The Exact Content System That Unlocks 100M Views

If we can't make this work, we're pulling the plug and we're redeploying resources. That's a beautiful question. I've never been asked that. If you want to build a really great process and you want to have a really good team and you want to be sustainable and consistent on YouTube, my guess today is one of the most respected creative directors in all of YouTube education. Hey, I'm Sam Gidea. I work for Dan Martell and I've been able to grow this personal brand from under 100k followers across all platforms over 10 million and you're listening to the gimbal podcast. You have been working with Dan Martell for a number of years now and you were stuck under 100 k subscribers for nearly a decade. But then you gained a million subscribers in a single year. What changed? That's that's the question everybody wants to know the answer to and yeah, we talked like full transparency. We did all the things that we thought were right at the time and we essentially went sideways for six years, right? Where I was just banging my head against the wall. We were posting videos. We were posting consistently. We were posting every week, but we didn't know what we didn't know, which was how to actually run YouTube operation. And so right around 2023, when right before the hockey stick came along, I reached out to one of my good friends who was crushing it on YouTube at the time and I asked him like, "Hey, look at our process. What's wrong?" And he looked at me and he's like, "Are you just posting any video about what's on Dan's mind at any time?" And I'm like, "Yeah." And he's like, "Don't do that." YouTube's a very forgiving platform once you've built a brand. But if you don't already have a brand in place, you have to kind of adapt to the algorithms. And you started introducing me to this concept called ideation, which means like, come up with ideas before you actually write a script. We were doing it completely backwards. And I'm the title science and figuring out how to actually get people to watch the video through. That's kind of how I distilled it down to my foresee framework, which is click, capture, consume, and then convert somebody that either buyer or subscriber. And it's just when we started implementing all the micro strategies that we're probably going to dive into on this call that we were able to get that hockey stick growth. But if I had to distill it down to one single thing that changed, it was our time and attention went into ideation rather than just the surface level stuff like production value, editing, analytics. Because at surface level, you look at YouTube, you're like, "Oh, all that matters is you have a really fancy camera and you have really good editing." And then you post it on YouTube consistently. And at the end of the day, those three things are just the bare minimum now in a hyper competitive market. So that was the biggest thing that changed for us. What is your process around ideation now? How long do you spend on it? What ideas get pushed through the pipeline? Yeah, so it's evolved over time. I used to be very involved, especially two years ago when we were just getting results. But now I have a team that takes care of it luckily. But the actual process of it is essentially every week we come up as a team with around eight to 12 ideas. And out of those eight to 12 ideas, only two ideas actually make it through the filter. And so you have to come up with a really good idea to actually get through that filter. And that filter is a meeting between my head of production, myself, and my head of YouTube. And we pitch each other. So we literally just like, you know, a business pitch, just picture dragons then, but for YouTube video ideas. And so we just sit on the table and we bring up our ideas and we're like, "Hey, this is my idea. This is a thumbnail concept. This is the title. I think it would crush for this reason. I think it's aligned with Dan's unique perspectives in this way. I think you would talk about these things. And I think it could get anywhere between 500,000 views to a million views. And then we go around the table and we vote on the best two ideas. And they make it through the filter. If you want to do this, you know, as a creator, you know, have a huge team, I would just do that to yourself or do it to a friend. You're like, "Hey, I've got these five video ideas. And I'm thinking about doing this one, this one, this one, this one, and this one. Which one do you think I should do?" And then get their input. But I do think, you know, especially when we get married ideas, because they are fun to, you know, think about. You don't actually get outside your head and look outside the box and ask yourself, "Is this actually going to perform on YouTube?" So we spend anywhere between on ideation just as a team today. We spend anywhere between five to 10 hours a week across the whole team on ideation. But, you know, it didn't start that way. And we went from like, spending zero hours to spending one hour to spending two hours a week to spend, you know, three hours a week. And that was the biggest shift for us. It was actually spending time on the thing that matters the most, which is what is the video going to be about? Not just how the video is going to be shot and how the video is going to get produced. And, you know, later down the line, I was sitting down with somebody on Mr. Beast's team and asked him, like, you know, "What do you think we should do?" And at that time, I was filming the videos and coming up with the ideas. And he asked me, he's like, "Is the person producing the videos and the person