15:06Mike and Matty · Talking Head
The "Boring" YouTube Strategy That's Printing Money
Why repeating the same problem category — updated for the current moment — is now the only durable growth strategy on YouTube.
June 26thThe argument in one line.
A new YouTube channel wins by serving one specific person with one specific problem, spending 80% of its effort on the idea and packaging, and running many small learning cycles instead of perfecting or batching videos up front.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- A founder, coach or expert with real knowledge who wants YouTube to bring in clients, not just views.
- A new or stalled creator who keeps hearing 'pick a niche' and still can't decide what the channel is about.
- Someone with only about five hours a week for YouTube who needs to know which steps actually move results.
- A creator who just had one video pop and wants to know how to turn it into a repeatable series instead of a one-off spike.
- A business owner deciding whether to spend money on gear, an editor, or a strategist first.
SKIP IF…
- You want tactical hook-writing templates or editing tutorials; the hosts explicitly stay at the principle level for those.
- You run a faceless or AI-voiceover channel; the advice assumes a personal brand on camera.
- You only make short-form; the whole system is built around YouTube's click-and-commit long-form model.
The full version, fast.
The YouTube algorithm works like a DJ testing tracks on small groups, so a new channel grows fastest when every video serves the same specific person with the same specific problem. Map that person's journey into about three big obstacles, make every video hit one of them, and get variety from formats (reviews, versus, upgrades, tier lists) found with outlier data rather than guesses. Stand out with an earned point of view, not a copy of the leader. Then run a minimum video process where idea and packaging (title, thumbnail, first 30 seconds) carry about 80% of performance. Post 20 videos spaced out with a what, why, how review after each, double down on breakout formats while exploring new ones, and judge the channel by revenue per view, not views.
Free for members
Chat with this breakdown — free.
Sign in and you get 23 free chat messages on us — ask for the hook, quote a framework, find the exact transcript moment, generate a markdown action plan. Bring your own key when you want unlimited.
Create a free account →Where the time goes.
00:00 – 01:34
01 · Standing out from 115,000 new channels a week
Sets up the three-phase plan (strategy, making videos, compounding) and challenges the standard 'pick a niche' advice.
01:34 – 10:01
02 · How YouTube decides who sees your video
The algorithm as a DJ testing tracks on small crowds; why the channel should be defined by a specific person and problem, using the hosts' own pivot to helping educators build a business on YouTube.
10:01 – 15:49
03 · The one rule every video must follow
Every video must sit on the 'tree trunk' of moving one person from A to B, organized into about three big obstacles; formats provide variety within that constraint.
15:49 – 19:50
04 · Spotting formats that are about to take off
Using outlier data instead of guesses, demonstrated through the sponsor's outlier scores, similar-topic search and trending formats feed.
19:50 – 33:57
05 · Breaking into a crowded field
Saturation as an advantage, steal like an artist without becoming a dupe, join the conversation with an earned point of view, and the three levels of credibility.
33:57 – 38:16
06 · Why viral videos aren't about production
Closet videos and iPhone vlogs that blew up; invest in a strategist before gear or editing, and the six-step video process.
38:16 – 42:38
07 · No editor can save a weak idea
The six steps mirror how viewers consume a video; idea and packaging drive about 80% of results, which defines the minimum video process.
42:38 – 45:39
08 · The three T's that decide the click
Title, thumbnail and first 30 seconds as one package; YouTube's A/B tests reward watch time, not just clicks.
45:39 – 52:26
09 · Making a winning thumbnail
Data-driven title and thumbnail catalogs, generating many concepts per video, using AI to remix rather than plagiarize, and borrowing patterns from adjacent niches.
52:26 – 56:56
10 · Stopping clicker's remorse
The first 30 seconds must confirm the click; target around 70% retention there. Packaging generates demand and the script supplies it.
56:56 – 1:02:18
11 · The three S's that make ideas stick
Why before how, illustrated with diabetic patients, then three ways to deliver the why: story, science and symbolism.
1:02:18 – 1:07:45
12 · The surgeon's checklist before filming
Lights, camera, audio with audio first; a documented timeout checklist for every shoot; teleprompter versus outline as two separate skills.
1:07:45 – 1:13:17
13 · Viewers are always looking for a reason to leave
Edit backwards from Hollywood: front-load the climax, put most editing effort into the hook, and keep a consistent look and feel.
1:13:17 – 1:24:07
14 · The only three numbers to check
Impressions grade the idea, CTR grades the packaging, retention grades script, filming and edit; read them by audience segment and reintroduce yourself to new viewers.
1:24:07 – 1:33:44
15 · Why 20 imperfect videos beat one perfect one
Three launch patterns compared; spaced repetitions with a what, why, how review after each video beat both perfectionism and early batching.
1:33:44 – 1:39:21
16 · The cheat code: repeating a breakout
When a video breaks out, study its format, alignment and topic (FAT), read the comments, and build a signature format and series.
1:39:21 – 1:45:39
17 · Found a format that works? Exploit and explore
Ride a format until fatigue, keep 20% of effort exploring, and why a back catalog aimed at one person turns a breakout into hockey-stick growth.
1:45:39 – 1:48:34
18 · Why 400-view videos can drive more sales
Views don't equal revenue; track revenue per view by topic to find what attracts buyers.
1:48:34 – 1:49:35
19 · What separates channels that succeed
Having a strategy is easy; implementing it for your situation is the hard part. Closing pitch for their strategy service.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- Don't pick a niche; pick a problem for a specific person, because 'business' covers audiences who would never watch each other's videos.
- A brand-new channel has no data, so the algorithm tests each video on a tiny group and only widens distribution when the same kind of viewer keeps responding.
- If you can't list 50 to 100 video topics for the person you claim to help, you probably aren't qualified to help them yet.
- Creativity comes from the constraint of three content branches; formats are how you avoid burnout without leaving the branch.
- Saturation is a good sign on YouTube, because it means the algorithm has enough data to place you next to bigger creators.
- There are no competitors on YouTube, only collaborators: people who like Jay-Z also listen to J. Cole.
- Copying an outlier's title, thumbnail and points exactly fails, because nobody picks the dupe over the original.
- A contrarian point of view only works when it is earned through serving real people and seeing patterns others missed.
- Credibility has three levels: results for yourself, results for others, and a method that lets others get results for their clients.
- Hire a strategist before you hire an editor or buy a camera; production polish on a weak idea is an empty wrapper.
- The idea and packaging decide about 80% of a video's performance, while scripting and editing eat most of the time for about 20%.
- YouTube is a click-and-commit platform, not scroll-and-watch, so a great second half is worthless if nobody clicks.
- YouTube's title and thumbnail A/B tests optimize for watch time, not click-through rate, so the most-clicked thumbnail can lose.
- Treat the first 30 seconds as the third piece of packaging; aim for about 70% retention through that window.
- Borrow thumbnail and title patterns from adjacent niches your audience also watches, not from your closest competitors.
- Explain why before how: people only lean in to instructions once they understand what's at stake for them.
- Invest in audio first, lighting second and camera last, because viewers will tolerate a dark screen long before bad sound.
- Front-load the climax in editing; a viewer on YouTube has no sunk cost and a sidebar full of reasons to leave.
- Twenty videos spread over three months beat one perfect video and also beat twenty videos batched before you learned anything.
- A channel's 400-view videos can drive more sales than its viral ones when they target the exact buyer.
- Split effort 80/20: repeat proven formats most of the time and keep 20% of uploads exploring the next format before fatigue hits.
Aim at one person, then learn in public.
WHAT TO LEARN
A channel grows when every video serves one person's problem, the idea and packaging get most of your effort, and each upload teaches you something before the next one ships.
02How YouTube decides who sees your video
- The algorithm tests each new video on a small group and widens reach toward whoever responds, so a scattered channel gives it nothing to learn from.
- Define the channel as a specific person with a specific problem rather than a broad niche like business or content creation.
03The one rule every video must follow
- Map your person's journey into about three big obstacles and require every video to address at least one of them.
- If you can't brainstorm 50 or more topics for that person's problem, question whether you're ready to teach it.
- Get variety from formats such as reviews, versus, upgrade ladders and workflow vlogs instead of drifting off topic.
04Spotting formats that are about to take off
- Pick formats from outlier data: videos that beat their own channel's average by several times show what is resonating.
- Filter outliers by recency, view count and long-form length, then remix the format for your own person and problem.
05Breaking into a crowded field
- A saturated topic is a good sign because viewers watch many creators in a genre and the algorithm has data to place you.
- Copying an outlier's exact title, thumbnail and points fails; borrow structure and add your own flavor.
- Build a point of view from what others already say plus your own stories, and only go contrarian where you've earned it.
- Position yourself honestly at your credibility level: results for yourself, results for others, or a method others use.
06Why viral videos aren't about production
- Many breakout channels were shot in a closet or on an iPhone, so production polish is not what makes a video spread.
- If you can't strategize yourself, pay for a strategist or creative director before paying for cameras or editing.
07No editor can save a weak idea
- Each step of idea, packaging, script, film, edit and analytics makes the next one easier or harder, so fix problems upstream.
- With five hours a week, spend them on the idea and packaging, which drive roughly 80% of a video's results.
08The three T's that decide the click
- Treat title, thumbnail and the first 30 seconds as one package, since a click followed by a quick exit hurts the video.
- YouTube's thumbnail tests reward total watch time, so the most-clicked option can lose to one that keeps people watching.
09Making a winning thumbnail
- Generate several title and thumbnail concepts per video and always include one proven format in your A/B test.
- Use AI to remix working formats into a starting point, never to paste your face onto someone else's thumbnail.
- Borrow title and thumbnail patterns from adjacent niches your audience also watches so you look different from direct rivals.
10Stopping clicker's remorse
- Keep the hook under 30 seconds, confirm the promise of the click immediately, and aim for about 70% retention there.
- Packaging creates demand through curiosity; the rest of the video has to supply that demand and exceed it.
11The three S's that make ideas stick
- Explain why something matters before explaining how to do it; people ignore instructions until they see the stakes.
- Deliver the why through a story, a piece of science or data, or a symbol such as an analogy or metaphor.
12The surgeon's checklist before filming
- Prioritize audio, then lighting, then camera, because viewers forgive a dim picture far sooner than bad sound.
- Write a timeout checklist for every shoot so a forgotten SD card or light never wastes a session.
- Teleprompter delivery and off-the-cuff speaking are two separate skills; try both before settling on one.
13Viewers are always looking for a reason to leave
- Edit in reverse of a movie: show flashes of the climax up front because a YouTube viewer has no sunk cost.
- Put the most editing effort into the hook and first act, since only a fraction of viewers reach the ending.
- A consistent set, wardrobe, edit style and packaging makes videos faster to produce and easier to recognize.
14The only three numbers to check
- Use impressions to judge the idea, click-through rate to judge packaging, and retention to judge script, filming and edit.
- Compare against your own channel's trend rather than outside benchmarks, and read metrics by new, casual and regular viewers.
- With more new viewers arriving, reintroduce who you are in every video and make each one stand on its own.
15Why 20 imperfect videos beat one perfect one
- Plan for about 20 videos over a few months; spaced uploads beat one polished video and beat batching before you have skill.
- After each upload, ask what is wrong, why it is wrong and how to fix it, and make the fix your next hypothesis.
16The cheat code: repeating a breakout
- When a video breaks out, drop everything and study it, including what the comments praised and what confused people.
- Check its format, alignment with your business and topic before turning it into a repeatable series.
17Found a format that works? Exploit and explore
- Spend about 80% of uploads repeating what works and 20% testing new formats so a replacement exists before fatigue.
- A breakout only compounds into hockey-stick growth when the back catalog serves the same person and problem.
18Why 400-view videos can drive more sales
- Track revenue per thousand views by topic yourself, because YouTube Studio only shows ad revenue.
- Narrowly targeted videos with a few hundred views can bring more buyers than broad videos with millions of views.
Terms worth knowing.
- Outlier
- A video that performed far better than the average for its own channel, usually shown as a multiple such as 14x. A signal that its idea, title or thumbnail struck something worth studying.
- Format
- The repeatable shape of a video independent of topic, such as a product review, a versus comparison, a tier list, an upgrade ladder or a day-in-the-life vlog.
- Minimum video process (MVP)
- The leanest workflow that still produces videos that reach the right viewer: idea, packaging, script, film, edit, analytics, with most effort placed on the first two.
- Three T's
- The packaging elements a viewer judges before committing: the title, the thumbnail, and the first thirty seconds of the video.
