tyson busted his ass on you know what i'm saying like when mike tyson got on he like busted um he gets on one of those as like a segue thing and just starts riding through like the the entire facility showing us everything like look you're seeing a uh bronco get restored there like i used i did a hook right here yeah absolutely cracked but what he said is like i need to take my my output to times 10 yeah and I need to start doing new things.
Yeah. But I know everything that works for us. So I can at least give you all the knowledge to say, hey, this is what works.
Now make it 10 times better because my skill set has run out. Or saved my time. Yes.
And so your job, when you bring this hybrid, like this hybrid.
a cinematographer is to basically say that same thing. Look, I have all this knowledge of what works, what doesn't work and what I think can work. But now your job is to say, Hey, here's how we're going to make this better.
You now have the eye that I may not have. Like if I've done everything iPhone, typically I'm operating like two phases, right? Like straight on and maybe overhead, but like with a, with a camera, it's like, you could get so much better.
You add, you start adding a gimbal. It's like, you can. add so much variation to some of the things that you do and so and right like you could start leveraging uh captions even as hooks like all of these things that typically but for 60k this is a lot of stuff that frankly like we can do we can figure this out 100 for 60k you can you can definitely figure this out and the reason i like film school um the people that come from film school is when you come from film school you learn everything about cinematography right you you have a different understanding of composition yeah what you and i were talking about before is like a lot of these talking head creators talking about how to grow brands online and like saying like brands need to do xyz brother like most of these brands aren't going to be two and talking head videos and so you have to understand composition as an as an you know as a one point you have to understand composition and how you can leverage composition as a hook.
If you don't know, like if you're bringing in a cinematographer doesn't know the rule of thirds versus one that does and one that could be like, yo Grant, can you stand right there when you do your action? Because now the whole visual just got 10 times better because of like one small thing. Like that's the individual that I want.
That person comes out of a film school. That person also could be like. Could also in a way, like help bring in some ops, which I know sounds crazy to hear, like maybe a 20 year old to bring in an ops.
But if he's like, Hey, this is how I learned to shot list. And we could bring this into like ClickUp or Notion or, you know, or there there's something there as well. But your job is to give them as much data and work with them hand in hand until it's time to let go of that.
And something I love about what you're communicating. It's very interesting because it's, it's very different from what I hear. from other people in your position and other like social media experts is that you are emphasizing creative aesthetic as an important thing.
And you're giving a path to that, which I think a lot of even business owners or people that are aspiring to be personal brand people, they, they want it. They just don't know how to get it. And what they're being told is, Hey, instead, just go the easier route, do yapping videos, you know, just like get better communicating on camera, uh, do mock cast, do.
Do, do formats that are like repeatable and optimized for time. Cause you're doing it by yourself. What you're describing is like, Hey, actually, if you want the premier brand, like if you want the aesthetic that everyone else is going to crave, here's the step -by -step build of it, which I think is like, I've never encouraged people towards it.
Cause I think it's so hard, but you're making it sound like a lot easier than you think. It's like, you just said 5k for a cinema. Like I would never think about a videographer.
I would think about like a creative director before I think about that. You're just saying like, dude, hire someone that's like. talented at that.
And then just give them the runway to direct you. 100%. I mean, did you see like some of my New York content?
Yeah. Yeah, dude, it was gorgeous. Okay.
Like that's all that was, was me teaching him. Not that he doesn't know rule of thirds, but it's me, me teaching him, Hey, here's how you're going to start creating vignettes, which are like those single kind of scenes, moments, seven seconds, swipe carousel. He said, you're going to start thinking about these when we go do the most normal shit.
Yeah. Hey, which by the way, is so cool. Cause you're like, you're integrating that.
It's personal because it's like, Hey, I'm working in these contexts. I'm living, I got my wife and kid, you know, we're just like, we're, we're chilling and we're doing, we're doing, this is our life, but there's a way that we can integrate content and make it aesthetic and make it cool. And you're saying that you're not even the person directing it.
No, I think it's so rad. That's the coolest thing. That might be a huge unlock for people that want to be perceived as creative, but might not actually feel creative.
Every 10 seconds can be a story if it's shot. Interesting. I love that.
An example is probably two of my favorite shots that we published. One, we were inside of Iconic Magazines in New York. And it wasn't, I want to be very clear, none of this is me going and doing something purely for a shot.
I go into iconic magazines every time I'm in New York to find reference images, right? And to find like magazines that I can pull references from. So I'm literally in there shopping.
And I think he like took a shot from outside that shows me like reaching for a magazine and like pulling it and starting to look at it. And the shot is sick because the whole right side of the frame is like just magazines, magazines, magazines, magazines, right? And then there's a little bit of things in the foreground.