coming up with these ideas, the same person?" And, you know, I looked at myself in the mirror. I'm like, "Yeah, it's me." He's like, "Don't do them." And I'm like, "Why?" And he said, "Because then you're always going to optimize for the easiest thing to execute, right? The easiest idea to execute. And you're always going to be in this hamster wheel of doing the same thing." And sometimes these big ideas that get tax results, 15x results, 20x results, aren't necessarily the easiest to execute. And so you have to separate ideation from production. And that's when, you know, I got a production team and I was more the ideas guy. And then now we have an ideation team and a production team. They're still separate, so they don't kind of like step on each other's toes. And the creative team can stay in creative where the production team can stay in production. You've spent a lot of time with one of the most respected educators on YouTube. You've spent, you know, years with him. What are the three most valuable things about greatness that you've learned from working alongside Dan Martell? I would say the first thing that you have to understand about greatness is it happens in the mind first, not in the world. And that's what I first saw in real time with Dan. He's an extreme, you know, a visualizer. He understands how to, you know, manifest. If you want to call it that, things into his life. And he spends most of his energy thinking about possibility. And he stays in abundance. And I'd say that's like the number one thing that I've observed in all top creators, you know, not just Dan and all top entrepreneurs is before they ever do something they believe that it can become true in their mind first. And they understand that the world around us is built by the same people, right? And they're no different than you and I. And if you have an idea and you want to execute it, you can do that. And I didn't believe it at first. Trust me. When I came on Dan's team, I was 16 years old. And you know, he's talking about all these crazy things that were going to happen in the next 10 years. I did not believe him. But then as these things start to happen, I realize that, oh, if you just put your mind to something and you show up every day and you genuinely believe it inside your head, then these things are just going to happen because you attract what you believe. So that's the first thing. The second thing I would say is it doesn't matter how many times you lose all that matters is you keep showing up. So relentlessness. And I've seen that, you know, especially with Dan, like he had been making content. Keep in mind for he started on Periscope. He was doing Twitter and he was doing YouTube for over four or five years when I met him. And he wasn't getting crazy results. Like when I first met him, he maybe had 20,000 followers on other subscribers on YouTube. And he was getting an average of like 1,000 to like 1,500 views per video, which isn't like, it's not a low amount of numbers. Like I know a lot of people watching this are like, well, that's a, you know, enough views. For somebody who'd been doing it for five years, that's an, like, that's not impressive results, right? But he was extremely relentless. And when I think about, you know, looking back at all the, you know, challenges that we face, at one time we're spending a lot of money, multi-five figures a month on medium. We weren't getting any results, especially in that first period of time. And six months and he looked at me and he was like, bro, like, what do we need to do? I'm about to pull the plug on this. And we had a conversation and he's like, look, I'm going to give you another three months. And obviously we made it work in those three months. But just his ability to see this finish line and being able to be relentless in that, in that time period, I think was definitely the biggest thing that I've seen him, you know, the reason why he's achieved greatness is because of his relentless, reallessness. And then the third thing I'd say, especially in the greater grades, you know, Dan Martell's the loose house of the world, the Gary V's of the world, the Tony Robbins, every time that I meet these people, especially Dan, is their extremely human, right? And you can't manufacture that. I think a lot of high performers, you know, are just that high performers and they're not actually a good human being. And when I meet these greats, the people that I've actually achieved, you know, 10, 15, 20, 30, 100 times more, then all these other influencers are entrepreneurs, they're 100% human and they understand, you know, how to actually show up as, you know, an empath and a leader and, you know, somebody who actually draws for outcomes without, you know, diluting some of their principles by like attacking people's character and stuff. So I think, you know, a big reason why a lot of people follow Dan and like what he does is because he has a, you know, beautiful family, he prioritizes his health, he spends a lot of time working and he's passionate about his work, but he doesn't let his work get in the way of his actual life. And I think that's a reason why he's been able to scale to the level that he has is because he's 100% human and relatable in the way he shows up in life. So if that's kind of the three things I would say are the three things that I'd observe in Dan's life that made him great. Did you join his team because you were a fan of him or was he hiring and it was a good fit and then all of a sudden now you guys are where you're at? What's the backstory there? You know, obviously grew up in an entrepreneurial family. My dad was