- Clicker's remorse
- The urge to leave a video right after clicking because the opening doesn't confirm the promise of the title and thumbnail. Similar to buyer's remorse after a purchase.
- Impressions
- Every time YouTube shows a video's thumbnail anywhere, such as the home page or suggested sidebar. Rising impressions mean the platform is finding the right audience.
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- The percentage of impressions that become clicks. Single digits are normal; around 10% indicates strong packaging.
- Engaged views
- A newer YouTube distinction separating views where people actually stayed and watched from raw view counts, which raises the importance of the opening.
- Format fatigue
- The point where an audience stops responding to a format that used to work, often after several uploads in a row with falling results.
- Breakout video
- A video that suddenly performs far better than anything else the channel has posted, and the best evidence of what to repeat next.
- Revenue per thousand views
- Business revenue attributed to a video divided by its views in thousands. It shows which topics attract buyers rather than just viewers and has to be tracked outside YouTube Studio.
Things they pointed at.
02:55channelCodie Sanchez
02:55channelGreg Isenberg
05:15channelKallaway
10:50bookRick Rubin (creativity comes from constraints)
23:30channelAlex Hormozi
23:57channelGary Vaynerchuk
24:24bookThe 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss
33:33channelPeter McKinnon, Parker Walbeck, Matt D'Avella (filmmaking tutorials)
34:29channelRyan Trahan
47:54toolCanva
1:10:36channelThe Diary of a CEO (dedicated hook editor)
1:21:15channelAli Abdaal
1:29:09channelAI in Context
1:30:22bookThe First 20 Hours by Josh Kaufman
1:30:51bookOutliers by Malcolm Gladwell (10,000 hours)
Lines you could clip.
03:55
“I say don't pick a niche, pick a problem for a specific person.”
19:24
“There's no such thing as competitor channels on YouTube anymore. They're only collaborators.”
39:43
“Unlike TikToks or Instagram Reels, where it's a scroll and watch platform, YouTube is a click and commit platform.”
51:58
“We usually like to talk about the first 30 second window as clickers remorse.”
1:00:44
“Are you going to continue watching this video now that this audio is so terrible? Probably not.”
1:09:10
“You got to show Thanos fighting Iron Man, like flashes of it in the very first few seconds.”
1:44:18
“Views does not equal revenue. You don't need to go viral in order to grow your business.”
1:45:15
“Many attributed sales in our program have come from videos that got like 500 views.”
Word for word.
Read-along
Don't just watch it. Burn it in.
See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.
metaphoranalogystory
Something like 115 ,000 new YouTube channels launch every single week. With the new monetization update just around the corner, that number is definitely going to climb. But what's working right now is completely different from even stuff that was working just six months ago.
We've grown dozens of YouTube channels. hours sold for a million subscribers and over 100 million views. So if we had to start over in 2027, this is the exact strategy that we would use to build a profitable channel.
So we're going to break this down into three phases. First is strategy, then how to make videos and then how to compound your content.
And so one of the most common pieces of advice is to pick a niche, right? But the reality is that that's a terrible way to start a youtube channel and to understand why we need to look at how the youtube algorithm works think about the youtube algorithm like a dj right this dj's only job is to keep people dancing right in order people dancing you have to keep giving them what they actually like to dance to the problem is if you're a brand new channel you have no data on the channel This DJ doesn't know what kind of music you're going to make and who it should give it to.
And so the first thing that the algorithm does is it's going to test your content with a very small group of people. This is a group that like the DJ tried to put the music in front of. And of these three people here, let's say that just these yellow people, I don't know, we can call these like the hip hop lovers.
They really like that song, right? They're the only ones who really like that song. And so next week you post another track, right?
Another video. And the DJ is going to play that song. And this time, because the DJ saw that, hey, these guys kind of like that video.
Let's sample it with a few more people. Right. And so for video number two, the DJ now tests it with this group right here.
Right. And lo and behold, again, these guys were also yellow people. Again, these hip hop guys, they also kind of like the track.
So we're seeing that there's more yellow people on the dance floor now. The week following that, let's say you post a third video now. And then the DJ kind of has some insight now about who might like this video.
And so they're going to show it immediately to, you know, another group of people at first. And probably it's going to show it to a group of only hip hop lovers. Right.
And this is pretty much the whole game of YouTube right here. The DJ is just trying to make sure it knows who to put your track, your video in front of to keep them dancing because they really like it. YouTube now is much more audience focused, which if you're a consumer of YouTube, this is great, right?
You're always going to be shown the content that you actually want. We're hearing more and more that social media is turning into interest media. You're no longer trying to figure out what videos to make.
You're trying to figure out who you're making it for. From our prior example, right? We've got like the yellow people.
We've got the blue people. We got the red people. They're all interested in business.
But the business niche is huge, right? So for example, we got Cody Sanchez. As a channel, she talks about like what she calls boring businesses.
It's usually like service -based businesses, right? She talks about like laundromats and vending machines and plumbers. And then you got Greg Eisenberg.
He talks about startups. How do you launch a startup? How do you use AI to find startup ideas?
Technically, those are all business topics in a business niche. but it's very different audience right these red people who are interested in startups they could care less about vending machines so what do you do instead of picking a niche then yeah and just just and just to clarify because like i know technically like when you think about niching you are getting more narrow i just think that the term niche is easily confused online and people just take it the wrong way thinking that they're niching down when they're really not clearer way to understand the value of your channel, I say don't pick a niche, pick a problem for a specific person.
It's a lot clearer when you think about those two definitions as what the value proposition of your channel should be. All of these channels, although in the business niche, they are helping a different type of person with a specific problem. And this is like so important, which is why it's like the very first step and the first sub step of that first step is to get clear on the person and the problem.
that you that you help solve because that kind of serves as like the north star for basically every single decision that we're gonna make about growing our channel right and you know even reflecting on our own channel like this one you're watching right now when we committed to a specific person and a specific problem not only did our channel grow a substantial amount we went from like 200k subs to over a million in like six months but our business also grew dramatically too Because when you remove all those decisions about who this is for or what we're doing, then it's really clear that that DJ knows who's going to resonate with this track.
We're in the niche of helping people make money and build business through content creation, right? There's a billion people who do that. Yeah, it's like make money online niche or content creation.
With content, right? And, you know, we got further in thinking about what is our skill set and what are we good at. we hone specifically on okay we're going to use youtube as our platform for helping people create content and build a business that immediately already like weeds out all of all like many of our competitors i remember us thinking through that very problem like we're like dang we're entering this space and we're gonna go head to head with like callaway for example right but when we got really specific on the person we realized that callaway is helping a lot of short form creators talking about instagram and stuff like that and we honed in on people who specifically wanted youtube right and so that that helps a lot but we can even you can go even further than that even more specific yeah so many people want to use youtube right exactly you know if you if you like search on youtube like how to build a business with youtube you're going to find you know there's like how to do it with like a faceless ai automation channel or like um i don't know using it to build a gaming channel or something like that the specifics that we went further with is like we want to help educators
People who have knowledge to share and who have skills and maybe have a body of work or something like that. They want to demonstrate to the world and build a business with that. So the bottom line here is not to think about what videos you're going to make, but who you're going to make it for.
Which is like a great segue actually into kind of the step two of strategy. Now that we know the foundation of like what your channel is, we need to now know what topics are we going to cover on that channel. Now, a lot of people misunderstand that just because you're narrowing in on a person or problem that you're going to run out of like topics to cover.
Yeah, that literally happened to one of our one of our recent clients. So Matt, right. He makes a channel where he talks about music production, talks about filmmaking, and he talks about becoming a creator.
Yeah. So we told them, like, let's get rid of all of this content here. and just focus on one person.
So forget the filmmakers, forget the creators. Let's just talk to music producers. Where basically, you know how you take a magnifying glass and you like zoom in on a person, like looking really deeply into them?
You start to realize that this person, this music producer, they have a lot of problems. They're sad, that's why. They're sad, yeah.
So replace it with a sad face. So now that we're just focusing on music producers, what are all the obstacles? along the way that they're going to face on the journey to becoming a hollywood level music producer so the first thing he said is how to actually make good music right how to make music that people actually listen to cool um the second step he said was how to turn all of that into a workflow like a repeatable process that you can just keep cranking out more music and then the third big obstacle he said was how to get your music in front of the right people Right how to get your music heard by the right people so that you can get it placed and you can make some money I like thinking about content strategy in this way because this means that every single video that you make as long as it fits on the spectrum of Will it actually help this person solve this problem?
Then you have like a thumbs up green light that this is a good video topic to make right and I think of so many people Want to try an experimental piece of content even though it's like about music but if it's not actually helping this person solve a problem that they have then it doesn't count so like you're a music producer right like if i were to ask you like how do you actually make music that is good enough for people to want to listen to okay well you probably have to understand like some basics of like music theory i guess so you can make a video about music theory you probably have to understand like rhythm that's that's something else sure like or like beats you probably understand um you know uh chord structures i don't know so there's a lot of like more technical music theory things that compose songs that actually people listen to knowing like what kind of gear is going to give you the right sound i guess that one's probably pretty good for the second the second piece too like building like a good workflow for music okay yeah well what would you talk about for workflow yeah that would be kind of just like daily habits to to stay creative sure um you know building building a uh a workspace that allows you to produce and create frictionless um with like with less friction yeah um understanding
what software is going to work with your gear and stuff like that. I mean, I am sure that if we just sat here for an hour, you can continue listing topics and you probably come up with like 50 topics, 100 topics. And that's actually kind of a pressure test that I'd recommend everyone do is if you are trying to help this person transform and solve a problem and you actually can't.
come up with topics then ask yourself are you really qualified to help people with that problem this is like probably one of the most important principles about growing a youtube channel is understanding that everything that you make needs to sit on the spectrum of helping a person go from a to b and transforming their life it needs to sit on this trunk right of the tree if you can chunk up just like three big you know obstacles that this person is going to have and just make sure that every video you make at least targets one of these three obstacles then you're good yeah so once you start seeing that all your content can fit into one of these branches a lot of people start pushing back right they start saying like well if i can only make videos about these three branches then i'm still going to be pretty limited on my ideas oftentimes you hit like creative burnout or fatigue it's like i'm sick and tired of making the same content over and over and over talking about the same things doing the exact same you know structure from all my videos and i think this is like where as creatives we have the most room to play in right so you know i think it was like rick rubin who has probably said this a billion times but like
So if you know that like you're only confined to these three branches or these three big problems you can solve, what are all the unique ways that you can create content within those constraints? And that's where creativity really comes through. Right.
And so this is like this is and this is where we get to the idea of creating different formats for your content. What are all the different formats of videos that you can talk about gear? Right.
And so maybe one video is like, yeah, I'm just going to break down. Like, I'm just going to do a review of, who knows, like a product review of the new, I don't know, Arturia Mini Freak, right? You're just going to break down this piece of gear.
That might be good for you. That's like one format. You can just like do a product breakdown, right?
But what if you also want to do like a very common format, like a versus format? Let me compare the Mini Freak versus the MicroCore or something like that. Which one's better for you?
It's still on branch because it's helping someone who's deciding what kind of work they want to do. But you're given a different flavor now. The kind of format that you can do.
Or you can do like I review Rick Rubin's setup. Or like I review Jay -Z versus Jay Cole's mic. Yeah.
Or something like that. Exactly. Like the versus format is awesome for this kind of stuff.
Another one that we like a lot is not just a versus, but we call it an upgrade. So it's like building a workflow for $5 or $100 or $1 ,000. Like using a different setup, an incrementally increasing budget or something like that.
Or another common one is that people always want to do is a vlog, right? A vlog actually works on this branch if it's like I vlogged. my entire workflow throughout the day showing you how i how i think about my decisions and how i'm actually making music right like there are basically an unlimited amount of formats that you can do and remix together to still deliver on the value even if it's on like one of these sub branches down here yeah but having so many different formats can be pretty overwhelming so like how would you actually find the formats that you should use for your channel yeah i definitely wouldn't just guess and just do a format that you think might work One of our core pillars in how we operate is to use data.
We come from the world of medicine, so evidence -based approaches are always our favorite. And so what kind of data can you find that informs you this is a format that'll work for your channel? And one of the best ways to actually get that data is to use certain software or tools that can analyze YouTube videos for you.
Which kind of brings us to the sponsor of today's video. So let's go ahead and pull up 1 of 10 here. So when you first log into 1 of 10, you're immediately going to see the presentation of all the most recent outliers, right?
