The Most Valuable Personal Brand Training You'll Ever Watch
A one-hour live workshop that treats a personal brand as a small media company: who to attract, what to say, who to hire, and how attention turns into revenue.
Posted
2 days ago
Duration
Format
Talking Head
educational
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4.9K
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57 · 43
Big Idea
The argument in one line.
A personal brand that pays is run like a small media company: built on trust with the right buyers rather than views, organized into repeatable systems with owners, and routed through an owned newsletter to an offer.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
A founder, coach or consultant who already sells a service and wants organic content to bring in clients instead of just followers.
Someone posting regularly who feels the weight of keeping up and has no team or system behind the content yet.
A person stuck trying to pick a single niche who suspects their mix of interests is actually the differentiator.
A business owner whose views are growing while leads and revenue from content stay flat.
Anyone deciding what their first content hire should be and how to justify the cost.
SKIP IF…
You want to earn from ad revenue or sponsorships as a full-time creator; this is built around selling your own offer.
You need tactical, platform-specific growth hacks like posting times or algorithm tricks; the training stays at the strategy and system level.
You want a neutral overview; parts of the hour double as a pitch for the presenter's paid program.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
Views measure attention, not whether it is the right attention, and only trust with the right buyers pays. A video with 94,000 views made $60,000 while one with 567,000 made $226. The training maps five stages (Dreamer, Tinkerer, Operator, Media Company CEO, Iconic) and gives one job per stage: find your themes with an ikigai exercise and become the niche instead of choosing one; tighten with a 4-3-2-1 formula of phrases, pillars, formats and one platform; hire a social media manager first; waterfall each pillar piece into 30 assets; and move followers onto a newsletter with contextual lead magnets. A 10-point pass/fail audit tells you which single move comes next.
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Credentials and the agenda: 44,000 pieces of content, a 3 million audience, client examples, and the promise that you will know your level and next move by the end.
04:08 – 07:13
02 · The 5 Stages of Building a Personal Brand
Dreamer, Tinkerer, Operator, Media Company CEO and Iconic. In 2026 you run a personal media company or you are the bottleneck of one.
07:13 – 14:52
03 · Building the Right Audience
Views versus cash with real channel numbers, writing for one specific person, killing a viral animated series that never sold, and why trust pays while attention does not.
14:52 – 17:51
04 · Becoming the Niche Instead of Choosing One
Why 'niche down' paralyzes multidimensional founders, the Tim Ferriss example of following curiosity, and the five-year reflection test for story ideas.
17:51 – 32:41
05 · Finding Your Content Direction With Ikigai
The ikigai exercise, writing a positioning statement, the raw-to-polished spectrum and other brand dials, and engineering one emotion across the brand.
32:41 – 36:35
06 · The 4-3-2-1 Content Strategy
Four signature phrases, three pillars, two formats (how-to videos and whiteboard sessions) and one core platform, plus pen-first versus camera-first.
36:35 – 46:08
07 · How to Package Ideas That Perform
Outlier title research, an idea notes file, mining sales calls and client surveys with AI, the hook-proof-promise-plan opening, the content waterfall and the monthly content ritual.
46:08 – 50:08
08 · Building Your Personal Media Company
One job per level, a lean team of social media manager, video producer and designer, AI replacing strategist roles, and the 21x math on the first hire.
50:08 – 58:14
09 · Turning Attention Into Trust, Leads, and Revenue
Stranger to follower to believer to buyer, the newsletter as the missing middle, contextual lead magnets, a quality filter for content, and doubling down on what drives cash.
58:14 – 1:04:25
10 · The 10-Point Personal Brand Audit
Ten pass/fail checks from bio to newsletter, a score that maps to your level, and the one move to make next, closing on ten lost years of not posting.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
A YouTube video with 94,000 views produced $60,000 in tracked revenue while one with 567,000 views on the same channel produced $226.
Attention does not pay you; trust does, so the metric that matters is profit per piece of content, not views.
Viral animated Instagram videos added up to 130,000 followers a month and almost no buyers, so they were shut down after six months.
You cannot out-hustle a missing system: more output only gets you to the Operator stage, not past it.
Instead of choosing a niche, become the niche by building content around your own mix of interests, quirks and values.
Sharing your genuine interests outside business acts as a gravitational pull that attracts people you would actually want to have coffee with.
A positioning statement should be simple enough to travel through rooms you are not in, and it is fine to evolve it every six months.
The more boring the industry, the better a sharp founder-led positioning works.
Raw versus polished is a dial, not a right answer; you can succeed anywhere on it and move along it over time.
Study outlier videos from creators at your own size rather than the biggest names in your space when packaging ideas.
Your customers' exact words on sales and success calls are the best source of content topics you already own.
One pillar video should yield 12 to 30 downstream assets, and a single 30-second clip can outperform its source video by 100 times.
Recording a voice memo on a walk and having AI format it into newsletters makes the copy sound like you because it is how you speak.
The first content hire should be a social media manager, because getting 40 founder hours back a week is roughly a 21x return.
Email converts far better than social posts because followers are rented and the list is owned.
Offer a lead magnet that matches each post, like a deep work checklist on a deep work post, instead of a generic 'join my newsletter'.
Before publishing, ask whether someone would share it with 20 friends and whether it would be worth $100,000 to the right reader.
Treat fear and criticism as data rather than a verdict; one stranger's comment cost the presenter ten years of not posting.
Takeaway
Build for buyers' trust, then build the system
WHAT TO LEARN
A personal brand earns when it attracts the right few people with content true to you, then runs on a lean system that routes them to a newsletter and an offer.
02The 5 Stages of Building a Personal Brand
Think of your brand as a media company with stages like ideation, production and distribution, each one eventually owned by someone other than you.
Know which of the five stages you are in, because each stage has one job and skipping ahead creates more noise, not more results.
03Building the Right Audience
Track revenue per piece of content with tagged links, since high-view videos and high-revenue videos are often different videos.
Make each piece for one specific person whose problem you know well, rather than for a broad audience chasing views.
04Becoming the Niche Instead of Choosing One
Stop trying to pick a single niche; build around the overlap of your skills, interests and values so nobody can copy the mix.
Mine your past five years for hard lessons, mentors and near-failures, because those stories carry the most pull.
05Finding Your Content Direction With Ikigai
Run the ikigai questions and keep five or six resulting themes as a filter for whether an idea feels true to you.
Write a one-line positioning statement naming who it is for, the outcome, your mechanism and the result, and expect to refine it often.
Choose where you sit on dials like raw versus polished deliberately, and know you can move along them as the brand grows.
06The 4-3-2-1 Content Strategy
Name your recurring frameworks and phrases, because content built around ideas you coined becomes intellectual property only you own.
Limit yourself to three pillars, two repeatable formats and one main platform for about 90 days before expanding.
Pick the platform that suits how you create and where your best buyers spend time, not the one with the most hype.
07How to Package Ideas That Perform
Find ideas in outlier videos from creators your size, then combine those proven titles with topics you genuinely care about.
Pull content topics from the exact words customers use on sales and support calls, or survey your best clients directly.
Get many assets out of each pillar piece so a single recording session fuels a month of posts.
Batch creation into one monthly session, such as recording voice memos on a walk and formatting them with AI into newsletters.
08Building Your Personal Media Company
Make a social media manager your first hire so you stop spending founder hours on posting and scrolling.
Keep the team lean by hiring editors per piece and using AI for strategy, call analysis and lead magnets.
09Turning Attention Into Trust, Leads, and Revenue
Put a newsletter between social content and your offer so trust compounds weekly without making every post a sales pitch.
Give each post a lead magnet that matches its topic instead of a generic invitation to subscribe.
Hold every piece to a high bar: shareable with 20 colleagues and valuable enough that someone would pay for it.
10The 10-Point Personal Brand Audit
Audit your bio, pinned posts, voice, aesthetic, posting rhythm, clarity, funnel, calls to action, consistency and newsletter, and fix the weakest first.
Publish before you feel ready; polish can be bought later, but the years spent not posting cannot.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
Personal media company
Running your personal brand as a set of repeatable stages (ideation, production, post-production, distribution) that each have an owner, rather than as content you personally make and post.
Ikigai
A Japanese framework that looks for the overlap of four questions: what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs and what you can be paid for. Used here to find content themes.
4-3-2-1 formula
A content focus rule: four signature phrases you own, three content pillars, two repeatable formats and one primary platform, held for about 90 days.