an entrepreneur. He was watching YouTube one day. I was 14 years old. He calls me into his office and he says, check this guy out on YouTube. And it was Dan Martell with like 200 views. And I started watching his videos. And yeah, two years later, after first finding his videos, I applied for a job at his company and got the editor role and then was able to kind of scale up at every level right into the creative director role eight years later. What did his team look like when you joined? Like what did the content team look like? Yeah, I mean, I was the content team. So it was one person. You know, we had a marketing team. So like we had somebody that was running ads. We had somebody that was, you know, had the email list going. We had, you know, the assistant doing a lot of stuff. But we didn't really have a content team. Media wasn't big at that time. I understand. Like this was 2017. So like YouTube, was kind of big-ish and there was some YouTubers out. But short form wasn't out yet. TikTok wasn't even a thing, right? Like Vine just basically phased out a little bit later. The closest thing to the short form video on Instagram was like these IGTV videos or like these 60 clips. (laughing) Your review was obviously crushing it. But yeah, I was a whole content team. We were making some decent content. We're like posting once a day on all short form platforms. And then also a weekly video. But it wasn't built out to the level that it is today. What does your team look like now? - Yeah, so thankfully it was able to scale from zero people to we're 15 people on the media team today. Most of those are either editors or copywriters and then I have a few leaders in place that drive some of the outcomes they want in the business. And then one or two contractors. But most of them are all time, which is great. And they're also here in Canada at our HQ in person, which is also if anybody listening is like I wanna build a media team, doing it in person, it's a lot of fun. You'll get way better results than if you have like a distributed team in my personal opinion. 'Cause I've done both and understand both. And I do understand that there's some logistical challenges around like getting an office. You know, you have to get insurance. Like there's all these things that you need when you have a physical office. But you can't replace being in person with someone and creating stuff. If you can't do that for whatever reason, I would just say get an off site every three months where you get together with your team and you actually create some really cool things. Because when we were hybrid and distributed, we did that. And that was probably when we got the high level work done was when we were able to kind of sit down and mastermind jam together. But yeah, highly recommend being in person. Do you feel like you maybe lose out on talent who aren't willing to move to you? - Yeah, yeah, and that's a big thing for me is like, I, you know, hire for the sole train for the role. Like I, you know, hire for their will. And then I'll train the skill. Like I, I am a leader that believes in hiring really good people that are obviously motivated to move here and want to work with us. And I believe especially in the world of AI, you can teach anyone any skill. I'm like, great example of that. I didn't know anything about content creation. I was a videographer by trade, right? I had a production company. I didn't know anything about YouTube performance or Instagram performance or short form performance at all when I came on dance team. And then obviously took a long time 'cause, you know, I'm a slower learner than some people. But I was able to, once you get to the point where we're at us. - We got the results. - Yeah, I think, you know, all the people out of heart, you know, in the past six months, 12 months, they've all been, you know, really good people first. And, you know, they obviously ramp up quick on the skill side if they really care about the mission and the vision of the company. - So our target audience for this podcast is people who work behind the scenes for big creators. So people like yourself, people like many of the other guests that we've had, people like myself. And I want you to please paint a picture between what a top tier employee looks like, maybe a mid-tier employee. How do you get from being a mid-tier employee to being a top tier employee? - That's a beautiful question. And this is beautiful that I get to speak to my people. (laughing) - I'd say, I'd say the difference between, I'll just think about like people out high higher and then how I try to show up. 'Cause I like, I'm not perfect. I'm, you know, not the perfect employee, but I do try really hard. And I'm also driving for results. But I'd say the difference between, you know, a B player and a A player, a B player meeting like somebody who does a bare minimum or just like enough to not get fired. And then a A player as somebody who does the extra mile is an A player will always look at the next problem and solve it proactively. Where, you know, B player anytime they solve a problem, they'll look back to their leader and say like, what's next? An A player will be proactive in finding that next problem and solving it. And that's what I've tried to do, you know, at every level of my life is like, once I get to the end, I go and see more. Let's say, you know, tomorrow we get, you know, a 10 million view video on YouTube, right? A B player would sit on that win for, you know, six months and say, you know, let's go, we won. And it's over, right? Where an A player, I think, you know, would look internally and say, how can we