All these trending outliers. An outlier is a video that performs better than the average for that channel. For example, this video here, Best AI Coding Tools for Developers in 2026.
It has an outlier score of 14x. So if you hover your cursor over that, that means that this video performed 14 times better for that channel. versus all the other content.
That's evidence that there was something special about this particular video, whether it's title, thumbnail, or I don't know, something about it that worked. Even if you're not like in that specific, like, you know, industry, right? And we talked about like the specific person, specific problem.
Let's say that you're Matt, you're a music producer. And you can say, okay, how can I remix this format for my channel? Right?
So it's like, maybe I can do best, you know, music plugins working in 2026 for music producers. that's a format we're stealing the format that worked really well and you can kind of just use it for your own for your own content and all this outlier data that you see here it's actually not provided by youtube right and so one of ten what they do is they aggregate all these numbers together and they give you this outlier score and what we recommend pretty much everyone do is to go and download the one of ten plugin for youtube it's completely free what that does is it will show this new dashboard next to the videos where it'll give you all this deeper insight on the video's analytics and performance and this is not your channel right these are these are other channels on youtube and so if you go to let's say code evolutions library you can actually see like their there's their previous video was a 7 out of 10 for them or the video before that was a 4 out of 10.
So you can actually see how well their videos perform relative to their own videos. So a couple of things that I like to do, first of all, when you find a video, let's say like this one, for example, that you did like, if you click on the dots next to it, there's different options for finding similar topics to it or similar thumbnails to it if that's what you really like.
So I'm going to click on similar topics. And you can see a whole bunch of other channels have also borrowed this exact same format for their channel. So I also like to use the filters at the top here.
where you can really like filter out by like, what's the outlier score that you want? Let's say anything above three. How many views these videos actually have?
I like to look at things that have a lot of views just to see like if there's a lot more signal, you know, and then how recent the videos actually were. So let's say the last year or so. I don't really care about duration and I only want to see like long form videos, right?
So apply changes and you can also just continue refining your search to find what are the things that are working right now. but i do really want to highlight like one more thing about them that's really really cool which is directly aligned with what we're talking about in terms of formats before is in the sidebar they actually are releasing a new feature called trending formats and so if you click on this one this is like gold for anyone who's like trying to build a channel strategy right now they have done the research to find multiple examples of different formats that are working across different industries and they even give you the exact title structure that you might want to use for that right so for example let's look at you know this one right here right but like the number levels of things explained that is a tier list format right and they're showing you right now this format is picking up steam again in the last last few weeks of august and so right now if you want to jump on this
format. Rising 4 .1x. Right.
So this format is now kind of rising in popularity. It kind of took a dip, I guess, over summer, but it's kind of gaining popularity again. So if you want to check out a tool that's like always studying the latest meta of YouTube, we highly recommend you check it out.
You can check out our special link below and you can try out one of 10 for 30 days for just a single dollar. All right. So now we know like the foundation of our channel.
We know what kind of topics are going to work and what are those like, you know, formats maybe I want to try. but there's one more crucial piece of strategy that you have to nail in and this is the one that i think matters honestly more than both of these if you actually want your channel to gain traction and if you want to differentiate yourself in this space because the reality is all smart creators are going to do some form of this strategy that we're talking about so far and so what are you going to do to stand out but we're entering an era of youtube now where saturation can actually be your advantage i mean let me ask you a question right um what is the last genre of music that you listen to?
I mean, I can pull up on my phone. It's probably EDM. Okay.
Probably Deep House, if I know you. Yeah, the last artist I listened to was Bonobo. Okay.
Is that the only Deep House artist that you listen to? No, of course not. Absolutely not, right?
Yeah. Think about yourself for all the viewers out there. When you like a genre, you are listening not just to one person.
You are listening to multiple people in that same genre. And so it is to your benefit that any genre needs to be saturated because you want to always be discovering new artists all the time, right? And it's the exact same way with YouTube.
Yeah, I think saturation indicates that there is a lot of interest. Yeah. You know, if you are in such a small pocket of the internet where there's literally no one there, then obviously you're not going to get discovered.
Because it's too small. And so if your industry that you're trying to play in has a lot of players, it's a good thing. Because that means the algorithm is more likely to have the data to put your content in front of the right person.
Right? Like our goal is to show up next to some of the bigger creators in the space. Right?
Like if our content gets shown next to our competitors, that's a good thing. Right? Yeah.
I mean, that takes us to the next point. Is that... There are no competitors on YouTube.
We're entering an era now where competitors don't even matter. Yeah. And again, it comes back to this analogy, right?
Like if you like hip hop, then you are listening to Jay -Z and J. Cole, right? It's not you're listening to Jay -Z instead of J.
Cole. There's no such thing as competitor channels on YouTube anymore. They're only collaborators.
But that brings up a very important strategy. is that how do you actually break through into a field full of collaborators? Typically, the smartest way to learn and the fastest way to learn is to steal.
To steal like an artist? I guess so. The fastest way you're going to learn music, I'll just use music, for example, if I were to learn music starting over, maybe that's what this video is supposed to be about, if I was to learn how to play the piano in the fastest way possible, what i would do is just try to play songs from pianists or musicians that i like right i would do covers but odds are if i were to cover let's say like i don't know a justin bieber song or something that it's not going to sound like him yeah i'm not going to sound as good as him and it's not going to be played the exact same way and that is kind of like a cheat code for for youtube right here like imitate to learn the skills but in doing that you're going to discover that you have a different flavor right and this is the same thing with music when you listen to someone like i don't know i mentioned because he's blowing up right now but like fred again is like one of the most there's like one of the most popular djs and musicians on youtube right now and in the past year there have been so many like similar fred again like artists that are popping up yeah but all of them have like a slightly different flavor to them and i like all of them too you know but it's the people who try to copy him too closely the exact beat the exact
Sounds that uses the exact melodies that he uses those videos on YouTube will fail Right, and this is like a concept that I've I've tried to get a lot of people to understand If you directly steal the title the thumbnail the points in a video, why would anyone? give your video which is literally like a copycat dupe a Chance versus the original that's already an outlier and it's already winning right like no one no one's gonna give your video a shot And I would say that the majority of people who try like what we're talking about, like borrowing outliers and formats, they do this approach and they fail.
But tactically, how do you actually make this happen? Let's say a new artist who's basically entering the genre, right? Let's say this is the hip hop genre and got a newcomer here.
This person is going to be taking beats. borrowing beats from like the old like the old legends right like maybe taking a making taking a chord progression here or taking like a sample there and then making their own song and then rapping on top of that yeah right that that would be like how they would tactically do it on youtube we're talking about youtube is a conversation right it's a conversation it's a it's a town hall right it's a it's a place where people come and share their ideas Right.
So let's say we are coming into the conversation here and we want to teach people about content creation and YouTube. And we also want to help people build personal brands, grow their business. And so there are all these other people here talking about business and talking about branding.
Like we have to actually join the conversation and contribute to that conversation. I think there's two things that you want to do. to make sure that you enter in a very tasteful way that actually allows you to stand out the first thing you want to do is look outward like we were talking about before you want to gather inspiration and understand what are all of these people who are already there talking about you want to know what their opinions are what their perspectives are so you don't come in and just be a copycat understand who you're getting into the arena with on the other side you also want to look internally what are your own stories right and what are your experiences um and what are your interests i guess interests as well what are the things internally that you can now reflect on and come up with your own perspective right so we had we had alex hormozy over here saying like you just got to do more better volume volume like just do as much as possible right just eat crap endure the pain and just pump out content and the next time you have like
you know gary vaynerchuk who's talking about like hustle for for years like you gotta hustle for 20 years like oh you're 50 years old you're still young right you can still hustle for many more years but then now we got a guy who enters the chat um his name is tim ferris right and he's like yeah i hustled all my life i've worked really hard but i realized that i only have to work four hours a week to achieve what you guys are talking about And then lo and behold, we have the four hour work week, which is a book that has impacted so many people.
And so what we see is that he actually entered with a contrarian opinion. And I think having a contrarian opinion to the mainstream is a fast way to stand out. Yeah, it's a classic saying of if everyone's turning right, then you should turn left.
Yeah, if everyone's zigging, then you're zagging, basically. But I think there's another caveat to that being there's no right or wrong. right like everybody who joins the conversation with the pov is going to win because you are going to attract people who have a similar experience who maybe share a similar story to you and they have that same belief right and so you're going to build a following like that yeah and then everyone who doesn't agree with your point of view is going to go to one of the other guys and that's totally fine yeah i mean so there is no right or wrong answer but there is a true or false answer Right.
There is an answer where there is a point of view that is authentic to who you are And there's a point of view where oh you're just like coming up with you're just trying to be contrarian For the sake of stirring up, you know, you're stirring up rage in people, right? That is not the way to approach. Yeah, and that's and that's it.
Of course Yeah, like you don't want to just go out there and just like spread lies And for the sake of spreading lies, because then you'll build a brand of mistrust and scamminess, which is, again, why I think it's very important to also do these steps over here about digging into your story, your experiences, and your interests.
Because this is what crafts your point of view. And if you really don't have a point of view on the industry that you're trying to get into, then maybe you're not ready to build a strong brand yet. And what you need to do is go out there and get more experiences so that you develop a point of view.
Or start really analyzing your stories and trying to extract things that change your beliefs and change your mind about certain things. We have developed our brand and our taste and what we believe in over the course of seven years. When we started our YouTube channel, we had spent 10 years in academia and becoming doctors.
So those are the lived experiences we brought to our content. And I have to harp on this because there are many people who want to build a channel in 2027 who think that they can skip this step and build something successful. It's very difficult if you don't have like an authentic point of view to do that.
Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, being contrarian to the mainstream is the fastest way to stand out, but it's also arguably, it's also the hardest way to stand out. And when I say hard, I mean like you have to be contrarian.
in a way that you have earned so the only way to be contrarian is you actually have to go out into the world and serve people and get reviews and testimonials and results and case studies because only through serving people and and you know being hands -on with people are you actually going to notice patterns that are different from the norm and only only then can you speak to those patterns when we first started out teaching youtube and content i felt like our our our methods were very similar to other people in the space but then as we started getting like very hands -on with our coaching clients and actually running running full operations for for other youtube channels we started to understand how our person and problem was very different from the rest of the industry And so now we actually have very strong opinions on certain things when it comes to YouTube.
For example, we're just working on a video about faceless AI channels, which is, I don't know. At this point, I would say it's probably one of the most common types of channels now, I would dare say, because it's so easy to start. But we have a very strong opinion on that.
And it wouldn't have developed if we didn't actually work with... people who are trying to build a personal brand. And with personal brand means you show up with your face and you show up in front of people like the way you speak and how you dress and in the ideas that you talk about.
And you put all that accountability on yourself as a personal brand that is completely opposite from a faceless channel. Yeah. And so those things only come from proof of work.
If you are struggling to find a point of view or like a contrarian way that you do things, odds are you just haven't been in this space long enough. you know? And then again, like there's nothing wrong with that.
Actually. You just have to understand where you are, what level you are, and then work your way up slowly. It's this principle called positioning, right?
If you, for example, don't have the credibility and proof behind you, you should not position yourself as I know everything. I'm the expert, right? Yeah.
Position yourself as someone who is just starting out. We call these growers, right? People who are just getting into this space.
Maybe they're you know, they're starting to explore and learning for the first time. The content in this, the formats that you try, the titles that you use don't make it seem like you are this guru who's super successful.
I think like the best way to build your brand is to be truthful about what you know, what you believe in, where you currently are, because people will can fish out scamminess faster than anything, especially nowadays when one A .I. slop is like top of mind. Everyone in comments, even if it's not A .I.
slop. they're like sussing out is this ai slop or not there are three levels of credibility that you can have level one is you have achieved a result for yourself right you did something yourself so if it's like you're building a channel about weight loss or something then like i lost like 50 pounds or i got in really good shape right that is personal credibility the lowest level of it i would still put you in like the grower phase because you're you got the result yourself but like Understanding that this is a game where you're helping other people, helping other people solve problems, you haven't really done that for someone else yet.
Which leads me to number two, one level above that is you've gotten results for someone else.
You have helped someone now lose weight, right? There's a lot more credibility that you can put and show receipts for if you've gotten transformations for other clients or for a certain amount of people, right? And the more views you have of that, then it's like, yeah, that's...
that's now leveling you up for the second round, right? But there is a third level of this where I think the gurus actually sit. And this one here is if you've helped someone else get results for someone else.