Content waterfall
Turning one long pillar piece, usually a video, into many smaller assets such as reels, shorts, carousels, threads and newsletter sections.
Outlier
A video that performs many times above its channel's average views, used as evidence that its topic or title resonates.
Lead magnet
A free resource such as a checklist or guide offered in exchange for an email address, so a follower becomes a subscriber.
UTM
Tags added to a link that let analytics tools attribute a signup or sale to the specific post or video that sent the visitor.
7-11-4 rule
A trust heuristic attributed to Google: roughly seven hours of content across eleven touchpoints in four places before someone buys.
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This is the most valuable personal brand training. This is how my personal brand collects about $15 million a year. What I wanted to do is synthesize basically everything I've learned from building my own personal brand over about the last six years now, but building media companies for around 15 years.
97 % of our business at FounderOS is all from organic content. For most of it, we've run zero ads. In fact, we've only started running ads six months ago.
Those are the first ads I've ever started running in my entire life. So, herb. Bitmaker, my previous companies were all run 100 % off organic.
Over that duration of time, I've published over 44 ,000 pieces of content and I've been on X for some time. Although just like many of you started with nothing. The first media company I built was called Herb.
As you guys know, that company was valued at $90 million. Around my personal brand with the stuff I'm about to show you, we've grown it to over 3 million people now across all platforms. And so I know you guys are...
building on platforms like YouTube, X, LinkedIn, and all that. And my hope is to kind of go from the ground level here, because I know some of you guys are just kind of like getting your sea legs on your content and personal brand journey, all the way through to the vision of where it needs to go. So that also for all of you, I think more than the tactics here, it's an identity that needs to get shifted in many of you to kind of be successful in this.
So obviously, this is like the stuff that we've also showed every Founder Us member, whether it's... folks in our low ticket offerings all the way to high ticket these are the sort of systems that we show you and i wanted to kind of put it in a bit of a crash course here today get those brain juices going over the next few days the hope is here maybe you're able to take a couple of the core learnings that we go through and kind of take some action so it's not that you need to know every single piece of what we're about to go through hopefully there's a core few insights that stand out just like many of you i started with like three followers and i'm pretty sure two of them are my mom i know being cringe I know being terrified with content.
I know making a bunch of garbage. I know making stuff that I'm really uncertain about. I know people stopping me in the street and being like, what the heck was that thing that you put out?
I know all these emotions that you guys are going through. And I feel like to some extent with trainings like this and just in general in Founder Us leads to a bit of a superpower because I've been in your shoes actually versus wondering how you guys are feeling. I've literally been that feeling.
And so as an example, a good friend, Steve Guttena. founder of Prey .com. I remember working with Steve at first.
He's like, dude, I don't want to be famous. I wonder what my team is going to think of me and what investors are going to think of me. And sure enough, a year later, over 120 ,000 folks on LinkedIn and a thriving new business arm off his personal brand.
Same thing with Michelle. And sure enough, we were able to kind of evolve her brand to now over 900 ,000 people and $5 million a year. or Steve Wade, someone in like a platform engineering space who's in Velocity as well.
And then folks like Liam, same deal, helping him scale it to over 950 ,000 on YouTube with the same stuff. So you get the point. We won't belabor that stuff.
The point is, I think by the end of this, my goal is that you're going to know kind of what level you're at with your personal brand right now, and then be really clear on some of the core like tactics and strategies you're going to want to have to get to the next level with where you're looking to go. And we'll kind of get into that.
So what we're going to cover. building the right audience this idea of becoming the niche versus just finding a niche the importance of just one hour a month to go and make your content and that being like the real pillar if you can just schedule that ideally like today basically at least commit to it we're going to be in a hell of a better spot if you don't have that and then we want to obviously build this out so the machine can start running without us i know none of us want to be stuck on social media all day we'd love to be able to enjoy mountains like the ones behind us here and be able to yeah just really enjoy life and not have a whole media operation that all depends on our effort all the time.
And then obviously we need to make money from this, not just to have cash in our pocket, but to be able to build an amazing team, build the right systems and have something that scales. And then lastly, you're going to leave here knowing that level, being able to grade your brand across a couple of core areas. So we can leave here kind of already diagnosing some of the things that we need to do with like the core few tactics systems that we need to put in place to get you to that next level.
Sound good? All right, let's roll. So.
the five levels here y 'all first here we got the dreamer you may resonate here if you're like imagining building a personal brand it sounds exciting it's been something on your list for a bit but you haven't gotten going with it the tinkerer is now you've kind of gotten that morsel of sort of confidence going you're getting that muscle for putting yourself out there but nothing's really taken flight yet on the operator side now you're getting the content going regularly maybe across a couple platforms but now you're starting to feel the weight of like the responsibility to keep up with this posting cadence and you realize when you look around you there's not much infrastructure there to support it not many people there to help you and you realize that while you could go and operate like this for another three months you can feel a pit in your stomach if you imagine going and operating like that for another three years and so that's where then I think where we want to go and at least in the room here have this vision for us is this media company CEO and when I first got going with my personal brand this was the one unfair advantage I had
I think, over most folks. It wasn't that I really knew how to build a personal brand per se, but I had this media company CEO identity and sort of mindset with things that while I may be in the weeds for a second here as the tinkerer, I'm going to have this vision for building this into the media company that I know I built Herb to and I'm going to build.
founder of us and my own personal brand to that as well. And then from there, obviously, as the media side and the leverage start building out, you start to become like more of an iconic brand. This is where I think for many of us, we're hoping to have a brand where our dream clients already know so many of our core mechanisms or language and already are coming to us for the unique things that we do.
Our reputation precedes us in rooms that we enter. So many deals don't even need to get closed. People just want to meet us on a call, but they're not there to be sold anymore.
It's these sort of things that we want to get to. and that's what happens when i think we progress through these five stages which we're going to do here together so first things first here i think it's kind of committing to that you don't have a personal brand anymore in 2026 you really run a personal media company if you're not running that you're just the bottleneck in one none of you guys aspire to be creators as far as i'm aware we all aspire to be ceos and there's a difference there all of us are building media companies with a core offer off the back of it we're not looking to make money from adsense here so there's a whole different mindset needed there and we're going to get into a lot of that today the key thing though is realizing say if you're just getting going with your personal brand that's okay but making sure that we have the vision in mind of there's repeatable things that we're doing we're gradually going to systemize those things and get ourselves out of it
we're going to look at things like ideation or content production post -production start to look at these as stages and systems that can have owners to them so that we can slowly but surely get ourselves out of it and all along the way make sure that we're connecting people effectively to our offers so we can make the cash necessary obviously to build that whole infrastructure this shouldn't feel terrifying it should feel like something that bit by bit you're making yourself slightly uncomfortable but from little little like improvements bit by bit with the right kind of path in place it can actually happen a lot faster than you think part one here is really building the right audience so who do you even want to attract in the first place when i talk to a lot of you guys i think that it's things like we want to go and drive more clients we want the right audience and we want a reputation that serves our goals and i think my hope for all of us is that beyond like growing our businesses driving more clients more cash flow doubling year over year
Well, all these things are really great and I'm very confident that we're all going to do it. Beyond that, I think it's like just having fun. When we're looking at our content strategy and we're going to cover this, how do we make sure this strategy that we're putting together, the content we're putting out there is actually stuff that's exciting for us?
Because what I've learned over the years, and we'll cover this today, is that when I'm most excited, I'm most magnetic. When I'm most at magnetic, people are coming to me because they're like, damn, like I love this guy's energy. He clearly loves what he's doing.
And it's less the content itself sometimes. It's more... the feeling the vibe the resonance that you're putting out there because people are like this guy really cares and so there's sort of that left brain more analytical side of it than that other side that's more okay like what what's really tapping into what you're stoked about and this is where i think even the reflections that we're going to be doing over the next number of days can actually tie into your content because it's one part yeah having this dialed in content strategy that attracts the right kind of people but it's also making sure that you're sharing stuff that you feel passionate about, that you're excited by, so that you can stand out and be able to do something again, not just for the next three months, but for the next 10 years, hopefully, and really enjoy this whole process.
So as we know, as founders, views are just going to measure attention, but they don't measure whether it's the right attention or not. And this is like all the difference. It's easy to get caught up in, oh my God, my views are down 50 % month over month.
