The Strategy That WON the Internet’s Attention [FULL BLUEPRINT]

You just keep being consistent. You will just pato. The actual formula for growth is consistency x experimentation. We went from 8,000 on YouTube for 13 million. This is the blueprint going forward for brands. We have like 40 questions. Meet Grace Andrews, the marketing genius behind the biggest brands in the business. And today she's revealing her exact playbook. We can go viral. There is a science and a maths to it. But I'm in the game of content for business outcomes. If you want to get someone to actually pay attention to you, you have to and the tactics they use to grow one of the biggest shows in the world. Diary of a CEO. Diary of a CEO. Guys, we're in 9-tier way. We're in 990-tier way. None of us had ever worked in podcasting before. All on the phone trying to find gas because we had no credibility. Our whole mindset was it's an on-the-game. If we message a thousand people, we're going to get 10 people who say, "Yeah, so we would message a thousand people every single week." If we keep doing this and we do not quit, we will win. I'd be introduced as the brand director of the D'Aruv Sia Grace Andres. Who am I without that? You ultimately decide to leave the D'Aruv Sia. What was going through your mind during this time? Can I do this again? We are on the hunt to make one of your dreams a reality. Now, we have a series called What's Your Dream, where we help make one person's dream come true. And we don't do these very often, but we wrapped one of our projects recently, and we are looking for our next big dream. Let us know in the comments what your dream is and what part of your dream our team can support you in. Our team is going to be looking through all the comments, and you just might hear from us. All right, guys. Let's get back to the video. Grace, what patterns do you see in brands that know how to hold attention? A lot of companies at the moment, I think they're understanding that the route is entertaining. And if you want to hold people's attention, like, episodic entertaining content is the route to go down. There are of course different approaches depending on your industry, but I truly believe that the blueprint that spans all of those brands is the idea that you are a media business that happens to sell product. And they all are adopting this same mindset and all seeing results. That has been proven to be true with all of the content we've seen in the last six months. My favourite example is being Rumi's Rumi's Rumi's. So this rental software platform, like on the KuffaVet's super boring, right? So what do they do? They flip it on its head and basically become an entertainment media company. They create a new Instagram account called Rumi's Rumi's Rumi's. It's not logo driven. It's not even the name of the brand. And they create this entertainment, comedic, relatable series about people moving in together in New York City and finding apartments. And they play into all the problems and the struggles of their customer. It's hilarious. It's entertaining. And it's addictive. Like, you want to come back to it, right? Like, I'm not even in that sort of category of the people they're going after. But it was really interesting to see the direction they took. Because a marketing team could sit down in that corporate environment and go, OK, we can maybe we can hold a conference or we can send out some flyers or we can put some posters up around the city. And some person who understands content has gone, or we can drive millions and millions and millions of views in our target demographic city by just feeding off the common problems that people are facing and turning into entertainment. And what happens is people spend minutes, minutes, minutes, maybe up to hours now because their content's quite long consuming their content. So when someone thinks about a rental platform or they need to move apartments or their friend needs to move apartments, they go, oh my god, they've understood that people are allergic to sales messaging. They are allergic to being told to do anything. People are looking for relief when they come onto social media. They're not looking to be sold to. So they're not putting their logo in your face. They're not telling you to go and buy the product. They're not explaining the features of how it works. They are purely going out to entertainment. And to me, that is the blueprint for social media going forward for brands. One of my favourite examples recently was British Vogue had Millie Bobby Brown on the cover. And the intern? Yes, yes. So exactly. So the fact that you said that, they had it on the cover. What went viral? The entertaining, episodic content, they created alongside that. So instead of just having the cover, which is sort of historic vogue, what they've done forever, tradition, they created social media first, entertaining content that drove so much conversation, excitement, shareability around it way more than like the cover still image. Because if you can get someone to watch the intern, next time they walk in the supermarket and they're choosing a magazine, they're more likely to choose Vogue because Vogue feels relevant to them. And that's what I wish more brands understood about social. It's not about pushing a product. It's about thinking about your sales and media company. How can you drive attention from media, capturing them in the moment where they are, jump in on the relevant trends, showing interest in the things they're interested in, until you just slowly move closer and closer and closer until the purchase fails in habitable. So let's say someone is building a startup and they don't have an audience and they don't have the budget. Entertainment sometimes feels like this long-term play. Should they be investing in this long-term play as a media company or is it something that they do once they're more established? I don't think it matters if you are day one or day a thousand in one. It probably actually matters more if you're day a thousand in one to sustain relevancy. But I don't think it matters either way. As long as you're thinking about yourself as a media company that happens to sell a product, you're always going to approach content with the right mindset. There's a brand in the UK called Salt, SELT which is an actualite brand and they bootstrapped this business before they even had a product or told anyone what the product was. They had 20,000 followers because they've been driving entertaining content. And now they've got this reputation for storytelling and attention-grabbing content. And people spend time with them and their engagement rate is crazy. So what happens is the product goes on sale, it sells out overnight. It's never like, "Here's the product. Like go and buy the product. Here's our logo." What you should be focusing on instead of like telling them where to go is trying to meet them as many times as you possibly can. So that's multiple assets across multiple platforms and getting them that way. If people are interested enough and they attract the right people, they will naturally click through because they've captured their attention. I totally understand that because I feel like I can't even tell you how many clients will hold on to just like, I mean, the logo, but the logo, but the logo, but the logo, right? And you've talked a lot about brands being creators and creators operating like brands. Can you elaborate a little bit more? Why do I begin? I think the money that is being poured down and drain because brands aren't able to keep up with the rate and change of what's happening in the creature economy. It blows my mind. So brands need to look towards creators to understand attention, social, content, storytelling, retention, loyalty, all of that wonderful stuff. And then you've got these creators who know all of that stuff, but don't know how to tell it into a business. They don't know how to monetize it. They don't know how to commercialize it. So creators know attentions, brands know business. And if they could just sort of teach each other those competing but also complementary skills, then we'd have some incredible, incredible, creative driven brands. So to that point, if there's an entrepreneur that's watching and they want to dip their toes into operating like a creator, right? They want to build in public. What does it actually look like on a day to day? Is it only through building in public or are there other ways that they could be a creator? I think it's a middle-conjubation when I say this because I've advocated for personal branding. For a long time, it's what I think is the magnet for opportunities. It's diversified my revenue streams. It's allowed me to scale my career far, far quicker than anything else. But does every founder need to build a personal brand? No. It's not critical. But it does fast-track trust. People build trust with people. They don't build trust with logos. So if you've got to go within your sphere that looks like increasing your credibility or raising investment that requires you to get in front of of certain people, for sure. Building a personal brand is going to be amazing for that. But if you have a founder who is resisting it and it feels so uncomfortable, actually they just love being behind the scenes. Is there another individual in your organisation who can take on that role to build the connection? I mean, you think about some of the biggest brands in recent years who have done it from DoorDash to in the UK, we have Curries which is like your version of Best Buy. Like it's like a tech shop. They've been able to genuinely scale the revenue of their business by focusing on certain employees in their storytelling. The CEO of Curries came out and said it's directly attributing the revenue increase in Q4 last year to their presence of employees on TikTok. And I don't know who the CEO of Curries is. She, he, I don't know, they don't have a personal brand. I'm not aware of them. I'm aware of their employees and I'm aware of their brand. And they've been able to build incredible retention, connection and trust through their employees. So there are other routes to take. But also just creating a really, really great brand story that you can tell time and time again, it doesn't have to have people. You just have to understand how like connection and trust works. It's only because you say the word trust a lot. But when we're dealing with brands, attention feels like the thing we're chasing sometimes. And so should their first thing be trust or is it attention? I'll start from the top. So I talk about the marketing funnel being dead. And the reason I talk about that and it's backed up in a lot of research and data and scientific papers is because it's not linear anymore. So what we used to have as awareness down into consideration down into conversion, it was a very sort of simple a linear bucket that went straight through. Now in 2026 we have this concept of, I guess, discoverability is everywhere. So let's talk about this podcast, for example. Someone may discover this podcast from a clip on Instagram. Someone may discover it when they're scrolling their YouTube algorithm looking for business advice. Someone may discover it when someone in there WhatsApp group chat sends it to them. So it's now not a awareness consideration conversion. It's touch points of discoverability. And it's how many touch points they need to experience real brand before they convert. So it's messier. Then we think about the content