22:39Sam Gaudet · Tutorial
How to Actually Grow on YouTube in 2026 (Full Playbook)
A 22-minute masterclass on the Four Cs: the sequential system a creative director used to take a channel from 10K to 2.7M subscribers.
May 24thThe argument in one line.
A personal brand grows when you build a world around it, using seven repeatable levels that turn constant association into recognition, trust, and a path from stranger to buyer.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- A founder or creator with a small audience who shares advice but has never told the origin story behind why they do what they do.
- A solo operator who wants a content system that runs without waking up each day asking what to post.
- Someone building a personal brand around a business who needs a way to name, package, and own their ideas.
- A content or brand lead hired to build a founder's personal brand who needs a structure to plan it around.
SKIP IF…
- You want platform tactics like hooks, editing, or algorithm tricks, since this stays at the brand-strategy level.
- You have no product or offer yet, because levels six and seven assume something to funnel people toward.
The full version, fast.
Branding is repeated association, and worldbuilding is how you organize those associations into something people can live inside. The video walks through seven levels: share your origin, introduce multiple characters (each with a purpose, pain, weakness, and worldview), plant recognizable places, artifacts, and rhythms, coin your own language and frameworks, pick a common enemy that inverts your promise, build a repeatable content engine from your product, and design doors for each level of awareness so strangers can go as deep as they choose.
Free for members
Chat with this breakdown — free.
Sign in and you get 23 free chat messages on us — ask for the hook, quote a framework, find the exact transcript moment, generate a markdown action plan. Bring your own key when you want unlimited.
Create a free account →Lines worth screenshotting.
- People don't just follow you for your advice, they follow you for your journey, so skipping your origin story to give advice weakens the brand.
- Branding isn't associating yourself with a thing once. It's repeating the same association until people think of you automatically.
- People trust a founder more than a company logo, which is why personal brands win distribution that corporate accounts can't.
- Spreading a world across several characters lets different audiences find someone they resonate with.
- A character diamond has four corners: purpose on top, pain on the bottom, weakness on the left, worldview on the right.
- Your purpose sits on the other side of the worst thing that ever happened to you.
- Sharing losses and weaknesses builds more connection than sharing only wins.
- Places, artifacts, and rhythms are what make an audience feel at home when they finally show up in person.
- Wearing the same blue shirt in every video is a deliberate artifact that ties a person to a look.
- Teach a named mechanism, not a generic term: 'buying back your time' sticks where 'delegation' doesn't.
- A good framework is hard to simplify, not hard to complicate. Distilling to the fewest steps is the real work.
- Test a framework with your team before you teach it publicly. One short-form framework was tested four years before it was ever posted.
- People rally around what they hate more than what they love, so a common enemy pulls an audience together.
- Your enemy is the inverse of your promise: help entrepreneurs build a business they don't grow to hate, and the enemy becomes hustle culture.
- The bigger and more indestructible the villain looks, the more powerful the hero looks when it falls.
- A content engine starts from the product: training becomes a long video, then short clips, then posts, so there's never a blank page.
- Make content approachable to everyone but applicable to a select few, so people choose how deep they go.
Seven levels that turn a brand into a world
WHAT TO LEARN
Branding is repeated association, so the job is to decide what you want to be associated with and then show it again and again across origin, people, places, language, enemy, engine, and doors.
- Tell your origin story before you give advice, and repeat it, because people follow the journey as much as the tips.
- Add supporting characters so different audiences find someone to resonate with, and map each with purpose, pain, weakness, and worldview.
- Plant places, artifacts, and rhythms in your content so people recognize your world when they finally step into it in person.
- Coin your own terms and package ideas as named frameworks, built by mapping the outcome, observing, distilling, experimenting, then labeling.
- Pick a big common enemy that is the inverse of your promise, since people rally harder around what they hate than what they love.
- Build a content engine from your product so a training becomes a long video, then clips, then posts, and you never start from a blank page.
- Design a door for each level of awareness so strangers can stay on free content or go deeper into products and events.
Terms worth knowing.
- Worldbuilding
- Organizing a brand's story, people, places, language, and enemy into a consistent universe that an audience can step into and recognize.
- Character diamond
- A four-point map of a person in your world: purpose on top, pain on the bottom, weakness on the left, and worldview on the right.
- Artifact
- A recurring object in your content, like a signature shirt or a book, that people learn to associate with you.