And I'll show you here that the views don't equal cash. and so i want to show you guys two videos from my channel same channel same camera same general approach this video here success is hard until you build systems like this 567 000 views it made about 226 dollars so we go and we have trackable links under all these videos attribution's not perfect by any means these aren't like perfect numbers but as much as we can track it we're looking at in this case tracking it via hubspot utms under each video that also the lead magnets that people are getting from the video have UTMs in them as well.
So we can then link the video themselves to cash collected. And so pretty insane. You'd think this video is like insanely successful and probably made us tons of money, but it didn't.
Now on this side of things, this is a video around copy this content strategy. It'll blow up your business. 94 ,000 views made us $60 ,000.
last year same sort of approach generally same filming day same amount of work in a way to make both of these pieces no drastic difference in terms of like film production or the set or anything like that but drastically different results in terms of cash about a sixth of the views there and the other one had 270 times the revenue so pretty insane and so it keeps happening this is another video over 367 000 views how to build a profitable personal brand in just seven steps made us about 26k But then, you know, a video here in the Dolomites, I was feeling inspired one time on a hike, smacked down a tripod, put the camera there and made a video around you'd be richer if you relax and just riffed for 30 minutes.
And that video drove over $55 ,000. So we'll go over some patterns here. But again, seven times the views, but half the revenue.
The difference in this is like, who's actually watching? And who am I, when I'm even making this piece of content, who am I making it for? Something I've learned over the last bit is oftentimes trying to imagine like, what is the one person i'm speaking to when i'm making this given video as an example so just two weeks back while i was on a hike i got a text from my executive coach a guy named ryan begleman and he had asked me you know matt you got any like newer videos around your mindset your systems for folks that are maybe at eight nine or ten figures and are stuck he was going back and forth and i said okay well what exactly are you looking for and he sent me this long text message and sure enough like two days later on my way back down from this hike set up the tripod put on the camera and just rift speaking to that text message to that person that maybe has scaled up a business, scaled up a successful offer, but no longer feels fueled by it, no longer feels that fire and made a video around what happens if you feel like you've lost your fire.
And I point this out and just double click on it because I think whether it's the platforms or it's different strategists or it's consultants that you'll meet, everyone just gets so caught up in this vanity stuff. But the reality is, is that again, the vanity metrics are not gonna grow your business. And oftentimes too, they cause you to make a bunch of beginner -based content.
And for some of you, that's maybe who your market is. But for most of you, I just don't think that's the case. And so you want to make sure you're looking at the right signal.
Again, I've learned this the expensive way. And I've learned this, by the way, multiple times over my career. I think, again, if you're not careful, you get pulled to views.
And so fewer views aren't necessarily better. attention that gets you what you want is on our instagram as an example at one point when i was first getting going on my personal brand we were making all these animated videos some of you guys may have seen that stuff these videos some of them would get like 14 million 10 million views blowing up there was points where my instagram was growing at like 130 000 new followers a month but when i kept on like meeting people say on the street or an event nobody was really buying off this stuff it was like pure sort of like dopamine addiction vibes and so We ended up after six months just shutting that all down.
The views were bigger than I've ever driven in my life. But you meet someone maybe at an event that was watching one of these animated videos and they're like, oh man, I love those things. They're so cool, man.
And then you meet someone maybe off of YouTube that had watched a video that got 5 ,000 views. And it's like, oh, I've been following your stuff and binging it and really connect with not just what you're sharing, but the energy behind it and your value. Like I've been telling all your friends about it.
There's just that deeper one -to -one. rich relationship. You don't want just to build something around entertainment.
It's about building something that provides real value to the core client that you're dreaming of. I think a lot about core identity marketing, tapping into the stuff that you're really fired up by, the stuff that your dream client is likely really into. And it's beyond just business and growth.
Some of you guys are really into meditation, taking care of your health. You love nature and hiking and getting outside and value connection and community. These are all things that I value.
This is all stuff that I've intentionally shared in my content because it's what I'm genuinely into. And thereby it serves as this like kind of gravitational pull, pulling in similar type people that are of similar type values and into similar type interests. And I think the benefit here is not this that you build a vibrant business, but versus that dopamine addict I just mentioned.
These days when I walk down the street and say I'm recognized by someone. It's like someone that I would love to go for coffee with or go for a hike with or invite to one of these experiences or whatever, because I genuinely am like, I jive with that person versus you're walking down the street and you're like, oh, turn the other way, which I know a lot of other folks have audiences like that.
I was talking to a creator just a week ago who had built an audience about 8 million people on YouTube and refers to them as brokies. There's like this distaste with his own audience. And that's a common thing.
And if you're not careful and you're not, intentional about how you build things, you end up in paths like that. And while it can look all good because you're growing subscribers and you're growing views, I think you're getting way further away from your mission than you intended.
And so you get the vibe. Attention doesn't pay you. Trust does.
And so with all of you, I don't think it's a discipline issue with anything that you're building here. You guys want to build a personal brand. You want to build a personal media company.
The issue is that you can't out hustle. a missing system. And so if you don't have that infrastructure there, bit by bit, things start to collapse.
So we want to get the system right, and then the content makes itself. The question then becomes, well, who the hell do we want to attract in the first place? What do we need to go and become known for?
And so I'm going to kind of share how I've gone and thought about really niching on my own side, which I think is a bit different from most people. So you've probably heard the advice, just go like pick a niche and then post consistently. And for many of you, I think You get caught up in that niching phase.
Am I the systems guy, the habits person, the productivity person? Like, what do I want to be known for? And it can become super paralyzing.
And this is kind of, I think, the general sentiment of what I hear across folks, advising folks around content. And it never worked for me either. I always thought of myself as into like a bunch of different shit.
And I didn't want to be pigeonholed with my brand and only one thing. When I started going, I remember thinking about folks like Tim Ferriss, who I've been following for about... 15 years or so at that point who inspired me even to become an entrepreneur in the first place.
And when you look at Tim's content all throughout his whole career, it's really just been around his own curiosities. It's not like he's known for just like one thing. And in that sense, I think his brand has had like amazing longevity that way.
And so I think this whole like niche down thing for many of you, not all of you, can just be bad advice and just super confusing. Also, I think what happens is that we're very multidimensional. And I think that in many of your spaces, whether it's or insurance or coaching or financial services or DJ software equipment.
The reality is that I think what separates you guys is that you're not in a box. There's like this personality, this certain sort of vibe you've got. There's a certain interest that you have.
There's some quirks and weirdness. And it's all that stuff that I think ends up becoming your competitive advantage and will separate you online. So you want to embrace that.
So it's much more about not... owning a niche. It's about becoming the niche.
Building it literally just around who you are. That's kind of my belief on the niching downside and so here's kind of how I tap into it. One great exercise I think is you guys are starting to kind of think about content ideas and what stuff you want to tap into is this sort of five -year test.
So grabbing a notebook or it could just be your voice memo app in your phone and thinking about questions like what did you learn the hard way in life or looking back In five years, what skills did you have to learn? What problems kept you up at night?
Just reflecting on what you've learned and beyond it helping you come up with amazing ideas. It's again, coming up with ideas that have real resonance behind it. Because you're like, oh my God, I get fired up thinking about that mentor that changed the trajectory of my career.
Or I get fired up thinking about that crucible moment in my career where it nearly all fell apart, but I found a way through it. It's like those stories, those moments are what are going to really pull people towards you. There was one exercise about six years ago when I was getting started that had a big impact on me.
I remember driving through Jasper National Park with mountains that look something like this. I was looking at the mountains. I hit a snowbank, hit a bit of ice, and then boom, skidded into the side of the road, wheels up in the air, couldn't get anywhere.
And so there I was stranded in the middle of nowhere. It was actually Christmas Day too. And I had to get a tow truck and was stranded basically in this random motel room for three days while this car got fixed.
And so luckily... I had a book on me and the book was called Icky Guy. And I've shared this exercise with you guys a bit.
But yeah, this being a really good exercise, not just for figuring out my own calling in life, but a great exercise too for figuring out what the kind of content I wanted to put out there was as well. Really the mission over the last like six years of my life has just been to constantly just optimize everything I do for my Icky Guy.
Looking at what's in the center here, things like design, systems. building epic experiences for founders, building communities, building A -plus teams, building distributions since day one. These are the kind of things that I'm fired up by.
And this is the kind of stuff that's become my content strategy over the last bit. So not pigeonholing myself to one thing, just embracing the kind of stuff that I'm actually into. And so I think one thing that can help you is like going and thinking about those four questions yourself.