I'm like, yo, that's clean. Then there was another shot where. actually we left iconic magazines anytime you put me and brian who's my co -host together we're shopping like we both love clothes we love to spend money on clothes and have bad shopping habits he was like yo we gotta hit this store i was like okay let's say let's like it closes a minute we hurried over there first they they said hey we're closed we just kept staying by the door they're like all right you come in real quick we get in there we go to the like there's there's a little a little area to shop steps and then another area to shop.
I'm not thinking anything of it, but again, I've had these conversations with my, with, with my cinematographer to be like, Hey, remember here's everything could be a story. If you, if you, if you shoot it right. Yeah.
He gets a, an immaculate shot from the top where it's like both pieces of the wood of like the wood, um, kind of like just like the stairs is going like this. And then there's like the backgrounds, like all these different shelves and there's like all these different colors from like the store. And it's like the, and it's just me and Brian, like shopping, looking at a piece and talking, but it looks like we're doing the coolest thing in the world.
Yeah. We're probably just talking shit. You know what I mean?
Like we're probably not doing anything, but that moment, if you're able to shoot it right, you can create that moment. And you're just raising standards. Cause again, like you're, this is a, this is, we're not talking about like.
Like I have questions on the conversion ability of this, like whether we're majoring in minors, trying to be creative. But I think at the same time, if you're saying like, Hey, you want your brand to be represented as this, why not make it the most pristine thing possible? This is like, this is a massive unlock for me.
Cause I'm like, Oh, I shouldn't, I, I, my standards are too low. Like I'm okay with ugly videos. And there's like, I'm not dude.
Yeah. I, there's a lot of videos that don't make it out because there, there's a lot of vignettes that don't make it out. because of like you know he uh my sister cinematographer would be the first to admit this we got in a heated argument when i was at the when we were at the masters the last day because he's i was like hey can you pull the vignettes and he was honest and he was like hey i dropped the ball in these vignettes and he shows them to me and i'm like these are terrible like we did not follow the drill here like you know exactly what We should have shot like we're at the masters.
You know what I mean? Like we got to get the dopest stuff, but we had a big argument about it. Obviously we solve it.
He goes, he comes in New York and regardless is like, I had a standard. I could have posted it just to say like, boom, I was at the masters. Let's show these.
I didn't post any of them. There's 20 something of them. I didn't post a single one because they didn't meet my standards, which is hard because I'm like, there's a social proof aspect built into going to the masters and working with the brand.
Right. didn't post a single one of them. These New York ones all hit the standard, right?
And so from a visual perspective, they all met the standard. Now to touch on what you said from a conversion standpoint, I didn't look at it as conversion content by any means. You know, I didn't look at it as content that needed to get me a client.
What I wanted is all of you only know me for doing green screen or talking about content. a lot of you probably don't know i'm married a lot of you probably don't know that i have a three or almost three year old yeah a lot of you don't know that i love to shop a lot of you don't know what i look like here down yeah you know what i'm saying yeah a lot of you don't know those things these this content is for the people that doesn't know those things this is content is for the people that have only ever heard me talk about content playbooks and art direction and world building and has never seen me hug my wife or, you know, like play with my daughter or travel or walk.
Yeah. It's so there's this idea of content to get followers. Yes.
A lot of us stay in that world. Yeah. Content for our followers.
Yeah. This content, I'm not looking at the analytics from the perspective of I need to make, this needs 10, 10 X the views. I'm not looking at it from that perspective.
I'm looking at the comments being like, it's the same. yes and is is like the same person that's commenting on the top of funnel video commenting on this video right are they getting more invested in me so like the one that i told you i staged i didn't stage this part i staged the the again i didn't stage i just told him like hey take this i was sitting and like typing on my computer and a lot of people that have been commenting and i've been commenting back were like yo posture King, like making funny jokes and stuff like that.
And I'm like, cool, we're going deeper when someone starts like making jokes and they don't even know you, we're going deeper with that audience. Yeah. You know what I'm saying?
And so that content was purely for the people that want to get to know me. And also I can get, um, or I have the ability to get, help them, uh, get to know me. And that was the job of, of that content.
I wanted you to essentially feel like you were in New York with me for. the last five days yeah that was my goal um and that stems from when we were at the masters and we had and we were doing this activation for maupin home The biggest thing people were saying online was like, I feel like I'm there.
I feel like there was an open door for me and that I was invited because the way we approached content, we said, hey, we have our top of funnel content. We have all of our content that's made to go viral, that's made to get hundreds of thousands, if not millions of views. But we also have the content that's made to get 20 ,000 views, but it's supposed to be for the fan base.
I want to jump to level three, which is. $10 ,000 budget. We've established you can be beautiful and creative and aesthetic and top of funnel and middle funnel with a budget of 5K by hiring someone that is not a videographer necessarily, but a cinematographer or an aspiring cinematographer.
