29:06Jake Trinder · Essay
Once You Learn Psychology, YouTube Becomes Embarrassingly Simple
A YouTube growth strategist breaks every video down into four sequential viewer decisions and shows how to find which one is actually broken.
August 26thThe argument in one line.
Winning on YouTube is not about making valuable videos, it is about proving demand exists before you record, then packaging, hooking, and converting viewers using formats and data that already work instead of guesswork.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- A business owner or creator using YouTube to generate leads and sales, not chasing views as an end in themselves.
- Someone who already has expertise or an audience-relevant topic but keeps making videos that nobody watches.
- A person willing to do keyword and competitor research on YouTube before scripting or filming anything.
- Someone running a YouTube channel for a client, a brand, or their own coaching or service business.
SKIP IF…
- You're a hobbyist creator optimizing for entertainment or personal expression rather than business results.
- You want a shortcut that skips research. This is a research-heavy, unglamorous process by design.
The full version, fast.
Jake Trinder runs a YouTube agency behind Gary Vee, Ali Abdaal, and dozens of business channels, and argues most creators fail by making videos they think are useful with no proof anyone wants them. His five-step system: validate demand first by tracing outlier videos into a demand map before scripting anything; package with a proven title and thumbnail format matched to the audience's psychology, not just copied words; open every video with promise, proof, and plan to hold attention past the click; convert viewers with give-first calls to action framed as a useful next step rather than a pitch; and treat every upload as evidence, doubling down on what already works while avoiding one-hit videos that attract the wrong audience.
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00:00 – 01:46
01 · Cold open: credibility and client results
Trinder introduces himself and lists results across the 100+ channels his agency runs, including Gary Vee, Ali Abdaal, Instantly AI, and several business owners who went from zero to six and seven figures.
01:49 – 02:18
02 · The roadmap
States the five things he'll cover: finding video ideas with proven demand, packaging them to win the click, making videos YouTube keeps pushing, converting viewers into customers, and using data to double down.
02:18 – 06:37
03 · Step 1: Validate demand before you record
Using Dr. Sean O'Mara as the example, argues that knowing your audience isn't evidence they'll choose your video, and shows how searching for outlier videos on YouTube first (visceral fat, then insulin as the mechanism for Tessa Damm) proved demand before a single video was scripted.
06:37 – 10:44
04 · The depth-first search research process
Explains the depth-first search algorithm as a repeatable method: seed a niche with search terms, follow outlier videos into their channels, mine each channel for more outliers, then back out and repeat until the niche is fully mapped.
10:45 – 14:39
05 · Step 2: Package the idea so people choose your video
Covers title and thumbnail formats (the 'so fast it feels like cheating' format, the red-block-white-text thumbnail style, the 'if you don't understand X you don't understand Y' title), and warns against copying wording without understanding why a format worked for that audience.
14:39 – 19:39
06 · Step 3: Build the hook with promise, proof, plan
Breaks down the video-opening structure that keeps viewers watching after the click: reaffirm the promise, establish a reason to trust you, then show where the video is going. Uses the Glencoco speedrun video and viewer satisfaction as the real optimization target.
19:39 – 24:32
07 · Step 4: Turn viewers into customers with give-first CTAs
Argues most calls to action fail because they're a take (value, value, value, then a pitch). Uses the Instantly AI 'sell a service in 10 hours' video and Sam's free ad-creative library as examples of a CTA framed as the viewer's next useful step.
24:32 – 28:20
08 · Step 5: Use the data to double down (Gary Vee case study)
Walks through Gary Vee's channel: the first 'New Rules of Social Media' video, then the invented 'The New Era of X Has Just Begun' shift-format tied to Gary's social-media-to-interest-media thesis, showing how each upload's data pointed to the next one.
28:20 – 34:06
09 · Diagnosing the funnel and avoiding one-hit-wonder pitfalls
Covers tracking views through leads, qualified calls, customers, and revenue to find the funnel's bottleneck, the danger of an off-topic viral hit, and why one successful video using a format isn't proof it will work again without more evidence.
34:06 – 35:39
10 · The information advantage and close
Closes on why running 100+ channels compounds into a lasting research advantage, and that pre-published research is only a hypothesis until the market votes with its views.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- Knowing your audience does not prove they will choose your video's subject over the other twenty videos on their feed.
- A demand map, built by tracing outlier videos through their channels and recommendations, tells you what a niche wants before you record a single video.
- People can want an outcome without understanding the mechanism behind it, so a boring or unfamiliar mechanism can make a title stronger, not weaker, when it's positioned around the outcome they already want.
- Copying a viral title format without understanding why it worked for that audience's psychographics is how the format fails in a new niche.
- A thumbnail's job is to be understood in a single instant. The title's job is to qualify that the video is for the right person.
- The three questions a viewer asks after clicking are: am I getting what I clicked for, can this person deliver it, and is the rest worth my time. Answer them with promise, proof, and plan.
- Viewer satisfaction, not retention percentage or click-through rate, is the metric that actually decides whether YouTube shows a video to more people.
- A call to action that feels like the most useful next step gets taken even when the viewer knows it's a pitch.
- The video does not have to make the sale. It only has to make the next useful step obvious.
- Your highest-viewed video can be your least valuable one if it's an off-topic hit that attracts an audience uninterested in everything else you publish.
- One viral video is a clue that a format works, not proof. You need repeated evidence, including the cases where the same format failed, before you build a strategy around it.
- Editing can remove friction from a video, but it cannot rescue a weak idea or an unproven topic.
- Specificity costs reach, and that's a price worth paying when it makes the right person feel more understood.
- Running dozens of channels compounds into a durable information advantage: more channels means more evidence, which produces better decisions than any single-channel competitor can make.
The five-step system behind 100+ growing YouTube channels
WHAT TO LEARN
Jake Trinder's agency runs YouTube channels for Gary Vee and dozens of businesses by treating every video as a five-step system, not an act of creativity: prove demand, package the promise, deliver on the click, ask for the next step as a gift, then let performance data decide what happens next.
