Kallaway: How To Build An Audience Of Buyers In 2027
A live 68-minute interview on picking topics with data, why formats matter less than ideas, putting a lead magnet in every short, and the competitor-first research loop behind a 200K-follower lead-gen channel.
Posted
2 days ago
Duration
Format
Interview
educational
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3.2K
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57 · 43
Big Idea
The argument in one line.
An audience of buyers comes from data-validated topic buckets hammered at daily volume, each video carrying a lead magnet matched to its topic, because ideas beat formats and short-form viewers only convert in the moment.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
A business owner or coach posting short-form who gets views but almost no email signups or leads from it.
A head of content or agency creative director who has to train overseas editors and scriptwriters to match one person's taste.
A creator who keeps switching visual formats hoping the next one breaks out, while the ideas underneath stay the same.
Someone choosing a niche who wants to know which categories actually pay large brand deals at 50K to 100K followers.
An agency running content for clients that wants a cleaner research workflow for finding competitor accounts and winning topics.
SKIP IF…
You want a hands-on software tutorial. The tool discussion is strategy and workflow talk, not a screen-share walkthrough.
You only make long-form YouTube. Almost every tactic here is tuned for Instagram and TikTok short-form.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
Ideas, meaning topic plus angle plus substance, decide whether a short-form video works; formats and visual layouts are the plate, not the food, and copying them only buys a short-lived edge. To build an audience that buys, the guest pulls competitor data to find three to five topic buckets, splits daily posts across them on a 14-day feedback loop, kills losers and hammers winners. Every video carries a call to action for a lead magnet matched to that exact topic, which yields 12,000 to 15,000 emails a month and doubles as a conversion score per topic. Target the pain buyers believe they have, and find competitor accounts before searching keywords so the data stays clean.
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Preview of the episode, then the guest on documenting his first 64 weeks of entrepreneurship and taking a pay cut from a $250K salary to $100K in year one.
02:46 – 04:59
02 · Why distribution came first
Seven or eight years of failed side businesses traced back to one gap: no way to get customers. He chose short-form for its fast learning loop and went zero to 300K followers in nine months.
04:59 – 09:15
03 · Which niches pay the biggest brand deals
Work backward from company profit margins: fintech, AI and beauty overpay creators. The best openings sit on the outskirts where a hot category meets an unowned vertical.
09:15 – 12:10
04 · Training editors with feedback videos
Send one reference, let the editor try, then record line-by-line feedback explaining the why. Three to five rounds is the floor; business is cloning your brain with minimal loss.
12:10 – 21:31
05 · Ideas vs formats
The guest argues formats and layouts don't fatigue, bad ideas do. Formats exist to increase comprehension; ideas (topic, angle, substance) are far and away number one, with packaging, hook and body bunched behind.
21:31 – 26:26
06 · Finding your visual style
Use data for topics, test from about 20 story structures, and build visual style by transpositioning ideas from outside your niche, like a hat maker's signature prop.
26:26 – 31:21
07 · Why scriptwriting is hardest to teach
Sensing when a viewer will get bored is like a quarterback's internal clock. Hire for writing ability, test with flawed scripts, and use copywork to build the instinct.
31:21 – 34:26
08 · Growing a lead-gen channel
Unlike his viral-first tech account, the marketing channel posts daily base hits for one buyer, turns the best into carousels, and puts a CTA in every video.
34:26 – 36:58
09 · The 3-2-1 topic bucket method
Pull competitor data into Claude, find the three to five buckets that work, split seven weekly posts across them on a 14-day loop, then hammer winners and rotate tired buckets out.
36:58 – 40:05
10 · Power words and the five break points
Hooks matter for their power words, not their template. The method fails when you skip data, quit buckets early, articulate poorly, post too little, or stop before 100 videos.
40:05 – 45:17
11 · Why the right topic can flop
Buyers' perceived problems differ from their real ones, so target the perceived pain first. Collect pain data through paid surveys, live feedback calls, and one-on-one DMs.
45:17 – 52:10
12 · A CTA on every video
A matched lead magnet is a give, not an ask. Every CTA ranks topics by emails collected, deepens content minutes, and pulls viewers off a platform where they remember nothing.
52:10 – 1:01:40
13 · The Sandcastles research workflow
The guest's tool as a data layer for social media. Fixing the hosts' agency workflow: find best-fit competitor accounts before searching keywords so results stay clean.
1:01:40 – 1:05:48
14 · The bullseye builder
Plot every video on five rings from core to broad. His second-broadest ring won on both views and conversions. Angles and hook writing stay human in the loop.
1:05:48 – 1:07:46
15 · Wrap and where to find him
Thanks, a promised part two, and where to follow the guest.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
Most failed businesses fail on distribution, not product, so learning to get attention is the skill to stack first.
Brand deals pay most in high-margin categories like fintech, AI and beauty, because those companies can afford to overpay creators.
The richest underserved brand-deal niches sit where a hot category meets a vertical nobody owns yet, such as AI plus wellness.
Training an editor takes three to five recorded line-by-line feedback videos that explain the reasoning, not a longer SOP document.
A creative director who has never made content cannot give the nuanced feedback that turns an editor's 80% draft into 100%.
Formats don't fatigue audiences; bad ideas do, and a signature layout can run for years if the ideas inside keep getting better.
A format's only job is comprehension, so an S-tier ranking beats a talking-head yap only because the chart gives the viewer a visual anchor.
Locking your chair, hat and layout removes downstream decisions so all your creative time goes into ideas.
Find your visual style outside your niche, then bring one element in, a move the guest calls transpositioning.
When a video grabs you, pause and ask why you got caught; that double zoom-out is how you collect transferable tricks.
Scriptwriting is the hardest content skill to teach because sensing where a viewer gets bored is closer to instinct than process.
A lead-gen channel wants consistent 10K to 30K view base hits aimed at one buyer, not occasional million-view virals.
Run the 3-2-1 method: split seven weekly posts across your topic buckets, carry forward the winners and kill the losers.
Short-form viewers keep almost no memory between videos, so each post has to capture the lead in real time.
A call to action in every video doesn't fatigue viewers when every lead magnet is different and matched to that video's topic.
Calls to action in every video let you rank topics by emails collected, a closer proxy for revenue than views.
Videos about the problem you know buyers have will flop if buyers don't believe they have that problem yet.
Searching keywords pulls in noise; find the 10 to 20 best-fit competitor accounts first, then filter their videos by topic.
On his own channel the second-broadest topic ring drove both the most views and the most conversions, not the narrowest one.
Takeaway
Pick topics with data, then ask every time
WHAT TO LEARN
Ideas decide whether short-form works, so validate topic buckets with competitor data, post daily, and turn every video into a matched lead magnet that extracts the buyer in the moment.
03Which niches pay the biggest brand deals
Before choosing a niche for brand deals, check company margins; fintech, AI and beauty can afford to overpay smaller creators.
Look for unowned intersections between a hot category and another vertical, where brands need creators but nobody holds the spot yet.
04Training editors with feedback videos
Train editors by letting them attempt one video, then recording line-by-line feedback that explains the reason behind every change.
Keep going until an editor's first pass matches what you would have made, usually three to five feedback rounds at minimum.
05Ideas vs formats
Fix your layout, setting and wardrobe so every creative decision you have left goes into the idea and how you articulate it.
Treat formats as comprehension tools; a ranking chart helps viewers follow, but weak substance inside it still loses.
06Finding your visual style
Build a visual style by collecting references from outside your niche and handing them to an editor with real taste.
When a video holds your attention, pause and name the exact element that caught you, then ask how it would work in your niche.
07Why scriptwriting is hardest to teach
When hiring scriptwriters, screen for strong writing and test them on deliberately flawed scripts to see where they add re-hooks.
Build boredom-detection through volume and copywork; around 100 written scripts is roughly what it takes to develop the instinct.
08Growing a lead-gen channel
For lead generation, aim for steady 10K to 30K view videos targeted at one buyer rather than chasing occasional virals.
09The 3-2-1 topic bucket method
Pull competitor performance data to find three to five topic buckets, split daily posts across them, and keep only the winners.
Retire a bucket when it saturates and test a replacement, keeping roughly three working buckets at all times.
10Power words and the five break points
Get attention with the exact words buyers already use for what they want, then deliver something non-obvious that maps to your offer.
If the method seems not to work, check volume and persistence first; most people quit well before 100 videos.
11Why the right topic can flop
Make videos about the problem buyers think they have, then teach them their real problem after they join your list.
Collect pain data directly through small paid surveys, live feedback sessions or one-on-one DMs with 10 to 15 people.
Ask for the email first with no conditions, then send a follow-up survey, instead of gating the freebie behind questions.
12A CTA on every video
Put a call to action in every video, but match each one to a different lead magnet so it reads as a continuation, not a pitch.
Use emails collected per video as your topic score, since it tracks revenue far better than view counts.