What should I care about if I have a budget of 10K? Cool. At 10K, as a founder, you're still the creative director and you're still kind of the creative strategist.
You can start now. getting more positions just as a creative director and now kind of start giving the creative strategist role slowly over time let's say during if if you have a ramp up period of like three months six months over time like putting that towards the the your videographer your lead videographer at 10k the biggest thing that you're doing is just scaling content and so all you're adding to like this hybrid videographer hybrid cinematographer role that you have is an editor that's the only person that you're you're going to add into the mix here because at this point you have wins under your belt you know what i mean like you probably have a few hundred thousand videos maybe you have a million view video if you do your job is to be like we need to do this 10 times this month you know what i mean we need to be doing this as maintaining the same level of quality don't let the bar drop by any means but now we need to be able to scale the production of these if we're making them once a week once every two weeks we now need to go twice a week if it was a series that's been absolutely crushing but you can only publish once a week now publish twice right and so at 10k it's all about scaling it's not about making like the the bigger win is increasing the output while maintaining the same quality versus from like an aesthetic standpoint yeah
versus making the aesthetic quality a bit better. The volume right there becomes the most, and that really becomes a competitive advantage to be like, yo, we can go from publishing 15 times a month to 25 times a month right now. And you should always kind of be in like this 80 -20.
80 % scaling what works and making, not just scaling what works, making 80 % better and continue to do like 3 % tests and iterations on the 80 % that already works well. Meaning. This is a Virgil Abloh rule.
I bring it over to content. Virgil Abloh says you can make anything novel if you just twist it by 33%, not 30%. So imagine this like Saratoga water.
If I take this Saratoga water and I want to make it completely novel, I can change this top to then be like a corkscrew. All of a sudden it's a completely different. it's like right it's a completely different product let's say we're doing it for the sparkling water because it makes sense to have like maybe a corkscrew because of the bubbles all of a sudden it's a completely different product just by adding the corkscrew that's a three percent change and all of a sudden it's a novel thing if i change this to a blue cap it's like okay cool you change the cap but if i change it to the corkscrew or to Quark, all of a sudden it's a completely different product.
And so when we think about content, we can think about it through that same lens of, okay, what's a 3 % change that I can make to this concept that makes it absolutely better? That can be, hey, we've always started, we've always started our talking head videos just like this. Camera where you are, I'm talking to the camera.
What if we start with a crash zoom? What if like grant you're 25 feet away. We use the 70 to 200.
As soon as I start saying, start talking, we fuck, we, we crank the zoom and then I hit the hook. That's a 3 % change that makes the video seem completely different. Right.
And so it's those things that you can start playing around with to say, Hey, this is a great video. What can we do to make it better? At what level, though, are we majoring in the minors?
Are those details the things that actually matter? Because I always thought that conviction and TAM, the actual topic of the video, is the most important aspect. You're talking about details that are so creative and so minute, but you're talking about them as if they have such a dramatic impact on the performance of the video.
But again, I'm talking about a lot of this from a perspective from a brand where you're talking about TAM. And I'm talking about desire, interest, aspiration, things that brands have to lean into to create TAM. Yeah.
You know, like the TAM for people that are going to buy candles is extremely high. The TAM for people that are going to buy my candles is extremely low if I'm a new brand, but the TAM can. be exceptionally high if all of a sudden the visuals make it feel like yo my house isn't complete until i put this candle on my coffee table so it's like we're we're operating from a world of we have to create tam the aesthetic matters how it's shot is matters like and and again like us just saying let's throw a crash zoom in there is a thing that's gonna add like take an extra five minutes dude have you seen a i want to ask because like do you have an example of this like an example of someone's doing this really well someone that's doing what this really well yeah dude like um shinzo this is a it's a clothing brand and what i'll say is like if you want to be absolutely dialed and know what's always going to be working before it works pay attention to fashion they have to move so fast because it's so competitive and they always have to figure out like closes you know it's
Compare close to Graza, which is the olive oil brand. Graza is like new. It's innovative.
Me adding a zipper here and here in like, that's my innovation is not very innovative unless you're in fashion. Right. So I have to be so ahead of the curve on like formats and creativity and concepts that I have to understand how to do everything in a different way.
I'll give you an example of like something that they've, that they did. And you can do this on a 10K budget too. So you know what a lookbook is, right?
It's, hey, Grant, can you stand in front of this psych wall and can you change fits, right? That's level one. I'll have a camera on a tripod.
That's level one. What's level five look like with a 10K budget? Level five on a 10K budget says, hey, let's rent a classic car.