What are you great at? What does the world need? What can you be paid for?
And what do you love? and then documenting some of like, even just the five to six core themes that come up there. And as you think about your own content strategy, when you think about different titles or stuff you could be putting out, kind of putting it through that barometer check of like, does this feel true to the kind of stuff I'm into versus just making a bunch of stuff, maybe because it gets views or maybe because what someone else is doing in your niche, but doesn't feel aligned with what you're really all about.
And so one of the things on those lists for me were systems, but obviously that's not everything that I make. And I knew that even in that exercise, When I thought about systems, again, while it was one thing that I thought I could stand out for, I knew that I wasn't just like only going to make content around that.
It felt way too restricting. It's not really all that I am. And so a lot of the kind of core topics inside of that icky guy started to become the brand that I've built.
And along the way, as I kept on kind of leaning into those things, what I've noticed too is that I've started to be able to attract amazing folks like yourselves here. Legends like Misha here, who spent a couple of years in... monasteries in Norway, legends like flying in from Singapore, people building cool stuff for DJs and everything in between.
And so I'm really proud of the community that's being built, the values of that community. And to be honest, it's the content that does most of the work from just putting out stuff that feels aligned with who I am versus losing my way and maybe trying to niche down just to one thing that doesn't feel true to me. This is kind of how I've been able to build this positioning statement of just helping founders build profitable founder -led brands by installing the founder OS so they can close clients on repeat.
And so I think in terms of when you guys are looking at your own positioning, and maybe something to even just take a second and give a shot, is this writing down like, is your clear positioning statement ironed out here? Who it's for, the outcome you're maybe driving people to, what's a core mechanism that you have that's unique to what you do, and then what's the core result you're driving people to?
When you're thinking about your own positioning statement, and again, it takes reps. I actually change my positioning or evolve it probably about every six months, not to... pivot it, but just to evolve it to something that feels more true to us.
So maybe when I was first getting going with founder -led branding, it's like, okay, well, we're going to help someone build a profitable personal brand. But fast forward five years when we've helped a lot of eight, nine, 10 figure founders, I feel more confident saying this is the operating system to help eight to 10 figure founders build founder -led brands.
It kind of keeps getting refined. I may keep thinking bigger with it and it evolves as I grow. Not feeling like I have to be where it was, say four years ago.
This is like how folks like Mark Flippen, someone I've helped the last few years. was able to go and drive 250K in the first month of getting going together all off his founder -led brand, positioning what's pretty boring, an industry around insurance, but making it impossible to confuse. And so on Mark's side, right, it's for the CEOs, CFOs, and general counsel who are actually signing these insurance policies.
This stuff I think works like the more boring your industry, I think the better these strategies work and being really clear on your positioning. And I think sometimes the worry is in any industry, like how much of my own life should I share? How much of me should I share?
And I think by no means am I saying you got to share it all. I leave my private life out of most of my stuff. It's also though not being afraid to share like your own humanity.
So people can actually connect with you as a human versus just feeling like you're some corporate brand. That one line is the positioning that has really separated Mark and his space, right? The insurance broker to CEOs, CFOs and general counsel of financial institutions.
So keeping it clean, keeping it easy to understand. I'm always thinking about a positioning that... could easily go and travel in rooms where I'm not there.
So can people go and tell their friends about it? Is it simple and easy to understand? That's kind of where you want to be.
And so obviously then consistency alone is not going to get you there. Consistency is kind of just what gets you to this operator area. And we want to obviously scale past that.
And so more output isn't going to get you out there. It's really one identity decision. And I think it's becoming more of that media company CEO.
And so recently I had a founder, Jordan, that I was helping with. He runs an AI company doing about $5 million a month. And he was asking the question that I think some of you guys are asking.
How much do I share? What's that right balance between being really raw with my content or being more polished? And there's a lot of these kind of nuanced decisions when you get going building your brand that start to come up.
You start to get a bit of confidence that you're like, oh, is this the right way to do this? Should I do it this way or that way? There's fears and some of it's justified and some of it's maybe just some limiting beliefs.
And I think that a lot of these things exist. on a spectrum and so the question is more just where do you sit on it and where do you unintentionally build it's not that there's like a right or wrong way to do it so we think about like super raw content as an example it's like jackass filmed off a camcorder doing crazy that you're probably going to regret in 20 years on this side you have like insanely polished like apple and a keynote they may do and just on say that one decision and there's multiple when you're kind of thinking about the aesthetic and the vibe and the energy of your brand There's no right or wrong way to do it.
It's using your own judgment, intuition, and your just decision -making power to kind of pick where you want to exist on that spectrum. So when I think about someone like say George Heaton, the founder of Represent, his stuff's more raw, kind of showing how he's making decisions. He's kind of bringing you in the room to discover how he's building this billion dollar men's lifestyle brand, let's say.
And then you have folks like... my buddy Daniel Dalen, who's a little more polished with his stuff. There's a degree of like just preciseness and an aesthetic to it.
And when I think about my brand, I think we kind of oscillate along this line a bit sometimes, but generally are somewhere kind of in the middle. And so again, there's no right or wrong way to do this. It's just picking where you want to be.
Be jackass on one side of it, Apple on the other side, or anywhere in between. The cool thing with all this stuff is you can be successful in any side of this. You can be successful with an iPhone.
Or you can be successful with the whole studio you're building stuff out of. There's no right or wrong way to do it. And again, the thing with all of this, whether it's your positioning, whether it's your niche, whether it's your content ideas, you can change all of this stuff anytime you want.
Especially when we think about you're becoming the niche versus like you are a niche and that you need to niche down. The beautiful thing is that, again, it can evolve as your interests change. It should evolve as your interests change because that's going to make it most magnetic versus feeling like, oh.
One month ago, I was doing this. I have to do that again. In fact, when I'm building my brand, I'm like, I hope I'm embarrassed by who I was one month ago.
And now what I'm doing now actually feels way more aligned and exciting to me. So I'm constantly kind of pushing that needle, trying to make every piece of content 10 % more dialed into the vision I'm looking for and more aligned with what's exciting me. There's going to be pros and cons to these things.
When you think fully raw, it may be things like, okay, well, it's super fast to make and people are going to trust me because I'm showing a little bit more of the mess. And I can make infinite content because I don't even need much of a team. I can just press play and record this.
But then obviously on the other side of it, your content quality may not be as high sometimes. It may feel a bit sloppy sometimes. You may feel at some point, man, I want a more polished brand.
I don't want to be so messy. But that said, on the super polished side, what you get is this maybe premium feel. Every frame feels super intentional.
Maybe you feel like you're building more of that brand equity. And then quality becomes more of your moat. People are like, damn, this is the best I've seen in this space.
But... Obviously that's going to cost you by being maybe more slow, more expensive. It's easy to kind of slip into playing a character.
I've had this happen with me where you're trying to be so perfect with things then that you start to kind of mistakenly put yourself in a box because you just want it to be so perfect. So there's pro cons with any of these decisions. And again, it's just deciding on what's the right thing for you.
And where I think some of you can get stuck. is thinking that there's one right way the real question is like what do you want i think like if it's any question in life whether it's like relationships or business or who we even are right asking yourself like taking that second to pause for a second really ask yourself like what do i really want to do here it is actually the hardest question and for many of you and i know this happens to me too yeah it brings up like oh man should i really be doing that thing that kind of my soul speaking to me.
Am I worthy of that? Is that really going to resonate? I think it's taking that next little step to just like, okay, yeah, this is what feels true to me.
And I'm going to start making stuff that feels aligned there versus again, feeling it needs to be one way or another. And so for me as an example, right, this was a video when we started pursuing more sort of the polished side of the spectrum. I had gone from filming videos in my backyard in Puerto Escondido, Mexico, and just pressing play super raw.
I realized, you know what, I want to kind of make a different polished look we had brought on a creative director we had changed our kind of instinct with everything i realized also that publishing three times a week wasn't what i wanted to do on youtube instead i wanted to go and kind of just upgrade things a bunch and i figured maybe if i pursued something that was more high quality on youtube maybe it would stand out a little bit more and so sure enough that video is actually now the most watched video on our youtube has done a lot for the channel and the business and we started to move up that spectrum after say about eight months of filming and pursue like something more polished but started on the more raw side of things so again illustrating this that you can move up and down this spectrum the ultimate question is what do you really want to build and so the core version of you is what i believe is the most magnetic is really like when you can tap in to who you really are what you really want that's the ultimate content strategy it's not what some guru online tells you it has to be this way the reality is in all your spaces nobody can compete with you just being you
And the best long -term strategy is just when you're showing up in your content, just talking about the things that you love to talk about, talking about the things that you're currently nerding out over. That's the stuff that people are going to be most interested in. When I'm going and screen sharing a new system in Claude that I'm excited by, unbeknownst to me half the time, that's what people are like, holy shit, what was that?