13The Sandcastles research workflow
Find the best-fit competitor accounts first, then filter their videos by topic, instead of searching keywords that pull in noise.
14The bullseye builder
Measure which breadth of topic converts best on your own channel; the winner may be broader than your instinct says.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
Lead magnet
A free resource, such as a guide, template or database, given away in exchange for an email address so a viewer moves from a social platform onto a list the creator owns.
ICP
Ideal customer profile. The specific type of buyer a business wants to attract, used to decide which topics are worth making videos about.
Loom
A screen-recording tool used to record a video walkthrough with narration, commonly used to give editors timestamped feedback on a draft.
ManyChat
An automation tool for Instagram and Facebook DMs that sends a link or asks a question when someone comments a specific keyword on a post.
Alpha decay
Borrowed from investing: an edge that shrinks as more people copy it. Applied here to new video formats that stop standing out once everyone uses them.
Copywork
A writing practice where you copy great examples by hand, word for word, to absorb their rhythm and structure.
Re-hook
A line partway through a short video that renews curiosity just before attention would drop, keeping the viewer watching to the end.
Power words
The specific terms an audience already associates with what it wants. Saying them in a hook pulls attention because viewers recognize their own problem in the words.
Transpositioning
The guest's term for borrowing a visual or structural idea from a creator outside your niche and adapting it to your own content.
Bullseye builder
A framework that sorts topics into five rings from core niche to broad, then measures which ring delivers the best views and conversions per video.
MCP
Model Context Protocol. A standard that lets AI assistants like Claude connect to outside tools and data sources and use them directly in a chat.
“Really all businesses is cloning your brain into other people with the least amount of lossiness. That's all it is.”
big claim in one line→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
49:09
“Each video is a sniper shot to extract the lead in real time.”
sharp image that reframes short-form's purpose→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
40:36
“Every video I make about ideas flops, because nobody thinks they have an idea problem.”
self-own with a lesson baked in→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
39:40
“It's just math. This shit's just math.”
punchy closer after the five break points→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
27:05
“Like a quarterback has an internal clock, great scriptwriters can feel when the boredom will kick in.”
relatable analogy for an abstract skill→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
1:03:12
“The fourth ring, the second most broad, was actually getting me the most views and the most conversions.”
counterintuitive data point→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
Topic Map
Where the conversation goes.
00:00 – 04:59steadyBackstory and why distribution matters
04:59 – 09:15denseBrand-deal economics by niche
09:15 – 12:10denseTraining editors and writers
12:10 – 26:26denseIdeas vs formats debate
26:26 – 31:21steadyScriptwriting as instinct
31:21 – 45:17denseLead-gen channel playbook
45:17 – 52:10denseCTA in every video
52:10 – 1:05:48steadySandcastles workflow and bullseye builder
1:05:48 – 1:07:46sparseWrap
The Script
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.
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In this episode, we sit down with Kane Calloway, who I perceive is literally number one, and I'll say that lightly, number one at understanding short form content. We talk about a few things. Number one, we talk about the balance between ideas and formats.
Him and I actually have a little bit differing opinion that we get into and essentially rank the hierarchy of what makes a video go viral and what skills you should master first. Then we talk about how he grew his marketing channel from zero to 200 ,000 followers in less than seven months. Then we get into some specific creative director shift style content like...
like how to train editors, how to train script writers. And then we end breaking down one of the best AI tools that really the only AI tool that my team uses internally. And we talk about how to use it and how to get the most out of it.
A little bit into the live stream, but now we're live. Let's go. What's up, boys?
Let's kick it off. Here we go. Kane, how would you intro yourself?
Feel free to brag about yourself. Well, actually, first, let me say this. Dude, I've been following you since your newsletter where you were breaking down.
earnings journey follower probably since month like four in that yeah the blueprint how long would how long would how long ago was the blueprint so that i was doing content for like nine months while i had a corporate job and the goal was like i can give the backstory after this but when i left the corporate job like that week one i wanted to document every single week by week like the goal has always been i want a million a month profit For 12 months straight was like my is the end goal.
So I was like, let me just document literally every week all the way up. So I did that for 64 weeks, like a year plus, but for various reasons, I stopped writing it. The biggest would just literally the time allocation towards writing.
It was not the highest leverage use of my time at that point. Like we were inflecting. So I was like, I can't waste four hours on Sunday looking back.
I just need to like keep pushing the ball forward. So I stopped writing it. That was like my biggest regret because.
that period from like 64 weeks to now was like a couple years that's like that's the biggest thing people would want to see so yeah it was kind of sick to have that artifact like those 64 weeks written because you can see how my brain was like evolving over time you know and you if i remember right it was like barely profitable like if i made like i made like 100k my first year as an entrepreneur so basically like i was i was at like 250k salary Then I quit my job the first year I made a hundred K.
So I took a step back. So I was like, it sucked. And then from there, yeah, from there we were ripping.
So it was, it was kind of like a lot of people were like, you know, what's it like being like a starving entrepreneur? It's like, it wasn't that bad. Like I, cause I had the over, I had the overlap for nine months.
Right. So it was okay. And the big, the big switch had to have been, uh, multiple channels launching the YouTube and then a better product.
Yeah. So there's a few things. So like when I started out, I can kind of give people the backstory if they don't know who I am, but basically like my whole life, I wanted to be an entrepreneur.
I started a bunch of companies. My first thing before doing a corporate job was a company. We raised money, failed, sold the assets off.
Then I did management consulting the whole time at management consulting. I was like, I'm just going to do this for cashflow during the day. And at night I'm going to launch it until I have something that was product market fit.
And then I'm gone. And that led to like seven or eight years of like launching, failing, launching, failing. I always say it's the four horsemen of horrible businesses.
I basically did like a clothing brand, a crypto thing, like a media play before like there was the 4U feeds. I was literally just checking off all the worst possible businesses. And then, yeah, I was stacking skills and basically like.
When I got to seven or eight years in the corporate job, I kind of zoomed out and I was like, why are all these things failing? I feel like I'm not that stupid and I'm seeing a lot of things win. When I reflected on it, I had no distribution.
I had no way to get traffic, no way to get customers on anything. Even though I was stacking skills, it was all below the water level. I needed to just focus on distribution.
When I started, I was like, I'm just going to make content. I picked short form because the learning loop is the fastest. I can go daily and speed up the slope the quickest.
The play was like, I want to learn short form to then grow a business. I don't know what the right business is. let me just pick a vertical where I know the brand deals will be lucrative so that that as sawdust can fund whatever the business is.
So I picked tech and AI cause I'm, I am interested in tech and AI, but like there was a much more strategic approach, which like I knew those brand deals would be fat if I could get it going. So it was just a matter of time, like how long will it take before I can get the following big enough for the brand deals to be meaningful.
And so, yeah, like nine months or so of like doing that flat part of the hockey stick, trying to grow my following. I think I went, I think I went from like zero to 300k followers across instagram and tick tock in that nine month window and at that time the brand deal started to be like 5 10k a pop so i was like cool we can we can leave i can take the salary down to zero and then just jump straight over but the whole goal the whole time was like i wanted to grow a business i didn't want to be a famous creator right or an influencer so that's when i started adding youtube and all of this Talk to us more about your thought process for picking a space where you knew the brand deals would be lucrative.
I think one thing that Brian and I experienced a lot is creators talking about monetization potential, not realizing that, you know, if you go into a space like fitness, you have a much larger platform that you have to have to get to a place where you can really fund a lifestyle or a business on the brand deal. So how are you thinking about that when you were making that decision?
Yeah, so if you're going to be a creator, there's several ways to monetize, but the big two buckets are you either rent the ad space on your content for brand deals or you buy your own ad space and you channel it towards your own products, right? Either way. So brand deals are a great way to get cash flow that's like pure margin and you can get the brand deal wheel spinning, but you kind of have to like get up to 50 to 100K followers for it to be meaningful.