Let's get a Mustang or whatever, any kind of classic car. We're going to buy a $40 car mount and we're going to put like, let's say, let's say this is the hood of the car. I'm going to be on the passenger side.
Okay. We're going to have someone driving. He's not going to be in frame.
We're going to mount the camera to the side of the car here. Okay. I'm going to be here and I'm gonna have the top down.
Okay. As the tops down, we're just going to drive through the neighborhood and I'm going to be like, I'm going to do this. I'm adjust my glasses.
And every time I do this, I'm going to match. I'm a match cut with a completely different fit on. All of a sudden I made a, again, like a very simple video.
I just made it level five by where, by again, when I, what I've mentioned earlier, the action, the angle and the aesthetic. The action is we're driving and I'm adjusting. I'm doing like these micro actions, like maybe putting my hat on, changing my glasses.
The angle is from like the POV of the car. The aesthetic is partially the classic car and everything else that's around me. all of a sudden we turned what is typically a very, very boring thing into a viral piece of content.
That piece of content got hundreds of thousands of views, right? So we turned something that was inherently very boring into something inherently very interesting. Any product can be done like that.
CPA, right? The CPA could be talking while doing that. You know what I'm saying?
What kind of brand would a CPA have if they're adding that type of aesthetic? into it like how different would they be from every other brand and every other person 100 now take it from the angle of like put the put the person that's like going to charge a hundred dollars an hour and like maybe put them in a raggedy fit and have them talking and then have that same individual change fits into like a nicer fit and like more professional yeah and be in the car saying his side of it and they could go back and forth like dialogue or and it's authority framing yes creatively yes with something that's very boring yes But it's just like you have this massive authority frame that's different.
It's like, I think of this, it sounds like the purple cow theory. It is. It's like, essentially, you're just creating this idea that no matter what, that stands out because of the randomness of it.
Yes. Yeah. And because no one else is doing it within the category.
Yeah. You could get so funny and so creative with it, but people only look at the things that are working in their category and be like, hmm, how can I make this 1 % better? Versus like, how can I do something that's 100 % better?
The fashion brand's doing it. The skincare brand's doing it. How do I do fashion for my industry?
Yeah. And like when you start operating like that. Dude, that's so cool.
You can do amazing, amazing things with a 10K budget. Yeah. And I know that because like I've had to do crazy things for brands on small budgets.
Greg Hoffman, who's the ex -CMO of Nike, used to say. it's not how big you could think outside the box it's how big you could think inside the box that's where real creativity comes from that's like when you can stretch 10k to pull off some of the craziest things that is like when you start doing some some amazing things like our most viral piece of content for the mob in home was us buying a uh a hundred dollar etsy old phone, I forget what they're called, an old phone and setting it up and basically having a camera in the bushes and having, and having a prompt on the phone that was like, call whoever introduced you to golf and say, thank you.
And it was such an easy concept, but emotional, but exactly. Very relatable, very emotional. And people stepped up, they start crying.
They started like leaving these voicemails. We rigged up a mic to the, to the phone, like in and hit it. And then like the camera, the cameraman, Randy was, was basically in the bushes.
And in like the way we framed it as well, going back to composition was part of the aesthetic. Like we weren't like fully in the bushes, but we like if the phone is here, bushes are here. We shot here so that there's bushes in the foreground.
Yeah. So it looks like we're hiding in the bushes. Yeah.
But it also makes it beautiful. Yeah. And like the composition was so that the.
only the right third you would see the mob in home which was beautiful and then the rest was like open space for the individual that also plays into the visual layer of that being a good series and a good piece of content but it's a cheap piece of content when we truly think about it yeah right so and scalable because you can do so many iterations of that because there's like the difference between each shot even though it's the same shot It's a different story each time.
It's a different call each time. So it's like massively scalable if you have 20 people in there. Yes, it's like that's 20 individual pieces of concept from one concept.
We shot 25 in three hours. That's incredible. One thing I'll say for the 10K budget is a brand that's doing this exceptionally well, basically saying, hey, like we found a concept in a format that works.
We're going to continue to iterate and make it better is a brand called Everyday Better Club. Everyday Better Club added 110 ,000 followers in like two months. And they're a, um, an athletic wear brand.
They found a concept that absolutely crushed for them, where it was basically those one -shot videos, right? Cause you could, I said it earlier, like there's levels to one -shot videos. They did a one -shot video where it was like, let's say it's you and me and we're running in the snow and we're like, we're in all black, basically like, you know, black, uh, kind of like a windbreaker, let's say, uh, quarter tights, black socks, whatever.
And we're running in snow and You just hear like the crunching of snow, like very ASMR focused. And then on top, it's like, you're only as good as your circle, right?
That was all that they were doing. And it was like seven to 10 seconds. And it was like that single shot locked off the entire time.
