The Content Training for Business Owners Who Don't Want to Go Viral
A two-hour sit-down with a creator running three seven-figure businesses, including a live screen-share where he builds a full content strategy from scratch.
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today
Duration
Format
Interview
educational
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9.2K
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Big Idea
The argument in one line.
Content only prints money when it sits on top of real expertise, and once a niche saturates the only formats that still convert are the ones that apply or prove that expertise rather than list facts.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
A business owner with a high-ticket, high-margin offer who keeps posting and keeps getting the wrong leads.
A service provider or operator with genuine expertise who has never been able to turn it into content that converts.
A creator whose views are fine but whose sales are flat, and who suspects the audience is too broad to buy.
Anyone building an AI-assisted content workflow who wants to see what a real data layer plus a model actually produces end to end.
A solo founder deciding between chasing reach and building an owned email list from short-form.
SKIP IF…
You want brand deals and sponsorship income, because the whole argument here is that the view-maximizing game is the wrong one to start today.
You have no marketable skill yet, since the central prerequisite is being top ten percent at something before you make content about it.
You are looking for editing, camera, or gear advice, which never comes up.
You need platform-specific tactics for LinkedIn, X, or newsletters, because the demo is Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts only.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
Content formats stack in a pyramid, and as a niche fills up a saturation line rises and kills the easy tiers from the bottom: first plain facts and lists, then explanation and tutorials, leaving only application and personal stories. That means four levers remain for separating yourself: better ideas built from validated topics plus a contrarian angle, deliberately more advanced takes that shrink reach but raise buyer quality, visible proof of results, and storytelling that converts facts into emotion. The money sits in the backend, so the job is to move people from rented feeds onto an owned email list with a lead magnet aligned to each video's specific pain point, then sell a high-ticket, high-margin offer.
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Cold open promising a million dollars from zero without big views, plus a preview of the live build.
00:42 – 02:27
02 · Social media has split into different games
There is no single strategy anymore. Mainstream fame, category fandom, product sales, and authority are separate games with separate playbooks.
02:27 – 03:59
03 · Copycats are a bigger problem than AI
Platforms are banning AI avatar content harder than expected. The real flood is humans performing other people's scripts word for word.
03:59 – 10:29
04 · Why your content stopped working
The Format Pyramid: facts, explanation, application, stories. A saturation line rises from the bottom and kills the easy tiers first.
10:29 – 15:40
05 · The four ways left to stay competitive
Better ideas first. Topic selection plus a contrarian angle beats editing, hooks, and formats combined.
15:40 – 20:55
06 · Turning the views down on purpose
Running two accounts at once to prove the point: one chasing reach, one deliberately advanced and narrow for conversion.
20:55 – 22:27
07 · Proof is the ultimate separator
Buying is a risk calculation. Proof lowers the risk, and if you cannot beat a competitor's proof you have to change lanes.
22:27 – 28:27
08 · Why the host stopped hiding his numbers
A worked example of noticing what someone else's proof did to your own brain, then applying the same move yourself.
28:27 – 30:03
09 · Why stories sell better than facts
Story is a sequence of words engineered to trigger emotion, and emotion is what drives purchase.
30:03 – 31:32
10 · Distribution is the final moat
Business reduces to traffic, funnel, and product. AI is shrinking the product moat, so distribution is what is left.
31:32 – 34:43
11 · Followers are rented, emails are owned
Feeds can zero your audience overnight. The job is ramping people from rented platforms to owned lists as fast as possible.
34:43 – 39:39
12 · How he gets 10,000 to 15,000 emails a month
One post a day, each with a lead magnet aligned to the exact pain that video aggravated, then an aligned funnel below it.
39:39 – 41:57
13 · Building trust without proof
The trust ladder runs from warm endorsement down to demonstrated ability, earned through repeated non-obvious insights.
41:57 – 45:29
14 · Learn a skill before you make content
Content amplifies expertise rather than substituting for it. Eighteen months of daily short-form came before any content about content.
45:29 – 49:20
15 · Why he built Sandcastles
The pitch: put a content strategist's analytical habits into software so the research layer runs without him.
49:20 – 1:00:20
16 · Live demo: finding the best videos in your niche
Building a competitor watch list, filtering by engagement and recency, sorting by outlier score, and deep-analyzing the top videos.
1:00:20 – 1:12:16
17 · What the model found when his views dropped
Piping a channel's full history into Claude surfaces the missing format that carried four strong months and vanished in August.
1:12:16 – 1:27:02
18 · A plastic surgeon's content plan from zero
The longest build: interview questions, a positioning wheel, the audience bullseye, a 3-2-1 weekly plan, topic scan, and a format matrix.
1:27:02 – 1:36:01
19 · Auditing the host's own channel live
260 clips analyzed to find which hook ingredients and which guests actually carried the channel, and what to say differently.
1:36:01 – 1:45:39
20 · Grading last year's predictions
Scoring a year-old set of calls on AI content, in-house brand teams, and when free distribution closes.
1:45:39 – 1:47:48
21 · Running three businesses with a baby coming
The honest cost of a one-person operation and why hiring has not solved it.
1:47:48 – 1:51:23
22 · What changes by the end of 2027
A prediction that a new medium emerges, plus more experts going narrow and the rise of live build content.
1:51:23 – 2:04:24
23 · Quickstrike questions
Rapid answers on thumbnails, platform preference, cutting the middle, hooks from the gut versus the data, and shipping at 80 percent.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
As a niche saturates, a rising line eats the fact-based formats first, then the explanation formats, leaving only application and personal stories.
The human copycats ripping content word for word are a bigger drag on a niche right now than AI slop, because platforms are actually banning AI avatars.
In every niche a handful of topic buckets always outperform, because the average viewer carries the same beliefs about what their problem is.
You can have world-class insight on a topic nobody thinks is their problem and still lose to a mediocre take on one they do.
Deliberately making your content more advanced shrinks your reach and raises the value of everyone who stays.
One channel posting a consistent 10,000 views to the right buyers can out-earn one posting 400,000 to the wrong ones.
Paid ad algorithms find a narrow buyer with precision, and the organic algorithms on the same platforms are the same machinery.
Proof de-risks the purchase decision, so a buyer with no proof to evaluate is just being asked to gamble.
If you cannot beat the proof of the person already serving your customer, you have to position into a lane where nobody outranks you.
A result nobody else can claim, even one narrowed down to a single store or category, is worth more than a bigger number someone can match.
Collecting proof across several business models means every type of buyer sees someone who has already done their exact thing.
Story is just sequencing words to trigger emotion, and facts delivered at machine-gun cadence deliver almost none.
Followers live on rented land that can be zeroed overnight, while an email list survives the platform that delivered it.
A lead magnet works when it answers the exact pain the video just aggravated, and fails when it is merely adjacent.
Longer lead magnets convert worse, because a viewer who just watched three hours wants the answer, not ten more pages of homework.
Organic content is paid advertising with the ad swapped for a free video and the landing page swapped for a lead magnet.
Repeating something a viewer has already heard elsewhere accrues zero trust, which is why copying cannot build authority.
Without proof, trust comes from saying things that are non-obvious until you say them and obvious the moment you do.
Content is a vehicle for amplifying a skill, so acquiring the skill has to come before making content about it.
If everything you have done is obvious, you have no non-obvious perspective to sell.
Outlier score divides a video's views by that channel's rolling three-month average, which makes a small creator's breakout comparable to a large one's.
An AI model is close to useless for content strategy without structured performance data, and genuinely useful the moment it has it.
The strategy layer that content consultants charge ten thousand dollars and several weeks for can be assembled in about thirty minutes with the right data.
A workable weekly plan is three buckets at two videos each, one broad and two narrow, plus a single speculative swing.
A chaos-agent video that reaches far outside your niche can go viral and still poison your targeting, because none of those viewers buy.
Hooks framed around fear, conditional if-you logic, or multiple sentences underperform consistently enough that the pattern shows up in the data.
At a high-ticket, high-margin offer, twenty incremental customers in a year is a million dollars, which does not require a large audience.
Hook rate and retention graphs are icing; views, followers gained, and conversions are the only metrics that decide anything.
Takeaway
Expertise first, then the narrow audience that pays for it.
WHAT TO LEARN
Once a niche fills up, only content that applies or proves real expertise still converts, and the money comes from moving a small, precisely targeted audience onto a list you own.
02Social media has split into different games
Pick which game you are playing before picking a strategy, because fame, brand deals, product sales, and authority each need a different approach.
An empire needs your own products and services, since relying on brand deals leaves someone else holding the revenue.
03Copycats are a bigger problem than AI
Platforms are banning AI avatar content harder than expected, so the real flood in most niches is humans performing other people's scripts word for word.
04Why your content stopped working
Content formats stack from facts to explanation to application to stories, and a saturation line rises from the bottom as a niche fills up.
If you are entering a crowded niche, skip the fact-based tier entirely and open with application content that proves expertise in a single video.
Stories built from your own experience are the smallest-reach format and the only one nobody can copy.
05The four ways left to stay competitive
Ideas beat edits, hooks, and formats combined, and an idea is a validated topic plus a perspective only you hold.
Every niche has a few topic buckets the audience already believes are their problem, and a brilliant take on a topic outside those buckets still loses.
Let performance data choose the topic, supply the angle yourself, and import formats from unrelated niches when yours goes stale.
06Turning the views down on purpose
Pitching deliberately above beginner level shrinks your reach and raises the value of everyone who keeps watching.
Consistent small view counts from exactly the right people outperform large numbers from people who will never buy.
Organic algorithms target as precisely as paid ones, so posting narrow will find the narrow audience if you stay consistent.
07Proof is the ultimate separator
Buying is a risk calculation, and proof that you got this result for someone like them is what lowers the perceived risk.
If a competitor's proof beats yours on the same positioning, you either go get better proof or move to a lane where nobody outranks you.
08Why the host stopped hiding his numbers
Notice what someone else's numbers did to your own impression of them, then publish your equivalent instead of hiding it.
A result nobody else can claim outranks a larger number someone can match, even if you have to narrow the category to own it.
Accumulating proof across several business models means every type of buyer sees someone who has already done their exact thing.
09Why stories sell better than facts
Facts delivered rapid-fire generate almost no emotion, and emotion is what moves someone to act.
A first-person account of a problem, an action, and a result lets someone see themselves in you, which is the fastest emotional transfer available.
10Distribution is the final moat
Business reduces to distribution, funnel, and product, and AI is lowering the barrier on product faster than on distribution.
Both remaining moats are closing, which makes the next few years the window to use them rather than a permanent advantage.
11Followers are rented, emails are owned
Feed platforms lend you reach and can zero it overnight, while an email list survives the provider that delivered it.
Build the infrastructure that moves people from rented platforms to owned lists before the rented reach gets noisy.
12How he gets 10,000 to 15,000 emails a month
Nobody hands over an email because you asked, so aggravate one specific pain in the video and offer the fix as the exchange.
Keep the lead magnet on the exact pain the video raised, because a merely adjacent offer breaks the trade.
Keep the low-ticket offer, the landing page, and the high-ticket program on that same problem, since the problem does not change as the buyer moves down.
Shorter lead magnets convert better, because someone who just watched a long video wants the answer and not more homework.
13Building trust without proof
Warm endorsement outranks proof of result, which outranks demonstrated ability, and each rung down takes more work to establish.
Repeating something a viewer has already heard earns zero trust, which is why copying cannot build authority.
Without proof, aim for two moments per video where the viewer thinks they never considered that, repeated across several videos.
14Learn a skill before you make content
Content amplifies a skill rather than substituting for one, so audit honestly whether you are top ten percent at anything first.
If everything you have done is obvious, you have no non-obvious perspective to offer, and no amount of production fixes that.
16Live demo: finding the best videos in your niche
Build a watch list of the strongest accounts in your niche, then filter by recency and engagement to screen out boosted posts.
Rank competitor videos by views divided by that channel's own average, so a small account's breakout is visible next to a large one's.
Study the small channel's outlier hardest, because the idea carried it rather than the creator's existing credibility.
17What the model found when his views dropped
Run a strategy audit on your own back catalog on a schedule, because the format that carried four strong months can disappear without you noticing.
An AI model needs structured performance data to say anything useful about content, and becomes genuinely useful the moment it has it.
Give the model separate context about your goals and your past work, so its suggestions are grounded in more than the raw numbers.
18A plastic surgeon's content plan from zero
Map every competitor against the ways you could differentiate, then target the slice nobody occupies while accepting it is unproven.
Define your buyer as concentric rings and keep the outermost ring off the plan, since those views corrupt targeting without producing customers.
Run three topic buckets at two videos each plus one speculative swing, with one bucket broad and two narrow.
Scan what competitors actually published, keep only the videos that map to your approved buckets, and ask whether you have a unique take on each.
19Auditing the host's own channel live
Cross narrative structure against visual layout and score by performance, which exposes both the crowded cells and the untried ones.
Taking a validated topic and arguing your own position on it is not copying, since the angle, substance, and delivery all differ.
Hooks framed around fear, conditional if-you logic, or multiple sentences underperform reliably enough to show up in the data.
The strategy layer is the expensive part, and the writing still has to be iterated by hand in your own voice.
20Grading last year's predictions
Starting a channel purely for views and brand deals is the wrong move in a saturated category today.
An untapped category is still worth entering early, because the groundswell builds before the wave arrives.
Adoption of these tools is slower than the headlines suggest, since most people keep working the way they already know how.
Companies are now hiring content roles in-house at real salaries, which means the expertise is moving inside businesses.
23Quickstrike questions
A tightly targeted audience with a high-ticket, high-margin offer can produce a million dollars from roughly twenty extra customers.
Views, followers gained, and conversions are the only metrics that change a decision, and retention minutiae is noise.
Work in order when something flops: check whether the topic was validated, then the angle, then the hook.
Cut from the middle first, where the unnecessary context lives, and let the video be as short as the value allows.
Write the hook from your own head first, then use the data to validate it, because starting from the data produces clones.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
ICP
Ideal customer profile. The specific person a business most wants to sell to, defined tightly enough that content and offers can be aimed directly at them.
Topic TAM
The total addressable audience for a subject. How many people in a niche are interested in a given topic at all, separate from whether your take on it is any good.
Outlier score
A video's view count divided by its channel's rolling average over the prior three months. It makes a breakout on a small account comparable to one on a large account.
MCP
Model Context Protocol. A connector standard that lets an outside data source feed a chat model directly, so you can query the data in conversation instead of exporting files.
Lead magnet
A free resource such as a guide or template offered in exchange for an email address, used to move a viewer off a social platform onto an owned list.
ManyChat
An automation tool that replies to social media comments and direct messages, commonly used to collect email addresses when a viewer comments a keyword.
View maxing
Optimizing content purely for the largest possible view count, typically monetized through advertising rates and brand sponsorships rather than direct sales.
CPM
Cost per thousand impressions. The advertising rate that determines payout when a creator earns from ad revenue or sponsorships rather than selling an offer.
Chaos agent
A deliberately speculative video outside a creator's usual lane, included in a weekly plan as a cheap bet on finding an unexpected winner.
Arb
Short for arbitrage. A temporary advantage available because a market has not caught up yet, which closes as more people discover and exploit it.
First-party data
Customer information a business collects and holds itself, such as email addresses, as opposed to audience data that only exists inside a social platform.
Rented versus owned audience
Rented audiences live on platforms that can throttle or delete an account at any time. Owned audiences are reachable directly, so they survive the platform that delivered them.
“The way to make money with content is to have expert level skills. Content is just a vehicle to amplify attention on those skills and monetize around it.”
complete thesis in two sentences, no setup required→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
06:33
“There's a lot of people in many niches making this like fact based list based stuff that has no insight. And so new people come in and they think that's the way to do it.”
names the exact mistake the viewer is probably making→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
21:00
“The proof is not in the pudding. It is the pudding.”
short, quotable inversion of a familiar phrase→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
25:16
“If you have proof and you're burying it, you're just doing yourself a disservice.”
direct second-person accusation, lands in four seconds→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
17:10
“I don't want beginners that are broke and don't have money to come down the funnel because they're not going to buy.”
openly says the thing most creators will not say out loud→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
17:30
“You will decrease views because the TAM will get smaller, but you'll increase conversion a lot.”
states the whole tradeoff in one line→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
20:20
“The paid ads algorithms on Meta are so targeted that if you run paid ads, you can find who you want. So why would the same algorithms on the organic not be as good?”
reframes organic reach using something the viewer already believes→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
35:21
“You aggravate a pain point in the video and then you offer a solution to that pain point, which is if you give me your email, I'll give you the solution in the lead magnet.”
the entire email-capture mechanic in one sentence→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
40:30
“Once I have them on the email, the job's not done. Just because you have their email doesn't mean you own them.”
punctures the assumption right after the list-building pitch→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
41:17
“Trust comes from hearing novel things over and over.”