So when you think about it, if you just work backwards, it's like what are the companies that print the most profit? those companies and that are like social native those companies are going to be the ones that pay the biggest per ticket so it's like financial services and anything in fintech anything in tech ai right if you go down the stack where you're in like like fashion brands unless they're luxury fashion they don't have that high margin so they can't afford to like overpay beauty is really good for influencer because like the like beauty uh perfume like all that is 95 margin so they can afford to eat more of the of the margin stack to pay creators so if you think about it purely like numbers and cents there's only a few spaces that pay huge brand deals when you're kind of smaller and they can afford to like waste money on trying creators so if you're trying to play the brand deal game it's actually very helpful to go for those spaces that's why you see a lot of these people who are like in marketing now pivoting to try to get the ai bag because all these ai companies have so much money yeah shout out orin for that one yeah exactly yeah orin's the orin's the king of like just tam expansion right he's just like wherever the money is he'll he'll do the crossover yeah that's funny is there a is there a a niche that you feel like is
Could serve in under Like a supply and demand is matched from a high profit company Market to an underserved creator niche For brand deals you're saying yeah, I don't stay here too long. So I don't think anyone else gonna talk about brand deals for a while Yeah, yeah, and that's the thing a lot of people don't know like I make a lot in brand deals on the tech side because I don't really talk about that on the podcast very much but like I'm pretty a lot of the people in our Academy who come in for brand deals I like get them to the point where they're going from zero it's like making five figures per deal so i do i do think a lot about this so there's there's a couple like one bucket is the emerging spaces that are like if you imagine the waves right now ai is like a huge tidal wave big but like what are the waves that are kind of swells out right like robotics for example in three years the people that are the robotics people are gonna make a ton and so that there's there's one bucket of like what are the emerging spaces the other that's probably easier and i just talked to a kid about this the other day is
just think about if you were imagining a neighborhood, like the city center is like AI tools, but what are the outskirts? What are the suburbs outside the city center? Well, it would be like AI intersected with like every vertical that doesn't have people owning it.
So like, for example, AI and wellness, there are wellness creators, there are AI creators, but there's not really anyone who like owns AI and wellness. So if you can just like be the bridge from the city center to whatever suburb you care about, like in this metaphor. then there's a lot of money there because open ai and all these companies need to start expanding the use case like the use case map for what they do so there's essentially it's very simple it's like if the companies in your space make a ton of revenue and have high profit margins you want to play in that space and it's just a matter of how long will it take for them to realize that creators are a great vehicle for them to to get roi if you play in a space where the companies don't make a ton of revenue and their margins are super tight you're going to have trouble getting these huge deals.
And so you have to kind of like work your way into the bigger margin players. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Okay, let's pivot into more of the more creative director, head of content type of stuff.
One thing that I think really separates you, Cain, is like you have trained, and I know you worked with Clipped for a little bit. I don't know where you're still at there. I do think you're world -class in training editors and getting really good output consistently from editors.
And so let's say that the average person watching this is, you know, they work with a big brand and they're their head of content and they have to go higher and train one to two editors. Do you have a playbook, a blueprint for this? Any thoughts around getting the best output from specifically overseas editors?
Or if you have any thoughts on local editors, yeah, just give us the full blueprint there. Yeah, 100%. So I have like five or six clipped editors.
I also work with another agency on a different channel. So both models, like we have people installed who are 40 hours a week to me. And then we have like the pod model where there's like 10 editors.
We throw videos to them. They allocate themselves across. So I've kind of worked across the spectrum.
The number one thing is you really, and this is going to sound obvious, you need the creative director to have actually grown their own shit before and like made content. Because what I do is when I get a new editor in, I send them a video.
I have like a doc with references of my own videos to be like, yo, use this as a template on their own. I don't micromanage them initially. I just let them do one version.
When they send that back to me, I pull it up in a loom and I like literally for 30 minutes go line by line, word by word. And I say, change this, change this. And I explain the logic for why.
If you're a creative director who hasn't made content or you understand it's that nuance, you're not gonna be able to give that feedback in the loom. All it takes is just like. three to five rounds of the back and forth in the looms and you're set because the you basically it's just about really all businesses is cloning your brain into other people with the least amount of lossiness that's all it is and so i'm very good at doing that without any lossiness because i go so deep into the nuance because i i edited my own videos for the first 200 right so that's that's a critical thing to look for so to recap general sop to get the ball rolling on a specific format and style And then three to five looms, breaking down and feedbacking with thought process to get them from the 80 % to the 100%.
Yeah, it's like the tactics for what specifically you want in the edit and then the strategic reason for how they should think about arriving at that conclusion. But three to five looms is like the floor. I would say it's as many looms as it takes until that person sends back the first pass and you're like, yeah, this is as good as I would have done it.
Like for the pod editors that run my marketing Instagram channel, We've probably posted 200 coming up on 200 short form videos. And I would say for the first 75, I was doing looms because there was a pod of like 10 guys that were all editing.
So really, if you divide, it's like seven each. So I had to like train them all. And then once you train them all, it's a train the trainer model where they train each other.
But then there's lossiness because those people training them don't know they're not me. So then I have to train up the next guys. And so it's literally business is just a constant evolution of this like training and training and training.
You see what I'm saying? Yes, that's fire. That's fire.
Kane, I want to zoom in on your own format that you're known for. I think so many people that have seen you have seen this one kind of overlay style. We've obviously seen people getting into Claude and using that to duplicate it.
But a lot of people that double down on one style, it loses its efficacy. sooner rather than later and you seem to be the exception where you've been able to run this format for so long and see success across multiple accounts why do you think that you have been the exception to the audience fatigue that comes from that signature format you're talking about the visual layout like the split screen yeah yeah so my so when i say format when i think of formats i split it into like two variables so like the format is the when i say format i i think of like the story structure so how i lay out the actual story and then the visual layout let's say is the split screen or whatever so in my maybe controversial take is that I actually don't think the format or visual layout is the thing that fatigues.
I think the thing that fatigues is just bad ideas. And so the format is just a canvas. It's like Picasso painted paintings on the same square canvas and that shit slapped for a long time.
It's like, well, was the canvas overdone? It's like, no, all the painters painted on that canvas. It's just a matter of he was a better painter.
The inputs were better. The ideas were better. The actual picture he was producing was better.
I do see the point of everyone's taking my stuff, putting it into cloud code, being like, give me the two -third, one -third with the little head. Everyone's doing that, right? Agreed that the initial visual pop when you see my stuff come on the screen might dilute over time if everyone's doing that.
I do agree with that. But that's far less important than the idea, the actual framing of the angle, the substance. There's so much more that's high leverage.
The way I look at it is... Like I added really strict creative constraints on myself because I knew that the answer was volume, right? High quality volume.
So in order to rev up volume, I have to minimize the amount of downstream decisions. That's why I wear the same fucking hat every day. That's why I'm like, I have to sit in this chair.
If I can't make a video in this chair, I'm not making it because the time it would take me to go out in the world, unless I'm doing a walking thing, just ripping a yap and like setting up lights and stuff would take too long. So for me, I was like, I'm going to bet. that the format and visual layout is not the constraint.
And the real constraint is the idea, the quality of the ideas, the articulation of the information. And so far that's turned out to be true. I do think because now with this AI editing, there is going to be just this huge emergence of people doing my exact style.
And if they can produce the visuals, like the animations and stuff as good as me, I think it's like step below now, but if they can produce as good, maybe I'll have to, you know, refine that hypothesis and like come up with something different visually. But for now I feel like. People that take the style have really bad ideas and bad articulation.
And so the value is not there That's interesting I think like you just put me on some game there I think I've like overweight formats for a long time and like needing format diversity and like yeah, the way you just explained that was like very i gotta sit on that a little bit i gotta chew on it a little bit we should we should talk we should talk about that more right here because i i do think it's a bit contrarian of me to say that formats don't matter as much because like everybody is always like formats of the language of content i don't know if you're the one who said that or someone said that and i heard so this is my take on it it's like a 30 guy the cut 30 guys said that 2026 formats are the language of content and then i kind of ran with it because i had seen a quick little just on a green screen would make a 10x change but i've also seen creators where they hit the same format so much and then people flood in and copy them and then it dilutes the the alpha the alpha decay is really hard and so that's my hypothesis and then i've seen you and i'm like okay that completely is the exception to the hypothesis but i'm curious i keep going so
I do think the novelty of a new format, there are legs there and that arb does close when people copy it. So I do agree that like when a video pops, it's a soup of things. It's like a stack of things.
And it's like if every, imagine it was a bar of 100%. It's like if you were to allocate all the variables and why the video popped. some non -zero percentage is the format and if it's if it's a novel format like when you came up with the bracket thing there was like a novelty there for a minute where like a good percentage of that bar was pushing those videos that that part closes quickly and so i guess my point is like when if that bar is zero you could still have a video rip if all the other pieces the idea and such are bigger the the real the real way i think of this though is like all the formats meant to do is increased comprehension so if you do if you do a s tier ranking the reason s tier rankings work is because human brains are visual mostly so when i when you say a thing and i see you place it on the s a b c whatever it helps my brain follow along but it doesn't mean that like making an s tier ranking is going to beat a yap just because it's an s tier no it's like the substance is actually the most important thing it's just having that little chart
helps increase the comprehension so the whole game is like what format can max out comprehension and that's why i don't really love yaps because yaps have no visual anchor so you have to be amazing at articulating yourself to get the full comprehension to stick so It's not as though like I could do an S tier ranking and so could someone else, and mine would beat theirs every single time, maybe with a couple exceptions.
And it's because my idea and substance is better. The actual format is just the dinner plate, right? It's like who's cooking the best food.
It's like, well, those are just the different shapes of the plate. You see what I'm saying? 100%.