That crushed for me. One of them got like a few million views. And then he was like, okay, I'm going to continue making this like 50 million times.
And so. He made other iterations of it where it was like, now four of us are, are running together. And now we're going to add five shots instead of one shot.
And we're going to continuously test and use trial reels to test the different hooks, the different texts on screen. And then he brought the best ones over and then he posts the best ones. And so he grew literally off like that.
And like one other format, 110 ,000 followers in three months, I got on the phone with him and he's like, dude, inventory gone. You know what I'm saying? Like absolutely crushed and showing me the analytics.
It was like, 80 or 90 million views in a month, two months, you know? And it was like the, that's the ability of having a videographer and an editor.
It gives you the ability to test and scale, test and scale ruthlessly, which is what you have to do at that kind of budget. I love it. All right, so let's move to the 50K budget.
This is big leagues. Yeah, this gets more interesting. This is like, I think we just entered in this place, it's inaccessible for a lot of personal brands, and you have to be a legit person with legit monetary value to be doing this level.
I'm really curious what your thoughts are on this, because this is where I think team is really important, structure is really important, and you should be optimizing for the founder's time, you should be optimizing for the person's time, especially so in this. What's different about this level versus the previous ones? This is where you truly go into world building.
Okay. At 10K, at 5K, at zero, you're almost starting to build the base for the, you're more so attracting, at that stage, you're attracting the right people who eventually want to be in the world that you can build. But you don't really get into world building.
You can a little bit at 10K. Again, like when we talk about visuals, visuals play into it, but. At 50K, everything becomes important.
At 50K, you now have a creative director slash creative strategist. This person is responsible for world building. They're responsible for cohesion.
They're responsible for how your personality exists on Instagram and TikTok and YouTube or whatever platforms you're on. This person is responsible for narrative building, which is... the most important thing as a brand or even as a personal brand to understand, which is what narrative do I want to implant in somebody's head and how do I use content to cement it?
That is all about perception. It's all about how do I build the, like if I named a brand right now that you know, and had you basically like say something about them, that is based off probably the content that you consume, right? If I said, which is the 50K brand that I'm going to mention, if I said like BPN and, all of a sudden I hear what you say about BPN.
That is narrative building. That is world building, right? So you have a creative director slash strategist.
How much does that person cost? It can range. It can range like 150 to 250, depends where you live.
It depends the type of brand. Yeah. How do I find them?
You have two angles. You can go and find the individual that's making content about creative directing, right? And has probably like an extensive background on it.
Or you can try to poach from what's a brand that you like, consume their content, and want them on your team. They need to be established. They can't be built.
They need to be already doing the thing with proof. Yeah. Especially at a stage where you're investing, everything kind of exists because of them.
Everything that is going to get put into the world is... They're leading. based off their vision and their, you know, they're taking over leadership.
Yeah. And so that person has to have experience. You know what I mean?
So that person's again, focused on world building, cohesion, narrative building. Now you have to have your lead videographer. You could call him a DP, but you have your lead cinematographer.
And the key thing is this person's vision and taste has to match the creative directors. That's what's key here. You can't have somebody that's like, wants to be tacky and playful, and then the creative director's like, no, we need to be luxury and pristine and have those two worlds collide.
Because this person has to see this person's vision and basically be like, my taste, my skill set, and my vision match yours. To say, oh, I can take yours and I can make it reality. Not, I can take yours and then put it into my world and how I see it.
That sounds like a dream. That sounds like a dream to a lot of people. Like, I think everyone's craving that person.
I talked to a lot of people. They're saying, I want my Sam Gaudette. I want, you know, like there, there's so many people that are saying like, I want this person, please.
Where can I find this person? Yeah. And it is difficult.
What that comes in screening and basically comes in, in how you interview somebody and how you, um, one of my favorite questions that Sam Parr would always ask anybody they hired him when he hired me is like, what do you consume? If you're telling me like, if you're telling me that you consume cartoons and like, not cartoons as like in a bad way, but like you're.
You're juvenile. Yeah. And I'm trying to be luxury, probably not going to match.
But if you're, if you, if I ask you like, Hey, what else do you do to like sharpen your skills? And you're like, well, I watch these YouTubers. I read this newsletter and I'm like, I do too.
Or B, you just put me on. We're probably in the same world. Yeah.
You know what I mean? And, or like, it's going to be easy to mold it. You don't have to be one of one.
It could be like, Hey, in 30 days, you're going to be like me and think like me. Yeah. Right.
Like Mr. Beast and that giant manifesto or thing that he put out, he was like, my job is to make you as much of me as possible. Yeah.
That whole process. Right. And so my job isn't for you to come in and be a direct replicate of me, but it's, Hey, I have my vision for my brand.
Yeah. You're you. Can I get you to still be you with a little bit of me?