replicate that or how can we get to 15, 20 million views on a video, right? And keep pushing the standard. And I think that's the difference between, you know, somebody who will stay on the team for a year, two years or somebody who's gonna stay on the team for eight years, is that person that, you know, is driving outcomes is always hungry, always wants to grow. And they also understand that they can give up what they want now for what they want most. Like at every level of, you know, my journey or even somebody, you know, especially the people in my team that have been on my team for the longest, they've given up what they wanted now, right? You know, maybe running an agency for, you know, 10, 20, K, 30, K a month for what they want most, which is, you know, being on the team with Dan Martell and building him to be the fastest growing personal brand in the business space and eventually being the biggest. And so we've made a lot of sacrifices as a team. And I believe, you know, A-Players understand the long game and they thinking decades, 15 years, you know, 20 years, 30 years without, you know, having to needing a win right now or a win tomorrow or a win next month. They always think in, you know, long term. And I think that's what makes a difference between someone who's just, you know, a B-Player and somebody who stays on the team for a long time as an A-Player. - How do you get a job at Dan Martell if you're an A-Player? Like, what do you do to stand out from the crowd? - Yeah, I mean, like, like, transferally, I don't know if I'd make the cut today and I mean, like, I got it in a whole lot. Like, I'll just talk to, you know, some of the people that I've hired in the past six months that people have stood out the most. We're obviously extremely proactive in their test project 'cause we do do a test project. So, you know, everybody that comes in my pipeline, I do initial interviews and then I move them through into a test project where I simulate the work. I do pay for that test project. I don't like making people work for free. And I also, you know, simulate the work that they would do within the company. 'Cause I think a lot of people hire people and then expect them to do the work after. I'm like, "Hey, let's do the work first and see if you're good." And then we'll talk about, you know, a full-time position. So, I think the people that sit out for me in the test project are the people that can obviously do the work really well. But then, the thing that I look for, especially in the presentation, and I actually communicate this before, you know, the interview is I tell them like, "Hey, I've seen your work, I've seen the project. You sent it through. All I want to hear on this presentation is your thinking behind the project." And the people that can articulate their thoughts, like the clearest are usually the people at higher the fastest because they're going to be able to raise the standard on the whole team. Because what I believe, you know, good team members create other good team members and how you do that is you communicate clearly your ideas to somebody else so that you can create this organizational context. And so, you know, even all these frameworks that I share on my Instagram and, you know, all the content that I'm creating now, it's all stuff that I was telling my team before. Because I believe, you know, the more I talk about artifacts, which is what I call them, you know, creating frameworks and playbooks, the more they're going to be able to repeat them and the more they're going to be able to understand the nuance, why things work, right? And so I think that's what people do it out to me in the hiring process so the people that can articulate their thoughts clearly on their actual work, right? Because I can hire an editor that can edit really good videos. But if you can't teach another editor on how to do that, I'm not interested, right? Because, you know, I'll hire maybe for a talk for, you know, contract position or like one project or two projects. What I want in a team member is somebody who can actually communicate their ideas clearly and explain what they did and the reason behind it. And that's going to help us be able to get even better results in the future because then we're stacking knowledge and context on top of that. I want to pivot to the operations inside the content team at Dan Martell. What does your flywheel look like? I think there's two ways to look at content. Number one is a water fell method, where you have one pillar piece of content and then all the content gets repurposed. The problem with that is then you're optimizing for one format and then everything else is kind of sawed us. I don't love that because then you run into these issues where you're over optimizing for one platform, which is totally fine, especially early on. But then at scale, you want all your platforms to perform, you know, at the same time. And so we look at it more, instead of a waterfall, we look at it as a lake. We work backwards from our outputs, right? So we have, you know, a lake where we have a bunch of content, footage, whatever it is. And we pour into that lake. And then my platform owners, that people actually own the platforms. So I have somebody that owns Instagram, I have somebody that owns Facebook, I have somebody that owns YouTube. They go pull from that lake only the content that they need for their platforms, right? Even deeper than that, we'll break it down into workflow. So we'll have a workflow for long form, a workflow for short form, where for long form, it goes, you know, ideation, scripting, script review, shoot, edit, then we go review the edit, and then we post, right? And so that's a workflow. Then in parallel with that, we have a short form workflow that literally has the exact same thing copy-pasted. But then all the sawdust and everything goes into the pool so that my other channel owners, the people that own LinkedIn, the people that own Twitter, the people that own our email channels, they can all go into that pool of content and be able to actually pull what they need for their specific platform at that time. 