But to your point, I do think like whoever came up with that S tier ranking thing initially, they leveled up their comprehension. a stepwise change because it was such a great way to visualize. So there is alpha in finding those.
I just don't think it's like the thing. Yeah, it's almost like you can still ride waves of alpha through the exploration, but a signature format that's kind of the backbone of who you are will have its own value set aside from chasing the quote unquote alpha, I guess you could say. And if you have bad ideas, bad substance, and a one -of -one format, you will cut through until that format arb goes away, which will happen because people can copy formats a lot easier than they can copy substance.
So it's almost like it's not defendable, but there is a premium on it. Another way I think of this is I like to call them content formulas. Like really every creator is trying to find their content formula, which I view as a topic plus a format plus a visual layout.
So if I do like... you know storytelling tips in a listicle format in my split screen and that works that's like a formula in my bag that i can just keep hammering most creators are trying to get to like five to ten of these formulas that just work and eventually some of them stop working because the formats are polluted like you said so you have to you have to throw those away and replace with something else so yeah it's not that they i don't think they matter zero it's just I do think people overweight it because there's all these creators that are like, if I just find the right format, it's like, well, I could just tell you the right format and you gotta work on the idea, the substance, the actual meat of it, right?
Okay, so it's interesting. I have my four horsemen of what make a great video. In order is this, and you're kind of like making me change my hypothesis here, but I want you to workshop it with me.
Number one is ideas. Ideas are king. We're completely aligned there.
Literally topic selection. Number two for me is the packaging. Visually.
and what i would say also in like um in a potential like a listicle or a non -listicle type of thing then it's the hook so it's the combo what you're describing as a format individual layout i call both of those just a format right format then i move to number three which is the hook and then number four which is where i need to maybe get more clear is this is what i would call the body but this is like my value per second my story to my retention my curiosity loops etc would you agree with that Or would you move formats maybe down and move the body higher?
So when I say topic, I usually, or when I say idea, I say topic plus angle plus substance. So it's like topic is what you talk about. Angle is your like take on it.
And substance is like the real meat of what you're saying. So it's essentially the substance. That's why I call it substance.
But the storytelling is more just how you sequence it and like how you flow through. So I'd probably say it's idea first. I think packaging matters a lot.
i can't say it doesn't matter visuals matter a ton but but but like relying on the format to be the thing that differentiates yeah it could be could not i would say those that order is probably right but a lot of the things two three and four are like kind of bunched together i would say number one is like far and away the most important and then you could interchange two three and four most people the the reason why this matters because we're getting into the nuances of this which i think is pretty interesting but the reason why this matters is because if you spend any of your time instead of rather than focus on number one that's the idea you're waiting you're wasting your time like the idea is everything and the rest is like you need a decision for sure but it can be done quickly and that's where you thought of if i can just rinse and repeat the same exact have the same exact seat the same exact whatever then i can spend open up all my time into ideas exactly that's exactly that's exactly it my hypothesis was that nothing matters except the idea so yeah
So when, you know, let's say we have a creator, a founder that is looking to find their visual language and their format that's going to be what people know them for. How would you think about testing to find what format is going to work best for them? And then how are you using data to inform the decision of what the best format is for them to use?
yeah so base so topic format visual layout i would look at those three variables topic i'd go full data i would run the sandcastles flow i'm sure you guys built something on the sandcastles rail similar very easy like look at the niche figure out what topics are working that at least tells you which ponds to fish in you got to like come up with subtopics and takes that are unique but like at least you can fish in the right places so that's the topic on the format I think there's like 20 formats that are kind of like the way I call it, storytelling structures, right?
So you've got like breakdown, listicle, problem solution, A versus B, ranking. Like there's only so many. So I'd be open to testing any of those in the first phase.
You can kind of rank the formats on like easiest to execute versus hard. A ranking is super easy. You can just rank things, obviously.
Scenario is kind of hard. Scenario is like, if I was a designer for Microsoft, this is how I would approach the team's redesign. You have to actually know design and think about that and do it.
So there's a variety of effort across, but I would test there. The visual language, visual style, I think is what you're getting at, right? Which is like, how does someone actually come up with their visual packaging?
That's the hardest one, I think, because it's a lot taste -driven. And the way I would do it is, I would look in my niche. And I would then look outside my niche.
I would ignore the visual stuff that's working in the niche. And I would transpose, I call it transpositioning from the outside. So I would find somebody outside who's doing something in a visual way, whether it's the layout or like their background or the way they shoot the angles.
And I would create like a mood board of those options. And I would go to an editor that's, that's legit. And I'd be like, this is how I want my shit to look.
This is what I'm saying. Try to like, start trying to make this look this way. Like on my marketing channel.
I didn't tell them, like all I said was I want to kind of do what Rourke from the AI niche is doing with the like bottom third with his head over. I was like, I want to do it like this because I think having more surface area to show visuals would be better. I think motion graphics may work best for this because I talk in a lot of theoreticals.
Go. That's all I said. And then they were good enough to figure out that style after like five iterations.
And like the visual language, like how it has the red coloring or whatever. So I actually think. If you're not a branding person or a graphic designer, you need to have an editor that's high taste to kind of craft that visual language for you.
Transpositioning is the dopest term I've heard in a long time. I might have to rip a video on that and give you some credit. That's like right up my middle house.
Yeah, rip a video. Yeah, I think transpositioning is like this. That's the secret to.
what makes great creators great is they can see shit that just comes up outside their niche and then know how to pull certain things in and leave the rest. That's, that's a huge skill. Give us an example of like maybe two to three principles of what you would pull from a different niche.
Yeah. So like, When I scroll, like, random shit comes up.
So I saw this guy in, I think he's in Kentucky, where he makes these, like, hats, these, like, crazy, like, cowboy hats. He's a really funny character. He has, like, a million followers.
I wish I knew his name. I would shout him out. But basically, like, every video, he starts where he's, like, spinning the hat on his hand.
And he's like, today we're making a, you know, skeleton kickback boot. Yeah, you've seen it. And then he does it.
And he's, like, he's really charismatic, obviously, as well. But when I watched that, I was like, oh, shit. him having an object that's like moving in his hand that becomes a theme for everything.
Then I saw you do it where you held a notebook a couple of times and I was like, oh shit, that's basically, so basically what I would take is a common prop that relates that you actually use in the video is very interesting. Cause when I was watching his videos, I, this is another thing that I think is really helpful. I call it the double zoom out where I'm watching on my phone.
And then when I feel myself being caught by something, I pause and I try to like zoom out as if I'm like over my own shoulder and be like, why am I getting caught? So it was the little prop thing. So then I would say, oh, you could in any niche take any prop.
And as long as it's like, you know, symbol that makes sense for the video, that would be sick. So it's like those little things like that. I love it.
Yeah, that dude will be like, all right, today we're making the triple brim rattlesnake 360 caliber, whatever hat. And then he starts slamming over his knee and stuff. That's cool.
And when I was watching that, another thing he does is he like steams the hat with this thing and the steam as a sound and it comes out, it's like, oh shit, that's actually kind of sick too. So it's like those little, those little things. That makes a ton of sense.
Okay. One thing I want to kind of move to is, you know, you're world -class at understanding open loops, retention, all of just the psychological note of when someone is intrigued versus someone is lulled. Right.
And now. Me and you have talked about, okay, we need to find and train people that can also execute at this, which feels like maybe it's something that you are trying to accomplish. Maybe you have accomplished it.
But the question I want to ask you is when you think about handing off that intellectual property of open loops, script writing, et cetera, have you thought about how you're going to train people like this or how you have trained people in the past? Essentially, how do you actually train and equip a phenomenal script writer, storyteller, open looper?
This is the last mile. This is the toughest thing because I think training the editing taste is pretty straightforward The idea system is actually pretty straightforward. The script writing is the hardest part because there's like a natural I think about like when someone plays quarterback, right?
They have a clock, an internal clock in their head. Like they're like, if I don't throw the ball in four seconds, I'm dead. And they can like great quarterbacks can feel the blind side.
So the same thing with script writing is you can kind of feel when the rhythm is off or like when the, when the boredom will kick in, like I can read a script and be like, Oh shit, right here. We got to fix it. That's a little bit of it is like an innate ability to understand.
like when the easiest way is when you read it, when are you getting bored? And so like, I have a lot of people in SFA that I like try to teach this to. And some of them are just like, I don't like, I don't feel bored.
I'm just trying to like, you know, just not have to spend time making content. I was like, you're just never going to learn that skill because it's like this innate rhythm thing. So what, you know, the best way to like, if I zoom out, the best way would be you look at someone like me and you look at the scripts and you try to understand like, when am I re -hooking them?
Or when you, when you hear my videos, when are you re -hooked? And then look at the transcript and try to be like, well, how much stuff did he have before that? And roughly try to learn that way.
But it's hard. I try to be objective about the fact that, oh, I could train anyone on anything. But some of this is like there's a little sauce layer involved that's kind of hard to transfer.