Versus me trying to make some system around something that I thought I had to because someone thought of me as the systems guy. In my own path, I've kind of chosen the middle over time. I think that quality is really a proxy for your product.
My belief is that for me, at least, like if the quality of our brand, quality of our content is a more elevated sort of aesthetic and it feels really put together, almost like an apple for founders, that's exciting to me. And I think it's a proxy for what people can expect if they join FounderOS. On the other side, I can keep it relatively simple.
We don't need a massive editing team. We don't need an insane setup. These videos, I can still film with a tripod.
and a camera and a mic and do them myself. So they're not so polished that it's just unreasonable. And then the other side is that because we have some controls in place, we've got Memo and other legends on our team.
I can also slip up in a presentation or show something sensitive on my screen in a video, knowing that there's a control in place in the post -production that will clean that up and make sure it doesn't actually go out. Where if something was super raw, that may just go and hit the Instagram feed and maybe over the course of a few years.
lead to a few issues. And so when you're building, it's like you've got all these kinds of dials, raw, polished, casual, formal, high energy or calm, accessible, more exclusive. Are you going to keep it more fun or serious?
Be more of a teacher or do you just want to document your journey? Do you want to share kind of more of your private life or do you want to be more of an open book? I bring this up not to overwhelm anyone with like decisions to be made, but just typically when folks are moving up those levels from dreamer to tinkerer to operator you start to kind of as you're putting stuff out there wonder damn should i really be doing this or do i want to share the fact that i love ultra marathon running or do i want to share the fact that i'm an investigative journalist and have that bent to me again it's like no one's going to really have the answer for that for you the ultimate answer is like again what do you really want to do with it i mix these things too because you can do whatever the hell you want and so i've gone over to laird hamilton's house and for two three hours done an underwater pool workout and sauna and cold bath and got my ass kicked by him because that just sounded fun and then the other side i've made more serious videos on how i've actually grown my instagram to 950 000 organic followers again i can kind of oscillate between these two i can show a bit of my own personal side and them into and folks maybe i've had the chance to go and meet that are kind of my heroes while also then giving people a lot of value in these systems and so it doesn't need to be one way or the other i think when we think about our brand it really just comes down to
kind of engineering an emotion. So when I think about FounderOS and my own personal brand, I'm looking to engineer an emotion of freedom and inspiration. Show people that entrepreneurship can be expansive, it can be abundant.
It doesn't have to be this or that. It can be this and this and this and this. You can have the money, you can have a vibrant life, you can have amazing clients, like you can have it all.
You can have your time too, which I think so many founders lack. As we're going and thinking about this, I'll go and enter a certain season, say when I'm reflecting on my own life. and maybe the season's around deletion right now, and it feels a little bit uncomfortable.
Oftentimes, as I've grown as a founder -led brand, it's sort of just embracing the tension of all of this as well. Maybe you're in this tension between, oh, I'm this coach, and I'm supposed to be an expert to these eight -figure people, but I'm actually feeling insecure about my own direction in my business. And one part of you could think you got to come across so perfect in that moment to have it all figured out to attract those people.
But what I've learned oftentimes is just being more vulnerable and real with people about sort of what's going on and embracing the tension of not really knowing everything. People want to know more about what you're all about, how you think, your philosophy. That authenticity is what it's all about.
I think to me, authenticity is a loaded word. And oftentimes I don't know what it even means. I've come to learn for me what that authentic content is, is just not feeling like I have to be one way or the other.
I just have to be true to where I'm at. now and how i'm feeling now and just express that and it will attract and resonate with the right kind of people so now we start to get to like the systems of actually getting the traction going here so we can start to move from an operator again to this media company ceo it becomes okay well what do you actually want to publish in the first place so we went over like the five -year test we talked about the icky guy these are a couple good exercises to think about i don't think you have to do all of these things i think it's about picking like the one that maybe stands out to you And just start there.
I've done all of these things over three years and they all lead to amazing content ideas. This other one has also been really useful. This idea of this kind of like four, three, two, one formula.
It starts with kind of thinking about four signature phrases that you kind of come back to in what you do. So for me, that's things like helping folks build a personal media company, building a content waterfall so one piece of content can become 30 more. Things like the content GPS and the four W's in life.
You know, the control, where you work, when you work, what you work on and who you work with. You all have unique phrases or names that you use for different frameworks or ways you advise people. And it's awesome to make content around that stuff.
How -tos, lists, where you even learned it, the lesson you had to learn to even come up with that thing. That's great stuff because it's unique to you. And so when people see that, they're gravitating towards a message that you own.
And it starts to kind of create this content intellectual property that you own online. that's unique to you. The amount of time now after doing this for a few years, I have folks coming to us because they want a content waterfall or they're really looking to achieve the four W's in life and only have a couple of them.
This is just shit I made up. That was true in my own life and just started putting names of this stuff. And you can do the same thing.
You can invent these worlds. You can invent this IP. And I think it's a fun way to think about your content.
From there too, thinking about three content pillars, not to pigeonhole ourselves, but just to get started maybe in a few areas we're gonna start brainstorming in. So for me, Maybe things like organic content systems, a brand operating system, and time -saving systems.
And then two formats. So a format could be anything from lists to recipes to guides to white papers, how -tos, etc. Overtime is an example of the two core formats that we put out twice a week on YouTube.
One is our how -to videos, which are just any educational sort of how -to video. It doesn't have to be in the title. that really just pours value into people and kind of the systems that I'm finding most valuable right now and that founders are kind of bubbling up to me.
And then the second piece here are whiteboard sessions. So we'll essentially go and meet with a founder, get into their business. I've done this with Ali Abdaal, Blake Rocha, and others, going and chopping it up.
And the beautiful thing about those is that people are able to see me live helping someone. It's unscripted. And so you're kind of getting core Matt Gray out of those in a way.
And so... as i see them they're kind of like one format is really helpful for value it's also really good for actually growing the audience in terms of the how -to side of things and then the whiteboard sessions are really good for like middle and bottom of funnel and then as you're getting going to i know some of you guys are off multiple platforms i think it's useful to think of like what's that core platform you're building for whether you're a beginner and you're just trying to like pick the one that you're going to get started on or even after i've been doing this for a long time i know that like the thing that we are most obsessed around is youtube it brings the best kind of folks to us.
It builds the most rich relationships. It's the largest video search engine in the world and it drives us 56 % of our cash. And so it just checks all the boxes and I enjoy it the most.
When I think about my own little two -page vision that I read every single morning, I have an interest in being this like amazing. video brand and having stuff on Netflix eventually and being this intersection of like Anthony Bourdain meets Steve Jobs meets Rick Rubin sort of brand going on. And so YouTube is a great place for that to build these amazing visuals and videos and also build this awesome relationship and start to expand even the length of content.
There's no right or wrong approach though. Some of you guys getting going, you may be more pen first, feeling more comfortable writing things out. She picks X and LinkedIn within a newsletter or you're more camera first and you may move more Instagram, YouTube, TikTok.
And then obviously in any case, having a newsletter that then leads people to your given offer. Now we probably want to go and get into how to really hit the ground running here. So you've probably got like your icky guy as an example.
You've got some topics that are exciting to you. And then the question now on every platform is how do you package these ideas so they actually perform? Because now as we kind of evolve, it's not just about doing what we want or attracting clients or getting views or making cash.
I actually think you can kind of get all of these things. You can pick ideas that are really exciting for you, that are things that your client wants, that drive you a good amount of views and drive significant cash. And so one of 10 is the platform that I use the most for actually going and packaging my favorite ideas.
I have all my bookmarks here of like titles and different formulas for thumbnails that work the best. And then oftentimes I'll go and basically take a bunch of inspiration. And here you can see different title ideas that got and say 28X that channel's average.
So as we see here, this idea here, stop being an audience member of your own life. That channel gets an average of 88 ,000 views. That video got 2 .5 million views.