“If everything you've done is obvious, you will have no non-obvious perspective.”
brutal one-line filter for whether someone should be making content→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
1:21:35
“People pay like 10 grand to a strategist for like weeks of work. And we just did this in like 30 minutes.”
concrete number comparison right after a visible demonstration→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
1:34:08
“Without the data, Claude is trash at helping you with content. With the data, it's very helpful.”
contrarian take on AI that most creator content avoids→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
1:49:58
“A lot more people are going to go narrow. A lot more people are going to give up views. They're going to build these little pockets, these little kingdoms that nobody knows about.”
vivid prediction with a memorable image→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
1:54:56
“All of that is like icing not cake.”
dismisses analytics obsession in six words→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
1:57:50
“All he has to do is sell 20 incremental clients over a year to make a million net.”
makes a seven-figure outcome sound small and specific→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
The Script
Word for word.
Read-along
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How would I make a million dollars in one year from zero? You don't have to get more than 25 ,000 views a video. You don't need a huge following.
You just need to monetize a different way. Callaway is a creator with billions of views and founder of Sandcastles, a content strategy tool that has printed him millions. The way to make money with content is to have expert level skills.
Content is just a vehicle to amplify attention on those skills and monetize around it. Callaway shares his screen and live on the podcast builds out a winning content strategy from scratch. To be honest, this is the whole game.
People pay like 10 grand to a strategist for weeks of work and we just did this in 30 minutes.
He's got three separate seven -figure businesses, State to the End, and we're going to go through how to stand out on social media, his AI machine, and ultimately how he makes millions. So you were on about a year ago, and you said social media has completely changed. Where are we at right now?
Yeah, so I feel like the environment is bifurcating or diversifying depending on what game you're playing. last time i think the first thing we talked about was like the five content games right so if you're trying to go for mainstream fame you're trying to go for category fandom like you're trying to get brand deals and ai kind of like my first stuff was you're trying to sell products whether it's a commodity product or an explanatory product or you're trying to accrue authority it's like the games are the strategies are different they're separating and so you really have to be clear on like What is your intention?
What is the goal you're actually going for? What is your offer? What game you're playing?
Does it matter if authority accrues to you or not? Are you trying to go faceless or face? Basically, instead of one strategy or two, there's hundreds now.
And you can win with any, but you have to pick and align the right strategy to what you're doing. So maybe we can talk through, based on a scenario, how you should attack social media. I remember very vividly that you were talking about just the media game as a whole, unless you are selling product.
is not a good game to play. Has that changed? Well, it's a good game to play if the goal is like, if I want to be famous because of all the things that come with fame, it's a great game to play.
But if you're trying to build like an empire, you can't play just the media game. You have to have your own products, your own services. You want to build a world outside of just like relying on the brand deal stuff.
I'm more nuanced now. It's not like good or bad. It's like everything is winnable.
Everything is good. Everything is bad, depending on what you actually want. So you have to get very clear on your end goal and work backwards on the strategy.
How has these kind of AI avatars and these fake accounts and that kind of AI slop, that was something that we thought a year ago was going to be the downfall. of creators given that it would be just so hard to break through how do you think that has affected the marketplace you know currently i do think it's it's getting harder to break through in certain niches but it's actually a combination of the ai avatar stuff but also just like we'll call it the the human avatar stuff so maybe we could talk about that because i'm actually shocked at how hard the platforms are cracking down on the ai content like we're seeing YouTube, if they understand you're using ad content, it's like immediate ban, immediate throttle.
Meta is doing the same thing. So all these platforms are like, they're holding the line. Interestingly, I thought they were going to be like, yo, any content is good content.
If people want it, they want it. And like, we'll let everything like open platform. It's not really looking like that.
The platforms are kind of cracking down. So there are some AI avatar driven like flows happening, but a lot of people are getting Insta flagged and banned. And so there's less of that.
What's actually happening more, which I'm shocked at is like. there are so many actual humans that are just ripping people's stuff word for word and literally just performing it word for word in every niche. Like you see this in social media growth, obviously the most, but like most of the big niches, there are people just ripping and copying that has the same kind of effect as like the AI slop.
It's this slop layer at the bottom. So maybe we can talk about this. Like I can explain how you get around that and like why people's content is not really working anymore because of that.
But like, that's kind of what I'm seeing these two buckets where it's slop on both ends, basically. Let's dive right into that right now, because I feel like I see so many videos on Instagram of someone saying, hey, look at these 15 people that have copied me literally word for word. So what are those?
What are those kind of why is content not working for people? Yeah. So here's the framework I kind of have is I call it the format pyramid.
So there's four levels. So the bottom level is called facts. I'll come back and explain these.
But the bottom level is facts. Then you have explanation. then you have application, and then you have stories.
These are like the different types of content, the different types of formats. And within those, there's a bunch of formats for each. So if you think about a niche, if your niche is relatively open, like there's not that many people that make content in it, any of those four levels work fine.
Like the most people live at the bottom, like a base of a pyramid, the base is the biggest. So like if you just make fact -based content, so things like I'm listing out shit. I'm ranking things one to five.
I'm not really adding a bunch of expertise or opinion. I'm just like listing. That's like fact -based content.
That works when the niche is open. From a bottom -up perspective, we're talking about probably the least amount of talent lives at the bottom. Literally like you could go into ChatGPT or Claude, ask it for like a list of 10 things and then say the 10 with no extra stuff on it and it will work if the niche is open.
So that's like layer one. Layer two is explanation. So this is you say...
but then you also explain or break down like your opinion, your insight on it. That's like level two. So that would be things like breakdowns, tutorials, how to, stuff like that.
A lot of the stuff I make is kind of in this second bucket. The third bucket, which I think is like the biggest opportunity right now, and we'll circle back to that, is application. So this is not only are you saying stuff and giving your opinion, but you're showing or proving how you can apply that to actually get a result.
These are like case studies or scenarios or hypotheticals. Like if I had to grow a plastic surgeon from zero to a million followers, here's how I would do it. You can't fake that shit.
You have to have real sauce to apply your own insight. And then the last at the top of the pyramid would be stories. So these like one of one you storytelling, actual experiences, actual things that you did, whether it's in your job or your life.
Those are hard to make at scale, but like those are the most defendable, we'll say. So this pyramid is like from easy to hard and from the most people that will watch to the least. Like storytelling can work, but if I make an individual story on myself and you don't know who I am, you're going to have the smallest.
denominator of people that will watch so why is content not working now well when the niche gets saturated imagine there's like a red line that starts at the bottom and like slowly starts rising up that pyramid if you're below the line you're fucked Because that means there's way too many people making these like generic commoditized formats.
What we're seeing now with this like human slop machine and like the AI slop machine fits in this as well. There's a lot of people in many niches making this like fact based list based stuff that has no insight. And so new people come in and they they think that's the way to do it.
So they make those formats. They're below the red line. They're flopping.
What you need to do is get above that red line. So as things get competitive, that red line will slowly increase where it's going to eat all the fact -based formats where there'll be no alpha. Then it will eat all the explanation or like the breakdown formats and it will leave you with only application and stories.
And so one of my big DCs or whatever takes about how to actually cut through a niche. You just want to go straight to application content. Like if you're entering and you're like, how do I actually dominate a crowded niche?
The first thing you want to do is start making content that can show you have expertise and apply it to prove that fact. So when people watch one video, they're like, oh shit, this person actually knows what they're talking about right away. It's not like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or like you're listing these formats out.
This is kind of like base tier of the pyramid. That's all junk food. You're seeing like some niches are open, so you can still get away with the fact -based stuff if you're in like an open niche.
But markets are efficient, like ARBs close. And so most big niches where there's a lot of money, that bottom of the pyramid is not working. I think that these big pockets, let's just call it like content marketing, content strategy, I would argue that those bottom two tiers are basically done for at this point.
I think people are just starting to see that it's just completely regurgitated. Yeah. So you can see like...
I started my Callaway marketing account on Instagram like four months ago. And the goal was like, can I speed run this to 100K without going viral? Because I want to prove to people like, hey, if you're a business owner and you don't think you can go viral, you don't need to.
So I grew it pretty fast using this like second tier of content, mostly explanation. I'm pretty dialed with like my non -obvious shit. And so even my stuff sometimes works, sometimes doesn't in that second tier.
So you can see like in the social media growth niche. That first thing is completely cooked. And the second thing is almost fully cooked.
So now I'm like going back to the drawing board where I'm like, all right, I'm going to have to start going out on the risk curve to some of these like application and story based formats because I'm seeing the base commoditization of this like junk food content is just nuking everyone's brain. Like they see anything about social media growth.
And if it's not like I did this, I can prove this. I have this result. They're gone.
And it's because of this like. So in short, you would just recommend for anybody just to start at those top two tiers and obviously layer in three and four in conjunction with one and two. Exactly.
So you want to skip one altogether unless you're in an open niche. You want to start with two and three. Stories are really hard to like figure out how to make like the ramp to go from zero to I have a good story.
If you have no idea how to do content is like pretty tough. Can't fake that either. Yeah.
So I would try to. It all goes back to like, what is your unique expertise? What is your proof?
What is your authority? Like, have you actually done this shit? Or are you kind of a beginner accelerating?
If you've actually done stuff, you want to lead with the stuff you've done to get that application content flywheel spinning. Like, again, I go back to the plastic surgery example because I made a YouTube video that's coming out this week where I was like, imagine I was a plastic surgeon. Like, how would I actually dominate this category?
First, it's like, what have I actually done? Have I done a bunch of surgeries with like... legit people that I can show in the content and like talk about all the cases I've done or am I like just starting my career and I'm or I'm in medical school and I like haven't really done it like based on that you would decide to make certain formats yeah I would argue too on the story side it's almost like a 1a and a 1b and I think on the 1b side would would be to use kind of stories from third parties i .e.
if you're talking about entrepreneurs you could just talk about like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk but I think the ultimate your differentiator is the 1A, your own personal experiences. Because that's literally one -of -one content that no other people can talk about.
That's the final moat. The final moat is just like, I did this. This is how I did it.
I can do it for, depending on the offer, like I can do it for you as well, right? That's the final moat. Guys, we're going to get into that all things proof.
I want to dive into, you say there's four ways left to stay competitive once this kind of floor keeps flooding up. Let's just dive into each one of those. I guess the first one, let's start with...
With better ideas, at its simplest form, we know what better ideas means, but how would you kind of break that down? Yeah, so the 80 -20, 90 -10, 95 -5 of content, like the 800 -pound gorilla is ideas. Like really that is the separator.
Mr. Beast has always said that for YouTube, on social media, for whatever reason, like people always think edits and formats and hooks, like that matters. They matter, but like ideas is by far the most important.
And so when I say ideas, it's the topic and the angle. So the topic is like, what am I talking about? And you could say like the bucket of topics and the specific topic, like there's two levels.
The angle is like, what is my unique perspective on that? That is it. Like that is the most important thing in content.
The reason why topics matter so much is because counterintuitively in almost every niche, there are certain topics that do better always than the rest. And the reason why, if you think about it, is like the average viewer has the same psychology as the other average viewer. So let's just take social media growth, which like I've been obsessing over lately.
If I'm making content, I could cover storytelling or hooks or ideas or recording or delivery or strategy or systems. Like there's all these different topic buckets I could cover. If I didn't know what I was doing and I made a few videos across all of them, what I would see is that consistently storytelling, hooks, AI workflows, and strategy do well.
And consistently things like ideas, recording, delivery. don't do well. And it's like, why is that?
No matter what I say, if I have like the craziest sauce on recording and I have nothing new to say on hooks, still hooks will outperform. Like, why is that? Well, it's because the average viewer is sitting there thinking my problems are hooks, storytelling, AI workflows.
Like that's embedded in their psychology from all the things they've seen on social media up to this point. They do not think their ideas, their way of speaking, their delivery is a problem. So in aggregate, like there's a few topic buckets that just always crush that.
Pareto 80 -20 applies to every niche. So in your niche, your first job is to find out like, what are the topic buckets that the viewer prioritizes as important? Based on that, you then want to be like, okay, what do I know about certain things in those buckets that's different than everyone else?
That's your contrarian take. That's what you make content about. That is like how you separate people that don't actually have the ability to find those topics or unique expertise within those topics will not be able to separate.
So it's about topic TAM. We kind of talked about this off the record. It's just find those big topics that you know people are already talking about and then just your iterative different opinion on that.
Topic TAM, but it's also like the shock score of your take within that topic. Those two things go together. Like topic TAM matters, obviously, like if I was going to make a sports video, if I made a video about American football versus badminton, obviously more people would watch American football.
But if I don't have a unique take on something in American football, I'm just going to get drowned out in the sea of other people making the American football. So there's levels to this. You need to understand like what is your unique insight, your unique expertise, some non -obvious truth that you know to be true.
Ideally, that's also in the big topic TAM thing. Those two things combined, topic angle, that's how you win. So do you think it's a poor strategy to almost talk about a topic too early?
Do you want kind of it already to be spoken about at mass and then just add on? So this is where it comes down to like. how much do you want to experiment versus like how how fast do you want to win and how much do you want to de -risk like if you said you have to get this objective in 100 days which most agency owners like are on a time crunch you don't really have time to like dick around with like experimentation but the real huge one -of -one like insane outcomes they come from like somebody went out and found a topic bucket that no one had talked about they made a video on it and it turned out that that actually was the most important thing to viewers Someone has to discover that, obviously.
So you can kind of play it. You can be like, I'm going to be an explorer and find these new things and go against the grain. 99 % of the time you'll be wrong, but the 1 % will be huge.
Or you can just say, you know what? I'm just going to find the winners and just double down right there for the first six months. Then I'll earn the right to experiment.
So you kind of have to pick. I recommend almost all business owners that don't want to be a full -time content person. So do the 99%.
Yeah, just do the 99%. I think right now, given the gap from idea to execution keeps closing, the fact that... You know, formerly, if you found that 1 % outlier, you would kind of have this window where you can squeeze a lot of juice out of it and kind of take credit for it.
But now, given the fact that just people are copying so fast. I don't even think the juice is worth the squeeze to invest the time to find the 1 % under the notion that everybody's going to copy it so fast. Yeah, I like to innovate on the angle and just let the topics, let the data tell me what the topics I should make.
Like I have this kind of DCT framework, like D is data. So I let the data tell me on the topics. C is creativity.
I let my creativity go on the angle. So like I come up with some crazy shit about a topic that's validated. T is transpositioning on formats.
If my formats are not working in the niche because they're too saturated, I'll go outside the niche and trans. pose some other format, like the vintage hat making space. There's like some crazy guy that has this top -down shot.
I'll go take that format and bring it in. This like DCT is kind of what I like to do. Guys, we're going to go super deep on his software called Sandcastle.
Let's make sure you stay to the end. All of this stuff is in your software, which I love. I want to go into the second one, which is more advanced.
Break down like what you actually mean by that. So more advanced can apply to really like the sophistication of the angle. If you're selling to like a rich, sophisticated customer, I guess, let me back up.
Most people want to print money from content. And the way to print money is to have high ticket, high margin offers that you sell to rich customers. You can play the low ticket game.
That can work as well. But like the easiest way is just high ticket, high margin. Rich customers are sophisticated.
They're not at a level one. They're at a level three, four, five out of 10. So one way to separate from everyone else is just skip all the beginner shit at level one or two and just go straight to like the four, five, six out of 10 stuff.
This is what I've tried to do recently on my marketing Instagram channel. Very advanced. It's very advanced.
Yeah, it's pretty advanced. Like if you're a beginner and you watch it, you're like, I have no idea what he's saying. And it's kind of by design because I don't want beginners that are broke and don't have money to come down the funnel because they're not going to buy.
I only want people that like. actually sit on this shit all day they're like i'm willing to spend five grand right now because this guy thinks in my mode and so that's another way to separate is like if you actually know like the advanced level expertise just start drifting your content like the angle and the substance you say start drifting that up you will decrease views because the tam will get smaller but you'll increase conversion a lot so that'll be like a second way to kind of like own a niche.
I wouldn't even say increase conversion. You're going to increase the value of your ICP. Exactly.
I think a lot of people are afraid to turn the view dial down in exchange for getting a higher quality or like a higher value ICP. And the reason why is because so many of us are trained, A, like just big number theory, like we want to see the numbers go up. But a lot of us are trained on like Mr.
Beast, Logan Paul, these like massive, massive views, 30 million views. That's actually not the way most people should play the game. Most people actually want like 10 ,000 views, 5 ,000 views, but you want those people to be extremely dialed, extremely high value customer that aligns with whatever your ICP is.
So to do that, you almost have to like check the ego because if you're posting like right now on my channel, I'm posting videos that are consistently like 10K views. And before I got 400K because I wanted to rip the channel up to prove I could do it. But now I'm like turning it way down.
I'm like going only advanced, narrow. If you're a business owner doing content and you hear my stuff immediately after one video, you're like, this guy knows what he's talking about. That's who I want.
I don't really want a beginner. And so I have to be willing to like trade off the growth. The slope of the line has to flatten because there's just less people in the world to see that stuff.