- Rhythm
- A recurring event or schedule, such as a weekly video drop or a Tuesday group hike, that gives the audience something to count on.
- Levels of awareness
- Five stages a buyer moves through: unaware, problem aware, solution aware, product aware, and most aware.
- Model method
- A five-step process for creating a framework: map the outcome, observe, distill, experiment, and label.
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.
Look, if you don't understand world building, then you don't understand personal brand. If you don't know me, I'm Sam Gadet. I'm the creative director behind Dan Martell, and I've helped him grow his personal brand from under 100K followers to over 13 million across all platforms.
And I attribute a lot of that success to world building. And so in this video, I'm going to break down the seven levels of world building and how you can apply them into your personal brand journey today. So level one of world building is your origin.
This is where you share your personal. experience your story what you've done in your life and a lot of people skip to giving advice to people in their personal brand journey instead of actually explaining where you came from and so an example for us is in dan martell's world he always shares his origin behind why he does what he does today he was a troubled kid he was in jail twice by the time he was 17 and if you watch his videos and you look into his personal brand you're going to understand the lore behind what makes him him and that's the big thing you want to implement into your personal brand journey is the actual story and the origin behind who you are and if you look at people like spider -man he got bit by the experimental spider or you look at people like batman they got both his parents killed in the alleyway you want to share your origin story with your audience because people don't just follow you for your advice they follow you for your journey and if you show people where you came from and where you are today that is how you establish your world that's how you get to level one which is just sharing your origin story as an example for me all across this youtube channel and my short form content i always share the story of me at 14 years old finding damn martel on youtube and i started watching damn martel on
YouTube. Then at 16 years old, I started working for him full time. Nine years later, I'm his creative director and I'm a big reason why we've been able to achieve insane growth on social media.
And yes, people follow me for the advice that I give on social media, but a lot of people follow me for the journey that I've been on and where I'm going. And so if you want to start building your world, identify what is your origin story, where have you came from and how can you share that with your audience? And then once you have it, what you want to do is repeat it time and time again, because we understand that branding isn't just associating yourself with the thing one time.
constantly associating yourself to that same thing time and time again until it becomes automatic until people think of you as that person and then you know you've established your world which brings us to level two of world building which is your characters creating content and start building characters within your business because we understand as people that people buy from people not companies and a lot of CEOs are starting to hire their head of content their creative director their personal brand person to go on this journey and build their personal brand because they understand that people like Elon are winning not because Tesla is a great company but because Elon is a great entrepreneur and people trust the person Elon more so than the logo Tesla same thing for Mark Zuckerberg same thing for Bill Gates but these people understand that they need to build their personal brand in order to get distribution and so what you want to do for your world what you want to do to build trust with your audience is to
as many characters as possible within your world. And what this looks like is not just identifying your character, but it's identifying who in your world can you share with your audience so that you create even more depth with your audience. What this looks like, Disney, as an example, has Minnie, Mickey, and Goofy because certain people will resonate with a completely different type of person depending on who they are.
On the other side of it, movies in the Marvel universe, right? They have Iron Man, they have Captain America, they have Black Widow, and they're spreading their likeness across as many different demographics as possible so that people resonate towards different people. We're doing this in real time at Martel Media as well, right?
We have Dan Martel, who is, you know, the main personal brand, but then we have all of these supporting characters around them that we share in our content so that people can resonate to different people. We have Renee, his wife. She helps women with visibility and being seen.
And so women in our world will obviously gravitate towards Renee. And there's obviously myself. I help people with content creation and branding.
And so if people are interested in content creation and branding, they're gonna come to me. There's also Optin on our team, who's a young up -and -coming 20 -year -old, a supporting character that people in the younger, demographic resonate with.
And so if you want to unlock massive growth for your personal brand, if you want to build your world in an addicting way where people gravitate towards different characters within your world, then share those characters as much as possible. And what you want to do for each character is build their character diamond. The character diamond is what makes people gravitate towards your character.
Where on the top of the diamond is your purpose. And your purpose should be tied to your origin story that we identified at level one. This is what you want to write in the world.
And on the bottom is your pain, the worst thing that's ever happened to you. you. I believe your purpose, right, sits on the other side of the worst thing that's ever happened to you, your pain.
And so make sure that you share your pain as much as possible in your content so that people can resonate to it. Then on the left side is your weakness, right? What are you actually not that good at?
Because a lot of times building a personal brand, building humanity, building connection with people isn't just about sharing all your wins. It's about also sharing your losses. And then on the right side is your worldview.