funnel. So the content funnel still does exist. And the content funnel looks like attention, which leads to discoverability and understanding of the brand. Then you've got connection, which is where someone resonates their seats at your content multiple times. They might convert into a follow. And then you've got conversion into the brand at the bottom, which is ultimately trust. So you've got like attention, connection, trust. That's sort of what the funnel looks like. So at the top, you're not going after trust, right? Because trust takes time to build up. So the first time I see your content, I'm probably going to scroll past it in like two seconds and less it like hits with me. If it does, I'm probably not going to click on your page still because it's the first time I've seen it. If I get subject again and again, and then my friend tells me about it, and then I see another platform, and then I see the founder talking about behind the scenes of the brand or an employee. I'm like, OK, there's lots of moments here of capturing my attention. I'm going to go and have a look at the page. I'm going to go and maybe convert to the long form. And then over time, the trust is built. Because trust is what happens when multiple touch points of your brand have reached your desired audience. And you've offered them enough value to convert. So once you're a question, should brands be thinking about attention or trust because they feel conflicting? The top of the funnel that you need to think about is capturing attention always. And after capturing attention multiple times, through various different touch points, across multi-platforms through your influence maps of discovery, you're going to build that trust. And I think that's why it's so frustrating. Because I think the answer is always, what's the key to social media, the key to-- it's always consistency, right? Did you ever see those platform sneakers? They're like these ugly-- I think they're so ugly. But they're like these ugly-- someone's going to come and read for that. Yeah. They're like these wedge sneakers. They were really in 2012 or something like that. And I just remember seeing them. I'm being like, they're so ugly. And I saw them enough times all over. My friends had them. And then at a certain point, I bought them. And I'm wearing these wedge sneakers with the bell-croast straps. And it's because I was exposed to them enough times to the point where then I started to like it. I think that that's the hardest part. You chase the views. We chase the virality. Whether it's viral or not, I feel like sure that helps for exposure because it reaches more people. But the point is to keep doing that so that they see you several times, right? Yeah. I mean, virality is just a sugar rush. Like, virality is a sugar hit. You get the buzz, the excitement, and then what happens after a sugar rush is the calm down. You're like, where is everyone that's happened? Because you haven't actually bought your audience in. You've just got in front of a lot of people. Which is why I say to a brand, we can go viral. I could give you a list of 10 things we could do tomorrow. We create these videos right now. They're going to go viral because there is a science and a maths to it. If you understand how to capture people's attention of the upwards part of a trend, you will go viral. I can't think of many situations where that should be the goal. The goal is to always be getting in front of the desire to target people and building a relationship with them over time. It's growing for that reason, not just growing for the sake of views. If it's healing for pleasure, go for it. Like, how fun and enjoy. I'm in the game of content for business outcomes. And if you don't know why you're creating that piece of content and what business goal it serves, then I'd just sit there and say, well, why have we even got to the stage of it going live? Right. You know, that's the question we've got to be asking before it ever goes live is, for what and how are we measuring success here? And it's really important that you get so clear on what you're measuring when you go in so that when it goes out and say it goes viral, you don't get distracted by that. You don't get distracted by the views because if you're not measuring views, it actually doesn't matter. I use myself as the example. I posted-- I'd been posting a series called "Pastor Mike." First, to perform really well against the benchmarks of what I was measuring success as. That was like, mainly driving conversation. So the comments were really high, but the comments were really interesting. They weren't like AI bots or they weren't just emojis. There were people like, had clearly watched the video, maybe watched it a couple of times, and they were really engaging in conversation in the comments. So that was what I was trying to achieve with that series and the shares. So I posted a third episode the other day. And it did OK in terms of views. It was fine. But I wasn't paying any attention to that. I was paying attention to the conversation. It was really known. And the quality wasn't there. And I was there for like, OK, I need to pick this apart. What didn't work? Why was I not driving conversation? I came to the conclusion that actually it was a too simple of a conversation for the type of audience I've now built. It was a very introductory kind of conversation about what platform do I pick. And then I looked in the analytics and I got to pop up from Instagram and it said, "This reel is overperforming in terms of follows." And so to Instagram, it's measured that realist's success. As someone might see that, I'd be like, OK, it was performing really well. Against the metrics that I laid out, it still didn't perform. We've got to know what you're measuring. And there are many different things to measure, right? You can measure engagement, right? You can measure conversion from light to share. You can measure all of these DMs. Like, am I getting inquiries off the back of it? Like actual tangible things. If you don't know what you're measuring, it's really easy to be what I call like a paper bag in the wind and just go with the flow. And that's a dangerous place to be. There's so much to unpack there. Because if those people in theory, let's say, you know, were the ideal customer that you're looking for, why wouldn't that be the right metric? Because if you were going to run an experiment at school, we're in the school room, we're in the science room. I come back to it. It's really simple. Like, when we run an experiment in science, if you don't know what you're going into measure, then you don't know why you're creating the content. So for me, comments and shares were like the number one metric I was measuring. Shares suggest that people are sending it into other people's DMs and they're having a conversation about it, which is a really great place to be. And comments were like, they wanted to chat with me about it. So I was driving conversation. Like Instagram telling me it had been a success based on followers. It's like, yes, okay, cool. As a byproduct, it's born in people. But that wasn't what I set out to achieve. Like, this reel has not been successful. Because what happens is, if I look at that notification and go, oh, my God, it's been a success followers. I sit back and I go, great success done. In actual fact, it hasn't performed against my benchmarks or my metrics. So I get to analyze and ask why. Because otherwise, that just gets pushed to the side and we move on to the next. And I might repeat that again next time. I remember when we were at Darviceo and we were bringing in social media managers and I'd always asked them to do like a report each week on what of what had and what had. But what they do is they'd screenshot the reel and screenshot the insides and just highlight and be like, this one got more likes than the last one and then the next one. This one got more comments this week. Okay, this one had more shares. There was no direction with any of it. It was just trying to highlight something that had worked well with it. And what it prevents is growth because you don't unpick any of the failures or any of the learnings to then improve. So what happens the next week you go, this one did likes, this one did follows. And it's like, everything was good this week. Okay, but what were we measuring? Did it work against the criteria for success? We've all got to know what we're measuring this week. And then we can go back and go, did we achieve that? If not, which is way more interesting to me. If not why? Because you said earlier about the secret to the social media success as consistency. Of course it is. Don't give up when everyone else would give up, basically. But the actual formula for growth is consistency X experimentation. Because if you just keep being consistent, you will just plateau. Because you're not learning, you're not growing, you're not developing. And you've got to find the opportunities for leveling up. So when the platform introduces a new feature, if you don't lean into it, you're going to get left behind. If a trend's happening that's super relevant to your industry, but you've got your content all lined up and batched for this month, then you're never going to experiment and find the opportunity to grow. It's like you've got to be looking at what's working, what's not more importantly, and be adapting your content going forward. Because if you just keep posting, then eventually you're just going to flatline. You only get that hockey stick, like compounding growth graph. If you are willing to keep trying new things, obsessively every single week on the level of consistency that you're like, that's a cheapable fee. But how do you know which metric you should care about? Like, we're facing this now. This is why I'm asking, because we're so new, should right now be the season of trying to grow that following and then faster those conversations, or should I be aiming for the conversations and knowing that we'll lead to the following down the line? I would say you probably want to have goals, what I call destinations in mind in any one season. So I do quarterly. So part quarter, I will go, okay, one of the three things I'm trying to achieve. So right now, for example, in my life, I want to increase my rate of inbound speaking inquiries and I want more global inquiries. The second one is sign a book deal. And the third one, for example, is I want to grow my YouTube from 10k to 100k. So what I do then is I go, okay, if I want to achieve that, and I need to know what content types are going to achieve that, I need to know what content types are going to achieve that. So for example, if I want to increase my speaking inquiries, I know that I need more formats of my speaking. I need to build more credibility. I need to get in front of the right people, i.e. speakers, bookers. So I know that when I post a speaking clip, the way I'm measuring success for this is like, how many emails am I getting? And then I always ask, I say, where did you discover me or like, where did you find out about me? The book deal, for example, I know that the formats that are going to achieve like a book deal is probably like awareness reach audience size. Publisher is really interested in like the rate that you're growing. So yeah, it's great for a million followers, but if you've been started a million for five years, it's like not really interesting for them. They want to know that they're finding writers of books