03Step 1: Validate demand before you record
- Test whether a video subject has demand before recording, by finding evidence people already search for and watch that topic on YouTube, not just knowing your audience's problems.
- When a market wants an outcome but doesn't know or care about the mechanism behind it, position the video around the outcome and use the mechanism as the differentiating hook, not the headline.
- A single validated topic doesn't guarantee a hit. It removes the gamble on whether anyone cares, which still has to be followed by good packaging and execution.
04The depth-first search research process
- Build a full picture of a niche by following one outlier video to its channel, mining that channel for more outliers, then backing out to explore the next lead until the niche is exhausted, not just checking a couple of competitors.
- Generate a seed list of search terms for a niche with an AI tool first, then work through each term systematically so no corner of demand gets missed.
- This research process can be delegated to a virtual assistant or an AI system. It doesn't require the business owner to do it personally, but it does need to actually get done.
05Step 2: Package the idea so people choose your video
- A title and thumbnail work together to make one promise. Copying someone else's exact wording without understanding why their specific audience clicked is a common and costly mistake.
- Thumbnails get processed before titles do, so they need to communicate the transformation or outcome in a single glance, especially on a platform where twenty competing videos are one scroll away.
- Test packaging against the other videos it will actually compete with in the feed, and ask honest outsiders whether it would make them click, before publishing.
06Step 3: Build the hook with promise, proof, plan
- Open every video by reaffirming the exact promise made in the title and thumbnail so the viewer feels they chose correctly the moment they click.
- State a specific, credible reason the viewer should trust you on this topic, and reuse that authority statement across every video rather than reinventing it each time.
- For longer videos, show the viewer up front everything they're about to get, so they mentally commit to watching instead of bailing early.
- Viewer satisfaction, not retention percentage or click-through rate, is the metric to optimize for. It's the one that determines whether YouTube shows the video to more people.
07Step 4: Turn viewers into customers with give-first CTAs
- Structure calls to action as the next useful step for the viewer, not a value-value-value-then-pitch pattern. A give-first CTA gets taken even when the viewer knows it's promotional.
- A product or service can be featured inside a video without hurting performance if an unbiased expert on the topic would have mentioned it anyway.
- When the offer itself can't naturally be the on-screen tool, such as a service or coaching program, create a companion resource, like a swipe file or template, that extends the lesson and doubles as the opt-in.
- The video's job is not to close the sale. It's to make the next step so obviously useful that the viewer takes it, then email or retargeting closes the rest.
08Step 5: Use the data to double down (Gary Vee case study)
- Treat every published video as evidence: when a video 10x's the channel average, the next question isn't 'make the same video again' but 'why did this specific one work.'
- Look outside YouTube at what's trending in the creator's broader narrative or industry to find a genuinely new angle on a format that's already proven, rather than repeating the same video.
- Doubling down means preserving the underlying reason a format worked while finding a new, better execution of that same signal, not just cloning the title.
09Diagnosing the funnel and avoiding one-hit-wonder pitfalls
- Track views, leads, qualified calls, customers, and revenue for every upload so a bottleneck, whether it's traffic, conversion, or a weak call to action, can be diagnosed after the fact.
- A channel's highest-viewed video can be its least valuable one if it's an off-topic hit that pulls in viewers who ignore everything published afterward.
- One viral video using a format is a clue, not proof. Confirm a format actually works by finding repeated winners, and study the failures that used the same format to learn its real constraints.
- A full script helps entertainment-style talking-head videos but can make a genuine expert worse on camera. Screen recordings and challenge videos need a structure to follow, not exact wording.
10The information advantage and close
- Running many channels compounds into an information advantage: more channels means more evidence, which produces better decisions, which attracts more clients and even more evidence.
- Pre-published research is a hypothesis. The market still gets the final vote, so post-performance data has to feed back into the next decision.
Terms worth knowing.
- Depth-first search
- A research method borrowed from computer science: starting from one niche, following an outlier video to its channel, mining that channel for more outliers, then backing out to try the next lead until the entire niche has been mapped.
- Demand map
- A picture of what topics and language a niche already searches for and watches on YouTube, built by tracking which videos and subjects keep outperforming across multiple channels.
- Levels of awareness
- A concept from the book Breakthrough Advertising describing how much a market already understands about its problem or the solution to it, used here to decide whether a video should lead with the mechanism or the outcome.
- Promise, proof, plan
- A three-part video-opening structure: restate what the viewer clicked for, give them a reason to trust you, then show them exactly where the video is going.
- Winner-take-all platform
- A description of how YouTube's recommendation system behaves: the single video that gets clicked and watched more than its competitors captures most of the available attention for that topic.
Things they pointed at.
04:42bookBreakthrough Advertising
12:56channelDiary of a CEO
20:44productInstantly AI (pre-warmed domains feature)
24:06channelRyan Dice's company-scorecard video and lead magnet
Lines you could clip.
17:52
“Editing can remove friction from the process, but it cannot rescue a weak idea.”
29:01
“Your highest viewed video can be one of your least valuable, because an off-topic hit can attract thousands of people who ignore every video you publish next.”
33:10
“If you only research winners, you can prove any idea.”
20:15
“Views are cool, but views alone do not grow your business.”
18:14
“The goal of every video is viewer satisfaction, not retention, not click-through rate. Those are noisy metrics.”
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I'm going to be talking about how I build $100 ,000 plus per month YouTube channels as soon as possible, whenever I have to start over so that you can do the same. Now, you should probably listen to me, to be quite honest. And the reason why, if you don't know me, my name is Jake Trinder.
I started my first YouTube channel at 10, made my fair share of bad videos, bottle flip challenge, and my mom falling on the floor there. Finally, one worked to a degree, and this was where I started to fall in love with YouTube and the process of making videos, doubled down on it. So even doubling down at the age of 10 years old.