You know what I mean? And so that's how I would operate there. And so that's what you're looking for in that lead.
Again, I say hybrid because this is something we do internally. Hybrid means they can shoot, but they can edit. And they're typically the best at setting the vision for the edit.
What we do internally is if we're going to hire external, editors and or when we bring on editors to the team our dp is always the one to edit the first variation of a video yo randy i need you to set the tone set the bar make it fucking high and then we can pass it to somebody else right yeah and so that's why we we have that that i always have it as a hybrid because anybody the second you just hand it off the bar is going to be much lower.
Yeah. If you bring anyone that's competitive on and you set the bar extremely high. Yep.
And they're coming in as a, as an editor, they're like, I need to beat that. Yeah. I need to beat that individual or it needs to be like that, or I know I'm going to get really, not really cool, but I'm going to be, get called out.
So you have set the bar very, very high. And I always tell them, I always say, just do your damn thing. Editor, same thing.
We're talking about scalability here. Now, the two things that, that start to become a little bit different are one, You need to be, you need to have a hybrid producer slash set designer, which is hard.
So somebody that has, is, can get all, because now we're starting to get into like pre -production territory of 50K. You're probably doing campaigns, right? You're probably doing some of these, these bigger things.
You're, you're, you're messing with schedules. You have to have a producer, but you need to have somebody that can assemble the world. You don't want to just have a producers like hey, I found a gym in the gyms You know like let's take BPM because that's who I'm referencing in some cases here is like You don't want someone just be like oh we found the gym and you get to the gym like why are we filming a crunch fitness this is supposed to feel like like The talent in this is supposed to feel like they haven't made it yet in there They're still living with their parents and they're like living and he lives in the basement and he's Trying to make it out and he could feel like on the tip of his tongue that he's about to be successful and break through.
Why the hell is he at Crunch Fitness? Yeah. No, no, no, no.
We need to put him at Hyde Park Gym. Right? The producer and like the set design has to understand.
No Crunch Fitness slander in this podcast, by the way. No, not at all. Not at all.
And it's like Crunch Fitness is very just like, it's just clean, right? It's like a nice commercial gym. It's very colorful.
Yeah. Right? There's a lot of logos.
Yeah. We need grungy. We need dark.
We need grit. Yeah. We need somewhere where there's like some paint missing on the walls.
We need old power racks. We need steel dumbbells. These dumbbells don't need to say crunch fitness, right?
Yeah. And so that person has to be able to see the vision and now go assemble the world. Yeah.
Right. And so now they have to look at the locations and be like, can I bring, can I literally form the world that my creative director wants to form in this location? If they can, and, or if I have to build a set there, can I, that is who you're, you're looking for.
Cause now your job is to be like, Hey, here's a mood board. Here's references. Like go be you go be extraordinary and, and, and bring this vision to life.
I have someone on my team who's amazing, amazing at this. Um, who's taught. like has taught me that this is an essential role at this, at this stage.
Awareness is becoming a more and more expensive game. And this is why I even put this, this last role in there. I would bring in a creator in house who is almost like a pseudo faith.
Yeah, dude. Like they're, they're going to basically create another account, a completely separate account dedicated to your top customer.
in an on the street kind of fashion way like what do you mean let's take who's doing this well let's take martin let's say marathon runners are their top customer segment yeah okay we're gonna have a completely dedicated account to marathon runners that is made by a creator who's gonna give like maybe nothing but nutritional and training advice on this account.
And it's going to be like, let's say whiteboard sessions, like marathon whiteboard sessions, or it's going to be like, or you can go street style interview if you want it to and be like, Hey, this account is dedicated to, um, train with a marathoner for, for a week and making three posts with that marathon. How do we not, how do we de -risk from I'm letting them build a brand that's separate from mine and building an audience that's technically separate from mine, even though it's associated.
and then not ultimately wanting to go and just take it and do their own thing because they're building an audience and own the audience. Well, at this point, the brand doesn't own the IP here, right? So yes, you're...
It's commissioned. Like they're going to be on a retainer. They're going to be on a salary to do this.
Now, the reality is, yes, that is, could be, that's a hard thing to do, right? There's this guy from Morning Brew that I think went through... a similar situation his name's david something did to me or something to me we're like very talented creator he did his own thing he worked at morning brew he became big i think he went and did his own thing morning brew brought him back the deals have to be lucrative yeah you know as a creator you can know like hey i'm gonna i could be able to do this thing but a lot of times sometimes it's not always like his was so based on his personality that yeah um it worked for for him so um yeah it's very dependent but the creator in -house separate on a dedicated account huge and can absolutely crush for you like that is you can think about imagine getting five million views or five million impressions every single every single month in front of your dedicated customer base yeah and then for your growth team which is like where i'd really we could go deep on imagine i have this dedicated account to marathon runners
right? It's getting 5 million views every single month. Okay.