Now we're talking about like licensing models, like selling a methodology, selling a framework or a protocol that's been validated to work and you don't even have to be involved in it. Someone else can use that to help get results. It would be like, yeah i mean for the weight loss world it would be someone who came up with the keto diet and then they just spawned like tons of other youtube channels talking about keto diet right or you know someone's specific way of implementing paleo diet you know and that's gotten results for coaches you know like you're training coaches to coach other people now like that's like the level above i mean for us we started off just being successful at youtube ourselves And then we got to a point where we've gotten success for a bunch of other channels.
And then now we're at a stage where we're basically building out this model to train up creative directors. And we are now fractional creative directors into a bunch of other channels. And so we're moving up the ladder progressively so that we can make a bigger impact.
Right. And these are the things that take time, though. I think that most people fall off building brands somewhere between here.
because they realize getting results for yourself and then translating that to someone else is not easy like there are so many variables that are not that are not counted for when you're just doing it yourself yeah right you know like when we started it's like why can't you just do what i just did and there's like a bajillion reasons i didn't even think of that stood in the way of someone else getting the results as me and so until you like work with enough people to understand oh these are the things that actually matter that is where your perspective comes into play.
Because you've now done the work and gotten the results, you have now something better to make better content with. And that's how you're going to differentiate yourself, which is like a very key piece to making sure that your content strategy actually works. So that kind of wraps up strategy.
We know exactly the foundation of the channel, what kind of videos we're going to make and how we're going to differentiate ourselves. The next step obviously is we have to make the content. So we're entering now phase two of the whole system, which is the production.
a lot of people get kind of frozen about putting themselves out there like i don't want to i don't want to put content out there that makes me look amateur like if i can just pay someone to just make me look great out the gate then i'm going to do that what's the problem with that i wouldn't necessarily say like putting money and investing money into creating good content is the problem.
It's more so the way that they invest that money. I remember like all the videos that you were watching when we first started was like, you know, Peter McKinnon tutorials or like Parker Walbeck, like Matt D 'Avella, like how to set up a good shot and all that stuff. Grab my Lutz.
Because we thought that was like what mattered. And it's a common mistake because people think YouTube is a video platform. I have to invest in videos.
I think this is just something that a lot of people misunderstand about how social media and YouTube works. Like on any platform. Some of the most viral videos, some of the videos that have gotten the most attention, if you study those videos, they're not always the best looking ones.
And they're not always the most highly produced ones, right? Like very famously on YouTube right now, I mean, we talk about him a lot, but Alex Hormozy blew up on YouTube when he was recording videos in a closet. Ryan Trahan, one of the biggest creators right now still in the world, records most of his videos with an iPhone and a lap mic.
that tells us that production quality is not what matters. I mean, I will push back and say production quality does very much matter, but if it has no substance, then it's an empty promise, right? You're just having a fancy wrapper with like nothing good inside of it.
You need both, but to start, you want the substance first. And so if we were starting over as, you know, founders or business owners who don't have YouTube experience, the smartest way to invest your money into getting your channel started is actually to invest in a strategist, a strategist or a creative director, right?
If you're not gonna be your own strategist, then you need to invest in one before you invest in production. Like some people will show me a video of like, you know, this Whisperflow founder just blew up on YouTube or Greg Lav, you know, the founder of Bloom just blew up on YouTube. I'm like, yeah, because they paid like a really expensive creative director to do that for them.
They paid the strategist, not just the video editing. I mean, we did that with our second channel. Right.
Like we got monetized on that channel in like less than eight videos. And so let's let's go a bit deeper into our process here. Right.
And so if anyone is considering working with a YouTube strategist, maybe us or someone else like this is what they're probably going to do for you. And if they're not going to show you what we're about to show you, then they probably don't have the skill set that you're looking for. All right.
So regardless of what kind of channel, what kind of brand you're building doesn't matter at all. You're always going to run through the exact same six steps to create a video. Right.
That's coming up with the video idea. which we've spent an enormous amount of time already talking about earlier in this video. Then it's packaging for your videos, which we say are the three Ts, your title, your thumbnail, and your first 30 seconds of your video.
Then we move on to script writing. And then we have filming, editing. And then finally, the one that many people ignore, studying your analytics.
Now, if you're working with a creative director, they need to have an intimate and deep understanding of every one of these steps to coordinate the right people. to execute on them at the highest level. The steps that we just listed out here in order, these are the same steps that someone is going to experience your content as they consume it.
And so what happens in this exact order is that the DJ or the YouTube algorithm is going to actually put the video in front of your target viewer, right? So if it's an idea that they're not even interested in, then it's not even going to match their algorithm. It's not even going to show up on their feed, right?
You won't even get an impression. Yeah, that's what we call an impression. So once they see the video, then the next thing is they're gonna have to make a decision.
Should I even click on this video? So the title and thumbnail need to be packaged in such a way to win that click. Once your viewer clicks into the video, your video needs to have such good storytelling and scripting that it retains them throughout the video.
Because remember, most people don't finish watching an entire video all the way through. A lot of people will fall off. If your script retains them, But you as a person, you show up and you're just terrible on camera or you have you have bad audio, which is my major pet peeve.
Then they're still going to leave no matter how good the story is or the script is. And then likewise, too, like if the video editing is pretty terrible, then they're going to want to leave as well. Right.
All of these happen in an order where the previous step informs the next step. And very importantly, you missed the last one. If you are not studying your analytics, you are not going to get that full rep and cycle of learning.
to know, are you actually improving in your content? And so knowing that that's the order of like consumption and the order that you make your videos, we can start to prioritize what are the most important parts of this process. And so that's why we like to to draw the shape.
And this is hopefully to scale with like the importance of each step, right? So the video idea is more important than the packaging is more important than the production and the editing. And not only is this the order of consumption, it's also going to be the workflow that creates the most efficient and the strongest content for your brand.
If the idea for the content isn't very strong, it's going to be really hard for your team to package that video, right? It's like, what is this? How am I going to be?
I don't even know. Right. If you have poor packaging because you don't know what the video is going to be about and what's going to package like, it's going to be hard to write a script because like, what are you what are you writing a script for?
If you have a bad script, it's going to be hard to film the content because you can be rambling. You're going to be talking in circles. It's going to be frustrating.
You might spend hours filming that content. If you have a bad recording. your editor is going to hate you because it's going to be like like sifting through footage and cutting out you know a lot of you know mistakes and you know finding corrupted audio b -roll and stuff like that you know so everything that you do up front informs and makes the next step easier in the process too so let's say that you're a really busy person maybe you have a whole company to run and you don't have a lot of time maybe you only have like less than five hours a week let's say how are you going to allocate those hours into this process what are the small inputs that will give you the most outputs right like most return for the smallest effort it would be these two up here right the idea of the video and the packaging of the video is going to dictate 80 of the video's performance and so even though there's a lot of other steps here scripting and editing they notoriously take the most time
right they can take weeks or even months to edit a video that's only 20 of the importance of the video and this is like specific to youtube as well yeah because youtube is the only social media platform that requires you to create a title and a thumbnail for your videos before someone consumes the content and so you know unlike tick tocks or instagram reels and stuff where it's a scroll and watch platform as people call it youtube is not that youtube is a as we call it if your audience does not click on your video it doesn't matter what you do afterwards you could say the most life -changing groundbreaking cure cancer ideas in the back half of your video if no one clicked it they don't get to they don't get that value anyways and so that's why like that strategist who's making sure that the dj is going to put that video in front of the right person and make sure that's clickable That's why it's so important.
So if I was your strategist, right? Or if I were your creative director, let's say, and you are someone who's really busy, you have no time and you're just trying to run your company. How do we design a video process that optimizes for this?
The 80 -20 of what makes a video successful. And that is what we call the MVP. which stands for minimum video process.
Yeah, it's actually, this is something that we picked up from the startup world because our first company was a tech startup. All startups focus first on launching an MVP, a minimum viable product, because their whole goal is to just try to get their product in front of users and get feedback to know, is this actually worth putting more investment and dollars into?
And they have to know, what are they actually trying to build here? That same idea applies to YouTube channel. Your videos are your product.
We need to design a minimum video process to create videos that require the least amount of investment from you that generate the highest amount of return, which is reaching that right person, focusing on a good strategy. I mean, yeah, you bringing up our startup days brings up a lot of sad memories. We did the exact thing that you shouldn't do, right?
We hire like a ton of developers to come in and build a product. that was not even validated yet we didn't even test to see if people even wanted it and so we had no mvp go out spent tons of dollars in the wrong places um and ultimately wasted a lot of money i mean our ultimate goal here is to find a process where we can get out as much content as possible because each content is a data point the youtube algorithm needs multiple data points to be able to understand your channel so this was still a pretty high level overview let's now What do you say?
Go deeper into all of these steps. I'm going to skip idea because we just spent like the first, you know, half an hour of this this this video talking about the idea already. Hopefully you guys already understand the format and strategy for finding good ideas for YouTube right now.
So let's let's move into packaging next to packaging. We want to think about three T's the title, the thumbnail and the first 30 seconds of your video. I mean, for a very long time, it was just title and thumbnail.
But I think now more important than ever. 30 seconds needs to be part of the part of the packaging because what we're seeing from a lot of our data that we're studying is that just because you win a click it doesn't mean that the person is going to commit so you have to click to click on the video and commit to watching the video if you click on the video and then you bounce immediately that actually sends a negative signal to the algorithm.
Maybe this video was just not for the right person and I showed it to the wrong people. Or like maybe this video is actually really bad and I don't want to watch it. Or maybe this video is setting up some kind of expectation in the title and thumbnail.
Like, hey, this video is going to teach you how to grow on YouTube. You click on it and the first 30 seconds teaches you how to grow on TikTok or something. So that's clickbait, especially with the new YouTube update.
There's now a delineation between engaged views versus views, right? Making the hook more important than ever.
I mean, YouTube has given us the data about what it cares about, which is why, like, when you do any kind of split testing for your titles and thumbnails on YouTube, the metric that it actually optimizes for is watch time, not click -through rate, not impressions, not retention. It's watch time overall, which makes sense, right?
Because for YouTube as a business, they make the most money when people are watching longer. What we're seeing is that if there's three tests right like we got a a b c test here we've got three different thumbnails that that we're running a test on maybe thumbnail a got clicked on the most but the people who clicked on thumbnail a didn't watch for very long whereas thumbnail c got clicked on the least but the people who clicked on that they stayed the longest so if you think about just the title and thumbnail in isolation then you're just thinking about the click you're just thinking about how do i just get people to click but you have to actually fulfill on the promise so now that we understand the importance of all this stuff let's get like deeper even into each of these elements right here like what makes a good title good thumbnail and a good first 30 seconds right and again we could probably spend an entire hour talking about each of these individually maybe even more we're going to give a bit more like tactical high high level strategy just for this right now the smartest way to do your packaging is aligned pretty much with our whole philosophy about everything
You want to use data to drive the decision -making behind the title and the thumbnail. So again, calling back to 1 and 10, an amazing tool for this. When you're studying those formats that we saw before, look at what title structures they're using.
If they're using shorter titles, if they're using certain words or phrasing, try experimenting with those phrases in your content. Same thing with thumbnails. Look at the thumbnails that are already overperforming.
What's the composition? How do they craft their emotions, the colors they're using, and just see how can you adapt that for your content too. The best way to learn is to first understand the principles behind what's working, and then you can start to iterate for yourself.
We can flash an example on the screen here of our entire... title and thumbnail catalog that we use internally for our channel. Like we've done so much A -B testing that we've figured out which are the winning thumbnail formats, for example.
And so whenever we create a new video, we always make sure to include at least one of those proven winners as one of the A -B tests. But all those thumbnail formats, we didn't just come up with out of thin air. We can trace back each of those thumbnails to like multiple prior inspirations that we took from we studied other channels and borrowed what worked from those channels and crafted our thumbnails based on it and so when you're strategizing each video remember how important the packaging is right it's the 80 20 of this something that you need to get in the habit of doing is generating multiple titles and multiple thumbnail concepts for each video that you make right because the more ideas you can get out there you're going to get through some of the bad ones eventually the good ones will come up a mistake is just picking one title and making one thumbnail and being like, all right, I think it's good.
You know, like you want you like I think some creators even go down as far as to say, you know, come up with like 50 ideas for titles for one video or like I think Patti Galloway said for something because sometimes it has like 100 title ideas for one video. You know, if you know, if your full job is a strategist and sure, you can go that level.