12 years later, I run over a hundred different YouTube channels. One of which is Gary Vee. So recently we've took over his YouTube channel and we've 10x'd his average views in less than a month.
He's done a million long form views in the past 90 days when previously he was averaging like 10, 20 ,000 views a video. Jeremy Haynes, we just recently started with him. We literally just started and already we have his most popular YouTube video there produced on his channel Lifetime.
Ali Abdaal, I'm taking over his strategy as well to help him blow up his channel. Many charts, their recent video just hit 100 ,000 plus views in nine days. Instantly, AI, a million dollars annual recurring revenue added from YouTube.
Zero to 8K serves multiple viral videos. And some of our best results are actually starting from complete zero with no existing brand, no nothing. And so Glen Coco, they made a million dollars back from their first six months, from the first 12 videos.
Their first video made them $100 ,000 in the first 30 days. And then their first 12 videos, a million dollars in six months. Tessa, she went from zero to 50K net profit from YouTube in her first month from about four or five videos.
14 new clients you can see the screenshot there and she got 1 million long form views in 90 days as a doctor so super boring business and it just goes to show that you can see success with youtube no matter the niche and then sam's your 400k a month from youtube sammy went from zero to pretty much 100k subscribers in a few months you get the point and also i built my youtube agency to 500 000 a month at 21 years old Thank you.
So here's exactly what I'm going to be walking you through. First, how to get killer video ideas that your buyers actually want to watch. And you can know for a fact that they want to watch.
How to package them to destroy your competition. How to make videos so good they beg you to buy. How to keep hitting green winner after winner using data.
And also, in turn, build the number one YouTube channel in your niche and grow your business. So step one, finding video ideas your buyers already want to watch. Now, most business owners start here.
They know their target market. They know their problems. And then they just make something useful.
and YouTube will just find the right people. That's what they assume. That sounds logical, and it is also how you spend a week making a useful video that nobody watches.
Knowing your audience matters, but it does not prove that they will choose the subject on youtube so you need evidence that they will actually watch these videos before you even press record this is dr sean i'm going to tell this through an example so he's like a doctor that helps people lose visceral fat and he was getting roughly 1 000 long form views a day and then it went to more than 100 000 views a day and that happened in less than a month so this was what he was posting beforehand so he was just kind of picking whatever videos he wanted three eating strategies that will transform your health some of my favorite things he was making videos around what he thought people needed and what he thought his target market wanted just based on knowing his market and who he worked with wasn't that the information was necessarily bad but the subjects and wording were being chosen on a whim he wasn't really thinking about that and doing his diligence so we stopped guessing and we searched the exact problems in his market people already cared about so for example you know we basically generated a list using AI of what are the different things that people might potentially search for in his niche and then we actually went and did our diligence on YouTube to figure out
is there actually demand around this and so we found genuine standout outliers like this one here how to destroy visceral belly fat this video got 4 .4 million views so we now knew that there was demand around the topic of visceral fat and then we opened the channel and we kept following the evidence so after finding channels that had successful examples we then actually followed that evidence deeper to basically create a demand map within the niche to understand what are all the things that the target market wants specifically on youtube the same demand kept showing up visceral fat people wanted to lose it and they wanted to lose it fast.
And before we even touched the title, thumbnail or recording, we knew the subject and language already had demand on YouTube. So you have to validate that first before you make a video. Then we made this video here, how to lose visual fast, so fast it feels like cheating, 795 ,000 views.
And this video single -handedly broke their email marketing system, according to them. the topic to be clear did not do all the work and I am going to get into this in a bit but it did mean that we were not gambling on whether anybody cared in the first place before we actually went to the effort of making a really good video.
So this is what you want to ask is what evidence says that people that I want as customers are already choosing to watch this subject on YouTube? If you can't answer that question then you need to find that out. Something that happens quite often in a lot of these more boring niches where you might be doing something super valuable but people don't really care is what if people need something that they do not value yet i don't know if you've read the book breakthrough advertising but very good book in this book they discuss a concept called levels of awareness and in different markets people within that market are within different levels of awareness some are problem aware some are solution aware and you have to know where your market is at and where they are at on youtube because if you assume that they want your mechanism then you might capture nobody no matter how valuable it is people can want the outcome without understanding the mechanism and so this is an example of tessa dam you can see she was getting like 12k view
before but actually this was like 1k views it just got a ton of traffic after we started working with her couple of the recent videos hundreds of thousands of views now her audience woman who want to get into better shape lose fat better health but her mechanism was insulin that's all she talks about she's an insulin doctor she's an expert in insulin and fat loss was the outcome that they already wanted and so what we did was we identified insulin as the mechanism that they needed to understand so We made insulin relevant to fat loss.
Even though she just wanted to speak about insulin, she didn't really care about speaking about fat loss. That was the outcome that they wanted. They were solution aware, not problem aware.
And so we positioned it around the outcome. The broad desire gives the idea demand. And then the unfamiliar mechanism gives them a new reason to care.
When you basically use a mechanism that is boring or unknown. but you position it around the outcome, it actually can make the idea stronger rather than weaker because it's like a unique mechanism, right? It differentiates it from all the other videos around fat loss.
And so this was the video that we made. If you don't understand insulin, you don't understand fat loss. The reason why we picked this specific title was because this was a format that was working really well on YouTube, which I'm going to get into in a moment about title formats and all that juicy stuff.
But this, if you don't understand X, basically X being something that the viewer doesn't care about, you don't understand Y, which is the ultimate thing they care about. Drives curiosity, gets them to click 230 ,000 views. It's actually more than this now.
And so she got 1 million long form views, 30 ,000 subscribers. And then, you know, you saw the result as well beforehand. There it is.