I don't know if you have the same experience, but this is very difficult to teach. Yeah, it almost feels a little bit like the instinct needs to be moved into the hiring process. Like you need to get the person that at least has the uncoachables into the team, and then you can kick it the rest of the way.
But like you said, there is just some type of psychological, like this ticking timer, right? I've used that exact same analogy before about the quarterback. It does feel hard.
One thing that I want to try, we're about to try this with a few guys, is give them a script that's intentionally imperfect. We're going to give them five of them in the interview process. And there's a correct way that I have went through and kind of trimmed the script, added re -hooks.
And they're going to go through and we're just going to see their thought process over five to just see, hey, where's that timer at? How would you think about this? And again, you're not going to get it all the way.
I don't think yet. We're going to see. But you're right.
The only way to really do this, you need like 100 reps, right? Like 100 scripts written to train it into you. So if you interview a person that hasn't done 100 reps.
Some people have like a natural proclivity to have this timer, but they're not going to be great at it. So if everyone you interview has never done made content before, it's gonna be so hard to tell. Yeah.
What about this game? Have you ever thought about, um, like, have you ever done copy work for copywriting before where you handwrite literally with your hand headlines, you know, youtube titles whatever whatever have you heard of this concept before copywork yeah so so i i always so copywork's huge i always say a copy speech as well if you're trying to get better at the delivery cadence same thing i know i've never done it um yeah like i i do think my best skill is writing and so to your point like what are the skills that need to come pre -baked when you interview someone to be able to mold the rest you pretty much need a great by hand writer out of the box like they have to come in as a good writer and so to your point like if you're not a good writer copy work is the best way to become a good writer ideally they come to the interview being like yeah i can write pretty well and like i understand persuasive like how to how to create a psychological loop but i don't know how to translate that for short form that's something you can definitely coach if they're not a good writer they have never done copy work it becomes tough but but that yeah that would be one way
yeah i was even thinking just like 100 days of copywork on these scripts that are like your 100 best selected perfectly re -hooked timed scripts and you put them on that journey but like you said there's a chance to get through the end of the 100 days and they still suck so it's like i don't know yeah this is this is why i do think there's still alpha in talking head content because This skill of like taking, well, first of all, coming up with the idea and coming up with the angle and it being dope, that's hard enough.
But taking that and actually turning it into a 10 sentence thing that can hold attention the whole way, it sounds easy, but there are not that many people in the world that can do that for any niche, let alone for their own, like consistently. So that's why there's still alpha. I don't think talking heads going anywhere because we've been on the edges of this with AI trying to replicate me and we can't.
it's not consistent enough so we're trying but uh yeah it's tough yeah okay i want to pivot a little bit and talk about the success that you're having on this second account There's so much talk right now about how saturated the space is, how difficult it is to grow. And yet you and your team were able to build a completely new page up to almost 200 ,000 followers in less than seven months.
So walk us through how you were able to do that and what you think other people can take from the strategy that you're taking in a time where social media is more saturated than it's ever been before. Yeah, yeah. No, that account's ripping.
So it's definitely validated the hypothesis I had. So basically, for people who don't have the context, I've done two main content accounts on Instagram. I started out with the at Callaway account, which was tech and AI.
My goal there was like, I want everything to go as viral as possible because the more views it gets, the bigger the brand deals be. The whole game with that was brand deals. I was only making like three to four videos a week.
I was like, quality is the most important thing. It has to be 10 out of 10. I'm gonna spend 10 hours per video.
Like basically all the things that most people say not to do now, back then I was doing because I was like, as long as I get bangers that have, I think my hit rate at one point was 25 % were getting a million views. So one out of every four videos getting a million views on that channel. And that was helpful for the brand deals.
On this side, I was like, what I actually wanted in the marketing channel is to drive leads. I want leads and conversion, high authority. I don't wanna go viral.
A, because the people I coach are not going to be able to go viral. So I want to see if I can do it on purpose, not going viral. But then B, the strategy to actually drive lead gen is the opposite of what I just described on the tech channel.
Like what you really want is consistent base hits that have like 10 to 30K views that are super targeted for your ideal avatar. And you want high volume above the quality bar, but like it doesn't need to be perfect. So on that channel, I was like, cool, we're going one video a day.
Once I post 60 videos, we're going to sweep back behind and take the best ones, turn them into carousels. So we'll do one video, one carousel a day. Every single video is targeted at my exact ICP.
So it's like a business owner trying to grow with content. If it's not valuable for them, I'm not making it. I'm not doing any sensationalist stuff.
I'm putting CTAs in literally every single video. We can probably talk about that too. Like a lot of people think you shouldn't over CTA.
I'm absolutely, I'm doing like. 12 to 15 ,000 emails collected per month organic just on that channel alone because of the CTAs. Yeah, so it's absolutely ripping.
But I think the consistency of targeting and the volume at one per day is massive, right? And so obviously when you start out, if you're going for this like mid -bottom of funnel type content, you still need to get a couple locally viral rippers to like get it going. You still need a couple like 50, 100K views to like...
activate the channel so we had a few of those in the first week which were helpful and then yeah it's just been like compounding from there what i mean talk to us about the compounding i mean you talk about the the rules like what are you learning about it what is working on those new channels are you seeing like specific hooks or specific top like yeah give us like some of the principles or the tactics on the action yeah So the whole thing is topic driven.
Everything with content is topic driven slash idea driven. And you say that a lot. I say that a lot.
People still don't listen because most people want to think their ideas are good, which is totally fair. Like it's kind of unintuitive to be like, oh, I have not only do I have bad ideas, but I have no strategy around ideas. But this is the whole thing.
So basically what I realized was true and we started from zero doing this is. There are going to be a few topic buckets that matter most in this space. Those are going to be the things that have the most views on competitor channels and are the things that the viewers feel like are their problems.
So like if you're trying to drive leads, you have a buyer. That buyer is walking around with pain points all day. They have an ordered list in their head of like the most painful shit to them.
least painful shit the most painful stuff we have to figure out what that is we can either guess or we can try to use data to speed run the guessing so basically in every niche there's three to five of these buckets you have to find them so what i did was i took all the data from all the competitors fed it in through sandcastles into claude and i was like what what are the buckets that are working so it spit out a few answers so then i'm like cool if i'm making seven videos a week i'm going to split those three like two two two and one across those buckets and just test and so every seven We were basically running on a 14 -day loop.
So I'd make seven. I would post those seven. The next batch of seven were being made.
So then by the time I could see the first week's data, I was making the third week's videos, essentially. So I'd love for the feedback loop to be tighter, but we were batching. So that was as fast as we could go.
And so I'd post week one, and I'd be like, okay, which topics are actually hitting the way I thought? Which ones are not? The ones that were hitting, we'd carry forward.
The ones that were not, we'd kill. And I did that iteration loop for about seven weeks, like 50 videos. By the 50 video mark, I knew exactly what topic buckets, what topics, what messaging angles.
I could tell just by the lead flow, because I was doing the CTAs, and by the views, you could just tell. I call this a 3 -2 -1 method. This is why I teach every business owner.
You just do that enough until you can carry forward the winning buckets. Then you just hammer the buckets. You just hammer the fuck out of the buckets.
That's all you do. What happens in content is, let's just say storytelling is a winning bucket, which it is for me. Storytelling is a winning bucket.
Eventually, everyone will realize storytelling is a winning bucket and oversaturate that to where the effectiveness on my channel goes down. So then I have to retire storytelling for a little bit and promote something else that is fresh. And it's this constant evolution of like, you got three that work.
Okay, one died. Now we have two. Now let's test the third.
Now we have three. And you just keep doing that, right? So that's effectively what we've done.
I've just stayed super disciplined to that strategy and it's crushing. you can definitely tell them from the university of callaway because everything you just say yeah is like verbatim the like just how i think about content like that was the most aligned description of how to grow an account i've probably ever felt in my own little brain um yeah i will say that so the in that sense the formats visual ads don't really matter because i have those fixed the hooks do matter though the hooks matter but not in the sense of like i'm trying to copy a hook format that's working it's more around uh power words is is like my whole thing which i think you talk about this as well buzzwords yeah yeah people are walking around your your buyers are walking around with terms in their head that mean things that they want right so as long as you say those terms that are in those topic buckets you've got them like a magnet attracted to the video now you still have to say something in the substance that's like relevant and non -obvious something they can use that maps to the cta but as long as you get them paying attention you've got them so
like if storytelling is a bucket it's like what are the storytelling related words or phrases that they're thinking about right so let's just say like psychologically addictive they hear the term psychology they don't really know what that means but they know it means good like they they want it so when i say that it's like boom you like it's basically like hypnosis essentially uh and i try to use it for good only but but basically that's what that's what this is is hypnosis uh and so yeah it's working pretty well yeah the past whatever five six minutes is probably the the would be like a keynote speech that's like if i can just say one thing to anybody ever it would be just that breakdown right there it's that that important that crucial that covers essentially everything whenever it comes to the high level understanding of how to grow a social media account and uh and just run that blueprint long enough and compound on the data and you can literally achieve anything you want in life yeah let alone yeah just on a social media page
and so what would be helpful is like okay where where are the break points where that goes wrong so like because that is the answer so it's like if someone's not if someone's doing that and not getting knocking the result why why are they not getting that okay well number one they didn't use data enough at the beginning to identify those buckets so they're just they're in that early stage where they're guessing so that's one number two they didn't stick with the buckets long enough that the data said were good number three they pick the right buckets, but the actual topics and words they're using inside are like not interesting to the viewer or they're not articulating themselves well enough.