'Cause let's say I make a video on YouTube that's about leadership. And I know that right now, currently in this season, content on LinkedIn doesn't perform if I'm talking about leadership, right? But it does perform when I'm talking about, I don't know, money and wealth. Then instead of going to this week's video about leadership, I'm gonna go to a couple weeks ago's video or like a month ago's video that was about money and wealth, and I'm gonna take that content and then put it on LinkedIn. And so I think a lot of people romanticize this idea of like getting one video done, then repurposing all that same content in a single week on all platforms, where that creates is this mess, honestly, of the same topics on all platforms that perform differently depending on that platform. And I know this is like champagne problems and you get to this point where you have channel owners and people that own those platforms, but I think that's something that every consecratious should aspire to is a place where every single channel has someone that it's their baby, they're taking care of it, and they feed it what they want, right? And they feed it what they know is gonna perform, and that's how we've been able to scale up to 10 million followers across all platforms because I treat every single platform as important as the other. - So you have one platform owner, [BLANK_AUDIO] platform. So you've got someone for tiktok X. I'll bundle them up. So like YouTube shorts tiktok have the same owner Facebook and Instagram have the same owner. LinkedIn is, you know, one person threads in Twitter same owner, right? So I'll look at these platforms and ask myself which ones are the most similar and I'll bundle them up. But somebody who owns all short form, I don't know because like things that perform on YouTube shorts and tiktok are mostly like broader things that you don't really need context on. And then the things that perform on Instagram and Facebook are mostly like community driven posts or like some topics like family relationships that tends to perform a lot better on on Instagram and Facebook because it's more shareable. You talked about the workflow for long form and short form and then getting into the, you know, the lake as you said, I want to dig into just like what the workflow looks like. How many days, how much time are you spending on the ideation phase, the scripting phase, the producing, editing, uploading analytics, that kind of stuff. So let's double click on YouTube and I'll I'll break it down in real time. So for us to actually, you know, start a YouTube video, we need a good idea. That's comes from an ideation meeting that we talked about earlier where we all pitch ideas and we get, you know, two videos approved. And so those two videos are gonna now move to script writing. And so let's say a week one, we come up with the idea week two, we actually write the scripts. And then those scripts get in that week and we review those scripts on week three and we get them approved. And then on week four is when we'll shoot. And usually after we shoot, we have like a two week buffer, just because we're trying to stay ahead, where we'll assign it to an editor. So from week four to week six, at some point in those weeks, they'll get assigned an editor. And then that editor gets the video done in around five to 10 business days, depending on the length, because obviously like some videos that are not along and to take longer, some videos that are that are 10 minutes are going to take less time. And so we're a little bit more flexible on that. So from week six to week eight is all editing. Then we have a review week. And then we obviously are a couple weeks ahead. So you can imagine at scale, we're ahead around two to 2.5 months at all times. Wow. And so from the time that I come up with an idea to the time that we posted on YouTube is going to be around eight to 10 weeks, which sounds wild to most people. And trust me, I didn't start there. Like we used to come up with ideas, shoot edit in like two weeks. And then we get it out. And it's like, we're always scrambling. But when you get to this point where you can afford to actually step back and you know, obviously insert people into the process and slow it down to actually create better outputs. That's the reason why I think Dan skilt so fast is because when we actually slowed down to go faster eventually, we spread out the production across eight to 10 week period where we're able to actually focus our time and attention on these videos. And we're also producing, you know, two videos a week, where a lot of other creators are producing one video week. Right. And so our volume is twice as much as most people. And so we have to have a lot of buffer room. Right. And so a big idea too that I found out the hard way through posting late a lot of times like we would let's say our posting dates are Monday and Thursday every single week. Sunday would roll around. We didn't have the video for tomorrow. So we delay it to Tuesday, Wednesday until the video was done. And we reviewed it. And you know, all the revisions were done and we post it. And we found