But like that, the whole point is the more ideas for titles, thumbnails that you can generate. the better the combinations you're going to find are. Now, thumbnails specifically have always been a huge challenge for almost every single YouTube channel that I've worked with because learning how to design thumbnails, it's a different art and skill than like a typical graphic designer.
And also like not just knowing the psychology about like how to make a thumbnail. Oftentimes, the actual process of making the thumbnails requires knowledge of a specific software, right? Like a Canva or Photoshop or something like that.
To this day, I still don't know how to use Photoshop. Right. We use Canva for all of ours.
We've always used Canva to generate all the thumbnails basically that you see in this video. But in the past recent years, you know, AI tools have gotten very, very good. Yeah.
I mean, I think there's a right way and a wrong way to use AI. I think the wrong way to use AI is to just copy someone else's thumbnail. Like basically plagiarizing someone's thumbnail.
Like, hey. Take this Alex Hormozy thumbnail and replace his face with my face. And now you have a thumbnail.
I mean, so many people do that, though. Yeah. It's so obvious.
Yeah. I mean, people are smart nowadays. When they see that, they're probably not going to click on the video.
Like if it's obviously AI. I think a better way to use it is to brainstorm, to remix different formats that work and then give yourself a starting point. Then once you finish that, you can take it into a Canva or Photoshop.
and then you can make it your own and so we're talking about the mvp for thumbnails here again you don't want to just come up with thumbnail ideas from scratch like from the top of your head you want to base them off of proven data right like what are the thumbnails that are already working for other channels and you want to take the best parts that resonate with you remix them and then create your own style right and so again this is where we're tools like one of ten would come in handy because one of 10 shows you all the trending thumbnail formats that are working on youtube right now so just like how there are video formats right there's like reviews and tier lists and explainers and listicles there are also thumbnail formats there's like before and after thumbnail there's like the roadmap thumbnail we see a lot in our industry right like steps one two three Looking back at one of the trending formats on YouTube right now, the seven levels of whatever, seven levels of Darth Vader, you can see that there's clearly a thumbnail format that uses like this rainbow motif to show you like the wide spectrum of the seven levels of whatever it is in your industry.
So if you're going to make a video like that, I would base your thumbnail on that winning formula already to save yourself a lot of time. If I can give like one very, very, practical and also important rule for packaging your videos be very very careful not to pull those from direct competitors or competitors who are too close to your space but the same reason i said before if if if if you post a video with the same thumbnail format the same title next to i don't know someone else who's really famous like alex hormozy and you copy the same thing why are people going to watch your video it doesn't look different enough It doesn't seem like it's going to be providing new value in your industry.
And so a smarter way that we'd like to do this, look for thumbnail and title patterns outside of your immediate competitor list. What are some adjacent topics or adjacent industries that your audience is probably also watching? Let's say that your specific transformation is helping people lose weight again.
We'll go back to that example.
content about losing weight, they're probably going to be interested also in content about eating healthier, right? Preparing healthy meals or maybe like productivity hacks to like sleep better or like they're probably into self -improvement in some way or maybe into philosophy. So looking at those niches for certain formats that are working and then pulling those into your content, we want to zig and zag appropriately.
You're still borrowing and using proven data points, but now you look different in the industry. Yeah. And that's how you're going to stand out.
And finally, let's just round off packaging and talk about the first 30 seconds, a .k .a. the hook of your video. Right.
And kind of as the name implies it, what you want to do is keep it really, really short. Generally, within the first 30 seconds of your video, if you can get it shorter than that, you're doing really well. I mean, I know we haven't edited this video yet, but I can almost guarantee you that the hook for this video is going to be 30 seconds or less.
There's a reason why the YouTube analytics measures the first 30 seconds of your video. Right. YouTube is telling you what it wants you to optimize for.
Yeah. Right here. We usually like to talk about the first 30 second window as clickers remorse.
Right. Kind of like buyer's remorse where like when you buy when you buy a product at the store, you have 30 days to make up your mind whether you want to return it or you want to keep it. Right.
And sometimes when people. buy something and they don't like it they return it immediately they have really high buyer's remorse so you want to do the same thing here is like once you once someone clicks on your video you need to confirm the click you need to make sure that you reduce any degree of remorse possible because naturally what will happen is human nature is that most people will probably leave your video if you look at any video right The first 30 seconds usually does not have 100 % retention.
You'll probably see a number like 50%, 70%, whatever. And I would shoot for a 70 % retention and you're pretty good, right? That is like the 80 -20 of the hook.
I don't think we'll get too deep into any kind of like hook tactics and writing patterns at all in this video. If there's one thing that I would say, like the packaging, all of this up front here, all three of these together, the overall goal is to generate demand for the video it is to create such a open loop or curiosity gap that people have no choice but to continue watching and consuming the content so everything up to packaging is just generating demand for consuming the content and then everything we do afterwards from the script to the end is supplying that demand giving them exactly what they want and then exceeding those expectations which actually segues us perfectly into script writing um like i said the whole goal of scripting now is how do we supply this demand that we just generated how do we make sure that all the questions all the open loops all the curiosity that we generated from this is actually delivered on and so script writing really is like i say it's script writing because technically like it's words on a page that you're remembering but like really it's just more storytelling right how do you craft copywriting or language that keeps people on the edge of their seat and wanting to know what comes next
It's really an art imbalance of withholding information and then revealing information and then withholding information and then revealing information. That's what keeps people engaged. So the obvious question is like, how do you write scripts that hold attention, that create that push -pull, right?
And just to keep it super simple, this is actually something that I learned from like being a doctor in medicine about how you relay information to patients in a way that they actually walk away and understand what you're talking about. It's a pretty simple principle and I like it. It's just two steps.
Whenever you're telling a story or you're going through like a different point in the video, you just want to make sure you do why before how. That's it. It's so simple, but so powerful.
Like I remember. walking through like with my patients, I had a lot of diabetics who would come into our clinic and I would just teach them like, hey, this is how you take out your syringe and you've got to pull out this much CCs of insulin and you've got to inject it. You've got to grab a piece of fat and inject it in your arm.
And like, I can kind of tell like this information is just kind of glazing over them. They don't, they're not going to do this. Like you need to take these pills at 9am and 12pm.
Like they're not really listening. But when I start with a story, i will tell like you know mr j like hey you know what if you don't take your medicine what's going to happen is that your blood sugar is going to run into dangerous levels you could potentially cut off circulation to parts of your body like your feet for example your eyes for example and if you keep missing your medicine you could go blind right like one of the most common reasons why people go to the eye doctor is because of diabetes so you don't want to let your disease get to that level or it's that serious so that is why you should take out the syringe then draw three cc's and then inject it into like once i under once you explain why then they're now leaning in and they're listening to the how right because they actually care because actually is relevant to them i love that it's like if people don't understand why then they won't care about how it's done that's that yeah it's it's as simple as that and if you always have that in the back of your mind about how you're telling a story
you will keep retention and people will actually like it's not just about retention it's in your interest and it's actually serving them better because they will actually remember it and they will actually understand what you're talking about you know like this is a principle that we learned that saves lives tactically what do you do yeah tactically how are you going to make sure people know why right and for us i like we again we love threes um it's a simple 3s framework for deciding how are you going to get people to care about your videos.
And the three S's are, you can either tell a story, you can use science to back up your claims, or you can use symbolism, some kind of analogy or metaphor or simile, right? So let's just use that story again of the patient, right? If you have someone with diabetes, it's unmanaged, they're not really taking their medicine.
If you walk in as a doctor and you're like, look, bro, like I had a patient last week who we just amputated his leg. He was just like you. He had a family and kids.
His diabetes was unmanaged for this matter time He couldn't make it, you know, we had to take his leg off. Do you like do you want that to be you? Right if you started with that story, he's probably gonna be like oh shit I should probably take my medicine and do this, right?
Yeah, right another way you can go in there We can add this on there. You'd be like walk in you can be like look man this the the Journal of the American Association of Diabetes The AIDA just put out the study. We're like 82 % of people at your exact stage in diabetes are experiencing these kinds of results.
They only live for a few more years. The comorbidities they have are like this severe. Like that's what the data shows us right now.
He's going to be like, oh crap, I'm a statistic. Yeah. I don't want to be, I don't, I don't want, I'm going to take my medicine now.
Exactly. Right. That's science.
That's, that's, that's important. That's doing the science approach to pull data or studies into it. In the symbolism one, I might walk in to tell my patients like, you know, how you have credit cards and you usually spend your credit cards on you know big purchases and they always give the option to like pay like the minimum uh the minimum amount every single month and you don't realize but like if you're doing that you're just paying more uh interest or what is it not my interest but like yeah your monthly payments are just going to be are just going to start accruing and stacking up right and so your interest compounds and then eventually you're paying more and more and more until you can't afford to pay anything anymore and then now what they're going to come after your your assets and your home right yeah that's pretty much exactly what's happening with your in your body right now if we don't get this you know your your blood sugar and your your your your condition managed eventually your body is going to like give out and then when that happens what what happens when they give out they're going to come after you which means we have to cut off your leg potentially come after your legs off your legs it's going to come after your eyes you know so like do you want that to happen no obviously like okay so take your medicine
Start with that in the content and then now they're gonna lean in and really want to know okay How are how how am I gonna fix this problem? All right and hopefully that you guys are you know to break the fourth wall have been noticing how we've been doing that as We've been explaining and teaching all of these these lessons along the way, right?
Okay, so let's move on to film This is basically you press and record and delivering the video on camera, right? And so what has to happen for you to film is you actually have to have equipment You have to build a studio, but you can go down a rabbit hole of just obsessing over, do I buy this camera or that camera or, you know, this mic versus that mic?
And all of a sudden you're no longer MVPing. You're just like, you know, trying to chase perfectionism. So for us, we just like to think about the very simple framework that comes from the Hollywood world, lights, camera, action, but you replace action with audio.
You need to have lights, right? You don't want to be shooting in the dark. You need to have a camera.
And nowadays, like even your phone is usually good enough. And then probably the most important, I wish I could put a in the very front. The most important is audio.
Like even right now we can demonstrate like how important audio is. Like we'll just have our video editor turn off the video or just like turn off all the lights. And you can still hear us speaking.
You can still hear us teaching these frameworks. Like you're probably still watching. You're probably still listening.
But now let's say we'll have the video editor distort the sound, switch the audio away from this mic and over to like the camera audio. Like there's a whole, it's like a whole change in experience, right? Like, are you going to continue watching this video now that this audio is so terrible?
Probably not, right? Like that's one of my biggest pet peeves. If you're going to invest in any equipment, Consider the audio first, which is very counterintuitive because this is a video first platform.
But audio is actually how you communicate your knowledge to someone else. At the end of the day, we're teaching people something. And you can't teach people unless you communicate with them.
The order is really to me is like audio is king and then lighting would be second. Camera is actually the least important one. Because even if you don't have a camera.
there are different ways you can edit like layer b roll on or other things that don't even require you face this channel right i mean i don't i don't really like faceless channels and i also don't i also hate ai voiceover channels so technically you can do that for audio as well but like you know if we want to use a personal brand where you're on camera and you're speaking to the camera these are the order of operations that i would go yeah so once you have you know your lights your camera and your audio the next step is not just having them it is creating what we call a timeout checklist Right.
And this is, again, something that we got from the world of medicine. You know, whenever whenever you've ever been in the operating room on the non -surgical side of it, all the surgical staff run through a timeout checklist before the first cut into the patient. Right.
And that timeout checklist is basically like timeout, everyone. Let's run through this checklist to make sure that we're being safe. We have a lot of equipment and nothing's going to go wrong.
Basically treat your video experience. like surgery. Like this is life or death.
Yeah. Because oftentimes as a founder, it really is life or death. You know, we've had clients literally would fly across the country to do a podcast, buy a studio and set it up somewhere.
And if you go there and you have a bad recording experience, if you forget to turn on the camera or you forget, if you forget your SD card or to turn on the lights or something, you just wasted a lot of money and people's time. That pretty much is life or death because that could have been like a brand deal and opportunity.
that came out of that, right? So treat it that way. You just kill your partnership.
More or less. And so just treating it like that, like have a good process to get the highest quality stuff every single time. Do it once, document it, and then have that with you whenever you come back to studio.
Now, the second piece of filming is adjacent to the gear. And this is more about the actual person on camera. Right.
