Viral Isn’t Luck, It’s Structure - With Brendan Kane (Part 1) | Episode 350

So you've tried chasing trends, you've tried hashtags, you've tried posting multiple times a day, but you can't seem to break through. So today we're going to ignore all of that noise and we're going to focus on how to make you a world class storyteller. Because that's the only thing that you need to consistently succeed on social media. Hi, I'm Brendan Cain and you are listening to the Future.

Brennan. We've seen countless people get on the box. Whether they have a year experience or 10 years of experience, they're all promising this or that that you can get a result on social. What makes this different?

Well, I've been studying this for two decades and our team has done over 10,000 hours of research. And the only thing that we focus on is not tactics or tricks or any of that, that stuff, but purely what makes somebody stand out at the highest level, what makes them a great storyteller, what makes the algorithms want to favor them and partner with them over every other content creator out there.

Why does storytelling even matter in the first place? Because everybody will tell you story, story, story. But is it the same as what we're talking about on social?

So storytelling matters for a few different reasons. Number one, simply we have to look at the world that we live in and that is the world of attention. And it's not just social media. If we think about Netflix or Amazon prime, all these streamers, we have more content than ever before. So stories matter because they are the only thing that can grab and hold your attention. Now, we live in a micro attention economy, but just from grabbing attention, once you've grabbed it, people will stick with you for a long period of time. Like you have long form videos that millions of people consume. People will listen to a three and a half hour podcast, people will binge watch Squid games or a Netflix show. So stories are the thing that are primed to grab and hold our attention. Now why does that matter? Well, social media platforms, and we'll dive deep into this today, have algorithms. The algorithms only care about one thing and that's keeping people on the platforms longer because that allows them to serve more ads. And we are the fuel that runs these platforms. It's not like Netflix or Disney where they invest billions of dollars in content. So they want to see us succeed, but they only want to partner with the best storytellers because the best storytellers can hook people in and get them to view content and stay on the platforms longer than other content creators.

Brendan, we've heard so many people talk about certain trends or do this right now. I don't believe in any of that bs. Why is this different? What are we going to do that's going to stand the test of time?

So we're going to break down five steps to social media success. And all of these steps are rooted in storytelling. And the interesting thing is, as we dive into this, a lot of the storytelling frameworks and formats that we dissect were actually invented decades before social media. So the things that we dive into have stood the test of time and we know will continue to work for decades to come.

So are you saying the caveman by the fire were using the exact same story framework that you're talking about?

Not exactly. So now you're roasting me. I said decades. I decades, not thousands of years. Well, we have, but I mean, there are some principles like you have, like a beginning, middle, and an end to a story on a cave wall drawing.

Well, I know you're connected to the mindvalley folks, and one person I do listen to on the mindvalley content is a guy named Erica Meads.

And.

And he says something that's really interesting that ties together with what you're saying, which is the human mind was designed to consume and understand the world through stories, and that's why stories are so important. It's how we relate to the world. It's how we are able to recall certain memories. And when you master storytelling, you're going to have a much higher probability of hooking people in your content and then getting them on board with what it is that you do.

Yeah. I mean, you just even think about how do we raise young children? We read them bedtime stories, and we're trained as a young child that once we hear the beginning of a story, we want to hear the end of it. So it's ingrained in our society as human beings to unfold that way. And that's also how, like, information got passed from generation to generation. It was typically through story. It wasn't through textbooks.

So, Brendan, let's get right into it. What's the first social media truth?

So I want to just do a pretty hard level set here, because you and I were talking beforehand, and now we're at a place. You and I have been in this since the beginning. I started in social media in 2005, and there's a lot of these social media experts or gurus that have only been doing it for two, three, four years. And there's a lot of talks about hacks and tricks and frequency. But the number one thing is it's just storytelling. People forget that, that social media is just another storytelling medium. And. And the people that win at social media are the ones that tell the best stories. Now, as we know from doing this for decades, telling a great story is not necessarily easy, but it is simple in terms of what drives success. So I want everybody to just forget about algorithms, tricks, hacks, how many times you post, and let's just get to the core of what tells a great story.