Yeah, going back to what you mentioned in the beginning on your first video, those five games, I truly do believe that that first bucket with the view maximize game. First off, I think given all of kind of the AI slot that's going to become harder and harder, eventually I feel like these platforms are going to cross the chasm where the AI stuff, if it's printing money, they're going to allow it in some sense.
They might flag it, but they'll still allow it. But if you play that view game, you're almost always playing the CPM game where just your base is so wide that ultimately you really don't have the ability to sell to the end customer anything. Like if you play the view game, it is a losing proposition.
You will not. It takes... you playing the view game first to realize that typically like this is why i feel like i'm uniquely qualified to talk about content because i have i've played both and i'm playing both i have the tech stuff which is category view based i'm trying to hit home runs every video i just hit a million on this elon thing like two days ago like i'm in the trenches on that over here For context, you guys will pop up.
That's at Callaway. And then Callaway Marketing is the one that's more deep. And Callaway Marketing is like no viral videos, none over a million designed only for conversion, only for like this deep ICP.
I'm literally playing both games at the same time. A, I wanted to show that they're different and I have both strategies in the pocket. But also like you can literally see I am not going viral on purpose on the marketing one.
I'm going viral every like as much as I possibly can on the tech one. Different games. Usually people have to play the view game for a little bit to like realize, oh shit, the conversion's not there.
And then they recoil and they're like, uh -oh, I'm playing this wrong. They end up finding something like my stuff, which talks about this lead gen path. Then they go down that path.
It's much easier for most business owners. And ultimately we're going to get into it, but I feel like on the Callaway game, among other things, people are really paying on a CPM basis, meaning they really care about the view maxing. And then the Callaway marketing, I know you're still early in the game, but I feel like with that, like.
you could catch a fish with a guy that wants to pay you a million dollars to consult on their marketing for the company. So I feel like - And we have. We have a lot of huge value CEOs in the DMs.
They're like, I'll pay you anything. Can you please help my company? Because I'm like, I have these offers that are more designed for scale.
And they're like, I don't want that. I just want you one -on -one in the trenches with me and my team. So it's like, they're already coming in inbound.
I don't have anything to sell them. And that just shows when you narrow down, it's funny. The paid ads algorithms on Meta are so targeted that if you run paid ads, you can find who you want.
So why would the same algorithms on the organic not be as good? Like they're just as good. They're the same thing.
So like if you post narrow, it'll find the people you need. You just have to do it for a while. It's so funny, man, because I checked this morning people, mutual followers that are following your Callaway marketing versus the Callaway.
And you just see, man, it's like different. It's. 25 of, I'm just going to say my more advanced friends versus 116 of kind of my more wider people that are beginner.
It's so crazy. Like everything points to what you're saying is actually factual. So number three is better proof.
What does that actually look like? Proof inside a post? This is the ultimate, right?
So I think Hormozy, his latest Hormozyism is like the proof is the pudding. He's like, not the proof is not in the pudding. It is the pudding.
So good. And yeah, it's like everything comes down to proof. again, it depends on the games you're playing.
Like if you're playing, if you sell a soda, like Greg Lab is dope. Like you've had him on here. They're playing the Bloom game.
You don't really need to like trust Greg Lab's like taste in soda to buy the soda, right? So you don't need to really, you can like - Crisp Apple does rip though, guys. Yeah, yeah.
And I think that I've seen him, I've seen his videos, like the Shirley Temple pie bangs. But like - you don't need to trust that he's a flavor scientist, right?
You just trust that like, I like his vibe. The operation is legit. There's real flavor scientists behind the, and then you try the product, right?
That's a commodity product game. But if you're doing like a personal brand driven authority play where like they need to trust you in order to buy, proof is the ultimate separator. Like when people go to buy, all they're doing is they're saying, I'm going to risk X dollars to try to get X plus Y back or 2X, 3X back.
If you show me you've done that a bunch of times with people just like me, I have a higher confidence that you will do it for me and therefore will buy easier, right? It's just a risk game.
So like, if you don't have proof or you don't have a way to show proof, then you have to demonstrate your ability without the proof. And your ability has to be so good that they're like, they've never really done it, but like, they really sound like they know what they're talking about. I'm willing to try, but it's all this, like, it's just a risk game, right?
You're just trying to, proof de -risks the purchase decision. So proof is the ultimate separator. I'm going to do a hot take right now is I was for so long for people out there listening, you might not even know that I own a company called iconic.
It's an eight figure art company. I was not flexing at all. People had no fucking idea who I was and what I was doing.
So now I'm like, I, you know, we just talked about it off camera the last like five, six days, just like minimal, subtle flexing just to give people proof and understanding and know that I've actually done stuff. And like, What did we talk about off camera when I mentioned that the first $6 million in revenue, I was shopiconic at gmail .com.
I was customer service. What did you think in your brain when I said that? Yeah, yeah.
So this is something I want people to understand is like when you're watching, like me as the viewer, when I'm watching stories or I'm watching reels, I see it come across. I see certain things. I hear certain things.
I see certain words. And it causes my brain to react in a certain way. So like when I see your story, it's like I did the first 6 million customer service.
In my head, I was like. oh Iconic's doing more revenue than I thought and oh this guy's really in the trenches he really knows his shit that's my like subconscious take what I want people to do and what I do is I then pause I close the app and I I re I zoom out and I'm like okay if seeing the number of revenue he posted made me think away of him why don't I then show the number of revenue like how much revenue I've made to have people think that way like psychology works the same way most people will be influenced but they don't zoom out to think How can I influence others similarly?
So like, that's a really great case study of like, you need to be saying what you're doing, showing the proof of what you've done in order to get people to be influenced subconsciously. And like this kind of counter, counterbalances with a lot of people always say like, don't be too salesy. Never talk about your numbers.
I'm done with that bullshit, man. That performed so well. And something that Greg said on his episode, which I thought was an even deeper layer to this is you want to do the proof, but you want it to be, again, going back to the.
1A versus 1B on story, what can you say from a proof perspective that's uniquely you? Like for him to say we're number one on Amazon with this drink, I'm fucking interested. Yeah, exactly.
He's the only one that could fucking say that. The reason why Hormozy did the Guinness World Record thing, like other than if he just wanted to say that, was because he knew there's only one number one in that category. And so...
Until he gets usurped by someone else that's crazy enough to try to take that record of like most nonfiction sales in 24 hours or whatever it was, he owns that record. So he can then say that one of one proof line that nobody else can beat that immediately accrues so much more value to him. I think I think what what people this is like a slight tangent.
I think what people misunderstand is. The number one in the category is not just like a little bit better than number two. Often they're way, way better.
And so if you can win in a proof area that cannot be beaten, that proof serves you for a long time. So you want to like accumulate the proof moments, right? You want to accumulate those stats.
And I think by any means possible, it could be super, super granular. You could be the number one in X category in one store. And that is enough.
that you should be grabbing that and utilizing that and communicating with your audience about that. Anything, especially if it could be a one -of -one, you should communicate. If you have proof and you're burying it, you're just doing yourself a disservice, right?
If you don't have proof, you need to get some right away. And that proof needs to be differentiated relative to the bar in your niche. So for example, like if I help business owners with content, I have 2 million followers, billions of views.
I've done three businesses in seven figures in three years, yada, yada, like these proof points. If you're trying to compete with me, on the same positioning track and you don't have better proof, you lose.
Unless they don't know of me and they know of you, right? Which could be true, but like over time that gap will get closed. You can't rely on that.
So you have to be like, all right, I'm either gonna compete in a different sub lane or I'm gonna get proof that's better than his. That's it. So you have to canvas your niche and be like, who is serving the customer today and what proof do they have?
Can I beat their proof? Okay, can I go do it? If I can't do it, how can I position differently?
where I'm now in a new lane where there's nobody that has proof above me. This is like the game of influence, basically. Yeah, we're going to get into it deeper in this conversation, but the fact that you have three separate companies doing seven figures plus, like that in itself, I mean, there's people that are doing $800 million a year, and I'm not saying it's better or worse them doing that than these three companies, but like they can't make that claim.
That's something unique to you. Yeah, exactly. So I think just finding anything that you can kind of point your finger to.
Yeah, and to be clear, the reason I did that is because Again, like if you look at, I love looking at Hormozy as the proxy because he really has thought through a lot of this stuff really well. I think Hormozy is the fucking goat.
He's the goat. Yeah, he really is. He has four, or like when he was doing the book launches, he had four kind of different business models that he promotes he has proof for, right?
So he has like the main gym launch, which you could say is like a info slash services business. He had the supplement company, which is e -com. He had the Allen, which is the software company.
And then now he has like the pure media business play. He also has like the Deloitte. equivalent consulting thing for like mid tier businesses, which is like what they go to acquisition .com for.
So what he's done is he's getting the infinity stones of business models, basically. Right. So when, when you then are a business owner of any one of those categories, he can be like, well, I obviously, I obviously have the proof of having done that myself here, here and here.
So that's what I try to do. Like I have three business models. I have media, I have the info coaching, and then I have software.
And I was like, I want to run it up on all three. And now I have two different media plays. I have YouTube, of course, but then on short form, I have the media brand deal side with the tech, and now I have the conversion side with the marketing.
So I'm also trying to accumulate the infinity stones within the content space so that when you come in as a business owner trying to learn content, you're like, well, that guy's done exactly what I'm trying to do. And that applies for software, that applies for coaching, that applies for media. You see what I'm saying?
I'm trying to build up the portfolio of proof across every nook and cranny I want to be the best proof -wise. So there's no reason why you wouldn't buy. I think what's really good about that too is just like the optionality and going back to kind of that content pyramid, you know, maybe one of these buckets that you're in gets flooded tomorrow.
And it's harder to make money in that bucket. You have kind of all these other places that you can do. Let's go to the fourth one, better storytelling.
Why do you think story kind of lands, per what we kind of talked about earlier, better than the other three? Yeah, like story is just a way of sequencing words to trigger emotion, right? That's all it really is.
And so when you deliver facts at a machine gun cadence, it delivers almost zero emotion. Emotion typically drives purchase.
It typically drives action, intent. People get moved emotionally or they see a transformation they want and subconsciously their emotion is like, I want that. And therefore they go down the funnel.
Storytelling is just the pinnacle of triggering emotion with words, right? That's all it is. And so if you're great at storytelling, you can drive more emotion from more people more often.
That's all that means. And so I just think like, The easiest way to create an emotional connection or like signal that you know what you're talking about is through your own personal first person POV story.
So you can say like, I had this problem or complication I was facing. I took this action. I got this result.
Someone can see themselves in you. They get that emotional transfer and they want to take action. That's kind of what like storytelling is the peak for that reason.
If you take away the storytelling, what you're left with is just like facts. And so your goal is to go. from facts to stories and like try to add more of that emotional resonance as you go.
Yeah, I completely agree. Top of the pyramid on the content side of storytelling. Guys, if you want to apply these four ways to stay competitive with your content, we put together a free PDF down below.
Click the link at the top of the description and stick around because Callaway shares his screen and live on the podcast builds a winning content strategy from scratch. Enjoy the rest of the episode. Big claim.
I agree. Distribution is the only real moat left. for the next, let's just call it three to five years.
Make that case. I think distribution and product still, but like effectively, if you reduce business down to like the core atomic elements, it's just, can I get traffic? Can I get someone's attention?
Can I put that attention somewhere, funnels? And then can I have them buy a thing, offers or product? That's it.
There's three things. So like funnels can be very simply. they see a video they press a button they're on the product like funnels can be a page so like funnels let's abstract away like that's pretty simple it's literally just distribution and product so as ai makes it easier for you to build digital things the barrier for great products in theory goes down so basically like the moat around product is going down now you could also say the moat around distribution is also going down as as it becomes easier to make more content better faster which is what i'm trying to do with sandcastles that moat will slowly come down where more and more people can get reach with less skills, less time, like time on task, time spent learning the skill.
So in theory, like over the next three years, the only two moats are distribution and product. Right now, a lot of people are vibe coding a thing that could be sold, but they don't have distribution. So that's why I mean like distribution is the final moat.
But you could argue like both of those moats are coming to zero. So it's kind of like today, both are moats. In five years, both are zero moat.
You want to kind of like take advantage right now. Let's decipher between distribution and own distribution, i .e. followers versus let's just call it like emails or first party data.
Would you just argue it's all about own distribution or do you still think kind of followers is an important thing? So today to like frame this, you have rented platforms and you have owned. So rented would be anything where it's feed based.
So this could be Twitter. This could be Instagram. It could be YouTube.
Anything where you post, you can get millions of reach, but like they could also cancel your account tomorrow. And the reach goes away. You have an audience.
They ban you. It's zero. Those are rented.
They're allowing you to post for free in exchange for they take your content, run ads between it. They monetize. It's a great ecosystem today.
But that's temporary. It's fleeting. Then there's owned.
So these are things where even if the provider goes down, you can have the relationship with the customer. So this is like an email list. Like in Beehive, you can export the email list out.
If Beehive goes down tomorrow, you can take that email list, put it up on a competitor, and you can still reach those people. A private community.
Something inside your own walls, like more or less. So what you want to do is like ramp people from rented to owned as fast as you can. Because what happens is if AI content emerges, the rented platforms will get noisy.
You will lose the ability to reach on rented. Now, in theory, like maybe AI cold email agents are coming and like that will ruin the inbox as well. Like that's possible.
But like at least. There will be tagging where like if somebody actually wants to see your stuff, there will be no intermediary between them and you in the inbox. So that at least is more protectable.
So that's kind of like the delineation between those. You want to get as many people from rented to owned as possible as fast as you can. I feel like email and phone numbers are the last boss.
And per what you just said, like for us, our two biggest initiatives are YouTube and owned lists. And we utilize YouTube to get people on our own list. And a big thing for that is giving away free lead magnets and then getting them on our email list.
And then the Beehive MCP, I don't know how deep you are on that, but like just the first party data that you can get out of that. And this kind of all circles back in this flywheel that talking about those five games. If you're playing that second media game where you're going Callaway marketing style and going super, super deep on a specific cohort, if you can own them via email and then understand that first party data and really, really, really know who your end consumer is, I think that's where you get all the asymmetric cast through high ticket, whether it be a digital course, a product, a sponsorship on a podcast.
I think all of the money is going to go to there before anything. catastrophic potentially happens yeah yeah to be fair there's a there's a good sized window three to five years let's say three years on the front end five six years where there's still a huge moat for distribution and there's still a huge moat on product taste like there's a bunch of people that launch shit that's horrible today like has no taste that there's no product market fit they don't understand how the customer actually uses it they don't understand consumer psychology there's a huge moat on both but those moats are coming down so like If I were anyone focused on content, I would try to build systems and infrastructure that drives as many people from the rented platform to my owned email lists or communities as fast as you can, as big as you can.
We could talk about like how I do that, but that's like priority number one right now. Let's talk a little bit about that. I mean, I mentioned very, very briefly that guys on a bunch of these kind of quote unquote lead magnets where we give you free information in the description, obviously we collect your email in exchange for.
Yeah. That information. Yeah.
Any other big ones that we want to fight? We don't have to get too deep into it, but anything else? I mean, I guess for me, a big one was how are you utilizing short form to get people's information outside of many chat?
Anything else big that you're doing? So right now I'm doing like 10 to 15 K emails a month net just from short form. And literally the play is I post one time a day, like we talked about on the marketing channel, deep stuff, advanced stuff that like the type of person I want wants.
I make a lead magnet that's aligned to that video. So this is really important for people is like, if you were to make a video and at the end just be like, hey guys, give me your email. No one would do it.
How do you actually get them to give you your email? You aggravate a pain point in the video and then you offer a solution to that pain point, which is if you give me your email, I'll give you the solution in the lead magnet, which is could be a PDF, could be a guide, could be a clause skill, could be a video. Aggravate pain point, hand them, like, you know.
cut them, give them the bandaid, like to be crude about it. Like that's what you wanna do. Every single video, you want the lead magnet to be as closely aligned to that pain point as possible.
If I aggravate a storytelling pain point and I'm like, here are my editors, if you want, give me your email, those are kind of like incongruent. But if I say, here's the eight principles to make your stories better and I just aggravated the fact that you're bad at storytelling, you're gonna take that. And so by aligning those lead magnets, I'm just, people go into many chat, they comment story, they give me their email, I give them the doc, they're happy and I keep doing that.
Now, once I have them on the email, the job's not done. I have to then still send them more value on the list and not bother them. I think that's the thing people get wrong is like just because you have their email doesn't mean you own them, doesn't mean that they're going to give you money.
Like you have to continue to give them value, continue to nurture them. But the idea is like if they're lurking around your pain point sphere and you get their email, over time you will chip away at the walls of them either doubting that you can deliver the service or maybe they don't have the problem. they would pay you for yet.
You're chipping that away. Eventually they will buy. To read between the lines there too, for people out there listening, in most cases, the harder something is, the better the outcome is, just because people are inherently lazy.
And what you just said right there, it's kind of a top -down versus bottom -up approach as far as a narrow topic or a broad topic. You know, for us, a lot of our lead magnets were very, very broad. And maybe within that, there was four separate topics.