And this is probably like one of the most popular questions we get about the filming process. It's, do I use a teleprompter? and go word for word to camera or do i just use something like a structured outline and then just go off the cuff and riff right yeah what are your thoughts on this because i have you know kind of gone back and forth on it but like i don't really think there's a right or wrong reason but what do you think i also think there is no right or wrong answer i think that i mean if you look at our our videos like getting to a million subs we did use teleprompter and we did not use teleprompter we used both um obviously this video we're shooting now is on teleprompter if you can't tell but like i think it really depends on the person right like we've had a lot of clients who just like they can't stay focused on a topic like i'll give them an outline like hit these bullet points and they'll just talk on tangents and forever um And when it comes time to edit, they will dump like a three -hour raw file on our editor.
And there's like no organized thoughts. For that person, I would say you should try a teleprompter, please. But for other people who maybe, you know, maybe they have a lot of experience, maybe they've been on stage or done a lot of webinars or speaking events, then they don't need a teleprompter.
So I'll say it's situational with the format as well. for example like a lot our format is more conversational like an interview not an interview like more like a casual hangout and so we don't really script out a lot of these conversations it would feel weird and it would be unnatural and so i you know to what you said about like our editor getting a whole bunch of footage i still feel bad sometimes because we do that for them when it's more of an unstructured call or conversation but that's just what the format requires the last thing i'll say about this is that what i've seen is that speaking on camera is a skill that you have to acquire.
And then learning how to use a teleprompter is also another skill that you have to acquire, but they're both separate skills. And so if you're starting to try to use a teleprompter and it feels weird, it's because it's a skill. And what I've seen with a lot of clients is that the skill of using a teleprompter is more like acting than it is like speaking.
If that makes sense. Yeah. Like you have to actually learn how to come across as if you're not using a teleprompter.
And then on the flip side, like if you're not using a teleprompter, then the skill of speaking on camera is a separate skill. Right. You have to figure out pacing and tonality and everything else.
And as human beings, we're born with neither skill. We are not meant to be sitting in front of cameras alone by ourselves, like talking to a camera. Right.
So. their skills they will feel uncomfortable at first but highly recommend that you try both and then you find the one that fits you yeah totally agree and you know if you're fortunate enough to have you know someone on set with you also like a creative director behind the camera kind of giving you those visual cues and feedback about oh say it like that again or like oh dig deeper into that story i know that that interaction oftentimes really helps the founder as well, get into the zone of genius and like get into flow.
So use the resources you have available. But, you know, I guess speaking to the person who's alone, it is a weird and uncomfortable experience oftentimes. So that's the filming process here.
After the filming is done, we're moving out into editing the content here. And again, editing just like with the motif of everything here, front loading and making sure that like we're optimizing for the way that people experience the content is going to be the most valuable way. to produce content that people watch so the way that we have to think about editing content is actually backwards because of how we're all used to hollywood right like if you think about hollywood making movies the whole point is that they're making a movie where they're building up a story and there's tension and conflict and then there's a big grand climax at the end right usually like act three is like the huge battle or or something like that thanos meets uh iron man yeah exactly and so when people go to go to the movies they'll buy a ticket they'll spend their money and they'll go in the theater and they'll sit down and watch a movie right but very rarely do you see someone like get up and leave during the movie right very rarely do you see someone just quit and go skip go to a different movie but that's exactly what happens on youtube it's the complete opposite right
people are always looking to skip or leave your video for another video i mean the very viewing behavior is that they're watching a video and then youtube shows like an entire sidebar of other suggested videos just like enticing you to just continue going down your rabbit hole right and so when people are watching youtube video they haven't spent the however much money you cost to buy a ticket now yeah the money that you spend to watch movies like kind of like your sunk cost like i already spent the money i'm gonna settle in i'm gonna lean back and i'm gonna enjoy this movie but youtube you haven't really sunk any cost into it you're just kind of like you're just like when you're watching the hook right that's why again the 30 seconds is so important when you're watching the hook of the video you're still kind it's like a trailer so when your audience is watching the hook they're still trying to make up their mind whether or not they want to continue watching that's why it's
high clickers remorse, right? So it's very easy for them to just be like, oh, I don't want to watch this. This doesn't seem worth my time.
And so they'll just leave because there's no sunk cost into it. And so what you want to do in the editing phase is you want to make sure to front load the climax, front load the highlights, right? You got to show Thanos fighting Iron Man like flashes of it in the very first few seconds so that people be like, OK, I'm going to get to see this epic fight at some point in the video.
So that's how it's a completely reverse of what we'd expect from Hollywood. So to bring it back to like the whole MVP here, like the minimum video process, whoever's editing the videos, whether it's you or your team is doing it. We highly recommend that most of the effort into the editing process goes into the hook of the video.
Right. and even trickling it down after that fact, if you're going to spend more editing on any of the acts in the video, pick the first one to make it the highest edited part. Don't spend like 30 minutes or three hours doing a crazy motion graphic at the last minute of the video, because the odds are if you go to that retention curve in YouTube, there's going to be like 20 % of people or like 30 % of people who actually see that at the end.
Right. And so you have if you want to maximize the roi and the investment and time into the videos put it in the front you know and then it can slowly if you need to um start to taper things off as it gets to the end of the video and this is like specific i guess for like educational content i would say more so um if you are doing like a video where let's say like you are building up to a climax like i don't know a story or a vlog something like that then maybe these rules get flipped a little bit but it doesn't discount the fact that you need to earn that attention up front yeah right this is always really important We're not going to go too deep into the nuances of editing and stuff.
That's probably not for this video. Just know this is the principles of how we would think about the editing process. One of my favorite podcasts, Diary of a CEO, they actually have a separate hook editor who only focuses on their first 30 seconds.
They actually went out and hired a trailer editor from Hollywood, someone who would edit Marvel trailers, to just focus on their hooks. And if you think about a video that's that long, like a podcast, like a three hour video, if you can hook the person past the 30 seconds, then you win because that person has now settled in and committed to watching your podcast.
They'll probably set it and forget it and they'll watch the whole thing. Last thing I'll say about editing here, which I think is also fairly important for making sure that you have a minimum video process that's repeatable and gets faster over time. It's not just for editing, but it's easiest to see in editing is.
The idea about creating a consistent brand, a look and feel for the content that people will start to recognize. If you watch our channel, we pretty much film all of our content in the same room right here. We're generally wearing the same exact clothes.
So we don't have to worry about decisions about what we're going to wear. We're using the same equipment, the same camera angles. And in the videos, it's the same editing style, the same kind of titles, the same kind of music, the same kinds of motion graphics, right?
All that is very consistent. And the reason that we do this is to create a very familiar experience to your viewers, to build that association that, oh, I'm watching this content and I know and I recognize that it comes from this channel, this brand. And that's the same principle that you kind of want to apply, not just the editing process, like I said, to the filming process.
So if you have a consistent setup, the same timeout checklist, the same lights, camera, audio, they're going to recognize your content. And that also applies up here. to the packaging.
If your title and thumbnail style that people recognize immediately, they want to click on it because they recognize the brand behind it, right? So all of those components also add to this because it makes it easier. If you don't have to reinvent like a style every single video or reinvent new, you know, motion graphics or come up with new storylines and B -roll, it's actually going to help your team produce content more efficiently and faster.
And that's the whole point of the MVP, right? So... An underrated but important piece of making sure that the content comes out consistently.
All right, and finally, let's get down to analytics here, which is, again, the part where most people ignore because it's frustrating or maybe they don't even know what to look for in YouTube Studio because there's a billion things you could look at in YouTube Studio. What are really the 80 -20 here, too? What's the most important stuff to look at?
I would say for analytics, if you want to keep it as simple as possible, let's just break it down into three things. What are the ways that we can evaluate the performance? of the steps that we did before if an analytic doesn't help us make insights or adjustments to any of these pieces of here then it's a useless metric to look at yeah right and there's a ton of those in studio yeah just to tell you that yeah there's a ton of the things that you can look at and make charts for but like it's not going to help improve anything here then it doesn't really matter so what metric are you looking at to make sure that your ideation is improving so for ideations specifically what we're looking at is is impressions okay what's it what's an impression so an impression is anytime youtube shows your content at all right either that's on the home page that's in suggested somewhere that's a like a you know anywhere that it shows your content is an impression right and so an impression is really a quality metric for how good is your idea because if the dj remember if the dj doesn't know who it should give this video to because you're not following you know a repeatable strategy then your impressions are going to be low
Because I don't even know who would want this. So it doesn't give it to anybody in particular. But if you're following up like, you know, banger after banger after banger, it's going to give you more and more impressions because now it's found that fit of audience that you're trying to reach.
Right. So impressions is like something that video, especially if you're looking at your channel, if your impressions are increasing every single video, that means it is finding that audience fit. So is there like a good target number impression that you're trying to hit?
To me, not really. I mean, like. it's so dependent on a billion factors, right?
Like how old is your channel? What kind of content do you make? Is the industry even big enough?
Is there even enough people who would watch this? And so I think really for all of these, there's no such thing as like actual benchmarks. It's just the best benchmark is your channel.
So are you improving? That's probably the best. It's probably the worst answer, but the best answer at the same time.
Yeah. So you want to see like an uptrend. in the pattern of your numbers, not like an absolute number.
What metric are we looking at to know that our packaging is going well or improving? So packaging, like I said, I think we talked about it a little bit earlier. There's kind of two numbers, but the one that most signals packaging itself is click -through rate.
That's what we call CTR, click -through rate. Yeah, so CTR, it's, you know... It's always given as a percentage, right?
And that percentage basically means what percentage out of 100 people clicked on your thumbnail. So if you have a CTR of, let's say, 5%, that means of 100 impressions that YouTube gave your video, five people clicked on it. That doesn't seem like very much, but that's actually pretty good.
That's kind of like the limit of the algorithm too, right? It's like... you'll usually see click -through rates in the single digits.
You're not going to see like a 70 % click -through rate. No. That's just not a thing.
Right. Because YouTube is showing your video to like millions of people. Not yet.
It depends. A small channel is not going to get millions of impressions. But like on our channel, we're expecting millions of impressions for our videos.
5 % of that is still quite a bit of views, right? What we usually see is single digits, but I would say... a lot of the big creators or the big channels, they're shooting for like 7%, 8%.
They're shooting for like 10%. Which doesn't sound like a lot, but 10 % of a million is a lot of views. If you have a 10 % click -through rate, you're doing really good packaging.
Some people I've seen, I've seen some of the big channels have like 15 % or higher too. And the other metric we talked about before, don't just look at CTR. Watch time is also going to be an important metric because that's how YouTube split tests your content.
So kind of weighing those things together. So then what metrics are you looking at to see that the scripting and filming and editing are improving? Yeah, like you said that because the last metric kind of works together with all of the demand, all the supply here.
Yeah. Right. So like, remember, this is the this is the demand.
The supply just has one good metric, which is retention and retention in YouTube Studio. It gives you a curve. Right.
And so you can see what's the drop off point for the video. How many people are still watching till the end? At what point do they leave?
You can study that curve and just make sure that you understand your performance as you went throughout. I would say most of our attention actually comes from script. Again, remember everything is top -down.
So a good script leads to a good filming session, good edit. So most of our attention does come from what is the stories, science and symbols that we're sharing? Are we doing good?
Why and how? And how does that flow overall with the content? these are like the minimum metrics that that you would look at but there's like another dimension to these metrics too right because youtube recently started showing this is that there are different types of viewers to your channel it's something that like we haven't had access to for a long time and we used to have to find ways to reverse engineer these numbers but youtube's made it so much easier um to learn more about your audience and so sitting kind of like above i guess i'll just put it below but it's really like above all three of these metrics is understanding like your audience segmentation right so looking at impressions clue to rate or retention in isolation just like as a raw number on any video is very misleading well you got like your regular viewers right these are the people who love your content and they're watching regularly yeah they watch like every upload kind of thing then you have your casual viewers
so these are people who have like watched i think i think the definition is like one at least one video in the past six months or something so they're in your orbit and they're kind of watching the content and then you have new viewers right people who are discovering you for the very first time over time as more as we move more and more towards more sophisticated algorithms we're just seeing a larger influx of these newer viewers and we're also seeing like youtube trying to push out younger channels like smaller channels so youtube's always trying to do smaller channels to give give people a chance newer content to give people a chance and so we're seeing a lot more new viewers and so what does that mean for us when a lot of new viewers are constantly coming into your orbit is that you need to make sure to let people know who you are We've had to reintroduce ourselves so many times across so many videos that we are the brothers who left our jobs as doctors to do YouTube.
Yeah, every time we say that, there's always some people who've never heard that before, right? Like even now, like some of you have never heard that before. So like leave in the comments if this is the first time you've ever encountered us and let us know this is the first time that you've heard that story because we're going to continue repeating it.