If I have my paid team and I have my, you know, I have my growth team. I now have an account dedicated to a single individual that now allows my creative team to say, Hey, make an entire funnel or funnels dedicated to this segment, because these are the only type of people who are consuming this content versus a main account and main accounts, like probably two to three different customer profiles that are maybe have three to four different like pain points each yeah so when we're talking about operating in this world and where the world that like you can really get to and where i think you should go in when you're talking about 50 to 100 000 uh k budgets where it's awesome to have five accounts sounds like a lot of work it is but the distribution and and like the targeting and like the return on for the when you're spending 100k on organic content probably spending millions of that on ads yeah right yeah and that allows you to to basically target your at your ads to these specific individuals with very targeted uh creative yeah with content that you know works for that individual yeah you have an entire account dedicated yeah to like one individual that you now can come over here and be like shit like
We can, we can do more and more. But what you're describing too is, so you've, you've attached this. What I appreciate about what you're saying is we started this talking about creative and now at this higher tier, we're talking about data.
And I think there's a, that's the connect that's going to make a lot of sense for a lot of people is saying like, ultimately we started with data saying this, the analytics, and we're ending with data saying, ultimately you're looking for impressions that you can retarget on. And that's a math, that's a math problem. You can fix that and you can track that.
So. Any advice you have for someone that's looking to do it at the biggest level possible? Yes.
And I'll give you one tidbit as well. Everything that I mentioned at zero and even now to 100K stems off the same idea, thesis, and principle that the best brands that are getting built today are built off of organic content. They're built...
And organic content is the core. It is the nucleus of these brands. It starts on organic content and it bleeds elsewhere.
In the past, growth marketing was seen as multiple skill sets that operated in silos. You had your copywriter, you had your email specialists, they maybe did SMS, you had the CRO, your designers, you had your paid growth, social, right? And they all operated silos and they're like, hey, here's what I did.
And here's what I did. And maybe they don't even talk. And maybe one team hates the other.
Organic solves that when you go, hmm, social's here because culture's here, people's here. And one thing no one talks about, I don't know why they don't talk about is if I publish 60 pieces of content a month, meaning like stories, including stories and in feed. What other channel has 60 touch points?
You know what I'm saying? Like what other channel has the ability to, you're not sending 60 emails. People aren't getting hit with 60 ads.
People are on your landing page 60 times. So everything related to the perception of a brand should stem from organic content and the content you're creating there to provide some form of value to an individual. And so everything that I'm talking about here is talking about.
leverage organic content as a nucleus of your brand and then build out. So at a hundred K and actually at all of these, what I'll say is at zero, when you're, you know, you're still sending emails, you're still sending SMS, you're still building landing pages, everything that's working on organic, figure out how to put in these, have it live in these other areas.
Meaning if I'm, again, we'll go back to Martin. If I say five reasons why Your marathon, your intramarathon nutrition is terrible.
It's a terrible copy, but let's just use it as a reference. And it performs exceptionally well. And people are in the comments like, oh my God, I didn't know.
Like, I'm not supposed to do X, Y, Z thing. Don't let that piece of content die there. Now make a listicle landing page.
It's like five reasons why your intranutrition marathon is trashed, right? And now it's... Reason one, reason two, reason three, more in depth.
Reason one, reason two, reason three, reason four, reason five. Three ways to fix it. Product that's going to help you fix it.
Email. Five reasons. You get what I'm saying?
Yeah. Or three reasons. And then for the next two reasons, go to Lysical.
Lysical sends you, right? All of a sudden. your organic content is not just a data point for more organic content.
Now it's data for growth. It's your top of funnel, entry -level data point for testing on every single thing. On everything.
But it could be responsible for so much bottom of the funnel too. If that one -shot video performs exceptionally well, like we talked about, like single B -roll with text on screen, if that performs exceptionally well, guess what? It's probably a good headline for your ad.
It's probably a good headline for your email. But going to $100K budget, everything just gets more and more specific. We're talking about where brands are going at the highest level.
They're starting to build their own entertainment studios built into their teams or they're hiring entertainment studios. That's why we have an entertainment studio. We're not just trying to be a content agency.
And the reason for that is a lot of these brands are trying to operate like TV networks. Where, hey, we have dedicated accounts with specific concepts and we're going to scale those concepts no different than a TV show. MTV be like, hey, MTV Cribs was banging.
We're going to keep running it. And so you have your creative director, but now you get to expand past and go creative strategist, right? Those are now two different roles.
It's not a hybrid role anymore. Now you have a director of photography. You have your lead videographer.