So 14 clients, more than $50 ,000 net profit in the first month, even after paying us. Now, to be clear though, like... this was only part this was probably like 30 of the decision was choosing to make a video around insulin and then positioning the alchemist fat loss the exact wording came from a proven youtube format and i'm going to show you how to find that in the next section so if direct demand exists you want to build around it if it does not then change the subject or bridge it to something that people already want so how do we actually find what has demand on youtube this is where i'm going to get into some algorithmic source this is what you want to do yourself if you're doing youtube yourself single handedly you want to go through this process to figure out what people want or you can pass this off to a virtual assistant or ai so depth first search don't let the computer science language make it sound more complicated than it actually is it's an algorithm which is just a simple set of step -by -step instructions to achieve a goal and depth first search is used specifically to explore a huge amount of connected information in a given data set it's what web crawlers and these sort of things use and so
it basically makes sure that if you're going to explore your niche on youtube you don't miss a single corner so that you know all the successful channels all the topics with demand but also when you research the broader space of youtube you're finding all of the different things that are working a couple definitions that i'm going to go over a node in the context of depth first search is simply one thing that you explore and so this could be a search term a video a channel or recommendation the root node is where it starts and in all case That is the niche that we want to understand and explore and find outliers in these successful videos within.
And then you have the stack, which I'll also explain. So this is a list of useful things that you've found, but you haven't explored yet. So basically, this is the way it works visually.
So you start off with your niche. And within that, you will have a list of different things to search within your niche. The way that you get this list is simply by saying to Claude or ChachiPT, give me a course seed list of keywords for this niche.
And what it's going to do, if you say productivity, it's going to be like productivity. tips, systems, calendar schedule, and all these things. It basically gives you all the things that you need to search in order to explore the entirety of the niche.
And then what happens is you start with the first search term. So these search terms get pushed onto the stock and you start with the first search term in the stock. Then when you search that search term, you get a set of videos and all these videos, some of them are going to have...
hundreds of thousands of views they're going to be outlier videos that have performed outstandingly well those get pushed to the stock then you go to the first video and you explore the channel from that first video you get a video that's performed outstandingly well from a search term you then find and go to the channel and then in that channel there's a set of more outstanding videos and as you're going through this process you're recording all of this in a research database of just videos that have performed outstandingly well in that channel in that niche finally Once you've gone through the channel and you've seen all of the standout videos that you want to take note of, you then go back.
one step and you go back to that video that you were previously on you look at the recommendations you follow that process all the way through and you basically continue through this process where you've explored the entirety of a search term you found all the successful videos all the successful channels and then once the search term is exhausted you go back you repeat the same for the next search term and then you just iterate through this very long and tiresome process which is why yourselves as business owners shouldn't be doing it you shouldn't delegate this to an assistant or ai and this is how you explore the entirety of a niche and find all of the videos that are performing outstandingly well.
Do that enough and you'll have a very clear idea of what works on YouTube. So you start with the language that your market uses to describe the problem. So for example, lose visceral thought, and then you find a video that generally outperformed on its own channel, like this one here that I showed previously.
You open the channel and then you find all the successful videos on that channel following useful recommendations. And when a branch stops producing useful information, go back and then take the next one. Repeat until you understand the niche, not just one competitor.
You should have a full, full overview of the entire niche. The reason why we want to do this is because more visibility over what works on YouTube and what doesn't, it allows you to make better decisions.
And YouTube is just a game of decisions. What are the right videos to make? What's the right thumbnails to use?
What are the right titles, video structure, et cetera? As I said, VA can run the search process and AI can expand the search and organize the evidence. And now you know what people want, they can still choose somebody else's videos.
So you've identified what should I make videos around in the first place? And that's how you can direct your focus to something that can provide value and actually attract customers. But then it's about figuring out how do I actually, package that?
How do I get my video clicked on over everybody else's? Demand creates the opportunity and packaging, title, thumbnail, hook, structure, decides how much of it that you actually capture. So this is the second step is packaging the video ideas so people actually choose your video.
If you already want the subject, that does not mean they will choose your video. They can only click one video at a time. The title and thumbnail make one promise together and a format which you might have heard of title formats, people talk about this a lot, is a proven way of framing that specific promise.
And with this, what a lot of people get wrong is they just see a video that's worked and they're like, oh yeah, let me just copy that and twist it to my niche. Do not just copy the words. You need to actually work out why people wanted to click in the first place.
So for example, this was a format that's working very well on YouTube. You might have seen it if you watch a lot of YouTube, which is basically like how to get this result so fast it feels like cheating. The likes of Alex Amozy have used it.
Many of the top YouTubers have used it. And the reason why this works is because a result that they already want faster than they could have possibly expected.
And , right? It feels like cheating. So it's like, ooh, like if I click on this video, then I'm gonna get some sauce.
And so that's what we did for Sean. His audience already wanted to lose visceral fat. And ideally they would fucking delete it.
They're actually health conscious and they wanna lose visceral fat. They want that shit gone. And so that's why.