who are on the rise. So I need to prove to them like consistent growth month after month. So therefore I am thinking about followers. So I'm thinking about what content types can I post every single month that are going to generate growth and following. So follower is the metric for that. And then like retention of the follower. So I'm making sure I'm not having like a high drop of follows. So you can have multiple different formats happening at the same time as long as you know how your measuring success feed to them against the goals you're trying to achieve. And maybe you are in a season of growth, but at some point you're going to have to go, okay, what about loyalty and retention? And you probably need to be speaking of those both treats at the same time. So some of your content needs to be going off to growth and some of it needs to be conversation driving with your current existing followers to drive conversation and keep people engaged in that space. So your balance is going to be so individual to what you're trying to achieve. Maybe it's 2018, maybe it's platform dependent, maybe one platform is a growth platform, maybe one platform is a retention platform. Like that's where strategy comes into it because like about mapping out your goals and what they set. He is a great time to move into talking about how to apply that for someone who wants to improve their social media strategy in 2026. I want to talk about what they should do. And we have a little show and tell that we can go over together. Before we get back to the video, this is generally in the spirit of Diary of CEO where Stephen Bartlett would go, 60 something percent of you are not subscribed. Well, on our channel, it's currently looking like 90 something percent. So if you could help us get that number down and subscribe that would be so helpful, it will help us so much to continue making these episodes for you, bring on great guests. And well, yeah, as we always say, keep in the light, son. All right, guys, let's get back to the video. Okay, so I've never shared this before. This is what I do when I do my one-to-one personal content resets. And obviously storytelling is such a huge part of what I do. And I think people get on board with understanding how content meets business goals when it's told through a story. That's what I found with my clients. So if I go in and I'm like, your content needs to meet your destinations and meet your business goals. They're like, okay, like I don't really know what starts. So I've made this sort of analogy, which is about a city. And the city is you and your brand and your business. So like to take New York City, right? New York City, like people go there for a reason. They come and visit the city because it has amazing food and drink or it has an amazing energy. Like people arrive for a reason. So I start with Grand Central, like being the center of your city map. And that has got to be your why. Your why is your anchor. It's where everything starts. It's where everything comes back to. It's how the whole flow works. That's just dirt for myself. My why is like be the intersection for creators and brands. So that's why people visit my city. That's why they show up. They want to learn about that topic. And I go, okay, where do I want people to go to when they're in my city to New York City? You would go to Times Square. You would go to Statue of Liberty. So the destinations I want to get people to with my content is it increased my inbound speaking inquiries. So I want to like 10x my speaking. So that's destination one. Destination two is work deal and destination three. I want to grow my YouTube subscriber based to 100k. So if we want to get to the destinations, we need lines that take us from central station to the destination. So your lines are what I call your signals. What are the signals that's going to carry someone from your why through to the destination? So my signals for achieving this goal is that I need to increase my credibility. I need to demonstrate an ability to speak. And I need to talk about unique topics. So when people think about booking a guest for an event, they think about me. For a book deal, I need to own certain topics. I need to really, really have authority on certain topics. They also need to see engagement. And they need to see incremental growth. Because if they don't see engagement on my content, they don't see incremental growth. They don't think they're going to sell any books. And for 100k, I need to build awareness for my target audience. Currently, we've got all these people in the ground central in your why. They've arrived because they're interested in your brand. But we need to know the right kind of people who we need to get onto each line. So now we need to think about the passengers for each line. So the passengers that we need to get on the speaking line are people who book speakers for events, corporates, like the type of people who I need to attract. Who are going to book me here? For my book deal at literary agents, it's like a ton of agencies. 100k is my target audience, which is people who want to build, ambitious people, people who are driven, and people who care about content. Immediately, we've identified the audience that we're going to take along each line. And then we need to think about the stops along the line that are going to keep people going. And the stops are your content formats. And we're trying to move people from the central area that they've arrived in and keep them on the line of interest. They take you to the destination. And these are your content pieces that are going to do that. So it's like, OK, what are the formats that are going to take a person who's going to be in the middle of the line of credibility to reach the speaking goal? A lot of people think about the content they want to create. And then they think, OK, how am I going to measure it? They don't think about how it feeds into the wider network of your brand and how it's going to build towards a goal over time. So it's all about goal, signal content. It works backwards from that. So when I think about that, and I know that the signal is going to be credibility, I think, OK, the formats are going to be cut downs of me on podcasts. That's going to really help increase my credibility and be short form videos where I can talk on a specific topic with a really good amount of credibility. And it could even be written. It could be writing on LinkedIn. But am I holding attention? Am I able to hold attention on a certain topic repeatedly? So those become my content formats. And then what you need to do is you obviously need to create your time table. Like, how is this train system going to run? The time table becomes your content plan, right? So the time table says, OK, you're going to post to post for the credibility line this week, two for the authority line and two for the attention line. And then you repeat it for a few weeks and at the end of the month, you go, OK, how have we taken people along this line? I.e. have we increased speaking? How have we had any inquiries about a book deal? Have we grown our audience closer to 100K? If yes, great. We keep doing the same thing. If not, we need to look at our time table and shift it up. I redo this quarterly. So with my own brand, I have like a Q1 version of this, which I'm reviewing every single month. And I'm understanding like how far passengers are along this line to achieving this goal. And what happens over time is you start with three. And then your network expands. You build your business, you hire a team, you have more resource, you have more capabilities to build new lines. Eventually, it becomes like an incredible network map, which has kind of what happened with Steve and the driver. So, obviously, we had the podcast. He had his businesses. He had merch. He had shows. He had the book. And we were having to serve all of those goals all at once. So it was a case of how do we serve all those different goals and all these different people with different formats and keep them all happy moving along, taking the lines happy without any breakdowns. And yeah, I'm a visual person. So it really helps me. I am too. Normally, I'm so used to seeing spreadsheets. Yeah, you were like, can you bring spreadsheets? Can you-- I was like, I can do it, drawing. This is incredible to hear because I feel like this just actually makes things make a lot more sense. For a lot of people who are watching at home, you mentioned two things that I think are really important. We've spoken about audience and you've spoken about attention. How do you find the right audience? I think people just don't spend enough time at the start understanding that there are different audience types. I think people, especially entrepreneurs, they are so passionate about the product or thing they're creating that they want everyone to care about as much as they do. They'll go, but who is it for? Everyone. But who is using it? Well, anyone can use it. And the reality is if you try and speak to everyone, you're not going to speak to anyone. Because social media is this vast, massive place that millions and millions of people are spending every day. And the algorithm is working so hard to try and serve those people the content that they think they're going to care about. I mean, if you're going to say on Instagram now, you can choose your algorithm by a key word. So you can go into the explore page. And for example, I'm building a house, I'm planning a wedding, and I'm building a business. Obviously, I would not recommend doing all three of those things that wants to anyone, but here we are. So I've actually gone into my algorithm. And I've been like, wedding, 2020, sex bride, renovation, and entrepreneurship. And so I've told Instagram exactly what I want to see. So Instagram is like, OK, we can get around of 99% of content on this platform for this gal, and we can just serve other things within Haneesh. If you are not thinking and reverse engineering as if you are Instagram as a business person, then you're not speaking to no one. Because all Instagram is trying to do as quickly as possible. It's figure out who is this piece of content for, so we can savage them. It's not working against you. It's trying to work for you. But if you make their life hard and don't make it clear who that piece of content is for, whether it's through what you speak about during the real or the piece of content, or the keywords, the caption, the tags, the location, it's studying all of the data within that to try and serve it to an audience. If you are not so clear on who that is, you will get shown to no one. So I'll work with someone and they'll say, yeah, I think we're trying to reach like 20 to 40 of their worlds in the world. Yeah. And I'm like, where are they spending their time? What is their morning routine? What did they look like? Who are their friends? What group charts are they in? I need to know that level of granular detail to be able to speak to them. Like, be in the WhatsApp communities. Be in the Facebook groups. I remember I was working with a brand and there was a brand for new moms. They were all these incredible Facebook groups with all these new moms because they're so lost and they're asleep this night, so they're just doing these Facebook groups. And they told me about them. They were like, they're these Facebook groups. And I was like, are you in them? And they were like, oh, no, no, 'cause we're not new moms. And I was like, you will be