Now the things that get a little bit more interesting are you have a screenwriter. You have to have a screenwriter. You have to have a screenwriter.
A screenwriter. Somebody that knows what truly works on TV. Am I stealing from that industry?
Am I going to LA and trying to get somebody from LA or Atlanta and saying you got to come in? Chances are, yeah. Because there's not a lot of screenwriters that understand or can screenwrite for social.
You're probably going to LA and you're teaching them how to do it for short form. Because it's easier to translate that. to this medium versus trying to translate to the other, trying to take someone that's social and try to make them more professional.
All of it is relatively the same. It's like, hey, we just need to condense it. Set designer, now somebody that's dedicated to building out these worlds at scale.
Hey, I need... And they come at it from a completely different perspective now where they're probably going to hire PAs to help them, personal assistants to help them. where it's like, hey, this is the world that I need to build.
And they're almost setting the tone and the vision and like then making sure that they get it right. And then you have to have a producer that could handle all of the logistics. At 100K, you just get ultra specific with your roles, right?
And you kind of lose a little bit of the hybrid -ness. It doesn't mean that they don't have other talents. It just means you're 10 out of 10 out of doing this.
I don't want you spending your time on what you're five out of 10 or seven out of 10. I want you being 10 out of 10 because there's certain people that when they're 10 out of 10 at what they do, it's not a one X multiple. It's not a 10 X multiple.
It was a hundred X multiple. Yeah. Right.
And so when you have those people, you, and I think Sam says this as well, like do everything possible to get them on the bus. Yeah. And then once they're on the bus, let them drive their bus.
Yeah. You know what I mean? And so at a hundred K, all that really changes is getting more specific and getting the skill sets.
in the right position that they need to be able to do the thing that they're exceptionally good at. You do that at 100K, you can move entirely different. And then the last person that I would have on here that I don't think people talk about, and I talked about this with JT Barnett, is you need to have an analyst.
An analyst that understands growth marketing. That analyst is going to look at every single piece of content that you're making on every platform and go to every other team on the growth side and say, hey, here's what's working here. Here's how we can test it here.
Here's how we were doing. Here's the listicle video that worked here. Here's how we need to bring it to email.
Here's all the text headlines that worked here. Hey, ad team. And they bridge the gap.
And they take, and they stop these teams from operating silos. So many teams get stuck at these growth ceilings because they operate in silos and no one, no one talks, no one communicates, no one pulls data. Like everything that we're doing, everything that's responsible, that, that somebody is responsible for on the growth side is based off of data.
The fact that we don't share that data with each other to make better decisions is crazy. We rather waste and spend more money than share data. You're tripping.
So good. And I think like, again, like I, I, what I don't want is for people to think about some of this. There's an aspect of it's overwhelming.
There's simple aspects of things that like they see just to call out to be like, Hey, don't try to be 3 % better. Try to get 10 X better. And this thing is going to be the thing that gets you 10 X better.
I love that thought process because like we. I think about like testing and iterating on minute stuff and thinking about distribution. Like I'm a big distribution guy and that's everything we've optimized for.
But like when you think about taste, I mean, I'm restructuring a podcast right now for somebody and taking him from like one aesthetic to a completely different aesthetic. And what you're describing is like, oh, I don't, I should just go much more aggressive on cinematography when I didn't think it was as important. I was like, oh, if we just get a little bit more.
bet like a little bit better it's gonna be great no if we get dramatically better it's going to change the entire format of how people perceive them which i think is like that's a big unlock for me and i really appreciate it so um how can people support you um if you want to follow me follow kind of what i'm doing house of ag so house dot of dot ag um house of distribution is is my agency if you want a creative team in the house um and that's what this sick dude that's basically what equity podcast sweat equity podcast yeah i should have shouted out sweat equity sweat equity as as well it's our podcast it should feel like you're in the middle of a creative brainstorm storm session anytime uh brian and i talk so yeah yeah dude i love it thanks you're the best dude thank you thank you for this i appreciate you having me yeah thanks dude
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Grant Owen opens by handing Alex Garcia, the strategist behind House of Distribution and the Sweat Equity podcast, a blunt assignment: map the entire path from a $0 content operation to a $100,000-a-month team. What follows is a level-by-level hiring and metrics playbook, not a pep talk about consistency.
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A sales recruiter who has cash-collected over $100M walks through the five revenue levels that took him from bartending to $2.5M a month, and the constraint that defines each one.
A creator with 8 million followers and 5.5 years of daily posting breaks his whole content system into two teachable parts: how to stop niching down, and how to build hooks that stop the scroll.
A Forbes-ranked creator breaks growing an audience into six repeatable steps — pick a platform, build credibility without a studio, own a category, mine ideas, read the right metrics, and turn attention into a paid product ladder.
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