that format specifically meshed well with that topic so you have to understand if you find a former that works really well you have to understand why it actually works with that particular audience with the way their behaviors are their psychographics the way they think the intent behind the view so that if you're gonna plan on transferring it to your niche you actually understand that it will work well with your audience what a lot of people do is they'll see a former like one dollar versus ten thousand dollar thing from mr beast and then they'll take that and apply it to a business audience where it makes complete no sense but the actual viewing behaviors of those viewers are completely different so you have validated demand and then you have a proven reason to click and you have one specific promise and the thumbnail is what gets processed first so this is the first thing to pay attention to because if they cannot recognize the problem and outcome quickly and they cannot understand that the video is actually for them within a single instance they may not even read the title because people have short attention spans there's 20 different videos on their feed at once only one of those gets clicked on and so if you can't grab their attention straight away they're going to
go somewhere else so for example with dr sean the thumbnail makes the transformation look obvious we've got red highlight block behind the white text which is proven to work on youtube you might have even seen that a lot where people have the red block behind the white text it's gone from diary of a ceo they were the ones who innovated this and then everybody just copied it but also logically red on a dark background and then the white contrasts a lot then we have the visual transformation so it grabs their attention in a single instance they know that's for them and also his audience is predominantly male which is why we used a male body and then we have sean in medical scrub which subconsciously within a single instance proves authority because they know he's a doctor they make the connection straight away so this is all intentional and he luckily also just looks like he'd be a doctor so the thumbnail makes the transformation obvious and then the title is what qualifies the exact
problem and promise a thumbnail can look good and still give the right person no reason to click and so what you want to do is there's free tools that you can use for this but you can actually simulate what your thumbnail will look like against other videos that are being posted on youtube right now so that you can judge the packaging beside the videos it will actually compete against packaging is so important to the degree which if you're taking youtube seriously you should literally ask your friends you should put your packaging up against these other videos and just ask them to tell you honestly like does it actually stand out against these other videos would you click on this because it's so important if you lose that winner take all game of not getting clicked on then you're cooped so tessa used a different proven format she used the if you don't understand x you don't understand why why is the result that they already want and then x is the thing that they did not realize was you know stopping them basically but they didn't actually care about previously and that's where we got that idea from so ask the question do the title and thumbnail give the right viewer a clear reason to choose this video over all of the others on their feed in a single given instance if it doesn't do that you need to revise your thumb
The moment they click, this is getting into the hook now, you've made them a promise. And so this is where we actually get into making videos that YouTube keeps on pushing. They clicked because of this promise of how to lose visceral fat so fast it feels like cheating.
And so before the click, they're thinking, you know, which video should I watch? After the click, they're thinking, should I keep watching this one? So the opening of the video has to make them feel like they chose the right video.
Am I getting what I clicked for? Can this person actually deliver it? Is the rest worth my time?
Promise, proof. plan that's what answers all three of those questions homozy uses this framework but also just logically this answers all of those questions and keeps them watching so first you want to reaffirm exactly what they clicked for this is the promise this is meeting the expectation the moment they click so that they know that you're planning on giving them what they actually clicked for so they hang around for a bit longer the next thing they're thinking is why should i listen to you on this given thing so you give them the best possible reason to trust you this is the part that most people miss out is they're going to be like i'm going to give you this thing and then they don't tell them why they should actually listen to them and so you want to basically figure out what is your unfair edge that you can say and establish yourself as an authority around that given topic more than anybody else you have to nail this statement i actually encourage you to spend time nailing this statement so that you can use it throughout every single video and then
you want to show them where the video is going so this is different from the promise because if you're doing a full course video for example you can say that you're going to teach them everything they need to know about facebook ads but to actually get them to mentally commit to watching a two hour plus video it has to be crystal clear that they're really gonna get everything that they need to know like they need to have the confidence that you're actually gonna give them everything and so the way that you do this is you know this is gonna be the only facebook ads video that you ever need to watch and the reason why i'm qualified to tell you this is because i spend 100 million dollars on facebook ads every single month across my clients like ty lopez and in this video i'm gonna be going through absolutely everything i'm gonna be telling you how to set up your campaigns how to actually navigate around the ads manager how to come up with your creative strategy and find winning proven ads and then you're just listing through all these things to where logically like okay this is actually everything i need to know expectation is met i'm convinced that they're actually going to give me that thing that is super important also for podcasts as well this is why spoiler intros are really important because you have to like really make it clear in their mind of what they're going to get through that one hour two hour plus video it's also important for shorter videos as well speaking on this
terms of meeting expectations when they click on the video so this is one of our clients glenn coco those top two videos with the two videos before we started with them this one here got 2k views like that one there closest got 2k views but that was actually because of the video that popped up afterwards the other one got like 300 views most of this came from external traffic anyway terrible tiles terrible thumbnails bottom one got 300 000 views that was the first video made a hundred thousand dollars plus back in the first 30 days and they went from zero to a million dollars in the first six months from youtube from the first 12 videos so these videos work start from zero get the first sale show the entire process that was basically the expectation that was set in this one speed running call calls from zero dollars the first sale brackets i show everything right and this is very raw thumbnail gives this feeling that he is really going to show everything because he's just kind of like posted this video completely raw and so we have to meet this expectation if it was a polished 15 minute summary video that would not have satisfied the viewer's expectation and if i had like all these fancy edits and so on and so forth it would be like wait what what the fuck is this this is not what i clicked for and so editing can remove friction from the process but it cannot rescue
A weak idea. an empty video the goal of every video is viewer satisfaction not retention you know none of this not click -through rate that doesn't matter they're noisy metrics the thing you're optimizing for is viewer satisfaction which is simply based on what the viewers actually clicked for and their expectation coming into this what is the best possible video that i can make and how can i blow their expectations away because what a lot of people do is they'll set this expectation they'll not meet it to its fullest because of the reasons that i just mentioned in terms of not meeting them at the right awareness level and making a video that they didn't actually promise and then it under delivers the videos don't perform instead you want to set the expectation the title and thumbnail and you want to blow past that expectation in accordance with the expectation that you actually set so viewer satisfaction is the goal right people click they watch and they feel satisfied and then youtube tests it with more people like them that's the loop that they go through and that's why viewer satisfaction is so important if
the right viewers click on the video because the title and thumbnail are positioned correctly and on average the right viewers are also very satisfied and hopefully more satisfied with the experience of watching your video than your competitions youtube's gonna look at that and be like holy this audience likes this video the most let's push it to more of the people who are this audience and this audience is your target market and it goes through that flywheel this is why it's a winner -take -all platform if your video gets clicked on more than your competitions and they watch it and are satisfied with it more than your competitions, that video is going to become the staple for your target market on the YouTube home feed and in YouTube search.