getting all of your insight in data from that space. Like, that is where you need to be hanging out and they say, create an account and spend time in that space just to hear the problems, like spend time, except with the people. We consume so much every single day. We are absolutely flooded from every single direction with noise, with content, with marketing, with advertising. If you want to. cut through to get someone to actually pay attention to you, even convert to you through a follow-up or a purchase, you have to be speaking their language, you have to be solving their problems. And what will happen is your views, your engagement, everything, will go from zero to 100, because you'll be getting in front of the right people, you've got to infiltrate their habits, you've got to insert yourself in their daily routines. Because when you nail that down, you will explode within that niche of that category of that individual. How do you know for sure that it is the right audience? Is it the dollars? I think it's a little bit of everything. It's like, okay, who has the purchase power here? Like who is spending the money, who can make the decisions? And don't get me wrong, like there will be moments where you pivot. So you might go in and you think, okay, I think I'm building for this category. And then you have to look and listen and be on the ground with those people and go, okay, I thought it was this, I actually think it's like over here. That made change, and you have to be willing to listen to the data and accept when you get it wrong. Most founders are so romantic about their idea of what it should be that they lose sight of being able to pivot. I think some of the best founders and entrepreneurs I've ever met, like being able to pivot and pivot fast and not fathom around and just be able to make a decision and move on. It's like, can I remove my ego from the situation and do what's best for my audience here? And then spend time in your analytics. Are the people you think you're speaking to actually the people you're speaking to? So I think I want to speak to new moms when I look in the back end of my demographics. And it's like 45 to 55 year old men. Then something's going wrong. So that audience gap is something that you can close by just paying attention to the demographics and going, actually, do we need to switch our content or do we need to switch our audience here? So if someone is ready to move forward and they're ready to execute and they want to really hone in on mastering social media and marketing in general so that they can go on their attention for their brand, right? I want to go back to the attention. The way that I'm understanding this is that, for example, the first time I heard you on a podcast, immediately I trusted you from that video. However, you got my attention before I saw that video. You got my attention through DiaperC.E.M. How many minutes of that video did you watch? Our plus podcast. So you spend an hour with me, right? So when we think about what I call memorable minutes versus forgettable seconds. Forgettable seconds are MTV's. It's a reel that gets a million views and people can't recall a single thing that was said in it because it was like funny or whatever or they watched for three seconds, they scrolled past they gone on with their day. Imagine how many three seconds, 10 seconds, 20 seconds clips someone's gonna watch before they spend an hour with you. So that might mean they have to come across your content for six months, a year, I don't know, before they build that trust. If you've just spent an hour with me, so that is like what we call memorable minutes. And we're just thinking imagine like a jar as a brand or as a content creator. I'm trying to get you to spend as many memorable minutes as you can with me. The fact that I've managed to gain spending an hour with me means we've gone from like zero of attention to trust within that hour. But through short form that's gonna take weeks, months, years. So it doesn't mean to say that you can't go from awareness to trust or attention to trust within one asset or one video. It's just you're never gonna achieve that through short form. It can absolutely happen in long form and that's why I'm completely obsessed with like long form as a media form. - Grease, when I hear you talk, you know, you are so knowledgeable about all of all things marketing, all things brands. You understand it because you have, I mean, dedicated a incredible amount of your 20s, I mean, all of your 20s to this, but it didn't start off this way. And so I wanna go back. Where did we start? - I started getting rejected from all of my university choices, but I ended up going to find university. It just wasn't my first choice. And I meet my life partner, I meet my best friends. I study history and I finished that. And so I think I applied for like 50 grad schemes, got rejected from all of them, didn't have a clue what I was doing, landed myself in an internship in experiential marketing because it was literally the only thing that accepted me. And then I kind of turned around and I was like, I think I wanna be on TV and I think I wanna tell stories. As a news presenter, as a journalist, and I go study journalism, I'd got four work opportunities lined up through with the BBC, with Global, like some of the big companies in the UK, I was like, this is it, I'm running the world shuts down all the opportunities close our doors. They don't invite anyone new in because we're in a state of panic and crisis. And so that's when I turned to social media. And I just started posting content and it was so cringe, like it was painfully cringe. And it was like, hey, the world's locked down and all the opportunities are closed, but I would love to go for a virtual coffee with someone in this world. I was inundated with responses. I had exacts from the biggest studios in the UK being like, let jump on a call. Like they were bored and locked down. They didn't know what to do. I had so many people and that was the moment where, I didn't realize what I was doing, but I started building a personal brand. And it was the first time I realized that a personal brand was gonna be a market for opportunities. Eventually led to me building my social media management business. And I started building my brand online. I just shared the journey. Like I shared the messiness. I shared the learnings. I often, as much value as I could at the time as I was learning. And so what happened when Steve, who at the time, Stephen Bartlett, who was only really known, I would say, if you, I always say, if you lived in Manchester, which is a city in the North and the UK, because that's where he'd built his business. He was like really well known in that area of the world. Or you watched in social media because he built this incredible social media marketing agency and loads of people looked up to him. So when he posted on LinkedIn looking for a social media manager because he just left his agency and he wanted a personal social media manager, I didn't have to do much selling because I'd been selling myself through my outbound social media strategy all that time. And it's funny because I then went in to build his brand in the dark CEO brand. And I was high number three of ended up being 120 by the time I left. And we were just not willing not to win. So we would work harder, we would do more experiments, we would try new things, we would think about it differently. We had naive it to you on our side, which was a blessing none of us had ever worked and podcasting before. But we all understood the first principles of like attention and storytelling. And so you join your higher number three. What was the subscriber count of the channel at the time when you joined? On YouTube it was 8,000. And when the day you left, 13 million. So like we went from 8,000 on YouTube to 100,000 in the first year. And then the next year we did 100K to a million. And then the next year we did 1 million to 5 million. So the rate of compounding was evidence to us. Like it wasn't just this theory or this thing of like compounding consistency. We were seeing it happen in real time. What were those early days like? Intense. We sacrificed pretty much everything for it. Like we'd have breakfast lunch and dinner together worked all day every day. But it was the best. Like it was so messy. And every day was like, guys we've got to get an episode like on Monday. Who are we going to get to film this Friday? All on the phone trying to find gas because we had no credibility yet. Like why would anyone come on our show? And the rules were like we're not willing to put anything out. It doesn't feel like our current standard. And we don't skip. That we just don't skip. Like it goes over 8,000 no matter what. Like all costs. Like if we don't skip and we keep getting better each week, we will become the biggest in the world. Like there's no sign off. There was no layers of decision making. Like Steve sat me down on day one. He was like, so you're going to stop posting. And I was like, huh? I was like on your channels. And he was like, well, if you don't post, you don't learn. And I remember Steve saying to me, your first 90 days is going to be the steepest learning curve of your life. And then you're going to go and do it. So I just spent as much time learning, absorbing, listening, activating, experimenting as I possibly could. And it was that mindset, honestly, that I carried you for the next five years. I would have social media managers start, and I was like, what are you going to post today? And again, they'd have that panic moment. And then my role became building and skating the team to also have that mindset. I have a lightning round of questions, because I'm always wondered these things. So first and foremost, you were at it, because I know that you guys got an editor after. You were editing the videos at the beginning. Who was editing that? No. So the initial team was-- I joined-- he had a manager, so Dom, who technically, I guess, was my manager, but we didn't really have managers. And Jack, who was high number one, who is co-founder of the director of the CEO, he is editor-producer. So men, him, as long as I'd each other to do pretty much everything. So Jack was the one who actually did the video editing. So he would do a fast pass. Oh no, I would sit. So we had a studio. We had to sit in the studio in death silence. If you made even a peep, it would ruin the whole show. So we'd sit there. These episodes were like two hours long. All sweating because the alcohol had to be turned off. In his kitchen, right? In his kitchen. I'm sat behind the desk, making notes about the trailer. Then I'd go away with Jack. We'd be like, OK, I think it's going to be this bit, this bit, this bit, this bit. We'd then work together to figure out what it would look like, what the hook was. Would Steve would get involved? Because we're sitting around a table like this. We were working to the Y pretty much every episode, because there's no one in the team. And his Wi-Fi was not strong enough in his house. It would get to a 4 AM the day of the episode. And he would have to cycle to his brother's porch. His brother had high speed Wi-Fi to get the episode live. And then he would text me at 6 and pass the button on. And then I would get all the assets ready and link it back to the floor. And we did that every week for like two years before we started getting a team and then I'd pass the responsibility on. And we developed systems. Then