Part 1 - How I Gained 7.8 Million Followers In 40 Months | Ep 750

So you guys wanna hear something absolutely insane? Well, in the last 40 months, my YouTube grew from 0 to 2.23 million subscribers. My Instagram grew from 7,000 to 2.5 million subscribers, followers, you get the idea. My LinkedIn went from 0 to 324,000 followers. My TikTok went from 0 to 856,000 followers. My Twitter/X, the artist formerly known as Twitter, went from 0 to 617,000. My Facebook, which we just started, went from 0 to 25,000. There we go, going in big Facebook. My podcast went from 3,000 downloads to 25 million downloads. And my email subscribers went from 0 to 700,000 for a grand total of 2 billion impressions over that time period and 7.8 million new subscribers and for a grand total of a million copies sold of my book. For those of you who are like, well, what does that mean? And I'll get to that in a second. So in 40-ish months, all of that happened. And I show all of this as proof to start this, to show one thing is that this actually works and you can build a brand without babes, without stunts or kittens. And I start this proof because lots of people talk about stuff that they haven't done and teach a lot of sucky fluff as a result. And so before we got the 2 billion impressions and the 7.8 million subscribers, it wasn't like this. Because 40 months ago, I started with zero subscribers and a big quote, fancy plan. And my fancy plan had 3 steps. Step 1, make as much good stuff as I could. Step 2, post it everywhere I could. And step 3, learn as much as I could. And after 40-ish months, $4 million in team, equipment, vendors, studios, and software, 1,000 hours of me on camera recording, and 35,000 pieces of content. Let me say that again, 35,000, as in count to 1,000 and then do that 35 times in a row. I learned a lot of what not to do, but I did learn things that made money and grew my brand that you can use today. Now, what I'd like to do is for the remainder of the presentation, save you the 3.5 years and $4 million so you can just get the lessons without the scars. So that little box is our box of 6 lessons. Cool? All right, let's rock. So here are the changes that we observed over the last 4— 40-ish months that actually worked. So let's start with the first one, edutainment to education. So I see content in 3 buckets. On one extreme, you've got entertainment. Which is the entire point of entertainment, just to define the term, is to get people to watch. The only point of the entertainment is to just get people to consume it. That's it. If it accomplishes that, it has succeeded. On the other side, you have education, where the point of education is to get someone to change what they do, right? If you try and teach someone how to answer a phone, and then in the same situation, the phone rings and they don't do something, and then after they watch you do something, They then change what they do when the phone rings the second time. They have learned. So the point is to change their behavior. If the video or the content does that, then you've succeeded at educating them. And lastly, you have edutainment, which has the point of both trying to teach and entertaining at the same time. And to be clear, it's less that you make entertaining content or that you make educational content. It's more that you make content and people are either entertained or educated as a result. And so you can make one thing that entertains some people and then that same thing educates other people. And so I just wanna make this very clear that you don't control the audience. You make something and then education or entertainment occurs. But for our purposes, I'll define the content category as the most common outcome of your content. And so if a lot of people are entertained, then you've made entertaining content for the purpose of this presentation, even if 1 or 2 people learn something. So for example, some creators might learn stuff from MrBeast's videos. Wow, I learned how to make videos. But the vast majority of people are entertained. They watch just to watch. On the other hand, Wallah, who's one of the number 1 educators on YouTube, you can even see the different look and feels, and don't worry, I'm gonna get into that. He may entertain some enthusiasts around that subject, But mostly he educates students. And until recently, I've been trying to figure this out. I've spent a lot of time really working through this. And so I actually have videos in all 3 buckets. I have entertainment videos where the point is to get people to watch. I have edutainment videos where we try and teach and entertain at the same time. And then we have education videos where we just wanna change people's behavior. We just wanna teach 'em something. And so the first change, Number 1 that we see over lots of data, and I'll support in a second, is that I'm going all in on education for 3 reasons. Number 1 is that when we looked at all of our data, all views are not created equal. I'll dive into that in a second. Number 2 is I like educational videos. And number 3 is I like people who like educational videos too and/or people who educate themselves, people who want to learn. And so let me explain these. So all views are not created equal. So there's this theory, and this is going to— this will be one that's going to rattle some cages. There's a theory that media works like a funnel. In fact, the vast majority of marketing infographics and things like that, almost all are funnels. And the theory goes like this. You make entertaining content, and then the theory states that people who watch that content then will go to more educational content. OK, sounds simple enough. We've got something wide, we've got something narrow, fantastic. But in our experience, in my experience, and based on our book sales, based on our email opt-ins, and based on the applications we receive at acquisition.com to become portfolio companies, it works much more like this, which is that entertainment people want more entertainment content. And education people want more— say it with me— education content. And so that's the first