This is what makes YouTube a winner -take -all platform. The video that wins on the click and the watch can take most of the attention. This is where we get into turning the right viewers into customers.
So at this point, you kind of know how to do the research process to figure out what your target market actually demands topic -wise. Then you apply that same research process in order to find what's working on YouTube in the terms of title formats, thumbnail formats as well. Even video structures, right?
Certain videos have certain distinct structures that are also working. So you find all this information of what's working across YouTube right now. And then you look at your niche and you're like, nobody's doing this in my niche.
This is often the case because most people in business related niches suck at YouTube. And that's why our clients win so consistently. And so at that point, you know how to make the video right.
And also you know how to hook them in and view a satisfaction. That's the goal. So now you should be able to make a good video.
And now it's about actually converting those. So views are cool, but views alone do not grow your business. business and so the next job is turning the right viewers into customers and this is where most call to actions it up value value value random pitch that's how people do it right they're giving so much value and that's like and by the way if you want us to run your ads for you you can click the link in the description and we'll do this and that and there's not or and by the way if you want to join my free newsletter which nobody gives a about then sign up and then nobody does it and then the video falls the action should feel like it's the most useful next step this is where we turn call to actions instead of being a take instead a give and the viewers like thanking you for it and even if they know it's a call to action they don't Give a shit.
Watch me start and sell a service in 10 hours. This is a video we made for our client, Instantly AI. Made hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In this video, the whole thing was like, we're going to create this business and offer from scratch. And then we're going to sell it within 10 hours. And so the business existed.
We created that. And now it needed a client, right? This is the part of the video that we were at.
But the challenge only gave us 10 hours. And content couldn't distribute fast enough. And ads needed more time and money to learn.
Called email though. We could create a conversation immediately. We could send thousands of emails today.
And if we sent enough through pure math math. We could reach enough people and have enough people be interested based on like the industry standards of Response rate and all these things in order to get boost calls and then close the deal if we just run the numbers The problem was is that normal domains still needed time to warm up, you know called email It takes two weeks to warm up your domains both Instantly spree warm domains remove the exact constraint.
The funny thing is with this video is instantly came to me and they were like we just launched this new feature pre -warm domains and we need to make a video a feature video is what they said launching this feature and i was like we're not doing that That'll burn the channel.
Let me try to figure out a video of which we can package this in. So this video idea that ended up just being a viral YouTube video that everybody loves came from them wanting to make a video that just promoted the feature. And so people literally called this the best advertisement of all time, right?
Wow, did not realize I was watching that until 1449. Well done, 360 likes on that comment. This video is well done.
Clearly this was an ad for Insta itself, but I didn't realize that's what it was going to be until the product cropped up. Well said, Hook, my friend. I've never ever seen hundreds of people compliment that.
fact that the video isn't hard and it do organically well the question you want to ask when promoting your thing whether it be a software whether it be your service is would an unbiased expert still include it Because it makes the video more useful. People make videos all the time that promote softwares and products.
They do it all the time. And the video never suffers because of it. Because it's the energy behind the way of which it's done.
And it's the way in which it's communicated. Like I will promote YouTube tools and extensions. Though I don't use all these public YouTube tools.
I use the free extensions for some things. But like I'll position their product. Because I actually use it.
And so it comes across in a way where it's never going to nerf the video. And stop it from succeeding. Because like I was just going to mention it anyway.
So that's the question you should ask. And if the answer is no. Then you don't fall.
it in simple as that now sometimes the offer cannot naturally become the tool so if you're selling a service or coaching program there's nothing you can really do there because it's not you can't position a product because the product's like your service and so the way that you do this is you extend the lesson with something that the viewer can use and so you kind of like create the product for the viewer that is that natural embed in the video so for example sam he teaches people how to make better ads facebook ads and so one of the videos we made was this one here the best facebook ad strategy for 2026 they understood the strategy that we gave them and what they needed and what they wanted next was proven ads to study because they knew the strategy but it's like okay like part of the strategy is finding winning ads and how to actually do that and so we just gave them our creative library that we kept continuously up to date almost like a little mini sas really and completely for free and that was just a lead
magnet. It was an opt -in, but the viewer wanted it so bad, they literally clicked on the video for ad creative strategy. Who the fuck is not going to get an ad creative library when that is what they want if they're a serious viewer?
And then they opt in, it redirects them to the funnel. If they don't buy, we've got their email, we hammer them with emails, they buy eventually. The viewer gets something useful and the opt -in is what moves them into the funnel.
The video does not have to make the whole sale. It just has to make the next useful step obvious. There's another guy, I don't know if you know Ryan Dice, but I actually fell into this.
trap or ecosystem he like helps businesses scale through systems and he started his youtube channel and started taking it seriously one of his first videos was how i run a 10 million dollar plus per year business with only one hour per week and it was basically talking about the concept of having a company scorecard where you have your kpis and you have owners for those kpis and you track it weekly and that's what he was going through in the video and the lead magnet was simply just the google sheet scorecard and i fell in the funnel and i paid him like 16k so there you go it works step five use the data to know what to double down on so Once a video is live, it becomes evidence for what you should make next, good or bad, whether you should double down on it or whether you shouldn't.
And so this is the first video that we made for Gary Vee quite recently. As I said, his channel was averaging like 10, 20 ,000 views a video. He was having like AI generated thumbnails and stuff.
And so this was the first video we made for him, got 300 ,000 views. So already it was like 10, 20xing his average views. And so once we did that, first video that we did for Gary got 10x his previous average.
This was a proven format on YouTube, which was the new rules of this thing. Neil Patel did it for new rules of SEO. It was done.
the new rules of YouTube. We did it for LinkedIn, new rules of LinkedIn, got like 70K views in the LinkedIn niche. And then from that, we were like, gap in the market, hasn't been done for social media, but it's been proven for other social media niches, but nobody's done it for broad social media.
And Gary Vee is the social media guy. So we did it for him. He did own the social media space, right?