So 28X that channel's average amount of views. And so as many of you guys are building up your brands, a real hack here isn't to look at what Alex Hormozy is doing on his content. It's actually to look at like maybe a smaller creator like this one in the top right and then see what topics are they choosing that are blowing up their channels to get from say 5K to 10K to 100K subscribers as an example.
And I use this same title research tool, one of 10. to also help me come up with my Instagram carousel titles or hooks as well for short form videos. If you're coming up with your ideas as an example, and you're into maybe breathwork, let's say, it's like, you know, all these breathwork topics you want to talk about, but then you're going to kind of smush those ideas with proven titles and topics to kind of then just package those ideas in a good way.
Because on platforms, say like a YouTube, if you can't get someone to click, they're never going to watch. And so You're studying the outliers, not necessarily the giants, people that are kind of at your size and seeing some of what the video ideas, the titles that have worked best for them.
This is an example of a note in my phone. And as I'm just going and living my life, I'm just jotting down different ideas that have fired me up. So in this case, things like how I build my business like a Formula One team.
I deleted a task that didn't compound. I'm just even writing down words or themes that are interesting to me. Things like quantum leap or obsession is a gift.
A lot of this stuff too will come after I'm on a call with founders, helping maybe an eight or nine figure founder that I'm excited by, getting to some new levels. And I realized after the call, there was a couple of things that really jazzed me up. I may just take a pause after that for a second, just jot down some of those exciting notes.
And then I come back to this later with my one of 10 research to then package up some of those core themes. And so again, this is how I came up with this outlier that we had created just a year back here in the Dolomites. Kind of thinking about...
I was at that time hiking and I forgot a sleeping bag and some stuff and realized that in life, you just got to kind of relax a little more and settle into things. And it became the idea for a video. After that, right, I think it's a lot of thinking about before you record, do your buyers already watch this stuff?
We want to make sure, again, that we're threading that needle a bit between like what we want to do, what the outlier research is, what's going to work for the kind of people we're attracting. And it's going to drive us cash because again, we can have it all. And so these are the kind of lines that I get.
from my market. I'm having a panic attack because everything relies on me. So then we go and make content that helps them get more of their time back and build leverage around them.
They may say things like I have viral videos, but no leads. And so we're teaching them how to go and use a sales call analyzer to go and analyze sales calls for core quotes from folks and then use that to make their content ideas. Or folks say things like I'd rather not post than post something I hate.
And so we talk about how to build an intentional content strategy. not just some viral content strategy. So a lot of this comes down to really listening to those calls that you maybe already have going.
So much of your content already exists in those customer success calls you're doing. It exists on a sales call and using some of the skills that we have inside of FounderOS, the AI systems for sales call analyzer, customer success call grader. to then pull out those ideas.
If you're looking for more ways to go and come up with ideas, because you don't have enough yet, let's say, you may think about going and actually just sending a survey to folks like your best clients and asking them, what's your biggest goal this year? What keeps you up at night? And if I was a wave of magic wand, what would you want me to fix?
And the answers to those questions, then I would typically go and use a type form. You get a whole spreadsheet of all their answers, upload that to Claude or GPT, and then go and add in a bunch of screenshots from one of 10. where it has all these outlier titles, and then just ask it to take the mix of what your clients are saying, maybe you also show it your icky guy, and you show it the outlier title research, and then it's gonna smush all that together to then come up with some content ideas that make you money, fire you up, and attract a lot of cash to your business.
This video got the most views on my YouTube. These 60 seconds. didn't happen by accident, right?
They were very much engineered. The hook getting into how long would you guess someone was working if they made 730K a month. Then getting into the proof around it and getting into that I'm actually on pace to do this and I work four hours a day.
Then getting into the promise that I'm actually gonna go and show you how to do this in this video. And then the plan, getting into the four pillars of leverage. So every video essentially, right, has your storytelling that fires you up in it.
You're educating people most of the time. And most videos come down to some sort of list, whether like it's seven ways to dot, dot, dot, or you're just structuring it in a way where you're going over three lessons or four systems or five mistakes. You can think of almost every idea as some sort of list.
So we cover this a lot. It is the idea then of waterfalling that pillar piece of content you have out there. So as we start to build this media company around us, we want to make sure that we have the right people in the right seats to go and be able to take along from idea.
and turn it into six reels, take it into six YouTube shorts, build it into six TikTok videos, to four to six carousels, to six to eight X posts and threads, and maybe even use it for things like research for a VSL. Getting this all in place is kind of what that next level looks like when you've got a social manager in place, the right video editor in place, you can start kind of building this out.
Now, if you're just getting going on YouTube as an example, it doesn't mean that you got to go through this whole waterfall at the gate. It just means we're trying to get the most amount of content from the pillar piece. that we've put out there.
With YouTube, you'd hope that you'd be able to make another 12 pieces of content from each video downstream so that you're not just filming one video and feeling like you're on this treadmill constantly. You start to get more leverage from the time and effort you're putting into it. And so this is the kind of stuff we've done.
One pillar piece of video here around seven folks and how they've built magnetic personal brands. We're taking one piece of that, which is this clip of Rick Rubin in it. And funny enough, this video got 5 ,600 views on YouTube.
This reel ended up going and getting 765 ,000 views. So it's most of the time too, the waterfall's getting like 20, 30, 100 times more attention than the original piece of content. So you can just imagine how much more brand awareness you're getting from getting that system right versus just relying on your effort to keep on producing these pillar pieces of content.
And so we take that one core law from this video, we cut it into some 18 to 30 second asset, same words. nothing new just a good editing process there and 765 000 views so that one idea becoming 30 plus pieces of content same sort of thing here when we think about our content ritual each month doing one content ritual typically i'll go out into nature i kind of was talking about the beginning of this of creating content and making it feel fun and for me when i'm like say tasked with sorting out our newsletters for a month let's say the idea of like being in the mountains here and then sitting in on like a friday and just hammering out eight newsletters sounds like really daunting and i've done that before but i asked myself about a year and a half ago like how could i make this way more enjoyable the system that came from that was this content ritual system being able to go through some of those questions like the five -year test like my icky guy and then go and take those record a voice memo on my phone around those questions
just going and hiking, recording myself in my actual stream of consciousness, then uploading that to Claude, using the AI systems to go and create newsletters in my voice off that, where I'm simply just formatting my voice into a newsletter, and then waterfalling all that. So it all is off the back of me just hiking versus writing anymore.
And that's what my content strategy and creation looks like these days, is just going for a hike. and recording myself and so i'm able to mix a passion of mine and something i'm really into something that's kind of in my icky guy with the content creation side of things and versus being stuck behind a desk making my content i can be out there in nature and then trust that the systems will do the rest the beautiful thing to this too right is when you think about the best copywriting that should sound like you speak and so there's no better way to sound like you speak than just speaking to your content versus feeling you got to clank around and write it all if it's not on a rhythm right it doesn't exist and so what we want to get to here now is the machine that runs without you.
So how do you actually get going on something that feels sustainable long -term versus feeling like you're just stuck in it all the time? And so there's five levels, one job at each. So let's start going through how I think you guys maybe want to think based on the level you're at.
So level one, you're just kind of figuring out what the hell you should even be posting. The icky guy exercise is probably the thing you want to check out. Starting to kind of journal over the next few days in nature.
What are you good at? What does the world need? What are you excited by?
What do you love to do? What can you get paid for? That's a good spot.
That was me. six years ago stranded in a random motel but the good thing that came out of that was me doing this exercise which then allowed me to get kind of stage one of building a magnetic brand level two now you kind of got that going you want things to maybe feel a little bit tighter and start to get clear on things like your phrases your pillars your formats your platform that's maybe where you start doing the four three two one thing documenting some of those core things you want to be known for getting a little more tight maybe around your content pillars choosing a couple formats and then picking maybe a platform you want to get started on and kind of scale more on from there Level three is you'll eventually find that you're the bottleneck to all this.
And so this is where you start to kind of figure out getting the right team in place so that things like your ideas, your scripts, your filming, editing, posting, design, it's not all coming down to you. Level four is where then you're building this media company out. This to me though is like your V1 and it could be even your V4ever media company.
You don't need that many people to build this stuff. First person is a social media manager. Your CEO of distribution, that's Anna on my team.