reason that I'm doubling down on education. All views are not created equal. Number 2, the next is that I simply like doing it. All right, so, you know, I do believe that you should try and do stuff that you like doing. And if it happens to also be aligned with your goals, awesome. It's much tougher when the thing you like doing isn't aligned with your goals. But in this instance, when I got that first piece of data, I was like, thank God, 'cause this is stuff I like making most. All right, and so when I talk to ideal customers, in my mind, They are business owners and business-interested people. Because if you know me, and anybody who's close to me would probably attest to this, is that like, if you hang out with me for any amount of time, we will probably talk about business because it's what I love talking about. I eat it, I sleep it, I drink it, I work 7 days on it, and like I skip holidays for it because for me it is the holiday. So this is what I like doing and this is what the people that I like serving also like. And so they like it better too. And this is where it got confusing for me leading up to this and why this is so important is that it got very confusing when you have so many people saying, "Man, I really like the entertaining content." And this is where it gets difficult. This is where you have to read between the lines of the comments rather than just reading the comments themselves, right? Because the thing is, is for us, or at least for me, they weren't necessarily who I was trying to attract. Again, there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, hey, if I could serve the whole world, I will, but I know that I tend to do better serving people who want to educate themselves than people who just wanna watch or consume just for the sake of it. And so that's why I'm doubling down on going from edutainment, some entertainment, edutainment, some entertainment to education. So that's number 1. So let's talk about change number 2 that we saw. Going from for us to for you. You're like, well, what does that mean? Let me explain. So recently a mutual friend came to the headquarters and he said, hey, I've been consuming your stuff for years, but recently I just haven't been watching as much. And he said it offhandedly. He wasn't like trying to smash my ego into bits and he failed at that. But when he said it, I really took it to heart, right? It was very gut-wrenching. He said it just doesn't resonate as much. I was like, okay, got it. It felt like a gut punch since he's literally the person I could help most. This is a business owner doing $10 million plus a year. And I was like, man, well, that sucks. And that's when I realized that reading the comments actually led me a little bit astray. And for you, it might be leading you astray. And I'll give you some data to support that. And so some people loved our different styles, but not the people that I ultimately wanted to help or am best suited to serve. And so we realized that we were serving the wrong who, and that had some very significant downstream impacts on what we made and how we made it. So what is making for them or for business owners content really mean? Let me break this down into tactics. All right? So tactically it meant 5 things. Number 1, different packaging. Number 2, different introductions. Number 3, different meat. Number 4, different visuals. And number 5, different, what I'll call pre-work. All right? So let's start with number 1. So the difference between these two thumbnails is going from vague to clear. All right, so if I looked at all the stuff that we did in the past, if I said, what is the video on the left about? You'd probably be like, I, a rule of some sort that might have to do with money. Not sure. If I said, what's the video on the right? The yellow background video. If I were to describe it, I'd probably say a map or a blueprint or schematics of some sort that go from 0 to 1 million. Okay, well guess what? The one on the right, it's exactly that. The one on the left actually has nothing to do with what that thumbnail looks like. And what do you know? When people click on something that they don't know what it's about, they have a smaller percentage of getting something they actually want than if you say, "This is what this is about," and then they get exactly what they think it's about. So we're going from vague to clear in both what it looks like, the thumbnails, and what we say about it, the headlines. And so that's number 1 from a packaging perspective that we will be changing and/or going more all in on. And I wanna take a pause here for a second about this. There was also kind of a pervasive narrative in the kind of marketing world. It's like, you gotta have curiosity. You gotta like, you don't wanna tell 'em everything. You want them to be able to get, no, like if they want that thing, they will click on that thing and then you just give them that thing. And that has been a very hard lesson for me to learn and so I share it with you now. So the second is different introductions. You guys feeling this? Okay, good. Okay, different introductions. Now this one is really big. So going from confirming the thumbnail or confirming the headline to proof, and this is super important, I'll explain the difference. So a lot of the things that I learned, like many of you, if you are trying to get into content creation of any sort or media, is that you look at the people who are the biggest, right? And so oftentimes the biggest people in media are entertainers. Now why is that? Because everyone gets value from entertainment, but there is no one thing from an education perspective that can provide value to everyone. Why? Because everyone already knows different stuff. So if I educate a wide slice of people, there's still already people who know that thing and then do not get value. So entertainment by definition will always be greater or larger the followings for those people than people who educate. There is no, no bones about it. Like it is that way. And so a lot of the lessons that entertainment teaches, everyone listens to because they have