That was his whole thing. And he called it very early. So he was a perfect guy to do this for.
And the video matched what the audience wanted from, because that was what his audience was based around. And so we doubled down on this with brutally honest advice about social media in seven minutes, which was another format that worked very well. We did brutally honest advice about web design in seven minutes, which got 230 ,000 views.
And that obviously worked. other niches we got that idea from somebody else as well and it just kept working if i started social media in 2026 i'd do this this one was actually not performing as well as the others but it was still like a 10x plus outlier on his channel the next question was not how to make the same video again right all these videos are social media related it was what was the reason why the video actually worked cool social media was the topic we used these proven formats to package it but like why did this keep working for gary and so basically what we identified that we hadn't properly leaned into yet was yes gary's great social media which is why this video has worked but we hadn't even really leaned into the fact that this gary's basically been talking about this shift from social media to interest media recently we saw it was resonating really well on short form content with this audience so this is where you're even looking at the data outside of youtube of just what's macro trending and so you sort of like we're not in social media anymore we're in interest media right and people love that shit so we want
to make a video centered around that whole narrative and we needed to find the best way to package it i invented this format on youtube based off of these formats like the new rules of or this thing has changed but nobody even realizes there's all these formats that are like shift related formats and i just tried to think of like what is a way that i can make my own one of these formats and be first to market with it while still copying the same underlying psychology as to why those formats worked which are these shift videos and i landed on this The new era of this thing has just begun.
I first actually did this with a client, Tommy Clark, who's in the LinkedIn niche. And that was an outlier for him, did quite well. Obviously LinkedIn niche is a smaller niche.
I think it got like 20, 30 ,000 views. So nothing crazy, but lots of customers. And then somebody took it to the startup niche.
It was like the new era of startups or funding has just begun or something like that. Startup funding or startups has just begun. That got hundreds of thousands of views.
And then everybody started copying it. Again, had a meeting on social media. The new era of matched the interest media.
That's where we basically did this next video. The subject was already working. new thesis of interest media and a format that gave it urgency and that's why we made this video recently which is actually at over 400 000 views now this was recently posted by the way so it shows that this is very much being used in real time it's probably gonna hit 500k views very soon previously he was averaging like 10k views and the thumbnail format though we took from another shifts format which was this thing is about to change forever and nobody even realizes which was originally done by callaway with social media is about to change forever nobody even realizes so we took that thumbnail format and did it in this way but combined it with new title format and kind of like combine them doubling down means preserving why it worked and then finding a genuinely new or better way to use the same signal and in that case you saw it did better than all of the other videos right it was like the fourth time we did it but that one is now doing better and now you know we'll continue to get more and more and more better ones because we're finding what's working and finding our pockets in the niche views leads qualified calls customers revenue that's the funnel every upload should make the next decision
better right so every time you upload you want to basically diagnose the funnel if you've got proper tracking set up you'll be able to see how many views you're getting how many leads you're getting how many qualified calls you're getting how many customers you're getting how many revenue you're getting you've got to be able to have that data so that after every upload and after a set of uploads after a month of doing youtube you're able to log back and identify where the bottleneck is run a bottleneck analysis and figure out was it the fact i didn't get enough traffic in the first place was the fact that from the number of views that i did get in the traffic that i did get i didn't convert many of those views and therefore either i gave a poor call to action that might have turned viewers away.
I might have gave it too hard, or I didn't give a call to action at all, or my funnel just sucks. And then so you're basically diagnosing where the drop -off happened so that you can fix that. iterate through that cycle and you know you just iterate through this tight feedback loop to be able to optimize your youtube funnel a few quick things as well to quickly fire off just like some spit some facts your highest viewed video can be one of your least valuable right because an off -topic hit can attract thousands of people who ignore every video that you publish next you actually want to be very careful about this because one thing that you don't want to do is make videos that are like individual campaigns that attract different audiences to your channel where if you attract a viewer through one video but they don't resonate with the other videos that you're making it can actually really hurt your channel especially as it grows this is what a lot of YouTube channels do wrong like big channels they'll be popping and then their views go low and it's because they're making all these random videos that they're all interested in but there's not one underlying viewer that's interested in all of them and so obviously that shows low viewer satisfaction across videos and it kind of tanks your videos so you want to be very careful your YouTube channel is one overall campaign if you think of it in the sense of ads the videos on individual campaigns one viral video might be a clue when you're doing research but you still need repeated evidence
before you build around it you need to see enough data to understand what was the reason why these videos succeeded because a lot of people will just see an outlier video and be like oh cool title let me just take it but they might have missed the 100 plus other videos that use that same format that failed when you find a viral video cool that signal but you need to do more diligence to actually figure out if this is something to take a result can have more than one cause so when you're finding videos that have performed outstandingly well and you're thinking of taking the title spend more time to understand why did that video actually work for example there's a format which is i have this much amount of experience and learned this so for example i made 300 youtube videos and learners i sent 10 million called emails and learned this i made 500 000 call calls this that is a format that works on youtube and those two latter videos that i mentioned are videos that we did because of the format that i made 300 youtube videos and then this that video got 500 000 views when we took that format the title was cool
But one of the biggest parts as to why it succeeded was the execution format, which was that there was 20 to 40 points in the given video. If we had not taken the 20 to 40 points that was from that structure and we just copied the title, the video could have flopped. And so it's important to consider not just the title, but the thumbnail, the video structure, the way in which the video is delivered.
Do they use a whiteboard? Is it a raw video? Do they have some sort of unique execution style that you should take note of?
Make sure you find that out because all of that is signal and it helps you make better decisions. A full script can make a strong expert worse on camera as well. Figure out which ideas require exact wording and exact planning versus a sharp structure with room to think.
You shouldn't be scripting out a screen recording video. You shouldn't be scripting out a challenge video. Talking head videos that might tap into a bit more of an entertainment audience or might require a bit more entertainment and soothing of that part of the brain.