It's gonna get way boring for us. It's already pretty boring for me to keep saying that but it's gonna be it's but it's absolutely crucial that you make it known because The video that most people are watching they could be their last video of you, right? There's new people coming in and they're gonna be gone tomorrow and so we're treating almost every single piece of content as like Each video needs to be a full entity of its own and it is a win on its own merit And so that's why we're seeing like in this new era of YouTube, like more comprehensive kinds of videos or like more masterclass -y type of videos are going to be the new norm.
That's your chance to hook people in to the rest of your universe. So now that you have a repeatable process on how to make videos efficiently, next question is how do you implement this onto your channel? How many videos are you shooting for?
How many should we make? right i remember like when we're doing ptya for example with ali abdul he says you got to allocate two years to post videos and after two years that's when you'll like start to see results so there's a lot of like really long timelines and big like big number goals but like what is the sweet spot do you think there's two different pieces to that question that you just asked right and i think the inability to separate what those two are is one of the main reasons why founders fail when it comes to YouTube.
So to the Mr. Beast, to the Ali Abdallah, to the Hormozy, whatever it is, I think very, very much is true to set expectations right. Building a brand, building a YouTube channel, any social platform, you need to internalize this is a long -term game.
Like, this is the infinite game, as some people call it. And once you start posting content, you will keep posting content for as long as you stay in business or as long as you want to be known and it's a marathon not a sprint yeah and i think that if you are about to start building a youtube channel and you're already thinking about an exit plan or thinking that like oh by this time i'm going to be done with content then you're getting into this for the wrong reason and you're going to fail right it's like you're not doing this to eventually stop you're doing this and it's going to become part of your identity and it's going to become a part of your business like this is the brand component to it right like we've been building our YouTube channel for seven years right now.
I think it's going to take another seven years now. Yeah, it's going to take more than seven more years to get where we want to go. And even at that point, it's like, what is the next evolution of content going to look like at that point moving forward?
The other piece I thought was really interesting, which is not talked about enough, is the actual experience of going through that two year period. It can really suck and you can get nothing out of it or it can go really, really fast and change your life very, very quickly. so we know there's three patterns of channels when they launch so the first type of channel they produced one video let's say you know they had three to six months the time frame doesn't matter right then let's say they have three to six months and they spent all three of those months just hyper focusing on making this one video to perfection the second channel this person made 20 videos so maybe like the first month they made you know five and then the next month they made another five this third channel they also made 20 videos but the difference here is that they made 20 videos all in the first month so this is actually pretty common with some of our clients right like they they're really busy and they're thinking like how do i get ahead of schedule how do i batch all of these videos and just get them out there and just schedule them out there so that i can go and work on my business or go on vacation or whatever else
So which one of these channels do you think took off the fastest or got the results the soonest? I know the results of the study and of our own experience from this. Channel number two is going to have the best results.
Typically, when you start something for the first time, what are the odds that you're going to be good at it?
Like the first time I ever tried to go to the golf range and hit a golf ball, I missed the first two swings. And then I hit it and it went way to the side. Right.
I could have read every single book about golf. I could have studied every single video. I could have had Tiger Woods standing next to me and tell me what to do.
And it still would have had a really bad result. Right. Versus now let's compare that to a guy who didn't do any of that and hit 20 golf balls in a row.
The first 10 probably were going to go sideways. But I'm sure of one of those 20, it was going to go better in the right direction. Right.
And that's the whole thing about YouTube. There's like so many reasons. We talked about the DJ a lot already.
in this in this you know in this series about what's so important about giving it data one video gets you very little data from the algorithm but it also gets you very little data from yourself i would bet all of my chips actually on channel number two being the one that wins versus channel one yeah i mean this first channel is chasing perfectionism for one video and this channel is chasing repetitions this channel's got 20 times more repetitions than the first one yeah But now we left out this third one, which in the study that we're referencing didn't really have this third category.
But from our experience and seeing like how people tend to approach YouTube and content creation in general, these two channels still had 20 repetitions each. So would this channel be better? Because this channel actually is way more efficient, right?
Way ahead of schedule. Batch the videos like. one like got it done right even faster like get all the videos up at the same time yeah getting data from the analytic from the from the youtube analytics way faster what did we see between these two channels i will say that channel three here will still get better results than the first channel because we are giving youtube more data and that data is going to help the dj try to find the right person and the likelihood of one of those 20 videos they did popping off at least doing better than other ones it's a lot higher than just having one shot on goal right But there's a big difference between spacing things out with how you learn versus doing it all at once.
The problem with channel number three, which kills a lot of founders and business owners with this, is batching too soon. Their skill level is basically at zero. And so they've made 20 videos at zero skill level.
So let's say the first video they made was not very good and they learn, oh, I should probably not. I should probably not use bad words in my videos or I should probably not make thumbnails without my face in it. something like that but they didn't learn that and so they went ahead and made 20 videos saying bad words throughout the all 20 videos without learning like oh i should probably remove that or i should probably improve my thumbnails video after video so the difference here is that there is no learning cycle between these two and so the reason why i would even say this like i kind of disagree with you like i think this person may even be worse off than this person because this founder has already sunk thousands of dollars making all these videos that are like negative on the bank account whereas this person they wasted a lot of time getting no data this person wasted all their money getting some that is useless data i see this most often happen for founders who have a lot of knowledge and like a big body of work
and they're just like oh i have like i've written a book or i've done you know done a whole bunch of like 10 ted talks 10 ted talks like i'm just gonna basically like film an entire course and then i want to put it out on youtube in in small pieces right or another big offender i see is when people do podcasts they're like oh i went i filmed like eight episodes of my podcast it's like season three they're all filmed already they're all editing i just need to now schedule them out yeah right it's like you don't know what's gonna work in all those all you do is waste all this time doing all this upfront work before you have the skill to execute on it we've seen that a lot and that just breaks my heart they'll get like these best A -list guests onto their podcasts, just hoping for us to make something happen with it.
Now, there is another caveat to these patterns here, because I know that there are going to be people out there who are like, oh, what about all those channels who within their first video, they get an outlier, they blow up? Or within the Kumar method, the first video he posted, it got like 20 million, 30 million views. Usually when you see a breakout video from the first video from a channel that looks like it was...
high production and high costs it's generally because they are working with other creatives or skilled team members who already understand youtube strategy really really well right let's say for example like you you partnered with an agency who like lives and breathes about youtube and you pay them a bunch of money to make the first video successful then it's probably gonna do pretty well one example that comes to mind was um remember the channel ai in context that came out like about a year ago they they posted this like 30 minute video about like what ai what's going to happen with ai in the future and it got like 10 million views in the very first upload and i remember like every single like you know business newsletter or creator that i've talked about what i talked to you at the time was reacting to it and talking about how crazy that was and you have to remember like the person the people behind that channel they have a lot of experience with media and with youtube specifically and so if you have the skills then you can put more money and bets into it right and if it's not your own proof then it's proof that you've done this for other people
which is why i think at the end of the day working with good strategists or good creatives who have the reps and experience it can shortcut that process for sure yeah the one you're describing here is if this first channel actually had a history of already tons of practice that people don't see on the front end right and then they're just making their Their first video on their channel is actually like their 100th video in totality.
Right. It's like people seeing MrBeast's new vlog channel and being like, oh my God, like, how is he blowing up so fast? It's like, well, I mean, look at his proof.
Look what he's done. He's like mega famous already too. The point we're saying here is that it's not really about how many videos though, right?
Because these videos are the same. The point here is how many cycles of learning. are you allowing between each video and obviously some people learn faster than others if you have a team behind you you're gonna you're gonna execute way faster now we've used 20 videos a few times here and that is actually a pretty important number there's these studies that um josh kaufman did who the author of 20 hours he talks about how if you're trying to learn a new skill then you need 20 hours of practice to acquire that skill but His definition of acquiring the skill is very interesting here.
People have talked about how it takes 10 ,000 hours of practice to become world -class at something. This is something that Malcolm Gladwell published in his book, right? So it takes 10 ,000 hours to be top of your industry.
Like the best violinists, the best athletes will practice that much. He's arguing that you don't even need 10 ,000 hours. You only need 20.
It's not even about 20 hours. It's about the learning cycle that happens between those hours. And what is the end goal here?
It said the end goal is you want to get the skill to a point where you're actually enjoying the skill and you're actually getting some utility out of the skill. So it's the same thing here with YouTube is that you're getting into a rhythm where you're hitting your goals with your content and you're growing your business, but then you're also enjoying making the content because if you don't enjoy it, then you're going to eventually quit.
So we ran with this hypothesis on our own clients too. right we say like the goal is to hit 20 videos and what we actually found is that a lot of our clients will start succeeding way before their 20th video so how do we implement feedback every youtube video that you make is this little experiment it's three questions you ask them in order and that allows you to get to the root of the problem right so it's what is wrong why is that wrong then how do you want to fix it And that how is now the new hypothesis that you have for your next experiment.
So let's say you started a brand new channel, right? And we're going to now start posting. We committed to this to post 20 videos over the next three months, right?
And so let's say you post your first video and, you know, since you kind of suck at YouTube, it doesn't do that well, right? It gets like 10 views. Video number two gets like 15 views.
Video number three also gets like 25 views. But for some reason, Video number four.
Whatever you were trying to learn and improve your skills with, this video all of a sudden gets 2 ,000 views. Your first breakthrough video here. Right.
So this video was what we call your breakthrough video, a video that suddenly performs way better for your channel than anything you've done before.
There's something special about this video. When you get your breakout video, it's really important what you do next because it's going to determine whether your channel is going to succeed or not. Drop everything that you're doing and study the hell out of this video.
what worked about this video and what didn't work about this video. So, I mean, we can use our video here as an example, right? This video that you're watching right now is a hypothesis that was derived from a previous breakout video that did very well.
Got us a lot of views, a lot of leads, a lot of sales from that video. We've been really like repeating success from that video in many different ways. and creating like a repeatable series.
This is like the cheat code for growing on YouTube. And the way that we decided to do these videos is also pretty important. So like one of the first things when I look at like, we're talking about like what worked well for the video.
The first things that I look at, I call it the fat actually.
Because it's kind of easy and it's fast to tell. So F stands for format. So what is the format of that video?
A is alignment. So does this video actually align with my business goals? And then T, what is the topic?
of choice for that video. And if all three of those things are, you know, part of what we want to do again and we want to be known for, then it makes sense to do a follow up to that same video, right? So the format of the first video in our series that took off was a walkthrough, right?
Like a deep dive into a full framework or a system about YouTube growth or strategy. People seem to like that a lot, you know, and we also like that a lot. So there's also a good alignment with us and alignment with our business because it's diving deep into a topic and a skill set that we actually teach.
to our clients, right? And the topic was about YouTube strategy and YouTube systems. So what went well about that video?
I'm not going to deep dive into analytics yet, but one of the places that you can look is in the comments, right? So one of the things that was very prevalent in the comments is people just saying, oh, wow, I got a light bulb moment from you guys explaining how to find a niche. It's actually not to pick a niche at all.
and that actually gave people a lot of clarity on what to do next on their channel so we had to make sure that if we're going to do a video similar to this we have to you know talk about that concept again now what we also found at the same time is that people were saying wow the way that you guys talked about niche just completely confused me so what was interesting is that what we talked about had good and bad responses to it this is a perfect example right so how do we How do we recreate the success of this video by preventing the failure of that explanation and then doubling down on making that explanation work?
I hope we did it in this video. We'll see. We'll look again at the comments and see what really resonated with you guys.
In fact, if you guys can help us out, just leave a comment below. Do you really feel like the explanation about the niche was helpful this time? Do us a favor if you haven't watched the previous video go watch that one first and then you can kind of like study between the lines What are we doing in this video to improve the performance of the last one?
Yeah, I think format is something that's so underrated that a lot of channels don't think about. Like for some context too, like when we were doing this video, this walkthrough that took off, we were experimenting with a ton of other formats too, right?
We had like some news videos. We had like an origin story video where you were just like telling stories about your life. We had like listicle videos.
And so if you see a format that works for your channel, really study what is that format and how do I repeat it, right? Because if you find this... signature format for your YouTube channel, then production is going to be so much more efficient.