Well, I can certainly back that comment up because people ask me, what are you doing? I don't know. I just write a story. And I don't really care what the algorithm is doing or what the new features are, because story transcends all. And you can layer on top certain whatever the hack of the day is, but at the core of it, the foundation part of your post should be a really good, compelling story. So do you have a formula for what makes a good story?

Yeah, I think that the first place that I want people to start is people are endlessly scrolling social media. We all use social media, but we're using it more from a passive perspective. And I just want the audience to make this active creator mindset shift, actually starting to look at content, to start seeing, like, oh, this has 10 million views. Like, why does it have 10 million views? Oh, this only has 1,000 views. Why does it have a thousand views? And what I really want them to start looking at is what we call formats. And what is a format? It's a storytelling blueprint or structure that has been used repeatedly over and over again. So one of the things that we created at hook point is called the hook point format finder. So let's just say that you're scrolling through TikTok or Instagram Reels and you see a video that has 10 million views, well, you want to click on that creator's profile and go, have they used that same structure at least five or 10 times? Because they haven't. It's not a blueprint for success. It's either a trend or maybe they got lucky. So we really want to make that shift from passive to active to understand that there's this thing called formats. Because most people, as they're creating content, what do they do is they're just jumping to idea, to idea to idea. They're not looking for, like, what is the blueprint? So, for example, I started my career in the movie industry. Now, the interesting thing about the movie industry, almost every movie over the past 100 years is used the same format and that is the three act structure. They don't deviate from it. Why? Because it works. Now in social media, there's hundreds of these formats at hookpoint, we've spent 10,000 hours to date. We have about 300 formats in our library. We hope to have about 500 by the end of the year. And I just say that because there are so many options out there. So that first step in terms of that blueprint is just making that shift to understand there are these things called blueprints and then going through and identifying them.

So what you're saying is, and this is a Jim Rohn quote, success leaves clues. When you see something that works, go and figure it out. Don't just be passively consuming. Be an active learner. Look at their profile, see if they've used this multiple times and see what the commonality is between what they're doing and figure out what the format is. And you to date have discovered over 300 formats and hopefully by the end of the year, 200 more that you're going to figure out, Right?

Yeah. And you know what the fascinating thing is about some of these formats? People think that social media is like this new innovative thing, that it's so original. But if you look at some of the top formats and top creators, they're using storytelling structures that were invented pre social media. So let's like go through a few man on the Street. A lot of people use man on the Street. We have like Alex Stemp that uses it for photography. We have School of Hard Knocks that uses it for business advice. We have Body by Mark that uses it for fitness. It's used in all these different sectors. The man on the street format was invented in 1954 in the first season of the Tonight show and it's been around ever since. Another one that's popular is called Two Characters, One Light Bulb where it's the same person that plays two different characters. So we have like Erica Kohlberg that uses it to break down what happens when your flight gets delayed or your AirPods break or mark Tilbury does it for finance. If we think back to 1997 in Austin Powers, he was doing Austin Powers and Dr. Evil and doing this banter back and forth. You think about Mr. Beast. He does these challenge videos. Well, you go back to 1995 when they had the Road Rules challenges on MTV or in 2000 where Mark Burnett introduced Survivor. So you have all of these examples of storytelling formats working pre social media. So that's where it just Shows you, again, that it's not about these tips or tricks or hacks. It's just how do we become a masterful storyteller. And that's why you see some of these structures play out over decades. Why? Because they work.

I think it's pretty obvious the benefit of figuring out a format versus going from one type of content to the next to the next idea. What is the compelling reason why anybody should want to figure out what a format is?