These are the things that you believe about the world that nobody else does. And if you want to stand out in the sea of other people that are building their world, then you have to share the stuff that you genuinely believe that is completely different from everybody else.
And so make sure to share your worldviews if you want to build your character. And so go on this journey of going and finding the different characters within your business or outside your business that you want to associate with. You can go on this journey for a decade.
And that's the mission that I'm on with Dan Martell. We're going to work together for the rest of our lives. And so we're able to create those associations so that people can come within our world and resonate with different characters within the world.
Which brings us to level three of your world building journey, which is identify identifying your elements. These break down into three simple things, places, artifacts, and rhythms.
What you want to do is see different places, artifacts, and rhythms into your contents that people recognize them. As an example, for places, we live in Kelowna, BC, British Columbia, and Canada. We are one of the few content creators that lives outside of the US, the main cities.
And we live in a small 250 ,000 person city in Canada. And we make sure to share that as much as possible in our content. And so people associate us to those places.
Another place is our Martel Media Studio, right? We try to show that as much as possible in our content so that people see the behind the scenes of what we're doing. And so when people come to Kelowna, Like we just had an event, the AI Freedom Summit here in Kelowna, BC with 850 business owners flying in from everywhere around the world to see our world.
They saw those places that they've been seeing in the content for so long. And so we create familiarity with it in the content so that when people show up to our events, they see the behind the scenes of it. Then we look at artifacts, right?
What are the things inside of your world that people recognize? As an example, this shirt is what's worn by every single team member on our team. So that way people, when they come into our world, they start recognizing these small artifacts.
Another example of an artifact is Dan's blue shirt. This goes over a lot of people's head. Dan wears the same blue shirt in every single video online because we want to create associations between him and the blue shirt.
Another artifact is Dan's book, Buy Back Your Time. So make sure to identify what are the artifacts inside of your world that you want people to associate you to and make sure to show them in your content as much as possible. And the last one is rhythms.
What are the rhythms you are executing within your personal brand? As an example for us, every single week we post a YouTube video at the same time. on the same day if you come even closer within our world and you pay attention to our stories you'll notice that every tuesday we do what's called the founders hike where we have over a hundred people show up from everywhere around the world to klona british columbia canada to hike at 6 30 a .m on knox mountain in klona and that's an example of a rhythm that gets people to see our world even more closely so if you can't name three things places artifacts rhythms then go and identify what they are and figure out how can you plant them how can you seed them inside of your content so that you start building your personal brand slowly but surely.
Which brings us to level four of your world building journey, which is language. If you want to build your world, then you need to associate language to your world. As an example, for us, right?
Dan Martell doesn't teach delegation. He teaches buying back your time, which is a unique mechanism, right? Something that's familiar but unknown that we present in the contents that people associate him to that term and not just a generic term like delegation.
And you will have terms inside of your business, inside of your life, inside of your personal brand that people will associate you to. And so make sure to be extremely intentional with the terms that you use in your content.
For Dan, we have the replacement ladder, the drip matrix, the 131 rule, which are all examples of language that we use within our content so that people associate us to that language. And then what's cool is that some people will take that language and then teach it to their audience. So that language then propagates not just within your world, but then in other people's world, and then your world expands.
And so if you want to build your world, if you want to go on this journey of world building, make sure to have dedicated language for certain things. inside of your world so that when people come into it they can start using it easiest way to do this is to make frameworks you've probably seen me do this previously in other videos but then also inside of dan martell's videos right the one three one rule is an example of a framework that we use in our content buying back your time is an example of a framework that we use in our content and so if you want to create your own framework i have a framework for creating frameworks i know it's super meta but i think it will be extremely impactful for your content creation journey this is the method that's going to help you create a framework in real time so first part is to map the outcome of your framework.
You can't create a framework for everything. Figure out what this framework is for. What is it going to do?
And what does it not do? Then you get into the second level, which is observe. Observe what elements go into making the outcome true.
Because in observing, you will find out the truth. And then the next level is distill. You want to distill everything that you've observed into as little steps as possible.
It's super easy to make a complex framework. What's hard is to simplify your framework down so that you can actually get the outcome. Then you get into the fourth step, which is experiment.
You want to experiment with your framework so that you're not guessing if something's going to work or not. As an example, my hook explain, illustrate, teach framework for creating short form content was a framework that I tested with my team four years before I ever taught it on social media. And so you want to make sure to experiment with your frameworks before you actually teach them.