So when we're kind of scarcing all of our data, we don't know which of those four, how they came in. So for you, With these individual posts, it's so granular that you have such an understanding of like at a very, very granular level.
What is their actual pain point? And then stuff that's kind of adjacent topic wise, you can kind of cross sell them into other things. And you could imagine like we don't have this fully set up yet, but it's a priority for this Q4 is like.
if I make a storytelling video and then I have a storytelling lead magnet and I know they come in for storytelling, I then try to sell them on a low ticket product that's storytelling related. I then upsell them into my high ticket program based on a storytelling driven page. Like as long as it's aligned, you're good, right?
And so it's like, what are those? It goes back to those buckets. What are the core problems a lot of people think they have?
Can you make content on those? Can you then go straight down the funnel of like the content's aligned, the lead magnets aligned, the pages aligned, the low tickets aligned, the high ticket, I serve them, the whole thing's aligned. So it's like, Because the problem doesn't change.
If they have storytelling as an issue, they still have it as an issue as they're watching and reading and watching your VSL and reading the copies. It's all storytelling. So as long as you customize those, and it's obviously work to build out those funnels, that's what the real pros are doing.
Yeah, we are definitely a bit too macro. We're going way more granular for us. One other thing on that too, and this applies to you guys as well, is once I watch a three -hour video or as I'm watching it, I don't want more work.
I want the answer. So if you're like, we covered this crazy thing and then you're like in the description, we have this like 10 page thing. As a viewer, I'm like, ah, I have to then read 10 more pages to get the answer.
What I'd rather you say is like, I have this thing. If you click one button, I get the answer. So that's like classic psychology of like, more is not better in getting them to take it, right?
ironically, we are doing that wrong. We are going to change that. I usually flex on the length of the PDF when they're just like, fuck it, give me the answer in as few words as possible.
That was a nice little change. I'm being very, very descriptive in what is in. the lead magnet is very, very important.
Like for us formally, it would be very, very macro. But now we're, if you look in the description below, all the lead magnets for this episode is going to be very, very descriptive. Yeah.
It's all about power words, just like copywriting. It's funny because people doing paid ads do this, right? They run a paid ad with a messaging angle.
They try to get someone to click and they have a custom landing page that matches that messaging angle. Like that's very universally understood for paid ads. Organic's the exact same way.
It's just instead of a paid ad, you have a free video. And instead of a landing page, you have a lead magnet. And then that lead magnet could go to a landing page.
If those are aligned, you're golden. Like it's just, yeah, it's just copywriting. Dopamine Casino is back.
Free game right here. Talked a lot about proof. I think the number one most important word in all of this is trust.
I think ultimately if the consumer doesn't trust you, they'll never transact, obviously. So if you don't have proof yet. how do you get that trust?
Like how do you see the relationship between proof and trust? Yeah. So there's like a, I have this framework called the trust ladder.
There's like eight levels. There's no way I'm going to be able to rattle it off, off the dome. But basically like at the very top of the trust ladder, number one is like a warm endorsement from someone you already trust.
So like if, if someone really respects you and you co -sign me, they're going to pay me immediately because they trust you a lot. So that, that's like always number one, right? Proof of result is like number two or three.
So it's like, I've done the thing you want me to do exactly with someone just like you. I have the results. I'm not lying.
you know if you pay, you have a good chance of getting that result, right? So as you go down the ladder, it's like harder and harder to establish this trust. So the way I like to do it is demonstration of ability through like non -obvious insight.
So typically like when someone's watching content, I call these like dopamine hits or like the light bulb moment. What I really want, if I don't have any proof, is I want you to watch the video and you have a light bulb moment to be like, oh wow, I never thought of that before. That's kind of smart.
That right there is a form of trust accruing. It's a small bit, but if I can get those light bulb moments to happen, ideally twice per video and then in several videos in a row, I will have just as much trust accumulated as if I had given you the proof. So it's like demonstration.
This is like that application of ability, right? Demonstration of ability is worse than proof, but it can still get trust if you do it enough. Proof is then next.
And then obviously warm endorsement, which comes from proof from that person would be the top. That's like the simplified version of the trust ladder. This is why copying makes no sense because if I've heard something before and then I hear it from you again, zero additional trust goes to you because I'm like, all right, that's not novel.
Trust comes from hearing novel things over and over. And you're like, that person is a source of info that I need to pay to learn more from because they keep saying shit I haven't heard before. That makes sense.
It's like, this is kind of the Goldilocks of trust accumulation is like, what can you say that is non -obvious, but as soon as they hear it, It sounds obvious. That's the best place to be.
Because then it's like, oh, obviously it was not obvious. They hadn't thought of it. As soon as you say it, they're clear and they're like, that person's smart, right?
That's how trust kind of builds when you don't have proof. So all roads lead to being the quote unquote kind of like gold standard in your space. And is there anything that we haven't talked about that you think is very, very important to just cement yourself as the number one in the space?
Yeah, I think the most important place to start is with the skill acquisition, not the content. like, and this is the hard thing to hear because if you're like 21 and you have no skills and you're like, I just want to make money and like everyone's making money with content. I just want to make content.
It's like, hold on a second, zoom out. The way to make money with content is to have expert level skills. Content is just a vehicle to amplify attention on those skills and monetize around it.
You have to first have the skills. So like really, if you're listening to this, you want to gut check. Do I have top 10 % level skills, ideally top 1 % in my area?
If you do, All you are is just content frameworks and like a workflow away from like just printing. If you don't have skills, you should first obsess over a skill and then come and make content.
Like most people don't realize all I did for 18 months was just make short form video, did nothing else. Like I made a short form video every single day. I spent eight hours per video all the way down the front.
Like all I did was that because I wanted to become world -class at short form. Now, was that the right skill to pick from the beginning? I don't know.
It's working out decently well. Maybe YouTube would have been. better, but like, it was a pretty valuable skill.
I thought all I did was that I became top 1%. Then I started making content about how I learned that those skills and what those skills were. I didn't start on YouTube being like, here's how to make content about content, about content, about content all the way down.
I actually built the skill that you could say like, well, it's kind of like, you know, pyramidal where like the thing I learned was how to make content. Then I make content about content. You could say that, but like I had world -class level skills on a thing first.
whether that's paid ads or copywriting or sales or building product, like you need a skill, ideally more than one, but like one core skill you're world -class at before you can build expertise or authority in content. And the reason why is because you don't have non -obvious takes if you haven't done the thing to a level beyond where most people have gone.
Like by definition, if everything you've done is obvious, you will have no non -obvious perspective. So like you have to start with the skill. Most creators are just duct -taping together a bunch of different tools to run their podcast and their newsletter.
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Guys, this is something that I use every single day, non -negotiable. Give it a try. I want to dive into Sandcastles.
I'd love to just know what is it? How big is it now? Why don't you just walk us through like what it is first?
Yeah. So Sandcastles will be my kind of like magnum opus for this season of my life around the content workflow piece. So like I said, I have a co -founder.
We've built the whole thing together. The goal of Sandcastles is to take my content brain and put it into software so that everyone can use it. And so that comes from how do we look at psychology?
How do I build systems to like deep analyze my videos. What am I seeing?
When I look at a profile from mine or anyone I'm working with, what am I seeing? What patterns are there? What formats, topics, hooks?
How am I diagnosing what's working? Can we put that into software so that anyone without me can have me on their shoulder? That's basically the vision for it.
So I wanted to create a workflow, a content factory basically, where you come in, you answer a few questions about yourself, it pumps out videos. Not AI avatar recorded, but it pumps out scripts that are in your voice about your stuff with your takes ready to go. Those are just there for you.
All you had to do is like weigh in on your perspective and then you can go record those and edit. Basically compressing the content workflow from like four hours per video to like as long as it takes you to record and edit. If you're a business owner, you record 10 in one hour, send them off to the editing team.
You don't have to do anything. That was like my initial vision for what I wanted it to be. Short form only right now, we'll definitely be expanding to take over other things in the future.
But right now I want to have like, I just want to build the best product ever built for short form content first, and we can expand from there. And so basically what we can now do is for your channel, for any competitor channel, for your whole niche, for a single video, we can deep analyze that video. We can get everything about it.
The transcript, we apply a bunch of like the deep analysis that I would do in my brain, right? Like what is the topic? What is the contrarian take?
What is the idea? What is the hook? What is the format?
How is it laid out? Like I'm looking at, my brain is a computer with content. Like we're just looking at these things.
So when you deep analyze, you get that. The real value is you can then take all of that data in aggregate, hundreds of videos off your channel, hundreds across your niche, put it into the MC, like the MCP is just a bridge into Claude. Inside of Claude or inside of ChatGBT, you can then say.
Run a bulk analysis on this and tell me what I'm missing. What topics are working? What should I make more of?
What hooks are working? What should I make more of? We have the actual transcript.
So it's like, what power phrases are hitting that I'm missing? What format should I do? What's working for this guy in the niche that I'm not doing?
Compare our two channels. Like literally anything from a research and workflow perspective, from topic, research, hook, and script, you can now do because you have all this data. So what we're trying to do is build like the social data layer or the data layer for social media.
And so that's kind of where we're at now. What platforms besides Instagram? Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts.
And I know you've been profitable since day one. No paid ads. When are you going to turn on the gas?
So we have one really impressive thing that's coming in the next month or two, which will solve a lot of the like, what do I make next and how do I make it? Kind of reducing the time from like two hours to two minutes. Once that's out and it's viable, like people are like, yo, this is the shit.
Turbo mode from there. But until then, we could run the gas, but like basically, and again, like I could be naive to this, but I believe you need a great product before you apply gasoline. Like you gotta lay the tender first.
So we've been like iterating, boom, now we have product market fit. Now we're scaling. We're still missing a couple of things.
We're gonna close those gaps and boom. So that's kind of, it's coming. We have a very clear line of sight.
We know exactly what to do. We're doing it now. We've, I mean.
I've been answering, to your point on the customer support, like me and my co -founder have been answering every customer support email from day one. Like I've probably answered thousands and thousands of these emails. And so I have very clear visibility into like exactly what's breaking, what's not clear, where people are unsure, all of this.
All right. What you guys all been waiting for. We're going to put it up on the screen.
Blank idea to posted video via Sandcastles. Let's get it. So basically how it works is the goal is to figure out what is working best on your channel.
and your niche. If you don't have videos on your own channel, you want to first canvas the niche and be like, what topics are working? What hooks are working?
And the goal is not to copy. It's what I call data enabled creativity. I want to learn what's working with the data so that I can be creative in the areas that make the most sense.
So when you come to Sandcastles, you go to the channels tab and you can basically build a watch list of the best performing people in your niche. So you can see on the right side, I have a watch list. This is my social media growth workspace.
I have one for tech. I have one for Mark. We're going to go through the pod in a second.
So I've got Briar. I've got a bunch of these people who are pretty dope in the niche. If you already know who you want to add to the workspace, you can just search them here.
And if they don't come up, you can add anyone you want from Instagram, TikTok, YouTube Shorts. This suggests people in the niche. So I can go to describe and I could say like social media growth strategies.
These are the types of people I want to follow. And I want to say on Instagram and only between 10K and 1 million followers. And I can press search.
This will then pull up the best fit people that are not already in my space across three different buckets, social media strategies, social media growth, or paid social media growth. And what happens if you don't know, if you don't know that you should be looking for social media strategies? Is there like a way to audit what you currently have to kind of know which topics you should be going for?
So social media growth strategies would be like how I frame the niche. So you just, it's like, what niche are you in? So you'd be like, we make, it's like.
business breakdowns or like we do operator, like basically the keywords of how you would describe your niche. You can just try a bunch. So this is step one right here.
This is step one. And so in the onboarding, we just ask you like, what are you making content about? And we will actually build a list for you automatically.
But if you don't like the people in there, you can clear it out. This is just how you would do it yourself. So if you have someone you really want, you can click the double arrows on them and we will resort the list based on the closest proximity to them.
So the first step when you're really trying to canvas a niche is like, who is doing well in my space? Who's talking about the stuff I want to talk about? Who's talking to the people I want to attract, right?
So here I've got like, let's say 10 people or so. The next step is you go to the videos tab and this is like really insane that this exists. Basically what you have here is all the best videos from my channel and all of the channels in the list are in one place.
So what I like to do is I say, post it in the last three months with above a 2 % engagement. This just screens out the brand deals in case someone paid, juiced the videos to artificially inflate. And then I sort them by outlier score.
So what you got here is these are the best performing videos in the last three months from just these channels that are right here. Just to give full context as well to outliers, just videos that on their channel perform better than the average video. Yeah.
So to make that clear on this outlier score right here, that's 75 .6. What this means is these 710 ,000 views were divided by their rolling three month average before this video was posted. And so this gives like a relative score.
The reason why outlier score is helpful is because if someone's super small, versus someone super big this is like an apples apples metric so you can compare them evenly yeah like like sky tan his probably his average video is let's just make even numbers it's probably 10 000 exactly and it's 75 x it does 710 000 so what this means is like he's a smaller channel yet this video really kicked ass so you want to study this disproportionately more because it broke out for him he doesn't have a bunch of like credibility on his face so it's the idea that actually worked really well now if you want to sort by views you can also sort by views here and this will skew it slightly differently typically bigger people get more views and so this loses the apples to apples comparison you can see there are different videos up here so let's just go back to outlier score so what you essentially have here is like at the simplest level a hit list of the best performing topics in your niche so there's a few ways you can do this the simplest way is literally to just click into each one and when you deep i'll go back to the deep analysis so each one of these has a green button at the top these have been analyzed
If I scroll down to find one that hasn't been analyzed, like let's say this one, you can scroll over it and press the analyze button. This takes about 60 seconds. When you deep analyze, what you get is everything that you would want on the video.
So you get the full transcript. If you click this button right here, you can get the sections breaking out the different kind of like story sections within the transcript. You get the idea analysis.
So what is the topic? This is kind of like the unique angle. What is the contrarian take on this topic?
What are the core facts that they gave in the video? You get the hook. What is the exact formula of the hook?
The hook word for word, the analysis of why that hook worked. You get the format, the category, what the format is, and the visual layout. So on an individual video, this is like, holy shit, it's crazy you can get all this information.
This alone is not that valuable on one video. What's valuable is when you take all of the top 50 or all the top 100 with all of this data and you pipe it into Cloud at the same time. Then you can run analysis in batch and it gives you like really non -obvious insights.
Is it like, it's like an export CSV or are you saying, oh, it's an MCP, right? Yeah, so you can do both. So the easiest way, if you don't know what an MCP is, you can just come up to this little cloud icon right here and you can export CSV or JSON and literally drag that into Cloud.
If you have the Cloud MCP, which all you have to do is go to settings, you go to connectors and then the MCPs right here, we have instructions right here. You can follow the MCP is just a bridge that allows you to kind of pipe this data automatically.
You don't have to export anything. You just say like, give me the top 50 videos from my watch list in the last three months. And it would just pull in all the data.
So the point is sandcastles is this data layer. It allows you to get deep analysis on any video on any channel. So what I like to do first, and maybe this is where we'll start first.
I go to the videos tab and I go to. my channel. So these are my two channels.
You got my TikTok one at 14K and the marketing one on Instagram at 80. So I click on this. Now I've got, these are all my videos.
So I'm going to sort this by outlier score. Now I have all my best performing videos in order. So you can see like 730K views, 414, 315, and so on.
So what I want to do is I want to export all this or use the MCP to get everything into Claude so I can be like, what is working? What is not working? Et cetera.
Now, before I do that, I just want to show you guys the dashboard. The dashboard is a centralized HQ for your channels only. And so this top half is like my total following, the growth, et cetera.
But what's really sick is down here, I get a report on the best performing topics, hooks, formats, and script writing tactics for my channel. And it runs auto every seven days. So I can see my last seven days, hook writing frameworks have done the best.
And if I go down, this explains, these are what hook writing frameworks mean. These are the exact videos. Here's what's working best.
Here's what you should change. So I can do this for topics. I can do this for hooks.
These are my best performing hooks. You can see there's like not much of a difference. And I like for an example, these hooks, like these kind of selections, like, is this the Callaway brain where you're like, there's 20 types of hooks and they fall under one of the buckets.
Yeah. So everything has been codified. So in this dashboard, everything's been codified by me and bucketed.
But in the MCP, if you don't like my buckets, you can go into cloud and just have it look at the actual transcript. So like, for example, tutorial hooks are doing the best. So what does that mean?
Here's the explanation for the tutorial hooks. These are all the ones that use tutorial hooks. And then here's some examples of my best performing ones right here.
So I've got hooks there. I've got formats. And then I've got script writing tactics.
This is actually low key the sickest. These are specific tactics I use in the script that are working super well. So like tool tutorial script that has numbered steps, that works really well.
If we go down to the bottom, live demonstration of the technique mid script did not work super well. So like, what is that? I did that twice.
So I would then say, okay, well, why is that not working? this kind of explains why. So this is like, this dashboard is meant to be a shortcut version to get the insights that you can get in the MCP, just like a quick hit.