Because it gives you a blueprint for success. Now, I know some people, and we hear this from clients, and some people may be thinking this. Brendan, it sounds interesting. I know formats are successful, but I want to be authentic. I want to be original. So they think that formats restrict creativity, when in reality, they unlock creativity. So what do I mean? Again, starting my career in the film industry, I went to film school, and you have to study the top filmmakers in the world. So if you think about one of the best storytellers of our generation, Steven Spielberg, so he's used this single format to tell stories like ET Versus Jurassic Park, Jaws versus Indiana Jones, Lincoln versus Saban Pryorian. They're so distinctly different when we sit down. The experience that we have with allows us a massive amount of creativity. But what he did, and most film directors do, is they spend decades mastering the nuances of how to master that specific type of format. So what a format does is, like you were mentioning, success leads, clues. What it does is it gives you a structure to become a master of something. So the. Another analogy I can give you is a lot of people talk about trends and trends. Why I advise against them is they're fleeting. Like, if you think about one of the biggest trends back in the day, the ice bucket challenge, nobody uses that today. So you're switching from trend to trend to trend. So let's just say as an analogy, we wanted to learn a musical instrument. And there's two paths. We could take the trend route or the format route. So the trend route would say, week one, we're going to start with the piano. Week two, we're going to move to the violin. Week three, we're going to move to the guitar. Week four, we're going to move to the drums. Like, how are you going to master any musical instrument if you're changing the goalpost each time versus a format says, well, let's spend six months learning the piano, and let's master all the nuances of it so that our creativity can flow within it. So that format gives you a tremendous amount of creativity. But it also gives you a foundation for success. We don't want to reinvent the wheel. We want to master the nuances within the wheel to become an expert storyteller.

I want to add to this a lot of creatives, and I taught creatives for many years prior to getting onto social media. They swim in chaos and they like this idea, like, I'll just figure it out, I'll invent things. And they're delusional because what they think is original is just a lack of history, what's come before. And so that expression is cliche at this point. Don't reinvent the wheel, reinvent how it's used. And that becomes much more interesting. What structures allow us to do is to have a higher probability of success and removes a lot of, like, what am I going to start with? Where does it end? And then it allows you to play within the variables themselves. If we think about, like cooking, there's a recipe, there's a formula, and if you want to have success and you want to be able to not only do that dish right one time, but a hundred times, especially when it's critical, if you're trying to impress the in laws, if you had important guests over, you want to be able to make that again and again. So believe it or not, structure and creativity go really well together, whereas chaos and creativity, it's just a mess because you don't know what is probably one of the reasons why a lot of super creative people struggle with creating consistently and getting consistent results. So I'm all for that, by the way.

Yeah. And you can even see the success you have, especially in your short form. Content is, you use like a seminar format that has worked for you and you keep going back to it. But even within that format, the unique value you provide each time feels unique. It feels different. It's not like you're repeating the same thing over and over again. So again it's more about. And people say, well, I don't want to copy other people. You're not copying other people copying a structure. And oftentimes that structure was invented before social media. And you're using that structure to deliver your own unique insights, your own unique value to it.

Okay, is there anything else you want to say about formats?

No. Well, so that's the step one of the process. And you talk about recipes. This is my favorite recipe. It's the recipe for success in social media, the recipe for virality. So once we kind of made that mindset shift and at least understand that formats exist and what they look like. And we talked about a few. We talked about man on the Street. We talked about two characters, one light bulb. There's another one called Walking Listicles. I don't know if you know Robert Krok, the founder of Silly Bands, but he just walks around with an iPhone around the block and lists things out. So once we have understood what a format is, the second thing that we need to do is select a format and then analyze it. The two questions that I give clients in terms of selecting a format are very simplistic but super critically important. The first is, what resources do you have? Social media and formats. You don't need to extend beyond your resources. I think a lot of people will tell you, well, you need a fancy camera, you need a social media manager, you need a big team or a big budget. But there's literally formats. Like, we work with this hand doctor, Dr. Hernandez. Literally, she had no experience in social media, and we're just like, okay, we're going to design a format around that, and she's just recording it on her iPhone. So I want people to start with the resources they have. You don't need to extend beyond that because again, there's hundreds of these formats out there. And then the second question is, well, what format excites you? What? Like, you look at it and you're like, I would love to wake up every single day and create content with this format because if it doesn't excite you, you're gonna burn yourself out or that inauthenticity is gonna come off on screen. And again, there's hundreds of these formats to choose from. So don't just jump at the first one and be like, you know what? He is generating tens of millions of views with this. So I'm gonna do it. Just because he's having success, that's a recipe for a disaster, because you're just not going to keep up with it. So those are two key questions to ask yourself. Now, once we have gone through that process, we found our format. This is where 99% of people fail in this process. They will look at like the man on the street format, and they'll be like, oh, man, that's super easy. Or they'll look at your format. Oh, he's just sitting there at a whiteboard, just writing down things. I know what he's doing. You got 50 million views on that video. I can do the same. The reality is, you don't understand why it had success. So we need to analyze that format and study it in the same way. When I went to film school. You have to sit down and watch classic movies, write screenplays and things of that nature. So we created a proprietary process called Gold Silver Bronze. So we'll take a format. Let's just take man on the street for right now and we'll open up a Google spreadsheet and we'll put 5 to 10 of the high performers in that format from a single creator in that format. It's at least 5 million views plus that's the gold standard. Then we have the average which is like 500,000 to a million. We'll do five or ten of those and then five or ten of the underperformers, the bronze. So once we have that, then we're going to do a cross analysis. What that means is we're going to watch the gold, the high standard ones, and then we're going to cross analyze it against the low performer, the bronze ones, and we're going to look at what is the difference. And oftentimes it is not the content but the context. So it's like, is there a promise of value? What's the pacing? If it's a reaction based thing, what are the reactions of the person you're interacting with? What are the title cards, what are the captions, these small nuances that make up the telling of the story. Because if you don't take that process, you don't really understand well what drives success, but more importantly what, what detracts from success. Because without doing that analysis, maybe you hit it once, but you won't be able to repeat it. So again, step two of the of the recipe is how to choose your format and then making sure that you analyze it.