Number four, they're not putting enough volume through the system. So even if you know the buckets are correct, if you're only doing three videos a week, it's just not enough. The feedback loops are too slow.
The amount of volume is too slow to actually work. And then number five is they just stopped. Like it was working, but there were 40 videos in and they're like, I hate doing this, but really need to get to like 100, 200, 300 videos.
As long as those aren't your issues. Like, it's just math, right? This shit's just math.
It's not even anything more complicated than that. Yeah, and just to touch on number one, a lot of people, like you said, they have this subconscious ego of what they think a great idea is. And that actually fuels way more of the decision -making process than they actually think.
It's not coming. I think Caleb says this, or maybe it was Ogilvy, he says, content's not a game of guessing. Content is not a game of guessing.
It's a game of knowing. and if you're not coming to the table coming to the camera coming to the mic with like seeds of data signal is what i call it like just thoughts that oh this is for sure at least going to give me a really good chance because of the data i've seen then you've already lost the first part of the battle yeah so the thing the thing that's hard with content this was really a mind for me is and also are we allowed to curse on this show uh hopefully because i've dropped that to you already yeah yeah so the real the real mind for me was I know people, like my customer, I know they have a certain set of problems.
Like I just know what they are, but they think they have this set of problems and they're not always aligned. And so the problem is if you target what you think the problem is, but they don't think it is, the videos will flop. So in a perfect example of this with content is ideas.
Every video I make about ideas flops is because nobody thinks they have an idea problem. So when they hear the hook, they're like, that's not my problem. So you have to like go where their problem actually is.
get them into the ecosystem and then you can you can educate them on what their problems actually are once they've paid you and they're like they're kind of like paying attention right so that's a very non -obvious thing about content that took me a long time to realize i was like banging my head again i get a lot of people that come to the academy like i had this one lady who was a tv anchor and she was like My whole thing is delivery.
Like I help people talk better on camera. And I was like, I don't think most people think their problem is talking on camera. They think their problem is editing or the workflow or the AI.
And so her videos just don't break out. And it's because she's talking about the wrong topic within the problem set, right? So there's all these little things that are not obvious that you really don't learn unless you rip a bunch of videos.
That's what I was just about to ask is how you gather this data. I just ran inside of my community. So if you don't have a community, it's like you have to get a little fancy with it, maybe an email list.
I just gave. people i asked them uh i'll venmo you 25 bucks if you just tell me the biggest pain that you are currently struggling with it probably isn't even actually the real pain that i think is the best solution for them to go so yeah yeah but it's the perceived pain and then you need to get i needed to get a lot of people to answer so i'm going to incentivize them with like a free meal right and that for me you know i think i didn't get a ton i have a small group small active group but that's enough was enough data for me to now actually have a true purified untainted like understanding of the actual pain of my icp and it's worth every single penny every single penny this this is why everyone's like oh you're a founder you got to talk to customers like the reason you talk to customers because they tell you stuff about what they're struggling with that you didn't think they were and that that misalignment getting that aligned is critical like in our group we
I twice a week. I have these calls where like I'll people can submit videos I'll watch them live and like tell them what to fix and the reason I do that is because It's kind of have you ever seen like magnus carlson when he's playing chess against like 15 people at the same time He's like in the middle of the room and he's like going around and everyone's sitting at their board and he That's basically what I do twice a week for videos and I do that because when I tell them what to what to fix They tell me what their problems are.
I just I suck it out of them basically. Yes, and so you know pause and so then basically there's like there so there's like 10 to 15 per call so 30 per week of like what their frustration is but i but i get it out of them because i give them feedback and they're like in the pocket with me talking about it for five minutes that's like the most that's the reason i run the community is because i i'm able to get their pain at scale right like relative scale so super super helpful and real quick if someone doesn't have a community give us like two to three other ways that somebody could go get this pain at scale You just got to have conversations one -on -one.
So all community is just scaled one -on -one conversation. So if you don't have a community, you just like go start DMing or like email people, especially if you're from, if you're coming from a position of authority, you should be able to just email like 10 people that, you know, you've interacted with or follow your content or DM them and just be like, yo, I'll give you free advice.
Just like, tell me this answer. Just like you said, you paid them 25 bucks or whatever that I think you can get. It doesn't take that much.
feedback like 10 to 15 people to be able to get directional on what what they're struggling with thoughts on just like a you know smaller creator maybe with 10 000 followers building a really fire lead magnet giving it to the audience for free off of their stories not even collecting an email but just asking hey all i need you to do is answer this one pain point so i can understand my audience more if you do you get these five free steps on how i do bicep curls or some like that do you think that'd be good yeah i i would i would i would order it differently though i would give them you want to try to get the email from the lead magnet without any other contingencies because the easiest thing people don't value their email so they'll just give it once you have the email then hit them with a drip a second follow -up to be like hey answer this one question survey don't do it the other way where they have to answer the survey and give their email to get the thing because a bunch of people won't like they'll stop right there what if you just pass on the email entirely and you just went straight hey i'm not even going to click i guess you said they don't really value their email anymore so it wouldn't be point it would be pointless to be like hey i'm not yeah that could work that could work if you're
if you're just like, you want this comment, the word, and then in many chat and in the DMS, you're just like, answer this question. They answer it really quick. That could for sure work.
Yeah. But, but I do find like in a multiple choice question of pain points, people would just click and they don't think about it. Like you really want to, you want them to think about it.
Right. Yeah. Yeah.
we maybe it'd be worth talking about the cta thing because i think that that also i saw you message somewhere like that also broke a lot of people's brains in terms of like how i'm doing that so i don't i don't know if you guys have questions on that let's touch on that let's touch on that and let's get a quick little i think sandcastles is the only i think i could probably say that it is do we use any other softwares guys that is like creator first besides sandcastles really yeah i mean mini chat but yeah that wouldn't really many chat yeah Yeah, so I mean like Sandcastles is the only product that we internally like use on a semi -regular basis that's better than the systems that our AI guy is building.
And so I want to end with that. But yeah, okay, this blew my mind. I texted you about this separately.
I was like, it makes zero logical sense from my hypothesis that CTAing every single video would not fatigue the audience. Now you came back with like two to three phenomenal points on how that's not happening. go ahead and repeat those here.
Just phenomenal. Yeah. Yeah.
So it's, it's surprising how well it's working, but let me just explain. So when I started making tech content, I never put like a, you know, comment word and try to get the emails ever. Cause my hypothesis back then was like, well, I don't want to interrupt the flow.
I'm basically trying to put them in a state of hypnosis, keep them there, let the video loop. And then once the video is one and a half times done, they'll realize they'll be like, Whoa, where, where am I? And then they'll, but like, that's great for the metrics.
So that's how I used to think about it. That makes sense when you're doing brand deals, you don't actually have value in having an email list. But on the marketing side, it was like, yo, the more emails I get, the more money I make.
It's like very, very simple. So I was like, how can I scale email collection? Well, if the CTA is not seen as an ask, but it's actually a give, I call this a value ramp or like a native embed, then I'm actually doing them a favor to give them more information if they want it.
And it's not like me being delusional to myself. I do think that is the case. If I tell you something about storytelling and you really want to solve a pain, but I can't cover it in 60 seconds and I give you the perfect next thing, you will happily give your email of which you value zero in exchange for that thing.
So when I realized that, I was like, oh shit, all I have to do is align the lead magnet with what's in the video and then make sure it's actually good. And if I do that, people should want it. And so I started doing that.
So that's one thing. Second thing is I really wanted to measure the conversion potential of every video because instead of picking topics based on views, what I really wanted is to pick topics based on dollars. I want to know what topics actually print me money so I can make more of those.
Well, I don't have a system that's tracking views to dollars, but I do have a system that's tracking views to emails, which is a proxy for dollars. What I really wanted was to use the CTAs in every video so I could sort the videos by conversion and then optimize that way. So it's kind of two birds, one stone, which is like I'm collecting a shit ton of emails so I can understand which topics are converting better.
But also I'm getting all the emails, doing them a favor, giving them like actually enriching the community, right? In the content minutes frame, which I talk about a lot. If they watch one short form video, it's one minute.