Now what's cool is this report in the dashboard, if you go to the reports tab, you can actually talk to this report in cloud. So you can just press this little button, continue with MCP, copy this prompt. And then if you have the MCP installed in cloud, you can now have a conversation with this data.
So you can be like, hey, you said that the tutorial hooks are working the best. And these were the three videos. I tried something very similar that was bucketed as like something else.
Why did that one not work? What's the difference? Now it has the context of that report that can kind of talk back and forth.
So - And it's going to speak to you in the codify language that you - Exactly. So this is like everything I know about content's built into this. And so even if this existed somewhere else, it's not going to have my brain in it, which is super helpful.
So I'm going to switch to quad now to show you like a bunch of the things you can do with this data. But just so everyone's seeing, like all you have to do is build your channel list. And this could just be your, like you, if you just want to do your own channel, you don't have to build a full list.
You know, you just, for you, it's easy to do, but like build a list, go to the videos tab. You've got all the videos in here. I would go last three months or last six months, 2 % sort by outlier score, deep analyze the top 50 or a hundred.
You can click this little lightning bolt. If you just want to type in 50, it'll just do the top 50 or you can click them individually. And there you go.
So that's like step one. And what you can also do here is like based on the whole entire kind of episode that we did today as well, too.
You can use this data in conjunction with telling Claude, hey, this is my social proofing. This is my story. Where can you weave in my specific story and social proofing into this?
And we have some stuff coming on that that'll be sick soon. Amazing. So a couple other things really quick is just the hooks tab is all of the hooks from every video you've analyzed in here in one place.
So if I search my channel. I can flip between the format of the hook and the actual word for word, and then I can sort it by outlier score. So what this shows me is these are all my best performing hooks, just the first word in order.
You can export just this as well. So if you want to export this to a CSV, you can say, hey, Claude, here's my top 137 hooks that I've made. You can see the performance, what's working.
And I'll show you, I actually ran that analysis for my own channel, so I'll show you in Claude. Last thing I want to show here, and then we'll move to Claude, is this collections. So we've actually built 105 different collections of the top, formats, editing styles, signature series, and visual hooks.
Jesus. So if you go to formats, these are the top 22 formats, like about me, A versus B, breakdown, case study. Some of these are not rendering well because it's zoomed in, but like you can see these are the top 22 formats.
And if you click into any of them, you have a bunch of video examples across all niches that we've already paid to analyze for you. So you don't have to run credits. All the information's here.
So this is like the best library of reference videos that you could possibly see. So if you're like, oh, I want to try a new editing style, boom, here are all the editing styles that work. You can click, there's examples in here.
So it's pretty sick, like pretty helpful resource. And we add new stuff to that all the time. Okay, so I'm going to go into Claude and show you like the sauce.
But any questions on the app? No, no, no. Super, super clear.
All right, sick. Okay, so Claude is like the magic machine that takes the data and makes it amazing. So you actually don't need to spend that much time in the Sandcastles app once you set it up.
The goal is in Claude, you just say. What are my top videos this week? What are my top 100 videos?
Analyze the videos for my competitors. And it can just do it magically with Claude. So I've ran three different types of workflows to show you different stuff you can do with the MCP.
So, all right, dealer's choice, you pick. We either do your channel, my channel, or the plastic surgery one. Which one should we do first?
Let's start with your channel just so the whole audience could get the most amount of value because obviously you know it better than anybody. All right, sick. So the very first thing I did was - Four straight months with a monster.
Then August. So I messed up in August. So this is actually super helpful, right?
So what I started with is I said, pull in all the videos from the Callaway Marketing Channel. They should already be all deep analyzed already. I want you to build a super visual report breaking down the best performing topics, the best performing hooks, the best performing formats, the best script writing tactics, and any non -obvious patterns I might be missing.
Give me the full breakdown of all videos organized in whatever you think would be most important for me. And then tell me exactly what I should be doing on my next batch. Like this is something that someone would actually ask, right?
Like a realistic thing. And then this is a pro tip for anyone in Claude, just write build in dynamic HTML. And that's how you get this like sick visual thing on the side, which I'll show.
So just always write that on your prompts. So what it did first, it pulled my last 50 videos and it was like, yo, something happened where in August your, your stuff is not working. relative to july and june and so first it did like the first the first 50 so i'll show like this report so so here it's like okay in july you were crushing so it mapped out all the performance of my videos and like you can see the orange spikes were crushed like videos are crushed here's august and like the stuff has fallen off so i'm like all right what's going on so it's like five things the data says that the feed won't show you i've got all these takeaways that are like yo you're overrunning this specific assets like turn clod into a machine.
I had a video that murdered on that and I kept running it over and over and it's like, yo, you overcooked it. Like it's not working. So it's like, stop doing that.
This is like, you've drove a bunch of CTAs to sandcastles in July. It worked really well, but now you're doing too many in August. You need to back off and drive, drive CTAs to other stuff.
So like these are, I'll show you the full analysis of my channel, but like this is super helpful to have like a, basically me on your shoulder as a content coach telling you what to do and not to do. Here it's saying, these are the topic buckets. So the majority of my views are coming from the AI Sandcastles workflows, then storytelling, then hooks, and then like strategies not really doing that well.
It's saying, what does this mean? So it's like telling me in layman's terms, like what this actually means. It also does this for hooks.
It also does this for formats. And then the script writing tactics, which I think is super helpful. So it's like anytime you name the mechanism, it works super well.
So like whenever I name my framework, it works super well. And I don't need to get into like all of it, but these are the 49 videos like sorted in order, super clean for you. Now, what I wanted to do is I wanted it to actually run my entire channel, not just the top 49, like the most recent 49.
So I just said, hey, I think you're missing some. Go back even further and grab everything. So it's like, okay, cool.
Grabbed everything. So now the report was this. And I think this is even more illuminating.
Four straight months with a monster, then August. So basically it's saying each month I had at least one video that was crushing. And most of them were these like psychology breakdowns of storytelling.
In August, I didn't have one of those and it didn't work. And so that alone is like helpful because I didn't realize that. But it's also telling me like, yo, you need to stop making these mistakes and start doing this instead.
You were doing this before you stopped doing it. And so, and I was like, I basically was like, yo, tell me exactly what to do in September so this doesn't happen again. Like this is what I was saying right here.
And it just broke it down for me. The only way it's able to do this is actually have your data in detail and like also have my brain in it to be like, oh, I know what to look for, right? So.
This is just like, if you're not running a strategy audit on your own channel, I don't know what to tell you. Like you definitely should be. And so at the minimum, you want to run this like once every couple of weeks.
And so the beauty is you can download, deep analyze all your videos, get this data in, run it the first time. And you can just set up a recurring scheduled task in Claude to be like, yo, every two weeks, just run this again. And then ping me in Slack or send me a message when it's done so that I know like how things are changing.
So at the very minimum, people should be doing that. How prescriptive can it get? Like, is it going to suggest ideas for you?
Yeah. So so here's so what I really asked it for is like in my next batch of seven, what should I do differently? Right.
Or give me topics based on all the things you know about me. In theory, all the context you have on all of my other stuff, like my YouTube videos, as well as what this data is saying and saying, OK, cool, you should make. a video analyzing streak psychology.
So like talk about the psychology of like, if you have multiple videos in a row, how that streaking helps. That's like kind of a decent idea. Actually, it has make another video about the story arc, which is something that I did that worked before.
And it's pulling that because it has my data. It says the five desire hook templates. This is something that I've never made a video on, but it's like pulling from the, from somewhere else.
Like it has all my YouTube contacts, all my YouTube scripts. So it's pulling from that. And so you can see, it's like pitching me other ideas.
It's really hard for it to pitch you ideas unless it knows what's worked for you. It's also canvassed the niche. It also has context on what you're trying to do.
And so as you add that stuff into Cloud and you port this data over from Sandcastles, this can actually become like a proactive agent. Just so I know as well too, like obviously there's an MCP or you exported the CSV from Sandcastles to Cloud. Is there additional like MD files giving context within Cloud in this folder so they have more?
So you would do that when you set up Claude. So I've given Claude context on me separately. I've uploaded all my YouTube scripts separately and I'm like, you'll save this to the memory.
But then when this pipes in, Fable's just cracked because it's like, okay, let's go look at what he's done elsewhere and bring it in. And now we have all this data plus what he's done. We can just pitch him ideas.
For people out there listening, I think that's very important because it could give context. Maybe you don't care about views. Maybe you do care, like just knowing what your goals are.
The more you talk to it and tell it like, yo, interview me about what I care about, save all this context. And then when I ask you to do anything, use that as a layer, like a context layer is super helpful. So this is like the first example of just like analyzing your channel.
Then I wanted to do like, okay, well, what if I'm newer to content and like, I don't have a lot of videos on my channel? Well, the first place you should start is like analyzing your niche. So that list I made of other people, let's just take the top 50 videos from them.
and just see what it says in terms of what topics and hooks are working best. That's what it did here, right? So first I said, any of the hundred that I analyzed, get rid of anything that's like about their life or about like nonsense that's not related to me.
So it screened out 15. So I've got 85 left. These are the 15 that it screened out.
Then it goes through, okay, topic performance on these people. Script writing and storytelling is doing the best. So right away, it's like, okay, that's like, let's say I didn't know anything about the niche.
That's actually helpful. Script writing is doing the best. Craft and resources.
I'm not sure what that means. So we'll find out more. Hooks, content strategy, AI content.
There's a reason why the videos that are doing the best for them are the same videos I'm doing on my channel, the topics. And that's because I ran this. Like I looked at what's working for others.
I then use the topic buckets and find my own angles and my own subtopics. So if there's no better example of like me eating my own dog food, it's this right here. Because this is a pull off of everyone except me, right?
And so it also breaks down formats in the same way. It breaks down hooks in the same way. Jesus.
Here it's breaking down like specific hook formulas. These are the script structures that are working, like how the script is actually organized, like the levels ladder, for example. And you can ask it any questions.
Like the beauty of this isn't a static data report. Once you see this, you can be like, yo, what is the levels ladder? Like give me an actual example from the transcript.
And here's my context. Like, can you write me a levels ladder script? And you can just talk to it back and forth, which is sick.
Then this is like the leaderboard of all the videos kind of broken out in order. So what's cool about this is like, if you want to make, new topics.
The easiest way is just you get this in order and you just open each one and you just watch it and you ask yourself, do I have something unique to say about this or not? And if not skip it. And if yes, there you go.
Like there's a good video that's been validated. So for example, like this one from sky 10, the video scripting architecture. So I think if I close this, I can open this.
Yeah. So this goes straight to the Instagram. So I'm not going to open it because I don't want to mess up the screen share, but basically What he did is he went through, he's like, this is the best script writing format for short form.
And he like hook and he like went through it. So I asked myself, like, do I disagree with what he said? Do I have my own take?
Of course. So then I'm like, cool, I'm going to make a video. This is the best short form script, but I'm going with my own shit and I'm explaining it my own way.
Just because you're copying the, just the topic. Exactly. All I'm doing is saying like, he made a video about script writing, talking about the structure.
And I was like, cool, that's, that's cool. I disagree. Like I have a different take.
I'm going to make my own. So it's not copying because. Everything is different.
Like the angle is different. The substance is different. The way we edit is different.
The stuff I say. Only thing is the same is like he made a video about the script writing structure. So it's like, is that copying?
I don't think so. It's just like aiming my creativity towards something. I don't think at all.
So this is really helpful if you want to like canvas your niche. I would probably do this like once a month, once every three weeks. You don't need to do this every single day because, you know, as people post new videos, not everyone is going to be an outlier.
So this is just like the best 85 videos from that whole list over the last three months is right here. So that's kind of fire that you can do that as well. Next, I want to go to the hook analysis.
So I showed you guys all of the like top 137 hooks that I have written across these videos or however many it was, 139 hooks. And I exported that into a CSV. So now this analysis is just on hooks.
So it's basically like, here's my kind of like average performance of hooks. This is the psychology that actually works. If I have a transformation object, you take one thing to another, that seems to work well in my hooks.
If I have an impossibility clause, so like I say, this is impossible to skip, impossible to ignore, impossible, that does really well. If I talk about addiction in any way, that does really well. If I have a shock around like some new thing exists and it's shocking, that works really well.
So these are like high -level takeaways on the hooks, pretty helpful. What I think is more helpful though is as you keep going down, this tells me patterns that don't work. So it's like...
stop using if you conditional logic. So if I say like, if you want to grow on social media, you should do this. Those never work.
The if you, so it's like, don't do if you. I would never know that unless this told me. I mean, yeah, this is insane.
Fear and mistake framing. Anytime you frame fear, like this will never work for you if you do this, that doesn't work as well. So lean to optimism is what the data is saying.
If I do any hooks that require multiple sentence, it doesn't do well. And so this is so helpful to have this data to be able to then talk to, to say like. yo in the last two weeks i made 14 videos only two of them worked what did i do wrong on the hooks for the other 12 and it will then compare it to this the cool thing is this also built a hook generator for me right inside so if i let's say like what's a topic we can make a video about let's say like i'm mind blown right social media script structure and i'll say just like we'll call it the three two one structure let's just let's just make something up let's just see what the hook would be So now it's going to generate four hooks based on all of my own hooks for me right here, right in here.
So this is how you turn a blank page into a storytelling machine. Here's how to make your scripts. Here's how to make your scripts.
So structured is scientifically impossible to skip. Here's how to get people addicted to your structure before they realize what hit them. These are all like threads on what worked best for me on other hooks.
And if I want to just like, I say like, I like this one, but it's a little archaic or it's a, it's a little rigid. I'll just press riff four and it will give me four variations of that. And you can just go and go and go.
And so, Instead of like having Claude with a chat, like feeding it with a chat, this is just built directly into the data, like in this dynamic HTML. So I find that to be like pretty sick.
So the more data you feed it, the better it is. So if you don't have any videos, you can obviously take people's hooks from other, you can take hooks from the niche and then feed them in and then start the riff from here. So this would be like the specific hook workflow, for example.
And so I just want to like, before I keep going, I just want to emphasize like when you have the data layer, in one of these AI magic machines, you can solve anything. You can ask it anything.
You can have a conversation with it. You can say what works, what doesn't. Just wait till I show you what I did for your channel.
It's pretty crazy. I already know. We're not good.
Well, I think there's ones that worked and there's ones that didn't work, so it'll tell you. So that's what I wanted to cover on my channel. I did my channel recap.
I did the hook part. I did the niche analysis. If you want to get ideas, you just pull up the top 100 and you open them up and you kind of react.
Next, should we do your channel or the plastic surgeon? Let's go plastic surgeon. All right.
So this one I'm very proud of. This is like the most complex you can see. This is the most complex build I've ever done.
So what was I trying to do here? So I was basically like, if I am a plastic surgeon that's new to content and I've never done it before and I want to build a workflow, what can I like put into Claude and get the answers for? How do I use Sandcastle to like give me the answers?
What happens if this is net new? Like is any plastic surgeon? like winning on Instagram right now.
Like when you, there's a shit, there's others. There is. Okay.
And so if it's not new, it'll, it'll tell you like, we haven't found that many good matches, but it'll tell you who's a good match, who we think we can find. So, okay. So this is, this, this is the exercise of like, what if I had to string the whole thing in clod and you never touched sandcastles?
What would it look like? This is, this is it. It's pretty fire.
So the very first thing it does is it runs the niche interviewer skill. So this will ask the client six questions that help codify who they are. who their ideal avatar is, what their offer is, and like what they're doing just to get context.
So the first question was like, what do you actually sell and who pays you? So in this case, it's like, I'm a board certified plastic surgeon. I have a practice in LA and Beverly Hills.
I do about 150 surgeries per year. I only do facelifts, et cetera, et cetera. Each facelift runs about 95K to 140.
Like Claude helped me write these answers because I'm obviously not a plastic surgeon, but I was like, I want something specific like a plastic surgeon could answer. So he answers this. Then it says, Imagine you had the perfect person, the perfect viewer in a chair in front of you, the Frankenstein test.
Who would they be? Define them. So it's like, okay, cool.
She's 52. She lives in Brentwood. Her name's whatever, Emily.
She's spent 100K on Botox filler, whatever. She wants to do plastic surgery, but she's afraid of it looking whatever. She lost 30 pounds on GLP -1.
Yeah. So there's that. So her name's Elizabeth.
So then it's like, what's her dream outcome? Okay, cool. What are her biggest pain points?
This is actually extremely important. These are all the things that she's worried about. This is what you've heard in client conversations, right?
And then the last one is like, what is your unique differentiation? So like as a plastic surgeon, what's your unfair advantage? So here in this like fictional scenario, it's like a few things.
One, I only do faces. Most guys in LA do everything, but I only do faces. Two, a third of my practice is revision.
So I'm fixing other plastic, like the other facelifts that didn't work. And three, whatever. So like the point is you would have some differentiation that you would fill in.