Wonderful. I get nervous every time I talk to you because I keep thinking about a content drago. We're bouncing from things to things. We have more bronzes and silvers and every once in a while we get a gold. So I feel so called out right now.

It's time for a quick break, but we'll be right back.

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And we're back. Welcome back to our conversation.

Is it now we're on point two.

So that was point two.

That was point two.

That was point 2. So point 3 is now we come up with the ideas. It's the ideation phase. So where do most people start with social media? Well, they just come up with ideas. Well, why does coming up with ideas first typically lead to lack of success? Well, one, there's no format in mind. So you're just coming up with ideas. There's no format or structure that you're putting that idea into. And number two is if you're going from idea to idea, idea, idea, how are you going to master storytelling? It's like the analogy we just talked about with learning a musical instrument. If we're changing the goalpost and changing from instrument to instrument to instrument, how do we ever get good? So once we have a format, it becomes the vehicle for ideas. So to give you an example, we worked with an amazing guy. His name's Tanner Leatherstein, with a leather expert and he has a fascinating.

Is that his name?

No, it's not. It's not his name.

I knew it. I knew it. It's too good of a name too.

It's amazing. But, but like he has an amazing story. At age 9, he created his first leather jacket. Like, he just loves leather goods. But before coming to us, he was struggling with social media because he was doing like everybody else. He was just creating ads to promote his products. So we helped him design a format called is it worth it? Where he'll take very expensive handbags, like $3,000 Chanel handbag. He actually buys these things. He pays for it with his own money, deconstructs it on screen and tells you whether it's worth the money you have for it. So we have this container, this format of is it worth it? Now that we have this format, high performing ideas are super easy. So one week it's a Chanel handbag, the next week it's Louis Vuitton shoes, the next it's a Prada handbag. It's an expensive wallet, it's an expensive belt. You have this container that makes it super easy to find high performing ideas because it's vetted through this structure to the point where like he didn't even really feel comfortable being on camera. He has 94 videos with over 1 million views. Why? Because it makes the ideation process coming up with high power ideas a lot more effective and a lot easier.

I think one of the reasons why his videos work is there's some shock value. These are coveted objects that he takes. So somebody's like probably having a fit just watching him rip these things apart. He scrapes the coating, he sets them on fire. He's just pushing and pulling every little thing. Then he goes into like the cost, the material costs, the finishes, the trim, and then the labor costs to make a point. Like, when you buy this thing, you're not buying it because it's this value. You're buying it because of some other reason which he doesn't get into. But there's shock value there. If you're watching that or if you're listening to this right now and you're thinking to yourself, well, how does a guy afford to buy two to three thousand dollars worth of bags for each video and then to be able to do this sustainably? Do you have an answer for that?