people didn't have to stay up all night. And we were growing and getting the team. We were getting better caliber of gas. We were doing better edits. We obviously hired incredible trailer editors. And it just sat the president for what we were going to do. We repeatedly became a name. to the top podcast in the world, or your only second behind Joe Rogan, or the biggest of views. When those things happen, someone will send a message in and be like, "Okay, cool. So what's going on tomorrow?" It was never for those things. It was for the idea that we were just creating the blueprint for what this industry would be. And every day it was our responsibility to get better and better and better, to keep raising the bottom of the industry. And I think when you're not chasing like the accolades and you're chasing something that's a bit more meaningful and deeper and intrinsic, you can just keep going for a lot longer. You know, because otherwise what happens is you reach those mountain tops and then you realise that it wasn't ever a mountain top and you were just like the next mountain is a pit in front of you and you just get too tired. You're like, "I just can't keep chasing the next thing." But it was never about chasing. It was like growing in industry and it was our responsibility to keep growing that. And that's, I think, what filled us as well as the learning. Like I never stopped learning every single day in that business from the day one till the end of when I laughed every day was a learning day. There were so many incredible minds in there. The gas that we bought on, the conversations I was exposed to, like I just saw it as a fast learning opportunity of probably the fastest learning experience I'll ever go through my life. I want to talk about that and how you guys were testing. But I'm actually very, because I have to ask this. You talked about how it was hard to get guests at the beginning for anyone that is, because I mean, we're there, right? But I am curious, like in those early days getting guests, what were you saying to get them on there? Was it everyone on the team was trying to pull someone in? Was it mainly Steve? That was like, he was in charge of that. Steve never wanted to ask the guests to come into the show, but I don't think without his existing audience, we would have ever been able to get any guests. I think it's almost impossible to start a podcast or a long form show without existing audience, because getting people to trust you enough to spend 10, 20, 30 an hour with you, without having that existing audience base, I think is so hard. So whenever I see sort of people going, I just want to start a podcast, but they have like a thousand followers on Instagram. I'm like, that's going to be a hard climb. Why don't you wait for someone who's got an existing audience, because it's just going to make your life so much easier. But I mean, at the start, our whole mindset was it's a numbers game. If we message a thousand people, we're going to get 10 people who say yes. So we would message a thousand people every single week. And when we hit the limit on Steve's DMs, we would find their emails, which create a new account, we would do anything. It was all about what we could control. Maybe they have a book coming out and it makes sense that they want to press run and they will come and do your podcast because they're doing a load of other podcasts. We tried to be where we could, strategic about the guest, because we knew that one guest would unlock another guest, would unlock another guest. So we had like gates of unlock to reach out in guests and we were just trying to find like the people around that person. If we were like, "Hey, we want Obama," who they eventually did last year, we're going to start here and demonstrate that we can have a political conversation with like Boris Johnson. How do we get Boris Johnson? Okay, well, we need to have this person over here. And then eventually the person in the middle would be like, "Oh, I've seen that show. I've seen a lot of my friends go and I trust it." Oh, come on. It's the same marketing strategy that triangle bikinis used to get Kendall Jenner to wear their bikinis. I don't know if you've had the story. No. So there's Australian bikini brand. They went completely viral in the late 2016 and they wanted Kendall Jenner to wear their bikini. Like they knew that if Kendall Jenner wore it, they were going to go viral. They were going to take off. They needed her to wear it. They tried to get hold of Kendall. She obviously got some million inquiries a day. So they were like, "How do we actually get to her?" So what they did is they found her circle of friends and they sent like 10 bikinis, all of her friends. All of her friends start wearing the bikinis because they've been gifted at them, and they're not super famous. This is so cool. These are nice bikinis. Kendall Jenner's team reached out to Triangle and they're like, "Hey, Kendall really wants some of your bikinis. We'll have friends are wearing them. Can you sort her somehow?" So they infiltrated the friendship group. They built trust and they got proximity to her. So we always have the same mindset. It was like, "How do you reach that person?" Okay, well let's go to this first layer and then get closer and then get closer and then we'll finally reach the target. And then what to foot that target on that target? What's an example of data that directly changed? Something bit within the shell. I think when YouTube introduced the retention graphs, that was a big game changer for us. I think we play around a lot with understanding like where retention spikes would happen. It's all changed now, but other times we had to guess they would fit into four different categories. And we'd have understanding that within that category retention spikes would happen at certain moments. So in the adder of the episode, for example, on future episodes within that industry, we would lead with the retention spikes and try and make as many retention spikes that we could create within an episode. And that was a big game changer for us because we found that we were always starting episodes would tell us about your story. And actually people just want to get to the action they want to get to their advice. So we would, Jack would create the adder so that that came fast. I mean a huge thing is when we introduced like a pre-production testing. So what we used to do at the very start was we put the episode live and we'd test two thumbnails. And whichever one got more click-through rate was the thumbnail that it became. And we were like, why do we wait until the episodes out to test that? Because if we knew what people clicked on, then we could make the title it. Then we could front-row the episode with that topic. Like we could do so much the episode if we knew that information before. So when we would record the episode, someone would be in the room very manual at the start, writing down the lines that they thought were like the key lines based on understanding of what people click on. We put that all into a spreadsheet and turn them all into thumbnails. And all of those thumbnails would go into pre-production testing. So we'd understand what people were clicking on more than others. And sometimes you'd put like a tight slot and it would get like 20% more click-through rate. And our whole mindset was like, wouldn't it be such a shame if that podcast episode, which is the same podcast episode that they're going to get no matter what they click on, got 20% less clicks because we didn't know what the right title was. So our whole mindset became, kill the gas work. We didn't matter add testing. At some points we were testing 100 thumbnails per episode. There was something that scaled as a whole team dedicated to it now. I mean, they've created software that automatically run the whole thing. So it's a completely different space to what it was, but it was the same mindset. It was like, wouldn't it be a shame if this episode never saw the light of day because we didn't get the title right. And we knew the episodes were valuable, but we wanted to work on increasing who saw it and the visibility towards it. I mean, that's where the trailers all came from as well. We never saw ourselves as a podcast scene as you guys, we saw as a show. And so therefore we weren't paying the podcast game. We were playing the TV, the media, the movie game. And that was all like, how do you get bumps on seats in a cinema? We just always thought about it differently, I guess. And the packaging was really important. From the very beginning, you somehow had the quantity and still maintained an element of quality that you felt were like, there was the bare minimum that you guys needed to have. Is that fair to say? Because if you look back to the start compared to what Gats produced today, it's like a primary school versus like PhD. Like, yeah, I guess at the time in the moment it was good enough. And we had standards of what it had to be. And we weren't winning to put anything out that didn't meet that. So we had, I remember we sometimes would be up against the way we'd have an interview and it just wasn't good enough. And the Gats just didn't perform in the way we needed to. And obviously that level has increased over time to the point where there's an entire production team, crew production, they do pre-production schools. They speak with them about what works, what doesn't work, how they're going to have to deliver the conversation. They do some speaker training with it. It's like a whole other level of production now. Speaker training as well. Yeah, like, and making sure that there's evidence of them being able to deliver on podcasts in the way that we need it to because half of the work is from the guest, right? So as it scaled, the quality has continuously improved. I think that comes from the hiring mentality they have. They are not willing to hire anyone who's not the best. And they are absolutely unshakable about that. So I remember trying to hire a role below me, a head of social. And I must have done 50 in-person interviews and to get to an in-person interview you've had to have gone through about four stages to get there. And still no one was right. Because we were just not willing to bring in anyone who wasn't the very best of what they did and understood the culture of what we were building. It was an understanding that if you born in anyone who wasn't at that caliber, it was actually disrespectful for like the people who were there. So I wasn't willing to bring in anyone who wasn't going to raise a bar about everything we were doing. My gosh. For anyone that's watching, they may see this and be like, well, I'm not there yet. But at the end of the day, you guys did start where everyone else starts, right? So to that point, there is a version of like, okay, like there are steps that will increase your odds of success. And you guys talk a lot about the 1% better. You know, our company literally lives by that because of you guys. What's also crazy is that I mean, people like me are studying it, right? We study what you guys figured out in those early days. And it's really what you walked in when you were sitting all together at that same table that I think set the tone of where the industry went, which is really, really, really impressive. So you were around a lot of very successful individuals. Why did you learn from being around all of those people? The common thing I saw with sort of the most successful people that we