But if they also consume my lead magnet and read that for five minutes, that's six minutes on my stuff instead of one. So I'm actually kind of like deepening the relationship with the audience by giving them a lead magnet they actually care about. So for both reasons, I was like, oh shit, I should just put a lead magnet in every single video.
And so I started doing that. And yeah, like the first couple, like 5 ,000 comments, 7 ,000 comments, like the emails were just coming in like crazy. And people don't get fatigued because I'm doing them a favor.
So it's like, if I have a format database, they want it. If I have a storytelling thing, they want it. Where it fatigues them, I think, is if you do the same lead magnet and the same CTA on every video.
Because once they take it, there's no incremental marginal value for them hearing you say that over and over. And then you become a shill. So the secret is actually making a shitload of lead magnets.
If I have 150 videos, I have 100 different lead magnet combinations that match with whatever I'm talking about. That works super well. The other thing I wanted to say, which this is also a little contrarian, I guess, is with the way social media is evolving and the pure mashed potato -ification of people's brains, I think what's happening is the way I look at short form is each video is a sniper shot to extract the lead in real time.
Anything else other than like... The you watching 500 of my videos and kind of recognizing my face over time like that's the super long -term Anything in the middle is dead like there is no They watched five of my videos in a row and they love me now Like I don't think that works that way because people's brains cannot store information from short form It's like literally as if the brain has a pocket where you watch a video Then you go to the next video and you just cash that out like you just do you have no memory storage at all.
So If that's true, then the purpose of short form is just to extract the lead in real time, right? And long form, which is why it's so valuable, is actually enriching.
But short form is not enriching at all because people are seeing 100 videos. They've seen one of yours. They don't remember what you said at all.
Maybe they remember your face or like you have a little orange thing in your background, but they don't remember shit. If you accept that to be true, which I do, then also CTAs on every video is the best thing because you're extracting the leads from a rented platform of junk food into an owned platform where you can actually enrich them.
So for all those reasons, it's like, oh shit, you actually want to put CTAs in every video that are super aligned and extract people out. And so that's been my hypothesis. I think we've done like, I haven't run the numbers in the last like 30 ,000 followers, but it's probably been.
over 100 ,000 many chat activations, over 50 ,000 unique emails. And yeah, like 12 to 15 ,000 net new emails per month just running this cycle. So yeah, it's definitely, it's not what you would think, I guess.
Could you, it's okay if you can't do this. Can you give us a dollar per email subscriber going to Sandcastles? I actually don't know the dollar per email.
first so there's like two separate lists so i have my like content .game list which is where the emails kind of come from the the marketing channel and then the sandcastles has a separate list where it's like if you do make like some of the lead magnets are for sandcastles which drives them to the other list so i actually don't have a i don't have a good calculation for like every net new subscriber in sandcastles equates to this many dollars but um yeah it's the value of the so the thing is like we just launched short form launch this like four week thing it was just like a test i just wanted to see like i just scaled this channel like is there actual audience value here and all we did was hammer emails post reels and stories and like it did 260k in like two weeks so it was pretty it was pretty successful i was trying to get the jesse gene uh like 7 million thing, but yeah, there was, there was, there was factors there that I could not replicate fast enough.
So, uh, that was a good, that was a good learning, but yeah, like it's, yeah, it works. That's dope. That's dope.
Has he got anything before we go into sandcastles? No, that was actually my next pivot before we run out of time. Tell us more about sandcastles and why do I as a business owner absolutely have to be on that platform?
Yeah. So the vision for sandcastles was initially to like clone my brain into software. And like, obviously that wasn't fully possible initially with the base models, but where it's kind of evolved to is sandcastles is meant to be the data layer for social media.
So what most people want, if you accept, which you guys obviously do the like topic data and being able to look at your competitors, understand what's working. If you accept that to be true, which most people do, what you need is all the social media data with the performance piped into your AI models. or like InterCloud, ChatGPT, Grok, whatever people use, it's actually not that easy to get that at scale in.
You can use something like Appify or even computer use to like watch 15 of your videos or even like your whole channel, but you just can't do it at scale at the level with the data fidelity that you really need. And the segmentation. Okay, and that's what I think you have.
Your brain segments the data really well. So it's properly sorting and kind of giving labels and understanding to the data. I can stick Amplify on my account and it can bring me back some random observations that are actually not hypotheses that I wanted it to even remotely find.
And unless I have the opportunity to go in and give a really strong context layer to my Amplify, which could take me months to get that context layer, that sorting mechanism, then it's going to be ass. And that's what I think Sandcastles is top tier at. the taxonomy, the taxonomy classification of all of the different variables and what the options are and when you, the rule set for when you do what, like a lot of people will look at sandcastles from the outside and be like, Oh, this is like a vibe coded scraper that we could easily rebuild.
As soon as you get into it, you're like, Oh shit, there's like months and months of like refinement on this taxonomy. And then a shitload of, of compute to get the data in organized and accessible. So there, there's a lot to it, but essentially it's what I want is, We're starting with short form, but we're going to expand this.
Any short form video piece of content from anyone, you want to be able to get that tagged into an LLM at scale so that you can say, for you guys who are running an agency, it's insanely valuable because you can have a separate space for every single different niche. The learnings in a typical system are not going to cross over.
Imagine building that taxonomy for every niche separately. It would be so annoying. Yeah, it's basically if you're to put in a nutshell, if you're growing on social media or you're taking content seriously, you have to have enriched social media data to make better decisions.
And the only way to do that, or I guess the best way to do it is Sandcastles. And so that's my goal is like every person who's taking content seriously has Sandcastles embedded in Claude. It's embedded in ChatGPT.
It's just a bridge that enables you to enrich all that data. classified in the way that we know works best and then you have it accessible you can do anything with it yeah that's insane do you have a hard stop here you go a little bit no no keep going we know yeah we can keep going okay i want to walk through how we in a dream scenario would we onboard a client and we would take them through we would use sandcastles and i want you to basically like correct or redirect my sandcastles workflow to be more optimal cool let's do it okay so we onboard client we then give them a uh a quiz that is essentially generating ideas and topics buzzwords it's these these power words that we're talking about we're just dishing them buzzwords power words and they're rating them on a scale of one to five and then it triggers a quick little voice note on it it actually it triggers a microphone for them to give a one to two sentence voice note on why they said that So I chose a two because I hate this concept.
I would never talk about that. I chose a five. Oh my gosh, I love this.
My dad was this, whatever. Then that turns into basically an IP map that we then launch into our Sandcastles workflow to start giving this person who maybe is a tax strategist. They hate the Augusta rule, but they love this.
And so now our creative director can use Sandcastles to kind of point sand or use the IP map is what we call this intellectual property map. and point Sandcastles at some of these categories to get more and more data around the topics of what's going out into the field. So we're essentially separating like client's brain from field data, right?
Because some people don't want to talk about the shit that might be performing across the field. Then what I think we should do. Go ahead.
Good. No, go ahead. Go ahead.
Sorry. Then the last two stages is what I think we could do better on is we don't really. formalize like you said with the with the marketing these like five buckets from competitors as good as i think we should and then we use it on the back end where look at our download the data from the client over the last 30 to 50 days toss it into whatever our clients are asking questions and querying based off the taxonomy that uh sandcastles has done on the person's account so like a reverse audit of the the page now does that make sense yeah Yeah.
So we're, we're going to have something coming out in like four weeks that will like blow your mind on this front, like to make the workflow way streamlined. It'll actually, it won't solve ideas, but it will become a pipe for your idea flow. That's like legit.
It's not just gonna be like videos in, it'll be like ideas in which we dope. But until we have that, the question I had is in that workflow, are you not identifying the competitor accounts? you're going straight at the topic level to find individual videos because because that is one alternative i can i can walk through what i do but that's one alternative that makes this a lot easier i think we do we've am i good matthew okay we do find uh competitor accounts we ask them and we also find probably 10 15 20 competitor accounts that they give us that we also help find and i don't know if we're like super consistent about actually loading them into sandcastles but that is part of the workflow yeah so There's basically two main ways to access the data in Sandcastles.
One is you give, like you said, keywords or topics, and then you have Sandcastles surface videos about those topics that have performed well to kind of get the ball rolling. I think that's the less effective of the two paths. Wait one second, my dog's freaking out.
I forgot this is live, whatever. That's one of the paths. The other path, what we do is...
I actually think it's very helpful to first focus exclusively on finding the competitor accounts and then using that as the filter to look for the topics that you've validated. And the reason why is because essentially when you use data, what you want to minimize is noise. And so if you, let's just say like you're working with a tax accountant and like, yeah, the term Augusta rule comes out.
If you search for Augusta rule. Literally, if you search on Instagram, but also if you search via Claude in Sandcastles or you search directly in our global database, you're going to get stuff about the Augusta rule, but you're also going to get shit about Augusta, the golf course. You're going to get a lot of bad fits on golf, and it's going to be annoying.