Yeah. So it's a great question. One of the things, and I'll just insert this brutal truth into social media because most people don't get it. Your social media profile is not your website and your organic content is not your ads. People do not log onto social media to see you sell things. So what Tanner is doing through that format is he's building a strong relationship with them. He's getting people to know, like, and trust him. And because the format is so high performing, where he has 94 of these videos with over a million views and he has a bunch over 10 million views, he's getting so much exposure on him as an individual, building that relationship, building that trust that they ultimately want to take that next step with him. So if you watch his content, there's no calls to action. There's no visit the website. He just has a link in his bio. And before this format, he would pay per every click. Going to his website, he was generating 10,000 visitors. After this, he was generating 100,000 visitors, A plus organically. And his most expensive products, the ones that were handcrafted, would sell out. So I'm not suggesting that every person goes out there and buys a $5,000 handbag or piece of equipment and deconstruct it again. Match the resources to where you're at. But he has a fundamental business model behind it that he understands that translates into people that want to buy from him. Again, you can look at, like, Mr. Beast, where he'll spend 5 million, $10 million on a video. Again, we're not recommending that people do that, but he has an underlying business model that he has proven out over time. It's not like Tanner or Mr. B started at that point. They just built into it and knew that they got a positive ROI from it.

I thought the answer was going to be because social media rewards them financially so that they have a positive return on that investment. So if they spend $3,000, TikTok or Instagram might pay them 5. And so they can just keep doing this infinitely. But there's the real business. The business behind all the social is he makes bags that you can buy.

Mr.

Beast's model is he actually makes more money in ad revenue and sponsors than he spends on making the videos. Right. That's what I understand.

So that's a really great point. So Mr. Beast hit a saturation point where he was generating so many views that a sponsor couldn't underwrite it for the value that he was providing. He wasn't getting enough return out of it. So. So that's where he started building his own companies like he built. Beast Burger was the first one. Feastables is like the fastest selling chocolate bar in the world now. I think it's projected this year to do 500 million in revenue. So it hit a saturation point. And this is another kind of brutal truth that I talk people through, because you bring up a really valid point that we get asked a lot is like, well, what is the true ROI of social media? If I'm going to invest my time or energy in into social media, if I'm going to hire a social media manager, if I'm going to hire Brendan or Hookpoint, like, what is my return on going to be? The reality is the return is the size of your vision. How big can your business scale? Like, I'll give you an example. I don't know if you know Michelle Phan, but she was one of the original beauty influencers. I remember. She's a friend of mine.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah. So she's amazing, brilliant woman. She started YouTube in 2007 and she got in very early. And where most people saw it as like a novelty of YouTube because it was still like karaoke videos and cat videos, she's like, no, like, the people of the future that are going to lead industries are the people that have the largest audience. So I'm going to invest into it. And she was very successful. She built millions subscribers, millions of views. But instead of just doing what most beauty influencers do, which is do brand deals, she's like, no, I'm going to do something bigger. So she founded a company called Ipsy with a few of her friends, which was a quarterly subscription box and community where they would deliver beauty samples to you. In the first three years, it ramped to 120 million in revenue. At one point, it was valued at 800 million in revenue. Then from there, L' Oreal was like, we see the value you're creating. We want to partner with you, not give you a brand deal to create a brand new cosmetics line from scratch. Now, before this, l' Oreal had never done that. The only brand they created was l'. Oreal. They would just acquire businesses. So where most people get stuck in a kind of short term mindset of like, well, what is my ROI going to be from AdSense or ad revenue or my next client or brand deal, like, the reality is social media is a platform for creating something truly extraordinary. And your roi, your true roi, is as big as you can humanly think. As big as possible.

Drigo, I don't know about you, but I'm feeling even more called out. We're only on brutal truth number three. What Brendan is saying is if you're too cheap to pay for this stuff, it means you have a really small, small vision.

That's what you're saying it is, but it's also. It's like, if you want a small vision, that's fine. I'm not telling people you have to have a large vision. I'm just saying, well, I brew the.

Truth 3, and I don't know if I can make it to number 20, you guys. I just feel so called out right now. Okay, let's get into this. Right, so here's the thing. We've been speaking to some people recently. One person in particular is Dan Martell, who's only in the last couple of years, has grown his social media presence. And he said something at the dinner table. He said, what I've come to realize is as much as I was against all this stuff, brand is a force multiplier. It takes whatever you're doing. It grows it exponentially, it ramps faster, it reaches more people, and you can do it organically. So all you thoroughbred hardcore entrepreneurs like the Hermosis and the Martells of the world sit there and think, maybe this is the day of the year that I invest in this. And almost to the person, their biggest regret, or the insight, is I should have done this earlier. I should have done this sooner. And I'm part of that camp. I started doing social about 10 years ago. And the number one question is, what would you do differently, Chris? I would just start it when I was 19. Because if you start earlier, you can really get a really amazing place now. So we're all playing this game in a very long, long timeline. And we're not looking at it just like as a substitute for advertising or marketing, which you still need to do. Everybody. But this is a great alternative that you can do in parallel.