had at the table, they were willing to just start like build the plane while it's flying, figure out the mistakes as it was happening and glue it all together and make it work. It's like why I started YouTube way before I was like ready. Like I don't even know what being ready is. But like I was like, I'm just going to pick up the camera. So I started filming in the next week I posted because if I didn't start I would be now in this position six months later with no learnings until I'm still trying to figure it out. Probably still going to post a really average episode start with like if you don't start you don't learn and the other part is like the pivot. How many entrepreneurs start a business and it fails? How quickly can you pick yourself up from that rejection or that failure and start again and not sit in it? So now I get to work with all sorts of founders and people and I think those identifying traits is sort of what I look for when I want to work with people. And I do have a bias towards optimism and bias towards action, like those two things. And there are different things with action is, make it happen and matter the odds. Like if I asked you to do something, are you gonna figure out every way to make the impossible happen tomorrow? And everyone at the team had that as well. We'd have a guest in the UK who's all the flights were cancelled and we had to shoot that episode, that day in LA. There was no part of our brain that said they wouldn't be in that seat by 3 PM. It was just how. I mean, we had like billionaires turn up and they turned up by themselves in a pair of jeans. They driven themselves out or they got the tube or something and they were like just really like human normal people. And I think having proximity to people with that level of wealth and that level of success and seeing such normality within them is what made it feel sort of attainable and relatable. Your fingerprints were all over this, right? And I know that there is this phenomenon that once you've built something or you've owned something and you've had ownership in something, it makes it harder to let go of. So I can only imagine, you know, the next chapter is that you ultimately decide to leave the dire to CEO. And so what was going through your mind during this time and what led you to that decision? It's funny because it was almost a year ago probably linked to the week that I had the conversation about leaving. I was something that I sat with for a while and I played out lots of different scenarios and I spoke to lots of people who were close to me. I'd spoken to people who'd laughed. I asked what the world was like on the other side. And I basically had come to this point where the choice was taken away from me because I'd been building and skating away past some brand at the same time as working that. It was a marketing channel we took advantage of in terms of commercial partnerships in terms of organic growth, in terms of hiring. So it was very intertwined. And building my brand had started to lead sort of some opportunities that I didn't want to say no to. And I built a team of 20 who were working across multiple different shows. The system was running and it was kind of starting to run without me because I would be traveling for my own brand, traveling for work, meeting new teams and we were taking the blueprint of what we'd created at the dire of CEO and applying it to all these new shows. I sort of felt like my ceiling had been reached here. And as I said earlier, like I love startup phase. I love getting my hands dirty, being in the messy middle. And I really wanted to get back to that. And I was really happy with the people I had in place that I knew they were going to care about what I built as much as I did. And I mean, I sobbed my eyes out on my last day. Like I just, I'm not a cryer, but like I cried and cried and cried and cried. Like I felt like I was grieving something that I was no longer going to be my truth. And these people in that business are still some of my closest friends. In my last, last, where I sent to my team, I was like, the flag is now yours, keep waving it. Like, keep carrying it on for me. What scared you the most about walking away? So many things. I think identity was a huge one. Like I would do these podcasts. I would go and speak on stage and I'd be introduced as the brand director of the dire of CEO Grace Andrews. And I was like, who am I when it's just Grace Andrews and what does that mean? And also like the fear of going forward of, I don't know who I am without the dire of CEO. So that was one of the biggest bairs. And I guess the second one was without the comfort blanket of this huge success of what we've created. Can I do this again? Or was it just right time, right place, right people? It took a minute, I think, to build up the confidence again, to go, no, I know what I'm talking about. I remember putting up those first episodes of the vlog and I think I said something along those lines of, I'm going to find out if people are here for me or they're here for proximity to Steve. And then I remember the feedback I had and people were like, I've never followed you because of the dire of CEO. I followed you because of your content and your story. And I really had to sort of build up that confidence bank again, I think. I have this thing in my notes app, which is like my confidence bank. It's basically like a bank of when I get positive feedback. And it's not always positive feedback. It's sometimes I get a DM from someone and they've never engaged with any of my content publicly, but they'll send me a message and they'll say, I just want to let you know that your advice has been the reason that we've been able to scale our marketing. And so what I do is, in the moments where I'm having a bit of a wobble or during these last six months, I've been like, who am I? What am I? Where am I going? It's like truth and evidence that I can come back to. We're all going to have days where we wake up and we're like, what am I doing? Do I even know what I'm talking about? It's just code-hug truth that can't be denied. Like that's real. And collecting that evidence is something that really helps my brain balance out the noise sometimes. I think the thing that I really related to when you started you from the beginning were like, I'm actually not quite sure. 100% what it is that I'm going to form or what I'm going to build specifically. I just know that it's something. You know, everyone was like, this is all a marketing thought. You know, it's exactly what she's doing. And I was like, no, no, no, I actually have no idea. Like people talk about building in public. Like I was figuring it out in public. And I was like, I want to show this part because I listen to so many podcasts. I'm addicted to podcasts. I love founder stories. It's like my favorite indulgence. And they always skip. They're like, how did you figure out what it was that you actually wanted to do? And I was like, no one documents this. Like entrepreneurship is so glamorized and glorified. And the reality is it's really freaking hard sometimes. And that comes at a toll. I think this polished, fake, unattainable world puts entrepreneurship on this pedestal that feels so unachievable for people. And the reality is it's hard out here. We're all figuring it out as we go along. It's messy. And I didn't see anyone having panic attacks and telling me they were also building a successful business. I didn't see anyone saying, this week has just been really hard and there's been no highs. And it's been like working from my bad office. And I haven't got dressed all week. And this is the reality of building and getting a business. And I didn't see that. So I want to show that. And I want to show that I can build something great. And that is my reality as well. And don't get me wrong. I have amazing highs too. I'll go from that. And the next day I'll be invited to a PR influence of breakfast. I don't think there's anyone's had a life. But then you realize that everyone and you sit down at that breakfast and you go, how are you doing? And my friend turned to me last week. And she was like, honestly, this has been one of the last weeks of building this business. But here we are. Well, smile's joining me in. So I need to show some of that because I think it's probably more important than showing the shiny success. Enough people do that. Speaking about shiny success. You recently hit a very big milestone. 10,000 subscribers on YouTube, which is huge. And not only that, and on top of it, you launch community service. But I think the beautiful thing is seeing how the messy middle has paid off. And especially coming to the point where you really have identified what you want to do. Going back to what you were talking about, making that decision to leave the world that you knew. We had this principle about find your allies. And I think in a lot of ways, I'm sure it was really scary because you almost felt like you were leaving those allies behind. But that being said, those allies are still very much year so much so that we have a message from them. For you. Grace Andrews, this is for you. You're a naughty. I may just for I'd leave you a quick message to remind you just how proud I am of you and how happy I am for you. And you both know how much you've helped me. We both know that whenever I just send a text or WhatsApp or a voice note or call you're always there to give me more lessons and more advice. And that's the thing that will always be thankful for the most is just how much of a wonderful human being you are. And that I'm privileged that I get to say. Hello, G. Sky's the limits. I'm incredibly excited to see where you go and what you do. And I have zero, zero, and surprises that you would go on to do amazing things. A quick note to share how proud I personally am of you and how much of an inspiration you are to me on everything that you've done since leaving. You've just gone out there and absolutely proven to everyone that it's possible. And it's also the huge inspiration. You should be so proud of what you've done. It's always been the greatest privilege for me to what you grow into the woman you are today. And I'm so, so glad the whole world gets to see how incredible you are and how inspiring you are. And I'm missing you lots and I wish you could be with us. But I am cheering you from afar. 10,000 followers on YouTube is huge. I can't wait for you to hit 100,000. No doubt that will be sometime very soon. I love you. Lots. And I'm so proud of you. I am so proud of what you become the person you have. From being at the Garibasio together and growing the platform pages and podcast to getting to go off on stage with you and you were there for my first talk on stage and you showed me that it was possible to do things like that. And now I get to do that, which is wild, but it all started because you showed us that was possible. How lucky am I? Like that shows why it was so, so hard to make the decision to leave because the people are there, like the most wonderful people in the entire world. So this is just a proof of the legacy that you've created there. And the legacy you're going to continue to create. Maybe you may have left that project, but those people are still with you. I personally want to thank you so much because you've been a mentor of mine without even knowing me for a very long time. And when we first started this show, One of my dreams was to interview you. Crazy. And you are just truly such an