And then the last part is to label. Give your framework a name. You want to make it memorable.
And so give it a name that people will recognize and remember so that they can go out and teach it to their world. That was a super meta example of a framework. framework that i named the model method so that you're able to remember it and then go teach it to your world and if you want my custom gpt to actually help you create your own framework go find me on instagram sam .cadet and message me the word model and i'll send it over to you which brings us to level five of your world building journey which is your enemy you want to make sure that you have a common enemy that you share inside of your content because people rally around things that they hate more than things that they love and that's how we work and so you want to make sure if you're building your world if you're building something that you want people to live within and identify with then you have to have a common enemy some kind of evil that you're going against in the world as an example for us right our enemy at martel media is hustle culture the people that think they have to work 16 hours 18 hour days to be successful in life and what dan teaches on social media is that you don't need to work more hours to be more successful you just have to operate within a system that's why he teaches the buyback loop right where you're able to buy back your time to get more freedom to redeploy that time on higher leverage activities so that way you're able to
achieve your big goals without sacrificing what's actually important in life your enemy is the inverse of your promise you'll notice that we have the promise of helping entrepreneurs build a business that they don't grow to hate on the flip side the enemy is hustle culture because a lot of people hate their business because they're working way too many hours within the business and so if you want to build your world if you want people to resonate with your world then make sure to have a massive enemy that people rally around because there's a reason why in a marvel movie when you go watch the movie they make the villain almost look indestructible so that when the hero destroys it, the hero looks even more powerful.
And so make sure that your enemy, your common enemy, your evil is extremely big, then you're able to better position your personal brand, which brings us to level six of your world building journey, which is your engine. If you want to build a world that people gravitate towards, then you need to create an engine that runs without you.
Because what's hard is waking up every day and asking yourself, what content should I create for my personal brand today? As an example, if we develop a training around AI agents, and we teach it to our clients, then we're going to take that same content and we're going to make a YouTube video from it, repackaging it for the platform.
And then we're going to take some elements from that YouTube video and make a couple of pieces of short form content. And then we're going to take a couple elements from those short form pieces of content and then make a couple tweets and a couple LinkedIn posts. The big idea here is that we're creating a through line between our product and our content.
So that way we create continuity across our whole world. And what you want to do here is find your repeatable formats, the formats that you can keep repeating time and time again. As we said at the start of this video, branding is just constant associations to the same thing.
And what this looks like for us is we have the sit down teach format where Dan sits down at his desk and he goes over a couple ideas as it pertains to AI, business, or productivity. So that way we're never stuck with a blank piece of paper because we've built the engine that creates these ideas for us. If you build your engine for your personal brand, then world building will become completely effortless.
Which brings us to the final level of building your world, level seven, doors. What are the different doors that people are going to enter your world in? And to do this, you need to understand the levels of awareness, right?
There's five levels of awareness when it comes to your product or service or even your world. The first level is unaware where they don't even know about your world in the first place. Then it's problem aware.
They understand the problem that they're dealing with. Then we go into solution aware, which is they're aware of your solution. Level four is product aware.
This is where they understand that your product is a solution for their problem. And then the last level is most aware. These are the people that buy your products and services and the people that actually get the most results.
And so what you want to do is identify what are the different doors that get people from each stage of awareness down the funnel. Because your job is to get people from unaware to problem aware, to solution aware, to product aware, to most aware in as little time as possible.
And so how to do this tactically, create content for each level of awareness. And the big idea here is you don't want to just capture a customer today, but you want to create content that's going to create a customer in the future. And that's what you want to do in your content is to make it approachable to everyone, but then applicable to a few select.
people that you can help with your products and services and you want to build this so that people can actually choose how deep they go within your world right if they want to stay on the surface level they want to stay at the problem aware or solution aware stage they can just watch your free content and then if they want to go deeper if they want to go into product aware most aware they can buy your products and services they can come to an event like the ai freedom summit and see within our world but this is what you want to do in your content creation journey is to build your world so that people come within your world and learn from you and then become a champion of your world as a reminder if you want my custom gpt dashy help you create frameworks then go find me on instagram message me the word model and i'll send it over to you and watch this video next if you want to become disgustingly good at content creation
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
The pitch is blunt: worldbuilding is the missing layer under personal branding, and the speaker credits it for growing a founder's following from under 100K to over 13 million. The rest is a seven-level checklist you can run against your own brand.