Well, I think that. And I want to pull up because I did some research on it, because I think it plays to what you were saying of kind of the mindset going into. And this is kind of like another brutal truth is like, how long does it take to get to a million subscribers on YouTube? So the average is 492 videos. On the low end, it's 123. The highest is 1600. Now, if you would ask a lot of people that have scaled their audience that it would take that long, there'd be a good percentage of them that would just probably give up or quit. So to your point, there is a long game to this. Now, that doesn't mean that you have to hit a million subscribers or a million followers to make a living, to build revenue, to sustain yourself, to do whatever you want. But it's just to kind of have that mindset shift of like, I think people see like a Mr. Beast and they don't realize, well, he started to 10 years ago at 12 years old in his bedroom. You started 10 years ago? I started. I don't even know what I started.

Okay, so on average on YouTube to get to a million subs, because that's a pretty important threshold to break. It's going to take you 492 videos. We don't want to worry about the outliers, the ones who takes a really long time and the ones who get there really fast. Let's just look at averages. 492 videos. I want to reference something by Seth Godin. The Dip. The Dip is like, there's this thing where it's fun in the beginning. You get a lot of followers and attraction, attention and energy and return on investment. Then you go into the cul de sac or whatever, and it starts to get harder and harder, and it feels like you're putting a lot of work and not getting a lot of results. And then you get into the valley, the dip. This is where most people quit. I'm just saying this to everybody. What if you're at video 400 and you're like, I'm not making progress. It could be 92 more videos where you actually have that breakthrough. The question I have to throw at you is, what do you think happens in creating almost 500 pieces of content that allows you to get to that breakthrough?

It's pure learning. So I'll give you another kind of brutal truth that plays into this. And it's. What is one thing that people don't know about Mr. Beast? Because everybody looks at Mr. Beast today and they're like, oh, yeah, he's just spending 5 to 10 million on a video. It's easy to have that level of success. But the reality, when he first started out, he was going to university, and he's like, you know what? I'm quitting. Like, I love YouTube. I just want to create YouTube videos. And it wasn't an easy decision because his mom kicked him out of the house. Like, if you want to do this, then you're going on your own and you're going to support yourself. So when he did and made that decision, he spent. He got three other YouTubers, or college dropouts, and they spent a thousand days straight, eight hours a day on Skype, breaking down every single nuance about YouTube videos. Like, they would look at a thousand thumbnails. They would look at, you know, the first three seconds, captions, title cards, and things of all these small nuances. So even if you're at 50 video, because we work with clients all the time where it doesn't necessarily need to take 400, 500 videos, but if you're at 1002-003004-00500, or beyond and you're not seeing success, well, I would take a step back and say, well, what are you learning with each video? How are you becoming a better storyteller? How many other creators have you studied to understand what makes them successful? That is the biggest contributing factor. And I had the luck of actually going to film school where I wanted to be a movie producer. But even going in, being a movie producer, they make you take acting classes, they make you take directing, editing, they make you write a screenplay. Why? Because you need to understand all of these elements that go into making a movie. It's not just one thing. And the same thing applies to social media. And I think it gets lost because social media is a relatively new thing. And I think the downside of social media is anybody can pull out their phone, click, record, and post something. So what does that mean? Not a lot of thought goes into it. Now there's a massive upside in terms of it democratizing communication to the masses. But because it becomes so easy, I think it forces a lot of people not to put a tremendous amount of thought into it.

One step four.