So step one is you just answer those questions. Okay, now step two, these are the seven things I was saying earlier in the episode that are like the unique positioning angle ways to craft your own lane. So the one I missed, I guess, was, oh, unique stories.
So like, remember I said, topic selection, you're making topics that are different. Substance depth, you talk about different level of depth. Unique stories, you've done something different.
Like you did Kris Jenner's facelift, right? For example, et cetera. So first it just does a quick swag at like.
do we think there's some white space without even looking at the competition do we think like we have something unique here so just as a swag it is going to get second a second so then what it does is it automatically builds that channel watch list for you based on the questions you answered before so these are all plastic surgeons that only do facelifts that are succeeding on instagram and tiktok already so it pulls these channels for you straight from sandcastles you don't even have to go to sandcastles so it's like we got dr kevin dr kassir dr Radhi or Rabban, like whoever these people are, like these are, these are real accounts.
And so it says these top eight are like great fits for you. These are like tier B where like they're plastic surgeons, but they don't only do facelifts. So like some of their stuff might be relevant.
Some of it not. It's like, we recommend you adding the top eight and then like three of these. And those are adjacent, but there's probably pieces of the puzzle that you should take.
Exactly. So I'm like, cool. Okay, cool.
I take your recommendation. And so it'll automatically build a workspace in Sandcastles, automatically build a watch list for you. You don't have to enter the app.
So that's super helpful now because so far we have defined who we are and then we've now started to map the competition. Now from here, what I asked it to do is I want it to analyze. the top couple videos from each of those people.
And I wanted to build a mapping of what the position, what the niche looks like, like where is their white space in the niche across those seven components. And so what it ends up doing is it builds what's called a positioning wheel. So this positioning wheel is each of those seven slices and it's mapping each of the people on the slices.
So it's like for viral format, this guy does this, this guy does this, where is their white space? And so it's it pitches if you click into each slice it'll be like yo for visual format it's contested but there is some white space like here's kind of what people are doing here's what we recommend the white space for format will be drawing anatomy on a mirror or glass there's nobody doing that it's literally what you already do in the consults because that was like part of whatever the answer was like he we we said that and then it's like caveat there's zero like provenness on this like no one's ever done this format but there's white space it's potentially that one percent of 90 that's the one percent of 100 but that just like pitching it on its own like yeah it's insane so then you can go around and you can be like okay topic selection so here it's like this is pretty crowded there's a ton of people in the niche they all talk about procedure explainers whatever whatever so it's like the white space you could talk about how you do revisions of other people's facelifts as a series nobody's done that but a lot of these other ones people are making so you're not going to differentiate on this so the point is like you can go around this wheel
Without me talking to you on a consult and be like, oh shit. Okay. I think there's like some white space for me in some of these areas.
This is more meant to be just like a reference exercise, like more of a personal branding, like positioning exercise. But I find this to be like, there's nothing on the internet like this. So where you can just say, yeah, so, so that's, so that's that.
Then, then what I think is really helpful is it builds out what I call the audience bullseye. So. A big question most business owners have when they make content is like, should I go broad to get a shit ton of views or should I go narrow but give up the views to try to get conversion?
And like, what is my mix? So my take on this is called the audience bullseye. So I'll pull up this visual, which is pretty sick.
So the audience bullseye is very simple. It's like at the middle of the bullseye is your ICP. So this is like Elizabeth.
It's literally, if you click on it, it's like. Affluent LA women, 48 to 58, they've spent six figures on injectables. They've secretly researched a facelift.
They're terrified of it looking overdone. That's like a bullseye, right? One level out from there would be any woman 45 to 65 who has been on filler Botox and are wondering about surgery.
They're like kind of passively looking. That's pretty targeted, but like still one rung out. Yellow, the third one would be any woman 40 to 65 considering any facials, any surgery.
It could be neck, could be nose, could be facelift, right? So we're getting broader. The blue, the light blue would be any woman 35 plus who cares about their face aging and needs to learn about it.
So that's like pretty broad. And then the furthest one is like super broad, all beauty, all skincare. So as a, as a plastic surgeon, you want to know like, what should my mix be?
So this is where like the best strategy is what's called a three, two, one content strategy. So you want one bucket to be in this light blue ring number four. You want two of your buckets to be in the yellow or the orange.
Those are like more narrow. And then you want one chaos agent that could be anything from red to light blue. You never want to go in dark blue.
Dark blue is way too broad. If you made a video about skincare, like Selena Gomez's new, you know, cosmetic launch, that is so far away from you as a plastic surgeon. That's going to go viral.
But like anyone who comes in is not going to buy a facelift from you. So it's completely going to ruin the algorithm targeting. So what I find is really helpful is if you run this skill.
it will go ahead and just based on your interview, it'll build out the five levels, right? So that's step one. Then it'll start pitching you on topic buckets that are narrow, broad, and the chaos agent.
So for example, you can see right here, the first one it pitched me for narrow was the filler reckoning. Make videos showing what years of injectables actually did to your face. And so this is kind of like in this orange bucket where it's speaking directly to someone who's used filler a lot.
So a bunch of topics in there, you know, you can start having a conversation with this to be like, Well, what could I specifically say? I'd be like, we'll talk about which fillers to use, why filler's not good, why after you take filler out, your face drags, like whatever it would be, right?
This is a topic bucket. It's pitching me five of these different buckets for narrow. Then it pitches me four buckets for broad.
So this one is like how faces actually age. This would be this light blue. So it's talking about like, just talk about aging in faces.
It doesn't have to be facelift. It doesn't have to be about filler. It's just broad.
Then it pitches me, which I think this is like the sickest part. It pitches me these chaos agent ideas. So it pitched me this first idea is fire.
It's the $200 ,000 face. Walk through an anonymized composite of what Elizabeth's 15 years of injectables and devices actually cost item by item and the benefit it brought her. Like that's fucking fire.
It can do that automatically. So it pitches you some ideas, right? And the goal is you just want to pick one narrow or too narrow, one broad, one chaos agent to fill out like a set of seven videos.
And this is like your first set of seven, let's call it. And so. what we it's like which ones do you want of this list so i'm like cool i'll take what you recommended so it sequences out what the next seven days of content could look like and then it layers those buckets onto the map so i can see like am i properly doing one broad one narrow so here you can like swap in different ideas like if you know how to vet a surgeon cool i'm gonna click that one instead it'll show you like it'll just swap them in so this is almost like a content calendar for you for one week which is kind of sick so before i keep going because i've been just Does this make sense?
This is nuclear. It's crazy. It's crazy.
So, so this, so up to this point, this is a lot of, this is like the strategy and the positioning, but to be honest, this is the whole game. When you actually have expertise, it's just finding like, what is your lane? What topic buckets do you make?
What your series could be? So, so far we haven't even gotten into the actual video part yet. This is just like strategy, but people pay like 10 grand to a strategist for like weeks of work.
And we just did this in like 30 minutes. So, so, so there's that so far. So let's keep going.
So now once you've picked the topic buckets, What it does is it goes out and it scans, in this case, the top 400 videos from those competitors. Now we're going granular, like what actual videos have they made and which ones fit into our buckets.
So in this case, it went through, it scanned the top 130, 73 of them qualify and 57 of them are excluded because they talk about like boob jobs, which is not a fit for us or like lifestyle stuff or like the guys in the Ferrari driving up the coast. Like we don't want any of that. That's not going to help us.
So now it's got like 73 actually qualified videos. And if you go to the list, let me go to the topic scanner. It has first, these are the buckets of the different videos that it pulled from the different people.
It has like the format comparison as well. And then you can see like for every one of these people, where did it fit on the bullseye, right? So this is another just helpful way of being like, who's making broad, who's making narrow.
You can see almost none of them have super broad videos because they either know what they're doing or they figured this out over time. And then what it does is it takes the top 50 videos for you right here. And it says, should you make this?
Yes or no? Or like, is this viable for you with a check or an X? You can open this video.
But if you look at the topic buckets, it'll like mark with a star, the ones that map to the buckets that we made. So like we said, the filler reckoning, we should make this bucket. So this video, why I prefer hyaluronic acid based fillers over sculpture for facial rejuvenation.
This is like a bullseye fit for that topic. So what you could do is you could just open this video. watch it and just ask yourself as a plastic surgeon like do i have anything other anything else to say that's like non -obvious about this particular thing now all of a sudden you don't have to find topics this will just point you to where to make the videos and because these like i find it helpful to align on the buckets first so you can see like see all these buck like rhinoplasty we didn't really green light a rhinoplasty because that's a nose job that's that's not going to fit for us so any of those you would just skip but all the ones with the stars these map to the exact buckets that we approved So now I'm like, yo, I hand this to my plastic surgeon.
I'm like, look at the 50 videos. Anyone with a star, tell me if you have a unique take on it or not. If yes, mark it.
If no, don't. Now he's got a short list of videos that he can actually make straight off the rip. And so far, like he has not touched Sandcastle.
He hasn't gone into Sandcastle. He hasn't done anything but like press go on this Claude workflow. And just answer.
Which is crazy. Yeah. And just answer.
All he did really was just give his answers to the first six questions and the rest, he was just like, yes, yes, yes, yes. And this is really just backend strategy. And then you're...
backing into getting the topics in conjunction with the video as like a reference point. This is to make sure that when he makes videos, they're on topics that have already worked so that his unique expertise actually resonates with the problems that we know the viewer has. Because he could just guess, right?
Jesus. Yeah, it's sick. It's sick.
This is insane. He could just guess. He could say like, oh, I think they care about like the upper bleph or whatever.
I'm like out of my depth on plastic surgery, but like. I think I care about the upper bluff thing, but they might not care about that. And you only know that if you see videos that have been about that before, or you want to go out on the risk curve and just guess.
So this gets you to the topic part. Now on the format, this is another sick thing I made, which is the format matrix. So this is fire too.
So this is every one of those top 73 videos, we took the format and we mapped it across. On the left side is the storytelling structure. So like case study, Q &A, problem solution.
And on the top is the visual layout, talking head, surgeon plus patient on the screen, marking it on the face. This is mapping the outlier score across the format. Now, why this is sick, I think, is this shows you all the white space.
So you can either say, well, all the best performers are like talking head, problem solution. Let's just smash in that with a different angle. Or you're like mirror drawing is wide open.
No one's in mirror drawing. Let's go here. So that's kind of fire.
So this is like, again, so far, these are all just like. helpful resources for you to be like, where can we play? Kate, I'm fucked up.
I'm fucked up right now. Yeah, this is sick. This is insane.
So those first five things that we went through, those are kind of like the strategy. Now you get into the actual tactics and this is where you have to actually like iterate through. So if I were to take one of those topics and I wanted to make it, I would open a new chat.
I would brain dump my context. We have like a researcher skill that will research for it. But most plastic surgeons are like, I don't want external research.
Like just take my opinion. Then you would actually write the script and write the hook. So what we then did is we built a hook engine where I think it's here.
This is, this is a spoken hook database. So we took all the best performing hooks from those videos. We extracted all the best, like the power phrases from those hooks and all the best frameworks.
And we try to build an engine where if you just feed it a topic, it'll write a hook for you. This needs to be iterated through. Like you need to make it.
If the hook works, if you like it's in your voice, tell it. If not, if not, you have to kind of like iterate the writing. I'll be honest, like the writing part of the hook and script is not automatic the way the first five things were.
I think you've done enough here. Yeah, I mean, so that, so yeah, this is what I call the growth system. This is like a full end to end, like basically up to the format thing.
All the person had to do is answer the questions about themselves and press go. And it basically gave you the recipe for how to win in your niche, which topics work, which formats work, et cetera. Guys, when Kane texted me and gave me free credits.
I didn't value them enough. I did not value them enough. Let's go to, let's go to your channel.
Oh boy. Oh no. Okay.
So, so I did, I did pretty light work on this. I did two, two polls, but I just want to go over them. So the first thing I said is this, I said, I want you to look at the Mark Brazil workspace.
Also it's, I think it's spelled your name incorrectly, but that was, that was a talk to text. Mark with a K, Brazil with a Z. That was Whisperflow, not me.
So I said, I want you to analyze this workspace. There are 260 videos that have already been analyzed. And when I say already been analyzed, what I did is.
all I did is I went here, I made a new workspace. I went to the channels tab. I searched for your channel just right here.
And like, if I wanted to do open residency, I would search open residency like this and it would just come up. So it's all here. Like you only need to do one at a time, but I would just press the plus and boom, it's in here.
So I'm just going to, I didn't want to duplicate. So I just kept one in here. I went to the videos tab.
So it's just you, obviously these are all yours. I sorted by outliers. I think I just did newest.
And then I literally just analyzed all of them. So I pressed the lightning bolt. I pressed 100 because you can only do 100 at a time.
And then I went down and I analyzed the rest. So this gave me all of your videos. Can you go to Outlier?
Can you sort by Outlier? Yeah, yeah, for sure. And let's do...
Wow, look at that OG video from six years ago. So the thing with Outlier score from the old ones is like your channel is probably so small. So like 9K on like...
You know, your average of like 50 views. Maybe that was like the first video I ever posted. So a better way to do it would be you can set an outlier ceiling of like, let's just say 200x.
And then we can do last 12 months if you want. But like, so this Caleb video, is this Caleb? Yeah.
That was the first one that went nuclear. Yeah. So this is the biggest outlier you've had.
So in theory, like without even using Claude, you would just say, okay, let's dissect like this. What about this worked? Okay.
It was about trial reels. Well, can we make another one about trial reels? And it's not as hot now.
So that goes away. So that was big on topic. Like it was topic and timely then.
I should have doubled down on trial reels. Yeah. So now that's gone.
But at least that insight tells you what is the next trial reels that we can double down on with the next person who's on. So it's like always that now should be a question in your guys' prep of like when the guest is coming on, is there anything timely that's related to this person's niche that we can like bring up in the conversation?
That's like a pretty helpful insight on its own. For sure. But also you can just see like.
how did he frame what he said you're not going to be able to like coax that out of him per se but but it's good like you see trial reels is the most insane thing and this goes back to kind of those root hooks that you were talking about before you got george heaton here you have robert really quick when you go up really quick scroll up really quick so like an example is like that got 1 .9 million versus the 984 on caleb is that just because my my my your average had gone up my average i got up because we do we do rolling last three months average because if we did it on the whole channel it would completely warp the like basically if you were super early, the numbers would be huge.
And if you were super late, it wouldn't. So we try to like make it apples to apples. So you've got all the videos here now, like just clicking it and watching them in order, I do think is kind of helpful.
But what's more helpful is what I did here. So I was like, there are 260 clips and I want you to analyze them all. First, you're going to build this dynamic HTML thing.
And I want you to break down the best performing topics, hooks, and messaging. Obviously formats is not going to change. Everything is kind of the same format.
So I was like, we don't care about that. Script writing tactics doesn't matter because you're not writing the script. These are people saying this, but like, are there any themes around the messages?
Like things you say, things they say, like what's, what's, what's, what's hidden that we don't see. And then, so, so we did this, right? So the first poll was the whole channel, which is this.
So you can just see the headline. 258 clips went out, 25 carried the channel. So first it.
rank them all by performance which you could obviously see on the sandcastles app so that's not that this chart alone is not worth seeing but then it starts breaking down like oh shit the topics that did the best were about psychology or power obviously robert greens was super helpful if you found this report to be like slanting robert green too much you could just run it again but say get rid of him and so then you run it again and again and again so you've got like the hit rate on topics is here which is kind of interesting i find the The takeaways on this are crazy.
Let me go to the takeaways. So here's like the hook piece, although you're not really doing that on purpose. So here we go.
The five ingredients of winning hooks for these clips. Number one, a violent number. Anytime you say a number and you say a transformation of a number, like 7 million to 70, it crushes.
So like that's something that you should try to drive in more in the episode. Naming a famous person obviously works really well. Negation rhythm.
This one feels like pretty niche. Second person confrontation. This was Robert Greene, I think.
If you can't control your own mouth, then what can you control? He's like speaking directly to the person. Like that tends to work well.
So you've got some of this. And again, like you can have a conversation with this, which I think Jake should be doing for like an hour, just like talking back and forth. Like, what do you think about this, about this, about this?
Oh, you got us fucked up right now. Things are about to change. So here's winners make the viewer the subject.
Losers make the guest the subject. That's kind of an interesting insight. So you have this.
Then it's like the winning clip shape. And I didn't even ask it to do any of this. It's just Fable being crazy.
You could specifically ask for certain things. So then I was like, as I was watching this, I was like, okay, Robert Greene kind of carried this. So I really wanted to run again, but I wanted to break it out per guest.
So I want to see like, is there something, some commonality per guest? I think it said right here, I asked for the summary and it was like, let me see what. That's interesting.
Guest set the floor, clip set the ceiling. So I did it on. Oh yeah, here we go, here we go.
So I was like, I want you to go a level deeper on both topics and specific messaging. Ignore the hook type. Let's just focus on the actual words.
Specifically, if I were advising this podcast on what to do differently so they could manufacture better clips, what are the exact things I should tell them tactically to do? So they go, number one, not all numbers work. Transformation numbers win, credential numbers die.