this loop of just like being late all the time where we implemented this rule that we have to have two videos approved at all times in the bank that we can post. The posting day doesn't matter. Like I almost never tell my editors and they can go find out if they want, but I don't really tell them when the video is getting posted. I'm just telling them when their delivery date is. And if there are one or two days off, that doesn't matter. All we know is they have a delivery date when they deliver the video. And so we're not falling in this loop of just like, Oh, the delivery dates on the day that we posted the day before. And then we if we miss it, we have to move the publishing timeline and just having a buffer of like one or two videos that you can just be a week ahead at all times is really, really powerful for us. And yeah, if you can't afford to do, you know, one or two, I would just not post for one week. I think it's not the end of the world, right? Just like skip a post. And then you're ahead. I think a lot of people forget that, you know, especially when they start off, they're like, Hey, I'm going to shoot a video today and I want it out next week. But it's like, and if you want to build a really great process and you want to have a really good team and you want to be sustainable and consistent on YouTube, you have to stretch out your timelines that you're not actually, you know, introducing a bunch of wrist gear pipeline where, you know, somebody falls sick or, you know, this happened, that happens and you have nothing to fall back on. That's what gets, you know, people, especially high performing creators into burnout and not liking it is because they're always chasing their tail and chasing the next, the next post instead of looking at the actual process as what it is, right? A process that you can automate. Yeah, that sounds very similar to what I do with my teams as well. And I say like 90% of my job is just making sure that everybody's hitting their deadlines and that we're staying ahead. We try and work to two months ahead as well. Because it makes everything sustainable and repeatable for our team. And one thing that I've learned from doing this podcast has been there are a lot of really impressive teams out there. People who have eight, 10 million subscribers, that kind of stuff. And they are working week to week and they are grinding and not stopping. And I just, I just don't know how you do it. Educational creators are much better at the at the at the keeping things sustainable entertainment creators. They got so much energy. I don't know. I've seen behind the veil a couple of times and it is scary. I just hope that they find a different way because that's when you from running to this, this trap where you see creators not post for two months. And they take breaks. And you don't really need to take a break if you build that sustainable engine. Like you just said, do you feel like with Dan in particular, because Dan is very focused on AI and AI changes in the blink of an eye? Are you missing out on creative opportunities because of the pipeline? 100%. Yeah. And there's certain situations in those cases where things move so fast that we have to get a video out, where we'll actually expedite the process. So I'm not going to say here and say like every single video is going to take anywhere between eight to 10 weeks. Sometimes we can get a video done within four to six weeks. If we're even like four weeks on the like low end, if we're expediting the process. And in that case, it's, you know, a certain video that or a certain topic that has demand right now, you know, an example would be open claw, right? Yeah. We're trying to export the video on that right now, wink wink. And also some applied code stuff. Whenever we have these topics, they're like, it's an outing. We try to expedite it as fast as possible. I would even play with the idea of, you know, trimming down the editing process to the point where in those some cases, like I think there is some cases where it's actually appropriate to just shoot a video and get it out there for the sake of getting it out there to catch that demand window. Just as a philosophy on that, like I wouldn't make that the norm, because I see especially in the niche of personal finance and economics, these people just chasing headlines all the time. And it's like, hey, Trump did this, the Fed did this, interest rates, the war, whatever. And they're always chasing these things. Their growth is 100% depending on the outside circumstances that happen, right? Where they're not finding these topics that are what I call, have ever green demand. And so like AI, agentic AI, learning AI, are examples of topics that have ever green demand, which means learning AI is going to be hot from now until 12 months from now. Those videos about topics that are only in demand now are only going to grow for two to three months and then kind of flat line, right? Where if I made a video about how to learn AI in 18 minutes, those videos are going to keep getting views into next year, the year after. And that's how you create a big snowball and you create these massive YouTube channels is where you pick topics that have ever green demand. Who is more important? The core audience super fans or new audiences? If I had to put one on top, I'd say your core audience is the most important as someone that you have to keep in mind when you're making your scripts. That being said, I do still believe that you have to make your videos appeal to all three audience types. That patty y'all way calls your core casual and new audience, right? So your core audience