Yeah. So step three is ideation coming up with ideas. Step four is one video at a time. So what do most people do when they create content? They batch, produce. They sit down and they produce 10 pieces of content. Which I'm not saying like once you become a good storyteller, you can't do, but when you're starting out, it sets you up for failure. And let me give you an analogy. Let's say that we are trying a new recipe for a cake and we're baking 10 cakes at the same time with the new recipe and all 10 are in the oven. We pull the first one out and it's too dry. Well, what do we do with the other nine? We have to throw them out and start from scratch. Now, most people on social media won't throw out the other nine. They'll just post it and learn absolutely nothing and just repeat that process over time. Versus if we're going to cook the perfect pasta sauce, we want to really impress our in laws with a pasta dish. Well, what do we do is we're stirring the pasta sauce, we put in a little bit of salt, a little bit of vinegar, these ingredients, and we just keep tasting it along the way to refine it. So with content, as you're starting out and mastering storytelling, you want to just produce one video at a time so that you can actually analyze what you're doing and testing your hypothesis, testing your ability to become a better content creator as you go along.

Yeah, you want to iterate and learn and adapt because otherwise you're just pushing it out there. Like in the example when you're going to make 10 pies or 10 cakes at a time, what people don't realize is it's pretty crappy. And you serve the other nine cakes too. And that changes the relationship you have with the viewer or your customer at this point. Because the people who are showing up are going to say it was not good. But now I got nine more not good things to deal with. So maybe I'm giving up on this person and you've lost that opportunity.

Absolutely right.

So guys, before you get into it, really, you want to innovate and you want to learn as you go versus moving towards efficiency. Efficiency is good. Once you figure out your formula and you can repeat it over and over Again. But until then, stay away from that.

Yeah. And it may slow you down in the beginning and that's fine. Like you want to crawl before you run. So just start with one video at a time, Learn, master, and then once you master it, if you want to speed things up, then you can.

Okay, okay. What's step five?

So step five is now we've produced the content, now we want to do the analysis and really understand what happened. So remember in step two, we did that gold, silver and bronze process. So if we have a video that succeeds well, now we have a blueprint, we actually understand why it succeeds because in the TikTok era and YouTube shorts followed, Instagram reels followed, it made a little bit easier to have that quick win. You'll see people that'll get a million views, a 10 million views on a video, but they can never reproduce it. Why? Because they don't understand what elements of the story that worked. Now, as I mentioned before, if a video doesn't perform, we're not sitting there being like, oh man, it's the end of the world. I suck as a content creator. My team sucks all this stuff. It's. No, now we have a blueprint to benchmark it again. So we used what's called the hook point mirror process. So when we did that gold, silver and bronze process, let's just say it's man on the street or one of yours. The seminar education format, we have the high performer. So we can pull out one of those high performers, put it on one side of the screen and put your low performer on the other side of the screen and play them side by side. And if you're really honest with yourself and you're open, you'll be able to spot the differences. It'll be pretty clear. And that gives you a benchmark to understand. Well, what did I miss? Did I just execute something wrong? Or maybe I just missed something in that initial analysis. I just didn't see this one thing that the gold video did that I didn't do in my video, so that I'm going to perfect it for the next time around. So it kind of closes the loop there that once you're producing, you're producing one piece of content at a time. You give yourself space in a platform to really learn and refine. And that's what the best content creators are doing, is they're constantly learning and refining as they go along.

Have you heard the expression, it's hard to read the label when you're inside the jar?

No.

Well, easy for you to say, but most people are not that objective when they're making stuff because they're involved. They have a attachment, subjectivity, biases. Like, I worked really hard on this one. I wanted to do better. And it's very hard for them to be objective. That's why people hire coaches and consultants. So for someone who's listening to this and that feels like what they're going through, what kind of advice, if any, do you have for them?

Well, I think that one of the things that potentially holds people back from that is being honest with themselves because they don't want to be hard on themselves or they don't want to look at glaring gaps. And kind of one of the things that I would just tell people that if something's not performing, it's not about you. It's not really about your message. It's just the context of how you're delivering it. And I'll give you an analogy. How many movies are there about World War II?

Countless.