So anytime you say like 7 million to 95, 1 .5 million to 150, like you're creating, that works really well. But if you just say like we've done 13, it doesn't work well. So that means when you tee it up, you should be doing this.
Again, it's like winning vocabulary. There's something about that. Winners speak in named laws and absolutes.
Losers speak in hedged theses. So you're like, you know, being declarative about it. And then I was like, just run it per person.
And so I think the other report is here. I don't want to offend anybody on that. No, no.
I mean, I think it's fair to say like, like even mine, like that average outlier score on my episode didn't do that well for the clips, but that doesn't mean that it was a shitty episode. It just means like the clips didn't do well. So it's like, why didn't the clips do well?
And it's, and then you can break this down and you can go by any individual person. So if we go by like George Heaton, it was like, all right, there were nine clips. Here's how they did.
Here's the order. And then it breaks down what didn't work. This, this, the pattern for this guest, the clearest volcano in the data set is that, so like.
Because then you could say, if I'm having someone similar, like if you're having Ross, you had Ross McKay on already. But if you were having him on and you looked at George, you're like, they're kind of similar. What works for George?
Now I can kind of guide the discussion. So this is like, being able to have a conversation with this and then run this on a recurring basis every couple of weeks is like pretty cracked. So yeah, just for everyone, I know we like went deep on this, but for everyone watching, there is no great way other than Sandcastles to get the social media data into Claude.
And without the data, Claude is trash at helping you with content. With the data, it's very helpful. Yeah.
And I think it goes without saying, this is just data and questions and direction. You obviously have to put the human layer on top of this, for sure. So I know to say, I don't care about hooks.
I just want to know about the power words, the messaging, for example. I can say that because I know. But if you've now watched this episode, you can kind of repeat the words I'm saying here on your own.
And if you set up Sandcastles, it'll give you a lot of non -obvious insights. Guys, link below to get Sandcastles. This will put your content on crack.
We have not used it. Enough. At all.
Enough. I'm telling you, I'm out here. I'm out here in the deep, deep trenches, just giving people magic tools.
I appreciate you. I use Whisperflow for hours every single day. I think way faster than I type.
I speak about 220 words a minute and type only 45. Whisperflow closes that gap. It's a voice -to -text tool that works anywhere on your computer or phone.
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For the music, if you can just give me some other options. And that first photo, some more options as well. Please give me three options for each and make sure you send it to me by end of the day Friday.
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If you guys want to get one month free of WhisperFlow Pro, click the link below and use code OPENRESIDENCY. All right, guys. So if you guys didn't know, Kane was on last year.
We'll pop it up. We'll put it down in the description. But we are going to basically put a scoreboard together with all the calls that you made a year ago.
So I think first. Nice. Attention is the new oil.
You said that. I think that's fair. I think anybody who's listened to the spot agrees on that.
Yeah. You called the media game a dumb game to start and you would lose to Mr. Beast, Netflix, and the NFL.
Do you still stand by that? I think it's a dumb game to start today still. I think the category fandom, so like mainstream fame, but in a category.
can still be viable in new categories. Like for example, if you wanted to become the robotics guy or the robotics girl, great time to do it because robotics is still super early. There's really nothing to cover.
So if you want to like build the groundswell now, when all the AI goes into humanoids and like that's going to be the next wave, that still could be something that's viable. Like two years from now, you could print. Basically back to the content pyramid.
It's untapped. Exactly. It has to be untapped.
So I would not enter a crowded category designed for, and try to play the brand deal game today. I wouldn't do it. Yeah.
I mean, me and Jake were talking, I think it was yesterday where it's like, I don't even know now if I would start a podcast. Yeah. I'm not saying me.
I'm not saying me. You'd have to have an existing personal brand. You'd have to have an existing mode or leverage right now because it's already getting cloudy to scale.
Yeah. It's tough. It's super, super saturated and you can't be view maxing.
I think view maxing. Let's just make that very, very clear. View maxing is fucking done.
Yeah, views are cooked. I think most people who are starting from, like what we're not saying is you shouldn't start a channel from scratch. You can start a channel from scratch based around you if you want, but like don't go for views and don't expect brand deals, right?
You need to monetize a different way. You either do it for funsies or you have stuff in the backend and you're building a content strategy designed to funnel people to that. AI content is basically indistinguishable in two years on short form, five on long form.
So basically one year on short form, four years on long form. Ahead of that timeline or behind? What do you think?
So some of the latest like Seed Dance and Seed Dream models are insane. Like Rourke is a homie of our management agency. He's coming on.
I can't wait. He makes crazy stuff, like very realistic looking. So I think it's accurate in that it's getting better.
And like in a year, it's going to be indistinguishable. But also, as we mentioned before, the platforms are kind of cracking down on it. in a way that I wasn't expecting.
I expected the humans to like revolt against it, but I wasn't expecting the platforms to like bend the knee. They're kind of bending the knee. So in two years, will that be indistinguishable and cause content to go to zero?
No. If I said that before, I'm recanting that, but will it be indistinguishable in one year? Yes.
What did I say about long form? Five years? So yeah, four years.
I mean, four years in eternity. So I have no idea. I think we're still on track for that, but it's tough to tell.
I don't know if it's... a forever thing or a barbell thing where it's going to go up and then it's going to go down where the non -AI content, like for me, like I'm not scared about that at all. I think people are not going to trust the AI content.
And for me, it's just all about building brand and trust. I think that this show has its place for the foreseeable future. And then I think even past that, if you build brand and trust, like we could license out my IP and the Open Residency IP for an AI version of this podcast.
Yeah, of course. So there will always be... a desire for human -made stuff always.
The question is, will that be niche or will that be mainstream? Etsy, there's a bunch of Etsy stores where people make handmade clothes. Those are small stores relative to H &M.
So it's like, will the human -made stuff be niche and novel, like a little novelty thing, or will it still stay mainstream? Who knows? The thing is, I think what we've been proving or saying over this whole show is you can be niche and novel and still print, which is kind of like the game I recommend most people play.
It's like, You have authentic expertise. You go for an audience just based around that.
You have an offer that's aligned to that. You don't have to get more than 25 ,000 views a video. You don't need a huge following and you just grow a mid seven figure business and you can scale that accordingly.
That's the playbook. With high margins. Let's make that very, very clear.
Yeah, yeah. Different game. You said free distribution basically closes around 2028.
Is that still your number? It's tough to know how it's going to play out. I made a video breaking down like the four scenarios that I think platforms will take.
With respect to AI, tough to know. I think I'm finding things are evolving slower than I thought. I think the trickle -down adoption of these AI tools is a lot slower than I thought.
Sam Altman was just on Senra and he said something. I was listening to the first part. He said something very interesting, which I think is a brilliant insight.
He was like, I have this insane machine that can do everything for me. But for the last 30 years, I've gotten used to like clicking the buttons on my keyboard and like using a computer this way. And he's like, even though I have this insane machine, I still kind of am finding myself not using it fully.
And it's hilarious. Like he's the guy, like he found it open AI and still he's like, slowly I'm like shifting certain things over. But it wasn't like this switch flipping that he thought it would be because he has these embedded biases towards using the computers the way he was.
he was trained over this time to use. So I'm finding the same thing with myself. And I think a lot of people who are like even less on the edges, they're just not shifting over despite having this like magic wand.
They're just like, it's like, yo, here's a magic wand. They're just like, yeah, I'm good. And they just like play with whatever they're playing with.
So yeah, I think it's going to be slower. I don't really like to speak in absolutes. So I don't think it's like distribution goes to zero, right?
That's like a good clip, but I think over time it's going to get harder. Any ARB in the world closes over time with efficient markets. So it's just going to, it's going to close over time.
Yeah. Like for context, we were in the middle of nowhere in Kentucky and we were in an airport and I was just walking up to random people and asking them if they've used Claude or ChatGBT in the last 24 hours and like 20 % of them had even used it. So obviously the usage in middle of America, maybe international is still super low or obviously in a major market in LA and New York City.
We got a long way to go. You predicted businesses would build content in -house. in 2026 did they build teams are they buying tools just like sandcastles i think i think we're seeing this a lot so we have a lot of people buying sandcastles that are like marketing teams like the heads of marketing are the person who's actually doing the content strategy in startups in medium -sized businesses buying sandcastles and like that's their operating system we're also seeing a lot of these like bigger bigger companies with roles for like head of clipping or like the head of content for substantial salaries exactly multi -six -figure salaries i think 2026 weird it feels so late but like 2026 was the first year where these big brands were like oh shit a lot of the attention and the buying intent is going to creators instead of traditional long form you know tv or like traditional media so now they're all like uh -oh somebody must be coaching these guys up to like who they need how to build the teams i don't know who it is but and probably gary is involved in that a lot because he has a lot of these fortune 500 clients but like we're starting to see that shift now i think it's gonna a transition period over the next two to three years where like
probably by 2030, almost every company will have to have like a content pod where they go inside out. Their entire marketing team is based around this content pod. And then all of the flywheels around everything else comes off that.
Yeah. I didn't go to Cannes. I've never gone.
I'm going to go next year, but I feel like that's the best place to like see kind of the macro sentiment. And from what Samir told me, who's obviously YouTube OG and has been in the space for, I don't even know, like a decade. He said that it was like, it was different this time around.
People are starting to put like real dollars towards it and see the value of creators. Yeah. I think the hard part before was that you couldn't measure direct ROI to a single creator very well because the code redemptions and stuff, it's not clean.
Most brands stay away from stuff that's not clean until it's inevitable and they have to adopt. So because of that, I think they're all starting, they're like, yo, it's inevitable. We have to shift now.
Your two worlds, AI and content merging, you said you'd own the intersection a year ago. Are you owning it? I'm owning it.
I don't own it in terms of like nobody else is allowed, but I'm definitely becoming, I would say I'm probably top 10 in the world for organic content strategy. And I'm probably, I don't know, top 100 in the world at like AI storytelling. And so at that intersection, I'm getting there.
I think having Sandcastles as the operating system, that's like, this is the most data -driven way to do content. And it's directly connected with Claude and ChatGBT. We mostly use Claude for it.
And I'm just like hammering what I'm doing with that. That is the thing that's like the beachhead for owning this space. So nobody else is really making content on how to use AI workflows for content creation that other than like, yeah, I scraped with Appify and like I have a little script thing.
It's like that's nowhere near as sophisticated as what I'm kind of covering now. So I'm still, I think 2027, 28, I'll be continuing to double down on this lane and we'll probably be there, but it's not winner take all. I don't know anybody.
Obviously you're an entrepreneur and operator with Sandcastles and in your past life, obviously you're a content creator as well. I don't know any other content creators. I think Mark Manson, he was a guest.
He's building something as well too. Kind of this like AI that taps into his brain. I don't know many content creators that also had this kind of software in conjunction with what they're doing.
I feel like that's unique to you. It was very difficult because they're completely different games. That's the only way I was able to do this is to have a partner who is a savage on the product side and he built everything.
So it's like me and him. I drive unlimited customers and he builds. And the beauty is like the in -between is like my product brain for what would work for content is like the overlap.
So that's, but like, I couldn't do it. The reason people don't do both is because it's so hard to have both the content muscle and the product muscle. These are like completely different worlds.
So if you're at the intersection, it can be very powerful.
Guys, we're going to show you a little personal side of Kane now. He's not a robot. You've got a kid coming in six weeks, four weeks.
Four weeks. Yeah. It's going to be out by the time this comes out.
Yeah. How does the whole entire kind of machine and business survive that you're going to probably take a little bit of a step back? That's the million dollar question.
This is the Achilles heel of not having a ton of employees or really anyone on the team is that it's kind of all on me. So yeah, it'll be a fun, fun challenge. Don't you think you should be proactive in nature and just sign a couple employees?
I've tried. We've hired a bunch of people over the years, but... my attention to detail is so high and my like demand for perfection is so high that I'm either bad at it's probably I'm bad at hiring or training it's always on me right it's like my fault but like the people we've hired that I've tried to train up are not replacements at the quality I need they're augments but like I still have to fix and adapt on top of what they do so it's just an evolution like I obviously have holes in my game I'm not like bulletproof from a 360 entrepreneur perspective like I'm dialed on the content but like maybe on the hiring is something I need to close the gap on so I'm aware of that but the beauty is like environmental changes force you to adapt so once my kid is born I'll have to I'll just have less less cycles I'll just have less hours so like I I don't have much to cut from right now like I'm very efficient and I'm working 12 -15 hour days so we'll see how that goes
Guys, we're going to pop up the episode with Roman. It's a masterclass on hiring. The guy's an absolute micromanaging savage.
One of my favorite episodes. You should watch that. It comes out tomorrow.
Insane. Yeah. And also if you're watching this and you want to be my number two, you want to be my head of content, that would be, you can reach out.
They don't, they don't exist, bro. Yeah. There's like, we talked about Briar, Caleb, Sam, Sam on Dan Martell's team.
It's just like, bro, there's. Yeah. They don't exist.
They don't exist. There's literally like. They're doing it.
Dan Martell having Sam is so huge because Sam said, he's like, I'm not going anywhere. He's like, this guy could be, he could be like one of his, he could be his own personal brand, right? I mean, he is right now.
Yeah. That must be the way you have to do it. These like savages that are on your team, you also have to let them run on their own too.
Yeah, 100%. Let's get a prediction on the record that I can hold you for eventual part three post baby. By the end of 2027 in the content game, what is one thing that's going to change?
So, Well, selfishly, I will have sandcastles to the point where someone who's a business owner can come in with zero understanding of content, answer a few questions, connect all their shit, and then print winning content. I will have that by the end of 2027.
Probably not the AI. I just don't really like AI avatars. I don't think most people do either.
So like those probably still have to record themselves in the phone, but like everything else will be solved for them by 2027. So full workflow machine, social media, done. Now, let me come up with something that's pretty radical that's not related to my stuff.
Take your time.
I think by the end of 27, there will be either a new platform or a new medium for making content that emerges that is not the short -form scroll or the long -form YouTube. I don't know what it is. I don't think it's going to be glasses, like consuming on the glasses.
It's very fatiguing, to be honest. I just think people are ready for something else. And in the past, we've seen like every three to four years, something emerges that's like paradigm shifting.
The last one we had, I think, was like TikTok doing the short form feed and then Reels copied that in 2021 or two. So we're kind of due for like something new. Now, it's really hard to build network effects around these new things, especially now that the platforms, like Meta got caught on Reels.
They weren't ready. They're not going to get caught again. We'll see how much sticking power it actually has, but I think there's going to be something else.
I don't know what it is, but people's brains are just getting cooked. It's the mushy era. People's brains are absolute mush.
I think that most of the other predictions are incremental for now. I think a lot more people are going to go narrow. A lot more people are going to give up views.
They're going to build these little pockets, these little kingdoms that nobody knows about. If you don't know them, you don't know them. And if you know them, you love them.
Like that kind of thing. Way more of those. Way more people with expertise are going to make content.
Like way more doctors, way more lawyers. They're just going to realize that like the old way of doing business is very tough, very costly. To pay to acquire leads is very costly.
So I think we're going to see a lot more. I'm like trying to train that army. That's like who I work with on the academy side is like business owners that want to drive leads and sales with content.
So I think we're going to see a lot more of those. I agree on the latter. And I think it's brain rot.
But I think live shopping, if it's not out yet, spoiler alert, Gary Vaynerchuk is coming on. He's super, super bullish on live shopping, just live in general. He's been hammering live shopping for a while.
For a long time. I do think it's semi brain rot, but I think it's from a economics perspective on creator and brand. I think it's brilliant.
It's like the CAC arbitrage. One other thing to add is I made a video about this where I was predicting this a while ago. I think we're going to see a lot of like B2B live stream stuff.
So you could say Hormozy's kind of doing that, but not really. Like he's mostly doing like mindset and like sharing his frameworks just live. But I think we're going to see like live build content.
So like once the agent loops get fast enough where you can actually watch them on the screen, do stuff and it's not boring, you're going to see like the Kai Sinat equivalent of like, let's say it's me. I wire in for eight hours and like you watch me live build product or live build stuff. In like a dynamic way.
I don't think anyone's figured that out yet. That'll be pretty dope. Interesting hot take.
I like that and I agree with that. Let's hit quick strike. A shit ton of random questions.
Let's get it. Thumbnail or title for YouTube? Which matters more?
That's tough. I want to say thumbnail because there's more surface area, more pixels. People are inherently visual.
The thumbnail alone could drive a click. I don't know if you just saw a sea of titles with no thumbnail. I don't think that would be as visceral.
So I'm going to say thumbnail, but I do think they go together.
Outside of Sandcastle's best AI tool, you'd pay 10 times more for? Claude for sure. TikTok reels or shorts in 2026?
Oh, reels for sure. I mean, by a mile. Instagram is so much more valuable than TikTok and YouTube shorts.
First thing you cut when a video runs too long on shorts? First thing I'll do is go to the middle and usually there's fluff and unnecessary context that doesn't need to be there. So I'll cut it.