of people have been following you for a while that understand your stuff better than anyone. Your casual audience to be black, you know, pop in and out, you know, see your stuff here and there. And then your new audience to be like, never seen your face before because the problem if I only pick topics or made videos for my core audience, I'm always going to stay in this box of getting which is what we stayed in for, you know, six years. This box of getting the same amount of views all the time and never appealing to a new audience. And so how you find these topics, an example for us is, you know, meetings, the just the topic of meetings. And especially the idea of meetings being the biggest time waste during any company tends to perform with our core casual and new audience because our core audience are the business owners that run a lot of meetings. And so they're like, if there are ways to time, what what else should I do? The casual audience are the people that, you know, are in meetings all the time that are sick of it. And then our new audience understands the concept of like meetings being a waste of time. They've been on Zoom meetings that could have been in email and they understand that, right? And so we make that video, especially on short-former, even, you know, some snippets in long form. And we'll say, you know, meetings are the biggest time waste during any company, right? That hits our core casual and new audience. And then Dan will give an analogy example. He'll be like, you know, one time I remember my 20s, I went to a meeting, there was a hundred people in the room. And I just thought to myself, how expensive is this meeting? If everybody in the room is making, you know, $25 to $50 an hour, that's an expensive meeting, right? For no reason. And then he'll go into the lesson that's going to hit on our core audience, which is instead of running a lot of meetings, have a really clear strategy and KPIs that your team can follow. So you'll have to fall back on meetings to get people aligned. And so he's still providing value to his core audience, which I think is still the most important thing that you have to do as an education-based creator. But then those topics are appealing to our casual and new audience so that we can get a video that gets, you know, a million views. But then, you know, actually serves our core audience as well. So you are on a mission to get your own personal brand to a hundred thousand followers using just your phone. What are you trying to prove? I love that question. So yeah, I'm trying to get to 100,000 followers on with just my iPhone to prove that you don't need any fancy equipment gear to get views on social media. Yeah, you just need a really good message and idea and topics. And so I am a little bit above 90 days. I think I hit like day 100 and something in the last couple of days. And I'm at 34,000 subscribers. I started just under 10,000. So the progress is coming along. It's going to take a lot longer than I thought I would. You know, obviously, as a content guy, I'm like, over excited. I'm like, oh, I'm just like, it's done like a month. Um, it's going to take a while. But I just wanted to show people in real time that, you know, you don't have any excuses, right? I was the first person to say, especially a year ago that I needed to have a really good camera. I need to have a team and editor, all that fun stuff to, you know, get views on social media. And, uh, one of my good friends, kill R Allison, text to me one day and he saw that I had posted a story of me talking. And he's like, bro, post that on Reels right now in my head. Like he said something really nice in my head. I needed to hear like big brother telling me like, hey, get your S H I T. I mean, he didn't say that, but that's what I heard. And I needed to hear. And so from that day on, I posted every day and, you know, obviously that developed that idea that I wanted to get to 100k falls across all platforms. When I get there, I don't think anybody has an excuse to, to not post on social media. If, you know, if they have an excuse of, I need a team, I need a camera, I need gear, I need lighting. I just think, you know, I'm just going to show them my, my platform and say, look, I did this in less than a year. And it took obviously a lot of resource and time, but all that matters is just having a really good message and sharing that message online and people will care. Cool. Well, good luck. I'm following along. All right. Overrated or underrated posting weekly underrated. I think consistency is probably the most important thing that you can do as a creator. And I do think sometimes you can reduce the consistency down to like, you know, bi-weekly or monthly, but I don't think anything will replace the power of having a lot of data. And the only way you have a lot of days is with quantity outlier theory. I think properly rated. I think a lot of people, especially today, are finding out about it and are using it. I also think that you have to have a really good idea development team or, you know, at least a muscle that you can flex to take those outliers and actually make them yours. Because I see a lot of people ripping people's outliers and just making the same thing, which isn't going to get you views, by the way. So I think they're properly rated longer videos. I think underrated. We've increased our average video by about 20 to 30% over the last three months. And we've been able to get a lot more views. And I think YouTube wants people to watch for longer periods of time. And I think they're still going to reward watch time as a metric. And I think creators