So she's kind of one part project manager, one part quality control, and then handling things like captions and that last mile of distribution to make sure things go out the right message, the right time of day to the right people, right platform, and then feeding the data back in to folks like myself and Memo so we can keep on refining our content strategy.
From there, we've got Memo in the back here. video producer, editor, leading all things Foundry West Studios. And Memo was able to take a video from ideation to production, post -production, all the way through and handle that.
And underneath them, as we scale things out, bring on an editor if we need it. Who aren't full -time hires, they're just hired per piece of what we're putting out. So the team can stay super lean and things can stay really profitable.
I think the thing that we do different than most, because we want to have a brand that's balanced between raw, but also a bit polished, is that I have a designer. on my team that's really running our whole instagram so our designer runs our instagram it is the one that's also helping me with certain decks and things like that across the brand so that things stay kind of that apple -esque feel that we want to have for many of you right if you're going more video first you probably have a social media manager and you have that video producer editor if you're going more writing first it may be you your voice memo app and you could just even do it all with ai systems i'd probably have that in one writer on my team as well as a social media manager to then post everything so I don't need to be posting my content on the given platforms.
I think the big innovation, obviously, over the last 18 months is being able to then replace a lot of the roles that you previously had to hire for with all these AI systems. So things like your content strategist for ideation, things like analyzing your sales calls, analyzing customer success calls, helping you go and build out lead magnets simply, even going and creating things like workshops.
This is all the stuff that we've put into FounderOS, and this is the stuff that's allowed us to keep on scaling the business. while not scaling headcount. Level five, when you're becoming more iconic with everything, I think it's like dialing in the aesthetic, the confidence around the direction that you're going.
And there being this marriage between your offer and what you provide people and the content you're putting out. It's tightly interconnected. In my case, maybe I drop some new systems around AI.
Well, that's also then the content that we're putting out. For many of you, it may be you're adding a new curriculum video or new system to what you're doing. And part of that process is you add it to the customer success and the platform that you add it to, but then you also go and make content around it publicly as well.
So then you are updating people around the future of the business and the stuff that's new and exciting, and then attracting people into it and obviously making money, driving attention and doing stuff that you're passionate about. A lot of you guys, as you're getting going, I think if you're to narrow it down to one hire that I think you need to be thinking about, it's really your social media manager.
This hire, I think is one of the most important as you're building out the media company, because it allows you to really start to separate yourself from the actual posting of the stuff. Many of you guys, as you're getting going, building a founder -led brand, building a media company, it's your voice, it's your ideas to get going.
And that's great. But you want to be able to remove yourself from the actual posting of stuff. I think a lot of us get a little drained, feel the life kind of sucked out of us when we're like on Instagram too much in a day or you're scrolling X for too long or whatever.
We're all guilty of this, right? And I think the one hire that's brought me the most happiness. and the most time back especially early on as i build out media companies in any of my business is this higher and the roi too is insane if you're getting like say 40 hours back a week which i think early on sometimes that's how much people are spending between scrolling and posting and researching and all that stuff maybe even project management you think about for many of you which i think is a low hourly rate a thousand dollars an hour you think about maybe even just 43 working weeks in a year we're talking like 1 .7 million dollars a year and like just wasted potential that you're spending on shit that someone could do for a hundred bucks or less an hour.
That hire costs you like $80 ,000 a year, which it shouldn't. You can get folks a lot more affordable than that. It's like a 21X return on your time.
So this is like the biggest no -brainer hire to look to make very early on in your media company journey. So attention into cash. How do we actually then take all this attention to drive the sort of outcomes and cashflow you guys are looking for?
So it's never really right. It's like getting the positioning right that we talked about. linking that to your content ideas as we've gone over the ideation there, making sure that we're building trust, which is where things like your newsletter come into play, making sure that you have a clear offer that's landing with people.
And then the cash kind of just naturally comes from the first four rungs. And so where I'm seeing most founders is they're building, right? They've got strangers, they're building these followers.
They have trouble kind of converting people from follower to believer. to then buyer and this is where you get these audiences where no one's converting and so the number one thing there i think is really getting a newsletter in place and making sure you're consistent with that because when we're driving people to lead magnets to our actual email we're able to start compounding that trust we start putting out content people are reading our newsletter avidly they're seeing maybe different case studies and stories that we're putting in there from there they're seeing more proof over time they eventually maybe are seeing your offer on a landing page or an offer doc they see more proof and they keep getting baked and kind of warmed up to where they eventually convert when you're basically going and making a bunch of social content with no newsletter it's like you're just constantly at bat whereas with a newsletter obviously you get to show up with these people every single week you're actually capturing all that attention so hands down getting that email list going even if it means publishing once per month is an absolute no -brainer because that's where the leverage is going to start coming from and
you probably know as well, like your email is going to convert 37 times better than your social content. So followers are rented, emails owned. And when I started really figuring this out and dialing in the email list side of things, that's where I started seeing across all my businesses, revenues really started to rip.
You guys are probably also aware of things like Google's 7 -11 -4 rule, right? Seven hours across 11 touch points in four different places is what someone needs to see from you in order to trust you enough to buy. And so with an email list, with longer form YouTube, as you start to kind of branch out into these things, you're racking up that trust.
Whereas if you're posting once a week on X, you're not really doing much to take kind of like a dent in your kind of trust bank account you're trying to build. Maybe you kind of understand what step you're at now, the stage you're at. In terms of driving people now to that email list, it's all around being contextual.
And so in a given sort of deep work post, we're not putting out like, oh, join my newsletter. We're talking about want my deep work checklist. and actually having something that's contextual to that given post.
So deep work checklist here on the left as an example from LinkedIn, and then obviously giving away something that's actually relevant to that. And so in a given month across say four different content categories or a few different things you know you're going to talk about, you may actually create three to four different lead magnets so that in your content, you always have something contextual you can give someone so that they're not just getting generic asked to go and join your newsletter list.
And that's where eventually you start kind of building out. Your newsletter, you may have more of a capture flow where you start also having things like a welcome sequence that goes and welcomes people to what you do, what you're all about, and gets them more quickly to book a call. So as you start to stack this up, if each piece is kind of getting people 10 % more to buying, you sort of start to increase your odds of converting people to that yes by like say 46 % off of a piece of content because they saw the piece of content and they got four newsletters for you over the next month versus just seeing some content and that was that.
You never captured them. I think most... folks that get stuck is that they're suffering from the thinking that they got to do more things more topics more platforms more noise inevitably you kind of just start dealing with like indigestion just like clogging you up not being able to like move you to the next stage so as you're going through this and as you're thinking about all this stuff it's really about like what's that next best move i can make you probably got a couple insights from this that we can action it says right deleting the noise sharpening your brand and then really owning the stuff that you're excited by and so As I'm creating content and thinking about the stuff I'm putting out there, I'm running it through a general filter.
Would someone go and share this with 20 friends? Is it the most valuable thing that's ever been made around this given topic? And would someone pay $100 ,000 for this?
If I'm making a video, let's say it's around the most valuable systems training ever. I'm going to go and think, okay, would someone go and share this piece of content? with 20 colleagues in their company slack is that the most valuable training around operating systems that i've ever seen on youtube would someone pay a hundred thousand dollars or would drive a hundred thousand dollars in value to them if they did it so keeping that bar really high is i think then i'm kind of making sure my content is generous enough that it sticks that it gets shared and that over time you create a brand that really matters again we've talked a lot about this but it's like really focusing on your profit per piece of content and so over time as you start building this media company you're doubling down on the UTM tracking in place to understand what content really stands out.
And when stuff starts to pop, whether it's via views, if that's what you're after, but for more of you, it's cash, you're then able to go and waterfall that content, making more ideas around it, doubling down on those topics. And so this is kind of what you're looking for early on. You may be just getting going or maybe you're in that operator stage.
Your content is a little bit of a variety show maybe to start. You're not sure what formats you want. You're not sure what topics you want to double down on.
So it's okay. Like you're kind of just looking at different signals as they come up. You're listening to what clients are saying, what's resonating with you.
And then you're slowly kind of doubling down on the stuff that you feel is working. Now I know in my own business as well, I'm listening to things like what my sales team's bringing up. They're on different calls.
And this is how we came up with even the whiteboard content idea. We had done a couple just for fun. And sure enough, the sales team kept on saying that people were bringing this up on calls.
And so we're like, all right, cool. Let's double down on that. That seems like a great middle and bottom of funnel piece of content for us to keep on ripping.