It feels like, yeah, and there's great ones and then there's bad ones. The content is the same. We're talking about the same thing. It's just the way that we tell the story. And the same goes for whether you're a financial expert, a nutritionist, a fitness instructor, a real estate agent. It's not about the content, it's not about you. It's just how you're delivering it. And if you just look at it from that lens, it's like, hey, I'm one or two tweaks away from figuring out how to really break through. Because I think oftentimes, and it's hard, I don't know if you experience it. Sometimes I do is you'll take social media personally because you're exposing yourself out there, whether it's the comments or the numbers or things of that nature. And sometimes you get caught up as a human being in emotions that you get caught up in that emotional side of it. And I know it's hard, but just try and detach yourself from that and not look at it from the standpoint of what that you're bad at content creation. It's what can I learn to ensure that I can continuously improve? Because like everybody that is trying to do social media is probably an expert in another field. And like, the question I have is, well, how long did it take you to become an expert in that field? It took time, it took practice, it took refinement.

So the hook point mirror is like when you look yourself in the mirror and kind of have an Honest conversation like that sure makes you look fat.

Well, it's not that harsh.

Right?

But, like, to give you an example is, like, we worked with a. A puppy yoga business, and everybody thinks dog videos go viral. Well, they don't, because they don't all follow formats. And she was really struggling, and, like, her content is a format where she's just capturing content of puppy yoga in her studio, but she was struggling to break through. She was getting, like, 10,000, 15,000 videos. But when we did the mirror test against a gold standard, we saw a few things. One, there was, like, captions, like, the first thing on the screen, which was detracting from the actual action that was happening. The reactions of the people, the chaos that the puppies create. And then, number two, there was just a misaligned focus. They were focusing too much on the puppies and not enough on the people. And kind of like, what are these people gonna do? How are they gonna respond? And once we just gave these small insights, her Next video did 59 million views. She went from a few thousand followers to 134,000 followers. She did 250. 50 million views total. And she's getting asked to go all over the world now. We didn't completely change who she is, what her business is. We're just making small tweaks in terms of how she's telling those stories.

Okay, so you're saying that it's nothing wrong with you, per se. Not even anything wrong with the things you're creating. You're maybe one or two tweaks away from getting the results that you want. And it's your ability to look in the mirror and have an honest conversation to say, what if I change that? That's what's missing from this. And it's usually it's human connection and emotions that really drive things. Right?

Yeah. So one of the top aspects that we mentioned earlier with the brutal truths part is one of the key elements to going viral is tension, is you need to build tension in it. And if you think about, like, an analogy in, like, most hero movies, what happens in a hero movie, they go out, they do a battle, they fail, they go out, they do another battle, they fail, they go out. And, you know, and they keep going until the climax of the end of the movie, where they finally succeed. And Kurt Vonnegut, the writer, you know, says, it's somebody gets in a jam and they get out of a jam. Like, that is what kind of what we're looking for in terms of storytelling. Now, if we think about Mr. Beast. One of his videos is $1 boat versus $1 billion boat. There's added tension with each boat that you go through. Or you look at Mark Rober, who is a former NASA engineer, and he does I'm going to make a pool out of Jell O. He doesn't start at the end results. He's building that anticipation. Or if you think about a man on the street, why does a man on the street work? Is because there's this initial thing. You're approaching this random stranger. What's going to happen? How is this person going to respond? Respond. And a lot of this stuff happens on a subconscious level. But there needs to be that inherent kind of tension throughout of that ebbs and flows, even if it's in like a 60 second video. Because if it's just monotone or flat, it's going to fail. And you just think about like that one person you know in the office or that one friend of yours that just has that monotone thing where it's like almost difficult to stay awake during the conversation. It's the same thing with social media content.

So are we done with the first brutal truth?

I think we're through like 10 or 15 at this point.

Okay. Okay. Thanks for catching this first part. With Brendan Cain, we got into why formats beat trends and unlock creativity, but this is just the foundation. In part two we'll move into the fun stuff, choosing formats and building ideas that actually land. Stay tuned.

Thanks for joining us. If you haven't already, subscribe to our show on your favorite podcasting app and get new insightful episodes from us every week. The Future Podcast is hosted by Chris do and produced and edited by Rich Cardona Media. Thank you to Adam Sanborn for our intro music. If you enjoyed this episode, then do us a favor by reviewing and rating our show on Apple Podcasts. It will help us grow the show and make future episodes that much better. If you'd like to support the show and invest in yourself while you're at it, visit thefuture.com and you'll find video courses, digital products, and a bunch of helpful resources about design and the creative business. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you next time.