inspiration. I mean that with every bone in my body, because I know that I'm one of those people that would not be chasing my own dream if it weren't because you're in the world. So thank you so much. It's just been the most phenomenal experience. So it's a privilege. And thank you so much for having me. Thank you. All right, guys, you know the drill, we are going to be diving into the anatomy of graces and dream. We're going to be going over the principles that came up in Grace's journey. And because there are so many, we are going to be putting up a list of all of them. And we're just going to be touching on the few that we find to be the most important. And if there are any that you want us to touch on again in a future video, let us know. All right, let's dive in. All right, our first principle is the proximity principle. So this principle is basically that your environment shapes your outcomes, meaning being physically present around certain people or places or ideas actually increases your odds of success. And when you look at Grace's story, she didn't stumble into working with Steve. She literally chose it deliberately. She even talks about how she applied to that role, knowing that being around him would accelerate her career. And there are plenty of studies that prove that who you have in your proximity matters a lot. There's a professor at Harvard Business School named David McClelland, who did foundational research on motivation and achievement. And one of the most powerful things that he discovered was that your success is heavily influenced by a reference group. And basically, this is a small number of people that you spend the most amount of time with. And so by deliberately choosing that reference group, the people that we learned from, the people that we compare ourselves to, we significantly shape our own motivations and achievements. And this means that certain people set really high standards for us, meaning being around them actually makes us better. And there are people on the other hand that do the exact opposite and make us worse. And I think the thing about the proximity of the principle is that sometimes it feels like it's not in our control. Or that it is something that is really hard to change. Because where you live or the co-workers that you have around you, a lot of these elements don't really feel like they're in our control. But when you really think about it, when you really think about all the principles that we have control over, I would honestly say that proximity is the thing that we have the most control over. Maybe the job that you have right now or the place that you live right now is not something that you can change at the moment. But look at your friend group. Look at the place that you go get coffee. Look at the activities that you do on the weekend. And so right now, if you are in a place in your career where you want to level up, I want you to ask yourself this. Who are the top three people in your field that if you were in their orbit would change the trajectory of your life? And ask yourself, what is one thing that you could do this week to get closer to them? A lot of times you were just one person away from making the dream happen. All right, moving on to the success loop. The success loop is take action, fail, pivot, and you do that over and over again until that failure turns into success. Now the most successful people, they will go in that cycle over and over and over again till they actually succeed in whatever it is that they're trying to test. Now most people will go through a success loop cycle in maybe a week, a month, sometimes months. When you look at Grace's story, they were going through the success loop on a constant basis. They were figuring out what was going to work, what was actually going to get them to a place where they were growing. They were sometimes doing a success loop and they may be multiple of them. They took it so seriously that they literally have a head of failure and experimentation, which her job, Grace Miller by the way, she helped us out in setting up that whole surprise at the end, so truly, thank you so much Grace. But they literally have a head of failure and experimentation which shows you how seriously they take the success loop. And so Grace was implementing this in her social media strategy when she first started from day one all the way until she became the brand director at Flight Story. This leads us into the volume principle. The volume principle is kind of what it sounds like. It's that success becomes predictable when you increase the number of high quality attempts that you make. Grace talks about how their whole mindset was a numbers game that if they were to message 1,000 people, they were going to get 10 people to say yes. There's a saying that volume negates luck. And I really love that because when really, when you look at chasing any dream or any journey, understanding that the more you do something, the luckier you're going to get. And so if you really want to increase your odds of success, volume is your best way to get there. Currently in our journey with this channel, currently we're reaching out to, I would say just a few select guests every week. I did the math and at the rate that we are going in, it would take us 6.5 years to reach out to the same amount of people that they had to reach out to in one week, which is not good. And this explains why they grew at the rate that they did on our end. And depending on luck that the three people that we reach out to this week, that one of them is going to say yes. The thing is successful people, they understand the volume principle I think better than anyone else. The person who sends 1,000 messages will beat the person who crafts the perfect 10 messages every single time. Alex Armose talks about increasing his output so much that it would become unreasonable that he wouldn't succeed. So ask yourself in what area of my dream could I increase the volume of my output. So much so that it would make it unreasonable for me not to succeed. All right, moving on to our next principle, which is data as a north star. This principle is basically kind of what it sounds like. It's using measurable feedback to guide decisions, of run your strategy, and to remove any guesswork, as Gray says. I'm starting to realize that we underestimate the power of data. I think that we don't search for data most times because we don't think we have the time. At the beginning of our business, I honestly feel like data felt like this, like luxurious thing that big companies had the money to pay for. But I think that that is honestly what prevents a lot of people from getting to becoming those big companies. And if anything, if we were to apply it sooner, we would grow a lot faster because data is truly the best north star. And so with the data, you want to ask yourself, what are the numbers telling me? Where are people actually responding? What patterns are emerging? And you see that they were doing that with 100 thumbnails. I mean, who literally does that? Nobody. And it just shows you how committed they were to really removing the guesswork and finding out the data that was going to point them in the right direction. And I am sure there are plenty of areas in your own dream right now, and maybe in your own business, if you just take the extra time to go search for the data or to go find the data, you'll make a better decision. It might prevent you making a mistake and actually accelerate your growth, which brings us to our next principle, evaluate the right metrics. Now, evaluating the right metrics means that you're measuring progress based on what actually moves you forward and toward your dream and not on a surface level based performance. Everyone wants to go viral. Everyone wants followers. But none of it means anything if it doesn't fulfill what you're actually chasing. And that's exactly what Grace spoke about. If your goal is to go viral, so you can sell a product, let's say, and your customer base is female. And let's say that you hop on a trend and then you gain 100,000 followers, but they are all men. Literally, those followers mean nothing. This is why she speaks about a, knowing what your destination is and be tracking the right metric that will get you there. On the surface, it might look like chasing the 1 million views is going to bring you business. But the truth is, most times, it's the 100 comments with like die hard fans that actually move the needle in your dream. All right, moving on. Excellence as a value. This principle first came up when we studied Steve Jobs. And it's basically this principle that you do more than the standard. You care about the details that no one else will see. Now, Steve Jobs talks about how his father would create these cabinets. And maybe you wouldn't see on the back of a cabinet the work or the craftsmanship of it, right? And so you could, in theory, just put supply with there. But he talked about how his father was like, but you will know that it's there. You will know that you did not do 100%. And so Steve would require his team to create perfection, even in the parts of the Mac computer that nobody would see. I can't help but when I talk to Grace, to see that same exact obsession exists within her. This brings up the assumption of the 1%, which Stephen Bartlett and the diary of a CEO team speak about a lot. And Grace does too. There's this video where she's showing this PR box that her and the marketing team were designing. And they took them like six months to design. The level of detail that went into this PR box, like I promise you, I know PR boxes are super extra nowadays, but you could tell that they really took it seriously. And there's plenty of interviews where they talk about the air freshener and they even measure the CO2 levels in the room for the interview. And I think a lot of the times when we think about excellence, we think about it as like this big overarching, like I am the best. But in reality, it's actually just focusing on the tiny details and improving where you can, even if it's 1%. Our next principle is compounding consistency. Now, compounding consistency is this principle that small repeated actions build exponential outcomes over time. When you look at Grayson and their journey with the CEO, it wasn't easy for them at the first. Grace mentions this hockey stick growth in the interview. Once they started posting once a week, that was when they got that hockey stick growth, right? Where it's like, plan a plateau and then it suddenly goes up. When you actually look at that, that is due to this principle of compounding consistency. I actually found this post from Grace where she spoke about Mr. Beast. And it was his subscriber count from age 12, all the way to 25. And so when he was like 12 years old, he was at one subscriber. And then when he was at 25, it got to 184 million. And God knows what he's at right now. I'm sure it's a lot more than that. But, That is the compounding consistency in action. And she literally talks about it in that post. And so at the beginning when you look at it, they were like at 8,000 and then 100,000. And that's by the way a very big jump. I think most people in that first year, like they're not growing that quickly. Granted, they were really focusing on the volume, right? That is a huge reason as to why they were even able to get to that point. When you show up consistently at the beginning, it might be a little bit flatlined, but then eventually it will