Those usually require more scripting out because this is where you need to like make sure the copy is tight and retention matters more in those instances where, you know, you have an open loop and you transition between points smoothly so you don't have drops off in retention, all that sort of stuff. And what most editing gurus call retention is just decoration, especially for us in the room, because we target more sophisticated audiences that care less about this stuff.
If a visual does not clarify, prove, or help, the viewer follow the video and get the lesson and actually have a better educational experience. It's just movement and you don't need it. Specificity always charges you in reach.
If you're going to be specific, it's going to make you get less views, but you should pay that price when the right person feels more understood. You should always go as broad as you can and make an interesting title and thumbnail and claim to the market as you possibly can, as long as you're not sacrificing resonance with the core target market.
So what I mean by that is you always want to go as broad as possible, but if you start to make a title and thumbnail that makes it less clear to the actual true people that you want, that it's for them or not, you shouldn't make that trade because then you're going to attract less of the target market that you want. the viewer satisfaction is going to be lower on average with the average viewer and therefore the video is going to get pushed less but oftentimes you do want to think about how can i attract the core target market in its full whilst also attracting that broader market without sacrificing resonance with the core target market so for example if you don't understand insulin you don't understand fat loss the people who are interested in insulin they're going to click on that video because like holy nobody's making videos about insulin and fat loss that's exactly what i wanted but also the broader market is interested in the fat loss and the insulin is the unique mechanism so they're interested in it too if you only research winners you can prove any
idea don't just look at the positive data for formats because then you have positivity bias you have a bias towards the positive data you want to also look at the negative examples as well and not be blind to that you need a full holistic overview of okay if i'm going to do this format 80 of the videos succeeded and they were all 5 to 10x outliers there were these few videos that didn't succeed that used the format but two of them were pretty crap videos and the one of them that's just risk at the end of the day but i'm going to take that bet you need the full overview so that you can make the best decision positive evidence shows the idea can work negative evidence shows when and why it fails so that you can understand what pitfalls to avoid with that specific format i made 300 youtube videos on this that format works really well when people copy the 20 to 40 point structure oh this video didn't work with it but they just did a simple three to five point listicle and that was why it didn't succeed so then you can understand the rules of the structure that you need to follow and have those guardrails pre -published research is still a hypothesis the market gets the final vote at the end of the day you can do as much due diligence as you want on formats and that's what you need to do but
nothing is guaranteed you need to actually look at the post performance and see how the video does and then factor that in your decision making next better decisions need better information and better interpretation so if you're going to make better decisions on what videos to make what tiles and thumbnails to use how to structure the video etc etc everything downstream what editing style to use the only way you get there is through better information and better interpretation of that information find the information do the youtube research get the visibility and learn how to interpret that data properly so you can actually transfer it to your specific application correctly and this is a big reason why my clients win so consistently right like i've got over 100 youtube channels so i see across these channels what gets clicked what gets watched what creates the leads what becomes revenue because we have the tracking and it also allows me to have a full internal youtube research team to where we're doing hundreds of hours of youtube research a week i've got my own internal ai tools around how i actually research which i literally
running as we speak on our AI systems back home. And so i'm able to continuously have this visibility over what's working on youtube more than anybody else so when i step into a niche i just know what works better than anybody else because i have more visibility and i have more information more channels equals more evidence which makes better decisions better results and then that in turn gives me more evidence again because i get more clients and then basically and it's gg you're not going to compete so yeah i'm not starting blind when i enter a niche the person with the best information and the ability to interpret it will make the best decisions and then those decisions need to be executed properly each week so once got the decisions lined up you don't want to them up so you need a competent editor you need competent people to actually execute those decisions and that is how you become the number one youtube channel in your niche
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Jake Trinder opens by listing the channels his agency has taken over or scaled, Gary Vee, Ali Abdaal, and a run of business owners who went from zero to six and seven figures, before naming the five-step process that produced every result on the list.
Named ideas worth stealing.
06:37model
Depth-first search niche research
- Seed the niche with search terms
- Search a term, push outlier videos to the stack
- Open the channel behind the first outlier
- Log every standout video on that channel
- Back out to recommendations, then the next search term
- Repeat until the niche is exhausted
A systematic way to map every successful video and channel in a niche before making any content decisions.
Steal forany pre-production research phase, run by a VA or AI rather than the founder
15:07acronym
Promise, Proof, Plan
- Promise: reaffirm exactly what they clicked for
- Proof: give them a reason to trust you
- Plan: show them where the video is going
A three-beat opening structure that answers the three questions a viewer has in the first seconds after clicking.
Steal forany video hook, especially long-form tutorials where viewers need to mentally commit
04:42concept
Levels of awareness (mechanism vs. outcome)
Borrowed from Breakthrough Advertising: a market can be problem-aware or solution-aware. If they already want the outcome but don't understand or care about the mechanism, position the video around the outcome and use the mechanism as the differentiator.
Steal forany topic that feels 'boring' but sits inside a market with proven outcome-level demand
26:36list
"The New Era of X Has Just Begun" shift format
- Name the topic that already has proven demand
- Attach it to a real narrative shift the audience already senses
- Package the shift with urgency in the title and thumbnail
A title/thumbnail format Trinder invented by copying the underlying psychology of other 'new rules of' and 'this has changed' formats, then applying it first to a market nobody had used it in yet.
Steal forreviving a channel's core topic when the direct format has plateaued
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
35:49link
“I'll grow your business YouTube channel done for you / I'll train you 1-on-1 to become a highly paid YT Strategist (both linked in the description)”
There is no spoken pitch inside the training itself. The sell lives entirely in the description as a done-for-you agency link and a paid 1-on-1 strategist program, which is itself an application of his own give-first rule: the free training is the value, the links are the next useful step for anyone convinced by it.
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
AFFILIATECommission earned if you click.