Like, for example, like one of our creative directors, he has multiple YouTube channels. And one of his channels, he found that the tier list format, it does so well for the audience. And so he basically mastered the craft of like making thumbnails.
that are tierless based right like you can imagine what a tierless thumbnail looks like you have like the s and a b c tier on the side right but he got it down to such a science where he knew like if i use the word ranked in my title it would perform better than the word versus in the tier format and if i use like this specific neon color for the sab that pops out it's going to perform better than if i use like a different series of colors like that is how if you find a signature format for your channel then that is how like almost templated that you can make your videos so to recap like the smartest thing that you can do once you get that first breakout is to basically double down and just give your audience more what they want give that dj more similar tracks and keep people dancing and then growing your channel and this is really where a lot of channels see this big hockey stick growth curve where suddenly everything seems to start working right and this you just gotta ride that wave for as long as it takes you yeah but it will eventually die out we call this in the youtube world format fatigue right and so what do you do when your audience does experience format fatigue let me build this out a little further so you can see because the best channels are doing this right now is that if they find a breakout video
you exploit the hell out of that right like you said ride that wave until it dies out but at the same time you still need to be exploring because maybe this one's going to break out and when this one breaks out you want to go ahead and exploit the hell out of that format as well to the point where you you have like multiple formats running on your channel at the same time right A channel can have multiple series or formats running so that if one of them dries up, then you still have another one to bank on.
The X axis here is exploration. And the Y axis here is exploitation. You want to be doing both at all times.
It's the Pareto principle, right? Generally, if you look inside your own business, pretty much everything that you do, you'll see that a small portion, usually 20%. of what you're working on gives you 80 of the results so on your channel like we said of five videos that you posted one of them is doing way better than the other ones it's giving you 80 of the results from 20 of the inputs 80 of the time you should focus on repeating what works just giving the algorithm and the dj more more of what works 20 of the time continue experimenting with a new format that's the best ratio we've seen that allows your channel to continue growing at a healthy rate but at the same time exploring the next format that we can start milking and using for the channel right now a lot what happens to a lot of channels as well they hit format fatigue before they find the next one right and then if that happens you know after you've tried let's say like you know five videos and then they start they stop working you can pretty much consider that like now a dead format on the channel which means that all of your efforts go back to just full exploration mode to find the next format
We have a client who we work with. I think they did this exploitation very well. She got a PhD in mechanical engineering.
And so she talks about these science topics, right? And so she was doing a bunch of topics about like AI and about the pyramids and about all these interesting science. And then all of a sudden there was a video about a math equation that was just like impossible to solve.
And that was a breakout video. and so we looked at the analytics and we're saying oh this video is bringing in a lot of subscribers the impressions were huge and they even got like a sale into their membership from this right and so they're like oh we've got to double down and make more of these math equations so you can see on their channel here they made video after video exploring there's i didn't even know myself there's so many math equations about all these like different aspects of the universe that are just impossible to solve and they they would just hit on every math equation they could find and if you look at their videos here you can see like even the thumbnails and the titles are very similar like they're basically borrowing the same exact thumbnail format i think they even noticed like their first video their second video here when they were scrolling through the feed Like the thumbnail was like this optical illusion.
Like if you scroll up and down, like it will like zoom in and out. And they were like, huh, I wonder if that actually made a difference. And so they A -B tested that with their thumbnails.
A lot of these thumbnails had this optical illusion effect and it did work, right? Like the next videos was an even higher performance than the previous video. So they exploited that very well.
Realistically, like once you get your first or second breakout video, most people, if they are following. the right strategy that we talk about in this video so far, you will see what they call like this hockey stick growth, right? Where like maybe there wasn't a lot of traction, but all of a sudden things start working and things are snowballing against each other, right?
But that only happens under very specific conditions. One of our first videos was comparing two different note taking apps. And the problem there was that when that video took off, we didn't see the hockey stick spike.
And the reason is because all the other videos that the algorithm could have shown to our audience were just all over the place. We had like a blood pressure cuff video. We had a video of like you DJing in like our living room, like just completely unrelated, right?
And so when that video took off, there was no back catalog hockey stick. All those videos were addressing a different person and a different problem. Like the person who's watching for magnesium supplements.
was not the same person who cared about note -taking apps. So nothing really happened there. So for example, we had this one video go viral and it was basically a walkthrough on how to mind map, right?
And when that video took off, we saw a hockey stick because all the videos that were related to that mind mapping video were being shown to our audience. And so all the videos in the back catalog were just all taking off together. We already had...
all these videos that were specifically teaching study techniques for a very specific person. So when my map video took off, so did active recall, so did space repetition, so did how to use flashcards. Like it became a series.
We called it the ultimate study skills series. All of these videos in the back catalog took off because it was targeting the same person, same problem. This is why.
It's so important to, again, follow the steps that we're talking about in this video where the whole strategy piece has to come first. If you're not doing the positioning, if you're not thinking about like who's the person, you know, what are the problems they have and making sure all the videos actually line up to those things, then when you do get your burst breakout, it's going to be like this huge wave of momentum.
And then it's going to it's going to end really fast, where the whole goal is to just build such a snowball effect to where your growth compounds over and over and over. Obviously, like building momentum and getting views and subscribers is one way to measure success of your channel, right? But that's not the only way that you should measure success, especially if you're a business owner.
Views does not equal revenue. You don't need to go viral in order to grow your business. And this is a really, really important concept.
And it's one that might seem counterintuitive. There are many businesses and YouTube channels that I talk to on a regular basis where actually getting less views is the smart decision. to make our viewership has actually gone down our revenue over the past few months 3x so how does that even work right and as you can like see the evolution of the content that we're that we're creating we're starting to really narrow in on who is that specific person and what is that specific problem that they have or more as i'm like taking calls and understanding who actually buys you know program and wants to work with us directly, they're not the people that are consuming some of these broader topics on the channel.
We started a brand new YouTube channel maybe like eight months ago at this point. It's got like 5K subs. Most of the videos on the channel are between like 500 to like 2 ,000 views.
But many attributed sales in our program have come from videos that got like 500 views. They got like 400 views because I'll ask them like, what was the video that like got you to book this call with me? and to be interested in working with us and they'll mention videos they're like oh yeah it's that video they got like 400 views you know 500 views but those videos are so targeted for the right person right and so measuring views is one metric that you have but you also need to study other metrics in the business we call these business responses that indicate is this channel actually working and should i invest more into it those business metrics that you're talking about you can't actually find those in the youtube analytics right because youtube analytics will show you things like impressions and ctr and views and subscribers like i think the only dollar sign i'll show you is adsense but the actual number that you want you kind of have to manually set it up yourself so one of the most important things that we recommend you track if you're growing a business is revenue per views essentially like
which of your videos is making you the most money on the back end of what you sell. You can do this as revenue per thousand views. If you want to try to match it up with YouTube analytics, which your topics are bringing in more buyers and which of your topics are just attracting viewers who don't really buy anything from you.
So if you're tracking all of those things, then your learning cycles to getting to the very target customer that you want will happen so much faster. Right. And it's not to say at the same time that like the videos that also convert and actually make you sales will not also perform really well.
Yeah. Right. I mean, like some of the most successful videos on our channel this year that have increased revenue and also got the most customers and most subscribers, they've gotten like 300 ,000 views, right?
400K views. Yeah. There's one that's like half a million views at this point.
Exactly. It didn't go viral. Because we've had other videos in the past that have gotten like 7 million views, you know, but it's still got quite a bit of viewership.
And so there still is that whole strategy piece, understanding how important the idea is, how to package everything that you want to follow. But really, like everything that comes before that, too. It's positioning.
It's the person. It's the problem. I do want to put a caveat here because we're not saying that views don't matter.
Views absolutely matter because you can never know, like whoever's watching your video, like whatever secondary effects that can have. right like maybe there is a you know teenager who's watching your video and then they go and they tell their dad who is like a hundred million dollar ceo right that is just a secondary effect that you can never predict and so all views do matter it's just you need to know like what is this metric actually tracking for you and how do you intentionally make decisions based on those metrics so knowing what metrics you're tracking and you actually have to take some time aside to actually set up tracking for revenue.
So right now it's easier than ever to start a YouTube channel. There are hundreds of thousands of channels that are launching every week. And the thing that separates those who succeed and those who fail is simply having a strategy from someone who has done it before.
But having that strategy is actually the easy part, right? Actually implementing that strategy is where a lot of people get tripped up. because implementing a strategy is different depending on what channel you run, right?
What kind of business you run and what your life looks like. If you have like five hours a week or if you have 40 hours a week to work on YouTube. So if you need help implementing everything we've just talked about.
in this video this is literally what we specialize in we've been doing this for over seven years we would love to take a look at your channel and see if we're a good fit to work together and ultimately give you a roadmap that is personalized to you and your business so that you know exactly what to do next so if that's interesting to you check out the link in description below
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Around 115,000 new YouTube channels launch every week, and the most common advice they get (pick a niche) is the wrong place to start. This masterclass rebuilds the whole channel-launch playbook on a chalkboard, from how the algorithm decides who sees you to why a 400-view video can outsell a viral one.
Named ideas worth stealing.
00:43model
The algorithm as a DJ
YouTube plays each new video to a small test crowd, watches who 'dances', and widens distribution toward that type of viewer. Consistency of audience gives the DJ data.
Steal forexplaining why channel focus matters to a new creator
03:55concept
Person + Problem, not niche
Define the channel by a specific person and the specific problem you solve for them; it becomes the north star for every later decision.
Steal forpositioning any channel or offer
09:54model
Tree trunk and three branches
- Trunk: move one person from A to B
- Branch 1: first major obstacle
- Branch 2: second major obstacle
- Branch 3: third major obstacle
Every video must target one of about three big obstacles on the person's journey; formats are leaves that add variety.
Steal forcontent pillar planning
11:34list
Video formats
- Product review
- Versus
- Review a famous person's setup
- Upgrade ladder ($5 / $100 / $1,000)
- Workflow vlog
- Tier list / levels
Different shapes for the same branch topic, chosen from outlier data rather than guesswork.
Steal forbreaking creative burnout without changing topic
23:02concept
Look outward, look inward
- Outward: what the existing voices already say
- Inward: your stories, experiences and interests
Enter a crowded conversation by understanding the current positions and then forming an authentic, earned point of view.
Steal forfinding a differentiated angle
29:55list
Three levels of credibility
- Results for yourself
- Results for others
- Others getting results for others with your method
Position yourself honestly at the level you have reached; gurus sit at level three with licensable methods.
Steal forpositioning without overclaiming
35:54model
Minimum video process (MVP)
- Idea
- Packaging
- Script
- Film
- Edit
- Analytics
Six steps in the order viewers experience a video, drawn as a funnel: idea and packaging carry about 80% of results.
Steal forallocating limited weekly hours
42:38acronym
Three T's
- Title
- Thumbnail
- Thirty seconds
The full packaging that wins the click and confirms it.
Steal forany long-form video launch checklist
53:17concept
Demand and supply
Packaging generates demand through curiosity; script, film and edit supply it and should exceed expectations.
Steal foraligning thumbnail promises with content
54:41concept
Why before how
Explain the stakes before the steps, borrowed from patient education in medicine.
Steal fortutorials and teaching scripts
56:55list
Three S's
- Story
- Science
- Symbolism
Three ways to deliver the why: a real case, data or studies, or an analogy and metaphor.
Steal formaking any explanation stick
59:50list
Lights, camera, audio
- Audio (most important)
- Lights
- Camera (least important)
Gear priority for a talking-head channel, with a documented timeout checklist before every shoot.
Steal forfirst gear purchases
1:13:28list
Three numbers
- Impressions grade the idea
- CTR grades the packaging
- Retention grades script, film and edit
Only track metrics that inform a step of the process, read by audience segment (regular, casual, new).
Steal forweekly analytics reviews
1:31:48list
What, why, how review
- What is wrong?
- Why is it wrong?
- How will you fix it?
Run after every video; the how becomes the hypothesis for the next one.
Steal forany iterative publishing habit
1:33:41acronym
FAT check for breakouts
- Format
- Alignment with business goals
- Topic
Decide whether a breakout is worth turning into a series.
Steal fordeciding what to double down on
1:38:22model
Explore and exploit (80/20)
Spend 80% of uploads repeating proven formats and 20% exploring new ones so a successor exists before format fatigue.
Steal forcontent calendar balance
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
1:49:14link
“We would love to take a look at your channel and see if we're a good fit to work together and ultimately give you a roadmap that is personalized to you and your business.”
Soft pitch framed as the gap between knowing a strategy and implementing it for your own hours and business; it follows a full section proving low-view, targeted videos drive their sales, so the offer lands as a demonstration of the method.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
Visual structure at a glance.