multiply and it will compound moving on to our next principle, which is the art of attention. In another video, we talk about how there are eight ways to gain attention. It's to do something unexpected, provide extreme value, have a strong POV, be consistently present, accomplishments. You have to accomplish something really big, collaborate with those who have attention, tap into culture and develop indisputable talent, which is by far the hardest one. And I want to focus on one of them right now, which is to be consistently present. This particular way of getting attention is the thing that people like Alex Hermose and Gary Vee and yes, even Diary with CEO utilizes, because they are so consistently present online that at a certain point you can't help but be like, wait, who is this? I keep seeing them with Diary with CEO. Like I found them because I saw their shorts pop up so many times that eventually when the long form was actually fed to me, I recognized, Stephen and I was like, wait a minute, that's the guy from the shorts that I keep seeing who is this. Let me watch this episode. And that's literally how I came across Diary with CEO. Ultimately, that is how people started to gain familiarity and then we could eventually lead to the trust and that connection. So just put yourself out there. If there are any of you by the way who life are hearing this and are a bit annoyed at talking about this obsession with attention, the thing I'll tell you is this is that we can't escape it. We are in an attention economy. And so no matter what dream we have, you will increase your odds of success if you understand this skill. Mastering attention means understanding how to deliberately design it. It means understanding the psychology of human beings and obsessing over the pattern in tropes that make people stop and look. And I feel a great really understands this. And even just hearing how at the top of the content funnel that she was describing, attention is the first thing. The game of attention is not, let me tell you what I want to tell you. It is, let me figure out how I can get you to stop and most importantly, care. All right, moving on to our next principle, which is to build a personal brand. In her case, obviously, this is a very big thing because her personal brand led her to having a job with Stephen Bartlett at DiaryVizio and then it also led her to her next phase of her career, which is in leaving the DiaryVizio, right? She does say that like having a personal brand is an absolutely necessary, but I do agree with her that trust is a very big benefit of building one. I did want to do some research on personal brand. So there's actually this one 2019 study that found that personal branding actually leads to greater career satisfaction. It's found that people who actually shape and communicate their personal brand, they feel more empowered and then ultimately are seen as more employable. And then there was this other study that found that over 93% of surveyed managers said that personal branding had a significant or a very significant influence on achieving professional success. And so I think that on both ends, it's an opportunity magnet and it also is a built in audience that you are developing over time that will be there to support whatever it is that you decide to put out there. Now our next principle is to no one to quit slash pivot. In a previous video, we speak about pivoting and the different types of pivoting that can exist in your life. And there is one in particular that I think applies to Grace's journey and that is the role pivot. And ultimately in your life, if you are at a current role or position, there are a few ways to know that you should leave or not. And there are two in particular that I want to speak about in this video that are pertinent to Grace's, which is either that you've hit a ceiling but you want more ownership. And I think in Grace's story, it's a little bit of both. And it's not to say that she wouldn't grow more if she had stayed because obviously, Diabeseo, Flight Story, I mean, that is a company that is facing tremendous growth and they're gonna continue to grow. But it seems like she, in some capacity, felt that she had learned what she needed to learn from that experience. And it was clear that she was ready for ownership. I think that what we think about pivoting or quitting is that we expect that things have to be really bad in order for you to leave. And that's not necessarily the case, right? I think that in her case, things were going really well. And ultimately that must have made it all the more difficult to make the decision that she made. I think this is where we would want to follow in Grace's footsteps. I think that we'll harder the reason that it felt like an obvious choice is because she had created undeniable proof, which is another principle of ours. Now undeniable proof in our other dissections, if you will, has really come up when it comes to business deals or strategic partnerships. Like we saw this applied in, let's say, Rihanna's story, right? Where she had undeniable proof of success in other partnerships where she put out other releases of other products, right? And so when she approached LVMH to ultimately make Fenty, she had that undeniable proof. And in Grace's case, what's interesting is that her undeniable proof was really for herself. This undeniable proof came up twice. It came when she applied to work with Stephen Bartlip because she had, I don't think we wanted it into it too much in the interview, but she had this page called the social climber and she had clients. And so Stephen knew that she had, she wasn't just calling herself a social media manager. She actually had social media experience. She had the undeniable proof to get that position. But then later on that undeniable proof was for her. So at the time that she decided to quit, she was making it in her speaking engagements and online and in her brand deals. And she had created enough undeniable proof knowing that she could do this on her own. And I think that that was actually something that I learned from this, which is undeniable proof isn't necessarily just for other people. Probably the most important person that it's for herself. And so if quitting or taking a chance is very difficult for you, if you absolutely need that certainty and that safety, where in your spare time can you create that undeniable proof for yourself so that you can go take that leap. And even if you aren't thinking about leaving your current position, you're right now you're just chasing the dream, finding areas where you can create undeniable proof for yourself, even if it's in your consistency or in the volume that you're outputting, these are areas of undeniable proof that actually matter, which brings me to our next principle, which is to start before you're ready. Now this basically is what it sounds like, to start before you're ready. It's to move forward even though you don't have all of the facts and you don't have all of the information, but it's understanding that momentum is what's going to create the refinement and its skill and the direction that you ultimately need. And it's also this concept that starting before you're ready means that you know that you are allowed to suck at the beginning. You may not be ready because maybe you don't know all the details about it, and it also may mean because you don't know how to do it. And both are fine. And one of my favorite things about what Grace is doing right now is that she is documenting the messiness of this chapter, the uncertainty. When she left the dire CEO, she didn't have a perfectly mapped out master plan. She didn't know exactly what her channel was going to become. She didn't even know really what project it was as she was chasing. And not only is she documenting it, but she's embracing it. And I think that is really important. Because when we think about chasing a dream, we assume that we have clarity. We assume that we need to understand what the dream is. We need the blueprint. We need the five-year plan. We need the exact outcome that we are looking for. Sometimes the dream is just a decision to build, and that's enough to start. And you want to hear something wild? This video wouldn't have even been possible without this principle. I remember being on the phone with our producer guy talking about Grace. I've been following Grace for years, like truly. I am like a very big fan of Grace Andrews. And eventually that conversation like led to the, you know, our producer saying, "Okay, like why don't we reach out?" And I had this email drafted and we were going to send it. I literally backed out. I was like, no, no, no, we're not ready. We're too small. I don't know what happened in our miscommunication, but our producer guy, and guy, thank you so much, he sent it anyways. And then I get a text from him saying, "Corace Andrews responded, she'd love to meet." And I'm like, wait a minute. You sent the email? The crazy thing is if it had been up to me, that email would have never been sent. Which makes me wonder how many dreams did I get in the way of simply because I waited to be ready? Which brings me to our last principle of mindset. Now this mindset principle, I'm always gonna say this, cringe when I say it because it's such a cliche principle. But when we think about this principle, we usually think about having a winner's mindset. It's like an optimistic mindset, like a confident mindset, right? This is something that Grace clearly has. But even the most successful people like her, they still doubt themselves. In the interview, Grace talked about the moment that she was on the verge of leaving diarrhea of a CEO and she asked herself a very honest question, can I do it again? And perhaps it stemmed from the fact that she was wondering if what she accomplished was from the magic of that specific group of people in that exact time and ultimately a very universal feeling of could she do it on her own? She clearly had the doubt, but her mindset shows us that she chose the dream over the doubt. And that's personally what I'm struggling with right now. The time of filming this, our last video is currently sitting at 133,000 views. And first and foremost, I just have to thank you guys. You know, that definitely was a dream come true. I think the thing that I wasn't expecting is along the pure joy and excitement was coupled with this other emotion of a lot of fear. And it was the fear of could we do it again? As like Grace literally said that question, Like I have. I felt like a pit in my stomach. Because it was like the same question that I have honestly been asking myself for the past like a month. I think the question is like, was it a fluke? I don't know, could we actually do that again? And then what happens if we don't do it again? But I think the thing I'm realizing is failure and rejection don't really say much about you. How you respond to the failure and rejection says everything about you. And I hope that if you're watching and you're in the depths of your dream and wondering, can I do this again? Or can I even just do it to begin with? Choose the damn dream over the doubt. And so, will we do it again? Well by the time you see this video we will know the answer to that. But the same mindset that Grace had, whether we do what we don't, we will learn, we will pivot, we will be consistent. And more importantly, we will continue chasing the anatomy of a dream. All right guys, we will see you in the next one.