the biggest followings. But I don't think the actual tactics they subscribe or espouse are correct at a tactical level. At a principle level, yes. And so let me just say a second about what that principle is. Is that the person who's going to consume the content, we want to increase their perceived likelihood that they will get what they clicked. So just like the headline and just like the thumbnails, now when they said in entertainment, you wanna confirm it. Well, that's because most of the sensational entertainment is something crazy. And so the likelihood that someone just got the click so that they could not do that crazy thing is pretty high. And so if you want people to watch, you smash a Lamborghini, then you better have the Lamborghini next to you or people aren't gonna believe that you're actually gonna smash it. Now, let's switch to education for a second. If I say I'm going to teach you a physics thing, I'm gonna teach you about the law of, I don't even know what the first law of physics is, but if you push it, it will move, something like that. Anyways, if I want to have proof or increase the perceived likelihood that they're going to be well taught, then what I actually have to do is edify the person. Why should I listen to you if I'm the viewer? There's a zillion people that could write something on a board, but if you're a PhD physicist, then the likelihood that I will listen to you and that I will get what I want is much higher. And so in both of these examples, we are actually doing the same thing, but we do it differently. If you want to educate. And for me, when I looked at my videos, and I'll explain the data in a second, it became really clear. And so in entertainment, it's say the title again and then literally show them what was on the thumbnail. In education, it's show them that you can do what you promised them in the thumbnail, and that's the difference. And to figure out what made intros for our videos work, I actually rewatched my top 35 educational videos. This actually took some time, and so let me just save you like a lot of hours and just give you the nugget. And so I actually developed a new moniker around how to think about introductions for ourselves that I'm spreading throughout my whole team, and you can just steal it. Proof, promise, plan. So I'll break down all three of these. So all of the introductions of the best education videos that we had had these three characteristics. And I wanna make one point about the order of these is that you can have these three mixed in any order you want. I would emphasize the one that is the most important for that particular piece of content. So if you have something that you're making that you think the proof is gonna be really important, then lead with that. If you have a promise that's incredibly important for the audience, then lead with that. If you have a plan that for some reason is going to be more emphasized, then lead with that. But I would say that for our content, for the most, because I'm a business educator about making money in general, Most people have this big glaring sign above their head before they can even turn on the volume of their brain, which is, why should I listen to you? And so I tend to lead with proof. And so proof is that you prove that you know what you're talking about. You give people a reason to believe you. The promise is to tell them what they're gonna get or learn from the video. And the plan sets the expectations of what will happen next. So let me give you a real-world example of this. I started this presentation with data that shows that I've done what I'm talking about. If I went up here and just skipped this part, you might be like, okay, all of this up to this point, why should I listen to you? And you'd be right in thinking that because you have no idea who I am. I could just be some random dude that looks like a Birkenstock, slightly lumberjack-ish, weirdly dressed man. Like, why would you listen? And you'd be reasonable to believe that, right? But if you start with that, then you're like, okay, well, he knows something. The promise was what I said you would get at the beginning. I said I learned 6 things that made money and grew my brand that you can use today, and I'm gonna save you $4 million in 3.5 years and you'll just get all the lessons that I learned. That was the promise. Making sense? Okay. And then finally we had the plan. I said, how are we gonna get there? How am I gonna complete that promise? I said, well, there's 6 changes and I'm gonna walk through 'em. That's the plan. And so leading with those things, we found got business owners, or the people that I'm interested in, to actually better frame and perceive and get educated on the concept that we're talking about. And so that's what we're changing out of our introductions. Third, now let's talk about how this strategy changes the meat of the content, what we're actually like the real bones, the potatoes, all right? Is that going from be real/vlog stuff, 'cause we have made that, to list steps and stories. When we looked at the educational content that did the best, They had more of the right and less of the left. From razzle, I would love to say to dazzle, but it really is, it's just razzle on the left. And so I actually wanted to show a different type of content. So I don't wanna make this seem like this is all YouTube-y. I just have like long-form video there has all of the elements and some platforms don't have all of them. So YouTube's a very easy platform to base this off of. But this is from Instagram and TikTok would function the same way, et cetera. So if you look at the squares here, I just pulled the last 30 days of content that we made. And I looked at our bottom performing over the last 30 days that we posted that were Reels. And then I looked at the top. Now interestingly, it was almost a perfect reversal. So the bottom 12 videos that we made, 8 out of 12, I would say had more Razzle emphasized. It was more about effects, a little bit higher production. And on the flip side, and this is what was crazy, and this is why I'm sharing this stuff with