are still making videos that are too short in most cases. Okay. That just prompted something. You guys have done like the give me 59 second videos. What does the back end of that look like? What's the analytics look like compared to stuff? Yeah. So I mean, the 59 second video was a cool experiment. It was like something that we just threw out the wall and we wanted. It was a fun experiment. We wanted to see if it was going to work. Obviously, it didn't take a ton of resources in time. Like literally thumbnail title design and then a quick script. And we recorded it in five minutes and we threw it out. It didn't do well at all for the first month. And then all of a sudden, it found this corner of YouTube where obviously the algorithm found its audience. And it's been ripping, you know, past seven, eight million views on YouTube, which is wild. Obviously, as you know, you know, CPMs aren't high on a one minute video. Our views are high or conversion to subscribers is actually really high. Those kinds of things I think are one off. And I think it's cool when you find those formats at work and I would definitely repeat them. So we've done a 60 second video equivalent four to five times over the period of, you know, the last six months. But I do think, you know, I don't think that's a sustainable way to grow on YouTube. I do still think most of our brand on YouTube was built through making really powerful, longer form videos. And if you want to throw a 60 second short in there to actually just like do something new, I would definitely do it and recommend it. We did it once with the client and we found that it got a lot more new viewers than the core viewers. So it was good for bringing people onto the channel. So I was curious if that was the same with you. Yeah. Okay, back to overrated underrated time to value. I think underrated, I still think people's intros are too long. Fair enough. A B testing thumbnails underrated. It could be the difference between a flop and something that flies TV viewership on YouTube underrated. I keep saying everything is underrated, but you keep saying really good stuff like around 15 to 20% of our views are on TV. And if you want to actually grow on YouTube long term, I do think the next five years that percentage is going to go up over time. And just to think about, you know, how could you optimize for you for TV, make your thumbnail titles, text really viewable, really big faces, really, you know, consumable and understand that if you have a CTN, the video, they can't click the link in the description. So I have QR codes on screen. Um, it's how you optimize for TV. Nice. That's good advice. Okay. So we got a bracket here. I'm not as privy to AI as you are, but let's, let's try it. Chat GPT versus Manus, Manus, I think chat GPT is high on their own supply and they're not innovating. Manus is the new automation king right now. Grock versus Gemini Gemini, they have more context in Grock, Gemini has access to everything on Google YouTube and it's really good to find things that you wouldn't necessarily find on chat GPT or cloud or Grock or any other AI platform. Notebook LM or perplexity. Notebook LM, the podcast feature where you can have two people talk to each other and teach you stuff is super underrated. Do you use that a lot? Oh, yeah, yeah. I really use it to new concepts. Yeah, it's great. I love it. Nice. It's custom podcast. Yeah. It's cool. Okay. Last one. Cloud versus deep seek. Cloud, I think cloud Opus 4 is an insane model and it actually does reasoning back with you and I'll ask you questions about your output. So I think I'll, I'd put that, you know, above deep seek every day. Semifinals, Manus versus Gemini. Oh, man, I'll go Gemini. I still think context is everything with AI and Gemini has access to so much data. It's just, it's so golden. Notebook LM or cloud, cloud, especially cloud code, cloud is basically my go to AI every day. I still think it's, it's better than notebook LM. Okay. This is the finals Gemini versus cloud. I go cloud, like I said, it's my daily driver. I use it for everything. If I had to only use one AI for the rest of my life, it would be cloud every day. I agree, same with me. We're going to do pick the best AI tool. This is classic Denmark tell best AI tool for script writing. Cloud for research and fact checking Gemini, because that was a ton of context. Also, one of 10.com is really good for research. If you're looking for really good ideas for YouTube thumbnails, I agree audience analysis. I think using any large language model, like cloud to scan Reddit is really good, especially if you have the browser, the browser extension. I also think if you look at Google search trends across your industry and search different topics, I think you'll find demand in real time, which is really powerful brainstorming. I love cloud. I have also used a couple of tragedy, you know, because it's easy, but cloud is still the best brainstorming AI in my opinion. Building SOPs, cloud, I'm going to sound like a cloud fanboy, but I still think building up is a better for any other platform. Okay. I think that's all of them. Well, that's the episode. Thank you so much for watching or listening. If you're new here, please consider subscribing or leaving us a review. It really helps us in these early, early days of the podcast. If you are someone who is working for a YouTube channel that has a million subscribers or more, and you want to be featured as a guest, please reach out to us. We're looking for more guests all the time, and I love connecting with people like yourself. We'll see you in the next episode. Take care. [MUSIC]