I actually started building my personal brand pretty seriously on video when I was about 24. I started doing Facebook Lives and I was sharing kind of like the journey of building this media brand. And I remember one day walking the King Street in Toronto and this guy, Cameron Healy, who I didn't even really know that well, just like an acquaintance, not a friend, stopped me in the street.
and told me that I look like a goof in these videos and that I should probably stop. He's like, they're not a good look. And I listened to him.
And for 10 years, I didn't post anymore on social. And I came back then, 10 years later, still not knowing what the I was doing, still looking cringe. And at this point, I just said like, but I'm going to do this thing.
I want to do this. I think I was actually onto something then. I'd sobered up now.
I'd gotten down to the core of it and realized, no, I actually, I want to do this. I can see where the puck is going. with branding.
And I am excited to put myself out there and tell my story. And this time around, I'm going to do it because I really want to do it. I'm not going to let someone else sway me.
And so sure enough, started launching my own brand, started attracting about 30 founders of what I was doing. At the time, FounderOS was called Soulful Entrepreneur, sounded like a yoga studio. And we just kind of got going.
But I committed to not allowing what other people thought of me or what other people said to sway what I was doing. It would become maybe signal or a bit of data. but it wouldn't sway my decision to actually go and chart this path in my life anymore.
And so fast forward a few years later, it generally changed the trajectory of my whole career. As you're looking at your own life, whether it's with your brand or building your team or the vision that you have and stuff that you're going to chart out over the next few days, right? I think viewing fear more as a signal versus running away from it.
I wish I hadn't listened to that fear back when this cammed guy stopped me in the street. I should have doubled down. I think I was onto something.
And so... i want you guys to really think then about like publishing messy polish can come later my brand for the first year even after being called out 10 years earlier i just went back to my cringe self started sharing some stuff that felt right low production filming off an iphone sweating my ass off because it was like 35 degrees in mexico and just started publishing this stuff knowing that like i would just get it to where i wanted to over time because I'd be able to afford the team for it.
And I would just learn the ropes because I was pretty amateur with it all to start. So let's make sure that we grade your brand. So you kind of know the next step here in terms of what you need to maybe fix first to get rolling here.
So 10 checks, pass or fail. Here we go. First one, your bio, right?
On the given platform you're on, do you have like a one owned sentence there? Do you have that positioning statement nailed down and a bio that's consistent across all the platforms you exist on that feels like. In five seconds, a stranger could recognize it and know who you are, what you stand for and how you help.
This is what I have right now. This has probably changed about like 12 to 15 times over the last five years. So again, you can change this over time, but V1, get it live, make sure you feel good about it and that it's consistent everywhere you are.
From there, think about maybe pinning a story, right? About what you're all about and how you serve people to the platforms you're at. On Instagram, if you're on there, may have things like your story as a pin post.
Here's one. From zero to eight figures, this is my story. And you may have one about your actual service and what you do.
In this case, how to build a personal brand in just seven days. So we're starting to kind of like craft that brand that people kind of know instantly when they view my profile. Okay, this is what this guy's all about.
Check three, right? You have one voice everywhere. Across all platforms, it sounds like you because it is you.
You're likely doing that content ritual once a month, maybe getting outside while you're doing it and having fun with it. So whether people on LinkedIn or X. it's all the same voice it's the same sort of strategy generally maybe different formats you're playing around with it a bit but it's the same human it doesn't feel all disjointed from there aesthetic being dialed in it's clean consistent it feels good for you you're excited with how you're showing up it starts to feel dialed in the quality feels like it's a good proxy for how you want to present yourself to the world and so i think it's done right it all feels like it's from like one person it feels dialed in.
And then we want to make sure that we're posting on a rhythm. If it's not on a rhythm, it doesn't really exist. And everybody becomes a bit sporadic and it's hard to build that real audience loyalty.
And so that's where things like the authenticity machine come into play that we had run through in that content ritual. We want to make it obvious how you help people. And so really not being clever in coming up with random names that are hard to understand, whether it's book titles, YouTube videos, mechanism names, brand names, whatever.
making sure that it's really easy for people to understand versus something clever that they can't that may mean building videos just around how to insert the thing that you help people with making sure then you're linking to a real funnel so we can actually monetize this build the team out that initial funnel may mean you have your content going out with a core lead magnet from there people are being led to a given landing page and able to convert to say a call and then convert to your given thing make sure that flow is mapped out so it's working right And then the right CTAs across everything you're doing in your content, whether that's at the end of a LinkedIn post, in the description of a YouTube video, or things like from a ManyChat DM keyword on your newsletter and carousels and such.
And so from there, we also want to make sure we're being consistent across platforms, okay? So same brand, consistent across whether it's Instagram, LinkedIn, or X, making sure it's all super dialed in. And then check 10, moving people from the rented audience that we have across social to actually owning that audience again in a newsletter.
And that newsletter actually being something we take. even more pride in probably than the content itself so essentially that newsletter audience right being a core piece to all this making sure that we're being consistent there because without that middle link of the newsletter you're not going to make that much or you're going to force yourself to be super salesy in your content because you feel like you got to sell there because there's no middle layer and so the newsletter allows you to speak one -to -one with folks convert them without being salesy online so if you're doing this right you're converting probably about 10 of your audience to the newsletter 100 of those people are then seeing the message And you're maybe monetizing, say, 2 % of that overall newsletter list.
But over time, every single week you're doing that, you're building a real viable business with this. And so if you think about this, you're getting like a 9 or a 10 across all that. Well, you've kind of got that media company CEO thing dialed in.
If you've got a few of these going, you may find yourself still in the mix of a lot of it, though, and being the center of it. You're more of the operator. 3 to 5 is if you're still kind of tinkering through things.
And then, you know, if none of this feels like it's quite there, I'd encourage you to take that first step, answer some of those questions on the icky guy, and get started here. And so the next move, all right, to move on up the chain, if you're kind of dreaming of getting the brand going, answer those four questions, post the damn thing, as messy as it is, you're moving here and we're building that shipping muscle.
On the tinkerer side of things, you've got it going, it's moving a bit, but you want it to be a bit tighter and you're kind of looking for that core strategy to link it all together. That's where picking your four phrases, your three pillars, two formats, one platform, stick into that for 90 days. And now we're kind of moving on to the operator stage.
At the operator. You're posting every day. I think it's about making that social media manager higher, probably.
If you're more video first, a video editor, writing first, maybe a writer to help you out and becoming more of that media company CEO. And then from there, it's really just making sure that the content waterfall system is running right so that one of those content rituals you do every month is properly formatted into all your content for the month.
If you're making videos, you're maybe batching it for two, three days with a video producer on your team, and then that's it. And you just know that the rest of the machine is going to run. And just letting that kind of compound until your brand is iconic, it's known, people are repeating phrases you've put out there in rooms you're not in, your videos are being binged by folks, and people are showing up to sales calls if you have them already sold.
So I would recommend not installing all of this at once, obviously. This has been probably quite a bit of stuff. Just start with like the one thing that you think is like the best next move you need to make based on which of those five stages you're at right now.
My hope is that for each of you, I think that you all possess between your two ears the ability. to become the most trusted expert in your niche. And I think that you should take that next step to get going.
And again, not let the story of like Cam and the person that stopped me from doing my thing 10 years ago, kind of get in your way. So I think the one question then left is like, who's moving first? Is it you?
Or is that other competitor in your space that's already thinking about this stuff and already moving? You have the power to out -compete and become way more referred to than that person in your space. So I waited 10 years doing this stuff.
Probably my biggest regret in business, to be honest with you. And my hope is that you don't dare do that. Okay?
So that's that. Hopefully that was helpful, y 'all. Leave it there.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
It opens on a revenue claim, $15 million a year with 97% from organic content, and then quickly argues against the number most creators chase. The same channel produced a video with 567,000 views that earned $226 and one with 94,000 views that earned $60,000, and the rest of the hour is about building for the second kind.
CTA Breakdown
How they asked for the click.
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
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Matt Gray walks through a live Founder OS brand positioning document — nine sections, one fictional founder, and every lever that turns scattered content into a predictable sales machine.
A founder who scaled his own brand past 3.5 million followers maps the five stages every creator-led business passes through, and the one identity shift that moves you off the treadmill.
A solo talking-head breakdown of the five systems one founder uses to turn a personal brand into a machine that keeps growing when he stops posting, ending on the one question that reveals whether you've built a brand or an expensive job.
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