you because like I would literally never have guessed it and that's why we look. 9 out of 12, 75% of the best videos we had emphasized language, emphasized the actual message more than the production. And so it was about emphasizing the language rather than the razzle. I find this very fascinating. Now to be really clear, you can have really bad language, you know, like poor, vague, unclear language and it won't do well. And you might have razzle that just absolutely crushes. I just look at the trends of 75% on this side were this style or this type, and 75% that weren't as good were this style. Well then let's do more of this and less of that. And so those are the main meat changers that we're doing in the videos. We're emphasizing language. This also is true with Longs as well. So if I go and show you this real quick, language that's on the screen, and that's from one of our best videos ever, and that takes up 70, 80% of the video is actually just words. Interesting, for me at least. I mean, I was a little offended 'cause I thought I had a good face, but apparently no one cares. So that's what we're changing about the meat. So let's talk about visuals. This one's a big one. All right, so going from overproduction, and I wanna be clear, not overproduction, overproduction for the objective. So it's not like we did, like my team did anything wrong or anything like that. It's just that if we wanna educate, sometimes production distracts from the objective of education. If the point for entertainment is to get someone to watch, then adding lots of things can be a good thing. But if you're trying to learn physics and there's whiz-bangs and pop-ups and changing backgrounds, it's really hard to learn. And if that's the throughput or that's the point of the video, then it actually detracts rather than adds. And so the difference that I put in this example here is, We have a background that changes colors while I'm teaching something. It does not help someone understand the subject matter better. Fundamentally, changing background color will not help anyone learn more. On the flip side, clarifying what words on a screen are, 'cause maybe my handwriting's not that good, would help people understand. That's the difference. So overproduction to effective production, from distracting to enhancing. From visual effects to visualizing data. So instead of having flames behind me, it's what does this look like on a chart? So we can give relative scale, so we have scope, so we can show changes over time. And so that's how the visuals that did the best looked like. And then number 5, let's talk about pre-work for a second. So going from post-production to pre-search. So instead of saying, hey, let's just record something and then fix it in post— anybody who's in the media side knows what I'm talking about— 4 weeks of editing after almost no prep to get a video out. Well, what if we did 4 weeks of research and then we have almost no editing because we thought of everything ahead of time? Well, guess what? The videos where we spent— I mean, we're like, the hour-to-hour ratio is stupid, and I'll get to that in a second. But if we spend a quarter of the time that we used to spend on post in pre, we eliminate 90%, 90, maybe 95% of our post edit work and man hours. And for the business owners in the room, that's real cost. That's real savings. And for the also business owners in the room, that also means increased production. So if I can take the quarter of the time and I can get almost zero time on the backend, that's 4 times the videos. But not only is it 4 times the output, it's also higher quality for your goal and your audience. So this is a big thing that we noticed. The videos that we spent the most time on the frontend, we spent less time on the back and they did better. And so we wanna spend more time before than after. And so this is my little quote, if you wanna write something down, "An ounce of pre-work is worth a pound of post." So that was my little take on this. And so by focusing more on what educates and what it means we do great and everything else distracts from that goal. And so those are the 5 things that we're changing tactically and that we're doubling down on to cater to business owners. This, at least for my audience, is what they cared about. And I happen to be in that audience and I feel that way too, so I'm happy about it. So that's how we went from for us as media people to a degree, 'cause I've gotten into this now, to for you or for your audience. And for me, that means for business owners. So now let's talk about wide to narrow, all right? And this will also ruffle some feathers and rattle some cages. So instead of talking about relationships and college and food and lifestyle, I'm gonna be narrowing down or doubling down on, if you will, business, business models, business leverage, and selling in a business. Notice business being in all of these videos and all these topics. And so that's how I'm going narrower. Very simple. Now that, I'm gonna go back a slide 'cause I wanna hit on this for a second. Just like I said earlier that people who like entertainment also just want more entertainment. What we also found is that people who— I'll go back real quick— people who watch relationship stuff want more relationship stuff, and as they should. That's what they clicked on. That's what they want. That makes sense. And people who want to learn about college are people trying to make a decision about college. Guess what those people probably aren't? Business owners. And people who want to learn about food, they watch other food videos. And people who want to learn about lifestyle probably watch other lifestyle videos. But for me, those were not necessarily the people that vibed the most with my stuff. And that makes sense because to be fair, this is a little bit more foreign to me. When I talk about business, I feel very comfortable. When I talk about these things, I just give what I would consider hot takes. This is my perspective. So that is what we're doubling down on in terms of the topics that we're choosing for the content we make.