Speed to value is like a thing I tell the people in SFA a lot is like, you want to signal values coming as soon as possible and then get to the value as soon as you can. If the video has to be 45 seconds, make it 45 seconds. It doesn't need to be a minute and a half if it can be done in 45 seconds.
So like ruthlessly cut. Usually the middle, there's extra fluff.
Hook off the dome or from the data? So like when I was writing, rap songs the way I would do it is I would play a beat and I would just like let it play and then whatever came to mind I would write that down as like the first line and then I would say it over and over and I would tweak it and tweak it tweak it tweak it and if I didn't like where I would start over I kind of do hooks similar to that so like I think about the topic and I just write down what came to mind then I look at the data so I kind of like I don't go data idea I go or like data hook I go written hook data tweak it's kind of how I do it so if you just go on the data and you just copy everything it becomes very cloney, very fast.
And you just, you miss the, like, I try to like, what are the power words or phrases that pop in my head about this topic? And I'm trying to get those down straight from my head, not from the data. And then I use the data to validate.
A content metric that's totally overrated. Oh, most of them, to be honest. I think the only things that matter really are you either track on views, followers gained or conversions.
That's the only thing that matters. So like people will look at the hook rate, and the skip rate and like all this minutiae.
But like if the video flopped, the hook rate is going to be low. If the video did well, the hook rate will be high. And people could say like, well, the hook rate was low, but the rest was good.
So that means it was a hook problem. Okay, well, now what? It's like, cool.
Well, if you were working in order, you'd be like, is the topic validated? Do I have a non -obvious angle? Is the hook good?
Like that's the order you're going to go every time. So I kind of, I don't. overanalyze like oh at minute at second 35 there's a slight blip up of like 10 viewers because the data is usually immaterial anyway there's like a slight blip up we should say that word again all of that is like icing not cake the cake is either are the views higher lower if you care about the traffic what are the followers gained higher lower are the conversions through many chat higher lower and then you just base it off that long form or short form keep only one oh it's brutal it's brutal Short form is the cash cow right now, but long form he knows.
Yeah, if I wasn't building sandcastles for social media, I would just go all in on long form. But they both have their place, right? The modern content stack is short form, long form email.
Each one pipes into email separately. You can cross across short and long, but it's not the best to cross. So you kind of want both.
You have like super broad, eager to learn more viewers on short, way more email signups because you can't drive as much value in the actual content. So you can get way more people to email. Long form obviously though is the GOAT.
So I think if I had to pick one and I had the budget to keep my team, I would do long form. But if I had to go on my own, I would do short form. You can't do long form on your own.
It's too hard. Ship at 80 % or polish to 100 %? Tough.
I'm a big, I'm pretty like zag where everyone zigs on the like premium. I kind of believe that, like if you believe in asymmetric returns where like one video is, responsible for 99 of the traffic then what you want to do is polish the one up to 100 quality if you think your skills can read can like clearly get the quality yeah the problem is most people will be like i want to spend 100 but their skills aren't good enough so that 100 wasted time but i'm like yo if i spend another three hours i think i can engineer a banger and the banger has asymmetric returns on everything else so I like my, my brain for what people are listening wants to say ship at 80%, but like my gut is like, yo, just spend the whole day in the lab like that.
So yeah. Kane will be the only person that ever comes on this podcast that says, and he's doing fairly well. So that's, it's a good thing to think through.
I think when you're, when you're starting out, you want to go at 80 % to get the reps under your belt. If you're only doing this one thing and you're trying to hit, hit bombs, if you're trying to hit home runs, you got to send it almost all the way up. Maybe the extra like.
Instead of 20 minutes spent on the video, maybe you spend four hours, but you don't spend 40 hours. So there's a line, right? You said you're 100 % confident that you could take any person with real expertise and build them a content engine that prints a million dollars in profit in 12 months.
Yeah. Well, to be fair, a million dollars in profit is a lot based on the offer and the margin profile. So give me what the offer is and then tell me if the person has the expertise and I'll tell you if I can do it.
Is this an actual offer or a flex? Would you ever do this? I could easily do it.
I just don't have a lot of time. I mean, I'm doing it with myself many, many times over. I would definitely, so like, for example, we have a guy in SFA, shout out Dr.
Phan. He's, he's a plastic surgeon in LA. And this is why, like I keep saying the plastic surgeon, cause I was thinking, I was like, if I was working one -on -one with Dr.
Phan and like, all I did was like be his creative director, how would I just, how would I do this? How would I make him a million in one year from zero? And I start, and I will show this on the, I have a bunch of Sandcastle's flows or like Claude flows that I can share my screen of like, what is the positioning that I did for him?
or what I would do for him. And if he has a plastic surgery business where each surgery, let's say it's like a facelift and he's charging 60 grand, 70 grand, 100 grand. And let's say, what do you think the margins are on that?
Like he keeps 40. I was just going to say, yeah, probably to him, probably 30 or 40. Let's say 50 for clean numbers.
So all he has to do is sell 20 incremental clients over a year to make a million net. That's so easy. Like I would literally just, I'll tell you exactly what I would do.
First, I would look at the plastic surgery space and I'd be like, where is it open? Then I would look at his expertise and be like, is there a combo of where it's open and where he kind of like what his unique counter position would be like, like we go back to Brian's thing. Then I'd be like, okay, cool.
What topic buckets work in plastic surgery? Okay, cool. I'm going to run the three, two, one content strategy.
We didn't even talk about this, which this is like my best content strategy for business owners. You make three buckets of content, two videos each per week. One is broad, two are narrow.
So two videos broad, four videos narrow. One chaos agent, you can do anything. And I would just run this.
I would scan the entire niche, look at all the plastic surgeons in his area, let's say facelifts. And I'd be like, okay, this bucket is what we do broad. These we're doing narrow.
This, I have a random bet that I think could work. Like, let's say he has like a glass door on his office and I'm like, cool, we're gonna put up like Sidney Sweeney's face and you're gonna draw over it, like how you do a facelift for her or something. Like, let's just say that's a random bet.
And I would just run that. I would have a super targeted lead magnet for every video. It would probably just be like something about facelifts to drive to a consult.
And then, I mean, how many consults does he need to do to book 20? It's like, that'd be so easy. You could probably do it in three months.
All it is, is you need to go to his office physically probably and shoot it for him to de -risk all of the manual work. But yeah, like pretty straightforward. If you have a high ticket offer with high margin, I could easily do that for you.
It's harder when it's like a non -differentiated offer. lower ticket, lower margin. You don't have any expertise.
There is no clear counter position. You can't articulate yourself on camera. Like I could probably get you there, but it would be, I'd be dragging you uphill, which I, you know, don't have time for.
I'm sold. Um, what's the last thing you bought from a brand?
This was my, this was my own, just curious. I buy a lot of rep, rep and kith. I mostly wear like black, black stuff.
I bought a lot from them. What have I bought from a brand? Well, a lot of babies.
A lot of baby shit. Shout out Uppa Baby. I was just going to say, what's the premium baby brand?
Uppa Baby. We're Uppa Baby'd out. We have the stroller.
We have the bassinet. I just installed the car seat. We have like all the organic natural cotton stuff.
Like we got pastel shit all over my house. Like just binkies and bottles and like all of it. We bought the nanit, the camera thing that goes over the crib so you watch it.
Shout out Nestig. We got the crib from Nestig. Yeah.
Kane's going to be doing baby deals now, baby brand deals. I mean, yeah, if the money's there. All right, we're going to do something different.
You're the first person that we had on a second time. So we're going to do something a little bit different at the end. We kind of briefly touched on it.
But again, I look at you as one of like the leaders in this kind of hybrid marketer slash operator slash content guy. I'd love for you to just pick two, three, four max creators and just tell us why you respect each one. So for people out there listening, like maybe this is the creator and I would.
study them or follow them for x yeah yeah so roberto's obviously the homie number one best visuals best like cinematic storytelling by far like he and i at the same management company so like we're we're like brothers in this he's also a product builder he like built apps and design shit but like storytelling deep with the tools cinematic video That triangle, insane.
And speed too. Yeah, and he's super fast. So he's the goat for tech content.
Number one, Breyer's obviously the boy. I've been saying that many times on this episode. Very, very underrated.
He kind of makes like pretty much like raw Yap style, but the way he articulates in a Yap format while still accruing trust, I think is a rare intersection. Do you know what's really interesting? As I was talking to him, you know.
when working together i was like oh do you guys do thumbnails or do we need to do the thumbnails because i was like because we were talking i was like because i'm looking at your profile and i was like bro this looks like a fucking trailer park your profile and he said something that i thought was pretty smart he's like you know i've thought about that about kind of touching it up more he's like but i left it as is because that's kind of my print my brand identity yeah i was like wow very self -aware yeah very very self -aware so he's he's though obviously oran oran's the goat for I mean, Oren's becoming like almost like an anthropologist at this point.
Like he's commenting on like societal things, but he does it in a dope way. It's funny. It's like skit mixed with like actual take.
He's coming on again too. It's sick. I love Oren so much.
He is the best guy. Like I need a new book bag. So I'm like, I text Oren.
Yeah. I'm like, yo, what book bag? And he just sends me like the most detailed breakdown of all the fucking book bags.
He has the most deep. like deep bags in every area i've ever seen like he just knows everything about everything yeah he's sick dude he's also starting to do content soon i joked him i was at a dinner with him and i was like yeah when are you gonna bring the kid out because the kid's like he's young swag yeah and he's gonna start doing content with this kid that's gonna be good this kid wants to do a youtube bro that's gonna be good that's gonna be sick yeah so or and i love garcia i also love he's building a brand now very he's i love how so garcia i think deep down always wanted to do the like super cinematic build like a brand in like performance and fitness and like health that was always his mo he like went roundabout where he was doing like the marketing newsletter and then he started doing the cinematic shorts for those brands and now he's building his own brand which is like it makes so much sense like i feel like from a world building perspective he's somebody who's actually has the deep social media content bag and executing the world building for their own brand very worth very worth following amazing dude i had amazing time uh for everybody out there make sure you follow the new channel
Callaway Marketing. I know we probably have a more advanced audience listening. I fucking love this channel.
Every single post, he's speed ramping it fast. What is it? Zero to 75 ,000 followers in how long?
Yeah. I think it's at like 80 now, four months in. Yeah.
And to be fair, I'm like not ramping the follower growth anymore. Like I'm going to get it to a hundred K quickly. And then I'm just going to focus on niching down to like serve.
Basically it's like, if you're a business owner with between a three and an eight out of 10, in terms of like content understanding, I want to be the best. person to follow. And then ideally you come down the funnel if you want to grow your business leads and sales via content.
Amazing. And make sure you guys check out Sandcastle's down below and follow him on YouTube. And I'm sure we'll do a part three eventually.
Good luck with the baby. Good luck with the baby, bro. Thank you.
See you out there. When you see this, I'll have it already. Thank you guys so much for watching.
If you got value out of this episode, every single principle framework tactic is in one free playbook linked at the top of the description. Grab it, hit subscribe, and we'll see you in the next one.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
The cold open puts a dollar figure on screen in red before anyone speaks, then immediately removes the thing most people assume it requires: you do not need more than 25,000 views a video, and you do not need a huge following. What follows is two hours on what you do need instead, ending with a live screen-share that builds a full content strategy for a plastic surgeon who has never posted anything.
Frameworks
Named ideas worth stealing.
04:05model
The Format Pyramid
01 Facts: lists and rankings
02 Explanation: breakdowns, tutorials, how-tos
03 Application: case studies, scenarios, hypotheticals
04 Stories: your own experiences, one of one
Four content tiers ordered from easiest to make and widest reach at the bottom, to hardest and most defensible at the top. As a niche saturates, a red line rises from the base and the formats beneath it stop working. Facts go first, explanation goes next, and only application and stories survive.
Steal forauditing why a content channel's reach has quietly collapsed
10:29list
The 4 Ways To Stay Competitive
Better ideas
More advanced
Better proof
Better storytelling
The four remaining levers once the easy formats are commoditized. Ideas means validated topic plus contrarian angle. More advanced means pitching above beginner level to filter for buyers. Proof means demonstrable results. Storytelling means converting facts into emotion.
Steal forany positioning doc for a crowded category
14:58acronym
DCT
D: Data decides the topic
C: Creativity drives the angle
T: Transposition imports formats from outside the niche
A division of labor between the data and the human. Let performance data pick what to talk about, let your own thinking supply the take, and when formats in your niche get stale, lift one from an unrelated category.
Steal fordeciding what to make next without copying anyone
39:53model
The Trust Ladder
Warm endorsement from someone already trusted
Proof of result with someone just like the buyer
Demonstration of ability through non-obvious insight
An ordering of what actually makes a stranger willing to transact. Each rung down is harder to establish. Without proof, repeated light-bulb moments can accumulate to roughly the same trust, which is also why repeating someone else's point earns nothing.
Steal forany offer being sold before case studies exist
31:32concept
Rented versus Owned distribution
Feed platforms lend you reach in exchange for monetizing your content, and can reduce your audience to zero without warning. Owned channels such as an email list or a private community survive the provider. The strategic job is ramping people from rented to owned as fast as possible while the rented reach is still cheap.
Steal forjustifying list-building spend against follower-count goals
35:21model
Aligned lead magnet funnel
Aggravate a specific pain point in the video
Offer the solution in exchange for an email
Low-ticket product on the same pain
High-ticket program on the same pain
Every video names one problem, and the lead magnet answers that exact problem rather than a broadly related one. The low-ticket offer, the landing page, and the high-ticket program all stay on the same problem, because the problem does not change while the buyer moves down the funnel.
Steal forrebuilding a funnel where one generic lead magnet serves every video
1:17:46model
The Audience Bullseye
Center: the exact ICP
Ring 2: adjacent and passively interested
Ring 3: broader category interest
Ring 4: broad topical interest
Outer: general category, too broad to target
Five concentric rings describing how far a piece of content reaches from the ideal buyer. The outermost ring produces views that corrupt algorithmic targeting without producing customers, so it stays off the plan entirely.
Steal fordeciding how broad a given video is allowed to go
1:18:58model
The 3-2-1 Content Strategy
3 topic buckets
2 videos per bucket per week
1 chaos agent video
One bucket broad, two buckets narrow
A seven-video weekly plan that balances reach and conversion. Two broad videos bring new people in, four narrow videos speak to the buyer, and one speculative swing tests something unproven. Described as the best content strategy for business owners.
Steal forturning a positioning document into an actual posting calendar
1:16:35model
The Positioning Wheel
Topic selection
Substance depth
Unique stories
Visual format
Proof
Offer
Audience
Seven slices of possible differentiation, with every competitor in the niche mapped onto each slice so the unclaimed space is visible. A slice that is contested means you cannot separate there. A slice nobody occupies is white space, with the caveat that unoccupied also means unproven.
Steal fora competitive positioning exercise without hiring a consultant
1:25:10model
The Format Matrix
Rows: storytelling structure such as case study, Q&A, problem-solution
Columns: visual layout such as talking head, two-person, drawing on the face
Cells: average outlier score
A grid crossing narrative structure against visual presentation, scored by how well each combination performs in the niche. Crowded cells tell you where to compete on angle alone. Empty cells show formats nobody has tried.
Steal forpicking a shooting format instead of defaulting to talking head
52:13concept
Outlier score
A video's views divided by its channel's rolling three-month average before it posted. The division normalizes for channel size, so a small account's breakout and a large account's steady performer can be ranked against each other. The argument is that a small creator's outlier deserves more study, because the idea carried it rather than the follower count.
Deliberately accumulating proof across every business model your buyers might run, so whichever one a prospect operates, you have already done their exact thing. The stated personal version is media, coaching, and software, with two separate media plays underneath.
Steal forplanning which proof point to go get next
30:13list
The 3 Core Elements Of Business
Distribution: can I get attention
Funnel: can I move that attention somewhere
Product: will they buy the thing
Business reduced to three atomic parts. Funnels are treated as nearly trivial, which leaves distribution and product as the only real moats, both of which are eroding as AI lowers the cost of making things and making content.
Steal forstress-testing where a business is actually weak
CTA Breakdown
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
2:03:52link
“If you got value out of this episode, every single principle framework tactic is in one free playbook linked at the top of the description. Grab it, hit subscribe, and we'll see you in the next one.”
The free playbook is pitched three times: once in the trailer, once at the midpoint right after the four ways are finished, and once at the close. Each mention is tied to the specific material just covered rather than offered generically, which is exactly the lead-magnet alignment principle the guest teaches mid-episode.
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Two hours with Ronnie Fieg on 15 years of Kith: no paid ads, no wholesale, no outside money, and $1,300-a-foot stores that his CFO still cannot explain.
A 2 hour 45 minute sit-down on how virality gets engineered: ideas as the ceiling, 100 ideas for every video made, 10 titles and 3 thumbnails minimum, and a 45-second intro formula.
A communication coach swaps two heavily-produced uploads a month for a daily cadence sorted into five formats, and triples his content income in three months.
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