It's going to muddy the data. So the better way is you go into Claude. You say, we're a tax accountant.
You brain dump all of the, I call it the niche interview, but basically. You ask those questions, you dump that into Claude and say, go find all the best fit accounts on Sandcastles. Go at the channel level first.
It has a tool in Claude that can return the accounts for you automatically. So it'll be like, here's. here's 13 accounts.
And then there's also like these five that are also accounts, but they don't really talk about this thing. So maybe look at those, but it will give you like multiple. So then of those 13, you add those in, then you start, then you can download all of those videos and be like, all right, filter out anything that's not about accounting, filter out anything that's not about these topics and go from there.
And I think that might be the step that like, I would do that step earlier, basically, right? To find these accounts. that's so fucking good we have our clients give it to us and it'll be like a tax account and they're like we like hermosy and dan martell and i'm like exactly yeah that is like yeah and they we so that's or they don't give us the full list they give us like four to five so this is a huge pain point i love that that's a 10 out of 10 we will be doing that for sure you got you got it you got to do that for them the exact same thing is nobody does the research on the accounts like you guys will do it and the beauty is if you just so what we're gonna do in sandcastles is we're gonna every user that comes in we're gonna have This similar interview, six questions, super easy.
That builds what you call an IP map. I don't even know what we're going to call it, but like a little card with all of the context on them. We will feed that card into the system and that card will produce the best fit accounts.
And you can just do that in Claude today. Like literally just have the MCP set up in Sandcastles and tell Claude, find me the best accounts. From there, go build the watch list and you can just tell Claude, build the watch list in Sandcastles.
It will do it for you. Then look at those. I guarantee the fit will be so much better.
And you don't have to just stick to that, but that becomes one input source of ideas for you, right? And then you can jump off from there. If you're like, oh shit, the 14th video is about the Augusta rule.
Okay. now let's go do research on the Augusta rule. And that'll make it way easier.
That's so good. That's so good. Any, okay.
Well, it kind of helps us on the front half of the workflow. Next half of the workflow, we get our buckets, we get our alignment. We kind of use it.
It's going to dish us potentially, you know, 20 ideas a week from this watch list. We're going to look through, we're going to say we love five, seven, 13, 14, 17, whatever. And then we're going to spin them up for our client.
We're going to post those ideas and then reverse engineering the audit over the last 30 to 50 days to kind of find patterns. When we talk about these power words, when we open up this story structure, like you talked about, this substance, this angle, anything else in that journey that you think would be more valuable? One thing I run is called the bullseye builder.
And I can give you guys a skill if you want. But basically what it does is most people, like imagine a bullseye with five rings. The fifth ring is the outermost ring is like broad shit.
So if you're working with an accountant, that could be like. I don't know, like a money laundering story that really doesn't have anything to do with accounting, but it's like super viral top of funnel. And the bullseye would be like a perfect tax strategy for the exact person they want.
And like rings two, three, and four in between are like, you know, progressively getting broader. Core, casual, new audience. Exactly.
Exactly. So to run this bullseye fit, what you really want to figure out, depending on if they're going for views, followers, or conversions, you want to figure out at what. altitude of specificity, breadth versus depth.
Are we getting the highest conversion per view? And what's interesting is if you have a channel, like literally you can rig up a channel in Sandcastles and say, run the bullseye builder on this channel. It will plot every video across the, it will first figure out what the bullseye is, plot every video.
And what I did on my own channel, it was very shocking is I assumed broader would give me more views and narrower would give me more conversions. Like that's what most people would guess. What I found out is that The fourth ring, the second most broad, was actually getting me the most views and the most conversions for whatever reason.
And I ran it on hundreds of videos. So I was like, oh shit, that means now moving forward, every topic I pick and frame I put should be positioned at that fourth ring, which is like a little bit broader than what I thought. That one insight will probably end up driving millions in revenue.
Like just knowing that, because now I won't make these super narrow videos that don't do well because I'm not driving the conversion on those. So you would never know that unless you run this. run the data through this kind of like skill yeah we do a lot of this manually it's like a supply and demand mismatch like that last ring would have been a an ocean a body of water too big where you're not competing on a landscape that you've lost your slight edge where if you go down a ring you can actually capture more of this the demand because there's less supply there's a supply yeah that's sick we would yeah please and that'd be huge so that i'll send you guys that so that that on the strategy side is huge i think so so then let's assume you have the buckets You have the, you pull all the topics, you filter out all the shit.
Like, oh, this is an accountant driving a Ferrari up the coast. Like that's not relevant. Let's get rid of those.
You then pick of the ideas, like what we're going to make. So then it's like, how do we actually make it? So the actual substance and angle that's, I'm sure you guys have an exercise with a client where you're like, we need to figure out what your contrarian beliefs are.
So we can kind of understand like what the angle should be. That part is more person dependent, how you would do that. But that you wouldn't really use sandcastles to like find.
get the angles out of them per se that's like the one human in the loop piece that's really important on the hook side i think people overblow the like these hook formats are like i think that all this the only thing that really matters is the power words and so what what is helpful is you take all the best performing videos from that from the list that you've you know drilled down and you try to have claude extract the words that are actually psychologically you know triggered or or psychologically powered and But the real art of the script writing and formulation is you have to figure out for this topic with this bank of power words, what should we actually use in the hook so that we can get people interested?
There's no great AI system that's going to hammer that every single time. Like we've tried. It's sometimes good, sometimes bad.
So we don't have like a, you know, getting the power words is great with sandcastles. understanding which ones could link to topics is great, but actually using them predictably every time in writing that doesn't sound cringy, not perfect with AI. So that would be the second human in the loop step that's very high leverage.
And then, yeah, after that, we don't have a ton for Zancastles, like the recording, we don't do avatars, we don't do AI editing today. So that's mostly manual. That's so good.
Any thoughts on that, Chase? I feel like that's mind -blowing. That's game.
I feel like I got to go take a shower. Shit's a lot of work to do. Yeah, bro.
We're probably using Sankaza. It feels like maybe 15 % of its total capabilities. Yeah, that's on me for not making enough content, breaking down how to use it.
But we're going to try to scale that. But yeah, happy to help you guys as well. If you want to hop on a different call, I can screen share and help you.
Yeah, we'll have to talk more. All right, man. Well, Chase, unless you got anything or Kane, you want to rip on anything else.
Like, I feel like this is an absolute heater. This has been a heater, dude. Thank you.
Yeah, this is a heater. This is a heater. And yeah, I'm good for another 15 minutes.
So anything you guys have, we can chat or wrap it up. I think that was good. Yeah, let's wrap it.
We might have to do a little huddle play. Do a part two. Yeah, exactly.
Have you back on in like a month or so. So thank you, man. This means the world to me.
It's like crazy to think back. a year and a half ago before i'd even post a single video i was just balls deep in the youtube you open loops all that stuff like the blueprint um thank you for uh you know being being kind of the agency with sandcastles giving us your time and also just all the free value that helped uh help shape my journey so thank you man yeah dude 100 100 that long form on instagram is gonna hit hard too so you gotta Get ready for that.
Yeah, I know. I know this is going to find its way up there. It'll find its way up there for sure.
Um, where can people find you? What's a, what's the, what's the CTA? Give us the, give us the breakdown.
Yeah. So if you want to follow me for like the social media stuff at Callaway marketing on Instagram is the best account or at Callaway marketing on YouTube is good. Um, sandcastles .ai is the software.
If you, I recommend any creator use that. Um, we'll, we'll get you guys like a code you can put in the description if they want a discount so we can, we can do that. Um, if you want to work with me one -on -one, uh, Cali .co slash Academy.
That's like my program where I like review the videos and help people strategy wise. Um, but yeah, other than that, just keep going. Stay live out there.
Appreciate it. Amazing.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
The pitch is in the title: an audience of buyers, not just viewers. The guest walks through how a brand-new Instagram account reached almost 200,000 followers in under seven months and now collects 12,000 to 15,000 emails a month organically, and the method turns out to be less about clever formats than about picking topics with data and asking for the email every single time.
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Three agency strategists sit at a bare table for an hour and work through the actual frameworks they use to run other people's content: AI clone economics, market sophistication levels, and the KPI ladder that makes a creative director's value provable.
A 64-minute Creator Unplugged interview on reverse engineering attention, going premium on brand deals, and why creators should start asking for equity instead of just cash.
Nolan Molt walks through twelve habits from his own $700K YouTube channel and client work, from chasing the right viewers to ending every video with a handoff.
A 49-minute, single-camera, zero-edit argument against both the teleprompter and the off-the-cuff ramble, built around a five-bullet outline he calls the guardrail method.
A two-hour live training on running a small YouTube channel as a sales funnel: one sales video, a two-hour production week, and packaging built on interest.
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